AWFUL, MORBID, GRUESOME

No, not the National Press Club. These are terms used in the newspapers of early Oklahoma City to describe a serious of awful finds in the city dump. "Mountains of mangled flesh" or bodies most "dreadfully abused and mutilated." People pondered often in the midnight dreary what monster walked among them. Not even twenty years past the dreadful "Jack the Ripper" crimes of London Town - there was much for the imagination to contemplate. One story told of the finding of a small infant whose tiny body had been horribly "mutilated" by skilled hands and then the tiny body tossed on the "ash heap." One headline questioned what awful ghouls were prowling the gas lit streets of the new capital? The slasher in this morbid tale was none other than the local medical school, Epworth College. Or, to be more precise, the janitor of the facility. It seems that he had simply taken the discard body parts, bloody cloth, tumor removals and even corpses used in practice dissections, to the local city dump.