Tender Murderers Page 9

  The prosecution—and the legend—accused her of hacking up Charlie and burning his pieces out of jealousy for his affairs with various women. Frankie never got to tell her side of the story because she was not allowed to testify. The old English law, under which North Carolina still operated at the time, did not allow accused people to take the witness stand.

  However, the ladies of Burke and Buncombe counties seem to have understood. Perhaps they were all too familiar with spousal abuse, which was so accepted that the year Frankie killed her husband, a man went on trial in Burke County for beating his wife to death with a ramrod. He was found guilty and fined $3.60! Perhaps the ladies of Burke and Buncombe counties considered themselves fortunate because their more enlightened husbands didn't break the rule of thumb. In a clemency petition to the governor, signed by thirty-three women, they wrote,

  The neighborhood people are Convinced (sic) that his treatment to her was both unbecoming and cruel very often and at the time too when female Delicacy (sic) would most forbid it. He treated her with personal violence.

  The allusion to “female Delicacy” seems to suggest that Charlie beat Frankie while she was pregnant.

  Of course, women could not vote or serve on a jury.

  On May I8, I833, a month before she was to be hanged, Frankie escaped. Frankie never told, but the theory was that her brother, a talented whittler, carved a key from wood and opened Frankie's cell door. It took a few days, but the sheriff caught up with her, disguised in boy's clothing, her long hair cropped, following her uncle's wagon on foot. He rode up to the “boy” behind the wagon and asked, “Are you Frankie Silver?”

  “No sir,” answered Frankie. “My name is Tommy.”

  And that's when her clueless uncle blew it by turning and answering, from the wagon, “That's right, her name is Tommy.”

  Back in prison again, and finally resigned to her fate, Frankie dictated a confession, which sadly has been lost. Charlie had come home stinking drunk, she said, and it was worse than before. Maybe Frankie had decided not to accept his harsh treatment any longer, for this time she fought back. Charlie threatened to shoot her and started loading his gun. She grabbed an ax and let him have it. It was plainly a case of self-defense, but all it got for Frankie was a stay of two weeks from the governor, to give Frankie time to “prepare herself” for death.

  Frankie Silver is the only woman in this book who left no portrait, but this nineteenth-century drawing could easily be Frankie trudging through the snow with firewood to burn Charlie. Records report that she had long fair hair.

  On July I2, I833, Frankie Silver mounted the steps to the scaffold. For the past eighteen months, except for that too-brief period of freedom, she had been shackled to the floor of her cell. She was asked if she had any last words. This would be the time for her to reveal what accomplices, if any, she'd had. Her father, standing in the crowd, shouted out, “Die with it in ye, Frankie!”

  Frankie said nothing. A good daughter, she took her secret to the gallows.

  What Wasn't True

  According to the legend—and according to Ripley's Believe It or Not—one of those sympathetic ladies of Burke and Buncombe counties had baked a cake for Frankie Silver on the morning she was to be hanged. She asked to be allowed finish the cake, and was granted permission. Frankie ate her cake, brushed the crumbs off her chin, and went to her death.

  Frankie and Charlie Silver were definitely not the inspiration for the song “Frankie and Johnny,” which stems from a Mississippi Delta black blues tradition. There's another song, though, called “The Ballad of Frankie Silver.” Legend has it that Frankie Silver wrote it and sang it on the scaffold before they hung her. Since poor Frankie was illiterate, this is highly unlikely. In the song, Frankie confesses:

  His feeble hands fell gently down,

  His chattering tongue soon lost its sound,

  To see his soul and body part

  It strikes with terror in my heart.

  The jealous thought that first gave strife

  To make me take my husband's life,

  For months and days I spent my time

  Thinking how to commit this crime.

  And on a dark and doleful night

  I put the body out of sight,

  With flames I tried to him consume,

  But time would not admit it done.

  Frankie wasn't even really the first woman to be hanged in North Carolina, although that's what it says on her grave. At least nine women preceded her either to the gallows or the stake.

  Grace Marks

  The Canadian Conundrum

  Today, when you pick up the newspaper, the odds are on any given day you'll find at least one murder reported. In order for such cases even to get headlines, the murders have to be particularly horrendous, or someone famous has to be the victim or perpetrator. So it's hard for today's jaded society to understand why, in 1843, all of Canada was in an uproar over a mere double homicide. One reason was that one of the accused killers was a pretty teenaged girl. The other reason was that both suspects were Irish.

  Every society has its scapegoat, some ethnic or racial group that is lowest on its totem pole. In nineteenth-century North America, the scapegoats were the Irish. All during that century, shiploads of poor Irish farmers tried to escape the misery and starvation of their lives in the Old Country by emigrating to Canada and the United States. Once there, they found them selves hardly better off and with few choices. Many people simply would not hire them, and jobs that were advertised in the newspapers often included the warning, “No Irish Need Apply.” If they found work at all, it was as servants, working hard jobs that nobody else would take, for less money than anyone else would accept. In return they were reviled and called dishonest, lazy, and stupid. In cartoons of the period, they're drawn to look like monkeys.

  Sixteen-year-old Grace Marks was a housemaid. It's almost impossible to imagine how hard housemaids worked in those days. From before sunrise to well after dark, their lives consisted of endless hours spent dusting, scrubbing, cooking, and washing, all before any time-saving appliances existed. If they had a kind master or mistress, they might get a day off on Sunday. Grace Marks had been doing this since she was thirteen, when she arrived in Canada from Ireland along with her father and eight sisters and brothers. Her mother had died on the ship coming over. Conditions in steerage on the emigrant ships were ghastly, with too many people crowded below decks amid rats, filth, and chaos, and it was not uncommon for passengers to die onboard.

  In July 1843, Grace had been working for less than a month in the household of Thomas Kinnear, a well-to-do gentleman farmer who owned twenty-five acres outside of the tiny village of Richmond Hill, near Toronto. The only other servants were Nancy Montgomery, the housekeeper, and twenty-year-old James McDermott, the hired man. Like Grace, McDermott was an Irish immigrant. On the last Sunday of the month, two neighbors, suspicious because the house was empty, searched the place and found Kinnear's body in the cellar, shot once through the heart. All three servants were missing, along with some silver, money, various other objects, and Kinnear's horse and carriage.

  It took a week more for Nancy Montgomery to be found, badly decomposed, in the hot cellar. She had been killed first, strangled and hit on the head with a heavy object, and hidden behind some tubs. At least one grisly version of the story relates that her body had been cut into four pieces before being hidden beneath a tub. It had been common knowledge that Nancy was sleeping with her master, and sure enough, an autopsy revealed that she was pregnant. The plot thickened.

  A manhunt quickly turned up Grace and McDermott staying at the Lewiston Hotel on the United States side of the Niagar a River. She had registered under the name of Mary Whitney, and the two were in separate rooms, but the mere fact that she was sleeping under the same roof as a man started tongues wagging: Grace was obviously a hussy, a tart, a piece of baggage, and what could you expect from an Irish immigrant?

  It didn't help matters when Grace an
d McDermott showed up for the inquiry dressed in the clothing of the dead couple, McDermott in Kinnear's waistcoat, Grace in Nancy's best dress and bonnet, and even with a parasol.

  The trial of Grace Marks and James McDermott was yet another trial of the century, and was reported in newspapers as far away as London and New York. It had all the elements of sex and violence that the public always finds irresistible. Proper citizens were made uneasy by the thought of servants killing their masters, and were horrified by the accused murderess's youth and her beauty. The only portrait of Grace, drawn at her trial, does indeed show her to have been very pretty, despite her years of drudgery.

  The only known drawing of Grace, at her trial

  Grace's good looks made it easy for people to believe James McDermott when he said she was a vamp who put him under her spell and made him kill. McDermott's story was that neither of them got along particularly well with Nancy, who put on airs and bossed them around, just what you'd expect from someone who's sleeping with the boss. Grace was jealous of Nancy and convinced McDermott to kill her. She had even tried to get him to help poison Nancy's porridge. In fact, he said it was Grace who had strangled Nancy. Grace wanted Kinnear for herself. Trouble was, after killing Nancy and hiding her body, McDermott decided they had to do away with Kinnear, too. When Grace objected, he did it himself.

  Of course, that's not the way Grace told it. Her version agreed with McDermott on the first and last part—Nancy had indeed been a pain in the butt, and Grace had indeed objected to Kinnear's murder—but she testified that Nancy's murder was also his idea, and that, fearing he might kill her too, she was forced to help him. When the exasperated prosecutor asked why, if she'd been against the killing of Nancy and Kinnear, she had never warned them, why afterward she had packed the household valuables and willingly run off with McDermott, he drew blank stares from little blue-eyed Grace. Well gosh, she'd had to promise McDermott to keep his plot a secret, so how could she tell? Plus he had promised to marry her when they got to the United States, so didn't that make it okay? Public opinion was divided on whether she was young and naive and not very bright—after all, everyone knew the Irish were stupid!—or whether she was a conniving Jezebel.

  Both McDermott and Grace were found guilty, but only McDermott hung. He went to the gallows still insisting it had been Grace's fault. According to the local newspaper:

  The prisoner confessed to the murders, and added .. . when the housekeeper was thrown down the cellar .. . Grace Marks followed him into the cellar and brought a piece of white cloth with her.... Grace Marks tied the cloth round her neck and strangled her.

  As for Grace, her face turned out to be her fortune, or else people couldn't bring themselves to believe such a sweet child could be guilty of a double murder. At any rate, she was sentenced to life in prison. After a number of years in the Provincial Penitentiary in Kingston, Ontario, some prison officialdecided she was crazy and got her transferred to the lunatic asylum in Toronto, but by about 1853 she was sane and back in the slammer again. In both institutions, she was the star attr action. Proper ladies and gentlemen used to visit the prisons for entertainment, the way you might visit a zoo or museum. They would request to see the notorious murderess, and Grace would be hauled out and paraded around for them like a two-headed calf at a county fair. One of the people who saw her, both in prison and in the funny farm, was writer Susanna Moodie. In her 1853 book, Life in the Clearings, and in the flowery language of the period, she describes crazy Grace,

  lighted up with the fire of insanity, and glowing with a hideous and fiend-like merriment.... It appears that even in the wildest bursts of her terrible malady, she is continually haunted by a memory of the past. . . . When will she sit at the feet ofJesus, clothed with the unsullied garments of his righteousness, the stain of blood washed from her hand, and her soul redeemed and pardoned, and in her right mind?

  Grace was finally pardoned—by prison officials rather than Jesus—after thirty years in prison. She moved to the United States, changed her name, and was never heard from again, probably much to her relief. But she always stuck to her story that James McDermott had been the bad guy, not she. In 1872, when her pardon was being considered, she was asked, “What has been the general cause of your misfortune and what has been the immediate cause of the crime for which you have been sent to the penitentiary?”

  Her answer: “Having been employed in the same house with a villain.”

  The Ballad

  Today, when women kill, they get a made-for-TV movie. In those days, they got a ballad:

  Grace Marks she was a serving maid,

  Her age was sixteen years,

  McDermott was a stable hand,

  They worked at Thomas Kinnear's.

  Now Thomas Kinnear was a gentleman,

  And a life of ease led he,

  And he did love his housekeeper,

  Called Nancy Montgomery.

  O Nancy's no well-born lady,

  O Nancy she is no queen,

  And yet she goes in satin and silk,

  The finest was ever seen.

  Now Grace, she loved good Thomas Kinnear,

  McDermott he loved Grace,

  And 't was those loves as I do tell

  That brought them to disgrace.

  O Grace, please be my own true love,

  O no it cannot be,

  Unless you kill for my dear sake,

  Nancy Montgomery.

  He struck a blow all with his axe,

  On the head of Nancy fair,

  He dragged her to the cellar door

  And threw her down the stairs.

  McDermott held her by the hair,

  And Grace Marks by the head,

  And these two monstrous criminals,

  They strangled her till dead.

  Now Thomas Kinnear came riding home,

  And on the kitchen floor,

  McDermott shot him through the heart

  And he weltered in his gore.

  All in the middle of the night,

  To Toronto they did flee,

  Then across the lake to the United States,

  Thinking they would scape free.

  They had not been in bed six hours,

  Six hours or maybe more,

  When at the Lewiston hotel there came,

  A knock upon the door.

  O who is there, said Grace so fair,

  What business have you with me?

  O you have murdered good Thomas Kinnear,

  And Nancy Montgomery.

  Young Jamie Walsh stood up in court,

  The truth he swore to tell,

  O Grace is wearing Nancy's dress,

  And Nancy's bonnet as well!

  McDermott by the neck they hanged,

  Upon the gallows high,

  And Grace in prison drear they cast,

  Where she must pine and sigh.

  Lizzie Borden

  Forty Whacks

  Actually, Lizzie's father received ten and her step-mother nineteen; a total of only twenty-nine whacks in all, but enough to crush Abby Borden's skull, slice Andrew Borden's eye in half, sever his nose, and render his face into an unrecognizable pulp. And it may not even have been an ax. A hatchet was suggested as the weapon, even a heavy candelabrum. The murder weapon was never found. Plus, Lizzie Borden was found innocent.

  In August 1892, maiden lady Lizzie was thirty-two years old and her maiden lady sister Emma was forty. The Borden family lived in a dark, cramped wooden house in a shabby neighborhood in Fall River, Massachusetts. The only running water came from the kitchen sink, and the only toilet was located in the cellar. They didn't even own a horse and buggy.

  They could have lived in a better house in a better neighborhood; Andrew Borden was, ironically, a retired undertaker and very rich. He was president of at least two banks, director of at least four companies, and he owned quite a bit of eal estate. Fall River's gentry all lived in mansions on “The Hill,” the town's exclusive neighborhood, but
Andrew was a miser. He was a dour, old bearded guy who didn't socialize much or even attend church. His first wife had died when Lizzie was two years old, and he'd married plain, heavyset Abby because he needed a wife and unpaid housekeeper. Emma and Lizzie refused to call her “Mother.”

  Each member of the Borden household had their own room, which they kept locked. The front door was secured with not one, but three locks, this in that sweet long-ago time when many people didn't bother to lock their doors at all. Emma and Lizzie didn't even eat with Andrew and Abby, preferring to wait in their respective rooms until their father and stepmother had finished and left the room. Then they would go downstairs and forage the left-overs. It was not a happy household.

  Here are some things that had happened before the famous double murder:

  Lizzie loved animals and kept a coop of pigeons in their barn. When small boys started breaking into the barn, presumably to get at the pigeons, Andrew Borden's solution was to chop the heads off all the pigeons. At her trial, Lizzie recalled asking her father, “Where are their heads?”

  Abby Borden kept a cat, which had learned how to push open doors. One day the cat pushed open the door to Lizzie's room, where she was entertaining guests. Lizzie—the animal lover— carried the cat downstairs, put its little head on the chopping block, and chopped it off. For days Abby wondered where her cat had gone. Finally Lizzie told her, “You go downstairs and you'll find your cat.”