DIXON EVENING TELEGRAPH (Dixon Illinois) - Feb 10, 1938 pg5.

Marihuana - Girl Accused of Death of Bus Driver Blames Weed for Crime

New York, N.Y., Feb. 10 - (AP) The 20 year-old policeman's daughter accused of killing a bus driver in a $2.10 holdup told the jury trying her and a girl companion for murder today that marihuana cigarettes which made "wrong things seem right" started her on her brief career of crime.

The "smokes" Mrs. Ethel Strouse Sohl testified, "made me forget all about the pain in my head" which she said she had suffered since an automobile accident four years ago. She was introduced to the narcotic. She added by her young husband, now a reformatory inmate.

Occasionally, her co-defendant Genevieve Owens, 18, glanced at her.

The girls are charged with killing William Barhorst, 34, in his bus during a hold-up at Belleville December 21.

Her blonde, boyish-bobbed hair freshly finger-waved, Mrs. Sohl seemed scarcely more than a child as she sat quietly in the witness chair and answered questions of her counsel, Gerald McLaughlin, in a voice barely audible to spectators.

From the rear of the room, Barhorst's widow, in mourning, eyed her and wept.