A Beheading in Wilkes-Barre

Every year, Wilkes-Barre police respond to hundreds of calls involving domestic disputes. While many of these incidents culminate in arrests and minor injuries, very few domestic disputes end as tragically as the one between a Slovak immigrant and his young newlywed wife on November 16, 1914.

At around 4 o'clock on the afternoon of Monday, November 16, children walking home from school passed by the house at 62 Brookside Street and noticed a light glowing from the basement apartment, where 26-year-old Joseph Karni resided with his wife of four months. Through the window the young children caught a glimpse of something so terrible that it would haunt their nightmares for the rest of their lives-- the headless torso of a nude woman sprawled across the floor in a pool of blood, with a bloody axe by her side.

When police arrived at the scene, which they described as being the most gruesome crime scene they had ever encountered, they found the 18-year-old bride on the floor next to a sink and  her blood-smeared clothes, which her husband had torn from her body in a maniacal frenzy, strewn about the kitchen of the basement apartment.  The husband, Joseph Karni, was found asleep on a couch in the adjoining living room; a wound on his neck offered evidence that he had attempted to take his own life after committing the foul deed.

When Karni was roused to consciousness by the police, the killer seemed to show little interest or emotion; as Patrolmen Sobey and Broadhead led him out of the apartment he stepped over the body of his dead wife without glancing down, as if she were nothing more than a child's toy or a piece of trash. At police headquarters he made a full confession without the slightest coercion, admitting to the crime as casually as one admits to eating a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast.

Joseph and his bride were married just four months earlier in Dupont. After residing for a few months with the wife's sister, Sophie Balaisz, the newlyweds signed a lease on a place of their own, a two-room apartment in the basement of 62 Brookside Street.

Strangely, there were no previous arguments between the two, no warning signs of danger, no harbinger of the sad fate to come. In his confession, Karni claimed that his wife had been nagging him for money with which to buy beer. When he refused, she allegedly struck him in the face, which seemed to be the last thing that he remembered before blacking out in a state of unbridled rage.
"I guess I'll get the rope or the electric chair," he concluded in his statement at police headquarters, "or twenty-nine years." Yet the prospect of execution or decades behind bars seemed not to bother the killer in the least; he called for the undertaker and gave instructions as to how the slain woman should be buried, assuring him that he would pay all the necessary expenses.

The murder house as it appears today

During the ensuing investigation, police made a few fascinating, if not strange, coincidences. Only three years earlier the body of another murdered immigrant, a man by the name of Karros, was found not far from the rear of the property in a small stream. The prime suspect was a man named John Karni, a relative of Joseph Karni, who had escaped arrest by fleeing to Austria.

But the most interesting coincidence of all is that another Slovak immigrant attempted to kill his wife with an axe on the very same afternoon-- less than one mile away. At approximately the same time that Karni was hacking off his wife's head with a hatchet in the kitchen of their Brookside Street apartment, Michael Kasherosky took a hatchet to the back of his wife's head in the kitchen of their home at 222 Beatty Street in Parsons before attempting to cut open her throat with a fork (Mrs. Kasherosky survived the attack). If that isn't one of the strangest coincidences in the history of coincidences, I'm not sure what is!

On November 17, Joseph Karni appeared for a hearing before Alderman Brown, where he related, in detail, the incidents leading up to the murder, how he did it, and what he did in the minutes and hours immediately following the decapitation.

At the preliminary hearing Karni changed his story, insisting that jealousy had been his true motive. According to Karni, about a month after his wedding he became intensely distrustful of his wife. After the wedding she had left home for a week, and when she returned to Dupont she was accompanied by another man. He also said that she frequently told him that she regretted the marriage because he was too old for her, and that she often threatened to replace him with a younger man. And then, on the last day of her life, she had badgered him for beer money so that she could have a "farewell drink" before walking out on him and beginning a new life with a new lover.

These words were what had set him off; he grabbed a butcher knife and, after a brief wrestling match, took her by the hair and pulled her head over the kitchen sink. She slashed her throat, watching his teen bride's life trickle down the drain. His rage was so great that he watched his own actions in a state of disbelief, as one might stare at actors on a movie screen. He had been driven to lunacy, completely disassociated from reality. When he realized what he had done he put down the knife and, in a state of panic, picked up an axe with the intention of hacking his wife's body to bits and destroying the evidence.

It soon became evident to Karni that disposing of the body was an exercise in futility. It was messy, gruesome work and the whiskey he had drank to steel his nerves had failed him. He collapsed in frustration onto the couch and made a feeble, half-hearted attempt to cut his own throat before passing out.

The body of Mrs. Karni was taken to the undertaking establishment of Mr. Pacovsky in North Wilkes-Barre and prepared for burial. According to newspaper reports, the funeral home was deluged with curiosity seekers who, after hearing about the brutal manner in which Mrs. Karni was murdered, were eager to catch a glimpse of the corpse. On November 19 the victim was laid to rest at Saint Stanislaus Cemetery in Plains.