Linda Burfield Hazzard: Healer or Murderess?
government report · 2012
LINK
SUMMARY
Washington State Archives (Digital Archives) collection drawing on superior-court files and penitentiary records for the Hazzard case. It records that from 1907 to 1913 at least 14 patients in Washington died from starvation under her direct care; that she had studied with the fasting advocate Dr. Edward Hooker Dewey in Minnesota and moved to Washington in 1907; that she was licensed to practice through a loophole that grandfathered in alternative practitioners, under which she titled herself 'Fasting Specialist'; that on February 7, 1912 she was sentenced to two to twenty years for manslaughter and surrendered to the Walla Walla penitentiary in December 1913; and that some patients had turned over land, inheritance, or power of attorney to her before their deaths. The institutional source for the death toll, the licensing loophole, the conviction, and the estate transfers.
NOTES
The Washington State Archives collection assembles the documentary record of the Hazzard case from state court and penitentiary files. It is the institutional source for the figures used in this case: at least fourteen patients dead of starvation under her care in Washington between 1907 and 1913, her arrival in the state in 1907 after study with the fasting advocate Edward Hooker Dewey, her licensure through a grandfather-clause loophole as a self-styled “Fasting Specialist,” her February 7, 1912 manslaughter sentence of two to twenty years and December 1913 surrender to the penitentiary at Walla Walla, and the pattern by which patients signed over land, inheritances, or powers of attorney before they died.