In 1914, Linda Burfield Perry Hazzard’s unconventional healing methods landed her in prison in Washington State for manslaughter. Despite minimal medical training, she styled herself as a physician and for more than thirty years promoted healing through fasting, killing as many as fifteen people. Most of her victims died in Washington, but this Minnesota native developed her craft, and took her first victim, in Minneapolis.

Linda Laura Burfield was the first of seven children born to Montgomery Burfield and the former Susan O’Neil, in Carver County, Minnesota, in 1867. At age 18 she married Erwin Perry, owner of a livery business in Fergus Falls. They moved to Minneapolis in 1897 and separated soon thereafter.

Burfield Perry wrote that in her youth her father employed a physician to give

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