Individual Details

Death

FRANKLINTON, La, May 24 (UP) The state charged today that plump, middle-aged Mrs. Cola Lemming spent nine weeks in New Orleans love nests with a neighbor's husband, then slipped poison into the neighbor’s coffee when the affair ended. Mrs. Lemming 43, a housewife with two married daughters, is on trial for the murder of Mrs. Mamie Topwell Furr, also 43. District Attorney James P, Burns charged that Mrs. Lemming enjoyed nine weeks of “illicit, illegal and sordid” love with Mrs. Furr's husband as a prelude to murder Jan. 25. Her attorney, Barbee Ponder, suggested that the district attorney was partly right, but made the situation sound worse than it was. He said “this was a mutual exchange of spouses.” “The families had talked it over and agreed to get divorces and for each to marry the other,” Ponder said. But Burns charged that it was nothing more than “illicit love" between Mrs. Lemming and Will Furr, the lanky husband of the dead woman. He said they became enamored of each other “the latter part of last summer. Last September, Burns said, Mrs. Lemming and Furr slipped off to New Orleans and lived (together for nine weeks, first in a rooming house and later in an apartment. “She (Mrs. Lemming) told the apartment house operator that she was Mrs. Mamie Topwell Furr—the name of the woman she is charged with murdering,” Burns said. But, Burns said, Furr went back to Bogalusa, where the Furr and Lemming families live as next-door neighbors, in advance of Mrs. Lemming. Furr and his wife decided to make up, the attorney said, and he bought her a washing machine for Christmas as a peace offering. “The state will show,” Burns said, “that (Mrs. Lemming) told at least one party she was going to get Willie Furr, no matter what the cost.” Then Burns told the all-male jury how Mrs. Furr, allegedly was poisoned. “Mamie Furr had gone to work at the box factory,” Burns said. “She returned home at 1 o'clock that afternoon and the state will show she was in a happy and carefree state of mind. “Cola called her over and said to come and have some coffee. She went to the home of ‘Dinah'—that was Cola Lemings nickname.” Having drunk the coffee, Burns said, Mrs. Furr became violently ill, and started crying, "Dinah, what have you done to me?" She died a few minutes later in a hospital. A chemist discovered she had been poisoned with sodium fluoride, he said. Ponder said Mrs. Furr became despondent after an operation in 1947 and threatened several times to take poison. Once, he said, she took a “large worm pill," and left several “goodbye notes" about her home.
The Springfield News-Leader, Springfield, Missouri, May 25, 1949