
The morning of June 9, 1874, a two-story house burned to the ground in a section of Rutland, Vermont known as the “swamp.” Amid the rubble was the badly burned but recognizable corpse of Mrs. Ann E. Freese; she had been stabbed in the throat before the fire started. Finding her killer promised to be daunting since Mrs. Freese’s house was a well-known brothel with men coming and going at all hours. But circumstances quickly pointed to John Phair, a local ne’er-do-well whose relationship with Mrs. Freese was closer than that of a paying customer and who had conveniently left town the morning of the fire.