Etta Griffith
08 December 1906
Eastern Kentucky Lunatic Asylum
Lexington, Fayette, Kentucky

Brooding over the death of her little daughter, whom she was accused of poisoning, a complete physical and mental wreck from confinement in jail on the charge of infanticide, of which she constantly protested her innocence, Mrs. Etta Griffith, the young wife of Noland Griffith, who was taken from her cell in the county jail last Monday by an order of court and placed in the local asylum a raving maniac, died at that institution Friday night at 9:45 o'clock, after having been there only five days. Acute exhaustion is given as the cause of her death. No inquest was held over the body, as death was due to natural causes, the patient being a pitiable physical as well as mental wreck when received at the institution. Her relatives were notified of her death and the body was taken Saturday afternoon to Jack's Creek, her girlhood home, for burial.

Her death is the tragic end of a most pathetic life drama. Less than a year ago Mrs. Griffith, only 19 years of age, was a buxom rosy cheeked country lass in appearance, a happy wife and mother, a bright-eyed little daughter having come to bless her union with Noland Griffith, a young farmer of the Jack's Creek neighborhood. In July, while visiting the home of her brother-in-law, James Griffith, the little girl, who was only fifteen months old, became suddenly ill. Whether illness was due to the fact that the young mother had allowed it to nurse when she was warm and tired after walking several miles, or whether or it was given something that did not agree with it to quiet it, was a question of doubt in the mind of the attending physician.

That night the child died in its mother's arms, and she was later arrested on the charge of having poisoned it by administering to it morphine. The warrant charging the young mother with the crime was sworn out by James Griffith, her brother-in-law, at whose home the child died and who, it is said, had for some time been unfriendly to the young woman. Allegations were made by Griffith and several members of his family that the young mother, after a family quarrel with her husband, had been heard to say that she would get rid of the child. Griffith claimed to have found in the back yard a broken bottle which contained morphine, bearing a label indicating that it had been purchased at a nearby drug store. Mrs. Griffith was arrested, brought here, and placed in jail. The body of the infant was exhumed, and its stomach analyzed at the Commonwealth's expense. The hundredth part of a grain of morphine being found in the stomach served to strengthen the charge made against the young mother, in favor of this circumstantial testimony, the accused protested her innocence and her husband, who evidently believed in the innocence of his wife, visited her at the jail, sat beside her at her examining trial,, and did everything apparently that he could to comfort and console her.

James Griffith, her brother-in-law, was inexorable in his prosecution, and through his efforts the Commonwealth presented such a mass of evidence at her examining trial that she was held to the grand jury without bond. Her youthfulness, her protested innocence and her helplessness aroused much sympathy for her, and several prominent young attorneys at the local bar, among them Wallace Muir, now a candidate for the Democratic nomination for City Attorney, volunteered without pay to defend her. After her examining trial she was recommitted to jail to await the action of the grand jury, which later, upon practically the same testimony brought out at the examining trial, indicted her for the murder of her child. Her attorneys felt all the time, however, that they could clear her, as her side had never been brought out, which they intended to do at the final trial. This, however, she was not permitted by fate to undergo.
She seemed to have become depressed by her indictment by the grand jury, and brooding over the death of her child, together with the rigor of confinement, to which she had not been accustomed, began to tell of her physically as well as mentally, and from a picture of perfect health she gradually began to decline. Jailer Alhern and the other officials did all they could to make her comfortable and Mrs. Jones, captain of the Salvation Army, visited her constantly, and by tender ministration sought to relieve her of the melancholia which now seemed growing upon her.
 
The execution of Thomas Stout, the Negro murdered, then came, and although she did not witness the hanging, she knew Stout, having lived in the same neighborhood, and the sight of the gallows, which she saw from the cell window as the men were erecting it, seemed to presage to her her own unhappy fate, and after the extinction she became a raving maniac, refusing food and all attentions and seeking to starve herself to death.

As soon as her pitiable condition was brought to the attention of Colonel Allen, Commonwealth's Attorney, he immediately ordered an inquiry into her sanity, with the result that she was adjudged insane and ordered to the asylum. Those who saw the pitiable physical and mental wreck as she was led into court to be sent to the asylum could hardly realize that it was the same young wife and mother who six months before faced her accusers on the then doubtful charge of infanticide. Sorrow over her child's death, the shame of the accusation against her, together with the rigor of confinement that followed, had in the brief space of six months withered her from blooming young womanhood into a physical and mental wreck, for which the grave was the only relief.

The charge of murder against her will, of course, now be stricken from the criminal docket, and these lines from a celebrated poet, penned in commemoration of another indictment almost as pathetic, might appropriately be placed upon the head stone that marks her last resting place, as a mute but eloquent rebuke to the tardiness of justice:
"Your message, sir, has come too late,
For Heaven has claimed its own;
Ah, sudden change from prison bars
Unto the great white throne."

Source: Lexington [KY] Leader, 08 December 1906, p. 1 cols. 1-2