POISONED BUN

Greymouth Evening Star, 6 January 1934, Page 10

POISONED BUN

AN AMERICAN INCIDENT. Business was so bad, -says the “Ex-change;”-that it drove Mr, Jellinek to committing suicide. He' bought some cyanide, went to the Automat restaurant on Broadway, ordered, two buns, and sitting down at a table spread them liberally with the poison. After one bite Mr. Jellinek. got up quickly, found his way to the basement, and there died.

A woman was watching, from the gallery.’ She was poor, and hungry. She swooped down on the neglected buns, stuffed one into jier bag, and took a bite at the other ...

. The. police naturally-suspected a double suicide, until they visited the woman’s lodgings, and- say the manner of her life. For thirty years she had lived in the same cellar' room. For thirty years she had spent .her days prowling about the town; her eyes on the gutter, gathering an incredible collection of, rags, string, old . boots, bits of metal, and bottles. Hundreds of cardboard boxes were filled wit’> the accumulated rubbish of her thirty years’ hoarding, and the floor was an inch deep in peanut husks and chew-ing-gum wrappers. It was easy to see how she had come to eat the poisoned bun. Probably she hadn’t spent more than a few .pennies on food for years, but existed on ..what she could scrounge. And in the mattress of her filthy bedding they found six bank books, showing that she had to her credit a sum equivalent to £lO,OOO.-