Eva died after a &quo;Dr. Grant&quo; performed an abortion on her. Grant had an assistant help him to bury Eva‘s body in the basement of his rented house.

The assistant, plagued with guilt, told Ben Gordon, another of Grant‘s employees, about the incident. Gordon kept the secret until after a fight with Grant over money. He then went to the police.

As the sordid story came out, a nurse admitted to seeing Gordon &quo;saw off the young woman's legs with a common wood saw,&quo; then pack her body into a trunk.

Gordon and his assistant then took the trunk to the house. They tore up a section of the basement‘s wood floor, dug a grave, and saturated the ground with nitric acid. They then removed Eva‘s body from the trunk, wrapped it in a blanket, and dumped it in the hole.

After covering the body with dirt, they poured in more nitric acid, then covered the grave with a four-inch-thick cement floor.

&quo;Dr. Grant,&quo; it turned out, was actually a Dr. Robert Thompson, a graduate of Dartmouth and Baltimore Medical College.

Coverage in the Examiner painted a picture of a pudgy, heartless man who showed no emotion during his trial.

Eva's abortion was typical of pre-legalization abortions in that it was performed by a physician.

Note, please, that with issues such as doctors not using proper aseptic techniques, lack of access to blood transfusions and antibiotics, and overall poor health to begin with, there was likely little difference between the performance of a legal abortion and illegal practice, and the aftercare for either type of abortion was probably equally unlikely to do the woman much, if any, good. For more information about early 20th Century abortion mortality, see Abortion Deaths 1910-1919.

Source: Abortion Rites: A Social History of Abortion in American, by Marvin Olasky

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