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Mrs. Roberts also had a story. After eleven years, her marriage was in deep trouble. She told her friends that the family had been obliged to leave Canada four years earlier after her husband, who had been a sewer boss, “insulted” a prominent woman.
Around the turn of the century, the word insulted could mean almost anything but by today’s standards, this probably referred to something akin to what we call sexual harassment. Definitely not the sort of thing people have to flee their country over, but maybe it was back then.
So the Roberts and their three children came to Buffalo, New York in 1887 and opened a saloon at the corner of Carroll and Louisiana streets. But Roberts drank up the profits and they were soon evicted. According to his wife, Roberts had done three short stints in the penitentiary and she had paid numerous police court fees for him. Mrs. Roberts finally tired of this and, when her husband was sent to the workhouse, she moved to No. 20 Lester Street with no intention of ever living with her husband again.
During the construction of O’Neill’s house near Lester Street, James O’Neill got to know Mrs. Roberts, who was taking in boarders to support herself. In the late spring of 1891, Mrs. Roberts filed for divorce. According to William Roberts, who was working for Main Street Sewer by then, “My wife told me she intended to marry O’Neill, if she obtains a divorce from me.”
Roberts did not take it well. A deep animosity formed between himself and James O’Neill.
In the summer of 1891, Mrs. Kate O’Neill came down with “brain fever”. Just what “brain fever” entailed, it’s hard to ascertain. O’Neill said his wife became violent, destroyed some of their furniture, and sent the rest into storage, then she fled to Rochester to spend a couple of weeks with friends. The son was not mentioned.
In a statement he gave on November 14, five days after his wife’s suicide, O’Neill said, “It is certain that Mrs. O’Neill had been failing mentally since an attack of fever which she had in late summer, which can easily be verified from my family physician, Dr. Hawley, possibly attributable to jealousy on her part, for which there was never any foundation.”
According to O’Neill, during this time he needed somewhere to live. It didn’t seem to occur to him that he could perhaps take his furniture out of storage and live in the house on Eagle Street without his wife. So he rented a room from Mrs. Roberts. After his wife returned, O’Neill found he couldn’t take her violent spells. She stayed with her friends, the Smallenburgs, temporarily while James O’Neill remained at Mrs. Roberts’ house. “I was undoubtedly very unwise in not having her placed under restraint at the asylum, but neglected it until it was too late,” he said later.
old spirituals 