Editor’s Note: As Lexington celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding, the Herald-Leader and kentucky.com each day throughout 2025 will share interesting facts about our hometown. Compiled by Liz Carey, all are notable moments in the city’s history — some funny, some sad, others heartbreaking or celebratory, and some just downright strange.
It was a story straight out of a crime show, but it embroiled the well-to-do in Lexington at the prestigious Idle Hour Country Club.
The body of a member, Mary Marrs Cawein, was found the day after the country club’s Fourth of July party in 1965, slumped over in her bedroom chair. She’d been poisoned. The investigation into her death, with no resolution to the case, leaves it as one of Lexington’s biggest unsolved mysteries…