ROWING
Here the story splits sharply in two. On one side, we have Louis Wagner’s elaborate but unsupported version of where he went and what he did in Portsmouth over the next eleven or twelve hours. On the other side, we have the case against Wagner assembled from snippets of information gathered from dozens of witnesses and assembled by the prosecuting attorneys. After chatting with John Hontvet on Water Street, Wagner all but disappeared until he was spotted at nearby New Castle early the following morning. He did not show up for supper at Johnson’s boarding house on the evening of March 5. No witness could be found to confirm, as Wagner later claimed, that he had worked baiting trawls for another ship on the docks, that he wandered sick and drunk through the streets after visiting two bars, that he vomited and passed out by the town water pump, or that he was sleeping on the sofa in the sitting room at Matthew Johnson’s while Hontvet’s crew baited trawls in the next room.
In three months of investigation, Wagner’s defense attorneys could find only a single witness, a six-year resident of Portsmouth named Timothy Chellis, who was willing to swear in court that he had seen Wagner that evening. “I saw him about half-past seven on that night, I should judge, in my shop, it might be a little later,” Chellis told the jury. “He called for some ale.” When he was arrested the following evening in Boston, a police officer told Wagner they had found the baker who sold him bread before he left for the Isles of Shoals. Wagner challenged the accusation, saying he had visited a Portsmouth bakery, but on the morning after the murders.
So no one actually saw Louis Wagner steal David Burke’s dory from the small dock where it was tied at the base of Pickering Street in the city’s South End. Wagner had been fishing aboard Burke’s schooner, the Iris, three weeks earlier with Burke’s sons, and with fishermen named James Lee and Peter Johnson. All four men testified they knew Wagner and he had been with them when they used the dory to travel back and forth to Burke’s fishing schooner. On March 5, James and Peter had taken the dory into Portsmouth for provisions. They arrived at the base of Pickering Street at seven-thirty p.m. and tied it securely “with two half hitches round a post.” That detail tells any sailor that the boat did not drift away on its own. When they returned an hour later, the dory was gone. It would be discovered early the following morning adrift in Little Harbor in the neighboring town of New Castle.
For once, Wagner’s timing was perfect. It was a good fifteen-minute walk from the downtown saloon run by Tim Chellis to the end of Pickering Street, and it was a mere three hundred yards from the dock to David Burke’s house where the two fishermen were picking up their provisions. Another few minutes and they would return, taking the rowboat with them. Wagner may have been prowling the waterfront in search of a boat to take to the Shoals or he may have been searching, as he testified, for a quick job unloading fish or baiting trawls. He was wearing his worn-out cold-weather fishing outfit, among his only possessions not lost in the sinking of the Addison Gilbert—blue overalls, a blue jumper or sweater over a brown jumper, and a pair of size-eleven rubber boots.
By nature, Wagner was both calculating and impulsive. It is entirely possible that the daring plan suddenly coalesced the moment he saw the familiar dory bobbing in the water with its two oars attached. The calculus was clear. With all three men off Smuttynose, with the moon on the rise and the sky clear, with the wind low and the tide right, with a boat at hand, there was time enough. He could reach the Isles of Shoals, slip silently into the house, grab the Hontvet’s savings, and have the dory back in its place well before dawn. It might be days before anyone noticed the money was missing. By then, he would be far away. Murder, it is possible, was the last thing on his mind. If the women were asleep and did not wake, Wagner later told the judge in a semi-confessional moment at his arraignment five days later, he could have easily stolen the Hontvet’s money.
It would have taken no more than a minute for Wagner to step onto the dock, unfastened the dory line, position the oars, and push off into the dark Piscataqua River. New Hampshire has only three ocean lighthouses and Wagner would pass them all as he pulled toward the Isles of Shoals. The swift flowing tide, one of the fastest in North America, would whisk the dory and its passenger the first three miles almost without effort. Quickly came the glow of Portsmouth Harbor Light at Fort Constitution on New Castle Island, the last chunk of land before the mouth of the river turned into open sea. The beam from this wooden tower, built in 1770 under British colonial rule, was fixed like a spotlight, but would scarcely have illuminated a lone rower. The granite block fort had been the site of what locals still proudly call “the first battle of the American Revolution.” The whitewashed cast-iron tower that stands today near the ruins of the old fort was built in 1877, two years after Wagner’s death.
The second benchmark was the station on tiny Whaleback Ledge in the center of the river. It was actually two towers. The original brick lighthouse had been replaced just months before by a new tower of dovetailed granite blocks but the old tower had yet to be removed. The light from the expensive new Fresnell lens swept repeatedly across the dark water. Until he reached the sea, even at night, Wagner was at constant risk of being seen. A few years earlier, the keeper at Whaleback Light had counted 380 vessels as they passed by in a single day. The lamp exposed the dory with each pass, but Wagner was swiftly out of range.
From here, Wagner would have to row in earnest. During a recent reenactment of his journey, an amateur rower in a replica dory took only thirty minutes, borne by the powerful tide and traveling at over five knots, to reach this point from Pickering’s Wharf in Portsmouth. But here the sea becomes frighteningly vast and the intermittent glow from the third lighthouse at the Shoals seven miles away would be no bigger than a firefly. If Wagner had doubts, this was the point to turn back. There was still plenty of time to return to the city and to bait trawls. But the powerful undercurrent still tugged at his dory, urging it seaward. The Hontvet’s treasure, perhaps hundreds of dollars, lay waiting. Turning around now meant fighting the mighty Piscataqua tide. The return trip, Wagner knew, could take as long and expend as much energy as rowing the rest of the way to Smuttynose. By dawn he could earn a dollar from John Hontvet, or he could have it all. So the die was cast, and he pressed on.
The next few hours belong to fiction writers and to poets. The image of Wagner in his tiny boat, pulling relentlessly at the oars in the near darkness while his victims sleep is hypnotizing. Celia Thaxter imagined the scene as if in slow motion with the grim figure of death inching closer to his innocent victims. “It seems to take an eternity of time,” Celia imagined, as if she were in the dory with Wagner.
Instead of thwarting the murderer, she wrote, Mother Nature appeared to be assisting Wagner on his deadly mission. Two weeks earlier, the thermometer had dropped to thirteen degrees below zero in a “cold blowy snap” with plenty of snow and white-capped waves. Suddenly it was like spring with fair westerly winds, calm seas, and just enough moonlight to guide his journey while disguising him from view. Even God sat idly by as “this planned piece of deliberate wickedness” was enacted, Celia wrote, quoting from a play by the poet Robert Browning. The horror of Wagner’s journey stood in sharp contrast, she wrote, to the peaceful snow-covered scenery as he rowed “with his heart full of darkness, blacker than the black tide that swirled beneath his boat and bore him fiercely on.”
Maine poet John Perrault captured the seemingly endless journey by repeating this refrain after every stanza in his “Ballad of Louis Wagner.” The chorus goes: “Louis, Louis Wagner, rowing through the night/Louis, Louis Wagner, the noose will fit you tight.” While it is tempting, in retrospect, to imbue Wagner at this point with homicidal intent, he may have had little on his mind except the dull meditative rhythm of the oars. He apparently brought no weapons with him.
He was a dory fisherman and familiar with the ocean at night and in all weather. He knew the risk of being seen by a passing schooner, the mercurial changes of New England weather, and the dangers of the sea. If his boat was swamped by a sudden wave, he would most certainly drown minutes later in the frigid waters. In the dark, facing away from the bow of the boat, Wagner could strike a rocky ledge and sink or spring a leak. He could snap a precious oar and find himself drifting aimlessly toward open ocean, eventually to die of exposure. There was even the chance that John Hontvet, tired of waiting for his bait to arrive, had left Portsmouth and that the Clara Bella would suddenly appear out of the darkness.
On the same spot off the Isles of Shoals decades later, two men hauling their trawls had a fearsome encounter with a seventy-foot whale. It circled them and thrashed the water into foam with its tail, filling their dories to the railings with water and forcing the men to bail or sink. “The whale seemed to be disappointed and angry,” they told a trade publication called The Fisherman in 1895, “for he headed right after us and poked his big nose up to the tall rail of the sloop. He chased us about two miles then went to the eastward.”
The brightest of the three lighthouses was now dominating the night sky, its rotating lens flashing endlessly red, then white, then red every thirty seconds. As the narrow beam from White Island grew closer and the low dark islands appeared, Wagner must have feathered his oars with more confidence, pivoting them parallel to the water with each stroke to reduce the sound of splashing and the muffled squeak of the wooden paddles. His destination was almost a mile north of the pulsing lighthouse, its beam too distant to reveal his coming. If he arrived at the Shoals in good time, Wagner may have seen lanterns still sputtering in Celia Thaxter’s cottage on Appledore. (“What fearful thing passed by!” she later wrote, “but we slumbered peacefully.”) Or he may have seen lights winking out among the surviving houses on Star Island where John Poor’s workmen were retiring from another long day building the Oceanic Hotel. He may even have seen Maren Hontvet’s lamp go out on Smuttynose. The three women, after waiting in vain for the men to return, turned off their lamps and went to bed sometime after ten p.m.
It has been suggested that Wagner slipped silently between the stone pier and Malaga Island to see if there were any other boats in Smuttynose Cove. He was clever enough not to tie up his stolen dory there in full view but apparently landed some distance away. He may have gone all the way around the islands, killing time, passing around Star and Cedar. More likely he pulled his boat up among the rocks near what is now a stone breakwater connecting Smuttynose to Cedar Island. A hand-painted sign now marks the rocky spot as Wagner’s Cove.
March 5 had been an uncharacteristically lucky day for the Prussian fisherman. All the pieces of the perfect robbery had so far fallen into place. He knew the island intimately having lived there seven months. And he knew, or thought he knew, where John Hontvet hid his money in the family home. Just another hour or two and he would be a wealthy man. But as midnight loomed and Wednesday turned to Thursday, Wagner’s bad luck would return with a vengeance.
The problem was Karen. It is probable that Wagner believed there were only two women, Maren and Anethe, sleeping soundly in the house, not three. Karen had left her job at the Appledore Hotel two weeks earlier after serving the Laightons for almost two years since her arrival from Norway. In “A Memorable Murder” Celia reveals that Karen was planning to go to Boston and obtain work at a sewing machine “for she was not strong and thought she should like it better than housework.” Suffering from severe toothaches, Karen had also recently been to Portsmouth where a dentist had removed all of her teeth, an extremely painful process in Victorian times. According to Celia, Karen had told Mrs. Johnson, the woman who ran the boarding house on Water Street, that the waiting period for a set of false teeth was three months. Wagner may have overheard this conversation between Karen and his landlady in Portsmouth, and Celia says that Wagner then muttered to himself, “Three months! What is the use! In three months you will be dead.”
While Celia Thaxter is often a reliable source, this whispered threat is almost certainly untrue or highly exaggerated. According to one of her contemporaries, when it came to her prose writing, “Celia was always given to coloring in a little,” and this may be one of those times. Wagner’s comment was overheard by Mrs. Johnson’s daughter, Mary, as told to Maren Hontvet, as told to Celia Thaxter after the murders. It makes no sense that Wagner would threaten Karen’s life within earshot of a witness, and especially to do so with a three-month timeline. Neither of the Johnson women mentioned this incriminating comment at Wagner’s trial, nor did Maren. So if Wagner’s motive was robbery and Karen’s murder was not premeditated, why would Celia Thaxter include this damning detail?
Celia may have had personal reasons to demonize Louis Wagner. Maybe she felt more than a little guilt surrounding Karen’s sudden departure from Appledore. We get a fuller story from Cedric, who wrote to sister Celia on February 23, two weeks before Wagner’s dory slid silently into Gosport Harbor. While Celia downplayed the story of the firing of Karen in her famous essay, Cedric described it in epic terms as one of the most memorable days in the history of the Appledore Hotel.
With his usual comic wit, not knowing Karen’s death was days away, Cedric described the battle that ensued when Karen was instructed to clean out the apartments that housed the hotel workmen. The men would soon arrive to begin the annual spring preparation and their rooms had barely been washed or swept since the previous fall. Eliza Laighton, the widow of Thomas Laighton, apparently ordered Karen to get to work in a harsh manner. Karen, already unhappy with her job, embarrassed by her missing teeth, and heartsick for her lost lover, responded with righteous indignation. Karen stood in mother’s doorway, Cedric reported to Celia, “clutching the doorknob in her feverish grasp and with the fire of her pent up emotions flashing from either eye.” Karen then “annihilated” her boss in “a whirlwind of broken English” and stalked off.
The next day, Karen made a sorrowful apology but Eliza Laighton was unforgiving. She gave Karen some money, Cedric wrote, and then ordered her to, “depart and never come in my sight again.” On hearing that her favorite servant had been fired, Cedric’s Aunt Caroline, then living at the hotel, erupted in an “earthquake” of protest. Aunt Caroline “burst out into some of the most fearfully dismal and piercingly heart wrenching yells I ever heard,” Cedric wrote. The windows rattled, the cows mooed, and the horses in the barn pulled at their reigns in fear, Cedric joked. Karen Christensen’s departure from the hotel was a fearful scene that “will long be remembered in the annals of Appledore.” The truly fearful scene, however, was yet to come.
Karen’s untimely return to Smuttynose now appears as a cruel twist of fate. Worse yet was the sudden shift in the breeze on the afternoon of March 5. Karen had planned to go shopping in Portsmouth that day. John Hontvet was coming to get her. He intended to drop off Ivan at Smuttynose after fishing, eat dinner with his wife, Maren, and sail with Karen and Matthew aboard the Clara Bella to Portsmouth. While the men sold their fish and baited trawls in the city, Karen planned to run a few errands, then they would all return to the Shoals that same evening.
Karen was dressed for a trip into Portsmouth all day, Maren later told Celia. Karen had “lots of copper money” that day, too, Maren testified at the trial. Anethe gave her sister-in-law three quarters and Maren had given her a dime to buy some braid. Anethe also took a white button from Maren’s sewing basket. She gave the button to Karen and asked her to look for matching buttons while she was in the city. Karen put the coins and the button in her purse and snapped the lock shut. But then the wind shifted and the men went to Portsmouth and the bait train was late. So Karen did not go to Portsmouth on Wednesday as planned. She did not go on Thursday or on Friday. She did not go to Portsmouth until Saturday afternoon when she and Anethe arrived aboard the USS Mayflower. The tugboat delivered their battered bodies in pine boxes to the warehouse of funeral directors Woodbury, Gerrish & Company.