Hazzard by Name , Hazzard by Nature
C. A. Asbrey
Dr. Linda Hazzard was born Linda Laura Burfield in Carver, Minnesota on Dec 18th 1867, as one of eight children. She grew up to be a quack, a fraudster, and a killer, who sold fake starvation cures to the unwary. A legal loophole in Washington State allowed her to be registered as a medical practitioner despite having no qualifications. In her book, The Science of Fasting, she claimed to have studied under Edward Hooker Dewey, a properly qualified doctor, and a proponent of fasting cures.
He advocated two meals a day and no breakfast, and for some other ailments, a fasting cure. Whilst this was popular during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was not a universally accepted regime. The British Medical Journal noted errors in Dewey’s published work and called it a ‘foolish delusion‘. Another doctor noted that fasting should only be conducted under medical supervision and that Dewey took things to extremes. Linda Hazzard was way more extreme than Dewey. it’s doubtful that Hazzard ever actually met Dewey, and possible that she only read his work.
Linda Hazzard self-published books give us some insight into her rigorous regimes. She gave patients only small amounts of vegetable broth, numerous enemas, and ‘rested their systems’ with days of almost total fasting. Massages were so vigorous that nurses reported that they sounded like beatings.
She left her first husband to start a sanatorium in Minneapolis, and that’s where the first death happened. Bizarrely, she was not held accountable for the death as she was not medically qualified, but was evasive when questioned about the victim’s missing jewellery. She managed to slip out of charges and carry on with her life. That’s when she met her second husband, Samuel Christman Hazzard. He had a reputation as a drunk, a lecher, a swindler and a thief who had been thrown out of West Point for stealing. On top of all that, he had been married twice before, and didn’t even bother to divorce the last one before marrying Linda. That resulted in a two year sentence for bigamy.
After his release in 1906, the family uprooted and moved to Seattle where Linda opened a sanatorium in Olalla called Wilderness Heights. It was about forty miles from the city, and it wasn’t long before the new establishment claimed its first victim. Daisey Maud Haglund was thirty-eight, and left behind a boy of three, Ivar. Ivar Haglund grew up to make millions with a chain of seafood restaurants, despite the irony of his mother dying of starvation. In 1908 Ida Wilcox succumbed, followed by Blanche B. Tindall and Viola Heaton in 1909. Mrs. Maude Whitney died in 1910. When civil engineer Earl Edward Erdman took the cure in 1911 and died of starvation three weeks later. Yet the patients kept coming, despite newspaper coverage of the death toll. The cures were dressed up as more than just dietary, as this picture from Linda Hazzard’s book Fasting for the cure of disease shows a claim to both physical and moral transformation.
And it was a considerable total: 1908 Lenora (Mrs. Elgin) Wilcox, Daisey Maud Haglund. The official cause of her death was stomach cancer. Her inability to eat would have caused her to starve to death even without Hazzard’s assistance. Ida Wilcox 1909, Blanche B. Tindall, Viola Heaton, Eugene Stanley Wakelin died from a bullet in the head on Hazzard’s property. There was speculation that this was murder but was unproven. 1910 Maude Whitney, Earl Edward Erdman, L. E. Rader, 1911 Frank Southard, C.A. Harrison, Ivan Flux, Claire Williamson, 1912 Mary Bailey, Ida Anderson, Robert Gramm, Fred Ebson – Supervised by another fast enthusiast.
And the crimes were not driven only by dogma. You may remember that Hazzard was accused over missing valuables from Mrs. Wilcox, but nothing was proven. She was also under suspicion over property owned by C.A. Harrison. During his fast, Hazzard gained control of some of his cash and property, and his family was told he died with no more than seventy dollars left. This was a man of means. A publisher and was looking to buy a ranch before he encountered Linda Hazzard.
Claire and Dorothea Williamson were wealthy young women from England with a deep interest in alternative medicine. They were of independent means, and didn’t tell their family that they were admitting themselves into the sanatorium, as they had already met disapproval for their hypochondria.
Despite other people having already been treated at Olalla, Hazzard told the sisters that the building wasn’t ready, and admitted them to the Buena Vista apartments in Seattle. They were placed on a harsh regime under the care of a nurse, and Mrs. Hazzard offered to care for their diamond rings and property deeds in her safe. By April the women were emaciated and delirious, but were transferred by ambulance to Olalla. Claire also signed a codicil to her will stating that she would leave twenty-five pounds a month to the Hazzard Institute, and that in the event of her death she was to be cremated.
On the 30th of April, Margaret Conway, the Williamson’s former nanny in Australia received a strange message that caused her to sail to Seattle. She arrived on June 1st and Conway was met by Samuel Hazzard. He told her was told that Claire was dead and Dorothea was insane. They went to E. R. Butterworth & Sons mortuary, where she was shown an unrecognisable embalmed corpse of a woman. Dorothea was living in a rough shack, totally emaciated. A horrified Conway fed her. Dorothea initially begged to be removed, but changed her mind overnight. She was also approached by other starving patients who claimed they were prisoners, and begged for help. Hazzard was wearing clothing Conway recognized as belonging to Claire Williamson.
When Conway discovered that Dorothea had signed over power of attorney to the Hazzards, and they refused to allow Dorothea to leave. They had also been taking money form Dorothea’s account. The Hazzards gained a legal guardianship on Dorothea to stop Conway removing her from Olalla, and announced that Dorothea was going to be spending the rest of her life with them. Conway was having none of it, and reached out to the women’s uncle for help. When he arrived, Dorothea weighed only sixty pounds, and the Hazzards insisted that she could not leave until their $2,000 bill was paid. He negotiated a less than half that amount and took Dorothea to a real hospital.
As the women were British citizens, the British vice consul put pressure on politicians at a higher level to ensure local authorities acted. Even then, the prosecutors tried to evade action by pleading poverty, but Dorothea insisted that she would cover the costs of the prosecution. Their bluff called, Linda Hazzard was arrested in August. She claimed persecution by other doctors, but The Tacoma Daily News headline read: “Officials Expect to Expose Starvation Atrocities: Dr. Hazzard Depicted as Fiend.” Hazzard insisted that a cabal of doctors were trying to undermine her successful therapies. She said, “I intend to get on the stand and show up that bunch. They’ve been playing checkers but it’s my move. I’ll show them a thing or two when I get on the stand.”
She never took the stand, as her lawyer considered it detrimental to her case. She was admonished for signalling to witnesses during the trial, and evidence was produced of her criminality, including forged diaries allegedly from Claire Williamson, in which the diamond rings were supposedly passed on to Linda Hazzard. The forgery was crude and not credible, and numerous patients were found to have handed over money and property to the Hazzards. There were even rumours that Claire Williamson’s body had been switched with a healthier-looking one to try to hide the levels of abuse the victim received. Collusion with the authorities was inferred when it was found that an important state legislature, Lewis E. Radar, was one of her patients. He also handed over money and property and was moved to prevent him from being questioned in the case. He died in 1911.
Ex-patients and staff defended her. Even the husband of her first victim, John Ivar Haglund, stated that he was still a devotee and brought his son to her for treatment three times a week. Despite the cult-like devotion of some of her followers, people were appalled, and Linda Hazzard was found guilty of manslaughter. Newspapers speculated that she had got off lightly due to her sex, and that she’d have been hanged for murder if she’d been a man. She was sentenced to the penitentiary in Walla Walla, and released after two years. The governor pardoned her, but her medical licence was never reinstated, and she went to New Zealand to start a new practice.
She resumed starving people to death, and made enough money to return to the USA in 1921. She expanded and rebuilt her sanatorium, which the locals dubbed ‘Starvation Heights’. A lack of a medical licence meant she had to market it as a ‘school for health’. It burned down in 1935, and Linda Hazzard succumbed to one of her own starvation diets in 1938 at the age of seventy.
At least twelve people died at her hands, but there’s a good chance that a number of people were removed to other locations and their deaths put down to other conditions. Moving patients to confound investigation was part of her modus operandi.
It’s clear that there was a financial motive to her crimes, but her own devotion to the diet shows that she clearly had a deep root in the movement. But there’s little doubt that she played on a belief system prevalent at the time. Her followers were variously adherents to alternative health movements gaining popularity, Theosophists, and other free-thinkers. The nineteenth century was a petri dish of alternative societies trying to find new, and idealistic, ways to live. Hazzard was also said to dabble in spiritualism and the occult, and Margaret Conway was amongst a number of people who stated that Hazzard seemed to have a hypnotic power over her victims.
Fasting has been around since ancient times, and as it’s been reinvented in multiple forms as low calorie diets, juice fasts, cleanses, and even breatharians (who claim to live on air and light alone). It’s not a concept that’s going anywhere soon. However, Hazzard clearly played on people’s fears, suggestibility, and understood the psychology of belief perseverance before it became a study in modern times. People tend to hang on to beliefs even when new information contradicts them. Delusions can be such a powerful hurt to a person’s ego that to abandon them causes a psychological injury – and people have been seen to hang on to notions that kill them all over the world for a very long time.
Whatever the reason, Linda Hazzard did more than just believe. She stole from her victims. Such crimes were a new phenomenon at the turn of the twentieth century, and it was hard for a male establishment to believe that a mere woman could hold such sway over wealthy and educated men. Nowadays, she’d have been seen as the criminal cultist she was and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
