The Diabolical Murder of Michael Howrilso
Mrs. Howrilso Perhaps no part of Pennsylvania can boast a record of unfathomably cruel murders as the anthracite coal region, particularly Luzerne and Lackawanna Counties. It was in Exeter where, on Valentine's Day of 1891, Edward McMillan impaled his wife on a red-hot poker before torturing her with searing steel tongs. It was also Valentine's Day, in 1930, when a drunken Gervase Castner sawed his wife in half in their home in Avoca. In 1902, a fiend fatally poisoned five innocent children with arsenic in Olyphant; no arrests were ever made. And few murders were as barbaric as the one carried out by Joseph Karni , who, in the fall of 1914, beheaded his newlywed wife in the basement of their Wilkes-Barre home. But there is another contender for the title of cruelest killer in coal region region history-- 17-year-old Knidsu Howrilso of Dunmore, who, in 1907, put into effect a diabolical plot to dispose of her husband. In 1906, a recently-married couple from Poland (some sourc...
