I'm happy to announce that my newest book, "Murder & Mayhem in the Hudson Valley," will be out in early 2017 from Arcadia Publishing and The History Press. I'm hard at work researching and writing the stories for the book and boy there was some pretty outrageous crimes in the area back in the day. Here's a taste.


In 1851, Ann Hoag, to all appearances a good wife and mother, murdered her husband of many years with arsenic in order to be with her lover, but she paid for her passion at the end of a rope in Dutchess County, just after giving birth to a sixth child.

In November 1855, the schooner Eudora Imogene was found scuttled in Long Island Sound off the coast of Westchester County. The captain and a mate were missing but there was evidence that a brutal double murder had been committed with everything pointing to the ship’s cook, George Wilson. The man would eventually be executed for the crimes. 

After authorities discovered a man’s remains in the kitchen of Oscar Beckwith in Austerlitz, N.Y. in 1882, he was dubbed the “Austerlitz Cannibal” by the New York press. The 78-year-old hermit almost got away with the crime after escaping to Canada, but an intrepid investigator hauled Beckwith back to Columbia County, New York, where he was found guilty after two trials and executed for his crime three years after the killing. He was the last man to be hanged in New York state. 

My book "Gilded Age Murder & Mayhem in the Berkshires" is now available from Arcadia Publishing/The History Press. Fourteen heart-pounding true crime stories from between 1870 and 1911 await! Check it out here.

The Battle and the Damage Done

Editor's note: In honor of the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Iwo Jima, I'm posting this story I wrote a few years back that appeared in the Register Star newspaper in a slightly different version. 

Marines storm the beach at Iwo Jima.

It was 1945 and Fred Doty was on a transport leaving Iwo Jima. Looking back at the 21-square mile volcanic island, he could see the seemingly endless rows of graves of his fellow Marines on shore, and he wept. 

“I’m alive,” he thought. “I’m coming home.”

He had survived one of the toughest battles of World War II and now he was heading back to the U.S. and to safety, but for years afterwards the horrors he experienced stuck with him, a wound that refused to heal. 

During his time on Iwo Jima one of his jobs had been to help bury his fellow soldiers.

“It was pretty rough,” he recalled recently, his emotions rising to the surface. “They had crewcuts just like me. It could have been me.”

Doty had been on the island for months, beginning in February 1945 when his ship, the USS LST 84, a tank landing craft, was among the nearly 900 vessels in the largest armada invasion of the Pacific War up to that time. Doty was a corporal attached to the 5th Amphibious Corps of the Fleet Assault Marine Force.

Doty had volunteered to stay on the bridge to watch for enemy aircraft as the armada made its way to the target since he had a cracker jack ability to spot enemy aircraft. He slept on the bridge in all kinds of weather and kept a look out for the Japanese suicide pilots, known as Kamikaze, who crashed their planes into U.S. ships.

“The worst was the suicide pilots,” he said. “They were very scary.”

Thirty miles from Iwo Jima, his ship came under fire. He alerted the crew and began feeding ammunition to both the gunners helming the 40 millimeter weapons and the gunner at the 50-caliber machine gun.

“We got credited with shooting down three or four (suicide pilots),” he said. “I got a Bronze Star for it.”

Doty said they were lucky. At one point the ship had been the last in the convoy, but traded spots with another ship, the USS LST 477. On Feb. 21, 1945 a Kamikaze pilot managed to slam into the side of LST 477, dropping a bomb on deck just before doing so.

“It got hit broadside,” he said. “I wouldn’t be here today…Someone was looking out for me.”

A few days later Doty disembarked onto the beach, just before the famed raising of the American flag on Mount Suribachi by Marines and a Navy corpsman.

He recalled the incessant shelling of the beaches by the Japanese who were extremely well dug in at Iwo Jima, with a honeycomb-like defensive position with 16 miles of tunnels connecting 1,500 separate rooms dug out of the rock.

“It was a lot of hell,” he said of the battle that raged for more than a month, from Feb. 19 to March 26, 1945.

The island was considered home soil by the Japanese, while the Americans thought it vitally important as a strategic position due to its location.

Long range B-29 bombers were executing bombing raids on Japanese cities, but the U.S. had no fighter escort planes with the range necessary for the long flights. Iwo Jima, which had three airfields, was perfect for a fighter escort station.

“That’s why we were there,” he said. “For the airfield.”

While Doty liked combat—“I was young and crazy,” he remarked—often going out with a buddy to shoot Japanese snipers with their .45s when troops were “mopping up,” he also found his time there to be frightening.

The nights were the worst. There were always two men to a fox hole to guarantee a modicum of safety.

“One slept while the other kept look out,” he said. “The Japanese would sneak up on you in the middle of the night, cut your throat and take your canteen.”

On one of these long, often mundane nights, a nearby ammo dump suddenly went up with an earth-shaking blast that jolted those lucky enough to get some sleep awake. Doty was just a few yards away from the blast. Clouds of white sulfur blanketed the area requiring the use of gas masks, which clouded the soldiers vision  and made it that much harder to see if an enemy attack was on the way. 

None came that night, but Doty, scared by what happened, had a terrible night. 

He was still on Iwo Jima on Victory over Japan Day, Aug. 15, 1945, when the end of the war was announced.

“We were getting ready to go to Japan,” he said. “I guess they figured if (the Fifth Amphibious) could take Iwo Jima, we could take anything.”

The planned invasion of Japan, code-named Operation Downfall, never materialized, due in part to the U.S. dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, followed by the detonation of another over Nagasaki on Aug. 9.

Doty had heard rumors of a new weapon.

“There were a lot of Air Force men flying in and out of Iwo Jima,” he said, and they told him about “something special. A special bomb.”

With the war over, Doty was returning to Columbia County, N.Y. where he was born and raised, but while the fighting had ended he continued to suffer the effects of his experiences.

Back home in Columbiaville he took a boat out to the Hudson River, but when a seagull swooped down close to him he began to suffer flashbacks from the war.

“That’s when it all started,” he said.

“He hated to go to sleep,” recalled his wife of more than 60 years, Shirley. “We’d be getting ready to go to bed and he’d just be starting a project around the house.”

Doty wasn’t alone. He said several of his friends also suffered from their experiences.

For him, joining the Civil Air Patrol after the war and working with young people helped him.

“It eased my mind,” he said.

Even with his harrowing war time experiences, Doty said he would do it all again.

“I’m proud of what I did. I’m proud to have served,” he said. “This is the greatest country in the world.”

Over there: They fought for America and respect

Editor's note: I'll be posting some stories I've written over the last few years related to World War I (1914-1918) and World War II (1939-1945). While these stories aren't strictly old-time crime related, they deserved to be reissued and I felt this was the most appropriate venue of my many blogs in which to present them. So without further ado, here's the first of three, "Over there: They fought for America and respect."
A version of this story appeared in the Register Star newspaper in February 2010. 

Private Jacob Van Alstyne is second from the left in the front row. (Photo courtesy of Chatham historian and archivist Fred Friedel).

The men stood at attention. While still in their civilian clothes, many had already begun to assume a military air. They were all headed to Camp Upton, an army base on Long Island, and while all these young African-American men made it back to Columbia County, N.Y., one of them, Jacob Van Alstyne, would return a changed man.

In 1917 the United States declared war on Germany, entering a conflagration that had already been raging for three years.

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, by a Serbian radical in 1914 led to a domino effect of European countries declaring war on one another. Eventually America would join the fray.

Many African-American men stateside believed joining the war effort could help African-Americans gain the respect of white America by proving their valor and love of country.

At the time, America was a segregated society, more so in the South with its Jim Crow laws, but in the North as well, where second-class citizenry was the norm for African-Americans.

A week after the U.S. declaration of war the quota for African-American soldiers had already been filled.

In May 1917, the U.S. government began requiring all males between 21 and 31 to sign up for the draft and soon the lottery began to fill the Army’s ranks with men of all races. While some waited to be drafted, Van Alstyne volunteered.

Born in Stuyvesant Falls on Feb. 2, 1876 to Robert and Sarah Van Alstyne, Jacob became a farmer, living in Old Chatham, N.Y. before the war, where his wife died while she was still relatively young.

Van Alstyne was inducted into the Army in Hudson, N.Y., on July 31, 1918. After a few months of training at Camp Upton and later at Camp Hampton, also in New York, he became part of the 547th Engineer Battalion as a private.

While there were a few African-American combat units, notably the 369th Infantry — nicknamed the “Harlem Hellfighters” — most of the men, including Van Alstyne, would serve their country in labor battalions. These non-combat units were the backbone of the Army, keeping the supplies flowing to the front and helping to shelter and feed the men in the trenches.

Van Alstyne soon found himself at the Western Front attached to the 20th Engineers, a forestry regiment that was responsible for supplying wood for the Army. He was there at the final great allied offensive that broke the stalemate brought on by a strategy of trench warfare. While in France’s Argonne forest, scene of the French and American push against the German line that helped end the war, Van Alstyne first saw the yellow-brown gas that floated through the forest and smelled the acrid scent of mustard that burned his nostrils, then his lungs, and then his skin.

This was the first of three times he would suffer a gas attack by the enemy, along with a severe leg wound. But even with these battle scars he would stay on in service to his country, beyond the Armistice of Nov. 11, 1918 and into the next summer.

He returned to Columbia County and to farming in the summer of 1919, settling in Ghent.

The African-American men who went to war in the hopes of finding some equality back home would have to wait for a new type of strategy, one that involved civil disobedience rather than state-sanctioned violence to achieve its aims.

Van Alstyne’s battalion was integrated beginning in 1953, two years after the Army’s plan to unify its troops began, not in the name of equality, but rather for the sake of efficiency.

Van Alstyne would pass away in 1961 just as the Civil Rights Movement was rising up to force the nation this soldier proudly served to face the institutionalized racism that kept African-Americans second-class citizens.

I'm happy to announce I'll be having my book about murder and mayhem in the Gilded Age Berkshires (1870-early 1900s) published by the History Press. Look for it in the fall of 2015. I'll update readers on my progress as it moves along.

The Austerlitz Cannibal

Oscar F. Beckwith, alleged cannibal, was executed for the gruesome murder of Simon Vandercook. He spent his last days in the Columbia County, N.Y. Jail. The sheriff of Columbia County, Henry Hanor, tracked Beckwith down three years after his escape

Oscar Beckwith sat in the Columbia County Jail in Hudson, N.Y. eating his last supper. He ate sparsely of the roast beef, ham and potatoes on his plate and sipped at his tea.

In 16 hours the 78-year-old would be swinging at the end of a rope for the murder of Simon Vandercook. The gruesome details of the killing and charges of cannibalism by some made the case a sensation as did Beckwith’s escape from the law, eventual capture in Canada and evasion of the death penalty for three years.

It seems that the New York City papers were responsible for leveling the accusations of Beckwith consuming human flesh, with the New York Times describing him in an 1887 article as a “murderer and cannibal,” but giving no further background of the case.

There were no reports in the local papers that leveled those charges at Beckwith and no testimony in the initial November 1885 trial indicating cannibalism.

What was found in the small cabin in Austerlitz, N.Y. on Jan. 11, 1882 were the partially burned body parts of Vandercook, along with other pieces of flesh, described as “meat” that had been cut into “stove-length” pieces by one witness, stacked up in the back room of the shanty, along with a hanging basket containing Vandercook’s innards. Two “greasy” axes, one with hair on it, were also found, as was the victim’s clothing.

What wasn’t found was Beckwith. He had fled into Massachusetts, eventually finding his way to Canada, where he was living under the assumed name of Charles White. He was apparently living an exceedingly sparse existence, based on a letter he tried to send to his daughter in which he asks her to send $5 for a pair of false teeth and laments his impoverished state.

The sheriff of Columbia County, Henry Hanor, tracked Beckwith down three years after his escape, apprehending him “a few hundred miles from civilization,” according to a Hudson reporter, in the Parry Sound district, east of Georgian Bay, in the Province of Toronto, Canada,

A March 18, 1885 article in the Amsterdam Daily Democrat described Beckwith’s return to Hudson by train, saying that he was heavily guarded and had a chain around his leg, “which makes him very despondent.” But not so despondent that he didn’t speak with journalists, claiming self-defense for the killing and telling them that Vandercook had tried to poison him before attacking him with a wooden stick. Beckwith would reiterate this story when he took the stand at his first trial in November 1885.

According to him, he met Vandercook in 1878 and told him about a silver and gold mine he had been working on land owned by a man named Woodruff. Beckwith believed the man would sell the land for $500 and tried to convince Vandercook to go in with him, offering him a two-thirds interest in the mine for $1,000. Instead, alleged Beckwith, Vandercook swindled him, incorporating a mining company in Kingston and cutting him out of the deal. Beckwith said he was too poor to pursue a lawsuit.

It was at that time that Beckwith built the cabin on the side of the mountain where the mine was located and where, on Jan. 10, 1882, the fateful meeting with Vandercook took place.

Beckwith testified that Vandercook forced his way into his cabin and a fight ensued, apparently helped along when he called Vandercook a “dirty whoremaster.”

“He hit me in the forehead,” recalled Beckwith, “made my nose bleed and knocked me down.”

They struggled, he testified, Vandercook grabbing a piece of wood and threatening to kill him before beginning to choke Beckwith. It was then that Beckwith grabbed a butcher knife and stabbed Vandercook.

Beckwith later testified that he slit Vandercook’s throat from ear to ear, pulled out his tongue and put an ax through his head. The jury found him guilty of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to die.

Beckwith’s court appointed attorney, L. F. Longley, described as “indefatigable” by the Hudson Daily Evening Register, took the case through two trials and before the state Supreme Court and Appeals Court twice each. Beckwith was sentenced to death five times, but couldn’t escape the noose on the sixth go round. After Gov. David Hill denied him executive clemency it was only a matter of time. And now that time was upon him.

It was March 1, 1888 and Beckwith was waiting for Sheriff Felts, who had since replaced Hanor, to come read him his death sentence. The night before he had gone to bed just after 9 p.m. and slept soundly, snoring “unpardonably,” according to one local reporter. Another reported that “perfect quiet presided about the jail and not a whisper was heard for several hours in any part of the building, except that of the reporters at work in adjoining rooms.”

Beckwith woke briefly at 4 a.m., then returned to bed until “the morning light shone through the grated window of his window on the south side of his cell” looking, to the journalist, as if he was “feeling refreshed from an excellent rest that no man under the sentence of death, save (Beckwith), could have passed through.” When asked, Beckwith replied that he slept well because he was “used to trouble.”

After waking he dictated a letter to his daughter who was then at the Homeopathic Hospital in Albany, telling her that he had been sentenced to death by a “parcel of Free Mason’s skulls,” but not to worry, since he had read in the Bible that “blood shall be up to the bridle rings” and that he believed Europe would soon be at war. Beckwith talked a lot about the Masons on his final day on Earth, telling one deputy that his death “would be a death blow to Free Masonry and all secret societies.”

Around 9:30 a.m. Rev. Smith of St. Mary’s Parish came and performed the ordinance of Baptism. At 10 a.m. the death sentence was read and Beckwith responded by again proclaiming his innocence. His hands were tied, the noose slipped around his neck and the black hood placed on his head, but not pulled down. The procession left the jail and walked the short distance to the 90 by 90 foot temporary building just outside, a “rude structure” in the words of a Hudson Daily Evening Register reporter, where the hanging was to take place. The scaffold, “an unassuming piece of mechanism…as uninviting as it was unassuming,” wrote the Register’s reporter, had been put up by Joseph Atkinson, the executioner, who had come from Brooklyn to perform the deed. It was 14 feet high, with a crossbar 16 feet in length and was “suitable for hanging three people at the same time.” When the execution took place a hidden weight, weighing 380 pounds, would drop, sending the condemned up in the air, as opposed to other devices in which the floor would drop, sending the person hurtling downwards.

The rope was of Italian hemp and the noose was the same one, pointed out the reporter, used to hang Danny Driscoll. Driscoll was the co-leader of the New York City gang the Whyos who was hanged Jan. 23, 1888 for killing Breezy Garrity, a prostitute, during a gunfight between Driscoll and Five Points Gang member Johnny McCarthy.

On the morning of the hanging a massive crowd had gathered outside the jail in Hudson, held back by local militia. Every nearby tree and telegraph pole was covered in children hoping to get a glimpse of the famed murderer. Inside the structure a number of local dignitaries and press gathered to watch Beckwith hang.

The condemned wore a black suit and was clean shaven. His step did not waiver. On the scaffold he kissed a proffered crucifix and mumbled “Jesus have mercy on me, have mercy on me.” A minute later, reported the Register, an executioner “sent the soul of Oscar Beckwith to its maker and his body bouncing into the air.”

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to keep up this and my other blogs, but here's a link to the series of old time farm crime I've been writing for Modern Farmer. Enjoy!