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Authors: Harold Schechter
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the destined victim, and on all beneath his roof. A healthful old man, to whom sleep was sweet, the first sound of slumbers of the night held him in their soft but strong embrace. The assassin enters.… With noiseless foot he paces the lonely hall, half lighted by the moon; he winds up the ascent of the stairs and reaches the door of the chamber. Of this, he moves the lock, by soft and continuous pressure, till it turns on its hinges without noise; and he enters and beholds his victim before him … The face of the innocent sleeper is turned from the murderer, and the beams of the moon, resting on the gray locks of the aged temple, show him where to strike. The fatal blow is given, and the victim passes without a struggle or a motion from the repose of sleep to the repose of death!
According to literary scholars, Webster’s speech, reported in papers throughout the country, left a deep impression on the imagination of Edgar Allan Poe. Thirteen years after the Salem case, Poe published “The Tell-Tale Heart,” which centers on a strikingly similar crime: the brutal murder of a sleeping old man by a killer who sneaks into the victim’s bedroom at night and commits the atrocity with (in Webster’s words) “a degree of self-possession and steadiness equal to the wickedness with which it was planned.”
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[
Source: William Attree, The Trial of Peter Robinson for the Murder of Abraham Suydam, Esq., President of the Farmers’ and Mechanics’ Bank of New Brunswick (New York: New York Herald, 1841).
]
POLLY BODINE,
“THE WITCH OF STATEN ISLAND”
G IVEN OUR NOTORIOUSLY SHORT HISTORICAL MEMORY, IT’S NO SURPRISE that we Americans have completely forgotten Polly Bodine. In her own time, however, she was a figure of nationwide notoriety—the Lizzie Borden of her day. Like Lizzie, she was accused of hacking two family members to death. Like Lizzie, she was ultimately exonerated. Despite the judgment of the courts, however, most people, then and afterward, firmly believed that she was guilty. Indeed, there seems little doubt that Polly Bodine, like her 1890s counterpart, got away with double murder.
For all their similarities, however, there were significant differences between the two women. At the time of the Fall River horror, its alleged perpetrator was a prim and proper spinster. PollyBodine was a different breed of woman. Born in 1809 on Staten Island—then “a rural seafaring community of 10,000 people living in hamlets”—she was married at fifteen to an oysterman named Andrew Bodine and bore him a daughter and son in rapid succession. Five years after the wedding, owing to some unspecified “misconduct on the part of the wife,” the couple separated and the children were taken into the home of their maternal grandparents.
Soon afterward, Polly ran off to Washington, D.C., with a Frenchman and reportedly gave birth to another baby, who was evidently abandoned by the wayward young mother. Following the sudden death of her foreign-born paramour, she adopted the name Mary Ann Houston and took up with a series of men before becoming the mistress of a married Buffalo merchant. She was eventually abandoned by her lover, though not before wrecking his marriage.
She next showed up in New York City, where, rumor had it, she ran a high-class bordello. Sometime in 1835, she took up with an apothecary named George Waite, proprietor of a drugstore on Canal Street. During the course of their eight-year affair she underwent eight pregnancies. Seven were terminated by abortions performed by Waite himself.
In the meantime, Polly’s husband, Andrew—to whom she was still legally wed—had descended into a life of drunken debauchery, supposedly as a result of his wife’s flagrant infidelities. Sometime around 1841, without bothering with the formality of a divorce, he married “a disreputable character by the name of Simpson.” Two years later, the second Mrs. Bodine was found dead in bed, and Andrew was arrested
According to literary scholars, Webster’s speech, reported in papers throughout the country, left a deep impression on the imagination of Edgar Allan Poe. Thirteen years after the Salem case, Poe published “The Tell-Tale Heart,” which centers on a strikingly similar crime: the brutal murder of a sleeping old man by a killer who sneaks into the victim’s bedroom at night and commits the atrocity with (in Webster’s words) “a degree of self-possession and steadiness equal to the wickedness with which it was planned.”
----
[
Source: William Attree, The Trial of Peter Robinson for the Murder of Abraham Suydam, Esq., President of the Farmers’ and Mechanics’ Bank of New Brunswick (New York: New York Herald, 1841).
]
POLLY BODINE,
“THE WITCH OF STATEN ISLAND”
G IVEN OUR NOTORIOUSLY SHORT HISTORICAL MEMORY, IT’S NO SURPRISE that we Americans have completely forgotten Polly Bodine. In her own time, however, she was a figure of nationwide notoriety—the Lizzie Borden of her day. Like Lizzie, she was accused of hacking two family members to death. Like Lizzie, she was ultimately exonerated. Despite the judgment of the courts, however, most people, then and afterward, firmly believed that she was guilty. Indeed, there seems little doubt that Polly Bodine, like her 1890s counterpart, got away with double murder.
For all their similarities, however, there were significant differences between the two women. At the time of the Fall River horror, its alleged perpetrator was a prim and proper spinster. PollyBodine was a different breed of woman. Born in 1809 on Staten Island—then “a rural seafaring community of 10,000 people living in hamlets”—she was married at fifteen to an oysterman named Andrew Bodine and bore him a daughter and son in rapid succession. Five years after the wedding, owing to some unspecified “misconduct on the part of the wife,” the couple separated and the children were taken into the home of their maternal grandparents.
Soon afterward, Polly ran off to Washington, D.C., with a Frenchman and reportedly gave birth to another baby, who was evidently abandoned by the wayward young mother. Following the sudden death of her foreign-born paramour, she adopted the name Mary Ann Houston and took up with a series of men before becoming the mistress of a married Buffalo merchant. She was eventually abandoned by her lover, though not before wrecking his marriage.
She next showed up in New York City, where, rumor had it, she ran a high-class bordello. Sometime in 1835, she took up with an apothecary named George Waite, proprietor of a drugstore on Canal Street. During the course of their eight-year affair she underwent eight pregnancies. Seven were terminated by abortions performed by Waite himself.
In the meantime, Polly’s husband, Andrew—to whom she was still legally wed—had descended into a life of drunken debauchery, supposedly as a result of his wife’s flagrant infidelities. Sometime around 1841, without bothering with the formality of a divorce, he married “a disreputable character by the name of Simpson.” Two years later, the second Mrs. Bodine was found dead in bed, and Andrew was arrested
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