Chapter 11. Mother against daughter.

For two long, bitter years, three women had kept a secret. A secret of a situation, and a crime

fraught with dire consequences to them all should it be revealed. A secret of a sick man slowly poisoned until

helpless, and then cold-bloodedly stabbed time and time again until he died. A secret of hired

assassins and poisoners and spells, of a plot cunning in all its details, and planned by the

minds of women. Women, the life givers, the mothers of the race, plotting to take a life. A grandmother,

a feeble old woman, her daughter, the arch conspirator, a middle-aged matron

possessed of a sinister, almost hypnotic control over both her mother and her daughter,

discontented with what life had brought her and determined to better her condition, even by ruthless,

deliberate crime.

Her granddaughter, a young college student,

these were the three women, Mrs. Brickle, Mrs. Cabor, and Marion McArdle.

Two years of stricken conscience, of fear and distrust of all people, of wakeful nights and

worried days it had been for all three. Finally, the aged grandmother broke down under the strain

and revealed all. So it was that early in June 1921, Mrs. Eva Catherine Caber had been arrested in New York,

where she had flown to escape the memories of Cleveland, charged with the murder of her husband.

Her daughter, Marion, too, was there under arrest, but separated from her mother, Marion in the tombs, Mrs. Caber, in the Harlem prison.

In Cleveland, the old lady, Mrs. Brickle, was imprisoned.

Mrs. Brickle had confessed everything.

Mrs. Caber denied everything, declaring that all her mother

had said was lies, the product of an old woman's imagination, and that her hands were clean

of blood, her conscience of wrongdoing. For days against overwhelming odds, Mrs. Cabor continued her assertions of innocence, accused by her own mother.

...