Families can be fun…even when they’re fatal!
This is a delightfully bizarre little murder ditty, The Wicked Wardlaw Women and the Mysterious Death of Ocey Snead (Case #2 in the Murder, Mischief & Mayhem podcast series). Set in East Orange, New Jersey in 1909, it seems there are these three ladies the community has dubbed “The Weird Sisters” and “The Sisters in Black” because they go about town donning widow’s weeds of mourning…morning, noon and night.
Why…? Nobody knows!
The ghoulish threesome apparently have in-tow a late teens relative, Ocey Snead, who, it turns out, is the daughter of the lead sister. But motherly affection seems to play no part in their treatment of the girl because the three old crones (mother and two aunts) are starving her to death…deliberately withholding food, apparently trying to weaken her constitution, ruin her health and end her life.
Why…? Nobody knows!
It could have something to do with the fact that the beautiful Ocey is to inherit property. (It’s always about money!) And the ladies have forced her to draft a number of fraudulent wills bequeathing that property to them after her demise.
Eventually, the plan succeeds and Ocey succumbs. But when police arrive to investigate at the derelict flat and discover Ocey’s emaciated corpse in a bathtub, the sisters are indignant that their claims of an “accidental” death are not believed. Protesting their innocence, two of the cold, cruel crones end up in jail, while the third – a rather powerful woman with hypnotic, maniacal eyes and a demented God complex named Caroline Wardlaw Martin – remains at large. Police soon trace and arrest her at a local hotel…but not before she beats up half a dozen cops!
The matter ends up in the courts, of course, where the crazed Caroline decries police interference in private Wardlaw family affairs. And their brother, a Southern Baptist minister, shows up to testify against his creepy sisters…just before Caroline proclaims to the courtroom that she is God Himself!
So bizarre, it’s comical! And no surprise that the tale ends in an insane asylum and the annals of offbeat American crime.
By Justin Vyor
