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Authors: Harold Schechter
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public hanging on Friday, April 16, 1841, was “a gala event” in New Brunswick.
Another Tell-Tale Murder
Though certain aspects of the Robinson-Suydam case clearly found their way into Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”—in which the cold-blooded killer conceals his victim’s corpse beneath the floorboards of his home—another earlier crime also influenced the tale.
It took place in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1830. On the morning of April 7, Captain Joseph White, an eighty-two-year-old widower who had made a fortune as a shipmaster, merchant, and slave trader, was found murdered in bed, his skull crushed and his body perforated with more than a dozen dagger wounds. The killer had entered from the backyard by leaning a wooden plank against the house and climbing in through an open ground-floor window. Though White kept a stash of gold doubloons in an iron chest in his bedroom, the coins hadn’t been touched. Nor were any other valuables missing.
There were no obvious suspects. White’s live-in help—his maidservant, Lydia Kimball, and handyman, Benjamin White (a distant relation)—were old and trusted employees with no motive for murder. Bootprints left by the intruder in the muddy backyard, moreover, “in no manner resembled the prints made by either servant.” The only other inhabitant of White’s magnificent Essex Street “mansion-house” was his forty-five-year-old niece, Mary Beckford, who served as his housekeeper and who, at the time of the murder, was seven miles away on a visit to her grown daughter, wife of a young farmer named Joseph Knapp Jr.
“The perpetration of such an atrocious crime,” writes a nineteenth-century chronicler, “deeply agitated and aroused the whole community.” Fearing for their own security, the citizens of Salem outfitted their houses with extra window bolts and door locks and “furnished themselves with cutlasses, fire-arms, and watch-dogs.” Despite the offer of a large reward and the tireless exertions of a twenty-seven-member Vigilance Committee, the investigation went nowhere.
The case broke open a month after the murder when Joseph Knapp Sr.—father of the young man who had married Captain White’s grandniece—received a mysterious letter, threatening to disclose young Knapp’s role in the crime unless the sender received a payoff of $350. A trap was laid for the blackmailer, who turned out to be an ex-convict named John C. R. Palmer. Taken into custody and promised immunity, Palmer revealed that a criminal cohort of his named Richard Crowninshield had been offered $1,000 to kill Captain White by Joseph Knapp Jr. and his brother John, who (so they believed) stood to profit from a large inheritance upon White’s demise. On the evening of April 2, Joseph Knapp snuck into White’s house and made sure that the rear ground-floor window was “unbarred and unscrewed.” A few nights later, armed with a hand-crafted club and a dagger with a five-inchblade, Richard Crowninshield snuck in through the unlocked window and savagely dispatched the sleeping old man.
All three conspirators—the two Knapp brothers and Crowninshield—were promptly taken into custody. Three days after their arrest, Joseph Knapp dictated a nine-page confession that fingered Crowninshield as the principal perpetrator. Before he could be brought to trial, Crowninshield hanged himself with a handkerchief tied to the bars of his cell.
The two Knapps were subsequently convicted in separate, highly publicized trials and hanged three months apart. Joseph’s trial was particularly notable for the opening address by the legendary orator Daniel Webster, who had been brought in to assist the prosecution and who, as crime historian E. J. Wagner observes, “captivated the courtroom with a dramatic re-creation of the crime.”
“The deed,” intoned Webster,
was executed with a degree of self-possession and steadiness equal to the wickedness with which it was planned … Deep sleep had fallen on
Another Tell-Tale Murder
Though certain aspects of the Robinson-Suydam case clearly found their way into Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”—in which the cold-blooded killer conceals his victim’s corpse beneath the floorboards of his home—another earlier crime also influenced the tale.
It took place in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1830. On the morning of April 7, Captain Joseph White, an eighty-two-year-old widower who had made a fortune as a shipmaster, merchant, and slave trader, was found murdered in bed, his skull crushed and his body perforated with more than a dozen dagger wounds. The killer had entered from the backyard by leaning a wooden plank against the house and climbing in through an open ground-floor window. Though White kept a stash of gold doubloons in an iron chest in his bedroom, the coins hadn’t been touched. Nor were any other valuables missing.
There were no obvious suspects. White’s live-in help—his maidservant, Lydia Kimball, and handyman, Benjamin White (a distant relation)—were old and trusted employees with no motive for murder. Bootprints left by the intruder in the muddy backyard, moreover, “in no manner resembled the prints made by either servant.” The only other inhabitant of White’s magnificent Essex Street “mansion-house” was his forty-five-year-old niece, Mary Beckford, who served as his housekeeper and who, at the time of the murder, was seven miles away on a visit to her grown daughter, wife of a young farmer named Joseph Knapp Jr.
“The perpetration of such an atrocious crime,” writes a nineteenth-century chronicler, “deeply agitated and aroused the whole community.” Fearing for their own security, the citizens of Salem outfitted their houses with extra window bolts and door locks and “furnished themselves with cutlasses, fire-arms, and watch-dogs.” Despite the offer of a large reward and the tireless exertions of a twenty-seven-member Vigilance Committee, the investigation went nowhere.
The case broke open a month after the murder when Joseph Knapp Sr.—father of the young man who had married Captain White’s grandniece—received a mysterious letter, threatening to disclose young Knapp’s role in the crime unless the sender received a payoff of $350. A trap was laid for the blackmailer, who turned out to be an ex-convict named John C. R. Palmer. Taken into custody and promised immunity, Palmer revealed that a criminal cohort of his named Richard Crowninshield had been offered $1,000 to kill Captain White by Joseph Knapp Jr. and his brother John, who (so they believed) stood to profit from a large inheritance upon White’s demise. On the evening of April 2, Joseph Knapp snuck into White’s house and made sure that the rear ground-floor window was “unbarred and unscrewed.” A few nights later, armed with a hand-crafted club and a dagger with a five-inchblade, Richard Crowninshield snuck in through the unlocked window and savagely dispatched the sleeping old man.
All three conspirators—the two Knapp brothers and Crowninshield—were promptly taken into custody. Three days after their arrest, Joseph Knapp dictated a nine-page confession that fingered Crowninshield as the principal perpetrator. Before he could be brought to trial, Crowninshield hanged himself with a handkerchief tied to the bars of his cell.
The two Knapps were subsequently convicted in separate, highly publicized trials and hanged three months apart. Joseph’s trial was particularly notable for the opening address by the legendary orator Daniel Webster, who had been brought in to assist the prosecution and who, as crime historian E. J. Wagner observes, “captivated the courtroom with a dramatic re-creation of the crime.”
“The deed,” intoned Webster,
was executed with a degree of self-possession and steadiness equal to the wickedness with which it was planned … Deep sleep had fallen on
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