The Amazing Victorian Machine of Death

On a Sunday morning on 11 June 1876, a police officer had just popped into a hotel in Lafayette, Indiana, United States, called the Lahr House, for refreshment, when a chambermaid, pale and breathless, suddenly interrupted his repose. The young lady had been attending to her duties, cleaning and servicing the hotel’s guest rooms, when she made a gruesome discovery in room 41. The officer, along with a number of members of staff, quickly made their way to the room and were greeted with an unforgettable sight. The headless body of a man was strapped to the floor, encircled by a copious amount of blood, and the severed head lay in a box partly filled with cotton wool.

The initial assumption that the chambermaid had stumbled upon a murder scene was quickly ruled out, as the room also contained a remarkable contraption bearing the words “Karikari. Patent applied for.” So what was this strange mechanical device, and what did it do? As you may have guessed, it had everything to do with the parting of the man’s head from body. The mechanism consisted of a broad axe that had been sharpened to a razor edge, attached to two heavy iron bars to give added weight. The handle of the axe was attached to a beam in such a manner as enabled it to rotate, and the beam had been fastened to the floor. The axe had initially been held aloft by a cotton chord, attached to a hook that had been screwed into the wall. Below the chord was a small shelf on which a candle had been placed. When lit, the candle acted as a rudimentary timing device, burning firstly above the chord, but as it shortened it eventually reached the level of the chord, burning through it and releasing the axe to do its grizzly job.

 A little bit of light detective work soon revealed that the device’s inventor and victim were one and the same. So who was the man and why did he go to such extraordinary lengths to top himself? His name was James A. Moon, and he was 35 years of age when he took his own life. A journalist writing for the New York Times on 15 June 1876 commented as follows “Mr. Moon was well known in this city. He owned a fine farm near the Farmers’ Institute, and leaves a wife and four children. He served with Capt. Haggard in the Sixteenth Indiana Battery during the war, and was a gallant soldier. Upon his farm he had a blacksmith, wagon, and a carpenter shop and was considered a mechanical genius.” He had inherited a keen interest in all things mechanical from his father, but unfortunately he also inherited a propensity for suicide from his mother, who had killed herself some years earlier. He had attempted suicide twice before, firstly by trying to smother himself in a haystack, but he was discovered before the deed was done, and latterly by ingesting morphine, although in an insufficient quantity to kill him. Rather than relying on the notion of third time lucky, it seems Mr. Moon decided to leave nothing to chance on the occasion he checked into the Lahr House Hotel.

On the preceding Friday he had been to the local barber’s shop to have his beard shaved off, and from there he visited a hardware store where he purchased the iron bars and from where he had purchased the axe some days previously. He also bought three ounces of chloroform. He then left home with a trunk containing everything he would need to construct his “Karikari”. After assembling his killing machine, Moon strapped his legs to the floor and drew another strap across his chest, buckling it tight. The cotton wool in the box had been soaked with the chloroform, in order that once he placed his head inside, he would soon lose consciousness. He had precisely judged the trajectory of the axe blade, and the purpose of the straps was therefore to ensure he didn’t move involuntarily in his unconscious state. An article in the Evansville Courier and Press, a local newspaper, observed “The calculations were precise in every respect, and so completely was the head severed from the body that not a ligament was left to join it to the trunk. There can be no question but Moon wanted to demonstrate the utility of the machine, as well as to put an end to his own life, there is little doubt that he believed that someone would eventually patent ‘Karikari’, and that his own memory, as the man who demonstrated its perfection, would be perpetuated by the act.”

The New York Times went even further, commenting “The appliances which had been used to produce death were most wonderful and will stand in the history of suicides without a parallel.” Ironically, however, it turns out that it was the ingenious device’s precise purpose that would be its downfall. In response to a request for the likelihood of the patentability of the self-killing machine, the U.S. Patent Office stated: “Articles contrary to the public good are not patentable.” As suicide was illegal at the time, the patent that had apparently been applied for, stood no chance of being granted. James A. Moon, it transpired, would be the only person ever to make practical use of his ‘Karikari’.

Source:

The Victorian Book of the Dead. Woodyard C. Kestrel Publications