Helen Maria Hogle lived with Chester Jennison and his family, employed there as a live-in nurse. During the winter of 1908, while on her way home from a shopping trip to Providence, she would be scared to death on the streets of Warwick.

Helen was the daughter of shoemaker Ezekiel Luther Clark and his second wife, Ellen Kelley. Born on Oct. 14, 1860, in Massachusetts, she married merchant Samuel Hogle on Feb. 8, 1882. Samuel was 17 years older than Helen and had previously been married to her older sister Laura, who he’d exchanged vows with on July 18, 1880.

The marriage between Helen and Samuel was rocky and they eventually began living separately. Helen relocated to Providence, where she found work demonstrating soaps in shops along Westminster Street. She then accepted the position of private nurse for the Jennison family of Warwick, and moved into their home.

Helen didn’t have any family around her. She and Samuel had just one child, George, who was born in 1883. George became a machinist and lived with his wife Florence (Nudd) on Newbury Street in Lawrence, Massachusetts. On April 10, 1904, Florence found 21-year-old George dead in their home, having connected a rubber tube to the gas jet that supplied lighting to the home and inhaled the deadly combination of methane and hydrogen. Thirty-seven days after her husband’s suicide, 17-year-old Florence died of pneumonia.

On the afternoon of Jan. 19, 1908, Helen spent several hours in one of the stores on Westminster Street where she had previously worked. That night, returning home, she walked passed a group of men in the darkened area of Whipple’s Corner in Apponaug. Their behavior led her to believe she was at risk of being mugged and she began running desperately toward the Jennison house.

As she entered the house, out of breath, she announced: “I’ve been held up. I know I’m going to die.” She then fell to the floor and was soon lifeless. The medical examiner was called and the 48-year-old woman who suffered from heart disease was pronounced dead.

Days later, Helen’s body had still not been claimed. No one in Rhode Island knew her family members, they only knew bits and pieces of what she had told them. It was thought she had a sister somewhere in Massachusetts, and a brother in Lawrence or Boston who was a newspaper editor, but no one had been able to make contact with them. It was believed her estranged husband was still alive, but no one knew where he was, either.

Her older brother, Aaron, was indeed a newspaper editor in Massachusetts. She had an additional five older siblings, including four sisters. Samuel was in the restaurant business in Worcester.

Helen’s body was laid to rest four days after her death, in Elmwood Cemetery in Methuen, Massachusetts. The men who had fatally scared her at Whipple’s Corner were not identified.

Kelly Sullivan is a Rhode Island columnist, lecturer and author.