Fascination

Lydia Southard had a way with men She married Robert Dooley and he died. She married William Gordon McHavie and he died. She married Harlan C. Lewis and he died. She married Edward M. Meyer and he died.* After each death she collected a big lump of insurance. She was on her fifth honeymoon when she was arrested, put on trial for murder at Twin Falls, Idaho, in 1921. The State attempted to show that she was a chronic husband poisoner, did prove that she killed Meyer with a deadly fly mixture. Mrs. Southard, then 29, was sent to the State prison at Boise for ten-years-to-life.

Last week Lydia Southard, ten years older but no less fascinating to men, escaped from the penitentiary. Other women prisoners played a phonograph and sang loudly while she filed the bars of her cell, sneaked out to the yard. There she dug up a ladder, fabricated for her in the prison blacksmith shop by love-struck convicts and buried by an infatuated guard. She nimbly scaled the wall, let herself down the other side by a blanket rope. Waiting in an automobile to carry her away, prison officials believed, was one David Minton, a recently paroled prisoner who had fallen under her spell.

Began a great womanhunt by men who steeled themselves against the Borgiesque fascination of Lydia Southard.

*At Alexandria, La. last week a Mrs. Carolyn Willis, 64, wealthy, took Louis Paschall of Port Tampa City, Fla. as her eleventh husband. Three of Mrs. Paschall's husbands died; seven she divorced. She rid herself of her last on the ground that he was lazy, lacked ardor on their honeymoon.

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