My newest book, "Hudson Valley Murder & Mayhem," will be out June 26, 2017. You can preorder on my website, andrewamelinckx.com. A Hudson Valley book tour is in the works. I'll be posting the schedule of events soon. Cheers!

The Great Storm of 1888 Strikes Hudson, New York

“A terrible storm of wind and snow set in last evening and throughout most of the day,” reported the Hudson Daily Evening Register of March 12, 1888. “The snow was light and dry and floated through the air like smoke.”

The snow quickly accumulated on the ground creating massive snow drifts that (literally) halted business in Hudson—the county seat—and surrounding communities in Columbia County, N.Y.,  in its tracks. A howling wind blew in from the north east making conditions worse.

Business along the wharves, piers and slips was suspended in Hudson. Train and mail service slowed and finally stopped. The mills and schools were closed. Warren Street in Hudson was nearly impassable. Milkmen had a hard time getting out of town after their early morning deliveries. Special men were placed at all the hose company houses to make sure the firefighters could get out in case of an emergency.

“Did you blow in?” the shopkeepers jokingly asked the smattering of customers who made it to the Warren Street businesses.

The only conversations there revolved around the storm that people were already calling the worst they could recall seeing in more than 60 years. Telegraph wires were snapping all over the county prompting the Register to complain that “the snow raised the devil with the telegraph lines today” and that “our Associated Press news is very meager.”

The Register began its local storm coverage with a poem during each of the three days affected by the blizzard. The first was somewhat hopeful.

“Oh, this is the month of the year where nature says to the snow
It is time that you disappear you must take yourself off, you know
Just get yourself ready and go pack up your drifts and march”

While that newspaper provided poetry, their competition, the weekly Columbia Republican, preferred to insert poetry into their prose.

“The storm increased in violence hour by hour until it finally broke loose in a mighty effort,” reported the paper. “The rage of a howling gale swept over the city, blinding pedestrians with pelting snow and forming great drifts everywhere.”

And this was just the beginning. By the 13th they were referring to it as “the Great Storm.” Columbia County was not alone. The blizzard paralyzed the East from Virginia to Maine and killed more than 400 people. Sustained winds were reported to be 45 miles an hour, snow accumulation of between 40 and 50 inches and massive drifts covering entire buildings. One drift, in Brooklyn, was reported to be 52 feet high.

New York City was almost “shut off from communication with the outside world” according to an AP report, with an “embargo on traffic and travel” in the city. There was an elevated train wreck, people were “overcome by the weather” and snapped telegraph lines were everywhere in Manhattan, wrote the AP. A train wreck blamed on the storm near Dobbs Ferry, in Westchester County killed four. In Troy, the Albany Iron Works’ roof collapsed burying four men who, when found, had severe injuries.

Back in Columbia County, train service from six different railroad companies was completely halted.Three trains were stalled at the Hudson River railroad station. Large gangs of workmen spent the night and morning trying to dig out the engines. One mile from Chatham, heading toward Kinderhook, a passenger train with 25 people aboard was stuck and had been since the night before. Help, in the form of provisions, was sent to the train that was so buried in snow only the engine’s smokestack was visible.

In Chatham village there were 15-foot high snowdrifts. Several narrow escapes were made by residents who were nearly buried alive. Stockport saw 10-foot drifts with the highway between Stockport and Stottville impossible to pass. Area farmers took in “storm bound travelers,” reported the Republican. Blue Stores was “nearly buried in snow” with the tops of fences unable to be seen and “roads that will be impassable for some time to come,” according to the Republican. In Greenport the drifts looked like “small mountains” and the road between there and Hudson was also inaccessible.

As the storm continued, Hudson’s town clock could still be heard chiming on the hour, but the snow muffled the sound to the point of nearly being inaudible. The roads into Hudson were so drifted that “no communication with us could be reached,” reported the Register. Doors and windows were snowed over with drifts reaching to the second story of buildings. One newspaper carrier reported that half the houses on his route were under snow banks.

Hudson’s mayor and the common council were “doing everything possible to keep our streets passable,” stated the Register on March 13. “Teams of men are at work and the sidewalks on the principal streets are such that people can find their way through them.” The resulting passages through the snow were described as “miniature Suez Canals” and “an immense fortress.”

The Register’s readers, on March 13, were treated to a second poem. This one was a bit more mournful than the previous piece.

“Ah there my weather so cold, so bright
How do you do after so stormy a night?
Do you feel like an owl or a dickey-bird dear?
Or a defeated candidate finding solace in beer”

The next day, March 14, saw the storm begin to subside and clean-up begin in earnest. In New York City the AP reported that business was partly “revived” and that the stock exchange had reopened. Hudson was back open for business as well and its streets were sufficiently cleared to allow teams of horses, without loads, to make it through.

More than 20 inches of snow fell on the area during the storm, but by the 14th the Register was already chiding people for not clearing off their walks. “Only those negligent to their duties failed to clear the walks and gutters,” stated the paper. The road to Greenport once again opened thanks to that town’s supervisor, Fred Jones, along with 70 men and 20 mules. Train and mail service also began to trickle back into the county.

The train stuck outside of Chatham was finally dug out and the Register’s final poem of the storm was published.

“When the winter cold is over and we gambol in the clover
Or escape the shining sunlight in some cool and shady spot
When the snowdrifts have disappeared and the birds sing happy-hearted
Then we’ll kick around and grumble that the weather is so hot”

A different version of this story appeared in The Register Star on Feb. 26, 2011.

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!

More of my old time crime from Modern Farmer. This one on the horrific, and real crime, of ostrich feather theft.

Here's a few links to some great old-time mug shots from the Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums in England from the 1930s. These are from the 20s. And these are of 19th century child prisoners, as well as a cat murdering dog.

A link to more old time farm crime

The latest in my series on old-time farm crime: Trench Warfare.

I've begun writing a bimonthly series for Modern Farmer magazine called Old-Time Farm Crime. Here's the first piece, a look at an 18th century horse thief and highwayman named Dick Turpin and some contemporary examples of equine thievery.

The Hildebrandt murder

 It was a cold February evening in 1898 when Jonas Staats answered a knock at the door of his Chatham, N.Y.  farmhouse. He didn’t recognize the scruffy-looking man at first, but soon realized who was standing in his doorway.

“My God, It’s Joe,” he exclaimed, ushering the man inside. It was John Schmidt, an accused murderer who had been on the run for more than five years.  

That night after supper, Schmidt, in his broken English, admitted to the farmer that he had killed his stepson, William Hildebrandt, on the evening of Sept. 12, 1893, along the train tracks in nearby Philmont. He claimed that when he cracked the 19-year-old in the head with a hammer it was an act of self-defense.

Staats listened to the man’s story without much in the way of commentary, and allowed the alleged murderer to spend the night and made him breakfast the next morning.

The farmer had known Schmidt for about 15 years, having met him in New York City. Staats brought him to work on his Columbia County farm just after Schmidt arrived from Bromberg, in what was then called Prussian Poland. Schmidt remained at the Staats’ farm for about a year and a half. He then began working for a farmer in Ghent, John Coburn, with whom he stayed on and off for several years.

In 1891 Schmidt met Dora Sophia Johanna, a German immigrant five years his junior. The couple moved in together on Coburn’s property, but soon began a rootless life of travel, going from Columbia to Dutchess County to New Jersey and then Baltimore. When the couple returned to Ghent in 1893 Dora’s teenage son was with them. Schmidt had made enough money to pay the lad’s passage from Germany and now the family was back in Columbia County to work the fields of yet another local farmer.

Sept. 12, 1893

Schmidt and his 19-year-old stepson spent the day working in the field helping to bring in the corn crop of a Ghent farmer. After knocking off for the day they returned to the house. After dinner Schmidt insisted on walking into Philmont to pick up some meat for the family and invited Hildebrandt to go along.

A few hours later Schmidt returned home alone, his clothes bloody and with a leg wound — and without any meat.

He told Sophia that Hildebrandt had been arrested after they brawled with some rowdies in town and that he had escaped arrest by running off. This was just one of several versions Schmidt told of that night’s events. Early the next morning, the couple went to Ghent to catch a train to Hudson, where Hildebrandt would have been taken if arrested. The couple took the train into the city and walked to a building that Schmidt said was the courthouse. He went in alone and came out a few minutes later. Dora was crying and asking where her son was, but Schmidt told her a convenient lie and they headed back home. Later in the evening when the farm boss came around Dora overheard her husband tell the man that Hildebrandt had gone to visit his relatives in New Jersey.

Meanwhile, that afternoon, the crew on a freight train on the Harlem railroad noticed what appeared to be a drunken man passed out along the train tracks in Philmont. He was lying on his back with a leg cocked up, his cap hanging from a nearby tree. It wasn’t until the next morning, on the return trip, that the workers realized the man wasn’t a drunken hobo, but was in fact a corpse.

It wasn’t long until authorities determined young Hildebrandt had been killed by a blow from a hammer that was found near the body, a hammer belonging to Schmidt. He was arrested that afternoon and shipped off to Hudson.  But the constables in charge of the prisoner were drunk and when Schmidt made his escape, they were unable to keep up with him and he disappeared into the night.

For five years Schmidt evaded capture. He traveled widely from New Jersey to Michigan and Minnesota, working on farms and performing odd jobs. And then one evening he appeared on the doorstep of the man who had first taken him in when he arrived in  America.

Why he returned after more than five years as a fugitive is unknown, but Schmidt did say that being on the run and in constant fear of arrest had been hard on him both mentally and physically.

It is unclear whether Staats told authorities at the time about the conversation he had with Schmidt that night or whether he revealed that the fugitive was back in Columbia County. It would be another four months before Schmidt was taken into custody. While sitting in jail awaiting trial he allegedly confessed to two jailers that he had killed his stepson because the teen was having an incestuous relationship with Schmidt’s wife. Later, at trial, the testimony of the two men was called into question by the defense attorney, who told the jury that the jailers might have misheard Schmidt, because his English was so poor. Both witnesses stuck to their stories.

During Schmidt’s trial in Columbia County Court in Hudson, a two-week affair in May and early June of 1899, he told the jury a similar story to the one he had told Staats on that cold February night a year earlier, but in this version, he said he and the teen weren’t on their way to purchase meat, but had instead been trapping along the railroad tracks. Hildebrandt wanted to set a trap, Schmidt told the jury through an interpreter, but when it snapped on his finger he got angry and punched Schmidt.

 “I will give you more, yet,” Schmidt alleged the teen told him before pulling out a knife and taking a swing at him.

“(H)e stooped down and got the hammer and he raised the hammer and struck him,” the interpreter told the jury. “He says he didn’t want to strike him.”

After the boy fell to the ground and didn’t move, Schmidt said he stood there for about 10 minutes and cried, before pushing Hildebrandt’s body further down a culvert. He told the jury he didn’t think Hildebrandt was dead, merely stunned and figured he would wake up and come home. Before leaving, Schmidt left the teen’s cap hanging from a nearby tree. He tossed the hammer down the culvert, took his traps and headed home.

The jury deliberated for close to nine hours before returning a verdict of guilty of first-degree murder. After an appeal and a determination of insanity by a special panel appointed by the governor, Schmidt was electrocuted at Dannemora Prison in January 1902.

As a strange side note, during the hullabaloo surrounding Schmidt’s capture, he told his jailers that his wife had murdered her former paramour, a man named Gruber with whom she had been living before she and Schmidt got together. Police discovered the headless remains buried in a cellar on the property of the Ghent farmer John Coburn, whose home was known as “Broadstairs.”  Dora denied the killing, telling police that she came home one day to her residence, which she and Gruber had been sharing with Schmidt, to find Gruber gone. Schmidt allegedly told her Gruber had left her. Dora quickly took up with Schmidt and they were married a few months later.

There have been ghostly encounters reported at the residence since that time.

The wreck of the Albany and Hudson

The Rensselaer train station became a de facto hospital that day as the dead and dying lay on the ground. A low moaning filled the room from the wounded punctuated by hysterical crying from families searching for loved ones. Doctors tended to the accident victims as they awaited transport to area hospitals.

Among the dead the evening of May 26, 1901 was the man train officials would blame for the head-on collision between trains that claimed the lives of five people and seriously injured more than 50 on the new Albany & Hudson Railroad’s electric line.

“It was the worst accident in the history of electric railroading,” the Albany (N.Y.) Evening Journal of May 27, 1901 reported.

That morning had started like many others. It had been a busy Sunday with people as far away as New York City riding one of the first electric train lines in the country. Many spent the day at the train company’s brand new resort called Electric Park, located at Kinderhook Lake, in Columbia County, N.Y.

The Albany and Hudson Railroad and Power Company was formed in 1899 with the intent of creating an interurban electric rail line. Train service began in 1900 and ran from Hudson to Rennselaer, a distance of 37.2 miles. The company also provided local service in Hudson and Albany.

Both the train system and the park were run on electricity powered by a combination of steam and hydroelectric generation delivered through a dam and power station on Kinderhook Creek.

The train cars — 53 feet long and weighing 30 tons — used an electrified third rail for power and could reach speeds of up to 50 miles per hour.

That Sunday was a fine spring day and business was brisk for the train company with extra cars added to the regular runs to accommodate the crowds.

John DeWitt Peltz, his wife and their young son boarded the local Albany train on State Street at about 2 p.m., connecting to the southbound train in Rennselaer. They were glad to have made it on, as there were a number of people who couldn’t find room and had to wait for the next train.

“They will probably now consider themselves lucky for not obtaining seats,” Peltz later mused.

At 3:17 p.m. train number 22 left Rensselaer two minutes behind schedule and would eventually carry 83 passengers that afternoon. Three minutes later a northbound train, the number 19 — originating from Hudson — left Kinderhook Lake, 20 minutes behind its regular departure time. At the time of the crash there were 20 passengers aboard.

At the controls of the no. 22 was Frank Smith, a North Chatham resident and recent widower. Charles T.  Johnson, a 34-year-old from Clinton Heights, was conductor.

They chugged south, stopping in East Greenbush for a few minutes before leaving the station at 3:44 p.m., now 17 minutes behind schedule.

Meanwhile, the no. 19 pulled out of the Nassau station at 3:40 p.m., 25 minutes behind schedule.

The no. 22 should have pulled off the main line at the No. 69 siding, located 1.3 miles south of East Greenbush, to allow the northbound no. 19 to pass. That didn’t happen.

Five hundred feet south of the siding, on a wide and dangerous curve, the two trains collided head-on, with the impact so sudden that neither motormen had time to apply the brakes.  The no. 22 was traveling at about 45 miles per hour, the no. 19 at 25.

Peltz flew over a half-dozen seats, his son Jack in his arms, and landed in the aisle. His wife also flew through the air. The train car, he saw after gaining his footing,  was a seething mass of bodies. Peltz managed to get outside with his family.

“I saw the two motormen lying side by side, dead.” He later recalled. One, said Peltz, had been cut in half by the collision. Further on, he saw two women lying in a ditch; one was dead and the other unconscious. A third woman stood over them crying. The women had come from Albany and were on their way to visit the graves of relatives.

“Fully 120 men, women and children formed a struggling, shrieking pyramid framed with blood, detached portions of human bodies and the wreckage of cars,” the Brooklyn Eagle reported the next day. The number of people was actually less than that, but never the less, it was a gruesome scene.

Another witness said the two train cars had turned to splinters, with debris thrown 75 feet in all directions. The trains’ heavy axles lay halfway off the tracks, useless and twisted.

The injured were dragged to a fence near the north side of the wreck and those who were less badly hurt provided comfort and aid to the more seriously injured. One of the conductors telephoned for help and soon two doctors arrived, one from Rensselaer, the other from Valatie.

The state report, published the next year, listed the names of the dead and gave an accounting of the wounds suffered by the other passengers, which included numerous broken bones, internal injuries and one poor woman who had the skin from her face scraped off.

At least one report indicated that the accident might have been due to the company running two cars on one time schedule to accommodate the heavy Sunday travel.

The company, probably with the old adage “dead men tell no tales” at the forefront of their minds, firmly laid the blame at the feet of Smith. A state government report would corroborate the company’s version of events.

Newspapermen and others speculated that Smith, “practically insane” with grief over the loss of his wife, was demented at the time of the crash.

 Johnson, the conductor of no. 22, was also blamed for the tragedy because as the conductor he was in charge of overseeing the running of the train. He told officials he signaled Smith to stop at the switch, but that the motorman ignored him and continued barreling south.

Johnson was arrested and charged with manslaughter by the Rennselaer District Attorney’s Office, but the train company backed Johnson’s story. It was unclear what became of the charges.

Those who were killed included Smith; William Nicholas, the motorman from train no. 19; Rose Mooney a domestic servant from Stuyvesant Landing; Maude Kellogg, a 20-year-old from Ballston, N. Y.; and David Mahoney, a 60-year-old Brooklyn man who had been second mate on a Hudson River day liner. He later died in the hospital from his wounds.

The state made recommendations, including putting a steering mechanism and brakes at the back of the car where the conductors were stationed, to prevent this type of accident from happening again, but a little more than a year later, on Aug. 2, 1902, there was another accident on the system that killed two and injured 61.

It wasn’t long after the second crash that the company reorganized as the Albany and Hudson Railroad and again reorganized as the Albany Southern Railroad in 1909.

 The electric train’s final run was made in December 1929.

Surviving the Titanic

They were awakened by a tremendous crash near their staterooms. Anna Hogeboom, 51, got up and called out to her older sister, Kornelia Andrews, and her niece, 21-year-old Gretchen Longley, whose rooms were close by. “Go see what that was,” she told them, still half-asleep.

It was 11:45 p.m. Sunday, April 14, 1912 and the ship the three Hudson women were on had just had its hull breached and was beginning to sink, but at this point the women had no idea what had just occurred.

 When Kornelia, 63, entered the corridor and found it full of ice crystals that had come through the portholes, she correctly surmised that they must have collided with an iceberg. Gretchen went and found a steward and was told there was nothing to worry about.

“They told us at once that there was no danger, and as we had not a moment’s suspicion that such a magnificent ship could ever sink, we foolishly all went back to bed without a fear,” Kornelia later wrote to a friend. But a little more than 15 minutes later the women heard a commotion in the corridor and again asked what was going on and were told that as a precautionary measure they should put on life preservers.


The women only had about five minutes to get dressed. Gretchen threw on a pair of stockings and some slippers, along with a shirtwaist, skirt and a fur coat, but no underclothing. Her aunts only had time to thrown their furs over their nightdresses. Kornelia later complained that she didn’t even have time to grab a hat, but did gather a few hair pins before they left their rooms and rushed up the stairs to the Titanic’s deck.

What greeted them there was very different than the scene when they boarded the Titanic at Southampton only four days earlier after a nearly five-month-long European tour.

On the morning of April 10, the port was a hive of activity as the White Star Line made final preparations for the Titanic’s maiden voyage: cranes loaded luggage. The ship’s employees, from officers to waiters, who hadn’t been on the overnight shift made their way aboard and prepared for departure.

The ladies from Hudson were among the 325 first class passengers who made their way onto the ship via a separate gangway and were able to get their first close-up look at the ship. They were met by polished brass and hand-carved woodwork wherever they looked.

“The vision of the great liner as she moved away from Southampton quay forms an imperishable memory. She looked so colossal and so queenly,” wrote one reporter who was dockside. Aboard ship, Lawrence Beesley, a science teacher from a London college who survived the sinking and later wrote a book about it, recalled watching the crowd as they kept pace with the ship while it moved along the waterfront.

There was a near-collision with the steamer New York as the Titanic was leaving port, a fateful portent many later felt. The suction created by the larger ship snapped the New York’s rigging, sending it dangerously close to the Titanic, but several tugs were able to prevent the disaster. On the early morning of April 15, there was nothing to prevent the disaster unfolding before the eyes of Kornelia, Anna and Gretchen as they stood on the ship’s deck, chaos swirling around them.

For four days, as the Titanic made its way across the English Channel to Cherbourg, France then to Queenstown, Ireland and finally to the open North Atlantic, the women had enjoyed nice weather, smooth seas and the finest luxuries available, but now as they waited for the fourth and final lifeboat, they would soon experience deprivation, pain and fear that would haunt them to their ends.

When the women arrived topside no one seemed to be panicked, according to Kornelia, but there was a lack of discipline as the ship’s officers hurried to get women and children on to the boats. Jack Williams, one of the Titanic’s crewmembers who survived, alleged it was a much more chaotic scene, with six men being shot while trying to rush aboard the lifeboats. Gretchen also later recalled that the ship’s captain, Edward J. Smith, shot himself in the mouth while on deck, after initially being stopped from committing suicide by his officers while in the library. It appears Gretchen didn’t witness the captain’s end, but rather heard about it from others after the fact.

“Sinking by the head, and women are being rushed into the lifeboats,” was the final message sent by wireless before it sputtered out, according to an account in the Columbia Republican.

The three Hudson, N.Y. women waited for the fourth lifeboat since there was no room in the others for them to all fit and they refused to be separated. The boat was lowered the 75 feet to the water. Above them stood a line of men waving goodbye to their wives and family, surely knowing they would soon be dead.

“Oh, it would have broken your heart to have seen them standing there so bravely and waving farewell to their wives and daughters. It would have made you so proud of your countrymen,” Kornelia later wrote to relatives in Hudson. “There was Mr. Thayer, president of the Pennsylvania railroad. Mr. John Jacob Astor, having to wave farewell to his beautiful wife, Major Butt and hundreds of others, who probably knew there was no hope for them. We have never seen them since.”

Three men had been allowed into their boat in the belief that they would do the rowing, but when the small craft hit the dark, icy water only one of the men, a sailor, turned out to be an able rower. Gretchen and three other women took to the oars.

Kornelia was disgusted with the two stowaways on board who shirked their manly duty. She was also angry with the White Star Line, which she felt committed “a perfect crime” by not providing a large percentage of the ship’s passengers with a means of escape, since there were only 22 boats on the ship when “sixty  (boats) could not have taken in more than two-thirds” of those on board.

Gretchen, her fingers already numb, pulled at the oar, helping to get the little craft as far from the dying behemoth as possible before it went under and dragged them down with her. A vessel that large would create an incredible amount of suction that could easily capsize or drag their lifeboat into the depths.

Kornelia stared out at the water and saw horror whereever she looked. She witnessed two other lifeboats collapse, scattering women into the water. Another boat was partially submerged, the passengers shivering in the ice-cold water that was above their knees.

She heard shouts of protest from women in one boat after a sailor lit a cigarette and carelessly tossed the match among them.

“Ah, we're all going to the devil, anyway,” the sailor growled, “and we might as well be cremated now as then.”

And through it all there was the constant sobbing of those who knew their husbands, sons, fathers were not likely to survive the sinking.

At about 2 a.m., they heard the Titanic’s death knell, a deafening explosion, caused, the women believed, by the ship’s boilers blowing up, followed by the shrieking of those left behind. They saw people jumping from the ship just before her lights winked out.  The Titanic broke in two and both halves were soon gone from sight.

The night was cold. Massive icebergs floated nearby. The only light now came from the firmament above. Miles of black water surrounded them.

Dawn broke and the ocean, which had been calm through the night, began to swell and pitch. Large waves tossed the little boat and the women feared it would be capsized. They had been in the boat for nearly eight hours and the sailor, Gretchen and the other women who helped row were completely exhausted. All began to give up hope. Suddenly on the horizon they saw a ship slowly coming toward them. It was the Carpathia, the Cunard Line steamer that had picked up the Titanic’s distress call.

The Carpathia had hurried to the coordinates given by the Titanic’s wireless operator just before the ship went down, but found no sign of the Titanic or her passengers. The captain ordered the ship’s engines shut off and the Carpathia floated quietly.

Kornelia recounted seeing the rescue ship pick up survivors from the water, 17 in all.

Two of them died “almost immediately” and a third “went mad,” according to Kornelia. A little dead baby floated past their boat as they waited for their turn to board.

The boat containing the Hudson women was the last to be rescued. Five hours after Carpathia’s arrival the little boat came alongside the steamer. Ropes were thrown down and tied around the women’s waists to keep them from falling into the water as they climbed the wet rope ladder, a task made more difficult by their frozen feet and hands.

Aboard ship they were provided with hot coffee, tea and soup. They were covered in warm blankets and taken to a first aid station in one of the ship’s dining rooms.

“The kindness of the Carpathia, captain, officers and passengers to all the survivors was wonderful and was appreciated by all,” recalled Kornelia. Passengers offered the three women their rooms, but they declined, feeling that there were others in more desperate straits. They slept in the ship’s library with about two dozen other survivors. While they were all glad to be alive, a pall of sadness filled the ship as small children cried out for parents who had died and adults wept for their lost loved ones.

The three women also despaired about having lost all their personal belongings. They had nothing but what they threw on in the last few minutes before leaving the sinking ship. Kornelia wrote about the joy she received when a woman gave her a handkerchief and another some hairpins. A man traveling back from Italy provided her with a toothbrush. Kornelia, who wasn’t able to retrieve her glasses, had a hard time getting around as well as writing. Gretchen was lucky enough to run into a school friend who gave her clothes and a hat. After two days of sleeping on the floor of the library they were given a stateroom. The next evening, April 18, they arrived in New York.

“The steamer Carpathia, laden with sorrow for a world, crept to her pier on the North River at 8:45 (p.m.) and discharged to the hysterical embraces of hundreds of half-crazed friends and relatives 710 survivors of the $10,000,000 Titanic,”  the Columbia Republican of April 19 reported.

Kornelia, Anna and Gretchen went to stay with a third Andrews sister, Roberta Flack, and her husband Arthur, in East Orange, N.J. It wasn’t long before the press came calling. The women were quoted by far flung newspapers, from the New York Times to the Mexico, Missouri Message, and provided one of the more comprehensive accounts of the disaster.

Following their Titanic experience the women returned to Hudson and life resumed. Kornelia sued the White Star Line for the loss of her possessions. She died of pneumonia at her home in Hudson, on Dec. 4, 1913, less than two years after the Titanic’s sinking. She was 65. Kornelia would be remembered for her charitable works in Columbia County. She was on the board of the Hudson City Hospital and a member of many other local organizations, including the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Anna left Hudson and resettled in East Orange near her sister Roberta. She also kept a home in Hillsdale where she died in 1947. Both she and her sister Kornelia are buried in Hudson.

Their niece Gretchen married Dr. Raymond S. Leopold in 1913, moved to Philadelphia, Pa., where her husband became the executive vice president of Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital. They had three children.

Gretchen later ran an antiques store and traveled extensively, often by ship. She died in her sleep aboard the S.S. Constitution in the Mediterranean on Aug. 12, 1965.

Gretchen apparently didn’t often speak about her experience on the Titanic, according to a 1998 interview with one of her grandchildren, but it must have haunted all three women.

Kornelia, for one, said as much.

“All my life I will hear those shrieks,” she said of the sound of the dying as the Titanic sank into the cold, black water taking 1,514 passengers and crew with her.

The Greenport Christmas murder

Willis Van Wormer calmly read through the letter just handed to him by Warden George Deyo. The message sent by attorney J. Ryder Cady — who had represented Willis and his two brothers, Burton and Frederick, at trial — reported that all attempts at a stay of execution had failed. It would be the chair for the Van Wormer boys.

Two years earlier, on the night of Christmas eve 1901, it was a cool, but not exceptionally cold night. There was still snow on the ground from a recent storm.

Peter Hallenbeck sat reading while his wife, Margaret, sewed nearby in their farm house in Greenport, N.Y., a small town two hours north of Manhattan. Peter’s mother Almina was also home that night while Peter and Margaret’s son and his family attended church down the road.

Margaret, looking up from her handiwork, saw a wagon with two men walking behind pass by the window heading towards the church.

“They must be chicken thieves,” said Peter, watching them pass out of view. A few moments later there was a knock at the door and Peter got up to see who was there.

That’s when the shooting started.

Four men, two wearing devil masks, the others false whiskers, their coats turned inside out, rushed into the room. The sharp report of pistols rang out mixed with the screams of the two women. Margaret rushed to her husband’s side, but Peter yelled at his wife and mother to run to the attic. As Margaret fled a shot was fired over her head.

As the men continued to fire, Peter stumbled toward the stairs where his shotgun hung.

“For God’s sake get out of here. He is after his shotgun,” yelled one of the men, as they turned to flee.

Neighbors who heard the commotion ran over and soon the alarm was given that Peter Hallenbeck had been murdered.

By the next evening, Christmas Day, four men — the Van Wormer brothers and their cousin Harvey Bruce — had been rounded up by Sheriff Harry J. Best and his deputies and thrown in the Hudson jail, charged with murder.

Dec. 29 saw the start of an inquest in the case by County Coroner Edward Lisk and by this time the story had become a national sensation, with extensive coverage by the New York Times and the Associated Press, along with local media, including the Hudson Republican newspaper.

Judge D. Cady Herrick came down from Albany to preside over the grand jury proceedings on Jan.18, 1902.

Cady, the former judge from Hudson, was named as counsel to Willis and Burton Van Wormer, and to act as general counsel in the case. Alonzo H. Farrar was assigned as counsel for Fred Van Wormer and George M. Daly was appointed as counsel for Harvey Bruce.

According to the Hudson Republican, at the reading of the grand jury indictment for first-degree murder, the accused “appeared indifferent.”

They were arraigned and pleaded not guilty.

District Attorney Alfred B. Chace asked New York state Gov. Benjamin B. Odell Jr., to call an Extraordinary Session of the Supreme Court to try the case. The governor agreed.

It wasn’t long before Bruce turned state’s evidence, admitting to the killing and laying the blame with his cousins.

According to Bruce, who was 21 at the time, his cousins Fred, 26, Burton, 23, and 20-year-old Willis had made plans for that night, buying masks, renting a horse, and in Burton’s case borrowing a gun from a friend. He went on to say that on the way to Hallenbeck’s they had stopped by the Greenport Church to make sure that their cousin Charles wouldn’t be home when they went to the farmhouse.

Once there Bruce told of how the three brothers immediately began shooting when their uncle opened the door. Bruce said he had only shot into the air.

Afterwards when he asked his cousins why they had shot Hallenbeck they told him to “shut up.”

This, paired with the circumstantial evidence — shoes that matched the footprints in the snow around the house, testimony that masks had been bought prior to the murder by the Van Wormers in Kinderhook, wagon wheel tracks matching the get away vehicle and the unpersuasive testimony of the Van Wormer boys themselves — led to a guilty verdict in the case.

The testimony of the Van Wormer boys rang hollow with the jury.

Burton Van Wormer testified that they had gone there that night “to have a little fun” and never intended to hurt their uncle.

According to him, when Peter Hallenbeck opened the door he hit Burton in the face several times, a struggle ensued and the gun accidentally discharged.

The sheriff later testified that there were no bruises on Burton Van Wormer’s face. There were also 11 bullets recovered from the victim’s body.

The efforts taken by the defendants to hide their tracks didn’t help their case either. They allegedly drove to Valatie so they could be seen, cleaned their guns and later burned the masks once they got home to Kinderhook.

According to several newspapers, there had been bad blood between the two families for some time before the incident.

While Peter Hallenbeck had prospered, his brother-in-law, John Van Wormer, barely scraped by as a river boatman. He was able to finally buy a small cottage not far from Hallenbeck, who held the mortgage.

After John Van Wormer’s death, Hallenbeck allegedly foreclosed on the property. The remaining Van Wormers, including the three boys, were put out and moved to Kinderhook.

Their attorneys tried their best to persuade the jury it was an accidental shooting.

“They went to their uncle’s house for fun,” Farrar, special counsel for Frederick Van Wormer, told the jury. “They were probably foolish, but they never intended to injure his person.”

He said that “the tables were unexpectedly turned on them” when Hallenbeck pummeled Burton and “a desperate struggle began.” He called the resulting death “a tragedy that no one had anticipated.”

During his summation the defendants openly wept, the first time they had shown any emotion, reported a Syracuse newspaper.

Cady followed on Farrar’s heels, echoing his sentiment saying that in his 30-year career at the bar he had never seen such a tragic, heart-wrenching, soul-wracking case.

He argued that there couldn’t have been any premeditation in the case based on his clients’ actions.

Cady pointed out that they had rented a horse, traveled on public roads and had brought their cousin as a witness.

The jury was unmoved finding them all guilty of first-degree murder.

Judge Alden Chester, who presided over the trial, passed sentence a few minutes later.

“It is the saddest act of my judicial career to be compelled to sentence three young men, three brothers, under a verdict of murder in the first degree,” he said from the bench, sentencing them to death by electrocution.

On Oct. 1, 1903 the brothers went to the electric chair at the Clinton State Prison in Dannemora. Willis was first, followed by Frederick and Burton. Their bodies were taken back to Kinderhook and interred in the Kinderhook Cemetery.

Strangely, the memory of the assassination of U.S. President William McKinley in 1901 seemed to float through the case. The judge who presided over the grand jury proceedings went to Albany Law School with McKinley; Bruce alleged that Burton Van Wormer had bragged that he had “gotten a Czolgosz shot. I shot (Hallenbeck) in the stomach,” referring to McKinley’s assassin Leon Frank Czolgosz who shot McKinley in the stomach during the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo; and the doctor who performed the autopsy on the mens’ remains after they were executed had also performed the autopsy on McKinley’s killer.

Bruce was later found guilty of manslaughter and received an 18-year sentence in prison.

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.