Ocey Snead

Ocey Snead
Snead on December 21, 1907
Born	1885 Manhattan
Died	November 29, 1909(1909-11-29) East Orange, New Jersey
Spouse	Fletcher Wardlaw Snead
Parents	Caroline B. Wardlaw (c1850-1913) and a Martin.

Ocey Snead

Ocey Snead

Ocey Snead suicide note

Oceana Wardlaw Martin Snead (c. 1885 - November 29, 1909) aka Ocey Snead, was drugged and drowned in East Orange, New Jersey by her own family to collect $32,000 in insurance money.^[1]

Birth and family

Oceana was born around 1885, probably in Manhattan, New York City, New York to Caroline B. Wardlaw (c1850-1913), and a Colonel Martin, who had fought for the Confederacy in the American Civil War. Her mother had a career in education, at one point being removed from a position due to unstable behavior. She got her nickname, Ocey, because she frequently garbled her real name in her baby talk.

Caroline Wardlaw had two sisters, who were Ocey's aunts. Mary L. Wardlaw (1849-?), who married Fletcher Tillman Snead (1829–1891). Together they produced a son, Fletcher Wardlaw Snead (1875–1955), who was Ocey's first cousin and would become her husband. The second sister was Virginia O. Wardlaw (1852–1910) who never married. Both sisters were also involved in education.

The three siblings were the daughters of Martha Eliza Wardlaw (1828–1910) and Jake B. Wardlaw (1817-?). They were known for dressing in black at almost all times and for their secretive behavior. Strange deaths followed the women in their later lives.

Marriage

Ocey married Fletcher Wardlaw Snead, her first cousin. Together they had two children: Mary Alberta Snead (1908); and David Pollock Snead (1909–1910). Fletcher was the son of Mary L. Wardlaw and Fletcher Tillman Snead and he had two siblings: John Wardlaw Snead (1878-c1909) and Albert Snead (1880-?). In 1880 Fletcher was living in Oglethorpe, Macon County, Georgia with his parents. Fletcher was previously married to Vashti Gordan McLaurine (1872-?) who was born in Old Lynnville, Giles County, Tennessee. Fletcher and Vashti had the one child together: Robert Tilman Snead (1900-?). Vashti moved to Muskogee, Oklahoma by 1920 and by 1930 she was living in West Palm Beach, Florida with her son.

After they received word that Ocey was pregnant, the three sisters chased him to Canada and virtually kidnapped Ocey to Brooklyn. Subsequent to this, Ocey's mother told her that Fletcher Snead had died. In fact, Fletcher was alive and well and in contact with his mother and aunts.

Montgomery Female Academy

The Montgomery Female Academy was inherited by Martha Wardlaw and her three daughters from Oceana Seaborn Polluck (Martha's sister). Virginia G. Wardlaw became head of the Montgomery Female Academy around 1902.

Around 1906, Caroline Wardlaw visited Mary Wardlaw Snead's son, John Wardlaw Snead, age 28, who was married and living in Lynville, Tennessee. While there she persuaded John to leave his wife and return with her to Christiansburg, Virginia to teach in the college. A few days later, he was burned to death. Although the sisters initially claimed it was a suicide, it later emerged they'd doused him with kerosene and burned him alive to collect on a $12,000 insurance policy. Fletcher Wardlaw Snead, the brother of John Wardlaw Snead, was married and living in Tennessee. After a period of time, Fletcher divorced his wife and came to the college and married Ocey Snead.

Treatment and Death

For reasons that remain unknown, Ocey was the object of scorn from her mother and aunts, who deliberately tried to starve her to death virtually from the day she was born.

Subsequent to the departure of her husband, Ocey’s health began to fail. Dr. William Pettit was called in to look at the sickly pregnant woman. He found her suffering from depression, “general weakness,” and malnutrition. “She seemed depressed and indeed afraid of those about her,” he told police later.

Dr. Pettit visited the Wardlaw household several times and each time found that his instructions for Ocey’s care were not being followed. Because the sisters were not cooperating, nor were they paying him, he stopped visiting. The sisters called another doctor, who smuggled her food when he saw her condition. Not long after Ocey's baby was born, he snuck through a window to check on her, but Virginia threw him out. A lawyer subsequently told him there was nothing that could be done.

Several months after Dr. Pettit ceased treating Ocey, he was once again summoned. There he found Ocey depressed, even weaker, and no longer pregnant. The baby, named David, had been taken to a hospital, where he was in poor health. He was later placed in an orphanage by the sisters.

Virginia told the doctor that he should break the news to Ocey that she was dying and that the time had come for her to make a will. Instead, Dr. Pettit ordered that a nurse be brought in to care for Ocey. The nurse stayed just one day before being put out by the Wardlaw sisters. Rather than pay the $100 bill presented by the doctor, the Wardlaw sisters offered to make him a $1,000 beneficiary in Ocey’s will. He declined and decided to take steps against the family, believing that Ocey was “under some hypnotic influence.” What he did not know was that Ocey was being given regular but unnecessary doses of morphine for her post-partum pain by her mother and aunts. At the same time, her 2-year-old daughter had been removed from the home to foster care. Ocey was later told she had died. Her fate remains a mystery.

When Dr. Pettit returned to check on Ocey before he reported the strange case to police, he found the place abandoned and the sisters gone.

They next surfaced in another Brooklyn neighborhood in September 1909, when Virginia Wardlaw, wearing a thick layer of black veils, visited Julius Carabba, a New York attorney, and asked him to help a dying woman prepare a will. Carabba came to Ocey’s bedside while her mother and aunts chanted prayers over her. After the prayers, Virginia asked Ocey if she wanted to make a new will. Ocey agreed. Carabba told the women that Ocey needed a doctor and some food. The Wardlaw sisters said they could afford neither. He offered to write them a check and while the sisters left the room in search of a pen, Carabba talked to Ocey. She told him that she was dying, reached under her pillow and gave him her will, in which she left everything to her grandmother and asked him to make himself executor. The Wardlaw sisters offered Carabba $7,000 to make them the beneficiaries — Mother Wardlaw was too old, they said. Carabba refused and the sisters dropped him as their attorney.

In October 1909, Virginia Wardlaw was served as defendant in a lawsuit for nonpayment of the price of a new piano. Her response to the plaintiff was “wait until we bury our dead.”

At this time, Ocey was near death from lack of food and medical care and was moved to an East Orange, New Jersey apartment. There was no heat or gas for cooking and the place was furnished with just two cots, a rug, a chair, and a barrel for a table.

The police were called by the family on November 29, 1909 and told there was an "accident". The police then sent a physician to their home. Virginia Wardlaw led Dr. Herbert M. Simmons, the Assistant County Physician, upstairs to a bathroom where he found the naked body of Ocey Snead, sitting in a tub of water with her head tilted under the faucet. There was a suicide note pinned to her clothes beside the bathtub. The note read as follows:

"Last year my little daughter died. Other near and dear kindred too have gone to Heaven. I long to go there too. I have been ill and weak a very long time now. Death will be a blessed relief to me in my sufferings. When you read this I will have committed suicide. My sorrow and pain in this world are greater than I can endure. Ocey W.M. Snead"

Ocey was buried on December 7, 1909 at Mount Hope Cemetery, Hastings-on-Hudson in Westchester County. Snead is incorrectly listed as being in Mount Hope Cemetery in Brooklyn on Findagrave. Her New York Times obituary makes clear that she was buried upstate and also that she was not Jewish, as the Brooklyn cemetery is.

Investigation and Trial

Virginia Wardlaw's answers to the doctor were suspicious and the police were called to investigate.

The cause of death was identified as drowning, with starvation as a contributing cause. Suspicion for the death quickly focused on her family, particularly her mother and two aunts. The investigator who originally arrived at the home noted that it was cold and appeared unoccupied, and that the victim had been dead for at least 24 hours, prompting investigators to consider the death suspicious, specifically wondering about the delay in finding Ocey deceased.

The evidence against the women consisted of several life insurance policies that had been taken out on the young woman, suicide notes found in the possession of Ocey's mother that were written in the same hand and similar style as the note alleged to have been Ocey's suicide note, and the family's treatment of Ocey prior to her death. All three were arrested and charged with murder.

Fletcher Wardlaw Snead, Ocey's husband, was located under an assumed name cooking in a lumber camp in Canada and questioned. No incriminating evidence was found against him and he was never charged in connection with his wife's murder.

Virginia Wardlaw died of self-induced starvation on August 12, 1910 while waiting for the trial to begin.

Caroline Wardlaw Martin, Ocey's mother, was considered the most unbalanced of the three sisters and to have been the instigator of her daughter's murder. Caroline pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of manslaughter as part of a plea bargain. She was sentenced to seven years in prison and sent to the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, New Jersey. She was declared mentally unstable on May 18, 1912 and was then transferred to the New Jersey State Hospital for the Insane where she died on June 21, 1913. Years later, evidence emerged that suggested she poisoned her husband to collect on a $10,000 life insurance policy.

Mary Wardlaw Snead was cleared of all charges on a technicality; since her younger sister had pleaded guilty to manslaughter, she could not be charged as an accessory. She moved to her son's ranch in Colorado and was never heard from again.

Family of Ocey Snead

• John B. Wardlaw I (1817-?) who married Martha Eliza Seaborn? (1828–1910) was a South Carolina Supreme Court justice
  • Caroline B. Wardlaw (1847–1913) who married X Martin (c1845-1901), a Colonel, who she killed for the $10,000 insurance
    • • Mary Alberta Snead (1908)
      • David Pollock Snead (1909–1910)
  • Mary E.L. Wardlaw (1849-?) who married Fletcher Tillman Snead (1829–1891) an attorney and mayor of Oglethorpe, Georgia
    • Fletcher Wardlaw Snead (1875–1955) who married his first cousin Ocey Wardlaw Martin (c1880-1909)
      • Mary Alberta Snead (1908)
      • David Pollock Snead (1909–1910)
    • John Wardlaw Snead (c1875-c1890) was set on fire by his own family to collect the $12,000 insurance
  • Virginia G. Wardlaw (1852–1910) was head of Montgomery Female College Christiansburg, Virginia and later Soule College in Murfreesboro, Tennessee
  • John B. Wardlaw II (1854-?), reverend
  • Albert G. Wardlaw (1856-?), reverend
  • Bessie Warldaw (c1861-?) who married a Spindle

References

1. ^ De La Torre, Lillian (October 20, 1968). "Who Killed Ocey Snead?". New York Times. "Three Sisters in Black. By Norman Zierold. Illustrated. 240 pp. Boston: Little, Brown Co. $5.95." 

Archive

• University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey Libraries, "Scrapbook of Photographic Evidence Regarding the Death of Ocey Snead," Harrison S. Martland, MD Papers

Further reading

Books

• Gerald Tomlinson; Seven Jersey Murders (2003) ISBN 1-4134-1205-X
• Colin Wilson; The Mammoth Book of True Crime (1988) ISBN 0-7867-0536-1
• Norman Zierold; Three Sisters in Black; Little, Brown and Company (1968)

Periodicals

• New York Times; December 1, 1909; page 01. "Girl in bathtub slain, police say; East Orange authorities find her life had been insured and money borrowed on policy. They hold her companion Miss Wardwell's explanation of how girl's body came to be found in practically empty house unsatisfactory. The charge of murder was preferred by the police of East Orange, New Jersey, just before midnight last night against Virginia Wardlaw, the elderly spinster who reported on Monday evening the alleged suicide of a young woman who, she said, was Mrs. Ocey W.M. Snead, her niece, in a bathtub of the practically empty house in that town which the two had occupied for the last ..."
• New York Times; December 12, 1909; page 16; "Relatives will aid her. Many families of note in the south are akin to the prisoner. Miss Virginia Wardlaw, who is held in Essex County, New Jersey, in connection with the death of Mrs. Ocey Snead, is well known here, and is related to many of the old families which shaped the business, political, and social life of the Commonwealth in ante-bellum days."
• New York Times; January 21, 1910; page 01. "Ocey Snead was drugged; Morphine in the stomach of woman found dead in a bathtub. The theory that Ocey W.M. Snead was helpless from the effects of a drug when she was put in the bathtub in which her dead body was found in East Orange, New Jersey, on November 29, is said to have been strengthened by the analysis of her stomach made by Dr. William H. Hicks of Newark."
• New York Times; June 18, 1910; page 18. "Snead murder case up. Defendants Question Right of Prosecution to Certain Evidence. United States Circuit Court Judge Cross, sitting in Newark, New Jersey, yesterday, heard argument in one phase of the murder of Ocey Snead, which occurred in November, 1909. The case came up on the return of a rule to show causes why certain evidence in the possession of the Essex County prosecutor should not be used against the three Wardlaw sisters, who are in the Essex ..."
• New York Times; August 12, 1910; page 01. "Miss Wardlaw dies; starved herself; Ocey Snead's Aunt, Soon to Have Been Tried for, Niece's Murder, Had Refused to Eat. Miss Virginia O. Wardlaw, aunt of Mrs. Ocey W.M. Snead, whose body was found in the bathtub of an East Orange, New Jersey, house on November 20, 1909, died yesterday in the House of Detention in Newark, New Jersey, where she was awaiting trial for the murder of her niece. Her sisters, Mrs. Mary Snead and Mrs. Caroline B. Martin, mother of the bathtub victim, are in jail ..."
• New York Times; September 21, 1910; page 06. "Alienists declare Mrs. Martin insane"
• New York Times; November 8, 1910; page 07. "Mrs. Martin's cries halt lunacy trial. Mother of Ocey Snead denounces, a witness and criticises the court. At the hearing as to her mental condition before Judge Jay Ten Eyck in Newark, Mrs. Caroline B. Martin, who with her sister, Mrs. Mary Snead, is charged with the murder of her daughter, Mrs. Ocey Snead, in East Orange last November, created a scene yesterday. The court declared a recess of five minutes after Mrs. Martin arose and denounced the witness who was on ..."
• New York Times; June 21, 1913; page 2. "Caroline B. Martin dies. Had Been Committed as Insane After Confessing to Killing Her Daughter."
• Note: There are around 80 articles in the New York Times archives involving "Ocey Snead"

External links

• NJ History Mystery: Ocey Snead
• Photo of Ocey and baby on Shorpy
• Another Shot on Shorpy

Persondata
Name	Snead, Ocey
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth
Place of birth	Manhattan
Date of death	November 29, 1909
Place of death	East Orange, New Jersey