For a little while after the arrival of this strange letter, things were quiet for Lillian in Ashtabula.

Then the cruel anonymous letters resumed.

At the end of March, Lillian had an ominous dream. Her scream caused Mrs. Bliss to question her anxiously and the frightened girl said she’d had a nightmare. “I was on my home from a party accompanied by Frank Barney,” she told Mrs. Bliss. “I dropped my handkerchief and he returned to get it. Before he reached my side, I felt a shower of burning liquid on my face and screamed.”

The very next night, a stranger tried to get into the Bliss home but got frightened away by Lillian’s brother and Mr. Bliss.

On April 4, Lillian’s persecutor struck again. Around 9 p.m., Mrs. Bliss and Lillian were doing chores in the kitchen. It was a chilly early spring evening. Mrs. Bliss said she needed to bring in more coal to heat the house. Leaving the back door partially open, Mrs. Bliss seized a bucket and a lantern. She hurried into the backyard where the family had a small coal house. Lillian remained in the kitchen, continuing to clean.

A few moments later she heard a voice at the back door call, “Lil!”

Thinking it was Mrs. Bliss struggling to get in the door, Lillian called back to her as she hurried to the back door. She pulled the door open wide but, to her surprise, Mrs. Bliss was just emerging from the coal house. “Did you speak, Lillian?” she called.

Lillian watched absently as Mrs. Bliss put down the heavy coal bucket and shut the door to the coal house. The coal house door had a simple fastener to keep the door closed. Mrs. Bliss fumbled with it in the murky darkness unsuccessfully. After a moment, she lifted the lantern so she could see well enough to accomplish this task. The sudden bright lantern light caused Lillian to wince and she threw up a hand to shield her weakened eyes.

At that instant, a figure detached itself from the shadows a few feet away, lunged toward her, and threw the contents of a tin cup at her. Lillian screamed and squeezed her eyes shut tightly as the liquid splashed on her skin. Mrs. Bliss, having gotten the door fastened at last, spun around and ran to the girl.  Lillian had fainted and a putrid smell filled the kitchen. Mrs. Bliss recognized the odor at once as carbolic acid, which was commonly used for cleaning.

Lillian was badly burned. The carbolic acid burned her on her forehead, on the left side of her face, and her left arm. The doctors later said that her reaction to the bright lantern light had saved her eyesight. Even her left eyelid was badly burned.  The papers wrote that she was “badly disfigured.”

Lillian’s persecutor had once again taken deadly steps to harm the girl.

This dreadful attack caused reporters to come to the Bliss home and interview Lillian. The girl insisted she had no enemies. “She told of one person who didn’t like her–a woman relative–but she seemed to say that the grudge was not one that would warrant such a fiendish act of throwing acid in her face.”

Lillian refused to give her relative’s name, and only said she had auburn hair.

The Cincinnati Enquirer wrote an in-depth article about the case. The family had not requested police protection, they revealed. “They thought if they kept the girl inside the house, except when she was out with an escort, the attacks would be postponed indefinitely. She has been to the opera house and to church on more than one occasion, but always in company,” the Enquirer reported.

The Ashtabula police commenced an investigation at once. “Tracks led to the street and were followed…for 100 yards,” the Cincinnati Enquirer explained. “There they were lost. During the part of the night she was conscious the girl’s suffering was pitiful.” Though the footprints left by the acid-thrower led nowhere, they did yield one very important clue: the strange footprints were made with stylish women’s shoes.

Having few other leads, the police decided to interview Lillian’s auburn-haired relative, who had, in fact, been in Ashtabula the night of the attack. The papers printed little about this discussion beyond concluding that the police “did not connect [the relative] with the deed.”

This may have been partly because the police were certain that every attack on Lillian had been committed by the same person. And the girl’s auburn-haired relative apparently had a rock-solid alibi for the day Lillian was found bound and gagged in December.

Investigators learned from neighbors that, for three nights, a stranger had been seen lurking around the Bliss home. No one had gotten a good look at the person, but the people who saw this person thought it might have been a woman, dressed in men’s clothing.

In the end, the Ashtabula authorities proved as luckless as their Rock Creek counterparts.

Lillian maintained that her strange persecutor was a female. She added, “There is a certain married woman who is jealous of me, though she has no cause to be. She lives with her husband some of the time and some of the time she does not.” Lillian waved away their questions, adding: “I have no positive proof that she is the person who has made these attacks on me but there is no doubt about it in my mind.”

Did this intriguing little clue hold the key to the entire mystery?

Click here to read Part 5 (the conclusion).