AMERICAN FANATICISM

Evening Star, Issue 18628, 8 May 1924, Page 4

AMERICAN FANATICISM

SENSATIONAL SEQUELS. MUTILATION AND MURDER. The constant growth of strange cults, religious and of a scientific nature, has had a sensational sequel in some of tho Southern States, where the North American negro has Ills habitation and religious fanaticism is believed ie,sponsible for a number of striking murders and a ease of self-mutilation which have been recorded in tho South recently (writes the San Francisco correspondent of the Auckland ‘Star’). Quick action of surgeons and his own strong constitution are all that saved Herbert Tingle, a seventecn-year-okl farmer boy of Locust Grove, Georgia, when ho obeyed literally the Biblical injunction, “ If thv right hand offend thee, cut it off.” He laid his right hand on a chopping block and cut it off with an axe, swinging the heavy blade nine times before ho severed tho bone and tho flesh.

A fortnight previous to that occurrence Jane Eva Winchester, an eighteen-year-old girl living at .Seifner, Florida, slew her sick father by stamping upon his face and chest until she had trampled tho life out of him. She said she acted at the command of her mother, who declared that Jesus ordered the death of Winchester because the devil was in him.

At tho time of the Winchester tragedy the crimes of Frank M‘Dowell, nincteen-yoar-old slayer of his parents and of his two sisters, wore fresh in the public mind. He burned his two sisters to death at their home in Decatur, Georgia, and a year later to the.day killed his parents in St. Petersburg) Florida, by shooting tnem as they lay asleep in bed. Ho pleaded that he committed all these murders in the effort to atone for tho sin of cursing the Holy Ghost when ho was eleven years old. His weird story was that as a child he blasphemed against tho Holy Ghost because he. found that ono day buttons were missing from a clean shirt ho meant to put on. Later ho heard a preacher assert that such blasphemy was the unpardonable sin, and could be expiated only through fire and blood. M‘Dowell is in gaol at dearwater, Florida, awaiting trial for his crimes.

Herbert Tingle, the eighth grade student who chopped off his own hand, is tho son of a well-to-do farmer. The family had gone to bed, and Herbert was supposed to bo asleep. Instead of sleeping, however, ho crept silently through the back door of the farmhouse to the wood shed. There ho lit a lantern and hung it on a nail near the wood block. Then he picked up a heavy axe, placed hie right hand palm down on the block, and began to hack at his wrist.

Tho slaying of John Edwin Winchester by his danghtej is unparalleled in tho history of crime in Florida. Tho mother told the police, she had been attending a series of religious services held by a healer evangelist, and had become convinced that her husband was possessed of the devil, and that it was Jesus' command that ho be killed. She and her daughter dragged the sick man out into the yard, and there he was trampled to death as though under the hoofs of cattle. “My daughter is not to blame,,” the mother calmly said. “ I commanded her to do it. I stood over while she stamped my husband on the face and chest for thirty minutes. Ho cried for mercy, but I was commanded by Jesus to end his life.”