The Axe Murder Diaries

Trigger warning for suicide and the deaths of children.

Mary Seneff (18) was murdered with an axe by Ellen Ann Athey (27)

A Thanksgiving murder & ghost story

April 14th, 1897

September 14th, 1862. **Franklin B. Evans part 2**

My hometown murder of 12-13-year-old Georgianna Lovering

“His crime was caused by jealousy. Intending to disfigure the face of Miss McCandless, he fired at her with a rifle through a window, while the family was sitting at supper.”

"William Beadle cut the throats of his wife and four children, then took a pair of pistols and shot his own brains out."

Warning: This episode deals with the death of a family in 1904 including children as well as racism and deaths resulting from said racism. Listener discretion is advised.

"A roadside fire, apparently started by a lighted cigarette near the old cemetery on Sugar Hill, destroyed the Delia Congdon house, one of the oldest in town. The house had not been occupied, except transiently, since the murder of Delia Congdon, July 24th, 1908, as it had the reputation of being haunted."

"Because the father and husband held them in a thrall of fear, Mrs. Anthony Liszka and her daughter, Elizabeth, 13, hacked him to death with axes while he slept."

"A chance acquaintance in the back room of a saloon, a few moments of laughter and revelry over the cups, and Annie Walsh of 16 Elm Street walked out with her newfound friend last night to her death, for within an hour of the time when she and Captain Matroni of the barge, Snipe, moored at the City Coal Company's wharf; had left the place where they met, she lay in a bunk in the cabin, her body, t...

“What would you do if they were going to take your children away from you never to see them anymore?”

"I am far happier now I have done it than I was before, and I trust she is."

"...The murderer struck but one blow and that it was the most brutal and cold-blooded blow ever struck in Buffalo."

The hatchet murder of three-year-old Minda (Minnie) Effie Porter and one-year-old Adaline May Porter December 12, 1872 near Columbiana, Ohio

“His mutilated body buried in the woods and discovered by a dog. The worst crime in the history of Berkshire.”

“…on the blood-colored floor were found the pieces of the heavy iron tea-kettle with which Finn killed her, no axe being used as first reported.”

“Jacob Geogle and Annie Geogle came to their deaths by blows and cuts inflicted upon their heads and bodies with an axe in the hands of Joseph Snyder, on the night of Dec. 26, 1880.”

“What happened before the sun rose in the east this morning and looked in at the windows of a white cottage can be judged at this writing only by the marks of bloodshed.”

“Guiseppe Fuda went to the gallows for the butchery of his wife at East Norwalk, the night of February 17, 1897. By his own confession he and Nicondemo Impusino, who is sentenced to be hanged December 17, 1897, planned plotted and carried out the brutal murder of Marie Carmelia Fuda.”

“Mr. Gilman Spaulding was kill’d with an axe by an insane Brother, Sep. 19, 1842 AEt. 38.”

“Nels Anderson and his wife, Anna Anderson, came to their deaths as the result of wounds inflicted in their heads by an ax, said ax being in the hands of some person unknown…”

A family feud that had its inception two years ago ended yesterday, when Levin* K. Hopkins, 75-year-old farmer, of Glen Mills, took an ax and killed his son-in-law, Samuel Stoy, 41 years old, who was asleep on a couch in the small farm house occupied by both the Hopkins and Stoy families. The murderer then ran from the scene of his crime and, using an improvised noose, ended his life by hanging fr...