The son who isn't quite all here

Charles Henry Huls

Logan, Ohio

January 31, 1925

    Dear Folks:

    Just a few hospital notes from the son who isn't quite all here. I lost a tooth since I wrote to you last. An abscess had formed at the root of the gold crown in the lower jaw and I had an X-Ray taken and then the tooth was pulled. It certainly was arelief [sic] to get [rid, sic] that pain and get a nights rest.

    I didn't go to bed either Wednesday or Thursday nights and all I've had to eat since Thursday noon is tomato soup and milk toast. Went over to see Dr. Wingert again this morning and he gave me a dose of salts and some capsules and told me to go home and stay in bed today. Took the medicine at noon and was going to say that up until 5 there had been no action but it came just as I finished the sentence. Really I don't see where there will be much good done as I haven't exactly eater [sic] for over two days.

    Besides having the tooth raising cain I blistered the whole inside of my mouth with camphor and toothache drops and it just finished peeling this afternoon. And then I burned a blister on the outside of my chin with the electric light bulb. It's funny but the tooth hurst [sic] so much that I didn't feel it when I cooked the other parts. I hd [sic] to get a hot water bottle.

    Dr. Love, the dentist who pulled the tooth said it never should never have been crowned. He said the abscess had started over a year ago. Said it was getting dangerous and would have caused very serious trouble if it had been neglected any longer. The X-Ray showed the sac extending over to the roots of the adjoining teeth and when I saw the tooth I wondered how the sac ever came out the same hole.*

*typed on letterhead

Charley's last unmailed letter home ends here. 

It was found after his death.

(I thought there was another page but I cannot find it at this time.)

Charley's convulsions started about 8 p.m.

He was dead by 10:30 p.m.

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Still looking for clews

Thoughts of Great-Uncle Charley always crowd my head the last week of January. What would he have been like? What kind of man would he have been? Would he have been kind to his future great-niece?

Would I have even existed?!

His remaining letters shown his final week was fairly humdrum, other than a persistent cold and that darned toothache.

A CNN story in September rekindled my interest in the Tylenol Murders, which I wrote about in The ripple effect. I reached out to the husband of one of the surviving family members and he passed my request to talk on to his wife, Kasia Janus. She wrote back to me in November but I have heard nothing since then so maybe she changed her mind or decided it was too painful.

However, I saw a CBS story today that reminded me so I wrote to Ms. Janus again. This new story brought up touch DNA and how a survivor had been swabbed so her DNA could be compared to DNA found on her bottle 40 years later.

I admit I got shivers. If only there was surviving evidence from Uncle Charley's or David Puskin's murders, or from the other five men that were poisoned but survived, that we could use 98 years later. I know that our families wouldn't get justice after all these years, but could we get closure?

I think so. My father, the oldest surviving Huls at this time,  might. I certainly would and I think my brother would, too. Maybe even my cousins.

But as an amateur genealogist, this new field of genetic genealogy fascinates me no end.

Criminals beware! The geeks are coming for you!

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