The Washington times., 1920-02-01
frVTT HO are the richest families in
MI town and which of them have
" marriageable daughters?"

w marriageable daughters?"
These, it Is, said, were the questions
which DR.. j. A. Freudenberg asked when.
fresh from medical college, penniless and
unknown, he settled down to practise his
profession In Markesan, Wisconsin.
The young physician had no difficulty in
obtaining the information he sought, for
Markesan is only small farming village,
and everybody in 1t is thoroughly familiar
not only with the wealth or poverty but
also with the marriageability of every
body else.
And the doctor was not slow to act upon
the answers he received to his questions.
Within surprisingly short time after his
arrival in Markesan he had married the
richest girl in the village-Gladys Duties,
heiress to fortune estimated at fully
$400, ,O00-and had settled down to live with
his bride and her family in the comfortable
Duties homestead.
This was in 1915. And now, five years
later, the gossips OF Markesan and the
legal authorities of the county as well are
wondering il there was not deeper and
more sinister significance than they ever
suspected at the time in DR.. Freudenberg's
interest in the financial standing of the
villages manageable girls and his speedy
marriage to the richest of them all.
Is all this the injustice of cruel village
gossip?
fonpdad
these moves on the physicians part were
only the first steps in carefully planned
plot to obtain quick control OF the
Duties family fortune-a plot that sent
Mrs. Freudenberg's mother and three of
her grandparents to their death.
The local authorities claim they have
the evidence to prove that he is a whole
sale poisoner-a man who prostituted his
profession and betrayed his wife's love IN
the effort to gain his evil ends; who killed
not once but four times, and by methods
that must have been cruel torture for his
helpless victims, in order to satisfy his
greed for gold.
Disprove the truth of all this and DR..
Freudenberg is wickedly maligned man
"a man who will be entitled to the worlds
sympathy that his family happiness and
his professional prosperity should have
been clouded by the shadow of this unjust
suspicion.
Yet the Markesan authorities have found
It hard to believe that an entirely innocent
man could have become involved In chain
OF circumstances so amazing as that which
has coiled itself about the young Wiscon-
sin physician. Dr. Freudenberg has been
arrested charged with first degree murder
for the death OF his mother-in-law, and is
now out on $4,000 bail awaiting trial.
Any man can be arrested and charged
with a crime, but It will require more than
suspicion, curious circumstances and hear
say testimony to fasten the present
charges on DR.. Freudenberg
II was not long after the doctors mar
riage that the record of good health which
mad been traditional in the Duties home
for almost generation was broken by the
first of the long series Of serious Illnesses
and deaths that continued with llstle in
terruption until last Fall
People remarked how strange 1t was that
a household which had always been so
we'll should be repeatedly visited by serious
illness Just after a physician had married
into the family. But nobody thought this
any more than an odd coincidence. Until
= few weeks ago nobody suspected that the
deaths of the four men and women which
followed one another so quickly at the
Duties homestead were due to anything
but natural causes.
Mrs. Mary Perry. mother of Mrs. Duties
and grandmother OF the doctors wife, was
the first to fall Ill. For weeks she was at
deaths door. Then she began slowly to
recover But before she was able to be
about again ner husband sickened and
died after a short Illness.