He was generous with Mary-and suspicious of her traveling salesman husband. Her father, David Fridley, was a wealthy landowner. Mary Fridley Price had been the granddaughter of Abram Fridley, the Minnesota pioneer and state legislator for whom the town of Fridley was named.
The police and coroner agreed with Price’s and Etchison’s story: that Chum had bolted through the trees only to find a drop off, and Mary, in an attempt to save him from going over, had lost her footing and gone down with him. Chum died later, when police located the severely injured dog and shot him. Somehow, within minutes of exiting the car, both woman and dog toppled some forty feet.įridley Price died on the way to the hospital, the fracture to the left side of her skull proving fatal. Just beyond the parkway’s thin fringe of trees, the land dropped off. Mary Fridley Price’s decision to give her dog some air was her last.
Since he and Etchison would be tinkering under the hood for a while, Price said, why shouldn’t Mary take Chum for a walk? It was during that drive from their Minneapolis apartment near Loring Park to scenic East River Road that the Cadillac’s engine seemed to stall.
Mary, the husband suggested, could collect Chum at the apartment and bring him along. After the show ended, Price proposed that the three of them motor to St. In fact, Etchison had turned up with the tickets that morning and suggested the outing. Etchison next to him.Įtchison and Price had accompanied Fridley Price to the play. Price, was at the wheel, with his friend and sometime business partner Charles D. Fridley Price sprawled on her back with a halo of blood around her head.Ībout an hour before, she had shared the roomy backseat of her 1913 Cadillac with Chum, the Cocker Spaniel she loved like the child she didn’t have. Now it was after 6 pm on a chilly fall night. It had been the final matinee performance of the comedy-musical The Prince of Pilsen at Minneapolis’s Metropolitan Theatre. On November 28, 1914, Mary Fridley Price, thirty-eight, lay by the rocky shore of the Mississippi River, still dressed in the fine blue tailored suit and furs she had worn to a play that afternoon. But by January 1916, that grieving husband was at the center of a sensational murder trial, accused of shoving her off the cliff for her money. The November 1914 death of Mary Fridley Price made the front page of the Minneapolis Journal: “Woman Killed in Attempt to Save Pet Dog.” Her grieving husband, Fred Price, told police she had fallen off a Mississippi River bluff in a vain attempt to keep her dog from going over.
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