In 1911 two wealthy British heiresses, Claire and Dora Williamson, came to a sanitorium in the forests of the Pacific Northwest to undergo the revolutionary “fasting treatment” of Dr. Linda Burfield Hazzard. It was supposed to be a holiday for the two sisters. But within a month of arriving at what the locals called Starvation Heights, the women were emaciated shadows of their former selves, waiting for death. They were not the first victims of Linda Hazzard, a quack doctor of extraordinary evil and greed who would stop at nothing short of murder to achieve her ambitions. As their jewelry disappeared and forged bank drafts began transferring their wealth to Hazzard’s accounts, Dora Williamson sent a last desperate plea to a friend in Australia, begging her to save them from the brutal treatments and lonely isolation of Starvation Heights.
In this true story—a haunting saga of medical murder set in an era of steamships and gaslights—Gregg Olsen reveals one of the most unusual and disturbing criminal cases in American history.
This is a terrific book, not only about the scandal mentioned above, but also about the nature of small towns, authority and the need to feel healthy at all costs. If you’re looking for the lurid, gory details of true crime, look elsewhere – this book provides little of that; what details there are come across as more clinical than titillating. They provide a grim enough medical backdrop to the truly awful facts of the book.
The real horror of this work, and the thing that scared me personally the most, was the reaction of the town and the local authorities to the nature of this treatment. Lots of shrugging; the assumption that the rich people who patronized the resort must be paying good money to get themselves starved; an unwillingness to prosecute by a money-starved (yes, that was intentional) county; a business community that was willing to overlook starving people stealing from their stores. Someone should have said something, demanded something, shouted something to someone in power long before Hazzard was arrested, but everyone in town was too busy minding their own business. It’s appalling and somehow very modern and it makes the work much creepier than just a retelling of the defendant’s actions alone. One person was charged with the crimes inflicted on the customers of the resort; a whole community committed the silence that allowed the crimes to happen.
The story is undoubtedly a chilling and shocking one, but it does pose some punching modern rhetorical questions. In a world where people put vanity and body image above all else and body shaming has become a normalized practice in media and magazines, Starvation Heights, will most certainly make you ask yourself – when all is said and done, it’s vanity worth the cost?
A genuine story where truth is most definitely stranger than fiction. Gregg Olsen’s book, Starvation Heights: A True Story of Murder and Malice in the Woods of the Pacific Northwest, can be purchased at most online book retailers. Or find more details over at Goodreads.
Advertisements Share this:
