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Crime and Scandal

A Governor’s Son, a French Monster and the Murder of Schoolteacher Marietta Ball

On July 24, 1874, a Friday, schoolteacher Marietta Ball left her St. Albans, Vt., school at 3:30 in the afternoon. She planned to walk a wooded path to a friend’s house. She often spent the weekend and Sabbath with Foster Page before returning to Mrs. Abel’s boarding house for the week.

Illustration from The Trial of Joseph LaPage, the French Monster.

So no one in St. Albans was alarmed when Marietta didn’t show up at her boarding house. And when she didn’t arrive at Foster Page’s house on Friday, he didn’t worry either. She often stayed in town and came later to attend Sunday services. But he made inquiries the next day and soon the people of St. Albans found out their school teacher had gone missing.

A search party set out to locate Marietta, and found her lifeless body in the woods along the path to Foster Page’s house. “Her head was mangled as if beaten with stones and the evidence of outrage to her person was unmistakable,” the newspaper reported.

Rewards and a Manhunt

Marrietta Ball from The Trial of Joseph LaPage, the French Monster

The murder of 20-year-old Miss Ball incensed the town of St. Albans. Immediately a $3,000 reward was offered to anyone who could identify the murderer.

Suspicion fell on a burglar from Boston who robbed a jewelry store in Richmond, Vt., but nothing connected him to the crime.

The town was also reeling from a second murder. Two strangers had accosted and stabbed Joseph Minard, a young man passing through from Holyoke, Mass., to his home in Canada.

Two detectives worked to find out the truth. But as the weeks passed, the case grew colder. The detectives’ bills mounted, approaching $300 by November, and still they hadn’t identified the murderer.

Two hundred days after Marietta Ball’s murder, a St. Albans minister led his congregation to the site where her body was found. And with the winter wind blowing he preached his sermon surrounded by trees draped in black crepe. He urged his congregation to look after their fellow citizens. By May, the reward had been upped to $6000.

A Governor’s Son

Soon gossip began pointing to one young man in town, George Gregory Smith. George Smith’s powerful father, J. Gregory Smith, had served as a senator and governor of the state. His family holdings included a rail car manufacturing factory and he was president of a railroad. He had the means to cover up a murder committed by his son.

J. Gregory Smith

Stories began circulating: George Smith had attended a dance at the hotel in Bakersfield, and he had insulted Marietta Ball there. People had seen him visiting at her boarding house. Someone had seen a coach and team of horses on the night of Marietta’s murder near the crime scene, and could identify it as George Smith’s. One of the detectives in the case had supposedly mentioned his certainty that George Gregory Smith was involved in the murder of Marietta Ball.

The rumors infuriated Smith. In July of 1875, almost exactly one year after the murder, he demanded a public hearing. Witness after witness was called. All had heard the stories about George Smith, but one by one witnesses refuted them. He had not insulted Marietta Ball at a dance (he hadn’t even attended). He had not visited her boarding house. And the person who reported seeing the coach and team of horses said she could not identify who it belonged to. Finally, the detectives in the case told the packed town hall hearing that they had never said they believed George Gregory Smith murdered Marietta Ball.

Another Murder and a Clever Detective

Josie Langmaid from The Trial of Joseph LaPage, the French Monster

With George Smith’s name cleared, at least for the time being, the detectives went back to work on their case. Still, the murder of Marietta Ball might have gone unsolved but for a gruesome discovery on Oct. 4, 1875. That morning, the body of Josie Langmaid was discovered in the woods of Pembroke, N.H.

Josie Longmaid, 17, lived in Pembroke and attended Pembroke Academy. She had left her home at about 8:30 a.m. and headed off on her regular path to school. But she never got there. Along the way, someone attacked her ferociously. When the townspeople found her, they were stunned. She was assaulted and beaten badly, her head cut off. And her face bore the marks of what doctors thought was a heel strike from a boot. The town erected a memorial to Josie that still stands today.

At first, the town suspected a neighbor of attacking Josie. Bill Drew was a layabout. A story circulated that Josie had told her teacher that Bill Drew had “grossly insulted” her. He threatened to kill her and cut her into pieces if she told her father. Bill Drew was arrested, for fear he would flee. But a sharp-eyed detective had a hunch. The attack on Josie Langmaid struck him as suspiciously similar to the attack on Marietta Ball. He began piecing together evidence.

Link to the Marietta Ball Murder

Sure enough, he found that a man linked to the Marietta Ball case named Joseph Lapage now lived in Suncook, N.H. Detectives had detained and questioned Lapage in the Ball murder. He had lived in St. Albans at the time, but they could make no case against him.

In Suncook, Lapage “was known as a sort of wandering crazy person, yet he knew many persons there and frequently chased young girls.”

Joseph Lapage from The Trial of Joseph LaPage, the French Monster

Police arrested Lapage and searched his home. The search turned up an ax and a razor. Doctors identified human blood on some of his belongings.

The French-speaking community in New Hampshire took issue with the arrest. No one witnessed the crime, and some suspected police targeted Lapage because of his French Canadian origins. Coverage of the crime was coarse and xenophobic, with the media branding him “The French Monster.” Some may have even tried to clumsily cover for him.

But over the course of a nine-day trial in a packed Concord, N.H. city hall, an ugly story spilled out. Lapage originally came from Joliette, Quebec. There he had a troubling history. He had departed Canada shortly after his sister-in-law accused him of raping her. He had attacked and raped a cousin in Vermont, and even tried to attack his daughter, but his wife intervened.

His behavior patterns in Pembroke eerily resembled those in St. Albans. He stalked girls, asking where they lived, how they traveled to school and whether they had boyfriends. He carefully observed their movements so he would know just when to strike.

The Trial

After some legal wrangling over how much of his history prosecutors could use against him, a jury convicted Lapage of murder.

One observer of the trial came all the say from St. Albans. He noted: “We wanted to lynch him and sure it would have been a lucky thing for this other unfortunate girl, Josie Langmaid, if we had only hung him up on a tree to feed the crows and buzzards.”

Joseph Lapage had no more victims after Josie Langmaid. The State of New Hampshire hanged him in 1878.

Thanks to: The Trial of Joseph Lapage, the French Monster. This story was updated in 2022.

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Adam Worth, the Dandy Who Stole Georgiana From J.P. Morgan

In 1876, a British dandy whose real name was Adam Worth stole Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire, from Junius Morgan, who planned to give her to his son.

Junius Morgan was a wealthy Hartford banker living in London, father of the famous robber baron J.P. Morgan.

Adam Worth claimed to be a rich sporting gentleman named Henry J. Raymond. He made his living robbing people too, only in ways that broke the law.

Georgiana was a beautiful and wanton duchess who fascinated the English Victorians, as would her great-great-great-grandniece, Princess Diana, a century later. Thomas Gainsborough had painted her in one of his most admired portraits, Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire. Junius had started to collect European paintings, and he had his heart set on buying Georgiana. Only Adam Worth eloped with her first.

Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire

Adam Worth

Adam Worth, born a German Jew in 1844, emigrated to Cambridge, Mass., in the wave that brought Forty Eighters to America. The Forty-Eighters came to escape the fighting in Europe over German unification.

Worth ran away from home to Boston at the age of 10, and then to New York City. He began his criminal career as a soldier in the Union Army during the Civil War. Wounded in battle, he learned the army listed him as killed in action. So he became a bounty jumper, enlisting for the money and then deserting.

After the war his petty crimes of pickpocketing escalated into major heists. He broke a safecracker named Charley Bullard out of jail and together they robbed the Boylston National Bank in Boston of $1 million. When they realized Pinkerton detectives had discovered their trail, they moved to London.

Adam Worth began organizing heists while living in a fashionable neighborhood as Henry J. Raymond. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle later said he modeled Sherlock Holmes’ arch-enemy, the criminal mastermind Moriarty, after Adam Worth.

Adam Worth in prison

The Heist

By 1876, the Gainsborough painting of Georgiana had been reproduced many times in prints, on biscuit tins and on chinaware. An art dealer named William Agnew bought her for a little over 10,000 pounds, the highest price ever paid for a painting. So when he put Georgiana on display at his Bond Street gallery in London, crowds gathered to look at it.

Junius Morgan, who already owned several Gainsboroughs, read about Georgiana in The Times. Years earlier he had hired a genealogist and discovered he was related through his mother, Sally Spencer, to the duchess’s family. Though an extremely distant relationship, Junius took pride in it. And he decided to buy Georgiana as a princely gift to his son, the robber baron.

He dropped into the gallery and bought the painting on the spot for an undisclosed sum, probably around 15,000 pounds. But Agnew insisted that Junius allow him to display the painting for some weeks longer.

That gave Adam Worth time to plan his heist.

Worth claimed he stole the painting because he needed bail to spring his brother John from prison. He thought he could hold the painting hostage, asking the gallery owner to post bond for John in exchange for Georgiana.

Around midnight on May 27, 1876, Adam Worth put on his most fashionable clothes and a top hat for his date with the duchess. He brought along two accomplices to keep watch and to help him break into the gallery.

Once inside the Bond Street gallery, he cut the painting from its frame and rolled it up, paint side facing outward. He took the painting home, and it remained in his possession for the next 25 years.

Brother John

John Worth got out of prison on a technicality, so Adam Worth didn’t need to sell the painting. He couldn’t have, anyway. The theft received as much publicity as the heist from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum did decades later. Georgiana’s image was everywhere, and she had become too recognizable to sell without being caught. For years, though, people claimed they saw the painting much as they thought they saw Elvis after he died.

Adam Worth continued his life of crime, stealing property but never physically hurting anyone. After his theft of Georgiana he went to South Africa, where he stole $500,000 in uncut diamonds. Then he sold them through a diamond company he set up in London. He married, had two children and moved to the United States, where he smuggled the painting in a trunk with a false bottom.

In 1892, Adam Worth got caught robbing a money delivery cart in Belgium. He received a seven-year prison sentence, but won his release in five years for good behavior.

Upon his release he stole $4,000 worth of diamonds in London for his living expenses. Then he returned to the United States to visit his wife and children. While there he met with William Pinkerton and confessed everything about his life of crime. Pinkerton wrote it all down and published a book about him. He nicknamed Worth ‘the Napoleon of Crime.’ Called Adam Worth, Alias ‘Little Adam’ by the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, you can read it here.

Through William Pinkerton, Adam Worth arranged for the return of Georgiana in exchange for $25,000. The painting and the money were exchanged in Chicago on March 28, 1901. Then Adam Worth went straight and became a Pinkerton detective. He died in London on Jan. 8, 1902.

Georgiana Returns

J.P. Morgan

J.P. Morgan had already amassed a huge and priceless collection of art when he heard that Georgiana had resurfaced. The painting fascinated him, probably because of its huge cost and because his late father wanted it for him. And, possibly, because he had a string of fashionable mistresses not unlike Georgiana.

He contacted William Agnew, the dealer who repossessed the painting, and asked him to restore the painting and charge him whatever he thought a fair price for it. He had never laid eyes on it. Newspapers tried but couldn’t learn the price he paid. Morgan himself said, “If the truth came out, I might be considered a candidate for the lunatic asylum.”

He actually paid $150,000 for Georgiana.

The Morgan heirs kept Georgiana in the family for many years, once putting it on display briefly at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford.

In 1994, they sold the painting to the Chatsworth House Trust for 265,000 pounds. Georgiana now hangs at Chatsworth, seat of the Duke of Devonshire and her original home.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Hartford’s Sex Workers of 1913: An Intimate Portrait

In 1913, a juicy report on Hartford’s 200 sex workers came into such demand that the city quickly ran out of copies. When city officials refused to print more, Katharine Hepburn’s mother helped pay to publish another 500 copies.

Katharine Martha Houghton Hepburn.

Katharine Martha Houghton Hepburn and her physician husband Tom wanted to end the exploitation of women and the spread of venereal disease. Typical of the era’s social activists, they believed they could end poverty and prostitution through political reform.

They learned just how hard it was to reform the city government. And the salacious report of the vice commission exposed just how many sex workers plied their trade in Hartford — and how hard it would be to drive them out.

Hartford Sex Workers

During the late 19th century, Hartford’s social reformers starting pressuring city officials to do something about the sex workers.

In 1898, Hartford razed Gold Street tenements, which housed Irish and black families, to try to rid the street of prostitutes.

By 1907, the Hartford clergy shamed the police into storming bordellos in well-publicized raids. The police judge also changed the policy of fining sex workers and their pimps. Instead of fining them, he sentenced them to jail time.

But the police stopped raiding the bordellos once they learned the inmates would go to jail. So the judge resumed fining them, and the bawdy houses opened the next day.

Then in December 1911, Hartford Mayor Edward Hooker took the unusual step of ordering the police to close the city’s known whorehouses – about a dozen of them with about 200 sex workers.

A year later, three brothels were torn down, five became homes for law-abiding people and the remaining three were waiting for the ‘cops to let up.’ Thirty-five sex workers left Hartford.

Critics argued that closing the bawdy houses simply spread the so-called social evil beyond the red light district. Much better to tolerate and contain the problem, they said.

And so Mayor Edward Hooker appointed the vice commission to investigate and report on Hartford’s sex workers.

Vice Commission Report

The vice commission went to work exploring Hartford’s demimonde. In one salacious section, the report described a ‘carnival of fornication.’

On a rainy afternoon one of our investigators entered the wine room of this hotel, where a veritable “carnival of fornication” was in progress. Eight men and five women were smoking, singing and indulging in very, suggestive dances. Couples frequently left the room and returned in about half an hour, and the remarks made upon such occasions plainly indicated the nature of their occupation while they were away. None of the girls in this room were over twenty. The “fun” continued from 4 until 11 p. m.

The commission explored small apartments, private rented rooms, road houses, cafes, restaurants, private dining rooms or booths, hotels both great and small.

Hartford’s sex workers plied their trade in high-backed benches facing the bowling alley in a café. Some of the city’s saloons advertised ‘the joys to be found within.’

Hartford’s sex workers plied their trade in saloons. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, courtesy Library of Congress.

The so-called 50-cent houses took 25 cents from the sex workers for each trick and let them keep 25 cents. The first six dollars went for board, one dollar for the doctor and twenty-five cents for gas. The sex workers in such houses averaged 15 customers a night.

‘Go Ahead’

In one of Hartford’s respectable restaurants, detectives found a large room on the second floor with booths separated by curtains hung over iron poles. Each booth had a heavy table and four chairs. According to the report,

“Seeking advice from the waiter, one of our detectives was told to ‘Go ahead; nobody will come near this booth while the curtains are drawn’.”

The detectives noted drily that three booths were occupied and the conversation he overheard ‘corroborated the reputation of the place.’

White Slavers

New York City had long exported sex workers to Connecticut’s small cities. Since Hartford police tolerated the bawdy houses, sex traffickers came to the city during conventions.

According to the report, Hartford probably ranked third as a top destination for New York prostitutes.

A maritime tragedy in 1866 had exposed the scope of the human trafficking from New York. When the steamship Evening Star sank about a hundred sex workers died on their way to New Orleans from New York.

The vice commission report included a woman detective’s dealings with two white slavers from the Big Apple, 65-year-old Morris Cohen and his 32-year-old wife Lena. The detective pretended to be a madam interested in buying a brothel. The Cohens showed her around.

“We passed a saloon and a restaurant, and then opened what appeared to have been a stable door; up a flight of stairs into a low ceilinged room,” she wrote. “There was an oilcloth on the floor and a cylinder stove in the center of the room; at one side was an opening in the wall not as high as a table, supposed to be a ‘get-away’ into the next house. A young man sat there, a typical tough…

“There were two bedrooms divided by a wooden partition. The two beds had no linen on them, just a piece of dark, dirty oilcloth; there was a pillow on each with a case on, which was the only piece of white on the bed. There were three girls there. They appeared to be not more than seventeen.”

Police arrested the Cohens and the court convicted them.

Why Sex Work?

But what led the sex workers to their profession? Anarchist Emma Goldman wrote that exploitation by men forced women to sell themselves.

Emma Goldman in 1901

Others blamed low wages. In 1911, a U.S. Department of Labor study found that nearly half the prostitutes surveyed had previously worked in factories and shops before turning tricks.

The Hartford vice commissioners noted that most working women did not earn a living wage, estimated at $10 a week. But they concluded low wages didn’t explain why women turned to prostitution. Poverty did.

“It is not so much the insufficiency of the wage of the girl at the time she takes the first step towards prostitution as the environment of poverty in which she has grown up that gradually leads to the state of mind and to the situation which make that step possible,” the report concluded.

A 1913 slum interior.

Case Studies

The vice commissioners reported on an undercover detectives’ interviews with 66 of sex workers. They concluded the sex workers may have started out as respectably employed women who occasionally prostituted themselves for presents and tips. Then they joined the majority of sex workers and relied on prostitution to support themselves. Finally they ended up in brothels.

“Various factors in their lives, especially age, mental deficiency, alcohol, disappointment, and the venereal diseases hasten to unfit them for their particular business until, at the end, they either marry, die, become keepers themselves or land in jails and workhouses as common bums,” concluded the report.

A Hartford slum in the 1940s

Most – 61 of 66 – hadn’t yet reached 30 years old. Nearly all had hard luck stories. Many, like No. 52, said they were ruined by men.

“After the baby was born she was so ill that she never left her bed for ten months,” the report said. “He married a doctor’s daughter here. Since then she has been reckless. Her family cast it up continually until she had to leave home. This was eight years ago. Now she is careless in her appearance, rough in her manners and thoroughly hardened. She appears rather ignorant and claims she is in the life only for the money. She shows indications of being a drug fiend.”

No. 32 married the fellow who ruined her. He only stayed with her for six months after the baby was born. “When he found out I would not hustle for him he shook me,” she said. “I tried working in a factory but it was too hard.”

No. 33, another ‘low-type girl,’ started working in a brothel at age 16. She once serviced 23 men in one night. “She referred to it as the hoodoo number,” the report said. “That night she refers to as a banner night because she made $15 for herself.”

Nice Guys

No. 44 married when she was fifteen years old. Until the baby died her husband was all right. “After that he blamed me for its getting cold. We live in the same house but do not occupy the same room. He has a girl on Main Street whom he goes to see. She hustles the streets too.” Her husband knows of her going out. “I won’t divorce him and he could never save the money.”

No. 57 was married. Her husband forced her out to meet men. She was afraid to tell anyone.

No. 27, once a church girl, went to work in a factory. “Believe me, what I did not learn,” she said. She left home because her mother beat her so much. She and her beau left town and came to Hartford. But, she said, “We are going to beat it in three weeks. He is going to Washington, D. C, and I am going there to work during the big time.” (Inauguration week).

No. 64 uses heroin. She worked as a waitress in a cheap restaurant in Hartford, “I grew tired of the continual drudge in a restaurant; and too many chances were given me.” She married about eight months ago and supports her husband with her earnings as a prostitute. He has been out of work for some time.’ She has low ideas and is ignorant, but is a very fair looking girl.

Ain’t Safe

The report also maintained that closing the brothels reduced prostitution. “People are afraid to rent to women since the houses were closed,’ one anonymous person told the commission. “I have lived here all my life and I never saw things as they are now; a woman ain’t safe on the street after seven o’clock if she is straight.”

The vice commission recommended 15 ways to further raise the city’s moral standard. They included including keeping the brothels closed, repressing sex workers anywhere else they did business and paying for more detectives.

When the report came out, people snapped up 500 copies in two days. Suffragists printed up another 500 and sold them for 25 cents.

Hartford City Council did nothing. Suffragists like Kate Hepburn’s mother then passed out fliers attacking the majority of councilors for ‘tolerating commercialized vice.’ But 17 of the councilors who didn’t back up the vice commission ran for re-election, and 15 won.

According to the Hartford Courant, Hartford’s red light district stayed closed, but prostitution spread out. Sex workers found new ways to attract and service customers. They made assignations by telephone and met their customers in cars.

To read the whole report, click here.

Image of 1913 Slum: By Creator:Arthur S. Goss via Toronto History from Toronto, Canada – Slum interior, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24335179. This story was updated in 2022.

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Notorious Tom Bell – Minister, Teacher, Pirate, Thief . . .

In 1742 Tom Bell was probably the most well known product of Harvard College in America. Everyone knew how he dressed, what he looked like, where he traveled and how he lived. Because he was one of the most wanted criminals in the North American British colonies.

Bell was born in 1713 to a shipowner, Capt. Thomas Bell, and his wife, Joanna. They lived in Boston’s North End. The family sent the precocious Thomas to Boston Latin School, where he received a classical education. He was headed toward Harvard when, in 1729, his father died. The family found itself in debt, but it struggled to pay for Thomas to attend Harvard as planned.

Tom Bell entered the college in the fall of 1730, but by 1733 his college career reached an unceremonious ending. Sanctioned for stealing letters and lying, the final straw came when he stole a chocolate cake from a fellow student. Far behind in his studies, the college had grown tired of his promises to reform and pitched him out in the street.

Colonial engraving, Harvard College

Hearing the news that Harvard expelled Bell, his creditors pounced on him for unpaid bills. They sued him, winning judgments against him for unpaid debts, including 30 pounds to his tailor for silk suits. With his name dragged through the mud, Bell followed in his father’s footsteps and went to sea. He boarded a ship bound for England.

A Stroller is Born

For the next several years Bell would work at sea, returning to America from time to time. He gradually realized his education and exposure to the wealthier classes at Harvard had not gone to waste. Bell could speak Latin and read Greek, which put his education well ahead of most people in the colonies. He could pass himself off as a gentleman, and no one would suspect he wasn’t.

So Tom Bell simply became Francis Partridge Hutchinson or Thomas Wentworth Bell or Gilbert Burnet or John Rowland or William Bowdoin or whatever name suited him as he traveled up and down the colonies from New England to North Carolina. He gained notoriety as the Boston “Stroller” — a con man who strives to stay one step ahead of the law.

He was not terribly successful, however. In 1738 he was sentenced to be whipped in New York City for defrauding a merchant of 50 pounds. The next year in Philadelphia, he was spotted by a man from North Carolina who he had robbed years earlier. That episode landed him in prison. But Bell also gained some expertise in breaking out of jail — a skill that would serve him well.

Travels in Barbados

With his names and description widely circulating in North America, in 1739 Bell left for the Caribbean. In Speightstown, Barbados he undertook one of his more notorious escapades.

He had passed himself off as Gilbert Burnet, son of Massachusetts’ former governor.

A Jewish family invited the well-spoken governor’s son to a family wedding. But when Bell stole some of the wedding gifts, the young men of the family beat him up. This incensed the Christian residents of Speightstown, and they retaliated by destroying the Jewish synagogue and driving out the Jewish families.

Lord Fairfax

Bell nearly escaped Barbados unscathed. However, a merchant came forward and charged Bell with impersonating the brother of Virginia’s Lord Fairfax and running up an extensive tab. Again Bell was sentenced to a public whipping, but the governor of the island suspended a second sentence to brand Bell with an R on each cheek.

Tom Bell Becomes Rev. Rowland

In 1741 Bell returned to America and made his way to Princeton, N.J. Here a local man stopped Bell in the street and inquired if he wasn’t the Rev. John Rowland, a Presbyterian minister arriving from New England to preach. Bell corrected the man, who still insisted he looked exactly like Rev. Rowland. This presented Tom Bell with a golden opportunity. He proceeded to the next town and introduced himself as the Rev. Rowland. A local family invited Bell/Rowland to their home and offered him a horse to accompany them to the nearby church, where he was to preach.

The grateful “minister” accepted the use of the horse. But after traveling a ways toward the church he announced that he had left his notes behind at the house. He would return to collect them, and he asked the family to ride ahead and explain the delay. Naturally, Bell ransacked the house for any valuables and rode off, stealing the family’s horse.

Horse theft was a serious crime in 1741. Unfortunately for the real Rev. John Rowland, he was in Pennsylvania at the time delivering fiery sermons at religious revival meetings. When Rowland crossed into New Jersey he went to jail, accused of horse stealing. Rowland was eventually cleared of the charges, but the case was another prize for Tom Bell’s trophy case.

Tom Bell, Author

By 1742 Bell had returned to New England, this time to Newport, R.I. But by now the list of victims he had duped was a long one. No sooner had he arrived in the city than he got thrown into jail again, accused by a man he had swindled on a previous visit.

Painting of Newport, R.I. in 1818

From jail in Newport, Bell issued a public plea for forgiveness. He pledged to reform and promised to write a memoir to help others avoid his criminal path. It was yet another con. By 1743 he had returned to Philadelphia and was thrown in jail again for theft. By now his name was notorious and newspapers from New Hampshire to Virginia carried warnings that Tom Bell might be traveling again, looking for his next victim.

Bell continued his crimes and his sentences got more severe. A Massachusetts court convicted him of theft and sentenced him to be whipped and sold into servitude. Yet Bell always managed to escape. In one case he joined the militia, probably in lieu of jail, but he soon fled. A New Jersey court convicted him of counterfeiting. And later he was sentenced to death in Massachusetts. But he managed to escape the gallows.

Final Chapters

In between legal scrapes, Bell made a living as a schoolmaster or tutor. In 1752 he again announced, this time in Virginia and South Carolina, that he planned to publish “The Travels and Adventures of the Famous Tom Bell,” but he never did. Instead, Tom Bell returned to the Caribbean and took up piracy.

The final chapter of Bell’s life came in 1771 in Kingston, Jamaica. Bell had served as chief mate on a pirate ship that had attacked a Spanish schooner, robbing it of $14,000. Bell was arrested and convicted, along with the ship’s captain, and sentenced to hang. Tom Bell repented one last time and killed himself before he went to the gallows.

Thanks to Early Americans by Carl Bridenbaugh.

If you enjoyed this article, you might like: Stephen Burroughs Counterfeiter – A Revolutionary Success Story. This story was updated in 2022.

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The 1635 Perplexing Death of Maid Mary Sholy

In 1635, Mary Sholy had the tragic misfortune of meeting William Schooler. Schooler was not the sort of man the early settlers of Massachusetts wanted in their midst.

The Puritans who came to America were largely escaping intolerance. They wanted to establish a new country where they could practice their religion in peace. However, they also found America appealed to men and women who had other matters to escape. William Schooler was one of these

Schooler lived in London. He made his living selling wine and was married to an upstanding woman. But Schooler was a philanderer and a drunk. He would later admit his adultery. Schooler got into trouble in London when he wounded a man in a duel. He fled (likely to Holland) and from there made the journey to America.

In 1635, English colonists had small settlements under construction in Newbury, Mass. and Portsmouth, N.H. Schooler moved to the outskirts of Newbury and shared a house with another man. Their neighbors viewed them with a jaundiced eye because they lived as atheists.

Mary Sholy Goes Home

View of Ipswich from Castle Hill

Mary Sholy was a maid. She worked for a man in Portsmouth, and she had come to Newbury on personal business. The trip from Newbury to Portsmouth over land would have been a difficult one in 1635, roughly 30 miles on a narrow path, and a traveler would need to cross the Merrimack River.

Mary wanted to go home to Portsmouth, and William Schooler offered to guide her for a fee of 15 shillings. The pair departed Newbury, and it was the last time anyone would see Mary alive.

William returned to Newbury two days after he had left. Because of this unexpectedly quick return, the local authorities suspected something bad had occurred, and so they questioned William.

He told them he had crossed the Merrimack River with Mary, though not where he intended to, and guided Mary toward Portsmouth, then known as Pascataquack. However, she stopped part way and refused to accompany him any farther. He had then left her. He noted ominously that he had encountered a bear shortly after turning back.

Schooler’s neighbors noted that he had a scratch on his nose and blood on his clothing and hat. The blood, he explained, came from a pigeon he had killed to eat. The scratch was from a bramble. The magistrates at Ipswich thought the scratch was too large to be from a bramble. However, lacking any evidence of a crime they released Schooler.

William Schooler Can’t Keep Quiet

About one year later, Indians discovered Mary Sholy’s body in the woods, partially decomposed and undressed. She was about three miles from the Merrimack River.

William Schooler, meanwhile, had been conscripted to serve in the militia. He complained bitterly and loudly about this required service, and word of his complaining reached the governor who issued a warrant to arrest and question him.

When approached by court officers, however, Schooler assumed they planned to accuse him of murdering Mary Sholy, and he began loudly proclaiming his innocence. The protest renewed suspicions that Schooler had not told the truth about Mary Sholy, so he was again questioned.

Jailbreak and Back

This time the judges at Boston concluded he was guilty of a crime, and they sentenced him to death. While he was imprisoned on Powder Horn Hill awaiting execution, Schooler broke out of jail. But he returned and surrendered.

Some in the community, notably some ministers, protested the death sentence. The evidence against Schooler was purely circumstantial. They implored Schooler to confess to save his soul, but he refused. He had lied about certain details, but he had not murdered or harmed Mary Sholy in any way, he said.

John Winthrop

John Winthrop recorded the case in his journal. The clergy demanded that the court rescind the order of execution, but the court declined. Even if he had not actually murdered Mary Sholy, the court concluded, William Schooler had abandoned her in the woods and left her in great peril. And even when he suspected a bear endangered her, he did nothing. He was worthy of hanging for that behavior alone.

He was hanged on Sept. 28, 1637, protesting his innocence to the last.

If you enjoyed this article you might like Divorce, Murder and Madness: The Puritan Tuttles of the New Haven Colony. This story was updated in 2022.

Photo Credit: by John Phelan [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

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Unequal Justice for the Gay Puritans of New Haven Colony

Gay Puritans in 17^th century New Haven Colony were better off with money than without. Without wealth or social standing, they could go to the gallows for the crime of sodomy.

New Haven hanged three gay Puritans of low social status between 1646 and 1655. But a well-known gay Puritan escaped capital punishment because of his wealth and social standing.

Throughout the New England colonies, Puritans only executed those three for sodomy, according to historian Lawrence Goodheart.

Gay Puritans in New Haven

Puritans established New Haven Colony as a moral community that followed Biblical law. Sometimes that meant harsh punishment and unequal justice. Exposing sexual harassment got you whipped and disagreeing with a minister got you hauled into court.

Committing sodomy got you hanged.

Punishment for gay Puritans in New Haven Colony.

The New Haven Puritans made ‘Sodomiticall filthinesse’ a capital crime, defining it as ‘carnal knowledge of another vessel than God in nature hath appointed to become one flesh.’

The first of the three gay Puritans to die for their sexual orientation was William Plaine, a married servant in New Guilford.

John Winthrop

Theophilus Eaton, New Haven’s governor, consulted John Winthrop in Massachusetts about Plaine. Winthrop wrote in his journal that Plaine ‘corrupted a great parte of the youth of New Guilford by masturbation, which he had committed, and provoked others to the like, about 100 tymes.’

Plaine also questioned whether God exists. A hangman sent him to his death in New Haven in 1646.

Officials hanged another unnamed man for ‘unnatural filthiness’ in 1650.

The last of the gay Puritans to die on the gallows was John Knight. He had engaged in ‘filthyness in a sodomatical way’ with 14-year-old Peter Vinson and Mary Clark. Vinson and Clark received whippings for concealing evidence, and Knight died on the gallows in 1655. Puritan officials concluded he was ‘not fit to live among men.’

But another Puritan, widely acknowledged as gay, managed to escape hanging.

Nicholas Sension

Puritan officials charged Nicholas Sension, a wealthy resident of Windsor, with sodomy in the 1640s and in the 1650s. But they never punished him.

One of his frequent partners also worked as his servant, Nathaniel Pond. Before his death in 1675, Pond feared punishment and begged his fellow servants to stay quiet about Sension’s flagrant behavior toward him.

But in 1677, 12 men said Sension had approached them and offered to pay for sex. Witnesses then spilled the beans about his relationship with Pond. Two saw him having sex with Pond, and one cited a creaking bed as evidence.

Two other servants said Sension had tried to rape them. Daniel Saxton woke one night to find his underclothes off and Sension on top of him. Another servant, Thomas Barber, woke to find that Sension ‘with his yard [sought] to enter my body.’ He fought him off.

A jury found Sension ‘hast most wickedly committed or at least attempted that Horible sin of sodomy.’ But he only received a whipping and a fine.

Massachusetts Colonies

Puritan branding, from ‘Curious Punishments of Bygone Days.’

In contrast, Plymouth Colony to the north only whipped gay Puritans for sodomy. According to records, in 1637,

John Alexander & Thomas Roberts were both examined and found guilty of lewd behavior and unclean carriage one with another, by often spending their seed one upon another, which was proved both by witnesses & their own confession.

The court sentenced Alexander to a severe whipping, branding on the shoulder and banishment. Roberts, a servant, also received a severe whipping, but he returned to his master.

Massachusetts officials, too, seemed reluctant to execute gay Puritans. In 1629, for example, the ship Talbot arrived in Massachusetts. During the voyage from England, five ‘beastly Sodomiticall boyes … confessed their wickedness not to be named.’

The Puritan authorities sent the boys back to England.

With thanks to The Solemn Sentence of Death: Capital Punishment in Connecticut by Lawrence B. Goodheart.

This story was updated in 2022.

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