Anne Hawkins, a history teacher in Topeka, and some middle school students began piecing together the names of additional victims of Mary Troy, who went by several similar aliases. Here is their report:
Mary Troy was an African-American woman and David Marshall was an African-American orphan, living with his grandparents and an uncle in Kansas City, KS.
David was 16 years old and very bright--he had completed, or was about to complete, high school, when in late October of 1909, Mary Troy "enticed him" (according to his grandmother) to travel with her, promising to advance his education and provide him with money and clothes. She told his family members that she took him to Chicago, when in fact she carried him and a little girl away to Topeka, where she booked a room in the Washam Hotel under the guise of a mother traveling with her two stepchildren (the boy, David, she called "Willard Troy"). She poisoned David in early November with arsenic, and when he died on November 6, had him buried as "Willard Troy" somewhere in Shawnee County and then went to claim the $550 life insurance policy on "Willard" that she had earlier taken out.
A clever clerk at Metropolitan Life Insurance investigated, and found the real Willard Troy alive in Illinois, so had Mary arrested on insurance fraud. That's when the investigation began into the true identity of the body buried. David Marshall's body was exhumed in January and an autopsy performed by Dr. Frank Dains, head of the Washburn college chemistry department. Dr. Dains testified to the coroner's jury on January 27, 1910, that the boy had died of arsenic poisoning...and his true identity was confirmed when David's uncle and aunt came from Kansas City to identify his remains (which must have been grisly, after 2 1/2 months' burial...). At this point, Mary Troy was charged with first-degree murder in David's death, and investigations began to identify her additional victims.
We have not yet found out what happened to the girl who was with Mary and David at the Washam Hotel in Topeka, but we suspect the worst--we've learned that only weeks after killing David, Mary Troy married again in mid-December 1909, a man with several children, and she pressed her new husband to take out life insurance policies on himself and his children to her benefit. Mary was arrested in late December, however, on the life insurance fraud charge stemming from David's death, and so she was unable to carry out her plans with the new husband and family.
Mary's modus operandi, we've discovered, was to lure children to travel with her, take insurance policies out on them (falsely claiming that they were stepchildren), kill them away from home, then collect the insurance money. She also married several times, men with children, and she appears to have done the same with these men and their families to collect life insurance money. We don't know how many victims died at her hand before the Met Life clerk investigated her for insurance fraud and put a halt to her killings. One of the students discovered the name of one of her earlier victims, a little girl named Jessie Watson, whom Mary killed in April 1909 in KC.
====================================
The information above is reprinted with permission of the researcher Anne Hawkins and it has since appeared on-line at
http://cjonline.com/news/2012-08-18/young-history-detectives-track-1900s-serial-killer
Mary Troy was an African-American woman and David Marshall was an African-American orphan, living with his grandparents and an uncle in Kansas City, KS.
David was 16 years old and very bright--he had completed, or was about to complete, high school, when in late October of 1909, Mary Troy "enticed him" (according to his grandmother) to travel with her, promising to advance his education and provide him with money and clothes. She told his family members that she took him to Chicago, when in fact she carried him and a little girl away to Topeka, where she booked a room in the Washam Hotel under the guise of a mother traveling with her two stepchildren (the boy, David, she called "Willard Troy"). She poisoned David in early November with arsenic, and when he died on November 6, had him buried as "Willard Troy" somewhere in Shawnee County and then went to claim the $550 life insurance policy on "Willard" that she had earlier taken out.
A clever clerk at Metropolitan Life Insurance investigated, and found the real Willard Troy alive in Illinois, so had Mary arrested on insurance fraud. That's when the investigation began into the true identity of the body buried. David Marshall's body was exhumed in January and an autopsy performed by Dr. Frank Dains, head of the Washburn college chemistry department. Dr. Dains testified to the coroner's jury on January 27, 1910, that the boy had died of arsenic poisoning...and his true identity was confirmed when David's uncle and aunt came from Kansas City to identify his remains (which must have been grisly, after 2 1/2 months' burial...). At this point, Mary Troy was charged with first-degree murder in David's death, and investigations began to identify her additional victims.
We have not yet found out what happened to the girl who was with Mary and David at the Washam Hotel in Topeka, but we suspect the worst--we've learned that only weeks after killing David, Mary Troy married again in mid-December 1909, a man with several children, and she pressed her new husband to take out life insurance policies on himself and his children to her benefit. Mary was arrested in late December, however, on the life insurance fraud charge stemming from David's death, and so she was unable to carry out her plans with the new husband and family.
Mary's modus operandi, we've discovered, was to lure children to travel with her, take insurance policies out on them (falsely claiming that they were stepchildren), kill them away from home, then collect the insurance money. She also married several times, men with children, and she appears to have done the same with these men and their families to collect life insurance money. We don't know how many victims died at her hand before the Met Life clerk investigated her for insurance fraud and put a halt to her killings. One of the students discovered the name of one of her earlier victims, a little girl named Jessie Watson, whom Mary killed in April 1909 in KC.
====================================
The information above is reprinted with permission of the researcher Anne Hawkins and it has since appeared on-line at
http://cjonline.com/news/2012-08-18/young-history-detectives-track-1900s-serial-killer
Anne Hawkins, a history teacher in Topeka, and some middle school students began piecing together the names of additional victims of Mary Troy, who went by several similar aliases. Here is their report:
Mary Troy was an African-American woman and David Marshall was an African-American orphan, living with his grandparents and an uncle in Kansas City, KS.
David was 16 years old and very bright--he had completed, or was about to complete, high school, when in late October of 1909, Mary Troy "enticed him" (according to his grandmother) to travel with her, promising to advance his education and provide him with money and clothes. She told his family members that she took him to Chicago, when in fact she carried him and a little girl away to Topeka, where she booked a room in the Washam Hotel under the guise of a mother traveling with her two stepchildren (the boy, David, she called "Willard Troy"). She poisoned David in early November with arsenic, and when he died on November 6, had him buried as "Willard Troy" somewhere in Shawnee County and then went to claim the $550 life insurance policy on "Willard" that she had earlier taken out.
A clever clerk at Metropolitan Life Insurance investigated, and found the real Willard Troy alive in Illinois, so had Mary arrested on insurance fraud. That's when the investigation began into the true identity of the body buried. David Marshall's body was exhumed in January and an autopsy performed by Dr. Frank Dains, head of the Washburn college chemistry department. Dr. Dains testified to the coroner's jury on January 27, 1910, that the boy had died of arsenic poisoning...and his true identity was confirmed when David's uncle and aunt came from Kansas City to identify his remains (which must have been grisly, after 2 1/2 months' burial...). At this point, Mary Troy was charged with first-degree murder in David's death, and investigations began to identify her additional victims.
We have not yet found out what happened to the girl who was with Mary and David at the Washam Hotel in Topeka, but we suspect the worst--we've learned that only weeks after killing David, Mary Troy married again in mid-December 1909, a man with several children, and she pressed her new husband to take out life insurance policies on himself and his children to her benefit. Mary was arrested in late December, however, on the life insurance fraud charge stemming from David's death, and so she was unable to carry out her plans with the new husband and family.
Mary's modus operandi, we've discovered, was to lure children to travel with her, take insurance policies out on them (falsely claiming that they were stepchildren), kill them away from home, then collect the insurance money. She also married several times, men with children, and she appears to have done the same with these men and their families to collect life insurance money. We don't know how many victims died at her hand before the Met Life clerk investigated her for insurance fraud and put a halt to her killings. One of the students discovered the name of one of her earlier victims, a little girl named Jessie Watson, whom Mary killed in April 1909 in KC.
====================================
The information above is reprinted with permission of the researcher Anne Hawkins and it has since appeared on-line at
http://cjonline.com/news/2012-08-18/young-history-detectives-track-1900s-serial-killer
Mary Troy was an African-American woman and David Marshall was an African-American orphan, living with his grandparents and an uncle in Kansas City, KS.
David was 16 years old and very bright--he had completed, or was about to complete, high school, when in late October of 1909, Mary Troy "enticed him" (according to his grandmother) to travel with her, promising to advance his education and provide him with money and clothes. She told his family members that she took him to Chicago, when in fact she carried him and a little girl away to Topeka, where she booked a room in the Washam Hotel under the guise of a mother traveling with her two stepchildren (the boy, David, she called "Willard Troy"). She poisoned David in early November with arsenic, and when he died on November 6, had him buried as "Willard Troy" somewhere in Shawnee County and then went to claim the $550 life insurance policy on "Willard" that she had earlier taken out.
A clever clerk at Metropolitan Life Insurance investigated, and found the real Willard Troy alive in Illinois, so had Mary arrested on insurance fraud. That's when the investigation began into the true identity of the body buried. David Marshall's body was exhumed in January and an autopsy performed by Dr. Frank Dains, head of the Washburn college chemistry department. Dr. Dains testified to the coroner's jury on January 27, 1910, that the boy had died of arsenic poisoning...and his true identity was confirmed when David's uncle and aunt came from Kansas City to identify his remains (which must have been grisly, after 2 1/2 months' burial...). At this point, Mary Troy was charged with first-degree murder in David's death, and investigations began to identify her additional victims.
We have not yet found out what happened to the girl who was with Mary and David at the Washam Hotel in Topeka, but we suspect the worst--we've learned that only weeks after killing David, Mary Troy married again in mid-December 1909, a man with several children, and she pressed her new husband to take out life insurance policies on himself and his children to her benefit. Mary was arrested in late December, however, on the life insurance fraud charge stemming from David's death, and so she was unable to carry out her plans with the new husband and family.
Mary's modus operandi, we've discovered, was to lure children to travel with her, take insurance policies out on them (falsely claiming that they were stepchildren), kill them away from home, then collect the insurance money. She also married several times, men with children, and she appears to have done the same with these men and their families to collect life insurance money. We don't know how many victims died at her hand before the Met Life clerk investigated her for insurance fraud and put a halt to her killings. One of the students discovered the name of one of her earlier victims, a little girl named Jessie Watson, whom Mary killed in April 1909 in KC.
====================================
The information above is reprinted with permission of the researcher Anne Hawkins and it has since appeared on-line at
http://cjonline.com/news/2012-08-18/young-history-detectives-track-1900s-serial-killer
Inscription
CAME TO HIS DEATH BY POISON ADMINISTRATED BY MARY TROY
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