Family Genealogy Hunt Connects with Murder-Suicide

The records of the Abernethy and Whisnant clans show hard-working, respectable, religious people. So how did one of these families become connected with a lurid murder-suicide that made the front page of the Washington Post and other newspapers across America, even though it occurred in Savannah, Georgia.

The story and its characters became one of those family skeletons that no one passed down to descendants. That its outlines can be told now shows the power of the Internet and, especially, search engines such as Google in unraveling mysteries.

This much is known.

Eugene Whisnant, older brother of Edna Whisnant Abernethy, graduated from VPI early in the 1900s and found a job as an engineer in Savannah, Georgia. There he met and courted a young woman named Katherine Kittles. During the summer of 1906, he contracted typhoid fever and returned to Charlotte, to his parents' house in the prosperous Fourth Ward. In late July or early August he was deteriorating fast, so he asked the young woman to come to Charlotte. According to newspaper accounts (in 1913), on his deathbed he asked her to marry him so that he could die knowing that she was his wife. He died five days later.

That's a very sad, romantic story with no salacious details or wrong-doing on the part of family members, so why wasn't it told? Read on.

Seven years later (in the summer of 1913) Katherine Kittles Whisnant carefully purchased cartridges for her revolver that she kept in her purse, traveled to her doctor's office with a female companion, asked the doctor to write prescriptions for her, and then shot at him six times while chasing him around the medical offices. She made sure that he was dead, laid her body across his, and shot herself in the head.

The Whisnant family evidently was so embarrassed by the coverage that the story became unmentionable. How was it found? Many years ago Eugene's younger sister, Helen, told me that the family never got over Eugene's death (that was easy to believe) and that he had a girlfriend whom she seemed to remember was Spanish but she didn't know what happened to her. She indicated the family didn't think much of her. Since Helen was old enough to remember both the deathbed marriage and the later tragedy, let's call this an obfuscation.

The story would have ended there except that in July I found Eugene's father's family Bible and flipped to see if any records were in it. Surprise: there was the marriage date of Eugene and Katherine Kittles! After it was a brief notation that Eugene died the same month. It took a Google search of her name linked with his to unearth the deathbed marriage and the 1913 events

Don't you wonder what other stories are out there?