People and incidents
Grace Morey shooting at Atsion
Contemporary reporting · Outcome unverified
Grace Morey, 22, was killed and her brother-in-law Oscar Morey critically wounded at an Atsion Lake cottage on July 23, 1945. Contemporary reporting described an active investigation and did not establish who shot whom.
Shooting and evidence
At about 2:30 p.m., Oscar Morey, 39, left the Lake Road cottage wounded and reached neighbor Leason Small, who called Hammonton State Police. Grace lay dead on the kitchen floor. A short-barreled .22-caliber rifle and three spent shells were nearby. Oscar had wounds in his left chest and back below the shoulder and was taken to Burlington County Hospital in Mount Holly, where he briefly said Grace had shot him before collapsing.
An autopsy by County Physician Dr. Philip P. Remer found a bullet in Grace’s brain, entering through the back of her head. A broken nose and bruised knees and legs suggested a struggle and contradicted a simple murder-suicide account. Grace’s 13-month-old son was unharmed in another room. Her husband Albert Morey, 44, a farm truck driver/helper, returned about 3:30. Oscar, reportedly in poor health, lived with them. Detective Corporal Louis E. Bornmann, Trooper Arthur Aydelotte, and county detective chief Clifford Cain investigated amid storm flooding and failed communications.
Sources and research limits
- The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 24, 1945, digitized page hosted by Wenonah Historical Society — its dateline context says the fatal shooting occurred “yesterday,” establishing July 23, 1945, and names Grace, Oscar, and the Atsion Lake cottage. It reports that the autopsy and physical evidence challenged Oscar’s reported statement that Grace shot him, while he was too critical to question further. The surviving scan is a full newspaper page, and OCR is imperfect; details should be checked against the image. The other transcribed clippings in the source packet lack masthead and date. The original record’s stray “1942” is inconsistent with this contemporary page.
The available reports do not settle the sequence of shots, identify a perpetrator, or establish a later legal outcome. This entry does not infer guilt from the reported evidence.