Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Many writers incorporate elements of their personal lives in their fiction, but few go quite so far as Christine Sturm, nurse turned would-be Agatha Christie. Here is a UPI story from 1953:

Clovis, N.M., Jan. 29--Police disclosed today that the manuscript of a murder story led them to a shallow grave where a baby's body had been buried. They arrested the author and charged her with second-degree murder.

The infant had died six years ago shortly after its birth to Mrs. Christine Sturm, 27, an amateur mystery story writer, authorities said.

Mrs. Sturm was arrested and charged with the child's murder after Sheriff Val Baumgart had read a nine-page manuscript she had prepared for an "unsolved mystery" fiction writing contest. After reading the story the sheriff sent detectives to dig in a garage.

The investigators found the infant's skeleton wrapped in brown paper and buried eight inches beneath the surface of the dirt floor of the garage.

On instructions from the district attorney's office, Baumgart refused to make public any of the passages from the manuscript except for its closing sentence: "You can't lead a double life and be happy."

A two-count bill of information alleged that Mrs. Sturm killed the child sometime in February, 1947, by "exposure" with intent to take its life.

"It was an unsolved crime the way she wrote it and would have remained really an unsolved crime if it hadn't been written," Baumgart said. "It was a pretty good story for an amateur writer. It might have won the contest if we hadn't gotten our hands on it first."

The sheriff said the manuscript failed to say what caused the baby's death, but that the "story" described "all the details of how it was buried."

No attempt had been made to disguise the characters involved with fictional names, the sheriff said.

Baumgart said the manuscript was turned over to him by Mrs. Sturm's former husband, Dan Sturm, a carpenter. He said the couple were divorced three weeks ago after having been married since Dec. 24, 1946.

Baumgart said Sturm told him he did not know of the child's birth and was unaware his wife was seven months pregnant at the time of their marriage. Sturm said the child was not his.

The couple has one child of their own, a three-year-old son, who was placed in Mrs. Sturm's custody at the time of the divorce.

Baumgart said Sturm apparently "just happened" to find the manuscript. It never was submitted in the contest, he said.

Christine Sturm was charged with second-degree murder, but at the hearing, the Judge dismissed the case on the grounds that—by only a few months--the statute of limitations had expired. She left the courtroom a free woman, and vanished into obscurity.

The only positive thing that can be said about this story is that her baby finally got a decent burial.