Part 4: October 23, 1896
The Mussey Mansion Murders First Draft Peek
Welcome to the Prairie Justice limited series, The Mussey Mansion Murders, investigating one of Kansas City’s most mysterious murder cases. This case involves the murders of two children that occurred in 1896, and also include references to mental illness (both in antiquated terms and contemporary language), suicidal thoughts and attempts, violence, poisoning, and parental/child loss. This content may not be suitable for all audiences.
Welcome to Part 4 of the Mussey Mansion Murders script. In this section, we will break down the events of October 23, 1896 — the day that the children were poisoned, the day that Elizabeth Mussey perished, the day that Alice Platt allegedly committed one of the most heinous crimes in Kansas City history, and watched over the bodies of her victims.
Sunrise
Alice opened her eyes on the morning of October 23, 1896 and was met with chilly darkness. The sun had not yet peeked over the horizon, but the sounds of distant trains and less distant horses on the street let her know that morning was imminent. Her room was simple, but as far as servants’ accommodations went, it was among the best she’d lived in during her career. Every item in her possession fit into the room, spread across a trunk and a couple of drawers: books and hymnals, the dresses she sewed for herself, some trinkets and mementos…nothing of much monetary value. Alice’s most-prized possessions were her Charles Dickens novels, which kept her company into the quiet, dark nights alone in her room.
The floor quietly creaked under her slight weight as Alice stood out of bed and stretched. Despite being only twenty-five years old, she had to pause several times to let her muscles and joints pop and release as she went. Yawning, she splashed some water on her face from the basin in the corner and changed into a dark cotton dress. It was time for her day to begin.
The rest of the house was still quiet. Sleeping. Alice moved as soft as a whisper as she made her way from her modest bedroom on the uppermost floor of the home to the kitchen on the lower level, stopping to light gas wall sconces as she went. Before breakfast could be served, she had a full list of chores to attend to – lighting the fires in the kitchen and parlors, heating water on the stove, changing out the basins and chamber pots in the bedrooms, cleaning the dining room and readying it for the family, and then finally preparing the breakfast. At least she didn’t have to worry about milking the cow anymore, she thought to herself somewhat smugly, since it had died a few months ago. By the time she was setting plates on the breakfast table in front of the Mussey children, several hours had flown by.
Mr. and Mrs. Mussey soon joined their children at the table, he in a lawyerly, brown suit with newspaper in hand, and she in a plain navy dress with white trim and puffed sleeves. Sue excitedly broke into chatter about a surprise party she and some other neighborhood children were planning to throw for their teacher. Six-year-old Hugh ate as quickly as possible, eager to get to playing. Little two-year-old Charley laughed at his sister, Elizabeth, 4, as she made a silly face, earning her a gentle prod from her mother. It was a perfectly ordinary Friday morning for the family.
Alice herself listened attentively from the hallway as she enjoyed a biscuit. As soon as she heard Mr. Mussey stand from the breakfast table, Alice brushed the crumbs off of her apron and moved quickly to intercept him in the front parlor. “Mr. Mussey?” she called.
“Yes?” Mr. Mussey was just pulling on his overcoat.
“Will you be in your office today?” Alice asked as she reached to hand him his briefcase.
“I may be. Though, I may be away some in the afternoon,” he replied.
Alice frowned. She’d confided in him about the dark cloud already; in fact, he’d been the first person she told, while Mrs. Mussey was away from home after her mother’s funeral. He’d dismissed her concerns quickly. “It would be good to leave your address if you go out,” Alice suggested, “in case you are needed here.”
Mr. Mussey gave Alice a nod and headed out the door.
When Sue finished her breakfast, Alice was already waiting to brush and braid her hair and help her finish getting ready for school. Soon, Sue was running out the door and up the sidewalk with her neighbor friend. Alice turned her attention to her next chores: cleaning the dishes from breakfast and resetting the kitchen.
10:00 AM
“Alice?” Mrs. Mussey’s voice carried from the front parlor. Alice was in the kitchen, heating up water on the stove for cleaning.
“Yes, mamma?” Alice went over to the bottom of the stairs, where she could see her employer, her friend. She had added a jacket to her ensemble, and a pretty hat sat atop her chestnut curls. However, her face was fixed in an expression bordering on pain, her eyes wide and worried and her lips pressed together into a tight line. “I’m here,” Alice quickly swept up the stairs and put her arm around Mrs. Mussey.
“The cloud?” Mrs. Mussey asked, voice barely above a whisper now that Alice was close. Downstairs, in the kitchen, the younger children giggled and played, oblivious to the adults. “Do you see it still? Has it descended upon us?”
Alice pulled her eyebrows together and glanced around her. “It’s the same, mamma,” she said. “It lingers around Elizabeth and Sue.”
“Do you believe it shall happen today?” Mrs. Mussey asked.
“I do not think today,” Alice replied, though her arm still remained tight around Mrs. Mussey’s shoulders.
Mrs. Mussey steadied herself with a long breath, and pulled on her gloves. “I’m going to Brinkley’s pharmacy to purchase ingredients for that remedy we found,” she said.
Alice nodded. “Of course, mamma. I will have everything ready to fix it up when you return.”
Both women recalled the previous day, when they’d hunched over the family medical book in the kitchen. Alice’s premonition that something horrible would happen to Elizabeth and Sue pressed heavy upon them. They’d found ingredients for a cramp colic remedy that they had decided to brew up and keep on hand…just in case.
With one last squeeze of reassurance, Alice released Mrs. Mussey’s shoulder and stepped back towards the kitchen. Mrs. Mussey gathered her hand purse and set off on her shopping trip.
1:00 PM
Alice was in the kitchen with the children when Mrs. Mussey returned to the house. A light lunch of sandwiches filled their bellies, and young Charley’s eyes drooped in content fatigue. “Welcome back, Mrs. Mussey,” Alice greeted her and the servant immediately rushed to take the shopping bags from Mrs. Mussey’s hands.
“Thank you,” Mrs. Mussey replied. She had two bags in her hands: one from Brinkley’s pharmacy, several blocks away, and one from Gray’s pharmacy, just at the end of their own block. “Brinkley’s did not have poppy leaves,” she said at Alice’s confused glance. “Gray’s pharmacy did not have any either but he substituted paregoric. I suppose it’s just for pain relief.”
“I’m sure it will work just as well, mamma,” Alice said.
The two women had pored over a home medical manual looking for cures for cramp colic ever since Alice’s first inkling that a fate of that sort might befall Elizabeth and Sue. Mrs. Mussey had decided that this recipe would be best for the girls: poppy leaves for the pain, castor oil to induce vomiting, and castile soap as an enema. The idea of the remedy was to rid the body of whatever substance was causing the abdominal irritation as quickly as possible. As they combined the ingredients, Mrs. Mussey substituted the paregoric (a tincture of opium) for the poppy leaves. A second solution was created with water and shavings of the castile soap, to use as an enema.
Of course, none of the children was experiencing any symptoms, but it would be there if they needed it.
When they needed it.
As Alice tucked the medicines into a cabinet near the stairs, Mrs. Mussey set out to finish one more task; she gathered her skirts and walked upstairs again to the writing desk in the parlor. She pulled out a piece of note paper as she sat down. She dipped her pen in the inkwell and began writing:
Mr. Gray:
Please send for the nearest doctor and send for Mr. Mussey. The children are very sick.
Mrs. Mussey finished the note and brought it to the kitchen, where she tucked it up on the wall. “Now, Alice, we have done everything we possibly could,” she declared.
Alice had already turned her attention to baking biscuits and cookies. “Yes, Mrs. Mussey,” she agreed.
4:00 PM
Sue and her friend from school, Minnie Brendel, burst in through the side door and into the kitchen as the autumn sun was already beginning to dip below the skyline of the city. The cookies were still on the counter cooling. The girls would have dug into the cookies immediately, had Mrs. Mussey not caught them mid-grab. “Well, now!” she sighed, and the girls turned their bright faces towards the stairs.
Mrs. Mussey descended into the kitchen, even as Hugh, Elizabeth, and Charley pushed past her skirts. Alice followed behind. Within a few minutes, Sue and Elizabeth were running back outside with Minnie, on their way to ask the Brendels if Minnie could stay over to work on arithmetic problems. Hugh followed the girls out the door, though he only went so far as the front yard before a particularly interesting acorn sidetracked him. The girls were gone for the few minutes it took for them to walk across an empty lot and ask, before they returned munching happily on apples and thinking about snacking on cookies.
Alice lit the fireplace in the front parlor to make it comfortable for Mrs. Mussey and the children, and in no time, everyone was gathered happily around the parlor: Mrs. Mussey sitting in a chair, Sue and Minnie sitting at her feet with slates and books ready at hand, and the younger children playing about.
4:45 PM
Alice’s voice suddenly called up from the kitchen stairs. “Mamma?”
Mrs. Mussey set down the arithmetic book she’d been working in and leaned down to Sue. “Try to work the problem once more, my love,” she said, and then she crossed the room towards the stairs.
Alice was waiting at the base of the stairs, but Mrs. Mussey’s heart dropped into her stomach at the servant’s expression: her gray eyes were wide and bulging, her lips moved wordlessly and her fingers trembled as she clutched at her own collar. “The cloud has closed down,” she whispered. “I see no ray of light.”
For a long moment, both women stood in silent horror. Mrs. Mussey turned to look back at the children in the parlor. Sue was leaning over Minnie’s slate and working through the problem she’d gotten wrong the first time. Elizabeth was laughing with the baby. To her eye, there was no cloud.
She’d later testify that she’d never seen either girl in better health.
Alice snapped out of her silence first. “Tell Minnie to watch the baby,” she said, “I’ll give the girls their baths.” She was gone before Mrs. Mussey could even respond. The sound of the metal tub scraping on the floor downstairs soon followed.
The next few minutes were a blur. Alice called for Sue and Elizabeth, and Mrs. Mussey followed her daughters downstairs as soon as Minnie was set up to watch two-year-old Charley. Elizabeth shivered as Sue helped her pull off the last of her clothing and get into the tub. Mrs. Mussey quickly walked over to Sue and began helping her take off her own clothing. “I’m concerned they’ll freeze in here,” Mrs. Mussey said through the tight line of her lips.
Alice’s eyes were still bugging out of their sockets as she frantically darted from the stove to the tub, warming the water. “No. No. The water is too warm,” she assured Mrs. Mussey at first, but then she suddenly stopped and said, “You had better go upstairs and get something to put around them.”
Sue stepped into the tub and crunched down in the steaming water. Neither she, nor Elizabeth, said a word as they stared up at their mother. Mrs. Mussey turned and rushed up the stairs to grab blankets. On her way up, she plucked the note from the wall.
5:00 PM
Mrs. Mussey was gone for just a couple of minutes; she pulled several blankets out of a hallway closet and went to the front parlor. Minnie still sat on the floor, her eyebrows scrunched in confusion. “Minnie, please go down to Gray’s pharmacy and give this note to Mr. Gray,” Mrs. Mussey thrust the small piece of paper towards the girl. Minnie took the paper, her eyes hesitating only a moment before Mrs. Mussey’s expression sent her well on her way. The girl dashed to the front door and disappeared down the sidewalk.
Mrs. Mussey went back downstairs, colorful quilts stacked high in her arms. For just one heartbeat, she took in the sight of her daughters before her, healthy – if not alarmed. Alice stood just outside of the bath room. A spoon sat on the table beside her.
“I’ve given Sue some soda water,” Alice said, nodding toward the jar of baking soda on the counter.
“Very good,” Mrs. Mussey replied, and then she turned to her girls. “Let’s get them out of this tub and warmed before they take cold.”
Sue stood up and Mrs. Mussey helped her eldest child out of the tub, where she was immediately smothered with blankets. “It tasted bitter,” Sue said from between the ruffles of wool and quilts.
“What tasted bitter, my darling?” Mrs. Mussey asked.
“The soda,” Sue replied.
Alice stretched out a blanket and prepared to lift Elizabeth from the tub. “She mentioned it tasted bitter to her, but I tried some myself, Mrs. Mussey, and it tasted fine to me,” she said.
Mrs. Mussey pursed her lips and concentrated on wrapping every inch of Sue’s exposed skin. Was a bitter taste a symptom of any of the ailments she and Alice had read of in the past week? It seemed that every single fact she had researched and everything they had done to prepare for this moment had fallen out of her memory entirely. She half-carried Sue up the stairs, passing the entirely-forgotten remedies that had been readied just hours before. The sounds of Elizabeth fighting against her own dose of soda water followed her faintly up the stairs.
Minutes later, Alice also followed up the stairs with a blanket-wrapped Elizabeth in her arms. The servant woman sat in front of the fireplace in the front parlor, where everyone had been playing so happily just a short time ago. Mrs. Mussey comforted Sue in the back parlor, just down the hallway.
5:30 PM
For a time, all was quiet. For a time, it seemed like all would be well. For a time, it must have seemed like this “dark cloud” nonsense was simply that – nonsense. But, of course, that time came to an end.
Elizabeth’s body suddenly straightened in Alice’s arms, and her convulsions began. Her pained screams, and the panicked answers from her mother and sister, filled the halls of the Mussey home and echoed down the block. Elizabeth’s body went as taught and arched as a bow ready to fire. Even her face pulled tight into a devilish parody of a smile.
People began to arrive at the Mussey home in quick succession. First, Minnie Brendel returned to the house, with physician T. W. Overall on her heels.
Dr. T. W. Overall immediately rushed to Alice’s side and began examining Elizabeth. “Colic?” he thought out loud as he laid out his bag and prepared a hypodermic needle with a dose of morphine. Even as he did Elizabeth’s body was wracked again and again with waves of convulsions. Then, the horrified screams of Mrs. Mussey confirmed that Sue had followed with convulsions of her own. “No,” Dr. Overall knew it then: strychnine poisoning.
Mr. Mussey, responding to the pharmacists worried phone call, arrived shortly after, and Dr. G. S. Merriman strode in next. Seeing that Elizabeth was attended to already, he dashed to the back parlor of the house to treat Sue. He found her in the same condition as he’d seen the younger child: her body stiff, to the point of being arched off of the bed, hardly able to speak through the pain and clenched jaw.
The commotion reached such heights that neighbors, too, began to respond to the home. Mrs. Neel and Mrs. Williams came in quick behind Mrs. Page, who arrived to find Elizabeth still convulsing in Alice’s arms, despite Dr. Overall’s best attempts to aid her. “There’s nothing we can do,” Alice sobbed.
Moments later, Elizabeth’s body fell limp, and she was dead.
6:00 PM
The moments after Elizabeth’s death were not moments of silent recognition or reverent mourning; the air was a chaos of Alice’s sobs, the neighbors gasps, and doctors rifling through their bags combined with the steady cacophony of Sue’s pained screams and her mother’s anguish. Dr. Overall hesitantly gave up on his efforts to save Elizabeth and retreated down the hall towards his colleagues. The Mussey family’s physician, Dr. Wilson, then arrived and was assisting Dr. Merriman with administering a dose of morphine to Sue. “Gentlemen,” Dr. Overall said, as he watched the echoes of Elizabeth’s death play out in her sister, “I believe we have a case of strychnine poisoning.”
Back in the front parlor, Elizabeth’s body had been moved to the couch. As the next door neighbor, the duty to prepare and dress the body for burial fell to Mrs. Page. “Well,” she said quietly to the assemblage of other grave-looking women that had gathered around the girl, “I suppose we should wash the body, before it sits too long.”
Wordlessly, Alice pushed past Mrs. Page and made her way up stairs. The noise and chaos of Sue’s continued convulsions was contained to the back of the house now, the scene buffered by a dark aura of grief and shock in the front of the house. Alice returned moments later with a bundle of folded clothing – Elizabeth’s white dress, a white waist and skirt and undergarments – exactly the garments needed for the burial.
Alice herself washed Elizabeth’s body, tenderly fretting over the placement of her straw-colored curls and gently pressing the folds of her dress just so. When Elizabeth was ready, her body was moved to the bed in the room that her grandmother had stayed in just a month prior.
8:00 PM
The gathering of neighbors remained in the home, quietly praying and hoping for Sue’s recovery. The blessed morphine had brought her some relief, at least. In the back parlor, Sue was the picture of exhaustion. Though her body was no longer convulsing, her muscles were so tired from the ordeal that she could barely lift her hands or even speak. Mrs. Mussey held her daughter’s hand as if her grip could anchor her very soul into place. After Elizabeth was laid out, Alice Platt joined Mrs. Mussey at Sue’s bedside, where she stroked Sue’s hair and rubbed her hand.
Dr. Merriman gathered his instruments and put a hand on the shoulder of his colleague, Dr. Wilson. “I think there’s some home yet, eh, doctor?”
Dr. Wilson sighed and looked over his pale and weakened patient. “Some hope, yes. Some.”
With a knowing look, Dr. Merriman left Sue in the care of Dr. Wilson. On his way out of the home, he nodded at Mr. Mussey in the front parlor.
The grieving father stood and extended a hand to the doctor that had worked so vigorously to save his eldest daughter’s life. “Sir,” Mr. Mussey said, “You have my most sincere gratitude.” Despite his calm demeanor, Mr. Mussey could not hide the way his glance drifted towards where his daughter’s body waited, or the grief in the chords of his voice.
Dr. Merriman clasped Mr. Mussey’s hand. He hoped that handshake told Mr. Mussey ‘I am sorry for your loss. Be strong. Be ready for more.’ His voice simply said, “I shall be back in the morning.”
The duty of making arrangements for burial fell to Mr. Mussey, and with Sue caught between life and death, he could do very little to busy his mind or body. He walked down the hallway and found Dr. Wilson shooing Mrs. Mussey and Alice out of the door. “She’s asleep, and she needs her rest. I shall watch over her while you recover,” said the doctor.
With a weak huff, Alice went to her room. Mrs. Mussey walked a dazed few steps to her husband and pressed her tear-stained cheeks against his jacket. He wrapped his arms around her. In the quiet privacy of the hallway between the room where Elizabeth died, and the room where Sue lay dying, the two took their moment to break.
10:00 PM
Mrs. Mussey stepped softly in the upstairs hallway as she approached Alice’s door. Soft voices still drifted up from the parlor and kitchen, where neighbors and doctors kept company. “Alice?” Mrs. Mussey whispered at the door.
“Come in,” Alice’s voice called from the other side.
Mrs. Mussey pushed the door open and found Alice Platt sitting on her bed. She appeared wide awake, though she was clearly affected by the events of the day. “Oh, Mrs. Mussey,” she whispered, “how is Sue?”
“She’s still resting,” Mrs. Mussey replied from the doorway. She didn’t step into the darkened room.
“The doctors believe I poisoned her, that I poisoned Elizabeth and caused her death!” Alice’s voice was strained, and tears flowed freely down her puffy cheeks. “Mrs. Page, too,” she continued.
“Yes,” Mrs. Mussey replied, “they believe the children somehow came to ingest strychnine.”
“Will you stand by me?” Alice asked plainly.
“Of course I will,” Mrs. Mussey replied
Alice pulled at the ends of her shorn, uncovered hair. She cried softly. “If I am suspected, I will not live to face the disgrace.
Mrs. Mussey looked at Alice Platt in the dim light that spilled in from the hallway behind her. She was the picture of grief and agony, her fingers nervously picking at her dress, her skin, her lips. She rocked softly, as if in a chair on a porch somewhere far, far away. “I don’t believe it,” Mrs. Mussey told her. “I believe you are innocent, and we shall stand by you.”