Only in New England : the story of a gaslight crime Read online

  TO

  LUKE AND BENGTA

  AND HAP

  AND DICK

  AND RUSTY AND RUTH

  WHO KNOW THE POINT

  AND OF COURSE

  TO

  ROSAMOND

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  It is not often that a true-crime historian enjoys the opportunity of living in the very house where the victim was killed; of dining at the table where the victim, all unaware, ate a last meal; of walking in the garden where Nemesis walked; of using the inner door that led to the rendezvous with sudden death.

  Not only did I reside for several seasons in such a house, I saw its original furnishings, handled its original implements, read its period books, experienced its Victorian atmosphere—all left virtually intact when the door closed in the wake of that dark death many years ago. At which time the inheritors, for reasons manifest in the case history, sealed the house and left it to time and taxes.

  Sealed within the house were such skeletons in closets and secrets under rugs as would delight the heart of the most case-hardened mystery fan. Indeed, the house contained a built-in puzzle which might have been devised (and certainly would have fascinated) such past masters of the who-dun-it as Mary Roberts Rinehart or Anna Katharine Green. The closure of the domicile drew a curtain over one of the strangest unsolved murder cases in New England history.

  Like the famous Borden Case, this one involved the unusual charge of matricide. And, as in the Lizzie enigma, this one ended with a sinister question-mark posed over the head of the accused.

  Lizzie Borden presumably took an axe—a weapon quite as conventional as she was. The enigmatic figure in the present case, a former State Senator, was accused of slaying his mother with a weapon unique in the annals of modern crime. In reference, a device historically associated with David and Goliath. You put a weight in a sack and either hurled it or whirled it. A "slung shot." (Could this wicked item be the source of the expression "getting sacked"? Etymologists please advise.)

  But the Senator's mother may have died by a weirder device than that. I found this out while nosing around the spot generally designated as "X". And the old dark house divulged other previously undisclosed angles to the case. Added up with the benefit of hindsight and happenstance demonstration, they compose what seems to be a plausible solution for a murder mystery almost fifty years on the shelf.

  However, some of the official records which dealt with the case seem to be no longer extant. One of the oddest angles—namely, why the case was summarily shelved—remains a mystery. Because of these missing jigsaws, the writer could not pretend to offer a definitive case history or even a study containing facts of sociological or criminological significance. I prefer to present my story as fiction based on fact rather than as alleged fact based on fiction.

  All names of those involved in the actual case have been changed. Not so much by way of protecting the innocent as by acknowledgment that all of the facts were never brought to light, and, at this late date, never will be.

  To prevent embarrassment of the present owners, I have screened the location of the house, and have altered its exterior architecture and some of its appointments—in no way disturbing the basic arrangements which entered the modus operandi of the death trap. But "Quahog Point" is in the State of Erewhon.

  Similarly it was necessary to alter trial procedure and some of the testimony in order to preserve background anonymity. But the general substance is factually presented. Footnotes indicate verbatim quotes.

  The characters of my story represent types rather than the actual persons involved. Ed Brewster is a combination of several characters who might be found in the geographic region. Any further similarity to persons living or dead is unintentional or coincidental.

  The news excerpts are similar in content and tone to the newspaper accounts of the actual case. The letters presumably

  quoted are similar to those found on locale. The Police Gazette material came from issues cited. The actual house contained an old store ledger, and the "cheese entries" are factual. On locale was a grand piano swathed in cobwebs. The actual defendant did keep a jailhouse scrapbook like the one described and in the manner described.

  The legends in my story are so much story-telling. They are, however, closely similar to the tall tales told in the actual area. There was a mysterious recluse. There was a henna-haired charmer. There was a normally inanimate object that went leaping about in seeming defiance of the laws of gravity. There was a "customer" brought to the undertaker's in a wheelbarrow. The "stubborn Cornelia" story emanated from the locality's champion yarn-spinner.

  There was a household like Abby Bridewell's, complete with contentious sons, "bound out" orphan, doltish hired man, and nameless infant reported by an item of concealed correspondence. The victim in the actual case went to her mysterious death in the manner described herein. Relatives and neighbors made statements and depositions much like those in my story (I have researched many of the period, and their styling is fairly standard). In the actual case the elder son faced trial proceedings much like those herein related. The actual judge pronounced on the real case exactly as quoted in my text. And the fantastic denouement of my story follows the actual.

  For the rest, this book is fiction. I trust it conveys the spirit, if not the letter, of the real-life drama. If my characters are fictionalized, so were those who played the leading roles on the stage of reality. And when it comes to public images, aren't we all?

  T.R.

  "Quahog Point" April 1959

  ONLY IN NEW ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 1

  As someone once said, heredity deals the cards and environment plays the hand. Even today at Quahog Point there is in evidence enough heredity to demonstrate Mendel's formula to a black-eyed pea. The families that settled there in 1691 are still there. Those original settlers were of basic English and Welsh stock, and the modern derivatives hark back to the source.

  The originals came by way of a sailing vessel which ran aground in a booming nor'easter. The survivors crawled ashore and huddled in a cave. Eventually they salvaged enough timber from the wreck to build a communal hut. They lived throughout that pioneer winter on waterfowl and provisions from the ship. In the spring another wreck provided them with a windfall of live beef. The "Pointers" settled down.

  Sustenance from the two wrecks seems to have given these chance settlers an idea. According to legend, they became industrious ship-wreckers, and for a number of decades existed on the cargoes of vessels lured ashore by means of false lights and deceptive smoke-signals. Proof of this evil practice cannot be found in colonial records. You hear such stories of the settlers at Nag's Head, of the pioneers on Martha's Vineyard, of the early inhabitants of Block Island. The Quahog Pointers may or may not have lured ships in to the rocks where shattered hulls could be looted and drowned seamen robbed.

  The names of those original settlers were honest enough. Grimes. Babcock. Purdy. Jones. Robinson. Bridewell. Meek. Ord. They never went away. You can see succeeding generations of them on the headstones of the local cemetery. Crop after crop.

  Of course there are a few new names. Thorns and Bryces in 1775. Smeizers, Goodbodys, Hatfields and Ross crop up in the

  early 1800's. They are accepted as "founding fathers," but the older families still claim historic precedence. Anyone after 1850 is a Johnny-come-lately. The two or three Portuguese families that moved in circa 1900 were (and still are) foreigners. They may call themselves "Pointers," however, in contradistinction to "inlanders" or "summer people." These last, of course, are intruders.

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bsp; The ancestral families intermarried, and their collateral de-scendents intermarried. Eugenicists tell us this sort of inbreeding is bound to show. I found no evidence of it in the surface characteristics of the modern "Pointers." That is, they are not markedly endowed with six fingers, webbed toes and signs of congenital idiocy. However, nearly all of the old-timers were— as one modern old-timer put it—"vaguely related." The Point abounds with second cousins. There may have been an infusion of Indian blood during the colonial period. Perhaps that accounts for the clear black eyes possessed by some of the localites.

  Under-the-surface characteristics? The "inlanders" like to say that the "Pointers" have always been odd. City folk are liable to find them uncommunicative, unprogressive, and—yes—unreliable. But perhaps those are the opinions of sectionalism (urban dwellers are confirmed sectionalists), and the sectionalized "Pointers" were probably no odder than the inhabitants of any self-engrossed community, be it Greenwich Village or Montclair, New Jersey.

  That the Quahog Pointers practiced "togetherness" cannot be gainsaid. The same "togetherness" is found among the inhabitants of the Carolina Outer Banks, the natives of Nantucket, the movie colonists in Hollywood, brothers of the Rotary, the elite of Washington (D.C.) society, and in any exclusive insular commune whose members (to borrow from Tennyson) "think the homely cackle of their burg the murmur of the world." It must be conceded, however, that the "Pointers" were a little more together than most. The adhesion was imposed by physical geography.

  Environment. Isolation was the dominant factor. Quahog Point is out at sea. The town squats at the end of a long peninsula with beachfront on three sides and miles of salt marsh and bayberry

  ranging along the peninsular leg. On the land's-end headland overlooking the town stands a lonely lighthouse. Gulls swoop everywhere, and in season the marsh ponds are feathered with herons, drakes and mallards.

  In the old days—in fact, until recently—the Point was off the beaten track, and at times almost inaccessible. High tides flooded the peninsular marshes and often inundated the wagon-road across the dunes. Winter storms abolished road travel entirely. From January until the roadbed was repaired, Quahog Point was virtually an island cut off from the mainland save by an eight-mile picket line of lonesome telegraph poles. Weather permitting, there was a winter steamboat, twice a week. You could get there on foot if you had to, but it was hard, even risky, going.

  So Quahog Point evolved as a togetherish little community. At the period of this story, the resident populace numbered some seven hundred souls. So far as I could determine, that figure had remained roughly constant since the Gold Rush Era. Nineteenth Century Boston grew, and Providence grew. Bangor and Bridgeport grew. But at Quahog Point, remote, isolated, the economy precluded a population growth. Nor did geographic conditions invite it.

  The early "Pointers" had engaged in fishing and boat building. But the little harbor under the headland was too exposed for commercial shipping. And why haul timber and chandler's gear way out on a peninsula when yards were convenient at Charles Town, or up the sheltered Narragansett, or down New London way?

  Swordfish, mackerel, tuna, cherrystones—when New York was young the choicest seafoods at Fulton Market often arrived in barrels bearing the "Quahog" label. But Gloucester eventually gained the bigger game, the bigger name. By mid-Nineteenth Century, Quahog Point was out of the Grand Banks competition.

  However, for a brief period, which spanned the 70's to the late 90's, Quahog Point enjoyed a flush coincident with red plush. Some of the "Pointers" had joined the Forty Niners on the rush to California. As I gleaned it from local legend, these adventurers did not strike it rich in the gold fields. They hit the jackpot as carpenters earning one hundred dollars a day, as chandlers selling supplies at sixty times their wholesale cost, as laundry hands cleaning up at ten dollars a shirt.

  One of the "Pointers," a barber named Smeizer, came home with a clipper ship won by shears and razor. Another, Peleg Purdy, made a quarter of a million in 'Frisco real estate. Captain Nathan Bridewell, from Quahog Point, returned with a sea-bag full of gilt-edged mining stocks. This was the Bridewell who built the Surf and Sand Hotel—one hundred rooms and the longest double-deck verandah on the New England coast. It was the Surf and Sand that made of Quahog Point a fashionable beach resort.

  In its Gay Nineties heyday the Point was known as a second Newport. The ledger at the Surf and Sand bore the signatures of Diamond Jim Brady, Lillian Russell, Betcha-a-Million Gates. "Sapolio" Morgan put in with his yacht. An architect as renowned as Stanford White spent several seasons there. So did an artist as celebrated as Charles Dana Gibson. So did a writer as popular as Harding Davis, an impresario as successful as Daniel Frohman, an opera star as famous as Schumann-Heink.

  In this period the "summer people" built some ornate homes along the shore. A Temperance Society erected a fountain in the town's so-called Center (somehow the water was never hooked up, and from the day of its unveiling to this, the castiron fountain has remained as dry as Aunt Carrie Nation). Big paddle steamers with names like Shinnycook and Puritan came over from Montauk and down from Boston and around from New York. John Y. Gillion built the big gray wharf with the promenade pier. Absalom Purdy put up the Bayberry House. The Ords built two beach hotels. The Robinsons erected the fantastic Seagull with the glass-domed solarium, and the Ross family opened the Head-lander.

  Wiseacres would say the "Pointers" over-invested. Hindsight! Who, in those days, foresaw a revolution in the bicycle shop of Henry Ford? Railroads were the backbone of transportation. And here to stay seemed steamboating ("Take a trip up the Hudson, or down the Bay"). And trolley cars.

  So when a syndicate projected a trolley line down to the peninsula and out across the dunes—with a trestle across the marshes and a terminal at Quahog Center—the "Pointers" voted an enthusiastic franchise. Who couldn't visualize the benefits? Instead of a few hundred "summer people," weekend crowds of pleasure seekers. Trolley excursions. Chowder-and-marching clubs coming in. Clambake conventions. An all-season flow of vacationists with money to burn at Quahog Point.

  All of the older "Pointer" families went for the trolley. A Bridewell and a Babcock were prime movers, it was said. The Thorns, Smeizers, Rosses, Goodbodys—all of them bought in. Then the Century belatedly turned. A "tin lizzie" put the Lizzie Borden sensation in the shade. Almost overnight steamboating crawled up on the beach and died. America took to the highway in its Merry Oldsmobile, its Winton Six, its Stanley Steamer, its Packard, its Stevens-Duryea. Motoring, as everyone knows, was the ruination of the old-time summer resort.

  The Peninsular and Quahog Rapid Transit Line expired while the last mile of track was being laid. Before it was abolished by our recent Hurricane Hazel you could still see a section of trestle rusting in a stretch of open marsh. It was the trestle-work that really cost. That, plus a lot of stock juggling and inflation. Some of the "Pointers," deep in, went bankrupt. Nearly all of the investors lost a great deal of money.

  That was around 1910. The year the Surf and Sand saw its reservations drop to a dozen rooms, the Headlander closed its doors, the Bayberry suffered a disastrous fire, and the Seagull went into receivership. John Y. Gillion hanged himself in a cupboard at the back of Thorn's Fish Market. Neill Smeizer lost his fleet of mackerel boats and took a job tending bar in the Anchor Saloon. Joel Goodbody ran off with the wife of a visiting yachtsman. Absalom Purdy was jailed for the Bayberry holocaust (arson). And Earnest Bridewell started another term in the State Senate.

  The Bridewells had owned a reputedly sizable block of P. and Q. Transit stock. But they came off rather well. They managed to hang on to the Surf and Sand Hotel. They maintained an in-

  terest in the vestigial Quahog Trawler Company (three boats), the residual Quahog Kelp Company (three miles of beach with riparian rights), and the Neptune Chandlery (a yachting supply store). Then, too, there was the Bridewell homestead—the big, gray gingerbread house with the boxwooded gardens, the surrounding orchards
, the capacious stables.

  Other "Pointers" had to sell their boats, their horses, their surreys with the fringe on top. Some of them, desperate, began to sell acres of beach property, and even articles of furniture to acquisitive realtors and antique dealers—"inlanders." But the Bridewells kept up.

  The localites averred it wasn't the doing of the Bridewell Boys, although the Senator was smart enough. They laid the acumen and the credit to Abby Bridewell, the old mother. She it was who steered the family fortunes through the P. and Q. financial storm. She it was who managed the money.

  She had managed it, it seemed, when Captain Nathan Bridewell first fetched it home from California. It was she who had handled Nathan's investments, had conceived the Surf and Sand. After he became a paralytic in the 80's, she had done even better with her distaff hand. Now, herself in the eighties, she ruled the estate with matriarchal acuity and discipline. Abby Bridewell was the local Hetty Green.

  But with the calendar at 1910, Abby Bridewell did not have long to live.

  CHAPTER 2

  I first heard of the Bridewell case in 1939. On my maiden visit to Quahog Point. I went there with fish in mind. I came back with my thoughts on matricide.

  Luke Martin introduced me to the place. Come on, fold up your typewriter for a weekend. You need some oxygen in your system. I know a shore point where it's cheap. We can get a boat and a guide and try for swords. Luke is a champion salesman as well as angler, and he had me hooked. He was abetted by April weather and crocuses in Manhattan dooryards.

  We took the Post Road and cut over to Newport where we caught the coastal steamer. (It doesn't run any more.) Quahog Point was one of the regular stops. When we disembarked at the wharf I felt as though I had stepped into the past. The stubby fishing boats at wharfside. The nets. The old-timers posed like the one on the ad for cod-liver oil.

  The little town with its cottages and Western-style storefronts. The Center with the dry fountain. The steeple of the Shore-side Methodist Church. The old-time street lamps. The raffish beach hotels with the decaying verandahs and boarded-up windows. The broad "sea houses," lavishly shingled and dormered— architecture of the day when lumber was plentiful and carpentry could be afforded. Quahog Point was a period piece.