The Reed Family Tragedy

The suffocation of the George W. Reed family at Independence, Montgomery County, on the night of December 31, 1893, remains one of the county’s most profound tragedies. Initially shrouded in mystery, the incident involved the sudden deaths of Mr. Reed, manager of the Long-Bell Lumber Company; his five-year-old son Allen; and a household employee, Eda Scott, due to carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a blocked chimney. Mrs. Reed survived, though severely affected.

Many terrible tragedies have darkened the annals of Montgomery County, but among them all there has been no other that has so profoundly moved the people as that of the suffocation of the family of George W. Reed, at Independence, on the night of Saturday, December 31st, 1893. The calamity was due to the imperfect consumption of natural gas, on account of the entire stoppage of the flue of a chimney, resulting in the formation of that deadly product of combustion, carbonic oxide gas. This fact, however, was not learned until days after the tragedy, and meanwhile the mystery and the horror which surrounded the affair so impressed the public mind that the people of the city could neither think nor talk of anything else, and for a time business was almost at a standstill.

The Reed family at the time consisted of Mr. Reed, who was manager of the Long-Bell Lumber Company, his wife, Ella, who was a sister of E. P. Allen, president of the First National Bank, their son Allen, a boy of five years, and Miss Eda Scott, a young lady 22 years of age who had been in their employ for several months. On the night mentioned Mr. Reed had gone for a doctor for a neighbor’s child, about nine o’clock in the evening, which was the last seen of him alive. On the Sunday following, at least six or seven times attempts were made to obtain entrance to the house, but everyone who came found the doors locked and received no response to repeated knocks. Tom Foster, who was a step-son of a married daughter of Mr. Reed, had been invited to take dinner there on that day, and not only came at the appointed time but when he found the door locked, the curtains drawn and everything still about the house, sat down on the porch in the warm sunshine of that New Year’s day and waited for an hour before going away. J. A. Sparks, then turn-key at the jail, was the affianced husband of the girl, Eda, and he not only went there once but repeatedly, in fulfillment of an engagement to take her for a buggy ride that afternoon, without learning why it was that no response came to his knocking.

Everyone of course concluded that the family had gone out and so no attempt was made to break into the house. When, however, the next morning came and Mr. Reed did not appear at the lumber yard, his friends, and Mr. Sparks as well felt that it was time to make an investigation. Accordingly a party was formed, consisting of Allen Brown, whose first wife was Mr. Reed’s daughter, Rev. J. E. Pershing, Charles Yoe, of the Tribune, Justice G. E. Gilmore, J. A. Sparks, H. J. Fairleigh, and Geo. L. Remington, which proceeded to the residence and obtained entrance through an unfastened kitchen window. Mr. Brown went first, followed by Mr. Yoe. The kitchen fire was burning brightly, but the air was hot and foul, and Mr. Yoe stopped to turn off the gas. Passing on into the sitting room Mr. Brown was heard to exclaim “My God, what a sight!” Seated within two feet of the stove was the body of Mr. Reed, already so far decomposed in that overheated atmosphere that long lines of blood and corruption were stealing down his clothing to the floor forming a pool on the carpet and soaking through into the pine floor beneath.

Haste was made to throw open doors and windows and change the stifling and pestilential air which was charged with the odors of death and decay. Had not this been done, the cause of the calamity would have been sooner discovered in the asphyxiation of some of the party. Further search disclosed that the wife and child, who were in the bedroom most distant from the fire, were still alive, though unconscious. The girl upstairs had been stricken while at her toilet and had fallen to the floor and died many hours before, as was indicated by the stage of decomposition that had been reached.

The efforts to resuscitate Mrs. Reed proved successful, but the child lingered only until Monday evening, when his young life went out. Mrs. Reed could throw no light on the cause of the awful tragedy, though she remembered that Mr. Reed had complained of feeling chilly after retiring and had got up and lighted the fires, which had been turned out. It was later that he had responded to the call to go for a doctor for the neighbor’s child, after which, she said, he had retired again.

Autopsies of the victims of this tragedy were held, and it was announced that nothing inhaled into the lungs was responsible for it, and that in neither case was death due to asphyxiation. This was the dictum of a Kansas City expert who has never explained his blunder. The local physicians, Doctors McCulley, Masterman and Davis agreed that death was due to poisoning, and two of them said the symptoms were those of strychnine. From this, however, Masterman dissented. No people stood higher in the community than Mr. and Mrs. Reed, and so far as was known they had not an enemy in the world. How or why they could have been poisoned was a mystery that baffled every attempt at solution. And yet, that they had been poisoned by something other than gas from the stove, everyone was forced to believe. It was more than a nine days’ wonder. It was a horror which was inexplicable. Speculation ran riot, and everything imaginable was surmised. To solve the problem, if possible, it was decided to have a chemical analysis of the contents of the stomachs of the two adults and of Mr. Reed’s brain as well. Dr. Davis accordingly took them up to Kansas City and the inquest was adjourned to await the result. When word came on Saturday, a week after the fatal evening, that no trace of poison could be discovered the mystery seemed deeper than ever. Many people were demanding that a test be made by subjecting dogs to the same conditions that prevailed in the house when the victims were found. The idea was that in some way the heated air had proved fatal. Scouting this suggestion, one of the physicians had asserted that a dog would live for a month in just such an atmosphere as those fires had produced.

Unintentionally a test was made, however, in a way that set all doubt, as to the calamity being due to the fires in the stove, completely at rest. Mr. Reed’s married daughters, Mrs. E. L. Foster and Mrs. K. G. Barbee, had been summoned from New Mexico and Kentucky to attend the funeral. On the following Tuesday, Mr. E. P. Allen accompanied his wife and Mrs. Foster to the Reed house and lighted the fires to warm the rooms for them while they proceeded to look over the clothing in the bureaus and closets. Fortunately the outer door was left open. Each noticed that her eyes were smarting, but as the articles they were handling had become saturated with foul odors, they remarked that it would not do to rub them. Mrs. Foster soon complained of a smarting sensation in her throat also. A moment more and there was a strong twitching sensation in each side of her neck, and she felt her head drawn backward. She started for the open door and had barely reached it when she staggered, reeled and fell backward on the porch. Her head struck a post as she fell, and suffering from a terrible nausea she vomited profusely and became insensible where she fell. Subsequently there was observed frothing at the mouth and the same convulsive symptoms that had been manifested in Mrs. Reed’s case, as she was being slowly brought back to life. Not only that, but in her case her hands had remained clasped for twenty-four hours, and her jaws were set so that it was with the utmost difficulty they were forced apart to permit the administration of nourishment.

There was of course no longer any doubt that, whatever had been the cause of the tragedy, it was still potent and might easily prove fatal to anyone who should venture to enter that charnel house. One fact like this was worth a million theories in solving the problem of that awful calamity. The proposed experiment with living animals confined in the places in which the people had been found was now undertaken. On Wednesday, January 10th, Marshall Griffey got together three dogs and a cat, and under the superintendence of the sheriff and several physicians, they were locked up in the house with the fires burning. The dogs were in crates or cages, and in addition to placing them where the bodies had been found, a cat was fastened at the foot of the stairway.

An interested crowd lingered about the house all day watching the experiment. Some climbed to the roof of the kitchen from which the dog in the girl’s room upstairs could be closely observed. It was noticed that the fire in the sitting room was acting queerly, the blaze from the gas coming out of the door for several inches and showing a reversed draft. Step by step the mystery was being cleared up. On the roof it was finally noted that while a large volume of heated air was coming from the kitchen chimney, the one from the sitting room remained cool, and no draft of any kind was perceptible. The chimney had been choked up by the mortar which had fallen in when it was repaired and pieces had continued to fall until there was no longer any vent.

By half past two in the afternoon the dog in the sitting room was in convulsions and the one upstairs had begun to show signs of distress and was frothing at the mouth. From this time on the crowd of interested sight-seers increased, and there was a constant concourse of buggies and wagons in the street. The dogs were not rendered suddenly unconscious, as Mrs. Foster had been the day before, but suffered one spasm after another, each of them exceedingly severe. In the intervals between the convulsions the animals lay panting, the one near the stove with his tongue protruding and very rapid respiration. At half past seven this dog died, and just before midnight the last signs of life were observed in the one upstairs. When the animals were taken out on Thursday morning, the dog in the bedroom was still living, but it lay sprawled and stiffened with convulsions so that its recovery was deemed impossible and it was shot. The cat alone survived and with its proverbial hardihood ran away as soon as liberated and plunged its head repeatedly into a vessel of water, as if to free itself from the poisonous effects of the air it had been breathing for twenty-four hours.

An autopsy of the dead animals was made by Doctors McCulley, Chaney and Davis, which resulted in disclosing the cherry-red appearance of the blood that is noted as one of the marked indications of poisoning by carbonic oxide, a gas that is formed in large quantity wherever there is imperfect combustion of fuel in a stove. This gas is not immediately fatal and its evil effects consist chiefly in shutting out oxygen, though it has a positive deleterious quality also.

The mystery was at last fully solved, and in the ten years since there has never been another fatality in the county from poisonous gases developed by natural gas stoves. Though learned at such a terrible cost, the lesson proved effective beyond expectation.

A further demonstration of the deadly character of this carbonic oxide gas was made at the office of the Independence Gas Company the same week, which will prove both interesting and instructive in this connection. In the plumbing shop stood a stove with no pipe, the products of combustion being allowed to pass off into the air of the room. Placing a board over the hole for the pipe, at the top of the drum, the products of combustion were confined in the drum. In a short time, with the stove door open, the flames would project two or three feet and burn with the reddish hue of imperfect combustion. If then the stove door was closed, the fire would soon go out entirely, there being no oxygen to support combustion. Had the stove in Mr. Reed’s sitting room been of this sort, the only result of the stoppage of the flue would have been to put out the fire; but with the mica panels in its door broken, the flames came out as when the stove door at the shop was open, and the air grew more deadly every moment.

Visitors at Mr. Reed’s a day or two previous to the tragedy had noticed that the air was bad; but it did not become deadly until the vent in the chimney was entirely closed, and he was such a sufferer from catarrh that he did not detect the changed character of the air as the fatal gas began to poison it.