A MODERN BORGIA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 14835, 11 November 1911, Page 2 (Supplement)

A MODERN BORGIA.

FATE OF A FAMILY.

AMAZING MURDER CHARGE.

Americans are greatly interested by revelations in New Orleans which, if substantiated, will place Miss Amy Crawford, of that city, in the category of modern Lucrezia Borgias. Miss Crawford, who is 29 years of age, is a frail-looking, attractive young woman, of French-American extraction. She has been arrested on a charge of poisoning her younger sister, Elsie, a pretty stenographer, who expired recently from the effects of morphine. Within the last 15 months numerous members of the Crawford family have died under circumstances which the police consider demand investigation. They include the sister Agnes, vho died in June, 1910, the father and mother, who died a few weeks later, and now the sister Elsie.

In each case the prisoner held an insurance policy on the lives of the deceased for amounts varying from £50 in that of Elsie to £160 in that of the father. Foi several years she had charge of the drug department at a local hospital, and she looks more like-a prim, ambitious schoolteacher than a person of criminal inclinations. Amy Crawford admits that she administered morphine to her sister Elsie by mistake, but the police have charged her with wilful murder, and have ordered postmortem examinations on the other members of the family, whose deaths, though ascribed to meningitis and uraemia poisoning, are the police believe, traceable to the prisoners handiwork. The prisoner is accused of being a drug fiend, but she has such pretty and winsome ways, and is so unaffected in her speech and demeanour, that her friends declare she is incapable of serious crime, unless, as iB alleged, her moral senses have been undermined by morphine, of which she has taken large quantities. She ridicules the idea that she murdered practically the entire family for insurance aggregating £350, and says that her father alone was worth to her more than all the wealth this world can boast.

Despite the lady's protestations the police proceeded with . the work of exhuming the bodies, and tremendous excitement prevails in New Orleans pending the medical analysis. It is admitted that Amy and Elsie were not on particularly good terms, and when the former applied a , few days after the death of her si6ter to the railroad office where Elsie had been employed as a stenographer she was wearing a handsome dress ana rings, and was apparently far from grief-stricken. She collected £9 in wages due to her dead sister, and spent every cent of it in buying articles of personal adornment. It is not disputed that Amy aleo spent the insurance money on dress, to which she was so unreasonably addicted that she has been suspected of suffering from the madness of vanity.?'