Louise Betzer Sinking
She Took Poison Near a Cemetery in Middle Village

(Special to the Eagle) Long Island City, L.I., September 26, 1898– Louise Betzer, the 18 year old victim of fortune tellers, was still alive in St. John’s Hospital at noon time to-day, but was gradually sinking. The physicians say that considering the amount of carbolic acid the girl must have taken it is remarkable that she has lived so long. The unfortunate girl was seen to fall near the entrance of Lutheran Cemetery, Middle Village by a policeman on Saturday. He quickly found that she had taken poison.
The girl had been living with Mrs. Charles Banks, at 100 West Sixty-seventh street, Manhattan, and from what can be learned of the case had spent considerable time consulting fortune tellers about a young man whom she was going to meet. The girl frequently talked about her unknown lover and described him as a handsome young man. The fortune tellers kept assuring her that she was to meet the young man soon, but finally she lost hope and talked of ending her life. She left Mrs. Banks’ Saturday morning and that was the last seen of her. Why she selected the entrance to Lutheran Cemetery as a place to end her life is not known.

Suicide on Husband’s Grave
Mrs. Waldner is Found Dead, a Poison Bottle Nearby

The body of Mrs. Matilda Waldner, fifty-four years old, of 142 Meserole Street, Brooklyn, was found yesterday afternoon by Augustus Boeltes of 78 Moffett Street, Brooklyn, lying on the grave of her husband, Frederick W. Waldner, in the Lutheran Cemetery, Newtown, Queens Borough.
It is supposed that Mrs. Waldner went to her husband’s grave on Saturday afternoon to commit suicide, for a bottle that had contained carbolic acid was fund nearby. Mr. Waldner died recently.
Published April 4, 1904

Police Lose Sleep Over an Egg Case

Two Men Arrested After $45 Worth Had Been Stolen

Got Fresh, Not Bad Ones
Fight on a Wagon Loaded with Eggs –
And They Were Not All Fresh

October 21, 1906

The police of the Alexander Avenue Police Station had an egg case to deal with last night, with unpleasant results. Two men were arrested – Albert B.C. Young of Maspeth, L.I., and Samuel Setzen of 193 East Fourth Street. Setzen is charged with the theft of the eggs, and Young with receiving them knowing them to have been stolen. The amount of the theft was given to the police as $45.

Setzen is accused of giving to Young fresh eggs when he should have given him bad ones. That seemed queer to the police until they were told that Young has been coming weekly from Maspeth to the egg store of Fileschel & Son, 1,165 East 134th Street, to get a load of bad eggs. They are used in some tanning process by his father in Maspeth.

Recently Fileschel & Son noticed that some of their fresh eggs were disappearing without any return in money, and they notified the Alexander Avenue Police Station.

Detectives Heany and Ray, who were assigned to the case, confirmed their suspicions that Young was driving off with some fresh as well as some bad ones about 9 o’clock last evening. They jumped onto the wagon, there was then a fight that was more than exciting. Eggs were smashed and scattered over the street and they were not the fresh ones only.

When the detectives appeared at the police station Sergt. Jones refused at first to register the prisoners. He said he would throw up his job first. Finally he was induced to do his duty.

There was more trouble about the confiscated wagon with its broken eggs, good and bad. It was pushed into the stable next door to the police station, but the police dormitory is over that and the smell woke up the sleeping policemen. They insisted that the wagon be moved away. It was.

Queens Crash and Fire Kill Woman and Child

(Maspeth, NY February 7, 1986) A car careened out of control after a crash in Queens yesterday, speeding in reverse onto a sidewalk, where it struck a woman and her 4-year-old daughter, killing them in a fiery explosion, the authorities said.
The victims were identified as Patricia Orzo, 25, of 68-05 60th Road in Maspeth, and her daughter, Priscilla.
The police said the driver of the car, Armando Schettini, 30, of 35-55 170th Street in Flushing, was charged with criminally negligent homicide and leaving the scene of an accident.
According to the police, the car, a Chevrolet sedan, struck a car in front of it, causing a three-car pileup at Caldwell Avenue and 69th Street in Maspeth. The Chevrolet then sped northbound in reverse to 58-19 69th Street, where it jumped onto the sidewalk.
The car knocked down a tree on the sidewalk and struck the woman and the child, according to John Mulligan, an assistant fire commissioner. The car's gas tank was ruptured in the crash, and the vehicle burst into flames, which enveloped the woman and the girl and spread through the two-story frame house at that address. The house's occupants escaped unharmed.

Queens Man Stabbed at Funeral

(Middle Village, September 9, 1979) A man was stabbed while attending the funeral rites of his grandmother in Queens yesterday. Dennis Rizzato of 53-42 67 Street, Maspeth, Queens, was reported in serious condition at St. John’s Hospital after being stabbed as he sat in Our Lady of Hope Roman Catholic Church at 71st Street and Eliot Avenue in Queens. Ralph Scotte, 35 years old, of 69-88 Eliot Avenue in Maspeth, Queens, was charged with attempted homicide. The police said no motive was known.

Feud Between Two Foot Doctors Led to Arson, Authorities Say

by MICHAEL COOPER Published: August 21, 1998

For 15 years they worked side by side in their Queens practice, cutting corns, treating bunions and ministering to stubborn cases of athlete’s foot. But in the past year, Dr. Irwin Sater, 65, decided to put his three and a half decades in podiatry behind him, so he sold the practice to his junior partner and moved to Florida.
That is when the feud began. As the junior partner, Dr. Steven Mehl, 44, took over the practice, law enforcement officials said, he discovered what he believed were financial irregularities, so he made a series of angry phone calls to Florida threatening to stop payments on the practice.
The fight became so intense that on July 31, the authorities said, Dr. Sater flew to New York from Florida and set fire to Dr. Mehl’s office, at 65-08 Grand Avenue in Maspeth, Queens. Yesterday morning, Dr. Sater surrendered to fire marshals in Queens. He was being held last night while awaiting arraignment on charges of arson in the fourth degree and burglary, said Maureen Moore, a spokeswoman for the Queens District Attorney’s office.
A law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the feud had begun after Dr. Sater retired and sold the business to Dr. Mehl. Looking through the financial records, Dr. Mehl apparently became convinced that he had not been treated fairly in the past, the official said, and he angrily decided to stop payments on the business.
After several testy exchanges, Dr. Sater came to New York on July 31, the official said, and went to his former office in Maspeth. Finding the locks changed, he called a locksmith and — after producing old identification cards — he was let into the building, the official said. The fire began at 5:29 P.M. in the basement of the three-story brick building on Grand Avenue, officials said, but it was contained before it could do any significant damage. The building is mostly residential: Dr. Mehl’s office is on the first floor, three people live on the second floor and six on the third floor.
‘’He set the blaze in the basement, where the financial records used to be kept, but they had been moved,’’ one law enforcement official said.
Dr. Sater’s arrest came after an intensive investigation by the fire marshals, who deemed the July 31 fire suspicious from the start.
‘’We’re very pleased that the fire marshals were able to close this case with an arrest,’’ Chief Fire Marshal Louis Garcia said, ‘’because although this fire was set to destroy records, it had the potential to burn out of control and endanger the people living upstairs.’’
Dr. Mehl, who has practices in Maspeth and Glendale, declined to discuss the case yesterday.
Dr. Sater’s lawyer, Samuel Gregory, denied the charges. ‘’Dr. Sater is a wonderful man,’’ Mr. Gregory said. ‘’He’s probably done more good than 99 percent of the population. As soon as he was notified that he was a suspect in some wrongdoing he contacted me and came up from Florida.’’

At 80 He Captured his Man

Maspeth Veterinarian Took Him a Mile to Police at Revolver’s Point

Published December 28, 1910

Aroused by the barking of his dog early yesterday morning, Dr. Jeronius Rapelye, a veterinary surgeon, 80 years old, of Juniper Avenue, Maspeth, Queens, captured a man he says he found in his barn. Threatening the intruder with a revolver, the aged surgeon marched him to the Elmhurst Police Station, a mile away, where he turned him over to the police.
It was 4am when Dr. Rapelye was awakened by his dog barking. Looking out of his window, he says he saw a man rumbling with the lock of his stable door. In the stable were several valuable horses, some belonging to the surgeon and others he has under treatment. Hastily dressing, the veterinarian took a loaded revolver and went to the stable. He found that the lock had been broken. Opening the door he stepped inside and confronted a strange man. “Throw up your hands,” cried Dr. Rapelye, leveling his revolver at the intruder’s head. “Now walk ahead of me, and don’t drop your hands, or I’ll shoot you.” continued the surgeon.
Keeping a few feet behind the prisoner, Dr. Rapelye directed him to the Elmhurst Police Station and arraigned him before the Lieutenant’s desk. The man said he was Andrew Febster of 63 East Seventy-first Street, Manhattan. He told the police he had a brother living in Maspeth and was trying to find his house.
Later in the morning Febster was arraigned in the Flushing Policy Court where Magistrate Maurice Connolly held him for examination.

Bottle Exploding Tore Out an Eye

Mrs. Dexter of Newtown Was Carrying Home-Made Catsup up Stairs

Published June 13, 1895

Newtown, L.I., June 12 – Pieces of glass from an exploded bottle of homemade catsup tore out the left eye of Mrs. Alexander Baxter inflicted dangerous wounds on the right eye, and severely cut her about the face, head and hands.
The explosion was so forceful that Mrs. Baxter was knocked down. The doctors have hopes of saving the sight of the right eye.

Newtown Cemetery to Go

Ancestors of Noted Men May Be Re-interred in Pauper Ground

Published March 11, 1915
An original God’s Acre, which was laid out in 1652, the year of the founding of the settlement of the Village of Newtown, and in which are buried the ancestors of many of the leading families in New York today, is to be wiped out by the extension of Toledo Street, from Court Street through to Queens Boulevard, in the borough of Queens, and unless some of the wealthy descendants of the pioneers of Newtown come to the rescue, the bodies will all be reburied in the pauper burying ground on Hart’s Island. This situating was made known yesterday by President Maurice E. Connolly of Queens, who set about trying to find some suitable place to reinter the ashes of the old pioneers. It was finally learned that the only available place at the disposal of the city was the poor ground on Hart’s Island. The old cemetery lies in the bed of the route mapped out for the continuation of Toledo Street, which will open the residential section of Elmhurst, formerly the old Village of Newtown, to access to the Queens Boulevard. Engineers who have inspected the old cemetery estimate that the bodies of at least 150 former prominent residents of old Newtown are buried in this cemetery. Burials were discontinued more than sixty years ago, and the cemetery fell into disuse. Among the graves are those of Jonathan and Elizabeth Fish, the great grandparents of Stuyvesant and Hamilton Fish of New York. The Rev. John Moore, the first minister in Newtown, who died in 1657, is buried in the plot, and Dr. William Moore, a celebrated physician of his period, was buried there in 1824. Capt. John Ebbetts who commanded a big trading ship for the original John Jacob Astor that brought furs form the Pacific coast, with his wife and family sleeps in the cemetery unmindful of the march of progress that threatens to mar his last resting place. Many members of the Field family, at one time among the wealthy land owners on Long Island, are buried there.

Mrs. Baxter was carrying the bottle upstairs when it exploded. The catsup, it is thought, had not properly fermented before it was put in the bottles.

Deserted Him – “Dear Darling Jacob”

Published July 13, 1893

Jacob Fischer of 284 Graham Avenue, Williamsburg, returned home from his work in Maspeth and found his home deserted by his wife. She had left a letter, which read:
My Dear Darling Jacob: I don’t love you any more. I have gone to Maspeth and you had better go to Chicago. …Wifey
Fischer believes his wife eloped with a friend named Charles Brandt, and yesterday he tried to secure a warrant for their arrest but at the Ewen Street Police Court he was told that he could not be accommodated.