Stella, Do you have this one? It's a touching article. Jan

Daily Press (Sheboygan, Wisconsin) > 1910 > May > 21
KEPT TRUTH FROM PARENTS
Mrs. Cornelia (sic) Botkin died in the California penitentiary the other day. And the day after she died they took her body up to the village in the green hills of California and buried it. There was a funeral at the little old house where her parents lived and her mother and father sat together at the head of her coffin and the neighbors came and brought flowers and the preacher from the little county church preached a simple, kindly sermon and the village choir sang "In the Sweet Bye and Bye" and "Come Ye Disconsolate" quite as if the woman whose body lay in the coffin had been a good woman all her life and had never been tried and sent to the penitentiary for murder. For Mrs. Botkin's father and mother did not know that she had died in prison. They did not know that she had ever seen the inside of a prison anywhere and they never heard of the Botkin case, which was one of the most famous criminal cases ever tried on the Pacific Coast. There is a little paper in the village where Mrs. Botkin's old father and mother lived and the paper printed every day accounts of the trial when it was going on. But they called it the Dunning case and spoke always of Mrs. Botkin as the accused and the old man and the old woman read the paper and talked the famous murder case over together and never even dreamed that "the accused" was their own daughter. And all the little village took hold of hands and formed around the old people a cordon of silence, and woe to anyone who dared to try to break through. We are prone to think of heaven as a place far removed from everything we know here on this earth. But, oh that little village out there, nestling in the green, green hills of smiling California! I wonder if the angels do not look down upon it and smile.