Starving to Kill
Welcome back to my blog! Put on your seatbelts and hold onto your seats because this story is a wild ride. Today I am going to talk about a case that I have just recently learned about, but knew I had to share because it is so crazy. It is around the same time period as the Lizzie Borden case that I talked about in my last post. (If you haven't read it, check it out here!) It also has to do with murder, but it’s not as simple as you would think. In the Lizzie Borden case, whereas it remains unsolved, is fairly black and white. Andrew and Abby were stabbed to death with a hatchet. These murders were disguised as medicine.
Linda Burfield Hazzard was born December 18, 1867 in Minnesota. By the time she was 18 she was already married and had two children. She did not stay with her family however. In 1898 she decided to leave her husband and children to go to Minneapolis and married Samuel Hazzard. They somehow ended up in Olalla, Washington.
She wanted to pursue a career in alternative medicine. Whereas she did not have a medical degree or license, she called herself a doctor. She would even be offended if someone were to call her “Mrs.” instead of “Dr.” Crazy enough this was legal through a loophole in the law. She was grandfathered into the law stating that doctors practicing alternative medicine could practice without a license.
Her practice specialized in fasting. She claimed to believe that fasting was the cure to any and all diseases. It would allow the digestive system to rest and clean the body of any impurities. She claimed this treatment could heal pretty much everything that ails the body: toothache, cancer, anemia, STD’s… She even wrote a couple of books on the subject.
I was able to find her first book online and read some of it, and let me tell you, it was total craziness. In the first couple of pages she tells you to throw away everything that you think you know about surviving without eating. She claims that you can fast from anywhere up to 10 to 75 days instead of the 10 to 12 that was, and is, taught about food. She was trying to convince everyone that you don’t really need food to survive as she had only lost 11 patients - and none were due to the fast (LIES!). She preached that all modern medicine was poison.
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| This is a paragraph from her book, Fasting for the Cure of Disease pg 43. Yes, she does claim that you can tell whether or not someone is a pervert by the way they smell. I could not make this up. |
To justify her opinions of fasting, she went to the Bible. The Bible says to rid yourself of demons that you need to fast and pray. She interchanges “demons” and “disease.” So in order to rid yourself of disease, you need to abstain from eating. According to her logic: when you are sick you lose weight; when you lose weight but are still eating, your food is not being digested; if you are not digesting your food, then you are putting unneeded stress to your digestive system. She compares eating like a drug addict - we want our regular fix of food at set times, but we don’t actually need it. She claims that going without food, like drugs, is hard at first but gets easier over time.
Overeating was what gave our body disease (according to Hazzard) because unneeded food would get stuck in our system to rot. In order to fix that she would give enema's. The thing about this was she would subject her patients to have them for hours at a time, regularly throughout the course of their treatment as “constant irrigation of the stomach and intestines is an absolute requirement in fasting.” She would also give massages to help the intestines to evacuate their contents. Her massages were closer to what we would consider beatings than anything else though. Rumor has it that she would scream “Eliminate! Eliminate!” as she would beat them. There is no specific time frame for how long the fast is to last, she took it on a case by case basis.
A lot of her clientele were wealthy. During this fasting process Hazzard would confine her patients to her and her husband's property. When she got her patients to their weakest point, she would convince them to sign over their estate to her with the promise of food after they did so. She would also take their possessions. Anything she saw of value, she would take. She would even take their clothes to wear for herself. She was saving for the building of a sanitarium. She was just fine with getting the money for it in less than ethical ways. After they signed their money away she would still deny them food.
There were several that would try to escape in order to get food. The people in town would refer to these people as the skeletons and would refer to her place as “Starvation Heights.” By the time she was done with them, that’s basically what they were. By the time Hazzard was done with her patients, they would usually be under 50 pounds. These people were not children, they were fully grown adults getting down to that weight. She would not be afraid to kill them if they disobeyed her. One of her victims was found shot in the head, and his money transferred to her. Officially, she had at least 40 people die under her care, but it’s thought that she had many more than that.
Here is a food log recorded in the diary of one of her victims who did not survive the fast:
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| Diet consisting of strained juice from oranges and broth. |
Hazzard’s first victim died in 1902, the same year her divorce to her first husband was finalized. The local coroner did an autopsy of the victim and found that their cause of death was starvation. When he took action to try and get convicted of killing that man, the courts informed him that she could not be held accountable because she was not a licensed physician. People would come knowing that she practiced alternative medicine, and when first checking in, was willing to undergo this treatment. It’s said that the only time they would intervene was if she took a child into her care. I figure that this is why she started performing her patient’s autopsies herself. When one of her victims died, she would put just about anything but starvation as their cause of death.
Things changed for Hazzard in 1911. That year a pair of wealthy sisters, Dorthea and Claire Williamson, saw an ad for Hazzard’s practice and knew that they needed to see her. Neither of them really had anything wrong with them to cause them to need treatment, but they were both hypochondriacs. They did not tell their family that they were going to get Linda Hazzard’s fasting cure because they had been less than receptive to the alternative medicine they had tried in the past.
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| Dorthea and Claire Williamson with a friend soon before going to treatment with Hazzard. |
Once the sisters had become settled during February of 1911, Hazzard took their jewelry and deeds for “safe keeping.” They went through her treatment: enema's, beatings, and all for the next couple of months. In April, Hazzard had Claire sign a document stating that $25 a month was to go to Hazzard’s sanitarium; and, in the event of her death she wanted her body to be cremated under the care of Dr. Hazzard. Hazzard would perform autopsies and cremation by herself at the home.
At the end of April, the Williamson sisters sent a telegram to their former nanny, Margaret Conway, in Sydney, Australia. They asked for her to come to them in Olalla, where Hazzard now had them residing for their treatment. The message was cryptic, and Conway could tell something was off, so she got there right at a month later. I know this sounds like a long time to get to them, but this was before you could just hop on a plane and get just about anywhere in a matter of days. She had to board a boat and sail to the U.S. and then see about getting transportation to Olalla, WA.
Upon Conway’s arrival on June 1, Samuel Hazzard picked her up and informed her that Claire had passed away on May 19 and that Dorthea was of unsound mind. He took her to identify Claire’s body which was so emaciated that she did not recognize the body before her. As all she had consumed for months was water, fruit broth, and vegetable broth, it’s unsurprising that she had become too weak to sustain life. At the time of her death she weighed less than 50 pounds.
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| Samuel Hazzard |
After seeing the state Claire’s body had been in upon her death, she demanded to see Dorthea at once. To say that she was a ghost of her former self was an understatement. She did not look much better than her sister who did not survive. Dorthea begged for Margaret to rescue her from that place. The next day she was saying something completely different, she liked it there and the treatment was really helping. Hazzard had gotten to her, and Dorthea was most likely afraid of going against her. Linda Hazzard was also wearing Claire's clothing during these encounters.
When Conway announced that she was going to take Dorthea from that terrible place, the Hazzard’s informed her that they held power of attorney over Dorthea and her money. They refused to let her go, saying she was to live with them for the rest of her life. Conway knew that she could not let that happen, so she contacted Dorthea’s uncle. He bargained a ransom for her release of around $2000.
Dorthea was unable to walk as her muscles had wasted away from starving and weighing less than 60 pounds, so she had to be carried out of the Hazzard property. Conway moved her to Tacoma to aid in her recovery. They then started the process of testifying against Hazzard, who in 1912 was sentenced 2 to 20 years in prison for the murder of Claire Williamson. She ended up killing another 2 people after Claire before she was sentenced. The prosecuting attorney in the case called Hazzard a “financial starvationist” amongst other not so nice things. While gathering evidence, they also learned that she had forged Claire Williamson’s will leaving the Hazzard’s everything, and the last entry in her diary.
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| Dorthea Williamson just before she was rescued from the Hazzard's. |
After she was pardoned, Linda and Samuel decided to take the practice to New Zealand. Over there they continued to trick people into trying their fasting cure and taking their money. She also falsely used the title of doctor. This did not last long though as she was charged with practicing medicine without a license in 1920. There wasn’t a loophole in the law over there like there was in Washington. She was fined 5 pounds.
Not being allowed to practice her medicine in New Zealand, the Hazzard couple came back to the United States to set up shop again. She built a 100 bed sanitarium in Olalla, Washington - the very town that she had been charged with the murder of Claire Williamson just a few years prior. Because she did not have a medical license, she advertised the sanitarium as a school of health to prevent suspicion.
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| The sanitarium for fasting |
She treated her patients with her fasting cure there for 15 years until it was burned to the ground in 1935 and did not rebuild it as her reputation had gone bad because of so many deaths under her care. I could also imagine as science and medicine was rapidly progressing then, people started seeing that what she was doing was absolutely bonkers.
Soon after the sanitarium burned Linda Hazzard started feeling ill. Believing that her fasting cure could really cure illness or disease, despite the fact that so many people died under her care from it, she did the fast herself. She died in 1938 of starvation.
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| Linda Hazzard in front of her home in Olalla, WA |
Linda Hazzard’s story doesn’t end there unfortunately. In the show, Dead Files, her name is brought up again in season 2 episode 13. A teenage boy from Olalla, WA contacted the Dead Files crew about the house that his family owned next door. He and his friends performed a series of 17 seances inside the house after having a little bit of activity there. After they did the seances, the activity worsened. The boy admitted that he thinks he opened something that was too big for him to handle.
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| Steve in the Linda Hazzard house |
During the investigation Steve DiSchaivi learned that house was the same house that Linda Hazzard had lived and died in. She treated patients there, many of which also died there. When medium Amy Allan did her walk through the house, she encountered a dead woman who felt stuck there. She perceived the living woman in the house as what was keeping her there. She planned to either push her down the stairs, or to make her fall down the stairs so she could get rid of her. Amy did a sketch of that woman, and it looked just like Linda Hazzard. She wanted to continue to kill after her death. It's actually not surprising that she wanted to push the woman down the stairs because she had suggested that the Williamson sisters to commit suicide this way. Her reasoning behind this was that their illness was progressing faster than the fast could cure them. This was a flat out lie as they didn't have anything physically wrong with them to begin with - the fast was what was killing them.
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| Current picture of Linda Hazzard's house |
All in all, Linda Hazzard was not a good person. She attracted victims through false advertising and statements, then she would trap them there until she was done with them and had their life’s savings. She seemed to believe in her cure, but she would also take things a little too far and have people die on purpose.
I hope you enjoyed reading about this case! Leave a comment and tell me what you thought about Linda Hazzard and her starving cure.
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