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Avis Linnell, Murdered by Her Minister, Inspires ‘An American Tragedy’

The 1911 murder of a 19-year-old music student, Avis Linnell, in the Boston YWCA was one of the most sensational crimes in New England history.

She was several weeks pregnant by a charismatic minister who had dumped her for a wealthier woman. For a while, the minister thought he had committed the perfect crime. He was wrong.

Avis Linnell

Avis Linnell was born in Hyannis Port Dec. 19, 1891. She graduated from the high school in 1908, and from the Normal School in 1910.

She had ‘an exceedingly bright intellect which carried her through school with ease, of a lively and happy disposition, which endeared her to her friends,’ according to the Sandwich Observer.

Avis had a soprano voice described as ‘angelic.’ She sang in the choir at the small Baptist church in Hyannis that she attended with her parents and three sisters.

In 1908, a new preacher, Clarence Richeson, came to her church in Hyannis. People said the tall, handsome giant from Virginia was touched with mysticism. Avis fell in love with him, and he returned her feelings. On her 19^th birthday, he gave her a ring.

Richeson employed an energetic Southern style of preaching. The conservative Cape Codders couldn’t take his exuberance, so he resigned in 1910.

Boston

Clarence Richeson

Richeson got a job at the prestigious Immanual Baptist Church in Cambridge. He then convinced Avis to apply to the New England Conservatory of Music. She did, and in the fall of 1910, she moved to the YWCA in Boston.

In early 1911 Avis told her mother they had broken up. In March, Richeson announced his engagement to Violet Edmands, a well-connected, rich young woman from Brookline.

On Oct. 14, 1911, Avis Linnell was starting her second year at the New England Conservatory when she was found nearly dead on the floor of the YWCA bathroom. She died before an ambulance arrived. An autopsy revealed she was several weeks pregnant and that she had taken cyanide. Her death was ruled a suicide.

But several hours after Avis died, a YWCA matron called Richeson to tell him what happened. He said he barely knew her and demanded to know why she called him. The matron replied that he’d had lunch with her that day and ought to know.

Richeson may still have thought he was safe from suspicion. The matron told him Avis had not regained consciousness after she was discovered. But the crusading newspaper editor of the Boston Post, Edwin Grozier, brought him to grief. Grozier, who came up with the idea of the Boston Post cane, put his reporters on the story. They found Richeson had bought the cyanide from a druggist in Newton, Mass..

Suicide Ruled Out

The Post demanded a police investigation into the death of Avis Linnell. The medical examiner, Dr. Timothy Leary, ruled out suicide as a cause of death.

Excerpt from confession

Richeson was soon in the Charles Street Jail. On Jan. 12, 1912, he signed a written confession that he killed Avis Linnell. He had given her capsules laced with cyanide, telling her it would induce an abortion. He was indicted, convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair.

While in jail, Richeson tried to castrate himself. His lawyers sought clemency on the basis of insanity.

Massachusetts Gov. Eugene Foss then asked doctors to look into Richeson’s mental health. It turned out he had a family history of insanity, and as a boy he had received several blows to the head.

As a theological student he had asked three women to marry him. He had gotten caught cheating at college, and one of the trustees wrote to his father describing as deranged.

Dr. L. Vernon Briggs, director of the Massachusetts Society for Mental Hygiene, concluded Richeson had delusions, hallucinations, amnesic periods and delirium. Wrote Briggs,

He had exhibited signs and had had attacks of this disease for years, had been recognized as mentally unsound by several physicians who advised specialists in mental diseases to attend him.

Author Theodore Dreiser took a different view. He believed Richeson murdered Avis Linnell because he aspired to wealth and fame through a marriage to Violet Edmands. Dreiser wrote six chapters of a novel based on her murder, but then abandoned it to write about another murder. The work became the novel An American Tragedy.

Clarence Richeson died in the electric chair on May 21, 1912, and now lies buried near his family home in Virginia.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Henry Cabot Lodge–Statesman, Historian and Witness to a Kidnapping

One day in 1860, Henry Cabot Lodge was sitting on the porch of the little school he attended in Nahant, Mass., when a buggy came roaring down the road followed by two men in a trap.

The carriages stopped in front of the school, the men jumped out and rushed into the building. Moments later they came out carrying 8-year-old Allen Rice, followed by the headmaster and screaming children.

One of the men had muttonchop whiskers. He threw Allen into the buggy and off they galloped.

Henry Cabot Lodge wouldn’t see his classmate Allen Rice for another 20 years, when he was a rising U.S. congressman and Rice was editor of the North American Review, the first U.S. literary magazine.

Henry Cabot Lodge in 1890 by Johnn Singer Sargent

The Back Story

Allen’s mother was the former Miss Elizabeth Thorndike of Boston, a wealthy young lady who married Henry Rice of Baltimore. Before Allen was born she suffered such poor health her survival was questionable.

Charles Street Jail

Her husband drew up a will for her that gave all her property to him and, upon his death, his heirs. She refused to sign the will. He began to abuse her. She claimed at one time he tried to poison her. Finally, she went to Indiana and got a divorce. When she returned to Boston she was stunned to find a Massachusetts court had given custody of 8-year-old Allen to her husband.

The Rices drew up an agreement that Allen would stay with them alternately on his vacations from school. But then Henry wouldn’t let Elizabeth see her son.

So Elizabeth kidnapped the boy and spirited him away to Europe, dressed as a girl.

The Trial

When Allen was abducted, 10-year-old Henry Cabot Lodge was the only one who got a good look at the kidnappers. He was the scion of the Cabots, a Brahmin family that inspired the doggerel:

And this is good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots,
And the Cabots talk only to God.

Two days after Henry saw the abduction, his father took him to the Charles Street Jail in Boston. There they met Allen’s father and some detectives. Henry had to walk down the jail’s corridors and look through the iron bars to see if he could identify the men who took Allen.

Henry Cabot Lodge stopped at the last jail cell and said, “That is the man who took Allen.”

The boy testified twice before grand juries and the panel indicted the kidnapperer.

The boy enjoyed the grand jury proceedings and the attention that came with it. But when called to testify in open court, he got nervous – especially because his father had taken ill and couldn’t go with him to the courtroom. John Ellerton Lodge promised his son a gold watch if he told the truth and behaved well.

On the day of the trial, Henry Cabot Lodge waited nervously in the witness room until he took the stand. Hundreds of eyes watched him as he swore to tell the truth. Despite the butterflies in his stomach, he told the story clearly and well.

Allen Rice in costume for a party.

Cross Examination

Then attorneys hired by Elizabeth Rice cross-examined him. They badgered him with questions, but he stuck to his story. Then they tried to confuse him. Finally the judge told the lawyers, “I think that will do. It is perfectly evident that the boy is telling the truth.”

Young Henry left the stand and went to sit with his mother in the witness room. Suddenly he started crying and said, “Oh! I made a mistake, I must go back.” He ran back into the courtroom and stood in front of the judge. “I made one mistake,” he said. “May I correct it?”

The judge said, “Certainly,” and the boy corrected his slight error.

Nickerson went to jail. Henry Cabot received a gold watch engraved with the date of the trial, which he wore for the rest of his life.

To read about how Elizabeth Rice abducted her son, click here. This story was updated in 2021.

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The Sensational Surrender of Four Nazi U-boats at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard

On May 15, 1945, onlookers tried to glimpse the first of four Nazi U-boats towed up the Piscataqua River to surrender at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. The news media then went into a feeding frenzy.

U-234 surrendering to the USS Sutton.

Germany had surrendered to the Allies on May 7, 1945, bringing World War II closer to an end.

The excitement over the tangible evidence of U.S. victory increased as three more Nazi U-boats followed over the next five days. The shipyard then studied the technologically advanced Nazi subs and their cargo.

The Nazi U-boats

The U-boats, sophisticated and much-feared maritime predators, traveled together in wolf packs to sink their targets. They attacked commercial shipping in order to starve the Allies of supplies. At first they had remarkable success, sinking about 3,000 vessels, mostly merchant ships. They also killed more than 5,000 seamen and passengers.

More people died in attacks by Nazi U-boats than at Pearl Harbor.

“The only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril,” wrote British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Eventually the U-boat menace subsided by 1942 when the U.S. entered the war and developed effective anti-submarine measures. But their fearful reputation persisted, contributing to the drama on the Piscataqua River in May 1945.

One of the feared Nazi U-boats by Ferrer Dalmau

Fangs Yanked Out

The 245-foot U-805 was the first to arrive. She had surrendered in the North Atlantic and was towed into Portsmouth Harbor. Green dye marked the spot for the rendezvous with a tugboat carrying Navy officials and news reporters.

Three ‘surly, expressionless’ German officers appeared on board. They officially surrendered at 4:25 p.m. at the mouth of the harbor. The submarine was then taken to the shipyard for publicity photos. One caption read, “Its fangs yanked out, this prize U-boat will prey no more upon Allied shipping in the Atlantic.”

A bus took the prisoners to Portsmouth Naval Prison, commonly known as The Castle, where Office of Naval Intelligence interpreters interrogated them. They wanted technical details about jet aircraft, ballistic missile, guided bomb and nuclear weapons technology.

WHEB-AM reporter Charlie Gray scored an interview with a captain of one of the U-boats. He described Lt. Albert Finster as a ‘typical dyed-in-the-wool Nazi.’ Finster’s interview caused a stir because he blamed England for the war. He also said Allied bombing ruined his native town of Hamburg.

Two more Nazi U-boats arrived the next day: At 2 pm, U-873 was towed into the harbor, followed by U-1228. That night, a wire service report added to the excitement. The USS Sutton captured a U-boat near Newfoundland with three high-ranking German officials and two dead Japanese scientists aboard.

The Biggest Prize

Portsmouth Naval Prison, where prisoners from Nazi U-boats were first taken

On Friday, May 18, the public eagerly awaited the arrival of the fourth and last of the Nazi U-boats. Rumors circulated about its cargo. The submarine was headed to Japan, which was still in the war. Supposedly it carried personnel and materiel to help the Japanese war effort.

U-234 arrived in Portsmouth at 7:30 am on Saturday, May 19, greeted by swarms of journalists. The biggest prize of all the Nazi U-boats, the high-ranking officers aboard made it a major news story.

The submarine carried a disassembled Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter, prototypes, technical descriptions of new weapons and several senior weapons technicians. The two Japanese scientists were not on board. They had committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills, and the Germans buried them at sea.

The U.S. government kept the secret about part of U-234’s cargo: 1,232 lbs. of uranium oxide. Scientists later used it in the Manhattan Project for the Little Boy atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

German General Ulrich Kessler, assigned as the Luftwaffe liaison in Tokyo, made an impression as the stereotypical Nazi general. Tall and formal, he wore white gloves, a long leather greatcoat, polished leather boots and an Iron Cross around his neck. He seemed to enjoy the publicity, noted WHEB’s Gray.

Kessler spoke in fluent English with a British accent. When asked how he felt about surrendering, he said, “I was in the last World War. I’ve been through it before. I’ll probably go through it again.”

The Dark Side of the Story

The Germans complained of their treatment. A subsequent investigation by the U.S. Navy confirmed their abuse. Navy prize crews seized the possessions of the Nazi U-boat crews and saved them as souvenirs. They also distributed them to local boys in small boats as the Nazi U-boats made their way up the Piscataqua. Or they stockpiled them at the prison, where corrections officers looted and sold them.

Among those items taken: pep pills, revolvers, canned goods, parts of German uniforms and decorations. Under the Geneva Convention, the U.S. should have returned the prisoners’ property.

After the crewmen of U-873 were interrogated in Portsmouth, they were then taken to the Charles Street Jail in Boston. There, they awaited transfer to a prisoner-of-war camp in Mississippi. As military officers marched them through the streets in handcuffs, crowds pelted them with garbage and insults.

Their commanding officer, Friedrich Steinhoff, returned to his cell with his face bloody and swollen. An ONI interrogator had ordered a big, strong Marine to beat him. Steinhoff bled to death in his cell, possibly from slashing his wrists with his broken glasses.

Ironically, he had a brother, Ernst Steinhoff, a rocket scientist. Ernst Steinhoff also surrendered and helped the United States with its rocketry program.

Fate of the Nazi U-boats

The U.S. Navy then took U-805 on several ‘Victory Visits’ to ports on the U.S. East Coast before sinking her.

U-1228 was then sunk in 1946, and U-873 was scrapped in 1948.

Finally, U-234 was torpedoed off the Cape Cod coast in 1947.

With thanks to SeacoastNH.com. This story about the surrender of Nazi U-boats was updated in 2022.

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