DEATH OF THE GENERAL WHO KIDNAPPED HIS LEPER BRIDE.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXIX, Issue 237, 3 October 1908, Page 15

DEATH OF THE GENERAL WHO KIDNAPPED HIS LEPER BRIDE.

Tragedy has followed swift on the heels of the romantic kidnapping by General D. K. Wardwell of his wife from the County Hospital iv Los Angeles, California, for he has just died at Bisbee, Arizona, as the result of nn operation. General "Wardwell, who had retired from the U.S. army, met his wife in Mexico, when she was Miss Isabel Cole, the most beautiful woman in the country. She had contracted leprosy through nursing a brother suffering from the disease. Despite this, General Wardwell married her in 1890. and took her to Los Angeles. Mrs. Wardwell's ailment was kept secret until recently, when the authorities sent her to an isolation hospital, refusing her husbaud's request to take her to Mexico, where lepers are not isolated. The soldier then claimed that he. too, had leprosy, and de manded the right to live with his wife. The doctors refused, saying he showed no trace of the disease. Periodically the general was allowed to interview his wife through a barred window. Determined uot to be separated from the woman he loved so dearly, the general succeeded in abducting her, the authorities making only a perfunctory pursuit. They fled to Arizona, and since then the genera, had nursed his wife devotedly.