Innocence Buried: The Feutz Tragedy of 1935

The lives of a Dover family unraveled in 1935 with a secret birth and a tragic crime.

Content warning: The post contains discussion of infanticide.

Mary Warther (1887-1969) was born in Tuscarawas County, Ohio, the daughter of Swiss immigrants Jacob Godfrey Warther (1844-1888) and Elizabeth Anna Haney (1855-1938). Her early years were marked by the loss of her father while she was still an infant, after which she was raised by her mother alongside four siblings. Mrs. Warther settled the family on 5th Street in Dover, Ohio by 1900, where Mary spent her formative years surrounded by her three older brothers and a younger sister. In addition to taking in boarders, all of the Warther children grew up having to work to help support the family.

Mary married Alex Feutz (1881-1957) in March 1905; Alex was a Swiss immigrant who came to the United States at the turn of the century. The couple made their home in Dover and began raising a family, welcoming two daughters. The Feutzes lived on West 8th Street in Dover and Alex worked as a laborer in the local rolling mill when the census was taken in 1910. The Feutz family moved to another home on the same street by the time Alex registered for the World War One draft in 1917. Mary and Alex lived in this home until after 1940. At the time Alex registered in 1917, he was employed as a Shearman at the American Steel and Tin Plate Company.

Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, Mary managed a growing household that eventually included three daughters. The family continued to reside on West 8th Street, with Alex transitioning to work as a molder for a local manufacturing company. There were times during the Great Depression that Alex found himself unable to find regular work. Like their mother had as a child, the Feutz’s daughters worked in the homes of others in order to help support the family. Despite the challenges of the era, including economic hardship, Mary appeared to foster a loving home for her family. The Feutz home, and the Dover community, would be rocked however by an unthinkable act in the fall of 1935.

It was Saturday, October 19, 1935 when Mary and Alex’s newly-turned 18-year-old daughter started to feel ill while working for a family about a mile from the Feutz’s home in Dover. She decided to walk home and, when she arrived at the intersection of Factory Streets and West 8th Streets, she gave birth to a baby girl while walking. The daughter picked up the baby, its umbilical cord still attached, and walked the two remaining blocks to her parent’s home. Once there, she handed the newborn to her mother, who cut the umbilical cord, wrapped the baby in an old coat, and set her on the floor of an upstairs back room of the home.

Mary, her daughter, and the other family members all claimed in their later statements to authorities that they had no idea the daughter was pregnant. Mary, fearing the impact an illegitimate child could have on the family’s reputation, purposely never tied the newborn’s umbilical cord. The infant bled to death as it laid, wrapped in the old coat, in the Feutz home. Later that night, as the daughter went into town with friends, Mary dug a shallow grave in the back yard near a chicken coop and buried her deceased granddaughter. Somehow, possibly through a family member, authorities learned of the birth and Mary’s actions and she was arrested six days later.

Mary Feutz confessed to the crime, claimed she was “hysterical” at the time, and awaited the results of a grand jury that would determine what charges she would face. The grand jury convened in late November 1935 and indicted Mary for second degree murder and for burial of a body without a permit. A month after the indictment, Mary was allowed to plead guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter, was given a suspended penitentiary sentence, and required to spend three months in the county jail. The judge who sentenced her in the case stated that Mary “had already received her worst punishment for the crime”. Mary Fuetz died in December 1969, thirty-four years after taking the life of her newborn granddaughter.

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© Noel B. Poirier, 2024.