Bathsheba Spooner

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Bathsheba Ruggles Spooner
Born(1746-02-15)February 15, 1746
Sandwich, Province of Massachusetts Bay
DiedJuly 2, 1778(1778-07-02) (aged 32)
Worcester, Massachusetts, U.S.
Criminal statusExecuted
SpouseJoshua Spooner
Parent(s)Timothy Ruggles, father Bathsheba Ruggles (Bourne), mother
Conviction(s)Inciting, abetting and procuring the manner and form of murder
Criminal penaltyDeath by hanging

Bathsheba Ruggles Spooner (February 15, 1746 – July 2, 1778)

executed following the Declaration of Independence
.

The daughter of prominent Loyalist brigadier general and jurist Timothy Ruggles, Bathsheba Ruggles had an arranged marriage to wealthy farmer Joshua Spooner. After becoming pregnant by her lover, Continental Army soldier Ezra Ross, she enlisted the assistance of Ross and two others to murder her husband. On the night of March 1, 1778, Spooner was beaten to death and his body deposited in a well. Bathsheba and the three conspirators were soon arrested, tried, and convicted of Spooner's murder and sentenced to death.

Bathsheba

postmortem
examination revealed that she was five months pregnant. Historians have pointed out that the trial and execution may have been hastened by anti-Loyalist sentiment.

Background

Bathsheba Ruggles Spooner was the daughter of

Brig. Gen. Timothy Ruggles, a lawyer who had served as chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas in Worcester, Massachusetts, from 1762 to 1764.[citation needed] Timothy Ruggles refused to sign the Stamp Act protest when serving as Massachusetts representative to the Stamp Act Congress in 1765. An avowed Loyalist who threatened to raise an army to protect his and other Loyalist farms against attacks by Patriot forces, Ruggles joined forces with the British Army in Boston in 1775.[2]

Bathsheba Ruggles married Joshua Spooner on January 15, 1766. He was a well-to-do

abusive man for whom his wife developed "an utter aversion."[3]

Plotting murder

In the spring of 1777, sixteen-year-old Ezra Ross, a soldier in the Continental Army, fell ill en route to his home in Linebrook, a village in Ipswich. Bathsheba nursed him back to health. On his travels to and from army service, Ross visited the Spooner home in July and December 1777.[citation needed] On the latter occasion he stayed into the new year, traveled with Spooner on business trips and had an affair with Bathsheba.[citation needed] She became pregnant mid-January and began urging Ross to kill her husband.[citation needed] In February 1778, Ross accompanied Spooner on an extended trip to Princeton, bringing along a bottle of nitric acid given to him by Bathsheba with the aim of poisoning Spooner.[citation needed] Ross backed out of the plan and returned directly to his Linebrook home.[citation needed]

While Ross and Spooner were in Princeton, Bathsheba invited two runaway British soldiers—escaped prisoners of war Pvt. Williams Brooks and Sgt. James Buchanan—to stay at the Spooner home and discussed ideas for killing her husband with them. When Spooner returned, she recruited them to assist her. She also wrote to Ross to inform him of these developments, and he returned to Brookfield on February 28.[citation needed] When Spooner returned home from a local tavern the following evening, Brooks committed the murder and Buchanan and Ross helped hide the body in the Spooners' well. Bathsheba distributed paper money from her husband's lockbox and articles of his clothing to the three men, who then took one of the Spooner horses to Worcester, fourteen miles away.[3][4]

Brooks and Buchanan spent the remainder of the night drinking, and the next morning Brooks showed off Spooner's silver shoe buckles engraved with his initials. Once the murder was discovered, the three men were arrested in Worcester within 24 hours.[3] When Ross was discovered hiding in the attic of a tavern, he asked for a confessor.[citation needed] The trio implicated Bathsheba and three of her household servants in the crime.[citation needed] Brooks was charged with the assault on Spooner; Buchanan and Ross with aiding and abetting in the murder; and Bathsheba with inciting, abetting and procuring the manner and form of the murder.[citation needed] All were arraigned and pleaded not guilty.

Trial and execution

defended the accused. Brooks and Buchanan had no defense to offer, having signed lengthy confessions. Though Ross had signed a similar confession, Lincoln argued that he had no intention of harming the deceased, was not aware of the plan until a few hours before the murder, had not assisted in the murder and pretended to support it to maintain his affair with Bathsheba. He argued that Bathsheba had a "disordered mind," that her actions were irrational as evidenced by the lack of a getaway plan.[citation needed
]

All four defendants were found guilty the next day and

post-mortem examination, performed at Bathsheba's request, showed that she was pregnant with "a perfect male fetus of the growth of five months."[citation needed
]

Bathsheba's body was claimed by her sister, Mary Ruggles Green, wife of Dr. John Green. She was buried in an unmarked grave on the Green Estate, which today is the site of Green Hill Park in Worcester.[6]

Assessments

Shortly after the executions, on July 5, Rev. Ebenezer Parkman, the minister of the nearby town of

Westborough, delivered a sermon entitled The Adultress Shall Hunt for the Precious Life in which he said:[7]

So keep thee from the Evil woman, from the flattery of the tongue of a strange woman. Neither let her take thee with her eyelids. There are a thousand dangers, that poor young wretches are in by reason of the snares & traps which are everywhere laid ... particularly the poor beardless youth not quite 18.

One historian says the judgment of the first panel that examined Spooner–"they refused to acknowledge what must have been obvious"–and blames "vindictiveness".

Massachusetts Executive Council. Some suggest Bathsheba was executed because the community opposed her father's Loyalist stance.[4] John Avery Jr., the deputy secretary and leader of the Massachusetts Executive Council, who signed Bathsheba's death warrant, belonged to a group of Patriots called the Loyal Nine, who formed the innermost circle of the Sons of Liberty and was a step-brother of the murder victim.[8]

In popular culture

The CBS radio program Crime Classics dramatized the case in an episode entitled "The Crime of Bathsheba Spooner" that aired on June 15, 1953.[9] Bathsheba Spooner's case was also featured in Season 11, Episode 10 of Deadly Women.[citation needed]

References

  1. ^ a b Compton, Nancy. "Ruggles & Allied Families Genealogy". Archived from the original on January 9, 2009. Retrieved November 28, 2008.
  2. ISBN 9781558492271
    .
  3. ^ a b c d "Brookfield Woman Put to Death – July 2, 1778". MassMovements.org. July 2, 2008. Retrieved November 28, 2008.
  4. ^
    ISBN 1-85109-429-6
    .
  5. ^ Temple, Josiah Howard; Adams, Charles (1887). History of North Brookfield, Massachusetts: Preceded by an Account of Old Quaboag, Indian and English Occupation, 1647–1676; Brookfield Records, 1686–1783. The town [Boston, printed]. Retrieved November 28, 2008.
  6. ^ "Then & Now: Green Hill Park, Worcester". telegram.com. Retrieved December 13, 2018.
  7. ISBN 9781558492271
    .
  8. ^
    ISBN 9781558492271
    .
  9. ^ Crime Classics, June 15, 1953, accessed April 29, 2015

External links

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