FOUL MURDER.
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Account of a Terrible Affair in Texas.
Cincinnati, Sept. 16. — The following account of a most horrible murder is given in a dispatch from Houston, Tex.: The wife of George Lynch, a respected citizen of Herkley, (sic) Tex., died some weeks ago leaving an infant. Lynch had seven other children, the oldest, Clemie, seventeen years. On Friday night the family retired as usual, a lamp being left burning in the main room. At midnight the father was awakened by a pistol shot and a ball striking him in the breast. He sprang up and saw a masked man standing in the middle of the room, pointing a pistol at him. The assassin fired again, the ball entering beneath the collar bone. Lynch fell unconscious, and when he recovered found himself lying in a lane outside the premises. The assassin, thinking Lynch dead, seized a hatchet and put the children, who were witnesses, out of the way. He assaulted Clemie, buried the hatchet in her head, also crushed the skulls of three other children, and then set fire to the house. The distracted father saw the burning house fall in on the bodies of his eight children. The bodies were afterward exhumed and an inquest held, when the hatchet wounds were discovered upon the skulls of the children. It is thought Lynch will recover. A young man named Boatwer (sic), with whom Lynch had had difficulty, is suspected of the crime.
"FOUL MURDER." Cleveland Weekly Herald, Cleveland, Ohio, September 20, 1878, p. 2, col. 4.