In 1924, on this day the mentally unstable pulp-fiction writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft was arrested by the New York Police and charged with the murder of his Jewish wife Sonia Greene.
Click to watch the document "Fear of the Unknown"

Fear of the UnknownThe author blamed her killing on the "Mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred¹ a bizarre accusation that led to a search of the couple's Brooklyn apartment. Voluminous quantities of hand written correspondence was discovered, much of it shockingly xenophobic in character.

It emerged that by exploring his bitter race hatred in fantasy literatures, Lovecraft had made the acquantance of a fellow writer in Weird Tales, the Austrian emigré Adolf Schicklegruber.

It appeared that Schicklegruber encouraged Lovecraft to paint upon an althogether darker canvass. A dystopian nation far more frightening than the "Imperial America" conceived by Robert W. Chamber's insane protagonist Hildred Castaigne in The King in Yellow, a play that Lovecraft greatly admired. Instead of the voluntary Government-sponsored Lethal Chambers for Suicide, Schicklegruber proposed a proto-fascist regime in which the Aryan masters liquidated the immigrant races.

The discovery of this correspondence terrified Greene. She raced to the Police station to make a report, but she was killed by a mysterious, unidentified stranger. It was a tragic circumstance that Lovecraft instantly regretted because his wife had returned unconditional love in a way that his mother had not, a form of love that he recognized had deeply disturbed his emotional balance. In his suicide note Lovecraft wrote some of his most powerful prose ~ "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is Fear of the Unknown". For Lovecraft, something was missing from this harsh world, and that was love².