THEO & The Mouthful of Ashes

They found her lying at the bottom of her cellar stairs, the left side of her head bashed in and her mouth stuffed with ashes. An old black flat-iron lay near by.

I’d awakened and overheard all this lying in my bed in the dawn of a cold autumn morning as my Dad told my mother in a hushed voice so as not to wake me. The image of it stayed with me all these years – a lonely farm house back a tree-lined lane, a dark cellar, a corpse on the cold, bloody floor, ashes in its mouth.

That’s all I could remember. I couldn’t remember how old I was, or who the victim was, or if the murderer was ever caught…just the cellar, the flat-iron, and the ashes in the mouth.
The thing that fascinated me was the ashes in the mouth. Why?