Cherry Scott

Little Murders:

From Defenders and Offenders:

Cherry Scott.

"Cherry Scott is a mulatto woman, who killed her mother, and was brought to Dallas, Texas, from the Indian Territory where the crime was committed. Her mother, herself, a married brother, his wife and two other children all lived together in Fannin County, and were employed in raising a crop. The sister-in-law would not work and this made Cherry Scott angry, and therefore when she was told to do some work she refused, ordering the sister-in-law to do it. A quarrel ensued and the mother sided with the daughter-in-law. This so angered Cherry, the next morning, while the mother lay in bed, Cherry approached her bed with a rifle and shot her dead."

---

Defenders and offenders. New York: D. Buchner & Co., 1888.

The Six Capsules

Helen Potts, a nineteen year old student at Miss Comstock’s School in New York City, decided not to join her roommates when they went to hear a concert. Helen was feeling ill, but she had a remedy prescribed by her boyfriend, a medical student named Carlyle Harris. When the girls returned, Helen told them of the wonderful dreams she had been having about Carlyle. But she also complained of numbness throughout her body; before long she could not move and her breathing was labored. The dreams soon vanished, giving way to nightmare, revealing a world filled with deceit, betrayal and ultimately murder.

A Weschseter Tragedy Revived.

Little Murders

(From The World. New York, New York, November 18, 1885.)

A WESTCHESTER TRAGEDY REVIVED

Sudden Death of a Man Whose Name was
Connected with a Brutal Murder.

When the announcement was made in Kensico, Westchester County, yesterday that Wesley Stillison had been found dead in his bed there were many inquiries as to whether he had committed suicide. His sudden death recalled the particulars of a terrible murder committed in that village three years ago, in which Stillison's name was unpleasantly connected.

Stillison was the stepfather of Mrs. Mary Montfort, whose husband, Albert Montfort, kept a country store in the edge of the village. Montfort had some money, while Stillison was a shiftless fellow. Mrs. Montfort and her husband did not agree. Her brother Charles J. Reynolds, now in Sing Sing Prison, took sides with her against her husband. Affairs were approaching a domestic crisis when, one morning in August, 1882, Montfort was found murdered in his store.

Stillison was the discoverer of this crime. Montfort had been called from his bed, and when he opened the door he was struck in the head with an axe, knocked down and his head was chopped to pieces. Mrs. Montfort had gone away the day before.The store was robbed of about $300, as near as could be estimated.

Coroner Schirmer’s investigation led him to suspect Stillison and Reynolds, his stepson, and he placed Stillison under surveillance and arrested Reynolds. An axe was found in the bushes covered with hair and blood. Reynolds was locked up and the Coroner informed Stillison that he believed he was guilty. Reynolds had been indicted for burglary and pleaded guilty to the surprise of the prosecuting officer, and was sent to Sing Sing for seven years. Stillison then commenced a suit for $2,000 damages against Coroner Schirmer. The trial fully sustained the suspicion expressed by the Coroner, and the ease was thrown out of court. Since that time . Stillison has been moody and restive. The District-Attorney has been weighing the evidence and collecting such as he could with a view to lay the facts before the Grand Jury.

Death has now put an end to further proceedings, but there is a suspicion that Stillison's death was not due to natural causes and Coroner Purdy will hold an Inquest.

---

The World. New York, New York, November 18, 1885.

An Unfortunate Organization

Phrenology, the theory that a person’s character is determined by the size and shape of his head, was quite popular in America during the 1850s. A phrenological analysis of Reuben Dunbar in 1851 found him to be excessive in Destructiveness, Combativeness, Aqusitiveness, Secretiveness and Firmness, while being deficient in Self-esteem and Philoprogenitiveness.  He had “an unfortunate organization” in which his moral faculties were not sufficiently large to balance his animal propensities. While the phrenologist professed scientific objectivity in the analysis of Dunbar’s head, she may have been  somewhat influenced the fact that, at the time, Reuben Dunbar was charged with murdering his two young stepbrothers to protect his inheritance.

Murder by Candlelight

Just three years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, the first settlers put down roots in what would later become Essex County, Massachusetts. If the legends are true, that the Plymouth colonists lived in harmony with one another and at peace with the natives, the same cannot be said of Essex. From the earliest days, life in Essex County reads like an adventure book filled with Indian fighters, highwaymen, pirates and witches. My new book, Murder and Mayhem in Essex County, published by The History Press, tells the stories of these nefarious characters and relates the dark side of Massachusetts history, north of Boston.

Like Murder by Gaslight, Murder and Mayhem in Essex County abounds with murderous deeds and bad behavior, but the stories begin about 200 years earlier— murder by candlelight. The book covers the period between the first murder in the Puritan settlements of Essex County, and the first execution of an Essex murderer by electric chair; 1636 – 1900. While founded as a new world of Christian righteousness, and priding itself on civility and the rule of law, Essex County’s history is as bloody and barbaric as that of any part of America.
Here is just a sample of the stories in the book:

• In 1637 William Schooler and John Williams were hanged together for Essex County crimes. Schooler raped and murdered a young woman and Williams broke jail and killed his cellmate.
• In 1691, Elizabeth Emerson murdered her twin bastard infants; six years later her sister, Hannah Emerson Duston escaped Indian captivity by scalping ten of her captors.
• Essex County had a long history of witchcraft that neither began nor ended in Salem.
• The shores of Essex were plagued by piracy, including the terrorism of Rachel Wall, New England’s only female pirate.
• In 1795, Pomp, an African slave, dispatched his cruel master with an axe blow to the head.
• Highwayman Richard Crowninshield was hired to murder Captain Joseph White, by White’s two nephews, in 1830.
• In 1885, a successful inventor shot his business partner in cold blood, then pled insanity.
• An aspiring young singer was murdered by an obsessed ex-lover in 1894.
• In 1900, a dismembered corpse was found, stuffed into three feed bags, floating in a pond.

Essex is one of the oldest counties in America. In the 277 years between the first settlement and the turn of the twentieth century, murder and mayhem were never far from the lives of its citizens. Establishing a new country in a harsh land sometimes calls for harsh measures, but we can take pride in the fact that, more often than not, justice prevailed.

For more information on Murder and Mayhem in Essex County, go to www.Murder-in-Essex.com.

Anyone interested in reviewing the book, please contact info@Murder-in-Essex.com.

Thomas A. Reese.

Little Murders:

From Defenders and Offenders:

Thomas A. Reese.

"In May, 1888, Thomas A. Reese shot and nearly killed his wife in Kokoma, Ind. He also shot and killed a man by the name of Charles Marx. He had only been married three weeks when the tragedy occurred. One afternoon he saw Marx meet his wife on the street, and accompany her to a spot just West of the City, where he had followed them, and unseen, watched, and at length fired upon them. Two shots struck the woman, wounding her, while Marx was killed."

---

Defenders and offenders. New York: D. Buchner & Co., 1888.

Haunting Homicides

The nineteenth century was a golden age of spiritualism, so it’s not surprising that many murder stories from the 1800s have accompanying ghost stories.

In some cases the supernatural was an integral part of the story:

• After her death, the spirit of Zona Heaster Shue appeared to her mother in a series of dreams.  This prompted Mrs. Heaster to request the body be exhumed, revealing that her daughter had been murdered.
• Peter DeGraff was attempting to communicate with the spirit of Ellen Smith at the time of his arrest for her murder.

Other times the ghost appeared very soon after the murder:

• The ghost of Louise Luetgert haunted her husband, Adolph, in prison after he was arrested for killing her and dissolving her corpse in boiling potash. She haunted Adolph until his death, then she haunted his sausage factory.

Some nineteenth century murder sites continue to be haunted by killers and/or victims:

• In the house where Andrew and Abby Borden were murdered—now a Fall River, Massachusetts, bed and breakfast—guests still report strange visions and weird sounds.
• The Sprague Mansion in Cranston, Rhode Island, home of Amasa Sprague who was murdered in 1843, is allegedly haunted. It is uncertain whether the ghost is Amasa Sprague, or John Gordon, the man who was falsly accused of, and executed for, his murder.
• Savin Rock in West Haven, Connecticut is haunted by the ghost of Jennie Cramer whose poisoned body was found there in 1881.
• The body of Guilelma Sands was found in the Manhattan Well on January 2, 1800. Throughout the century people reported eerie sights and sounds coming from the well. Though the well is long gone, at the Manhattan Bistro, 129 Spring St., where the well once stood, Guilelma has been known to throw bottles off the shelf.

Sometimes the ghost stories seem to be anticlimactic addendums to otherwise interesting stories:

• No one seems to care that the ghost of Helen Jewett still walks the streets of Manhattan or that Mary Rogers haunts the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, though both murders are unforgettable.
• Then there is Lavinia Fisher. Since everything else about her legend is false, of course she has a ghost story. She still haunts the old jail in Charleston, South Carolina—her spirit, no doubt, disturbed by all of the false accusations of murder.

There must be dozens of other tales from the spirit world accompanying the homicides at Murder by Gaslight, but I will leave them to someone else. I prefer the world of flesh and blood.

  

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: Anthony Vaver of Early American Crime

Murder by Gaslight is pleased to welcome guest blogger Anthony Vaver of Early American Crime, a blog that documents murder, thievery and other criminal behavior in America’s colonial period. Anthony is the author of the new book Bound with an Iron Chain, which tells the fascinating story of America’s forgotten settlers: the fifty thousand convicts transported from England into servitude in the colonies. The book is available at Amazon.

Today, Anthony will be sharing with us the story of Charles O’Donnel, a particularly vile murderer whose narrative bridges the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.




Charles O’Donnel: His Life and Confession

By Anthony Vaver

On the side of a road in the middle of nowhere Mrs. Shokey begged for her life with “many bitter cries and tears,” but Charles O’Donnel remained unmoved. The unexpected meeting of the two neighbors presented O’Donnel with the opportunity to follow through on his previous threat: that he would kill Shokey if his daughter’s illness did not improve.

Barclay Peakes

Little Murders:

From Defenders and Offenders:

Barclay Peakes.

"A young and beautiful girl was shot in the head by an assassin, within a short distance of Mount Holly, N. J., in the spring of 1887. The girl’s name was Mary C. Anderson, who was living with a relative on a farm at Newbold’s Corner. She and Barclay Peakes were very much together, and on the evening of the crime she left her house to meet Peakes. She was afterwards found by the roadside and Peakes’ revolver by her side. Cause, jealousy."

---

Defenders and offenders. New York: D. Buchner & Co., 1888.

Becker Tells All

Little Murders

(from The Renwick Times, Renwick Iowa, March 3, 1899.)

BECKER TELLS ALL.

Kills His Wife with a Hatchet and Burns Her Body.

August A. Becker, the Chicago wife murderer made a second confession to the police Tuesday night. In a detailed statement to Inspector Hant he told of a crime so revolting that for some time even the police officials refused to believe it.

In the presence of Chief of Police Kipley, Inspector Hant, Captain Lavin and Assistant State’s Attorney Pearson the burly sausage maker broke down and said he had killed his wife by striking her on the head with a hatchet in the kitchen of his home. He then cut the body to pieces and boiled it in a large kettle. After watching the disintegration of the remains for several hours, and when nothing remained that resembled a human body, Becker says he took what remained and burned it in a red-hot stove, the fire having been prepared by him. The bones which would not burn, he buried on the prairie near his house.

Becker asserts the crime was not premeditated, but that he quarreled with his wife, and in the heat of passion he struck her on the head with the hatchet. Only one blow was needed to cause the death and after that had been struck the sausage maker says he thought of the way to dispose of the remains of his wife in order to destroy all chance of detection.

August A. Becker killed his wife Jan. 27, but was not arrested for the murder until after he had married a 17-year-old girl named Ida Sutterlin. When Becker brought his wife home it caused gossip which reached the ears of the police, and finally led to Becker’s arrest. At first Becker denied having killed his wife, stating that she had left him and gone to Milwaukee. Under pressure he finally made a false confession in which he said that he had pushed his wife into the lake at the foot of the Randolph Street pier. This was not believed, and until Tuesday night the true story of how Becker killed his wife was not known.

---

The Renwick Times, Renwick Iowa, March 3, 1899.

The Indiana Hero

In 1819, when the State of Indiana was still frontier country, Amasa Fuller, a prominent and popular citizen of Lawrenceburg, Indiana, was courting a young lady of that town. While Fuller was away on business, the young lady’s heart was stolen by a younger man, named Palmer Warren.  When Fuller returned to find that his true love had agreed to marry her new suitor, he challenged Palmer Warrant to a duel. Warren refused to fight so Fuller shot him in cold blood. Though guilty of murder, Amasa Fuller was so popular in Lawrenceburg that, when a ballad was written about the murder, the young lady was cast as the villain, and Fuller was “The Indiana Hero.”

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 Boston Barrel Tragedy

1872 was an eventful year for Boston, Massachusetts. That year the city hosted the World’s Peace Jubilee and International Musical Festival, lasting 18 days and drawing thousands of visitors. The Boston Red Stockings won the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players Championship. The Great Boston Fire devastated 65 acres of downtown real estate. And the dismembered body of Abijah Ellis was found stuffed inside two barrels, floating in the Charles River.

Is Holmes Hatch?

Herman Webster Mudgett, alias Dr. H. H. Holmes, confessed to killing 27 men, women, and children, but lawmen estimated that his actual total was as high as 230 murders. This is not enough for some people; there appears to be a movement afoot, to pin every unsolved murder of the 19th century on Dr. Holmes. Some amateur detectives are now attempting to “prove” that H. H. Holmes was also Jack the Ripper, though there is no evidence that Holmes ever left North America, and the modus operandi of the two men could not be more different (the ripper killed with a quick slash to the throat; Holmes preferred slow torture from a distance). It is also rumored that someone is trying to connect Holmes to the murder of Lizzie Borden’s parents.

Apparently, accusing Holmes of murders he did not commit, is not a new phenomenon. This article from The Fort Wayne Journal, September 1, 1895, tells of a  theory from Colorado, that Clark W. Hatch, who murdered his uncle there, was actually H. H. Holmes. The theory was effectively refuted by Yankee common sense.

IS HOLMES HATCH?
COLORADO PEOPLE HAVE WORKED OUT A STORY
THEY THINK MULTI-MURDERER HOLMES AND THE MYSTERIOUS HATCH ARE ONE AND THE SAME MAN – A HISTORY OF HATCH AND HIS CRIMES

The Sheriff’s Mistress

In the summer of 1827, George Swearingen was a hardworking, upstanding, young family man.  He and his lovely wife, Mary, had a new baby daughter. Working as clerk and deputy to his uncle, the sheriff of Washington County, Maryland, George was being groomed to take his uncle’s job.  Everything was going George Swearingen’s way; then he met Rachel Cunningham. In September the following year, George and Rachel were fugitives, running from the charge of murdering Mary Swearingen.

Edward Hovey

Little Murders:

From Defenders and Offenders:

Edward Hovey.

Edward Hovey was hanged in New York City on October 19, 1883, for the murder of his sister-in-law. The murder was unprovoked and he deserved his doom. He called at his sister-in-law’s house and after quarreling with her, shot her down in cold blood. He was so completely broken down before his execution, that he had to be dosed with whiskey, while a morphine injection was also given him.

---

Defenders and offenders. New York: D. Buchner & Co., 1888.

The Great Trunk Mystery

The afternoon of August 26, 1871 a porter at the Hudson River Railroad Depot in Manhattan, noticed a disgusting odor emanating from a trunk bound for Chicago. He notified the baggage master, who ordered his men to open the trunk and find the source of the smell. They lifted the lid, removed a blanket, and found the body of a pretty, young woman, with golden hair, jammed into the trunk, naked, in a fetal position. The trunk had no address, and no one knew who had left it. The police seemed powerless to solve the “Great Trunk Mystery”

Murder Most Foul

Little Murders

Well, it had to come out eventually. I try to avoid clichés like “murder most foul” but here it is in the Adams Sentinel, February 7, 1842. But  it was a particularly foul murder; James E. Lanier not only killed his two little sons, their mother, and their grandmother, but enlisted his father’s slaves to help him do it.

"Murder Most Foul – By a statement in the Danville Reporter, we learn the following particulars of murder more horrible than any we have yet chronicled:

From the verdict of the Coroner’s jury, it appears that on the night of Wednesday, the 22d of December, one James E. Lanier, living near White Oak Mountain, in the county of Pinsylvania, Va. Accompanied by three negro men belonging to his father, whom he had procured to aid him in his murderous design, proceeded to the residence of his victims and murdered four persons, to wit—Betsy Fleeman, Eliza Fleeman, her daughter, and two small boys, children of said Eliza. Two of the murdred person were deliberately beheaded—one of the other two the brains were beaten out with an axe. The two boys slain were sons of the murderer. After dispatching the victims, Lanier piled their dead bodies in the middle of the floor, covered them with straw, and set fire to it and the house.

One of the boys killed, about four years of age, terrified at the death of his mother and grand mother, clasped the murderous father by the knee, and begged him to spare his life, but the words of his request were scarcely uttered, before his head was severed form his body by a single blow."

---

Adams Sentinel, Gettysburg, PA, February 7, 1842

Fillipe Guestoni

Little Murders:

From Defenders and Offenders:

Fillipe Guestoni.

On the morning of June 11, 1888, several pistol shots were heard in the apartments of Mr. & Mrs. Mari in New York. It appeared that Fillipe Guestoni, who had formerly been a partner of Mari, had become infatuated with Mrs. Mari and was violently jealous of her husband, whom he wished her to abandon. He had had many violent scenes with her and had been warned by the husband to cease his visits. On the above morning, he broke into her apartments while she lay in bed, shot her three times and then sent a bullet crashing into his own brain.

---

Defenders and offenders. New York: D. Buchner & Co., 1888.