Killer Colt Read online

  There the lid was removed again, the corpse lifted from the box and placed on a rough wooden table. The rope was cut and the twisted body straightened out. So repulsive was its condition—so overpowering its stench—that no one could be found to wash it until a fellow named James Short, an attendant at the public alms house, agreed to do so for a fee of six dollars (the equivalent of one hundred fifty dollars in today’s money).3

  By the time Short had completed the task, Dr. C. R. Gilman, physician to the city prison, and his assistant, Dr. Richard S. Kissam, had arrived at the Dead House. At around 1:00 p.m., they began their postmortem examination of the carrion remains of Samuel Adams.

  • • •

  Their grim work was completed about two hours later. Not long afterward, Coroner Jefferson Brown convened an inquest in the old alms house. Until late in the evening, the jurors heard testimony from a string of witnesses, including Asa Wheeler, Law Octon, John Delnous, Dr. James Chilton, Richard Barstow, Thomas Russell, Mayor Morris, and Magistrate Taylor. They also heard from the Kalamazoo’s second mate, Bill Blanck, who had been taken to the Tombs earlier in the day. There, he had identified John Colt as the “man with the swarthy face, black side whiskers, and piercing black eyes” who had left the crate at the ship.4

  Far and away the most shocking testimony came from Dr. Gilman. His summation of the autopsy was rendered all the more disturbing by his tone of bland clinical detachment—particularly his insistence on referring to the savaged victim as “it.”

  “It was a man rather under the middle size, stout rather than fat,” Gilman began. “It measured five-feet-nine-and-a-half inches in height. It was very considerably decayed in all its parts. I should think it had been dead seven or eight days. Its head was so much decayed that the scalp could be pushed off by the rub of a finger.”

  Before the corpse was stuffed into the box, Gilman explained, it had been “tied with a rope around the knees and carried to the head. The thighs were strongly bent up and the head a little bent forward.” Gilman then offered a graphic description of the fatal injuries, all of which had been inflicted on the victim’s head:

  The skull was fractured in several different places. The right side of the forehead, the socket of the eye, and a part of the cheekbone were broken in. On the left side the fracture was higher up. The brow had escaped, but above that the forehead was beaten in. The two fractures communicated on the center of the forehead, so that the whole of the forehead was beaten in, also the right eye and a part of the right cheek. On the other side of the head, directly above the ear, there was a fracture, with depression of the bone—it was not detached, it was dented in. This fracture was quite small. There was also a fracture on the left side of the head, a little behind and above the ear, in which there was a round, clean hole, as if made by a musket ball, so that you might put your finger through it. There was no fracture on the back part of the head. When I examined the cavity of the skull, I found some pieces of bone, about the size of a half dollar, beaten in and entirely loose among the pulpy mass, which was the brain. The lower jaw was also fractured.

  Apart from a shirt—which had been “ripped up and was hanging like a gown from the arms”—the body was unclothed. Whoever had perpetrated the atrocity, however, had overlooked one telltale piece of evidence that Gilman had removed from the corpse and now displayed to the jurors: “a small plain ring on the little finger of the left hand.”5

  The ring—along with some scraps of clothing that had been stuffed inside the crate—was identified by the final witness of the day, Emeline Adams, who was also shown the gold watch discovered in John Colt’s trunk. She confirmed that her husband possessed a watch “precisely like it—that he had gotten it for a debt very lately.” He was carrying it, she declared, “when he left home after dinner” on the day he disappeared.6

  It was late in the evening when the coroner’s jury returned their verdict: “that the body was that of Mr. Samuel Adams and that, in their belief, he came to his death by blows inflicted by John C. Colt.”7

  27

  Though the Mary Rogers case was still the city’s biggest crime story in the days leading up to John Colt’s arrest, it was far from the only one. Murders, rapes, assaults—some of startling brutality—were regularly reported in the penny press.

  In Hempstead, Long Island, a woman named Hall was killed by her African-American gardener, Alexander Beck, who fractured her skull with a shovel in an apparent fit of religious delirium. Another Long Island resident, a boat builder named Jesse Ryerson, had his throat cut by a journeyman worker named Smith, who dumped the victim’s body into Hempstead Bay.

  A few days later—in what the Herald immediately trumpeted as “Another Mary Rogers Case”—the corpse of a “good-looking young girl about twenty years of age,” dressed “in a calico frock with purple fringes and muslin underclothes, but neither bonnet nor shoes,” was found floating in the Hudson River. Even as her body was being transported to the Dead House, the trial of eighteen-year-old William Phelps, “accused of murdering George Phelps during a robbery,” was getting under way in Brooklyn.

  In Lower Manhattan, William Bolton—a twenty-year-old “soaplock” (slang for a dandyish youth who affected the style later called sideburns)—was arrested after attempting to rape “a stout, athletic Irish wench named Mary Farrell” as she entered her backyard to use the privy. Bolton, according to the Herald, “so far succeeded in his object that he seized her, laid her on the ground, and was preparing to have carnal knowledge of her when two other women extricated her from the clutches of the ravisher.”

  From farther afield came reports of the hanging of sixty-five-year-old Samuel Watson of Williamston, North Carolina, who was executed for the murder of a neighbor, Mrs. Fanny Garrett. “There was a plum orchard between their residences,” reported the Herald, “and she was stooping, in the act of gathering plums, when he deliberately shot her dead, assigning as a cause that she was a witch and had conjured him.” Shortly before his death, the twice-married Watson also confessed that he had “caused the death of both his wives.”

  That same week, another elderly Southerner, seventy-year-old John Davis, went on a rampage in a Greenville, South Carolina, boardinghouse when another lodger disturbed him from his sleep. Leaping from his bed, Davis “commenced an indiscriminate slaughter,” stabbing “six men with a knife, two of whom—T. J. Larder, Esq., and Mr. Samuel Brawley—were killed.”

  Perhaps most shocking of all was a reported case of parricide in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, where twenty-year-old Henry Gunn brained his elderly father with a hatchet, then absconded with “money and valuables worth about $40,000,” leaving the bloody weapon in a woodpile behind the house, its blade clotted with “tufts of hair from the head of the murdered man.”1

  None of these outrages, however, proved to be more than a passing diversion for readers of the sensational press. Once the Colt-Adams story broke on the morning of Monday, September 27, they were immediately forgotten.

  Though multicolumn banner headlines didn’t exist in 1841, the city papers trumpeted the news as loudly as their small-print format permitted.2 Each of the dailies ran a version of the same attention-grabbing headline: “Awful Murder” (New York American), “Frightful Murder” (Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer), “Terrible Murder” (Tribune), “Another Shocking Murder” (New-York Commercial Advertiser), “Horrible Murder of Mr. Adams” (Sun), “Shocking Murder of Mr. Adams, the Printer” (Herald). The accompanying stories offered detailed accounts of the killing and the discovery of the victim’s crated remains in the hold of the packet Kalamazoo.3

  The case was an instant sensation, the talk of the town—“the subject of conversation among all classes of the community,” as one newspaper put it.4 By Monday afternoon, the site of the “awful murder” had already become the city’s hottest attraction. Two floors above Colt’s office, the Apollo Association’s fine arts gallery had drawn so few visitors in the first years of its existence that, at its third a
nnual meeting, the membership talked of shutting it down.5 Now the same public that couldn’t be lured to the Granite Building for its cultural offerings came flocking there in droves for a glimpse of the crime scene. Throughout the day, the northwest corner of Broadway and Chambers was so packed with curiosity seekers that pedestrians had to detour around the crowds.6

  Even as the gawkers blocked the foot traffic on Broadway, craning their necks for a better view of Colt’s second-story window, the man himself was being escorted from his cell to the office of Police Magistrate Taylor. There, attended by Dudley Selden and two other attorneys, Robert Emmett and John A. Morrill, he was examined by Taylor, who asked him his name, age, place of birth, and occupation. Colt replied firmly to these pro forma questions, hesitating only when asked if he was married. After a brief consultation with his lawyers, he replied, “I decline answering under the advice of my counsel.”

  “What have you to say to in relation to the charge against you?” asked Taylor.

  “I decline answering any further questions by advice of my counsel,” Colt repeated. “But I am innocent of the charge.”

  Newspapers described Colt’s appearance and behavior during this examination in dramatically different, if not completely contradictory, ways. Most agreed that he was an “exceedingly prepossessing” man: about five feet nine inches tall and “very well made,” with curly, dark brown hair and full side whiskers. Some, however, found his good looks marred by his eyes, reported to be of that “brown-colored class that cannot easily be read, and that are generally found in the faces of all scoundrels, schemers, and plotters.”7

  As for his mien, several accounts emphasized Colt’s “remarkable composure,” “singular coolness,” “peculiar nonchalance”—a trait presumably in keeping with the “calculating deliberation” he had exhibited in his attempts to hide the evidence. Indeed, in the view of more than one observer, it was the callous way that Colt had gone about trying to “conceal the deed,” even more than the murder itself, that made his crime an “enormity without parallel.”8

  This picture of Colt as a cold-blooded creature was reinforced by a widely printed story that the only emotion he had displayed at the examination was a flash of self-pity. “I don’t think they treat me well with regard to my meals,” he reportedly complained to Taylor before being led back to his cell. “They don’t bring my dinner on a clean plate but on one that had been used before.”9

  In sharp contrast to this image of Colt as a man of “extraordinary coolness of nerve,” other accounts depicted him as profoundly distraught during his brief appearance before Magistrate Taylor. “His face was of a ghastly paleness,” wrote the reporter for the Commercial Advertiser, “his eyes deeply sunk into his head and fearfully wild in their expression. The few hours since the verdict of the inquest had been rendered had evidently been those of intense suffering, of deep mental anguish. The prisoner made a strong effort to maintain his composure, but the effort was clearly visible.” Indeed, according to the same report, Colt was in such an “overwrought frame of mind” that “every means had been taken to prevent his committing self-destruction—a result he evidently contemplates.”10

  Of all the journalists in the city, James Gordon Bennett lavished the most loving attention on the Colt-Adams story, perceiving it from the start as a potential circulation booster on the order of the Helen Jewett and Mary Rogers cases. In Tuesday’s issue of the Herald, for example, he ran a full-profile woodcut portrait of Colt—a highly unusual feature at a time when the typical newspaper page consisted of row upon row of eye-straining type, unrelieved by any illustrations. He was also the only journalist to describe Samuel Adams’s burial on Monday, and to run a remarkable (if highly suspect) story about Adams’s wife, Emeline. According to Bennett (who provides no source for his believe-it-or-not anecdote),

  some days before Adams was murdered, his wife dreamed that she saw him dead—murdered and stript naked and put into a box, and his clothes thrown into a privy. She awoke and burst into tears; but finding her husband asleep by the side of her, she said nothing about it. The next night, she dreamed the same thing, and next day concluded to tell her mother of it; but finally laughed it off as an idle dream. There is no doubt of the truth of these facts, and to say the least of it, it was very remarkable.11

  Bennett, moreover, lost no time in exploiting the public’s prurient interest in Colt’s unsanctified relationship with Caroline Henshaw. Picking up on John’s evasive replies to questions about his marital status, other papers had referred to “the female who has been kept by him for some time.”12 Bennett alone, however—resorting to proper French at a time when the word pregnant was considered too vulgar for public utterance—added a titillating detail. Colt’s female companion, Bennett revealed, “is by him enciente and the period of her accouchement is near.”13

  It was Bennett who also provided the most extensive coverage of Colt’s arraignment, which took place in the Court of Oyer and Terminer on Tuesday afternoon. Standing before the bench, Colt appeared “firm, calm, and collected” as the clerk began reading the true bill indictment, a formulaic document combining tortured legalese with a Bible-steeped view of human motivation:

  The Jurors of the People of the State of New York in and for the body of the City and County of New York upon their oath present that John C. Colt late of the Third Ward of the City of New York in the County of New York aforesaid Laborer, not having the fear of God before his eyes but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil on the seventeenth day of September in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and forty one with force and arms at the Ward, City and County aforesaid in and upon one Samuel Adams in the peace of God and of the said People then and there being feloniously, wilfully, and of his malice aforethought did make an assault and that the said John C. Colt with a certain hatchet of the value of six cents which he the said John C. Colt in his right hand then and there had and held, the said Samuel Adams in and upon the right side of the head of him the said Samuel Adams then and there feloniously, wilfully and of his malice aforethought did strike and cut, giving to him the said Samuel Adams then and there with the hatchet aforesaid in and upon the right side of the head of him the said Samuel Adams one mortal wound of the breadth of three inches and of the depth of six inches of which said mortal wound he the said Samuel Adams then and there died.

  And so the Jurors aforesaid upon their oath aforesaid do say that he said John C. Colt, him the said Samuel Adams in the manner and form aforesaid feloniously, willfully, and of his malice aforethought did kill and murder, against the form of the statute in such case made and provided and against the peace of the People of the State of New York and their dignity.

  Jamming the courtroom for the proceedings were more than two dozen of the city’s most eminent lawyers, a reflection (in Bennett’s words) of the “intense excitement that this most extraordinary and unparalleled case has occasioned, even among the legal fraternity.”14

  It wasn’t just the gruesomeness of the killing, the macabre method of body disposal, or the spicy hints of illicit sex that made the case so riveting. Another tantalizing ingredient was the same one that, in future years, would help turn figures like Professor John Webster, Lizzie Borden, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, O. J. Simpson, and others into media celebrities: namely, their social prominence. However much Bennett and his competitors differed in their initial depictions of John Colt’s demeanor, all agreed on one point: that the accused was “descended from one of the most eminent families of the state of Connecticut,” being “the grandson of the Hon. John Caldwell of Hartford and son of Christopher Colt, a respected textile manufacturer of that place.” And none failed to mention that his brother, Samuel, was the “well known inventor of Colt’s celebrated firearms.”15

  28

  From the moment he embarked on his firearms business, Sam Colt had been forced to deal with a virtually uninterrupted series of crises. His brother’s arrest for murder, however, was, by a consi
derable measure, the worst. And for Sam, it couldn’t have come at a less opportune time.

  Since his meeting in June with Secretary of the Navy George Badger, Sam had been awaiting the passage of the naval appropriation bill with its promised allocation for the development of his harbor defense system. As late as September 5, he had received word from a Washington friend that the bill would most likely be “taken up and passed” within a matter of days. By then, Sam, brimming with confidence, had already drafted a prospectus for his Submarine Battery Company, approached a small group of investors, and sold five hundred shares at fifty dollars each.1

  Less than a week after he received his friend’s encouraging news, however, Washington was shaken by a political upheaval. On September 11, Naval Secretary Badger—along with the rest of the Cabinet, excepting Secretary of State Daniel Webster—resigned in protest over President Tyler’s fiscal policies.2 Badger’s replacement, a Virginia judge named Abel P. Upshur, knew nothing of the agreement struck between his predecessor and Colt. Suddenly Sam found himself without a governmental sponsor.

  It was at this very moment, when the federal funding he was counting on seemed about to fall through, that Sam returned from an out-of-town business trip to find the city abuzz with news of his brother’s arrest.

  From the start, Sam was his brother’s most stalwart defender. Despite the precarious state of his own finances, he assumed responsibility for John’s legal fees, offering each of the attorneys a thousand-dollar retainer—“five hundred in cash and ten shares par value in the Submarine Battery Company.”3

  At the same time, Sam never lost sight of his own business interests. Throughout John’s ordeal, he pursued his current project with the tireless drive that, to his later hagiographers, exemplified his “unconquerable spirit”—the “indomitable energy and perseverance” that, “when the dark clouds of adversity rested upon him,” allowed him to “overcome all obstacles and emerge triumphantly into the light of day.”4