The Mary E. Hovey Perjury Case

The Marietta Register (Semi-Weekly), Tuesday, June 17, 1884:

The Mary E. Hovey perjury case has occupied court three days and long ones at that. Saturday evening court ran till midnight, and then back to 11 o'clock and went over the last hour again. Nearly one hundred witnesses were examined including many experts. The cost to the county will be well nigh $1,000. As we go to press the jury are out on the case.

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The Marietta Register (Semi-Weekly), Tuesday, June 17, 1884:

The Hovey perjury case will cost nearly $1,000. The expense will fall upon the county unless the jury returns a verdict of guilty. For unadulterated nastiness and spite, this case is without parallel in late years at the court house.

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The Marietta Register (Semi-Weekly), Friday, June 20, 1884:

Guilty

The trail of Mary E. Hovey which occupied the court almost night and day for four days on a charge of perjury resulted in a verdict of guilty. The penalty is imprisonment for a term of three to ten years. A new trial was asked for and the motion will be heard July 2d. The grounds are considered slight and the chances are that Mrs. Hovey will be the second woman sent from Washington county for perjury. Mrs. Hovey's crime consisted in swearing out a warrant for a woman by the name of Kauf, charging her with stealing a watch which at the time was pledged to another party to secure a board bill.

The circumstances occurred some two years ago and were related at the time in the Register.

The case called a great many witnesses into court and in some aspects was scandalous. The defendant is a woman who has flaunted a disgraceful life in the face of decent people in Marietta for many years. A great many, several of them women, were dragged into court by her attorney and felt contaminated by the atmosphere surrounding the case, because they knew nothing bearing upon it and nothing good of the defendant. The verdict was one expected by all who heard much of the trial.

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The Marietta Register (Semi-Weekly), Friday, June 20, 1884:

At the close of the Hovey perjury trial Monday evening, when the jury brought in its verdict of "Guilty," Judge Sibley ordered the Sheriff to commit Mrs. Hovey until time of sentence. The defendant shed a few tears and her counsel offered $500 bond for her safe appearance. But all to no avail, the Judge was immovable. "That's the way we do at Zanesville," said her attorney. "Well," said the Judge, "That may be the way they do in Zanesville, but it's not the way we do in Marietta." She was committed."

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The Marietta Weekly Leader, Tuesday, June 24, 1884:

Monday evening about ten o'clock the jury in the Hovey case brought in a verdict of guilty Mr. Beard, the defendant's attorney, entered notice of a motion for a new trial and sentence was not passed. Mrs. Hovey was committed to jail notwithstanding Beard's earnest petition to have her placed in his custody. 

Since her confinement in the jail, Mrs. Hovey has evinced a good deal of stubbornness. She has eaten scarcely anything for several days and steadily refuses nourishment. Considering that she is probably doomed to a term of imprisonment in the penitentiary she is taking a poor way to prepare herself for it.

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The Marietta Register (Semi-Weekly), Tuesday, July 15, 1884:

Court Proceedings

July 9th.

The State of Ohio vs. Mary E. Hovey. Motion for new trial heard; leave to file additional motion; both overruled; defendant excepts; sentenced to Penitentiary 4 years.

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The Marietta Register (Semi-Weekly), Friday, July 18, 1884:

Mrs. Hovey expressed herself that she hoped she would never get out alive as she entered the female ward of the Penitentiary.

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The Marietta Register, March 19, 1886:

Mrs. Hovey Pardoned.

Gov. Foraker pardoned Mrs. Mary E. Hovey, Monday, on the petition of Senator John O'Neill and other leading citizens, and because the officers and physicians at the penitentiary officially reported her to be in such bad health as to have been a constant care and burden to the state for the last twelve months, and that her health is continually growing worse, with no reasonable hope of recovery. She was released and joined her son, Milton Hovey, outside the prison walls. Mrs. Hovey went up for perjury in July 1884.

The Ohio State Journal of Tuesday prints portions of a poem said to have been written by her during her imprisonment as follows:

God pity the wretched prisoners

In their lonely cells this day,

Whatever the sin that tripped them,

God pity them still, I say.

Only a gleam of sunshine

Cleft by the rusty bars,

Only a scratch of azure,

Only a cluster of stars.

Only a barren future

To starve their hopes upon,

Only stinging memories

Of a past that's better gone.

Only a scorn from woman,

Only hate from man,

Only remorse to whisper

Of a life that might have been.

Once they were little children.

Perhaps their unstained feet

Were led by a gentle mother

Toward the Golden street.

Therefore, it in life's forest

They since have lost their way,

For the sake of her who bore them

"God pity them still," I say.

And ye who judge so harshly,

Are you sure the stumbling-stone

Which tripped the feet of others

May not have bruised your own?

Then pray for the wretches prisoners

All over the land this day,

That a holy hand of pity

Will wipe their sins away.

Note: Mary E. Koontz, born about 1841, was married to Franklin Hovey in Meigs County, Ohio, in 1861. On the 1880 Census, she was listed as a seamstress, living on Greene Street in Marietta with her 16-year-old son, Henry M. Hovey. Mary E. Hovey was committed to the Washington County, Ohio, jail on October 8, 1883, on the charge of perjury. According to a complaint made by Miss Callie Kauf, Mary "wickedly and maliciously devising and intending to vex and aggrieve" Daniel Kauf and Caroline Kauf and to subject them to the "punishment, pains and penalties" of law, had gone to William Glines, Justice of the Peace, on March 14, 1881, and "falsely and maliciously" swore to him that on March 7, 1881, Daniel, Caroline, and Callie Kauf had stolen money from her in the amount of $84 and a gold watch valued at $200. A transcript of the trial is found in Washington County Common Pleas Final Record, Volume 59, pages 263-338. It appears that Mary E. Hovey lived until 1891 and is buried in Zanesville's Greenwood Cemetery.