jayjay:
I had no idea this was a real incident. Reading the quoted paragraph, my memory siezed on Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d From Side To Side , which fictionalized the Gene Tierney incident and made it a motive for murder. I honestly had no idea it was based on an actual event before this.
Here’s a post from an earlier thread on the subject. Interestingly, several people there also wondered about it being a real event, which produced some cross-pollination with the Snopes message board and the following information:
I bring progress from the thread on this on the snopes message board. Several people added info but pride of place probably goes to poster Bonnie who, as usual, has dug up a very impressive set of cites and makes a compelling case for the story being true, really. Or at least more plausible than I thought previously.
Link to snopes
Some key things discovered:
[ul]
[li]The story was reported as early as 1958 in Time Magazine and widely reported in 1959 in, amongst other papers, The Washington Post.[/li][li]German Measles quarantining was a regular occurrence in the 1940s and indeed it was something of a raging epidemic.[/li][/ul]
The link to the thread contains cites for the above and much more.
So… yep. Horrifying.