Starvation Heights by Gregg Olsen
Years ago, I took a ghost tour of Pike Place Market. One of the stories the tour guide told was of a woman named Linda Burfield Hazzard, who in the early 20th century promoted herself as an expert in the "fasting cure." She would condition her clients with the idea that the only way to regain their health was to engage in a dramatic fast and to take her "osteopathic" treatments to purify their bodies. Many of them died of starvation and she, opportunist that she was, would steal as much of their property, money, jewels and savings, as she could. She was featured in the tour because one of the buildings we passed by was one of the places in which she practiced. It was a fascinating story.
On New Year's Day this year, I was at the Museum of History and Industry here in Seattle and stopped by the gift shop. I found there a copy of Starvation Heights: A True Story of Murder and Malice in the Woods of the Pacific Northwest, the true story of two British heiresses who "took the cure", one of whom escaped, lived to tell the tale and to pursue Hazzard's prosecution.
Olsen's account of the story is novelistic in the telling, detailed, gruesome and evocative. The scope of Hazzard's villainy--and the complete conviction with which she pursued her course--is jaw-dropping. Her sadism--starving her clients in the guise of restoring their health, beating them as part of her treatment, thieving away their agency and property, isolating them outside of remote Olala, WA in the name of preserving the efficacy of their cure--is astonishing. And Olsen's research, detail, and the way he draws the people central to the story is compelling. Hazzard's ultimate fate, an act of personal faith, provides an ironic and just grace note to the entire story. If the woods of the Kitsap Peninsula are haunted, Linda Hazzard is the reason why.
If you dig true crime, if you have an interest in the history of the Pacific Northwest, if you are turned on by obscure history and by really good narrative, then I highly recommend Starvation Heights. Excellent stuff.
On New Year's Day this year, I was at the Museum of History and Industry here in Seattle and stopped by the gift shop. I found there a copy of Starvation Heights: A True Story of Murder and Malice in the Woods of the Pacific Northwest, the true story of two British heiresses who "took the cure", one of whom escaped, lived to tell the tale and to pursue Hazzard's prosecution.
Olsen's account of the story is novelistic in the telling, detailed, gruesome and evocative. The scope of Hazzard's villainy--and the complete conviction with which she pursued her course--is jaw-dropping. Her sadism--starving her clients in the guise of restoring their health, beating them as part of her treatment, thieving away their agency and property, isolating them outside of remote Olala, WA in the name of preserving the efficacy of their cure--is astonishing. And Olsen's research, detail, and the way he draws the people central to the story is compelling. Hazzard's ultimate fate, an act of personal faith, provides an ironic and just grace note to the entire story. If the woods of the Kitsap Peninsula are haunted, Linda Hazzard is the reason why.
If you dig true crime, if you have an interest in the history of the Pacific Northwest, if you are turned on by obscure history and by really good narrative, then I highly recommend Starvation Heights. Excellent stuff.