A Dark Day on Vining Hill

Southwick's Infamous Axe Murder Retold

At the urging of her second husband, Francis, who had fallen ill, Martha Ottenheimer was granted parole from the Northampton State Hospital in 1938. Originally thought to be suicidal, she was subsequently committed to the insane asylum for depression.

Martha visited her husband and father in Southwick after being initially paroled on February 11. She returned to the asylum on her own accord on the thirteenth.

Institutionalized on December 31, 1937, she was deemed cured and permanently released on February 16. Martha immediately returned to her family's homestead on their namesake hill in Southwick. It was a place the Vinings had called home for more than a century. Almost a year before her release, her widowed father, Lester Vining, who still lived in the old farmhouse there, had fallen ill but was doing better. Francis and Martha lived there too. It was the house where she had grown up, along with her siblings: Orpha, Claude, and Elva. (Martha may have had two additional siblings who died before she was born.)

Several people who remarked on Martha's "splendid recovery" were surprised when they found out that she repeatedly struck her father in the head with an axe as he sat in a chair in his kitchen on April 13, 1938.

Francis, still ill, was laid up in an upstairs bedroom when the attack occurred. Having heard the commotion, he rose from his bed and went downstairs to investigate. As soon as Francis entered the kitchen, he made a shocking and gruesome discovery.

Martha phoned Southwick doctor Samuel Finsen, M.D.

Dr. Finsen, a friend of the Vining family, was one of the doctors who had Martha committed to the insane asylum in 1937. Dr. Finsen was not at home at the time, so Martha left a message for him with the telephone operator, saying in part: "I've murdered my father. You'd better come and look at him."

Lester Vining was clinging to life. There is conflicting information surrounding whether he died on the way to Noble Hospital or shortly after arriving there. An autopsy showed he had multiple skull fractures after reportedly being hit some twenty times.

Massachusetts State Police immediately returned Martha to the Northampton State Hospital to have her recommitted. Under questioning, she freely admitted that she killed her father because he was old and feeble, and she did not want to see him suffer.

Lester Vining's Home

The district attorney had not formally charged Martha, but a grand jury would hear evidence of the horrific murder when it convened on May 2. (The court was also presented with a petition to appoint insurance agent and undertaker Luther E. Hollister as Martha's guardian.)

Following the Briggs Law of Massachusetts (enacted 1921), the Massachusetts Department of Mental Diseases announced on May 13 the appointments of Dr. George E. McPherson, superintendent of the Belchertown State School (for the Feeble-Minded), and Dr. Morgan Hodgkins of the Monson State Hospital to conduct a pre-trial examination on Martha.

The Briggs Law intended to bridge the gap between psychiatry and criminal law. Named for Dr. L. Vernon Briggs, it required the appointment of two psychiatrists to examine each person held on a capital offense. In doing so, the Commonwealth hoped to eliminate costly, drawn-out trials for those found to be of unsound mind, but only if the defense attorney did not contest the insanity findings. (Chapter 888 of the Massachusetts Acts of 1970 repealed Briggs Law effective November 1, 1971.)

Before the Vining murder, the Northampton State Hospital was under investigation when it paroled Elinor Randall of Agawam in 1937. Roughly two weeks after her release, she suffocated her 23-month-old daughter when she stuffed her into a steamer (travel) trunk that she may have mistaken for a crib on February 12. Her husband, Frederick, found the infant's body the following day.

It is unclear what exactly happened to Martha. But with gross overcrowding and rapidly eroding conditions, along with the public's perception of mental health treatment changing, the Northampton State Hospital eventually transferred patients to other facilities as it faced renewed calls for closure. Some patients were simply released back into society because, over the years, the underfunded insane asylum had become a dumping ground for those who could not care for themselves. Instead of offering proper inpatient mental health care, it became a warehouse for the poor, the homeless, and the elderly who had nowhere to go.

Readers may recall from an earlier Southwick Time Machine piece titled "The Southwick Tragedy" that Lester Vining was one of two Vining boys who savagely beat Willis Dibble at the Southwick Hotel (today's Southwick Inn) in November 1873. Willis Dibble was never the same after the attack. He slit his throat ear-to-ear as authorities came to take him back to the Northampton Insane Asylum (later renamed Northampton State Hospital) in 1880.

"A Dark Day on Vining Hill" 
first appeared in the March/2022 edition of Southwoods