"TRUTH SERUM."

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 307, 28 December 1935, Page 10

"TRUTH SERUM."

SEEKING A MURDERER. CHARGE "PROVED" UNTRUE. (From Our Own Correspondent.) SAN FRANCISCO, December 4. A slaying as old as the State, committed in 1907, remained a mystery after one purported solution had been exploded by' use of scopolamin—"truth serum" —on two persons in Arnett, Oklahoma. County-Attorney Charles B. Lecdey recently announced that murder charges filed against Mrs. Bonnie Lovall, of Death Valley, California, and J. C. Farmer, Lavernc, Oklahoma, justice of the peace, were dismissed. "It was a unique procedure," said Mr. Lecdey in describing the administration of "truth serum" to Mrs. Lovall and her former husband, Ora Lovall, who implicated her in the slaying in a statement given in California. "I took the written statements and questioned them, after they were given the serum. Their reactions were marked. Soon I was convinced that Ora Lovall's charges were untrue."

Mr. Leodoy asserted that Lovnll at'ryitted accusing his divorced wife in the slaying of Edward Nelson, Texan, at Arhett, in 1007, "to get even with her." Mrs. Lovnll, former dancehall girl at Arnott in the roaring days of the pioneer frontier town, made no damaging admissions while under the effects of the serum. She left for Texas shortly after she was released from gaol, and Farmer returned to Laverne. Two doctors administered the serum—the first instance in which copolamin has been used in Oklahoma to ferret out the truth in a criminal case.