They seemed to glide through the dried, brown and tattered leaves rustling in the chill Fall breeze cutting across the midnight darkness of Evergreen Cemetery. Dressed all in black and heavily veiled, they were three wraiths, bringing death and destruction behind them. Greed pumped through their veins and murder beat in their hearts. These were the women who became known as the “Three Sisters in Black” thanks to a book written about them in 1968 by Norman Zierold.
Wardlaw Sisters and Soule College
Virginia Oceana Wardlaw, Caroline Belle Wardlaw Martin and Mary Long Wardlaw Snead were, by 1903, the owners of Soule College in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. The school offered a “traditional Southern education for women in cultural studies and social graces,” according to Rutherford County Historical publications housed at Middle Tennessee State University. When Virginia was named president of the school in 1892 by John G. Paty who had bought the school in 1889, she brought the school much prestige. She had been recruited to the position because of her accomplishments in Nashville.
A Master’s degree graduate of Wellesley College, findagrave.com noted, “Under Virginia’s administration, with sister Mary by her side, Soule College achieved wide recognition, introduced dressmaking, typewriting, bookkeeping, commercial law, Latin, Greek, constitutional history, English, literature, French, German language, European history, ethics aesthetics, all math, physiology, geology, civil government and political economy.”
Then Caroline arrived with her daughter, Oceana “Ocey” Wardlaw Martin, and everything changed. Virginia and Mary changed. Where once they had brought order, discipline and honor, suddenly chaos reigned. Mary explained in [an] 1930 interview that Caroline was insane and that she and her daughter were taken in out of pity, according to rutherfordtnhistory.org.
The sisters, all dressed in heavy black garments with mourning veils, took to hiring a hack driver after sundown and having him drop them off at the Evergreen Cemetery where they were seen and heard chanting incantations in an odd language and dancing around graves and trees. Whispers emerged of the sisters being abortionists and child murderers. And perhaps they had murdered their father for insurance money.
Young women at Soule College became so scared of their odd actions, that the once prosperous school began losing money. It didn’t help that Caroline had been dipping her hand liberally into the till. The three sisters left in shame and ruin in 1904, and moved on to Montgomery Female College in Christiansburg, Virginia.
Move to Montgomery Female College in Christiansburg, Virginia
Montgomery Female College had been owned by an aging aunt, who gave it to the three sisters’ mother. In 1904, Virginia, Caroline and Mary began running the school. By 1908 they had run it into the ground and had headed to New York with Ocey and her husband, Fletcher Snead. Fletcher was also Ocey’s first cousin and Mary’s son. There are stories that the three sisters forced the marriage, even practically kidnapping Fletcher and forcing a divorce from his first wife.
Christiansburg was happy to see them go. They had left chaos behind them once again, and questions about the death of Caroline’s wealthy husband, Fletcher’s brother John, and John’s wife Lizzie. John burned alive in his bed, which the sisters said was an accident, after two previous almost fatal “accidents” from falling off a train and almost drowning in a well. However, they were believed by authorities and received his insurance money, in spite of the heavy smell of kerosene on his body. Plus, they were seen dancing around the graves of John and his wife after their deaths late one night under a witch’s moon.
Death in a Bathtub in New Jersey
By the time they reached New York, the sisters were running out of funds. Raised in a prominent family of doctors, lawyers, ministers and successful businessmen, they were becoming desperate. Then, on the night of November 29, 1909, the Main Street police headquarters in East Orange, New Jersey received a telephone call requesting a coroner be sent to 89 North Fourteenth Street. With no coroner on hand, Police Sergeant Timothy Caniff called in Dr. Herbert M. Simmons.
Once arriving at the squalid, unheated, and unfurnished home, Dr. Simmons found the nude and emaciated body of Ocey drowned in a bathtub. He was shown a suicide note, but he knew immediately that the girl had been dead for 24 hours before he was called. And the woman who had made the call and answered the door when he arrived, Virginia, was dressed all in black, heavily veiled and very uncooperative. The whole thing was extremely fishy.
The story of Ocey and her horrible death filled the national newspapers for two years, with reporters even going to Murfreesboro to interview locals about what happened when the sisters lived there. It seems that the three sisters had been drugging and starving Ocey for some time. And possibly even killed her first child and led to the death of her second through starvation. They eventually drove off Ocey’s husband, Fletcher, whom they led her to believe was dead. He had instead fled to Canada and was living under an assumed name when police found him. He had nothing to do with his wife’s death.
Ironic End of the Wardlaw Sisters
Virginia, Mary and eventually Caroline, who evaded the police longer than the others, were arrested and tried for the murder of Ocey. Finally, their fate was sealed. But they left a trail of questionable deaths and many questionable business dealings behind them.
The family had always had a strange, somewhat unnatural relationship. Caroline had a creepy control over everyone she was around, while also bringing out the worst in them. One theory is that she was in fact a serial killer, and her two sisters were aware of her proclivities, which they covered up. Or maybe partook in.
“As for motive,” says an article on rutherfordtnhistory.org, “the investigation established that the sisters had life insurance on Ocey in the amount of $32,000, [almost one million dollars in today’s currency,] and that they had often gone without food and other necessities in order to pay the insurance premiums. Moreover, it was found that Ocey owned several parcels of valuable property in her name alone through her father’s will. Testimony showed that on several occasions the sisters had tried unsuccessfully to get Ocey to make a will leaving them or their elderly mother the property.”
In 1910, “Miss Virgina Wardlaw…died here in the house of detention…General decline is given as the cause of death…It is the opinion of jail attendants [that] Miss Wardlaw deliberately starved herself to death…When she was removed from jail there was found in the cell she occupied a quantity of stale food which the prisoner concealed,” according to ruralnchistory.blogspot.com.
A 2009 article in the New York Daily News states that, “Mary Snead was acquitted and Caroline pleaded guilty to manslaughter. She clearly expected no jail time, because when she learned, on Jan. 23, 1911, that her sentence would be seven years, she shrieked, “I do not deserve it!” The prisoner had to be carried from the courtroom, still sitting in her chair, shrieking. Soon after she entered jail, she was transferred to [an] insane asylum, where she stopped eating and died on June 20, 1913.”
Survivor’s Perspective
“In 1930, 21 years after the murder, the “Murfreesboro News Banner” reported a statement from Mrs. Mary Snead who was located in Oakland, California at the time living with her son,” according to rutherfordtnhistory.org. “She began to shed some light on the many sinister happenings that led up to the tragic death of Ocey Snead.”
Mary says that Virginia had been negligent and irresponsible when dealing with her supposedly mentally unstable daughter, Ocey. And that she ran after finding Ocey dead from suicide in the bathtub, leaving Virginia to clean up the mess she made. But that Virginia was guilty of nothing, and that she killed herself in prison due to shame.
And yet, there are still many unanswered questions related to the sisters. There are enduring whispers of the sisters’ involvement with black magic, questions of why were there bones and hair from a child in the furnace at the residence Caroline shared with Mary and their elderly mother in New York, why there was morphine in Ocey’s system, and why the suicide note was not in Ocey’s handwriting.
Possible Full-Length Film of the Story
A filmmaker in Virginia, Richard Maitri, has made a short film about these events and hopes to raise the money to make a full-length feature film. More information about the film and the sisters can be found here. To see a clip from his movie, click here.
