The Hartford herald. [volume] (Hartford, Ky.) 1875-1926, 1912-03-06
At Country Home Near
Hopkinsville.
THE VIOLENT TEMPER OF BOTH
Was Cause of Awful Deed
Peace Making Brother
Badly Wounded.
THE CORONER's JURY ACQUITs

Hopkinsville, KY, March g.
The sinister specter of Hate sat an
unbidden guest at dinner to-day
with Irving Cayce and his ten child
rem in their snow-bound farm home.
An hour after the patriarchal figure
of the father had intoned a Sab
bath blessing on his household, he
lay dead, shot twice by his 20-year-
old daughter, Olive, who in anger
had been sent from the table, later
TO vent her ire in the tragedy.
-- The whole countryside in the
Palmyra Pike neighborhood, where
the Cages have been highly re-
spected for a quarter of a century,
was stirred tonight by the killing.
Grief-bowed and conscious for
the first time of the terrible reality
of the tragic fate which had swept
so suddenly upon her and her
household, the pathetic figure of
the girl, PROSTATE and. sobbing, was
a mark of sympathy for Coroner
John Rise and the members OF his
jury who viewed the body.
And, after they had heard the re-
markable story of how a chance
word by her parent to his daughter
had aroused her anger; how the ad-
monition, UNDECIDED, stung both
father and daughter, and of the
heat of the storm which the specter
of hate had brought over the peace
full family circle, the Coroner and
his companions silently left the
Cayce family to their great grief.
"Self-defense. their verdict read.
In whispers tonight the neigbors
of Irving Cayce are discussing the
fatality.
On cot only few feet from the
corpse of his father lies his 49,
year-old son and namesake. wound
ed in the wrist by the second of two
revolver shots which the girl fired.
II was he who, when his sire had
leaped at his daughter with an up
raised charlse witnesses told the
coroner this afternoon-used his
body as a living shield of flesh and
blood between his father and his
sister. Unconscious of the fact that
the girl, who had inherited her
parents violent temper, was armed
with the fathers own weapon, the
boy pleaded tearfully with both to
desist. In his eagerness to act as a
peacemaker he threw himself be-
tween the pair and thinking the
girl unarmed, implored Cayce not
to strike her.
And so for a few tense seconds
the trio stood, the father arrayed
against his own flesh and blood,
and betweeA them his son.
Two flashes of fire and the NOR
tai cry of Cayce broke the dead
spectre's spell. Hate fled and Grief
entered, to the accompaniment of
screams of fright by the younger
children, the cries OF the young
protector, in his pain, and the an
guish of the girl herself. Thus the
Coroner found them, and in the
sudden end of the man and the
tragedy of his family, neighbors
professed tonight to see something
weird and uncanny, that at the
height of their sabbath peace a
tragedy would have come so unex-
pectedly, and left trail so pitiful.
Mrs. Cayce. an elderly woman,
respected throughout the country,
was the only eyewitness able to give
a coherent account of the tragedy
to the Coroner and his investiga-
tors, when they made their grim
visit. She found herself confronted
with a crisis in her mother-test of
love: whether to blame the father
of her children, or her own daugh-
ter who had fred the shot that wild
owed her. She did not falter. and
it was upon her statement that the
law will not exact the daughters
life for her fathers.
1t was/a crisis such as few wo-
men have faced. and in the facing
of It, Mrs. Cayce won the victo-
ry over her widowhood that had
tern For very heartstrings.
forfeit comforting neighbors,
who surmised, perhaps, the sudden
..ooe - tha onall that hate h a