Ocey Snead - Treatment and Death

Treatment and Death

For reasons that remain unknown, Ocey was the object of scorn from her mother and aunts, who deliberately tried to starve her to death virtually from the day she was born.

Subsequent to the departure of her husband, Ocey’s health began to fail. Dr. William Pettit was called in to look at the sickly pregnant woman. He found her suffering from depression, “general weakness,” and malnutrition. “She seemed depressed and indeed afraid of those about her,” he told police later.

Dr. Pettit visited the Wardlaw household several times and each time found that his instructions for Ocey’s care were not being followed. Because the sisters were not cooperating, nor were they paying him, he stopped visiting. The sisters called another doctor, who smuggled her food when he saw her condition. Not long after Ocey's baby was born, he snuck through a window to check on her, but Virginia threw him out. A lawyer subsequently told him there was nothing that could be done.

Several months after Dr. Pettit ceased treating Ocey, he was once again summoned. There he found Ocey depressed, even weaker, and no longer pregnant. The baby, named David, had been taken to a hospital, where he was in poor health. He was later placed in an orphanage by the sisters.

Virginia told the doctor that he should break the news to Ocey that she was dying and that the time had come for her to make a will. Instead, Dr. Pettit ordered that a nurse be brought in to care for Ocey. The nurse stayed just one day before being put out by the Wardlaw sisters. Rather than pay the $100 bill presented by the doctor, the Wardlaw sisters offered to make him a $1,000 beneficiary in Ocey’s will. He declined and decided to take steps against the family, believing that Ocey was “under some hypnotic influence.” What he did not know was that Ocey was being given regular but unnecessary doses of morphine for her post-partum pain by her mother and aunts. At the same time, her 2-year-old daughter had been removed from the home to foster care. Ocey was later told she had died. Her fate remains a mystery.

When Dr. Pettit returned to check on Ocey before he reported the strange case to police, he found the place abandoned and the sisters gone.

They next surfaced in another Brooklyn neighborhood in September 1909, when Virginia Wardlaw, wearing a thick layer of black veils, visited Julius Carabba, a New York attorney, and asked him to help a dying woman prepare a will. Carabba came to Ocey’s bedside while her mother and aunts chanted prayers over her. After the prayers, Virginia asked Ocey if she wanted to make a new will. Ocey agreed. Carabba told the women that Ocey needed a doctor and some food. The Wardlaw sisters said they could afford neither. He offered to write them a check and while the sisters left the room in search of a pen, Carabba talked to Ocey. She told him that she was dying, reached under her pillow and gave him her will, in which she left everything to her grandmother and asked him to make himself executor. The Wardlaw sisters offered Carabba $7,000 to make them the beneficiaries — Mother Wardlaw was too old, they said. Carabba refused and the sisters dropped him as their attorney.

In October 1909, Virginia Wardlaw was served as defendant in a lawsuit for nonpayment of the price of a new piano. Her response to the plaintiff was “wait until we bury our dead.”

At this time, Ocey was near death from lack of food and medical care and was moved to an East Orange, New Jersey apartment. There was no heat or gas for cooking and the place was furnished with just two cots, a rug, a chair, and a barrel for a table.

The police were called by the family on November 29, 1909 and told there was an "accident". The police then sent a physician to their home. Virginia Wardlaw led Dr. Herbert M. Simmons, the Assistant County Physician, upstairs to a bathroom where he found the naked body of Ocey Snead, sitting in a tub of water with her head tilted under the faucet. There was a suicide note pinned to her clothes beside the bathtub. The note read as follows:

"Last year my little daughter died. Other near and dear kindred too have gone to Heaven. I long to go there too. I have been ill and weak a very long time now. Death will be a blessed relief to me in my sufferings. When you read this I will have committed suicide. My sorrow and pain in this world are greater than I can endure. Ocey W.M. Snead"

Ocey was buried on December 7, 1909 at Mount Hope Cemetery, Hastings-on-Hudson in Westchester County. Snead is incorrectly listed as being in Mount Hope Cemetery in Brooklyn on Findagrave. Her New York Times obituary makes clear that she was buried upstate and also that she was not Jewish, as the Brooklyn cemetery is.