One man went through the effort to construct a guillotine inside a rented room while another simply road his cart into an oncoming train.
This 1941 newspaper article brings up some of the strange ways people have ended their lives in the past.
Queer Tricks That People Played to “End It All”
Recently Richard Hoben, of New York City, selected the largest needle from the household sewing basket, looped a slender copper wire through the eye, connected the wire to an electric cord and turned on the current. Then he plunged the electrified needle into his chest, close to his heart, and died instantly.
Police called it suicide.
Why men like Richard Hoben kill themselves, no one knows. We say they are insane, but in choosing their means of death they act as sanely as we might have done. They make no attempt to cut their throats with soft blades of grass, but use razors. None was ever so insane that he did not know it is the carbolic acid in the medicine closet and not the bay rum that kills. And some have chosen the most extraordinary of methods that astound the psychiatrist no less than they interest him.
Last February an almost incoherent 46-page letter, found near the body of Sidney Dannenberg, Cleveland Manager of a movie chain’s Ohio theaters, endeavored to explain the reason for his strange suicide in a Hollywood apartment house. Dannenberg had ingeniously fashioned a perfect, airtight “death chamber” from a blanket, into which he had inserted a hose connected to a burner, turned on the gas, and quietly passed away.
Never was there a more spectacular suicide than that of William Dwyer, a grocer of Danbury, Connecticut. Having made up his mind to do away with himself for some reason or other, he hitched his horse to his delivery wagon and drove up the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad track, bumping along over the ties until he saw a fast express coming at full speed. Then he whipped his horse into a wild gallop toward the approaching train.
In the glare of the headlight the engineer saw Dwyer standing up on the wagon seat, flourishing his whip, not a hundred feet away. There was no time to slow down the tremendous speed at which the locomotive was rushing before the awful crash came. Fragments of horse, wagon, and man were scattered far and wide.
Louis Schwartz, a New York City butcher, committed suicide in a glass cage in his own store. Schwartz shut himself in the office booth, disconnected the gas heater under the desk, and for hours the passing customers outside saw the man sitting on his high stool, leaning over his books as if going through the accounts in his customary manner, until a clerk learned the truth.
Some years ago Lafayette, Indiana, gave history one of its strangest suicides. James Moon, a well-to-do farmer secured a room at the Lahr Hotel, erected his own guillotine and beheaded himself.
Moon brought with him a heavy trunk, which he instructed the porter to take to his room with the greatest care. Then he went to a nearby barber shop, was shaved, and returned to his hotel room to set up his death machine.
The “Moon Guillotine,” as it was christened at the time, consisted of a heavily weighted broadax with a seven-foot handle, the end being fastened to the floor with a hinge. The handle had been made in three sections for convenience in packing it in the trunk. The elevated ax was sustained at the proper angle for falling the greatest distance possible by means of a cord attached to the free end of the handle. A lighted candle was placed against the cord, and on burning down, severed it, thus permitting the blade of the heavy ax to fall.
The suicide had arranged every detail with meticulous care, for a soap box had been placed on its side, with the open end just in line where the ax would strike after the flame had released it, marks having been made on the floor to insure accuracy of execution. The box was filled with cotton and punctured on each side to admit a small rod that passed beneath Moon’s chin to prevent any possibility of his head dropping after the anesthetic he intended to use had been administered.
When all was in readiness after the candle had been lighted, he carefully bound himself with two straps screwed to the floor, one across his knees and the other across the upper part of his chest. After a bottle of chloroform had been placed within reach on top of the box, the rod was pushed through the holes so it went under his chin, a handkerchief saturated with the anesthetic covered his face, and he became unconscious. The candle eventually burned down to the cord, severed it, and released the convex blade which fell with perfect accuracy. Moon’s head was cleanly cut off and the weighted ax was imbedded an inch in the floor when the corpse was discovered. James Moon was said to have had quirks, but why he committed suicide remains a mystery to this day.
Almost as sensational was the suicide of Arthur Pennell, a prosperous young attorney of Buffalo, New York. His death came as a sequel to the murder of Edward Burdick, a millionaire manufacturer, of which Pennell was suspected. Early on the evening when he expected police with the warrant charging him with the crime, he took his pretty wife for a ride in his automobile. When they reached a point near a quarry the lawyer suddenly swerved his car off the road and headed toward a deep stone pit.
The machine catapulted over a precipice 25 feet high, somersaulted in midair, and crashed on the rocks below. Pennell’s mangled remains were found under the wreckage, while his wife’s lifeless body was close by.
An employee of the Santa Fe Railroad named Graham Gibbs, blew himself into eternity with dynamite one summer morning on a Main Street in Santa Fe. Gibbs walked downtown with a bulky package under his arm. In front of the Wellington National Bank he stopped, tied the package to his body by a rope around his neck, and lit the end of a fuse. The next moment he evidently changed his mind for e tried frantically to tear the parcel from him. But the rope held. In another second an explosion shattered half the windows in the block. If friends of Gibbs had not seen him wrestling with the lethal package a moment before, what was found of his body could never have been identified. The picked up the pieces, gave him a funeral and recorded the case in Santa Fe as one of the strangest ever heard of in the fabulous Southwest.
Source: Detroit evening times. (Detroit, Mich), 07 Dec. 1941.
