UNLUCKY IN LOVE
Left trail of dead wives from Brooklyn to Iowa
EBENEZER Blydenburgh was a foursquare Bible-thumper, testifying for God from the cobblestones of Brooklyn to the cornfields of Iowa. He was an ardent exhorter of the saintly and sinners alike. Some saw salvation in Blydenburgh. Others saw Elmer Gantry.
“I did not like my son-in-law,” said J.G. Godbold, a New York merchant and father of Blydenburgh’s second wife, Laura. “I felt that a man who was always carrying around a Bible and talking religion on every possible occasion could not be sincere.”
Like Gantry, novelist Sinclair Lewis’ shyster evangelist, people close to Blydenburgh tended to die unexpectedly. Especially his wives.
The son of seaman, Blydenburgh was born in 1862 in Brookhaven, Long Island.
At age 20 he married Emily Hawkins, whom he met in church, and the couple settled at 1214 Greene Ave. in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
He worked as a lay minister at Epworth Methodist Episcopal Church, on DeKalb Ave. His wife gave birth every 18 months — to children Frank, Irene and Arthur — as Blydenburgh shepherded Epworth’s Sunday school.
On Dec. 15, 1891, Emily Blydenburgh gave birth to her fourth child, a daughter named Emily. Sixteen days later, on New Year’s Eve, the young mother fell ill and died at home after eating supper. A physician reckoned the death was caused by peritonitis.
Ebenezer Blydenburgh salved his broken heart with a $1,000 insurance policy drawn on his wife.
After Emily’s death, Blydenburgh began courting Laura Godbold, an Epworth congregant who, at 18, was 13 years younger.
“We did not want our daughter, Laura, to marry the man because she would have to care for his four children, but she was devoted to them, to her church, and to Blydenburgh,” J.G. Godbold told a reporter. “We had to give in.”
She moved into the Greene Ave. home after they married in June 1894.
Laura bore no children, but she was a loving mother to her inherited offspring. The woman’s father said she was “deeply attached” to Blydenburgh, even when he strayed.
“He did exactly as he pleased,” Godbold said, “and she believed that anything he did was right, even if it was directly against her wishes.”
On Valentine’s Day 1900, after 5 years of marriage, wife No. 2 fell ill and died after a meal. A physician cited acute gastritis. Blydenburgh hired an embalmer less than an hour after the death — even before her father had been notified.
Again, money was emotional balm. Blydenburgh cashed a $10,000 insurance policy.
The two-time widower instigated new romances, including one with an older, affluent Epworth church lady named Jane Smith, who blushed at the attention — and opened her bank accounts. She loaned him hundreds of dollars before her brother caught wind.
The brother gave Blydenburgh an ultimatum: pay up or leave town. He skedaddled.
Blydenburgh hit Canada and the Midwest as a barnstorming revivalist. In 1902, he wooed Eliza Rosenborough, whose family farmed near Wauseon, Ohio. She was 10 years older than he was and rich with inherited land, including farms in Ohio and Iowa.
The couple married in Ohio on Oct. 1, 1902, then moved 500 miles west to Eldora, Iowa, where wife No. 3 owned 3,000 acres.
SIX MONTHS later, Blydenburgh encouraged his wife to attend church while he cooked Sunday dinner. Eliza began vomiting a few hours after the meal. One doctor diagnosed spoiled food. Another cited a flare-up of the woman’s chronic kidney condition.
She lingered for five days and died on May 29. Blydenburgh urgently summoned an undertaker for embalming and shipped the body to Ohio for burial the next day.
Her family found it strange that the coffin arrived from Iowa entombed in an iron chest secured with stout padlocks. And they were nettled to learn that Eliza had signed over her land to the habitual widower.
The dead woman’s sister had the body exhumed. A local physician cut through the padlocks and conducted an autopsy, removing organ samples that were shipped to Dr. V.C. Vaughn, a renowned chemistry professor at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor.
Vaughn determined that Eliza Blydenburgh had been poisoned with enough arsenic to kill an ox.
Ebenezer Blydenburgh was arrested for murder. The trial of the “pious Iowan,” held in Eldora in January 1904, was a national news sensation.
The defense claimed Eliza died of kidney failure. Blydenburgh testified that he and his children ate the same food — from the same pot — and did not get sick.
The evidence for murder was circumstantial, including Blydenburgh’s purchase of two bags of “Rough on Rats” arsenic poison before Eliza’s death. He tried — but failed — to buy an insurance policy on her, and his children testified that their father lacked affection for Eliza.
The jury found Blydenburgh guilty, and he was sent to prison for life. But in 1907, the Iowa Supreme Court reversed the conviction because the trial judge had given jurors a flawed explanation of circumstantial evidence and reasonable doubt.
Blydenburgh was acquitted at the retrial, and New York officials chose not to prosecute in the earlier spousal deaths. He soon married an Eldora woman, sold his Iowa property and moved to California, where he died in Oakland in 1929, at age 67.
His fourth wife, finally, survived him.