Like many such events of murder or suicide, suspected
marital infidelity was the motivating factor. At the time of the murder/suicide,
Frederick Defrouville was a clerk in the Agriculture Dept. and his wife
was also employed in the Department of Agriculture as a translator,
employment she secured from her association with Senator Benjamin Harvey
Hill.
Previously, Mrs. Defrouville had worked in the dead
letters section of the Post Office, a job that she secured after
immigrating from Denmark in 1871, through her connection to the former
U.S. consul to that country.
Frederic DeFrouville was the a nephew by marriage of
Confederate States of America spy Aaron Van Camp and the son of French
national Frederick Defrouville, who emigrated to the United States in
the 1840s.
An inquest determined that Mrs. Defrouville was
giving German lessons to an 18 year old neighbor when her estranged
husband entered the residence and shot Mrs. Defrouville and then himself
with a revolver. Mrs. Defrouville in buried in the Congressional
Cemetery and Mr. Defrouville in Glenwood Cemetery.
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