A horrifying news report published in 1921 tells us that a wife and husband decided to kill themselves and their four children to keep the family together. The children’s beds were soaked with gasoline and lit on fire, but the father chickened out and escaped the fire with severe burns.
Burns Home to Kill Six
Calgary, Alberta. — A confession that he and his wife deliberately set fire to their home, after soaking their four children’s beds with gasoline so that all might be burned to death, was made, according to the police, by J.J. Rutledge, an Innesfail farmer, the only survivor of his family.
The man said he and his wife preferred death to being separated from the children, who, they feared, would be taken from them by a children’s aid society.
Rutledge knocked one child unconscious to save it pain, then lost his nerve and escaped severely burned.
The man is in the hospital, charged with murder.
Source: The Jasper weekly courier. (Jasper, Ind.), 26 Aug. 1921.
