Belington Progressive

CELL SUICIDE ENDS
TRIAL OF SLAYER
Body of Dr. Young Discovered
Hanging by Wire.

HAD BEEN CALM IN COURT
Jury Was Preparing to Visit Cistern Where Wife's Body Was Sealed.
Three Confessions Alleged.

Los Angeles.-Dr. Thomas W. Young, 57-year-old dentist, passed and executed a sentence of death on himself, abruptly terminating a sensational murder trial in which he was accused of slaying his wife, Grace Grogan Young, with lethal gas and burying her in a cistern of a Beverly Glen summer cottage.

He garroted himself with a copper wire in his cell at the county jail.

The $1,500,000 estate of the late Patrick Grogan, "Olive King," which prosecutors say was the prize for which Young slew his wife last February, now goes to Patrick Grogan, Jr., step-son of the dentist.

"I am satisfied with the justice that he has meted himself," was the comment of the youth, who only in the past few days became convinced that his mother was slain by his step father.

Dr. Young strangled himself to death with radio antennae wire, a few hours before he was due to revisit the Beverly Glen scene of his wife's interment.

The prosecution had arranged for the murder trial jury to witness the re-enactment of the murder scene, with Dr. Young as the principal witness.

The suicide was discovered by jailers when they sought to arouse Dr. Young for breakfast.

The body was found under the cell cot covers, a copper wire buried in the neck by pressure of twisting by a little stick.

A few hours later the murder case was formally dismissed.

Throughout the proceedings, Dr. Young sat calmly listening without traces of emotion as the gruesome bits of evidence, articles which belonged to his former wife, the gas cone which was named as the death instrument and other mementoes of the crime, passed before the jury.

After Dr. Young's arrest on June 13, he made three purported confessions, which describe the murder about as follows:

The pair quarreled at a Los Angeles hotel February 21. He determined to kill her. He plied her with liquor at his dental office and when they left to motor to Beverly Glen, he took along a cone of dental gas.

En route to the Glen she fell into a drunken stupor. He affixed the cone to her mouth and nose and administered a fatal quantity of the vapor.

Arriving at the cabin, he placed Mrs. Young's body in a wheelbarrow and trundled it to a cistern beneath the dwelling. Later he sealed the body in the bottom of the cistern with concrete. The slain woman's unsuspecting son, Patrick Grogan, helped to mix the concrete, content with his step-father's explanation of what he was doing:

"The cistern leaks. I'll have to put a new bottom in it."

When the relatives demanded an investigation of Mrs. Young's disappearance the dentist produced letters purporting to have been written by her and indicating that she had gone to Paris to obtain a divorce. In his confession he explained she had written these at his request while she was under the influence of liquor.