Grandma Who Survived Great Depression Casually Drops That She Once Killed Man For Mayonnaise
LOUISVILLE, KY—In a wide-ranging conversation about the hardships and difficult choices her family had faced during the Great Depression, local grandmother Mary Sipple casually mentioned Tuesday that in August 1937 she took the life of a man who refused to give up a jar of mayonnaise. “She just crushed his skull with a rock and said a prayer while he bled out,” said Sipple’s granddaughter Sarah Green, explaining that her grandmother had managed to make the mayonnaise last until spring, right around the time the dead man’s body—which she had carefully weighed down and dumped into the Ohio River—washed up in the next county. “Grandma told me she was tired of having nothing to put between two slices of bread. So when she saw the man with his jar of Hellmann’s, she made him a proposition: He could either give her the mayonnaise, or he could die. I asked her how she felt about this now, and she just said sandwich spreads were hard to come by back then and the man had made his choice.” At press time, Sipple was reportedly listing on her fingers the various other items—eggs, flour, chewing gum, an Indian head nickel—she had killed people over during the worst economic crisis in American history.
