2. MRS. HENRIETTA COOK.
This woman was twenty-five years of age when she came to the Kansas
penitentiary to serve out a life's sentence. She was charged with having
poisoned her husband. For fifteen years she remained in close
confinement, at the end of which time she received a pardon, it being
discovered that she was innocent. When Mrs. Cook entered the prison
she was young and beautiful, but when she took her departure she had the
appearance of an old, broken-down woman. Fifteen years of imprisonment
are sufficient to bring wrinkles to the face, and change the color of
the hair to gray. This prisoner made the mistake of her life in getting
married. She, a young woman, married an old man of seventy. She was
poor, he was rich. After they had been married a short time she awoke
one morning to find her aged husband a corpse at her side. During the
night he had breathed his last. The tongue of gossip soon had it
reported that the young and beautiful wife had poisoned her husband to
obtain his wealth, that she might spend the rest of her days with a
younger and handsomer man, After burial the body was exhumed and
examined. The stomach showed the presence of arsenic in sufficient
quantity to produce death. The home of the deceased was searched and a
package of the deadly poison found. She was tried, and sufficient
circumstantial evidence produced to secure her conviction, and she was
sent to prison for life. A short time before this sad event happened, a
young drug clerk took his departure from the town where the Cook family
resided,
where he had been employed in a drug store, and took up his abode in
California. After fifteen years of absence he returned. Learning of
the Cook murder, he went before the board of pardons and made affidavit
that the old gentleman was in the habit of using arsenic, and that while
a clerk in the drug store he had sold him the identical package found in
the house.
Other evidence was adduced supporting this testimony, and the
board of pardons decided that the husband had died from an overdose of
arsenic taken by himself and of his own accord. The wife was immediately
pardoned. How is she ever to obtain satisfaction for her fifteen years
of intense suffering. The great State of Kansas should pension this poor
woman, who now is scarcely able to work; and juries in the future should
not be so fast in sending people to the penitentiary on flimsy,
circumstantial evidence.
The other female prisoners are nearly all in for short terms, and
the crime laid to their charge is that of stealing.
