An illustration from the 1840s that show the effects of chloroform. Kids, don't try this at home.

Love, lust, adultery, chloroform, gunplay, a hatchet and insurance money were a lethal combination (of course!) for a dentist in Detroit, Michigan, in 1895. An excerpt from a story in that year’s February 3 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Dr. Horace E. Pope, a dentist, with an office on Michigan avenue, where he resided, was killed this morning by William Brusseau, Mrs. Pope’s nurse. Brusseau says he found the dentist sitting on the side of his wife’s bed, holding a cloth saturated with chloroform over her mouth. The nurse says that when he entered the room Dr. Pope fired at him. Brusseau says he seized a hatchet and struck the dentist in the head. It is said that the deceased and his wife frequently quarreled over the attention paid the latter by the nurse.

In unearthing the circumstances surrounding the murder, it is learned that Mrs. Pope had urged her husband to place heavier insurance on his life. He had accordingly been insured for $9,000 and but a few days ago transferred the payment of his policies from his estate to his wife.”