Attorney/college teacher McConnell's debut is an accomplished
re-creation of two notorious murders of young women in the rural
gentility of 1880s Connecticut, with a remarkable sense for the
inequities and dark places of that vanished era. Near New Haven in
1878, a frightened, illiterate working girl named Mary Stannard was
fed arsenic and had her throat slit, almost certainly by her lover
Herbert Hayden, a failing minister; three years later, Jennie
Cramer, "The Belle of New Haven," was found dead of arsenic
poisoning, following her forced seduction by Jim Malley, a member
of the city's most prominent business family. Both cases created
what would now be called a "media circus"; both culminated in
grotesque trials which maligned the dead and their survivors,
ignored scientific evidence, and freed men who probably killed to
conceal obvious violations of then-universal notions of womanly
virtue. With a refreshing absence of maudlin declamation, McConnell
performs a masterly job of retrieving the lost history of these
sensational events. Her crisp prose and comprehensive research make
for a lively presentation of many remarkable details as she unfolds
a disturbing tale of class-oriented gender discrimination and
dramatizes the state criminal justice system in its infancy.
(Ordinary citizens and an indiscreet press readily insinuated
themselves into the investigation and trial, tainting them both;
the grisly Victorian fascination with the misfortunes of others
derailed justice still further.) McConnell also examines the
repercussions of both murders for the victims' hapless families,
not sparing readers the tragic nature of otherwise remote events,
and captures the resonance of these crimes within their
communities. An intimate, compelling portrait of seamy and
disturbing (thus "forgotten") aspects of the Gilded Age that, in
its narrative of yearningly naive young women and socially
respectable male predators, offers a sobering augury of our own
violent, sexually stratified times. (Kirkus Reviews)
A high-profile murder can function as a mirror of an era, and
attorney and crime researcher Virginia McConnell provides a
fascinating view of Connecticut in Victorian times, as glimpsed
through the unrelated, but disturbingly similar murders of two
young women near New Haven in the late 1800s. The colorful
characters involved in the commission, investigation, and
prosecution of these crimes emerge as real, vibrant individuals,
and their stories, compelling in themselves, reveal much about
Victorian sex and marriage, drugs from arsenic to aphrodisiacs,
early forensic medicine, and 19th-century courtroom procedures.
Both victims in these sensational killings were young women from
the New Haven area. The first, Mary Stannard, was a 22-year-old,
unmarried mother who worked as a domestic and believed herself to
be pregnant for a second time. The man accused of her murder,
Reverend Herbert Hayden, was a married lay minister whose seduction
of Mary was fairly common knowledge. Upon hearing from Mary of her
pregnancy, he assured her he would obtain some quick medicine for
an abortion and they agreed to meet in the woods. Mary's body was
found clubbed and poisoned, her throat slit; chemical tests
revealed she had been given 90 grains of arsenic. Hayden's wife
perjured herself on the witness stand to protect him (subsequently
becoming a darling of the press) and despite convincing forensic
testimony from Yale professors, the minister ultimately went
free.
Three years later, another woman of relatively low social
stature was found floating face-down in Long Island Sound off West
Haven. This strikingly pretty 20-year-old daughter of a cigar-maker
came to be known as The Belle of New Haven, and though she had been
seen frequently in the company of young people of questionable
character, had never been a loose girl. The autopsy of Jennie
Cramer revealed that she had not drowned, but had been savagely
raped and poisoned with arsenic just before her death. Three people
were put on trial for her murder: two scions of the wealthy Malley
department store family, and their prostitute friend from New York.
It was believed that the victim was killed to prevent her
disclosure of the date rape by one of the young men, but they were
likewise acquitted. "Arsenic Under the Elms" meticulously reviews
the evidence, the personalities involved, and the society that
produced them, resulting in a mesmerizing contribution to the
literature of true crime.
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