Fred Dolph – Died 1908

DOLPH, BROWN, GOLDSMITH

Posted By: Joy Moore (email)
Date: 5/23/2021 at 17:43:29

Source: Twice-A-Week Plain Dealer Mar. 13, 1908, 2, C6

A bride at the age of sixteen, and at seventeen a prisoner accused of the murder of her husband, is the tragical story of the wedded life of Mrs. Irene Brown-Dolph of Clinton. Enmeshed in a network of circumstantial evidence of the most accusatory description, the girl-wife of Fred Dolph, believed to be his slayer, maintains an extraordinary attitude of composure and indifference, from which the gruesome details of the finding of her husband’s body in their home, related by witnesses before the coroner’s jury, failed to arouse her.
Just a year ago, Irene Brown and Fred Dolph were secretly married in Morrison, Ill. They returned to Clinton, and, being poor, took up their abode in a three-room cottage on East street. Their home brought into public notice by the tragedy, was little better than a hovel; yet the couple were believed to have lived happily together, until recent quarrels and the wife’s jealousy disturbed their domestic life. Witnesses at the inquest told of quarrels, and of threats the wife made to take her husband’s life; of his expressed determination to share his goods with her and leave; of her threats to kill him if he abandoned her; and of her hasty departure from the cottage, and from the city on the morning of Feb. 29, and her return the next morning from Joliet, Ill., in company with Mrs. Nellie Goldsmith, her mother.
It developed that the women sought out an attorney to defend the daughter several hours before the body was found; this attorney, F. L, Holleran, giving the police the first intimation that Dolph’s dead body lay In the cottage.
A shotgun was used to give Fred Dolph his death wound. This gun was formerly owned by the Joliet woman, who had presented it to the Dolphs.
The young woman was held without bail on the murder charge.