Typed as
spelled and written
Lena Stone
Criswell
THE MARLIN DEMOCRAT
Eighteenth year - Number 56
Marlin, Texas, Wednesday, December 4, 1907
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NEGRO'S FIENDISH CRIME.
Kills his Mother-in-Law and Her
Daughter.
Lavernia,
Texas, Nov. 29.--Lavernia and vicinity were thrown into almost hysterical
excitement today by the brazen boldness and atrocity manifested in the killing
of a woman and girl, his relatives by marriage, by Louis Gibson, a negro, one
mile from town, about 9 o'clock this morning.
Posses
composed of whites and blacks alike are scouring the country under the
leadership of Sheriff Will Wright and deputies, but up to a late hour tonight
Gibson was still at large.
The
governor will be requested to offer a reward for his arrest. The
portentious (sic) mutterings and grim visages of the man hunters augur ill for
their quarry should he be found away from the protection of the law.
Hasty but
thorough investigation of the occurrence developed a horrifying (--rative) of
brutality and crime, the (missing) of which the annals of this county had not
theretofore contained. Gibson, his wife, and mother-in-law, Betty Taylor,
were at Gibson's home, located on the county road about a mile from Lavernia.
The wife left the house on some routine mission, and during her absence her
mother was killed. The head of the woman was (missing) but severed from
the body, being joined to the neck merely by a think shred of skin. A
bloody ax found near the corpse indicated the means of slaughter. The
woman's skull was crushed, the result of a blow before or after that which cut
her throat.
Reaching
the school house near by, Gibson called for his sister-in-law, Cora Taylor,
daughter of the woman he had so recently killed. The school teacher
refused to permit the girl to leave the room. Gibson strode in, grasped
the girl and carried her from the room. At the entrance to the school, he
drew a pocketknife and plunged it into the girl's neck, making a ghastly wound
from which the blood burst in sickening volume. The teacher rushed out at
this juncture and Gibson released the girl, who tottered fifty or sixty feet
from the building and sank.
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Copyright permission granted to
Theresa Carhart and her volunteers for
printing by The Democrat, Marlin,
Falls Co., Texas