The Colt-Adams Murder.

The Murder of Samuel Adams by John C. Colt.

An argument over money between bookkeeper John C. Colt and printer Samuel Adams, on September 17, 1841, ended in the murder of Adams in Colt’s Manhattan office. Colt tried to dispose of the body by crating it up and shipping it to New Orleans.

Read the full story here: The Corpse in the Shipping Crate.

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Illustrations from "Trial of John C. Colt", New York Sun, January 31,1842.

The Mysterious Murder of William Wilson.

Major William C. Wilson was a dealer in old manuscripts and proprietor of Wilson’s Circulating Library on Walnut Street in Philadelphia. He had fought in the Civil war with the 104th New York Infantry and received two field promotions for bravery, first to captain then to major. After the war, he settled in Philadelphia where he led a solitary and somewhat eccentric life. He had few acquaintances outside the Franklin Chess Club which he visited each evening between 7:00 and 10:00—the Philadelphia Inquirer would later call him “one of the most lonely characters in the city.”

Around 7:30, the night of August 16, 1897, Officer Smith of the Philadelphia Police found the back door of Wilson’s store open and suspected burglary. Investigating by candlelight, Smith found the store in disarray and saw a pool of blood on the floor with a trail of blood leading behind the counter. There he found Major Wilson’s body, with a towel around his neck and his face and head “beaten to a jelly” by a hammer which lay near the body.

The Brown Tragedy.

Mary A. Brown

A wholesale robbery operation was uncovered outside of Irvington, Indiana, four miles east of

Indianapolis. In January 1879, John G. F. Brown and Pressley Miller were convicted of grand larceny and concealing stolen goods and sentenced to one year in the penitentiary. Brown’s wife Mary was also indicted but was released on her own recognizance.

John Brown left his wife with a 40-acre farm to manage and three children to raise. She was 33-years-old—nineteen years younger than her husband—and desperately in need of help. That’s not to say that Mary Brown was helpless; she very soon found the answer to all of her problems in Joseph W. Wade, a 33-year-old Irvington saloon owner. Wade, who was in the middle of a divorce, agreed to live at the farm and manage it for Mary, and even before his divorce was final he was sharing her bed as well as her board.

A one-year prison sentence is not very long. John Brown was released from the penitentiary and returned to his farm to find a domestic situation that was not to his liking. It is not clear what transpired at the Brown farm, but John Brown expected trouble and consulted his attorney. The last thing Brown said to him was, “I may never see you again.” Less than three weeks later John Brown was found murdered.

Joseph W. Wade

At a railroad crossing, about three miles from the farm, a neighbor found a horse and buggy, its cushion and lap rug were saturated with blood. The buggy was identified as John Brown’s and a search of the area found his body lying nearby, beside the railroad track. It first it looked like he had been shot in the head, but it was later determined that his skull had been fractured with a hammer.

I didn’t take long to determine who was responsible—Joe Wade was clearly in conflict with John Brown and Mary Brown had told her friends she would do away with her husband if he ever returned, she had a younger, better-looking man and she didn’t desire to “be tied down to an old fool like Brown.” Both were arrested for the murder of John Brown.

At first, they both denied any knowledge of the murder, but after a brief incarceration Mary Brown weakened and told her story of what happened the night of the murder. She said that Wade had planned to go to Irvington to sell his horse and went out to hitch the buggy.

“I went about attending to my work as usual when I heard a dull, heavy sound, and some groans. I rushed out and saw my husband dying. I had the child in my arms and Wade said, ‘Take in that child.’ I did so, after which I came out again and exclaimed, ‘Oh, my God, what have you done?’ He came up to me and put his arms around me saying ‘This is what love will do, darling.’…My reason for making a different statement before was, Wade threated my life if I gave him away.”

After hearing Mary Brown’s confession, Wade corroborated the story of the surroundings of the murder but said it was Mary who actually did the killing. Both were charged with first-degree murder.

They were tried separately, with Joseph Wade tried first in April of that year. The issue was not whether Wade was involved in the murder, but whether he wielded the hammer and if it was premeditated. Wade could not convince a jury that he was only an accessory; he was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to hang.

When Mary Brown was tried in July, Wade testified for the prosecution. He was not offered any clemency for his testimony, he would hang regardless, so had no incentive to lie. He testified that he had been discussing the sale of a horse with John Brown that Friday evening when Mary came up behind her husband and struck him in the back of the head with a wooden mallet. He fell to the floor, knocking his head against a table. Wade grabbed a lamp from the table as Mary struck Brown again, this time in the face. Wade said, “My God, woman, what have you done?” She said, “That’s no more than he has done.”

Wade hurried out of the house and began to unhitch his horse. Mary asked where he was going and he said Irvington. “No, you ain’t,” said Mary, “Joe Wade, if you leave me now, you’ll rue the day—you’re a man and I’m a woman—you’ve been staying here and nobody will suspect me of doing this.”

She wrapped up the body in a blanket and he helped her load it into the buggy. Then Mary dressed in Joe’s clothes and drove the buggy with Joe sitting beside her. Anyone who saw them would think they were two men. They left the body by the railroad track, and Mary turned his pockets inside out to make it look like he was robbed.  Abandoning the buggy, they walked back to the farm.

The jury deliberated for forty-six hours then found Mary Brown guilty of first-degree murder. She was sentenced to hang on October 29, 1880, the same day as Joseph Wade. Two days before the scheduled hanging, Governor Williams granted them a thirty-day respite to appeal their cases to the state Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court reviewed both cases. They found the two of the jurors on Mary Brown’s case were not competent, having prejudged the defendant; she was granted a new trial. The Supreme Court found nothing wrong with Joe Ward’s trial and let the verdict stand.

On November 18, Governor James D. Williams, in his last official act before dying three days later of inflammation of the bladder, granted Wade another respite so he could bring another appeal to the Supreme Court. This time he appealed on the grounds that the judge gave the jury erroneous instructions.

While awaiting the Supreme Court’s ruling, Ward testified at Mary Brown’s second trial. This time said that Mary’s intent to kill her husband “was of a sudden conception,” the murder had not been planned. Mary Brown was again convicted of first-degree murder, but this time sentenced to life imprisonment in the women’s reformatory.

In February 1881, the Supreme Court granted Joseph Ward a new trial and in his second trial, he was also sentenced to life in prison.

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Sources:
“The Brown Tragedy,” Daily Inter Ocean, February 14, 1880.
“In the First Degree,” Daily Illinois State Journal, April 30, 1880.
“An Indianapolis Murder,” Cincinnati Daily Gazette, February 9, 1880.
“Joseph Wade,” Indianapolis Sentinel, July 3, 1880.
“Marion Murders,” Evansville Courier and Press, May 20, 1880.
“Miscellaneous Misdeeds,” Daily Inter Ocean, December 30, 1880.
“To the Scaffold Will Mrs.,” Indianapolis Sentinel, July 13, 1880.
"Wade and His Paramour," National Police Gazette, November 6, 1880.
“The Wade Trial,” Indianapolis Sentinel, April 21, 1880.
“Wade to Get a New Trial,” Daily Inter Ocean, February 5, 1881.

Fanaticism and Murder.

Little Murders

(From Centinel of Freedom (originally published in The Troy Times), May 10, 1859)

Fanaticism and Murder.

The Quiet Sabbath was broken in upon yesterday by the commission of a horrid murder, in the town of Sandlake, about fourteen miles from Troy, of a daughter by her father and only surviving parent, a man about 60 years of age named John Belding. The scene of the homicide is about four miles East of Sliter’s tavern, and near the steam saw mill on Sandlake road. The parties lived in a little house, in which the father earned a livelihood for himself and daughter by following the trade of a shoemaker. The daughter’s name as Christina. She is about nineteen years of age, and is described by the neighbors as a quiet and well-behaved girl. She had been unwell for some time, and, it is said, had been under the care of a female doctress residing in Berlin, in this county, named Weaver. Her mind, it appears, was somewhat affected, but whether from religious excitement or from some other cause, we are unable to say. She labored under the impression that the devil had possessed her, and used to pray very frequently for deliverance from his grasp. A day or two before he murder, the old man and daughter went over to the house of David Horton who resided opposite the Beldings, when Christina said she had taken medicine of Mrs. Weaver, and it made her feel as if “the devil was in her, and she would scratch him off; but that she had thrown the medicine away, and drove the devil away too.” The old man had not done much work recently, as it affected the  girl’s head, and it is supposed that in consequence of his care of her, want of sleep, &c., his own mind had become temporarily affected, and while under the delusion that “Dena,” as he calls her, was the devil, he killed her.

The account which Belding gives of the affair is, that he saw the devil lying on the bed and he struck it in the face. The girl, it appears, was lying down in the back room. Belding followed her from that room to the front room, in which the murder was committed with a shoemaker’s hammer. Her skull was completely smashed to pieces. Portions of the hair were scattered about the room, and pieces of the skull were lying over the floor. Her face too was considerably bruised and disfigured, but no marks of violence were discovered on the other parts of her body. Belding says he thought she was the devil—that she appeared to him to be four times as large as “Dena”—and from his previous and subsequent conduct there can scarcely be a doubt that the old man imagines he had a fight with the devil, or he he expresses it, with “three devils, and he had all he could do to kill them.” They lived alone in the house.

The Sailor and the Spiritualist.

Alfred and Althadine Smith had been married for more than twenty years but over time their lives had grown apart. He became a Great Lakes sailor interested more in drinking and carousing than in raising a family; she became a professional clairvoyant. When Alfred’s neglect turned to physical abuse and Althadine filed for divorce, she had the foresight to send the children away and bring in a friend for support and protection, but her clairvoyance failed when she was unable to predict the tragic consequence of letting Alfred stay just one more night.

Horror!

For several days there had been no activity on the Deering farm, just south of the city of Philadelphia, so on April 11, 1866, their neighbor, Mr. Ware, went over to see what was wrong. He found the house empty, but in the barn, he saw a human foot protruding from the hay. Ware ran for help, and together they uncovered the brutally mutilated bodies of Christopher Deering, his wife Julia, four of their children—ranging in age from eight years to fourteen months—and Elizabeth Dolan, a visiting cousin. Outside the barn they found the body of Cornelius Cary, seventeen-year-old hired hand, similarly mutilated.

The following day, the headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer bore the single word: “Horror!”.

The Hunter-Armstrong Tragedy

John M. Armstrong

The night of January 23, 1878, a man was found on the ground with a serious head wound not far from the home of Ford W. Davis in Camden, New Jersey. Near the wounded man, a hammer and a hatchet were found, each marked with the initials F. W. D. The man was identified as  Philadelphia music publisher John M. Armstrong, and when it was learned that he owed Ford W. Davis a sizeable amount of money, Davis was arrested. But Armstrong also owed $12,000 to Benjamin F. Hunter, who had insured Armstrong’s life for more than double that amount.

A Deed to Make Mankind Shudder.

Little Murders

(From Bangor Daily Whig And Courier, Augusta, Maine, February 28, 1881)

A Deed to Make Mankind Shudder

A Young Man Kills His Mother.
By Striking her on the Head With A Hammer.

He First Freezes the Body,
Then Cuts it Into Pieces.
And Tries to Burn It.

The Unnatural Son is Arrested.

He Confessed All—No Motive Assigned for the Hellish Deed.

Augusta, Me., Feb. 27, One of the most atrocious murders ever recorded in the annals of crime, has occurred near Weeks’ Mills, China, a beautiful little village twelve miles from Augusta. For cold-blooded wickedness and apathetic indifference, the murder will rank alongside any criminal whose foul deeds have made mankind shudder. One week ago Saturday, a young man named Charles Merrill killed his mother in the barn near the house, by striking her on the head with a hammer. He concealed the body in the hay mow until ti wsa frozen and then cut it into pieces. Part of these he burned as well as possible in the stove and fire place, throwing the charred remains into the manure heap.

Guest Blogger: ExecutedToday

I always like to start the morning with a visit to ExecutedToday.com  to see who was launched into eternity on this day in history. Then, no matter how bad the day gets, I can take comfort in knowing that at least I’m not that guy.

Murder by Gaslight is pleased to welcome as guest blogger, the Headsman of ExecutedToday. He will be sharing the story behind the 1858 execution of Marion Ira Stout, a particularly inept and unlucky murderer from Rochester, New York:

1858: Marion Ira Stout, for loving his sister

Originally posted October 22nd, 2008  by Headsman

It’s the sesquicentennial of a then-sensational, now-forgotten hanging in Rochester, N.Y.

At dawn on December 20, 1857, the city had awoken to the discovery of a mangled corpse by the Genesee River’s High Falls … and more than enough evidence to have the corpse’s killers in hand by tea time.

The Bloody Benders

In the early 1870s the counties of Labette and Montgomery in Kansas were experiencing an alarming number of missing persons. The investigation passed several times through the cabin of the Benders, a family of German immigrants who ran a small grocery store and restaurant outside of Cherryvale, Kansas, but the Benders appeared completely innocent. When authorities found the cabin abandoned one day the picture changed. A closer look revealed nine murdered corpses, the handiwork of the Bloody Benders.

The Corpse in the Shipping Crate

On September 17, 1841, an expressman picked up a crate on Maiden Lane in Manhattan and delivered it to the docks. The crate, addressed to New Orleans, was loaded aboard the packet Kalamazoo, scheduled to leave that afternoon. Inclement weather kept the Kalamazoo in port for a week and sailors started complaining of a foul odor coming from the hold. The crate was opened revealing a decomposing human corpse identified as New York printer, Samuel Adams. The man who had arranged its passage was John C. Colt, a bookkeeping instructor, client of Mr. Adams, and brother of the inventor of the Colt revolver.