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.