Stella Chalfa, age 22, a White/Caucasian female from Munhall, Pennsylvania, appears in online accounts not as someone who died on June 17, 1932, but as the survivor of a violent attempted murder that day. The case began in the Monongahela Valley outside Pittsburgh, where Stella said she had gone with her aunt, Mary Chalfa, and Mary’s close associate, fortune teller Gizella Young, under what sounded like an ordinary errand: a trip toward Homestead to buy shoes and then a walk through a wooded
area to visit someone. Once they stopped in a Mifflin Township picnic grove, the errand turned into an ambush. Stella later said the two attacked her with a blackjack, beating her badly about the head until she managed to break away and run.
Bleeding and terrified, Stella stumbled out of the woods and found help at a nearby home. Police were called, and she was taken to a hospital in Homestead, where accounts report that doctors closed her scalp wounds with either 21 or 22 stitches. At first the assault looked like a brutal but isolated fight between relatives and acquaintances. It did not stay that way for long. Stella identified Mary Chalfa and Gizella Young as her attackers, and warrants were issued accusing both of felonious assault and battery. Mary Chalfa was arrested at her home on Whitaker Way in Munhall, while Young was taken into custody at her own home nearby.
The reason for the attack soon became the center of something much larger and darker. Police officials said Young confessed that she and Mary had planned to kill Stella, Stella’s husband Joseph, and Mary’s husband John Chalfa for insurance money, though Young’s attorney later denied that she made such an admission. Stella’s survival appears to have cracked open the broader Munhall insurance-murder investigation. While Mary Chalfa and Gizella Young were jailed over the assault, detectives and insurance investigators began looking closely at several recent deaths connected to Mary Chalfa and her neighbor, Anna Allas.
Investigators focused on a pattern of illness, death, and insurance policies around the families. Andrew Allas, Anna Allas’s stepson, had died in April 1932 after being heavily insured. Stephen Allas, another stepson, had died earlier, and later accounts described prosecutors alleging poison had been used. A small child, Richard Dunyava or Duyava, who had been cared for by Mary Chalfa, was also listed among the suspected victims in the larger ring. Online accounts describe suspicions that the women used poisons, including stannous chloride, and that their motive was the collection of life insurance payouts taken out shortly before or around the victims’ deaths.
Mary Chalfa and Anna Allas eventually became the central defendants in the poison-murder prosecution. They were tried in connection with the death of Stephen Allas, with the state presenting the case as an insurance killing. Gizella Young, the fortune teller, became a major figure in the story because she was accused of participating in the assault on Stella and was described in trial coverage as someone who had given card readings and heard or discussed predictions of deaths. The defense tried to suggest that Young had influenced or controlled the other women through superstition or fortune-telling, but the jury was not persuaded.
Mary Chalfa and Anna Allas were convicted of first-degree murder in the poisoning death of Stephen Allas and were sentenced to life imprisonment at the State Industrial Home for Women at Muncy, Pennsylvania. They were also indicted in connection with the death of Andrew Allas, but online accounts indicate they were not tried on that separate charge. Gizella Young was not convicted in Stella’s attack and, according to later summaries, was not tried even for the assault. Her later whereabouts became unclear in the published accounts.
The aftermath stretched for decades. Anna Allas died in prison in 1951 after her own request for commutation had been refused. Mary Chalfa remained imprisoned for nearly three decades before Pennsylvania Governor David L. Lawrence commuted her life sentence in 1963, making her eligible for release. The commutation did not erase the conviction, but it closed one chapter of a case that had begun with Stella escaping alive from the woods.
Because Stella survived the June 17, 1932 attack, the clearest online record does not support treating that date as her date of death. A later grave record for a Stella Chalfa matching the age reported in the 1932 accounts lists her as born in 1909 in Poland and dying in 1977 in Lakewood, Ohio. The violence against her was still pivotal: her escape appears to have exposed the alleged insurance plot and led investigators into one of the Pittsburgh area’s most sensational poison-murder cases of the early 1930s.
