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Martha M. PLACE

 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 

 
 
 
Classification: Murderer
Characteristics: Jealousy
Number of victims: 1
Date of murder: February 7, 1899
Date of arrest: Same day
Date of birth: 1854
Victim profile: Ida Place, 17 (her stepdaughter)
Method of murder: Suffocation with a pillow
Location: New York City, Kings County, New York, USA
Status: Executed by electrocution at Sing Sing prison on April 8, 1899 (the first woman to die in the electric chair)
 
 
 
 
 
 

Martha M. Place was the first of 26 women (including one juvenile) to die in the electric chair when she was executed on April 8, 1899 at Sing Sing prison.

Born in New Jersey, Martha Place was struck in the head by a sleigh at age 23. Her brother claimed that she never completely recovered and that the accident left her mentally unstable.

Martha married widower William Place in 1893. Place had a daughter named Ida from a previous marriage. William married Martha to help him raise his daughter, although it was later rumored that Martha was jealous of Ida. William called the police at least once to arrest his wife for threatening to kill Ida.

On February 7, 1899, William Place arrived at his Brooklyn, New York home and was attacked by Martha who was wielding an axe. Place called for help and when the police arrived, the bloodied body of 17 year old Ida was discovered under a bed, her mouth burnt from having acid forced into it. The evidence indicated Ida was smothered to death.

Martha proclaimed her innocence while awaiting trial. One contemporary newspaper report described the defendant in this way: "She is rather tall and spare, with a pale, sharp face. Her nose is long and pointed, her chin sharp and prominent, her lips thin and her forehead retreating. There is something about her face that reminds one of a rat’s, and the bright but changeless eyes somehow strengthen the impression."

Martha Place was found guilty of the murder of her stepdaughter Ida and sentenced to death on March 20, 1899. Her husband was a key witness against her.

Having never executed a woman in the electric chair, those responsible for carrying out the death warrant devised a new way to place the electrodes upon her. They decided to slit her dress and place the electrode on her ankle. Edwin Davis was the executioner. According to the reports of witnesses, she died instantly.

The governor of the State of New York Theodore Roosevelt was asked to pardon Place, but he refused. Martha Place was buried in the family cemetery plot in East Millstone, New Jersey without religious observances.

 
 

Martha M. Place (1854 or 1855 – March 20, 1899) was the first woman to die in the electric chair. She was executed on March 20, 1899 at age 44, in Sing Sing prison for the murder of her stepdaughter Ida Place.

Background

Born in New Jersey, Martha Place was struck in the head by a sleigh at age 23. Her brother claimed that she never completely recovered and that the accident left her mentally unstable. Martha married widower William Place in 1893. Place had a daughter named Ida from a previous marriage. William married Martha to help him raise his daughter, although it was later rumored that Martha was jealous of Ida. William called the police at least once to arrest his wife for threatening to kill Ida.

Murder

On the evening of February 7, 1898, William Place arrived at his Brooklyn, New York home and was attacked by Martha, who was wielding an axe. William escaped for help and when the police arrived, they found Martha Place in critical condition lying on the floor with clothes over her head and gas from burners escaping into the room. Upstairs they discovered the dead body of 17-year-old Ida Place lying on a bed. Her mouth was bleeding and her eyes disfigured from having acid thrown in them. The evidence later indicated Ida Place died from asphyxiation. Martha Place was hospitalized and arrested.

Trial

Place proclaimed her innocence while awaiting trial. One contemporary newspaper report described the defendant in this way:

"She is rather tall and spare, with a pale, sharp face. Her nose is long and pointed, her chin sharp and prominent, her lips thin and her forehead retreating. There is something about her face that reminds one of a rat’s, and the bright but changeless eyes somehow strengthen the impression".

Martha Place was found guilty of the murder of her stepdaughter Ida and sentenced to death. Her husband was a key witness against her.

Execution

Having never executed a woman in the electric chair, those responsible for carrying out the death warrant devised a new way to place the electrodes upon her. They decided to slit her dress and place the electrode on her ankle. Edwin F. Davis was the executioner. According to the reports of witnesses, she died instantly.

The governor of the State of New York Theodore Roosevelt was asked to commute Place from the death sentence, but he refused. Martha Place was buried in the family cemetery plot in East Millstone, New Jersey without religious observances.

Although Place was the first woman to die in the electric chair, she was not the first woman sentenced to it; that woman was Maria Barbella, who was later found not guilty of her crime and released.

Wikipedia.org

 
 

PLACE, Martha Garretson (USA)

Many people aspire to achieve records, but Martha Place achieved a place in the record books for which she would rather not have qualified, for she became the first woman to be executed in the electric chair.

As Martha Garretson she was employed by widower William Place as his housekeeper, but their relationship became closer and they got married. William already had a daughter, Ida, by his first wife, and Martha resented the affection shown by her new husband towards the 17-year-old girl to such an extent that it apparently affected her mental balance, for on 7 February 1898, after an argument in which Ida had sided with her father before he left for work, she viciously attacked Ida, throwing acid into her eyes.

As the girl covered her face in agony, Martha picked up an axe and felled her with several violent blows; Ida collapsed on the floor, Martha then piling pillows on her face and suffocating her. Newspapers were later to describe the force of the axe blows, how a deep gash over the top of her head reached down to her neck, her face being horribly burned by the acid.

A little while later, William came home to be the immediate target of Martha’s axe; although with a severely fractured skull he managed to struggle out of the house, neighbours then sending for the police. On entering the house, the officers found Mrs Place unconscious, having turned on the gas in an attempt to commit suicide. Medical help was forthcoming, and she was revived – and arrested.

Such was the horrific nature of her crimes that at her trial her defence sought to enter a plea of insanity, but this proved unsustainable and she was declared sane. Confident that she would at least be reprieved at a re–trial, her spirits sank when this was refused.

In the condemned cell in Sing Sing Prison she had several hysterical outbursts, although following frequent prayer sessions with her priest, and perhaps due to his guidance, she regained her self-assurance when, on 20 March 1899, she was led to the execution chamber where the executioner Edwin Davis awaited. There, seated in the chair, she sat still and unresisting, holding a Bible in her hands while her hair was clipped short, preparatory to the head electrode being positioned.

A female warder tightened the straps around her, attached the leg electrode and covered her face with the mask. Davis then sent 1,760 volts surging through her body and after about four seconds had elapsed, a further 200 volts were given, followed by a third wave of current, this series of power bringing death to the murderess Martha Garretson Place.

One of the many newspaper journalists present reported that the execution was a success, going on to describe how Martha’s death was certified ‘by a woman physician dressed in the height of fashion, immaculate in a grey dress and a huge hat with pronounced crimson trimmings’. Must have been tricky using a stethoscope.

Amazing True Stories of Female Executions by Geoffrey Abbott

 
 

Mrs. Place’s execution

Electricity. Whenever you sit down to count your blessings, count it among them. Who knows how many lives have not been lost to house fires thanks to the regulation of this phenomenon.

When electricity first came into widespread use, it was hailed as a cure-all -- useful to eliminate darkness, treat frigidity and impotence and all manner of disease, and, -- let's get to it, execute murderers.

One of the first electrical executions, witnessed by Thomas Edison himself, was not of a human but of an elephant. Apparently the elephant had killed a man who'd fed it a lit cigar. The execution was pretty awful per the account I heard -- the unfortunate animal "made a whole lot of smoke." (I heard this story from my husband; Mr. James is a walking encyclopedia of Edison lore; he insisted that we give our first child the middle name Edison; I told him that it was awful to think about killing an elephant this way, and it sounded to me as though the elephant was guilty of manslaughter at most, and the story disturbed me; he rolled his eyes and said something sarcastic about my taste in true tales.)

But the development of state-sponsored death by electrocution was seen as a vast improvement over the method that preceded it, death by hanging. Botched executions resulted from misjudgment of the required counterweight, strength of rope, specific knot, or length of drop, and any number of people were accidentally beheaded or slowly choked to death when their necks failed to break.

In the state of New York, prison officials were so upset when they witnessed the execution of one woman who took fifteen minutes to die that they resolved to find a better way. Electrocution promised to be a neat and tidy and hands-off way of ending life that would keep the body intact for Christian burial.

Executions by electricity came into regular use in the 1890s; on this date, March 20, in 1899, the first woman was put to death in an electric chair in Sing Sing prison in New York State.

Her name was Martha Place. She had very little to recommend her; she was described in the newspapers as "homely, old, ill-tempered, not loved by her husband." The crime that sent her to the chair was the murder by smothering of her stepdaughter Ida. She begrudged the young girl the attentions of her father, William Place. "It was a murder so shocking," said one journalist, "that nothing worse could be thought of -- that is to say, only one thing worse could be thought of, and that was the electric killing of the old woman." 

New York is a liberal state and the death sentence imposed on the woman was not supported by public sentiment, and there was loud clamor for a reprieve. No woman had been executed in New York for many years because the governors who ruled there wouldn't allow it. 

But when it came time to make good on the sentence for Mrs. Place, the conservative Teddy Roosevelt occupied the governor's office, and he refused to be swayed by what he called "mawkish sentimentality."

There are particulars about her death that are interesting, aside from the new method. She was not informed of the exact time; instead, a few days before the event, she was told that all hope of pardon was lost and she was to prepare herself to go at any moment. She spent the last several days of her life eating at the warden's table and exhibiting a calm demeanor. The actual execution seems to have gone alright, as these things go. She died very quickly.

It was, per the prison doctor at Sing Sing, "the best execution that has ever occurred here."

 
 

Accused Murderess Faces Her Victim

Mrs. Martha Place Confesses that She Threw Acid in Ida’s Face

The World (New York, N.Y.)

February 9, 1898

Mrs. Martha Place, the woman who killed her step-daughter and tried to kill her husband and herself on Monday in Brooklyn, made a partial confession yesterday. She acknowledged everything but the foot that she had murdered the girl. She said she threw acid in the girl’s face. She had to be confronted with the corpse of her victim before she would talk.

William W. Place, the husband, will recover. Only the outer wall of the skull was fractured in one place by the axe blows. The splinters of bone were removed and the operation of trephining successfully performed in the afternoon. Mrs. Place spent Monday night in St. John’s Hospital, Brooklyn. There the doctors found that there was little the matter with her; that she had not inhaled enough gas to stir the pulse of a baby.

Nevertheless she feigned unconsciousness until about 6 A. M. yesterday. She moaned and mumbled all night, calling for her husband.

“Where is Willie? Why don’t Willie come to me?” she cried.

All the time her husband was in the ward just above her, and the physicians did not know then whether the axe wounds would kill him or not.

Woman Taken from the Hospital

At 8 o’clock A. M. Detective Becker told the woman to get ready to go to the Ralph Avenue Police Station. She kept on moaning and walked with eyes half closed to the trolley car in which she rode to the station-house.

There Capt. Ennis and the detectives spent an hour trying to get her to say something, but she kept up her wandering talk. Then the Captain told Policeman North to go to the Hancock street house and get the dead girl’s clothes and the blood-stained axe and bring them back to see if they would shock her into talking. This was done, but without result.

Then an open patrol wagon was called and Detectives Becker and Mitchell lifted the woman in and the driver was told to proceed to her home. Mrs. Place did not want to enter the house.

The detectives rushed her up the stoop. They had to wait there a moment, and the woman’s eyes wandered to the bell where the undertaker had fastened a long string of lilies, white roses and smilax. The woman started at this emblem of her crime.

Found the Body of the Victim

Inside she was half lifted up the stairs and into the little back room where the body of the girl lay on the bed under a sheet. Becker stepped forward and pulled the sheet aside, disclosing the face of the once beautiful young girl.

The step-mother stopped back, turned her eyes upward and refused to look down.

“Why don’t you look at her and say why you killed her?” said Becker.

Mrs. Place did look down and said in a low voice:

“I didn’t kill her. I threw acid in her face. That was all. I don’t know anything about killing her.”

Without delay the detectives took her to the patrol-wagon and back to the station-house. There the matron talked with the woman and to her Mrs. Place said her husband would not allow her to have her boy and that it always worried her.

Then Captain Ennis and the detectives again took her in hand, and after questioning she made a partial confession.

Mrs. Place’s Story of the Tragedy

“My husband and myself had a dispute yesterday morning before he went to business,” she said. “Ida had told him some stories about me. He asked me about them. I denied them, and we had a sharp talk. Finally he hit me in the face with his hand.

“When he had gone I went to Ida’s room. She was dressing. I asked her what she meant by telling such stories about me to her father. She answered me sharply. We talked and argued for some time, and finally I left the room slamming the door.

“I went into my room. Then I saw a bottle with acid in it. I don’t know what kind of acid it was. I poured the stuff into a cup, and again going to Ida’s room. I opened the door and threw the stuff into her face. Then I closed the door and did not go near her again.

“I spent most of the day attending to the household work. I went downstairs to the cellar to feed the furnace and saw the axe there. I expected that Mr. Place would blame me when he came home. When I went down in the cellar again I brought up the axe and kept it near me. I was afraid my husband would strike me.

Hacked Her Husband Twice

“When I heard him come in I rushed toward him and struck him with the axe. When he ran toward the door I struck him again. Then I went upstairs and tried to kill myself.”

That is all she would say. At 1 o’clock P. M. she was taken down to Police Headquarters, where she was questioned by Deputy Chief MacKellan and Assistant District-Attorney Clark. A stenographer was on hand to take down her statement. Coroner Delai was also on hand. She practically reported what she had told Capt. Ennis a short time before.

From Police Headquarters she was taken to the Gates Avenue Police Court and arraigned before Judge Worth a 2:30 o’clock, after a long wait in a private room.

Detective Baker made the forma charge against her of homicide by choking her stepdaughter and pouring acid in her face of assault in the first degree by attacking her husband with an ax and of attempting suicide by inhaling gas. The woman stood with bowed head be fore the Justice, her hands tightly clutching the brass railing project in from his desk and tilting backward at such an angle that it seemed she would topple over.

“No, No, No,” She Kept Repeating

Two court officers stood on either side of her. They had to almost drag her into the room and then every few seconds they kept pushing her up to the railing. All the time the charge was being read she kept repeating in a high-pitched voice, but which could not be heard half a dozen feet away:

“No! no! no! I did not do that.”

As she had no counsel, Lawyer Knittie was assigned to her, and he waive examination. The hearing will be continued Feb. 15, at 2 P. M. From the court the woman was taken to the Raymond Street Jail where she was placed in a cell in the woman’s division. The Warden place a special guard at the cell door to prevent her from killing herself.

She reached the jail at 4 o’clock, an for five hours she walked up and down. She was very nervous.

At 4 P. M. Drs. Henderson and Moser under the direction of Coroner Delap, began the autopsy on the girl’s body in the Hancock street house. Dr. Moser is a pathologist. The autopsy was not finished until, after 6 P. M Then Coroner Delap made his report.

Girl Died from Suffocation

“The girl undoubtedly came to her death by suffocation,” he said: “her eyes were burned with acid; what kind of acid we do not yet know. The doctors have taken with them certain portion of the stomach, which will be examine microscopically.

“The result of their examinations will be known on Thursday. We cannot yet tell If there is poison in the stomach The acid in the girl’s eyes burned them so that had she lived she would have been stone blind.

“The only wound on the body was found just above the left ear. We cannot tell whether it was caused by a blow or a fall. There was a clot of blood on the brain.”

Last night the undertaker took charge of the body. The funeral will take place to-morrow.

Theodore Place will confer to-day with his brother, father of the murdered girl, about the funeral.

Father Learns of Ida’s Death

It was not intended to inform the unhappy man of his daughter’s terrible death, but a young friend of the family visited the hospital early yesterday morning and gave him some clippings from the morning papers. It was in this way the father learned of the death of his daughter.

The police had a long talk yesterday with Hulda Talm, the servant employed in the Place household. From what she said and their own investigations they believe Mrs. Place killed Ida between 8:30 and 9 o’clock, after a hard struggle.

Mrs. Place, they believe, began by scolding the girl while the latter was dressing. The girl replied sharply and in a fit of rage the step-mother got the acid, which is supposed to have been diluted vitriol, and dashed it in the girl’s eyes.

Police Theory of the Murder

Then, to deaden the screams of the suffering girl, who was slight and an infant in strength to the muscular woman, he step-mother threw Ida on the bed, pulled a large pillow over the girl’s face and then knelt on it until Ida became still. The stillness was death.

Hulda Talm said yesterday she heard one scream from Ida’s room early in the day but supposed it was merely one of the usual quarrels between the laughter and stepmother.

Hulda said Mrs. Place kept her out if the house all day Monday on various errands, as told in yesterday’s World.

Edward Scheldecker, the young man engaged to marry Ida, remembered yesterday morning that the girl’s fox-terrier Trilby and four puppies were in the house. He went around to get them to care for them.

Police Say the Food Was Poisoned

“I went down in the dining-room,” laid young Scholdecker to a World reporter, “and thinking the dogs were hungry started to give them some food from the table. The policemen then told me to look out, that I would kill the dogs.

“They said all the food on the table was poisoned and that all the food in the house had been fixed. It looks as if she had intended to kill all hands that way, but changed her mind.”

Ida Place’s girl chum was Gertrude Elebbard, daughter of Mrs. Anna M. Hobbard, of No. 268 Reid avenue. Gertrude Hcblxinl was engaged to marry Frederick Fahreivkarg, a private detective employed by the American Detective Association.

Mr. Place Wanted a Divorce

Several months ago Mr. Place hired Fahrenkarg, according to Miss Hebbard’s statement to a World reporter to shadow Mrs. Place and if possible obtain evidence on which he could begin divorce proceedings.

For a long time Fahrenkarg followed Mrs. Place every time she went out. He followed her to Newark when she went to visit her son, and to New Brunswick when she visited her brother. He obtained no evidence.

Mrs. Hebbard and Ida had arranged to be married at the same time and place. Late on Monday night young Scheidecker visited Miss Hebbard.

“There will be no double wedding now. Ida is dead.”

That was the way the girl learned of her friend’s death.

Theodore Place, brother of the injured man, said yesterday that he believed his sister-in-law was crazy from drink when she committed the crime. He said she had the most fearful temper that he ever saw in any human being.

Mrs. Place used to ride a bicycle; so did Ida; but they seldom rode out together.

Crowds Around the House

That part of Brooklyn in the vicinity of Hancock street was on the tiptoe of curiosity all day yesterday. There were seldom less than 500 people about the house.

After school hours hundreds of boys and girls collected: there were women in fine clothes, some of them wheeling infants in carriages and others carrying babies in their arms or attended by nurse girls.

In hunting for the motive of the strange crime, the police and relatives agree that it was simply the ignorant jealousy of Mrs. Place. She was a house-servant when Mr. Place married.

The husband is a quiet, scholarly man, fond of pleasures of which his second wife knew nothing. He likes books, is fond of music and is a clever musician in an amateur way; he is interested in photography and has a fancy for dabbling in many of the sciences. Ida was like her father.

The two brothers of Mr. Place. Theodore and Charles, who lived in the immediate neighborhood. could not tolerate Mrs. Place. They and their families ostracized her.

Blamed Husband, Then the Girl

Mrs. Place blamed her husband first, and when Ida began to grow into womanhood, she blamed her. She saw the girl gradually usurp her place in the household. The little house at No. 598 Hancock street was in Ida’s name.

But the great obstacle to happiness in the household was the refusal of the husband to allow his wife to bring to the home a son by her first husband. This boy is now fourteen years old. He was christened Ross Savacool.

When he was three years old his mother and father separated. The father went West, and it is supposed to be still living. After the separation the mother was left in poor circumstances. She could not support the child and arranged for its adoption by William B. Aschenbach, a wealthy harness manufacturer on South Orange avenue, Vallsburg, near Newark. They changed the name of the boy to William J. Aschenbach, jr., for a son they had just lost.

Had the Temper of a Tigress

Every time Mr. Place refused his wife shelter for her son she would lose control of her temper, and the real tigress in her would come to the surface. She would yell and screech at the top of her voice and threaten the father and daughter with violence.

More than once Ida had to leave the house and stop with friends to escape the frenzied outbreaks of the stepmother. For months the woman knew that her life would end in some fearful tragedy.

As long ago as September last she made preparations by writing a letter to her niece, Grace Garretson, in New Brunswick, N. J.. and arranging for the payment of $200 to her son Ross.

This letter was only mailed Monday after Ida was dead. Other letters were mailed at the same time to her brother, Peter Garretson, a baggage-master on the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Her New Jersey friends declare that Mrs. Place was injured some twenty years ago by being thrown out of a carriage and striking on her head. They say she always asserted that she suffered from pains in her head. The defense for her crime will certainly be insanity.

Clever at Simulating Insanity

The Brooklyn police said yesterday she was a clever actress at simulating insanity; that she posed as demented from the hour of the discovery of her crime until confronted with the distorted body of her step-daughter.

Mrs. Place is about 6 feet 7 Inches in height. She is not stout, but looks hard and muscular. She weighs about 150 or 160 pounds. Her hands are large and bony.

Her face Is not pleasant. She is forty-eight years old. Her hair is scant and thin. It is a colorless brown, streaked with gray. Yesterday it was rolled up in a tiny knot at the back of her head. Her face is seamed with lines. She looks like a woman who has spent most of life fretting and worrying.

Eyes That Evade Inspection

Her eyes are a cold gray and do not look squarely at a person talking to her. Her nose is thin, straight and with wide nostrils. Her lips arc thin and bloodless and are held tightly against the teeth.

The forehead is low and narrow. The chin is full at the sides and tapers almost to a point in front. Her cheekbones stick out and her jaws are square.

Altogether her face is a strange one. To those who knew her crime and saw her for the first time yesterday it was an appropriate face; one that seemed capable of exquisite cruelty, but not brutality, like that of Mrs. Nack’s [another infamous murderess of the time]. Detective Becker, who was with her constantly from the time of her arrest Monday night until she was locked up in Raymond Street Jail at 4 P. M. yesterday, said last night:

“She has a cruel face, a cruel heart and she is a great actress.”

New Brunswick Was Shocked

The news of the crime of Mattie Garretson Place caused intense surprise in New Brunswick, N. J., where she lived for many years and where she is well known. Her youthful victim, too, had many acquaintances In New Brunswick. Ida Place spent all last summer in New Brunswick as the guest of the family of Hendricks Vliet, a wealthy clothing dealer. She was a beautiful and daring bicyclist, and always over her short, crisp curls she wore a military fatigue cap.

Mrs. Place was the daughter of Isaac V. M. Garretson, a farmer, who owned a place near Millstone, about six miles from New Brunswick. She went to New Brunswick to live after her father had given up farming. About fifteen years ago she and her sister, now dead, conducted a dressmaking business in New Brunswick.

Mattie married a man named Savacool at Newark. One child was them – a boy whom they named Ross. Four years after marriage they separated. Then the woman went to Asbury Park to live. She did dressmaking for a time and later became housekeeper for William M. Place, then living at Asbury Park. Subsequently she went to his home at Brooklyn.

Mrs. Place’s Brother Overcome

All of Mrs. Place’s family are dead with the exception of one brother, Peter Garretson, who lives at No. 318 Seaman street, New Brunswick. He was almost overcome with the shock of the news that his sister was in such trouble. he said:

“When I reached Jersey City this morning I tried to go over to Brooklyn to see Mattie, but I couldn’t get up the sand. There isn’t the slightest doubt that she was insane. All these stories that she was jealous of Ida must be wrong. Why, she loved that little girl.

“Ever since she was forced to let her boy Ross go among strangers she has worried and fretted over that. She was wonderfully attached to him. I think that brooding over her future to get the boy turned her brain, which was none too strong on account of a carriage accident.”

Before checking her trunk to her brother Mrs. Place wrote several letters. Garretson received these letters in the morning mall. There were two letters, one of which contained several notes written in pencil, on the back leaves torn from a blank-hook.

The other envelope contained similar enclosures, also the key of the trunk, the check for the trunk, a ticket from Brooklyn to New York purchased on Feb. 7, on which the trunk had been checked, and $25.

Sent Her Money to Her Brother

There were six notes in all, two addressed to her niece, Grace Garretson and the rest to her brother. In addition to the letters she sent two bankbooks, one No. 103,086, on the Howard Savings Institution of Newark, showing deposits of $1.074.08, and the other No. 312,312 on the Brooklyn Savings Bank, showing deposits of $213.83.

[She was thought to have] some intention of killing herself, if not the rest of her family, for some time. One letter that bears date of Sept. 20, 1897, and is addressed to Grace Garreton, is as follows:

“Dear Grace Garretson: If anything should happen to me please take $200 for yourself and keep the rest for my on Ross when he comes of age and he to use it for a good purpose. Hoping you will favor my request. I remain – “MATTIE M. PLACE, “598 Hancock street.”

This letter is written on a piece of legal cap. It is written in ink. But crawled across the bottom in pencil in a tremulous hand, as if the writer were laboring under great mental agitation, were the words: “Now is the time. Get our papa to attend to this.”

All of the other letters are similar in tenor.

Capt. Ennis, of the Ralph Avenue Station, who telegraphed to the New Brunswick police to have Mrs. Place’s trunk sent back to him, received word late last night that this could not be one just yet because of objections lade by the railroad company, which refused to give it up until its ownership is settled.

Martha Place was executed on March 20, 1899 at Sing Sing. She was the first woman to die by means of electric chair.

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