Apparently, I needed a break from Mary! So here were are at Mary Bissell Estey Part 2!
And now, the exciting conclusion... ;)
Elias Ives came around the corner of the house and shot John right in the chest. Mary heard the shot and thought McGuire had fired at the house. She screamed and ran downstairs into the dining room. In the dining room, Mrs. Sedgwick cried out that John was shot. Mary spoke to Ives, saying, “‘What is the matter?’ to which he replied, “I’ve shot him”. Mary said, “If he ain’t dead he’ll be to and kill all of us”. Ives walked over to the corpse carrying his pistol, in case John was"playing opossum”. According to a newspaper article about the trial, “[The body] was about two feet from the gate, inside the yard; [it] lay out on the back; the limbs were somewhat drawn up; the hands lay by the side”.
After making sure John was dead, Ives ran to the local constable's house and brought him back to the farmhouse. Ives was arrested for the murder of John McGuire and brought to the Hartford County Jail.
The next morning, while West Hartford’s residents amassed at the schoolhouse, Mary, Ives, Parsons, and Hartford detective Cowles traveled to Hartford in search of attorney S.F. Jones. As Jones was unavailable until Monday, the group returned to the Bissell farm, where Ives prepared to spend the weekend in jail. When Mary found that he would not be staying at the house, she said, "What, going to jail?" she exclaimed; "You've done nothing," and began to weep”.
At this point, Mary seems to have been hysterical, giving Ives “a bag of doughnuts and a pint of gin” and asking him if he wanted strawberries for tea, while becoming increasingly confused as to the sequence of the evening’s events. A newspaper reporter was in attendance at the house that morning, and quoted Mary as saying that she, “said it was a wonder that she was not crazy, she had gone through so much trouble”.
Ives went through three separate trials, one to decide whether he should be charged with murder in the first degree, one for murder in the first degree, and one for manslaughter. He was found not guilty of all charges.
Mary went on to live a long life after the events of 1877. The story of her second husband will be the subject of an upcoming post.
If you're interested in learning more about this particular story, it just happens that I was so obsessed that I wrote my Master's thesis on Mary. Click here to read more.
No comments:
Post a Comment