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The house occupied by Edgar and Helen McKnight and their family is a double one,

and Mrs. Elizabeth Fury lives in the other half of it.

She heard a scream in the McKnight home at 5.10 p.m., she said, and thrust her head out of a back window.

Gladys Magnite, she said, was looking out of the McKnight kitchen window, and Mrs. Fury asked what was wrong.

Gladys told her nothing, nothing at all, I was having a

friendly scuffle with my boyfriend and cut my finger on a knife. For some reason, Mrs. Fury was not

satisfied with the explanation. Twice she went to the back door of the McKnight house to ask Gladys

if she was sure everything was

all right. Each time, she says, the girl assured her that everything was quite all right,

finally begging her rather petulantly to return to her house and stay there. It was about

5.30 p.m. when Mrs. Fury saw them depart in McKnight's motor car. She left her house immediately

and tried the back door of the McKnight house. It was locked. She tried to peer in at the windows,

but the shades had been drawn and she could see nothing. She was not at all astonished when Mr.

McKnight had peered at her kitchen door and asked to borrow something with which he could force a window. He had been unable, he told her, to

get into his own house. She let him take a screwdriver and in a moment he was back sobbing that

his wife had been killed.

He then called the police and a physician.

The True Crime Historian presents yesterday's news, tales of classic scandals, scoundrels, and scourges

told from historic newspapers in the golden age of yellow journalism.

Episode 151 is the twisted little tale of a family quarrel gone extreme.

There are a couple of different explanations as to how things got so heated on that July afternoon in 1936. But my take is that four beers and a 110-pound girl coming home to a chronically nagging mother with a hatchet nearby.

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