Lucy Ann Handley (1892-1908)

HANDLEY

Posted By: Dorian Myhre (email)
Date: 3/14/2017 at 23:54:49

From Nevada Representative September 21, 1908

The suicide of Lucy Hanley in this vicinity a few days ago has saddened the community. Lucy was missed from her home on Thursday the 10th,, but her parents supposed she had gone to Des Moines. On Saturday they found her body in the granary with a bottle of strychnine by her side, together with a letter giving the reason for her rash act, and directions about her funeral. She was engaged to marry Bert Willets, a young man who had been working for her father. But he would have sprees. She had tried to reform him without avail. On the fatal day he had returned from Des Moines drunk, and she had pleaded with him. A few hours later being unwilling either to become a drunkard's wife or to live without her beloved she took her life. She was a bright, active girl but of an imaginative, morbid and discontented turn of mind. She left a manuscript story into which she had woven romantically, the incidents of her own life, the climax being the farewell note which she penned to her parents.