Norman Rockwell and a Gentleman Burglar

Editor’s note:
Sitting at a lunch counter recently I began thinking of Norman Rockwell and the idealized vision of America, especially small town life, presented in his work. Many of his best-known paintings from the 1950s have Stockbridge, Mass. — where he and his family settled in 1953 — as a backdrop and he often used his neighbors as models.

Growing up I was fascinated with Rockwell’s work, more for the nostalgic value than anything else, but I often wondered if life in a small New England town was as perfect as he pictured it.

I now work in the county where Stockbridge is located. As the Berkshire Eagle Newspaper’s crime reporter, my job is to write about the antithesis of Rockwell’s world. This is what my thoughts revolved around over a grilled cheese sandwich and a side of fries: has Stockbridge, historically i.e. 19th and early 20th centuries, had any big time crimes that shocked the nation? A quick perusal around the Internet seems to indicate that answer to be “not really.”

But I did come across an 1890s burglary spree that had the town’s citizens so frightened they upped the budget for crime fighting, the richer townsfolk began hiring private security and everyone became rather suspicious of strangers who happened to be passing through.

And so I present here “The Case of the Gentleman Burglar”

Charles Southmayd was awakened from a sound sleep with shouts of “the house is on fire!” Running to his bedroom door, he threw it open and there before him stood a man wearing a black mask around the lower part of his face and towels wrapped around his shoes to muffle his footfalls.

The 70-year-old put up a pretty good fight but the burglar, younger and stronger, threw the old lawyer to the ground, ransacked the bedroom and made off with $200 cash, about $4,800 in today’s terms, and quickly made his escape.

While the burglar didn’t behave very gentlemanly in that crime, in others in the fall of 1892 and summer of 1893, his soothing voice and civility shown through when several female homeowners were confronted by the six-foot-tall masked man. They reported that his voice and manners put them at ease as the stranger pointed his gun at them and went through their rooms looking for loot.

Most of the New York society women on vacation at Stockbridge whom the robber targeted demurred to his requests, this was the Victorian era after all, but Laura Field, the daughter-in-law of the eminent law reformer David Dudley Field, put up one hell of a struggle to try and keep a watch worth close to $30,000 (in today’s terms).

It was the robber’s second housebreak on that June 1893 night. He slipped unseen into the Field’s Laurel Cottage on Main Street and made his way through the home and into Laura’s bedroom. She awoke with a start, a hand over her mouth, hot breath on her face. The robber was on his knees groping around the bed looking for any hidden loot. When his hand found her watch she had hidden under her pillow any fear Laura had was replaced by anger.

“You shan’t have my watch,” she screeched, throwing her arms around his neck.

“Be quiet,” he told her, putting the barrel of his gun against her forehead, “or I shall shoot you.”

He straightened up to his full height, but Laura held on, clinging to him, her feet no longer touching the ground.

He argued with her, pleaded, told her she would be hurt, but she continued to fight him. The fracas awoke a valet who ran into the hall where the robber was trying to make his escape, Laura still hanging from his neck.

“Shoot,” she shouted. “Don’t mind me! Shoot!”

The valet stood paralyzed, pistol in hand, before turning around and heading back into his room, mumbling something about getting his robe. The robber finally heaved Laura off, throwing her into a wall, and made his escape out the back door. The valet, now wearing his robe, rushed down the stairs and wildly fired a bullet through the front door.

It wasn’t until seven months later that the man police believed was responsible for the crimes was captured in Long Island City, Queens. Michael Sherlock and his gang were responsible for a number of break-ins in Long Island, mostly preying on the same caliber of very wealthy victims as those in Massachusetts. Around this same time, another gang was picked up in Connecticut, and there was some talk that perhaps that gang’s leader, Thomas Kinsella Jr., a Stockbridge native who served time for accidentally shooting and killing his mother-in-law in 1887, was the “real” gentleman burglar.

While police were able to link recovered items, including Laura Field’s watch — described as small, of Swiss make, with a blue enamel case encrusted with diamonds — to Sherlock, it was believed Kinsella was the leader of the gang terrorizing Stockbridge of which Sherlock was a member at that time. Either way, Sherlock was given the infamous appellation, but both men went to prison. Kinsella did time in Connecticut for a series of Bridgeport break-ins, Sherlock went down for the Stockbridge crimes.

The Canaan Child Murder

Everyone who knew Angeline Brown loved her. The 12-year-old, called “Angie,” was bright — she spoke three languages — talkative and sweet. She had reddish hair, blue eyes and was small for her age. She had moved to Canaan, N.Y. with Joseph and Josephine Brown just a few months before her tragic death in an accidental fire Dec. 5, 1867. At least everyone believed it was an accident, at first.

The truth of Angie’s life and death would soon grip the entire nation and end in the execution of Joseph Brown, also known as Joseph Barney, and the acquittal of his wife for the girl’s murder.

Around 8 p.m. that December night, Walter Gordinier, the Brown’s neighbor, saw the flames licking out from the pantry in the basement where the Browns lived, immediately rushed over and began throwing water on the fire. Soon other neighbors joined him in trying to put out the conflagration. Within a half-hour the men were able to enter the house, and it wasn’t long before they discovered the body. They also discovered the first clue that not all was as it seemed at the Brown home.

“I found a bureau in the house,” Gordinier would later recall, “and a pass book in it with the name Barney upon it.”

The little dead girl, her body badly burned, was brought to Gordinier’s home and soon the Browns arrived from a neighbor’s house where they had gone for the evening. Joseph was hysterical, continually asking to see “his little girl.” At one point he even fainted. Gordinier brought Joseph some rum and a local physician, Asarich Judson, looked in on the apparently grieving father. The doctor would later tell the court that he believed Joseph was faking his behavior. No witnesses recalled if the couple even shed a tear over their loss.

An inquest was held and Angie’s death was found to be accidental. It was very shortly after this that Joseph and Josephine left for Connecticut to bury the girl. But they made one stop first, a stop that would be their eventual undoing.

The couple had taken out a life insurance policy worth $5,000 — about $77,000 today — on the girl from the Travelers Insurance Co., of Hartford, Conn., just before her death. The policy was for three months only and there was less than two weeks left on it when Angie died.

The couple stopped in Westfield, Conn., and applied to the insurance company for the amount of the policy and then continued on to West Granby, in the same state, to bury the girl.

It wasn’t long before the insurance company began to suspect foul play. Insurance investigators exhumed the girl’s body and also descended on the scene of the fire in Canaan and began questioning witnesses. Their conclusion was quite different from that of the coroner’s inquest.

The insurance investigation revealed there were remnants of a cord wrapped around Angie’s neck with a deep indentation beneath. Their investigation would also show that the girl’s body had been found in a closet, wrapped in combustible materials, the door tightly shut.

The Browns were arrested in Hartford, Conn., transported by train to Hudson under armed guard and held in the county jail to await trial. By this time newspaper readers from coast to coast were eagerly following the story.

Information soon surfaced concerning the Browns and their presumptive daughter. Angie’s real last name was Stewart, she was from Dayton, Ohio, and had been taken from her widowed mother, Mary Ann Stewart. Mrs. Stewart had been the washerwoman at the home where the Browns had been living in Dayton and had agreed to let the Browns take Angie with them on a trip to the East Coast.

“Angie will see more in one month than you will ever in all your lifetime,” Josephine told the woman.

The Browns left Dayton Sept. 17, 1867 and headed to New York. It would be the last time Mrs. Stewart would ever see her child.

The “diabolical and hellish plot” — in the words of Columbia County District Attorney John Welch — had been conceived in Dayton, and predated Angie’s abduction. The Browns’ first choice was another child from Dayton by the name of Coburn. The girl’s mother had initially agreed to let them adopt her, but at the last minute pulled out of the deal.

“I don’t care a damn,” Joseph said. “If I can’t get one I can get another.”

Joseph Brown, or Joseph Barney, as he was known in Dayton was a house painter by trade, or so he said. Back in Hartford, where he had met Josephine, whose last name had been Fox, he owned a house of prostitution. Much ado was made concerning the fact both were divorced, something still uncommon at the time. Josephine told two different stories about when and where they had been married — in either New Haven or New York City — and this was just one of many discrepancies in her story.

Joseph had been born in the United States but grew up in Canada and had a French accent. The 34 –year-old was slim, had dark hair and large eyes. One reporter commented that he had “rather good features” and was “not repulsive,” something that must have been confusing in a time in which physical features were believed to define internal characteristics.

“There was nothing on the surface to indicate the demoniac spirit which the commission of … the murder of this little girl evinces,” continued the reporter.

Joseph was brought to trial in Hudson, and after deliberating for 31 hours, the jury found him guilty and threw him “on the mercy of the court” for sentencing. Judge Rufus Peckham sentenced him to death and on Friday, May 29, 1868, he was hanged.

As he stepped up to the gallows Joseph gave a long and impassioned speech concerning what he considered an unfair trial and especially focused on the conduct of Peckham, who, it seems, was rather stilted toward the prosecution.

“Standing here with a rope around my neck, ready to draw me up when I get through with these few words, I haven’t seen much mercy yet — not much,” Joseph told the 300 spectators. He ended by declaring his innocence in Angie’s death.

After kneeling for a brief prayer he stood and a hood was placed on his head. When the sheriff pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket, the executioner’s signal, Joseph’s body sprang high into the air and into eternity, where, the defendant had told the crowd just minutes before, they would one day learn the truth.

Truth, or at least Josephine’s version of it, would come out after her trial the next year. Indicted as an accessory before the fact, Josephine went to trial April 19, 1869 in a packed Columbia County courtroom, with a large number of “giddy, thoughtless girls” who “snicker at nothing” in attendance, according to one reporter, obviously put out by the ladies’ behavior.

The four-day trial saw many of the same witnesses from Joseph’s trial take the stand, but with a very different result. After a six-hour summation by Josephine’s attorney, Robert Andrews, and 18 hours of deliberation by the jury, she was found not guilty. Almost immediately after her release she told reporters that her husband had asked her to reveal — if he were executed and she acquitted — the truth of the matter: That Joseph had planned Angie’s murder, but that another man had carried out the actual deed. She never said who the true killer was, but swore that the full details had been written in French by Joseph and would be translated. It appears the letter, if it existed at all, was never published.

Josephine’s last appearance in the pages of the nation’s newspapers came two months later. Josephine was by this time living in Pittsfield, Mass., and was involved with a man jailed in Hudson. A confiscated letter from Josephine to her new beau indicated that someone had offered to buy her a brothel and give her the deed. She made it clear that she would share any of her gains with her new lover and that the poor sap in Pittsfield would “soon find himself alone.”

As for Angie’s mother, Mrs. Stewart’s little girl continued to visit her in dreams and “visions.” In them Angie was always crying.