Show A SATANIC TRAGEDY A Poor Negro Woman has Her Head Completely Com-pletely Severed from Her Body E Special to THE HERALD Examiner Dispatch SOMERVELLE Tenn March 26Almost in i the shadow of the quaint little Episcopal Episco-pal church here yesterday while the bells were chiming for divine worship a tragedy occurred as singular as it is satanic All the afternoon the vicinity was crowded with excited villagers and country people mostly colored and all fully persuaded that whoever committed the crime and whatever were the circumstances it could only be explained on the theory of the direct interposition of the genuine personal devil himself The poor victim was a simple good hearted black woman Mrs Hobson who was a servant in the family of the Episcopal Episco-pal minister and lived with her four children chil-dren in a small house in the rear of the rectors residence Yesterday morning her husband who had been in the country I at work called at the house in company with another negro and after a short stay started out for a short walk Returning an hour later a spectacle that froze him with horror stared him in the face Rolling slowly down the walk to the gate as he approached the head of his wife the eyes seemingly fixed upon him with a tigerish glare and a ghastly grin on the ashen lips A veritable necklace neck-lace of blood encircled the throat but the womans body was gone The stricken husband staggered to the corner of the house A new terror confronted him hereOn here-On the doorstep lay the decapitated remains re-mains of tho sharer of his humble household house-hold cares and joys and against her shoulders shoul-ders was a stick of firewood that but too plainly had served as the block of her primitive prim-itive guillotine Against the fibre of the stick were three distinct cuts of an axe Now comes the strangest part of the extraordinary extra-ordinary tragedy It was the seemingly conclusive evidence that the headsman in the startling drama was a child the womans own son scarcely eleven years of age The little fellow was found playing innocently with a number of other children near by his clothing saturated with the blood of his parent The evidently I evi-dently mad explanation given by the child was that the blood came from a chicken he had killed a story which was changed later by the crimson stained little one to a direct statement that he had slain his mother He asserted that she had placed her head down on the block and commanded him to make of her a sacrifice sac-rifice telling him that if he did not cut her head off she would ariso and take his life Two explanations of tho mystery are entertained by the coroner and others of some intelligence One idearis that the mother suddenly became insane and that the son obeyed her behest as literally as did Jacob that of Abraham in the olden days of the Jews Another suspicion is that the act was not that of a child or of a frenzied woman but sprang from an old head and was the result of a cunningly laid coldblooded plot In other words Mrs Hobsons husnand and his tale of his vision of sudden death is locked upon askance Tho question is Did he not through jealousy jeal-ousy or some other sinister motive make away with his dusky helpmate and then with the instincts of a fiend seek to save himself by smearing his son with a mothers moth-ers blood and suggesting to tho unfortunate unfortu-nate youngster the palpable lie that would bring swift condemation I |