Mary Murphy wept as her tormented brother opened his eyes and cried, "Hold me down, Joe, my feet will come up."Mary Murphy, a kind, friendly and gentle person, loved to dress up for social occasions. And few social occasions in backwoods Michigan at the turn of the century equaled a funeral. A funeral, often the only occasion that
brought an entire family together, was usually an almost festive wake that gave hardworking farmers an excuse to relax and their wives a chance to dress up.
Mary Murphy seemed to enjoy going to funerals, and death hung on the black taffeta dress, black hat, and
vail she wore so many times. By the time she arrived in Fife Lake in 1899, she had already attended a sorrowfully impressive list of funerals. Mary's first husband, James Ambrose, died suddenly in 1887, and she also
buried all her children from that marriage - three who died in infancy and two who died of
diptheria at ages five and seventeen. Shortly after Ambrose's death, Mary married Ernest McKnight, and in 1889, the couple moved from
Alpena to
Grayling. Mary's father died in 1894, and, in 1898, second husband Ernest died.
After Ernest's death, Mary sold their property, moved in with her mother and a mentally retarded niece at the family's Fife Lake farm, and added to the funeral list. In late winter, 1903, Mary's brother John, his wife Gertrude, and three-month-old baby daughter moved into the farmhouse while John built a new house nearby. On Monday, April 24, 1903, Gertrude left the baby with Mary, a trained nurse and midwife, and went to help John at the house. When the young couple returned later that afternoon, Mary sobbed that the baby had tragically died of sudden spasms. John consoled the two grief-stricken women for several minutes then left for
town to buy a small coffin. When he returned five hours later, Mary tearfully told him that Gertrude had died of an epileptic fit brought on by the baby's death.
A little more than a week later, on a cold and blustery May 2, John Murphy lay on his back across his bed, his twitching legs protruding stiffly from his gray flannel nightgown. Sweat rolled over his closed eyelids and down his red face, and foam bubbled from the corners of his moth. Joe
Battenfield, a friend and neighbor who had been summoned by John's mother, moved to John's side and moved an open bottle of camphor under the stricken man's nose. Mary Murphy wept as her tormented brother opened his eyes and cried, "Hold me down, Joe, my feet will come up."
Battenfield pressed his knees against Murphy's legs, and John's body twitched and heaved uncontrollably for two more agonizing minutes before he mercifully died.
The sympathetic and kind folks of Springfield Township felt that three deaths in a little more than a week was more than any family should have to bear. So did a suspicious Grand Traverse County prosecutor, E.C. Smith, who ordered John's body exhumed and sent the dead man's organs to Ann Arbor for analysis. A week later the report came back; the strychnine found in John's stomach would have killed ten men.
Smith then launched a thorough investigation into Mary Murphy's past and compiled an
appalling report.
-James Ambrose, Mary's first husband, died in agony, his limbs twitching
convulsively.
-Mrs. McKnight, the first wife of Marys' second husband Ernest, died, in
Alpena, in July, 1887, after experiencing severe convulsions while under Mary's care.
-Two days after Mrs. McKnight's death, Mary's niece, baby
Teeple, also died of convulsions while under Mary's care.
-In
Grayling, after drinking tea with Mary in May, 1892, Eliza
Chalker, another niece, foamed at the mouth and died.
-Nine months later, also in G
rayling, Sarah Murphy, Mary's sister, died, also after drinking tea with Mary.
-Ernest McKnight, Mary's second husband, drove his wagon to cut some hay and, shortly after eating a lunch prepared by Mary, became violently ill but made it home. By the next morning, he had recovered, but that night, Mary reported, he died in his sleep..
-In 1896, Mrs. Carey, a relative of Mary's, mysteriously died.
-Dorothy Jensen, a child in the care of Mary, died on Good Friday, 1902, after uncontrollably twitching and foaming at the mouth.
Prosecutor Smith added the names of John, Gertrude, and baby Murphy to the horrifying report and continued his investigation. He ordered bodies of G
ertrude and the baby exhumed, and the Ann Arbor medical examiner found large amounts of strychnine in both. A neighbor, present when the baby died, told Smith she had seen Mary give the baby a pill shortly before it went into spasms and died. Shortly after that, according to the same witness, Mary gave Gertrude a pill for her nerves, and
Gertrude immediately fell to the floor, her limbs twitching horribly until she died.
Smith arrested Mary, and she admitted that she had given her brother and his family homemade strychnine-quinine pills but only to soothe, not kill, them.
Forty-year-old Mary Murphy McKnight was tried, found guilty of murder in the first degree of her brother John, and sentenced to life
imprisonment. She spent eighteen years in the Detroit House of Corrections before being paroled.
Story courtesy of the Fife Lake, MI museum. Author unknown.
