Eleven

“Yesterday I Was a Wonder”

April–June 1832

THE PRIME MOVER OF all the horrid circumstances. While Lucretia tried to resume her former life in Andalusia, Lino, still awaiting trial, continued his attempt to damage her reputation. He’d already written a letter to Mary Chapman, with whom he’d often flirted, begging the teenager to tell the authorities that her mother had once confessed to him that she and she alone had murdered William. If Mary would do so, he promised the girl, “My father, my parents, all will reward and favor you and take you away from your mother and you will be in the bosom of my family as a daughter.” But he hadn’t mailed the letter. Instead he’d begun concentrating on his memoirs, in the process presenting a Lucretia who was not just a killer but a con artist every bit as talented and devious as himself.

He’d known her before his visit to Andalusia, he wrote, met her while traveling by steamboat from New York to Philadelphia. She’d introduced herself to him under an alias. Miss Wilson, she’d said her name was—and made a point of telling him she was unmarried.

He hadn’t been all that interested in her. His taste was for younger women. He’d recently seduced one, a beautiful girl from upstate New York, a “flower that would have bloomed in the genial rays of the morning sun of love,” but whom he caused to “fall” to his “scorching” attentions. Still, Miss Wilson had found him attractive. And no wonder, for he’d been wearing a braid-trimmed coat and finely embroidered silk vest, and precious jewels had bedizened his fingers and chest. Where would he be staying in Philadelphia, Miss Wilson had asked him, and when he’d said he wasn’t sure, she’d suggested he stay at the boardinghouse where she was going to lodge. He’d agreed, on the theory that though she was older than the kind of women he liked, he might nevertheless have some fun with her, might “succeed in overcoming her scruples of delicacy.”

His theory proved right. “That very evening, Miss Wilson was sacrificed at the shrine of pleasure.”

He paid her for her favors. Gave her twelve doubloons, took her out shopping for some new frocks, and, showing her his jewel-filled trunks, presented her with pearl earrings and an emerald-studded bracelet.

But Miss Wilson wasn’t grateful for his largesse. After seeing his treasures, she played a cruel trick on him. She sent him, via one of her servants, a gold watch and musical snuffbox, and demanded he purchase the items. He didn’t want them, but Miss Wilson’s servant was incredibly rude, and to get rid of her, he bought the lot for ten dollars, after which the ill-mannered servant promptly disappeared. As soon as she did, however, a corpulent police officer arrived, said the watch and snuff box were stolen goods, and dragged Carolino off to jail. Miss Wilson had clearly planned the whole thing, and while he was in prison, she gained access to his room and made off with his trunks.

He’d discovered this despicable act of his inamorata’s when, freed from jail, he’d gone back to the boardinghouse to get his possessions. The previous landlady was gone, but the new proprietor told him who had taken his things. She was, said the proprietor, a woman named “not Miss Wilson, but Mrs. Lucretia Chapman” who lived “at a place called Andalusia about thirteen miles from Philadelphia.” So he set out for that place, and find the thief he did. He spotted a house with a sign that said “Chapman,” entered it, and discovered, seated in the dining room, “the very woman of whom he was in search.”

This story provides a far more plausible explanation of why Lino turned up in Andalusia than does the one the prosecution presented at Lucretia’s trial. But it is a difficult story to credit, since Lino told different versions of it on different occasions. When he sought release from the Eastern State Penitentiary, he told prison inspectors that the objects he was accused of stealing had been given to him by “another person of my own age” and made no mention of a mysterious woman’s having planted them in his room. When he was apprehended for William’s murder, he said nothing about Lucretia’s having stolen anything from him, or even that he’d known her before coming to Andalusia; he also, at that time, claimed to have stopped in Andalusia purely by accident. While awaiting his murder trial, he told a journalist that he had known Lucretia before he was jailed for theft, that she’d been his sex partner and stolen his treasures, and that when he was released he’d set out to find her. But he also told the journalist that no one directed him to Andalusia, that he stopped there serendipitously, and that only once there did he recognize—to his great surprise—that the lady of a certain house had been his “chère amie in Philadelphia.”

It was as if he couldn’t stop inventing and reinventing the story of his life.

On April twenty-fourth, a day on which a local newspaper reported the hanging of a Lancaster, Pennsylvania, man before fifteen thousand witnesses, Lino’s case was at last brought to trial. He entered the courthouse nonchalantly that day, chatted confidently with his defense attorneys, and as soon as he was placed at the bar began picking his teeth, as if oblivious to his setting or its perils.

Once again Judge John Fox was presiding and Thomas Ross and William Reed were prosecuting. But this time something was different. When Reed led off the trial’s preliminaries by inquiring whether the prosecution could ask prospective jurors if they had conscientious scruples against finding a verdict of guilt, Judge Fox unexpectedly said, “Yes. It is a proper question and I will allow it to be asked.”

As soon as he’d spoken, young Samuel Rush, Eleazar McDowell’s apprentice, called out, “Am I to understand your Honor to say that you have decided contrary to the opinion you gave in the former trial?”

“Yes, contrary to my own opinion.” He had changed his mind, Judge Fox explained, after discussing his previous decision with several other judges and with the chief justice.

Rush and McDowell were dismayed. They hadn’t, after all, asked for a jury of foreigners. But they’d been hoping for compassionate Americans, for the kind of jurors who, perhaps secretly harboring an antipathy toward taking the life of a fellow human being, might be counted upon to be automatic allies during deliberations. They tried to explain this to Lino, who with his limited English had been listening uncomprehendingly to the discussion. For a moment his face fell and he looked forlorn. But immediately afterward he recovered himself and glanced about him with an air of machismo.

The indictment was read. Jurors were selected—among them seven Quakers who did not abhor capital punishment. The prosecution delivered its opening remarks, promising to prove that “The death of Mr. Chapman was caused by a most deadly poison that the day before he was taken ill the individual at the bar purchased in Philadelphia.” Yet still, Lino’s nonchalance didn’t fade—perhaps because he knew that at Lucretia’s trial Ross had been unable to establish that poison was the cause of William’s death. But Lino was in far more jeopardy than Lucretia had been. For one thing, the state’s ability to tie him to the purchase of the deadly poison was potentially of greater significance to the jurors than was its inability to explain exactly how William had died. For another, unlike Lucretia, Lino was an outsider, an alien to the community.

Thomas Ross, who’d been bested by David Paul Brown despite all his hard work, his ambitions, and his dreams of glory, didn’t intend to lose again. Not this time. He’d tightened his case, located witnesses who could add to the devastating evidence of Lino’s having purchased arsenic by testifying to the fact that he’d lied in order to get it, that although he’d said he needed arsenic to preserve birds, he actually had no birds. Ross was ready with two such witnesses, acquaintances of Lino’s, and with the whole cast that had testified at Lucretia’s trial, including the medical men who had tended William while he was dying, those who had autopsied his body, and those who had searched for traces of arsenic in his tissues.

On the second day of the trial, he began producing his witnesses, and when he had examined them all, he capped his show with Willis Blayney. This time around he’d gotten Philadelphia’s high constable to come to court voluntarily. And this time around Blayney was talkative. He described at length how he’d taken Lino into custody in Boston, how he’d escorted him by steamboat to Philadelphia, and how he’d promised Lino that if he owned up to whether he’d ever been a pirate or a convict, Blayney wouldn’t divulge in a court of law anything else he might reveal. But after saying all this, Blayney suddenly clammed up. He didn’t want to break his word to the prisoner, he explained, and begged the court not to force him to report what Lino had said to him once he’d claimed never to have been a pirate or convict.

Judge Fox listened to him respectfully and said understandingly, “Any declaration a man makes that is drawn from him by the offer of favor or by threats cannot be given in evidence. But the question is, did you actually promise the defendant favor?”

Before Blayney could reply, all four attorneys rushed to give their opinions on the matter. Blayney had promised Lino favorable treatment in return for a confession, argued the defense counselors. “The defendant’s confession cannot be given in evidence.”

Blayney hadn’t promised Lino favorable treatment, argued the prosecution lawyers, and in addition they made the point that what Lino had told their witness wasn’t a confession. “It is a statement made by Mina with a view of shielding himself. There was no admission of his having participated in the murder.”

After listening to the outbursts from both sides Fox asked Blayney to repeat exactly what he’d said to Lino. Blayney described once again how on the steamboat Lino had kept trying to talk to him and how finally in order to silence the prisoner he’d asked him to answer his two questions and promised that anything else he said would be kept private.

“That was not a promise of favorable treatment,” Fox admonished Blayney. “You must tell us what he said.”

The high constable accepted the judge’s directive. He had no choice but to do so. “I asked Mina whether he had a medicine chest,” he began. “He said he had, and had left it in the Boston jail. I asked him whether he had arsenic in it. He said he had medicine or stuff in it that would kill people and kill rats. I asked him whether he gave any of the medicine to Chapman. He said no, he was innocent. He said Mrs. Chapman put the physic in the soup. He said, ‘She take it from my bottles.’ He said that afterwards, ‘Mr. Chapman get very bad and die. Mrs. Chapman then come and kiss and hug me and say, ‘Lino, I want you to marry me.’”

The story Blayney had managed to withhold at Lucretia’s trial was now out—for whatever it was worth.

Lino’s defense was a sorry affair. Rush was a very junior man—he had not yet even been admitted to the bar—and McDowell himself, court-appointed and not receiving his usual high fees, chose not to expend much energy on the case. The pair’s cross-examination of prosecution witnesses was so perfunctory that the prosecution was able to get through all of its witnesses—there were twenty-three of them, almost as many as at Lucretia’s trial—in a mere two days. Their presentation of their own case was even more swift. They produced no witnesses at all, contenting themselves with only two things: the verdict of acquittal in Lucretia’s trial, and a deposition from a medical expert stating that it was difficult to differentiate death caused by cholera morbus from death caused by arsenic poisoning. Worse, despite his reputation for being a shrewd as well as likable attorney, McDowell did not deliver an effective closing argument. At least, whatever he said made little impression on the reporter from the Saturday Bulletin, who termed prosecutor Reed’s summation “clear” and “powerful,” but said nothing at all of McDowell’s closing remarks except to note that he had made some.

Nor did McDowell’s closing make much of an impression on William Du Bois, the law student turned true crime writer. He copied none of it down. But then Du Bois, who had been enjoined from publishing anything about the Chapman case until Lino’s trial was over, seemed to have grown bored with the entire subject of William Chapman’s murder. He didn’t jot down any of the summations. Lucretia’s trial had struck the writer as being of “exciting interest,” and he had copied out virtually every word of it. But Lucretia was a woman of the same class as Du Bois and presumably of the same class as his readers. Lino was a lower-class foreigner. All that interested Du Bois about this second trial were the various legal arguments. And all he wanted, all that stood between him and financial fortune, was the verdict.

He got it soon enough. At nine o’clock on the evening of April twenty-seventh, only three days after the trial had begun, Judge Fox sent the jury out to deliberate, with instructions that they were to receive no dinner until they reached a verdict.

Despite their hunger, they stayed out a respectable period of time—nearly three hours. Then, at midnight, they pronounced Lino guilty of murder in the first degree.

“Take the prisoner back for the night,” Judge Fox ordered the high sheriff. “Return him tomorrow for sentencing.”

Lino was flippant. His neck was ready for the rope, he told reporters.

The next day, Saturday, April twenty-eighth, Fanny Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans was published. Among the many anecdotes recounted by the feisty Englishwoman, who had organized theatricals in Cincinnati before turning to writing, was one about two Pennsylvania criminals, one an American, the other an Irish immigrant. They’d jointly committed a robbery, and they’d each been sentenced to death, but, Trollope reported, “the Irishman was hanged and the American was not.” Worse, she wrote, she’d heard but not yet been able to verify that such injustice was common in America, where ever since the Declaration of Independence nearly all the white men who’d been executed in the country were immigrants.

Whether Trollope’s statistic was right or not, Lino was, on that Saturday, in grave danger of death by hanging—the requisite sentence for his crime—and to prevent that unfortunate outcome, his lawyers finally roused themselves to make a last-ditch effort on his behalf. There was as yet no legislation granting automatic judicial review to defendants convicted of capital crimes. But the common law allowed them to seek a new trial, provided it could be shown that at their original trial, improper evidence had been admitted. McDowell and Rush, convinced that Willis Blayney’s evidence should not have been admitted, asked Judge Fox for permission to file an application for a new trial.

Fox gave them less than the customary four days. He’d expect their application, and their oral arguments, too, he said, at court’s opening on Tuesday.

Over the weekend the two defense attorneys consulted the law books in McDowell’s Doylestown office and began writing down precedents and salient points. In jail, Lino, who had lost faith in McDowell and Rush, also began writing. This time it wasn’t another anecdote for his memoirs but a letter to the court asking for a few more months of life than the judges might be inclined to give him. “My name is Carolino,” he wrote. “I was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church, and desire to die in its faith. I pray that a priest of that religion may be sent to me that I may prepare myself for death by confession and the blessed absolution, and by partaking of the holy communion according to the rites and ceremonies of that church.

“I have written to my father and brother, and expect they will come to this country to see me, and I have in the island of Cuba, a daughter four years old. It is necessary before I die, that I should execute some legal papers, in order to secure some property to my daughter. I therefore pray the Court to grant me at least a few months of existence, before I am ordered to be executed.”

The letter was in English. He would ask to have it read to the judges, he decided, if McDowell and Rush proved themselves as inept at getting him a second trial as they’d been at handling his first.

“Is it necessary for the prisoner to be here as we present arguments as to why he should have a new trial?” Samuel Rush asked Judge Fox first thing on Tuesday morning.

“There is no such necessity,” Fox replied, “if you are willing to argue the motion in his absence.”

They were willing, Rush said, and began the petitioning. “The High Constable made a compact with the prisoner,” he argued. “It was a promise of favor. It amounted to an offer of immunity from prosecution.” To bolster his position, he cited two Pennsylvania cases in which judges had ruled differently from Fox about allowing similar police testimony.

At this, Thomas Ross demanded to be heard. But Judge Fox, gesturing him to silence, said it wasn’t necessary for him to speak. “We have not changed our opinion since the trial,” he declared. “We do not think that the statement or confession made by the prisoner to Blayney was obtained under any promise of favor whatever. It was at most a promise to keep secret a confession which Mina wished to make.” A promise, he added, that had been made to the prisoner “upon the condition that his declaration that he was neither a convict nor a pirate should turn out to be true.”

That said, Fox concluded imperiously, “We still think we were right, and therefore the motion for a new trial is refused.”

Ross leaped to his feet. “I move the prisoner be brought up for sentencing!”

“Motion granted.”

From the judge’s tone it was clear that Lino’s sentencing was inevitable, and in a matter of moments the prisoner was led into the courtroom. Briefly, he spoke to his lawyers, handed them the letter he had written, then took his place in the dock.

“Mr. Espos y Mina,” Judge Fox demanded, casting a grim look at him, “do you have anything to say as to why the sentence of death should not be passed on you?” Lino was silent and from down in the well of the courtroom, McDowell answered for him. “The prisoner has drawn up a paper. We think it best if we read his words.”

“Permission granted.”

“My name is Carolino,” McDowell began to read. “I was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church.”

Fox leaned back, his expression inscrutable, and McDowell read on. “I have in the island of Cuba, a daughter four years old.”

Judge Fox was a stern man, but he had no fondness for sending another man to his death, especially the father of a four-year-old. He started to look agitated.

“It is necessary before I die,” McDowell continued, “that I should execute some legal papers, in order to secure some property to my daughter.”

In the pews, spectators were weeping. Lino, with his taut words, had become for them not the embodiment of evil but a man. A parent. It was a shift in attitude that would soon have serious repercussions for Lucretia.

“I pray the Court to grant me at least a few months of existence,” McDowell finished, “a few months before I am ordered to be executed.”

When the lawyer sat down, Fox was silent for a moment. Then he began to speak, but his usually ready words came out slowly and with a difficulty that was noticed throughout the courtroom. “These matters will be laid,” he said. “Before the Governor. Who will no doubt. Grant the request which you make.”

Lino tipped his head in acknowledgment.

Fox was still visibly distressed. But he managed to continue speaking, to say as boldly as he could what it was now required of him to say: “Lino Amalia Espos y Mina, the sentence which the law imposes upon you is that you be taken hence to the prison of Bucks County, from whence you came, and from thence to the place of execution, and that you there be hanged by the neck until you are dead. And may God have mercy upon your soul.”

“Back out! Back out at once,” a voice from within Lucretia’s house shouted at a peddler making his way up to the porch a few weeks after Lino was sentenced. The peddler was carrying copies of Du Bois’s book, The Trial of Lucretia Chapman, which had just been published. The book, some copies of which included a brief supplement on Lino’s trial, had become an instant success. Philadelphia’s bookstores were selling scores of the volume each day, and vendors were lugging it door-to-door all over Bucks County. This peddler, however, had come to the wrong door. Within moments unseen assailants—they were probably Lucretia’s children—began hissing and hooting at him, and he was forced to scamper away as quickly as the weight of his heavy sack allowed.

The effrontery of the peddler was only one of the humiliations Lucretia began to endure once Lino was sentenced. In part her difficulties arose from the very fact of that sentencing: now that Lino was facing death, people were feeling sorry for him, speaking up for him. In part her difficulties arose from the public’s gullibility. Du Bois’s book had given wide circulation to Blayney’s report that Lino had claimed to him that Lucretia, not he, had poisoned William’s soup. Since making that claim, Lino had told variations of it to journalists who sought him out. The journalists hadn’t printed his stories; they’d been under judges’ orders not to write about the case until it was resolved. Now, however, they’d begun publishing information they’d gotten from Lino, including one story in which he had Lucretia poisoning not William’s soup but his dinner wine. She did it, he asserted, by first humiliating her husband, directing him to touch her lover’s curly head and feel how soft his hair was, and only then, when William’s attention was diverted by this small bit of wifely cruelty, delivering the coup de grâce and slipping arsenic into his glass.

One might have expected people to read such accounts with a certain skepticism. Lino’s history of fabricating stories—his lies to the Chapmans, his lies in Washington, his lies in New England—had emerged at both of the trials. But print has an almost magical effect on credulity, a phenomenon that was well known to Lino, who had used print to remarkable effect when setting up scams. Now, as his new accusations against Lucretia began to be printed, many who had championed her after her acquittal began turning against her. Neighbors stopped inviting her to social events. Local children declined to play with her children. Parents refused to send their offspring to her school. And one bright spring morning she found that she could not even travel at will anymore.

She’d wanted to take her children into Philadelphia for the day, and she’d waited with them on the turnpike for the stagecoach to Philadelphia. But when the coach arrived and they began to clamber aboard, the driver shot her an ugly look. Then he told her and the children to step down. He would not, he said, allow the likes of them onto his vehicle.

Hurriedly she hustled the children over to the steamboat dock. But there, too, they were turned away.

We’ll hitchhike, she decided, and she and the children set off on foot toward Philadelphia. But although several times she signaled to passing vehicles that she needed a ride, and several times drivers began reining to a stop, when they pulled up and recognized her they whipped their horses and sped rapidly ahead.

She and the children, fatigued after a few miles, returned home to Andalusia.

In Doylestown, Lino was basking in celebrity. An artist from Philadelphia came to sketch his portrait for an engraving and a marble bust. Reporters interviewed him constantly. They described his cell, noting that it was airy and comfortable and contained a writing table on which a letter to a man the prisoner claimed was his father, one Bridgadier General Esposimina in Cuba, was prominently displayed. They also filed numerous and erroneous stories about Lino’s origins: “He is a native of Cuba, where his connections are respectable,” said the Philadelphia Saturday Courier; “He is the illegitimate son of a very rich gentleman of Cuba,” said the Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin.

Lino was indignant about the Saturday Bulletin’s story. He had been slandered, he complained to a reporter from the Germantown Telegraph; he was many things, but he was not illegitimate, not, he said, an “unnatural” child. Still, all in all, he was pleased by the attention he was receiving, particularly when a distinguished publisher expressed interest in obtaining his memoirs.

The publisher was Robert DeSilver, who had started a bookbinding and bookselling company back during the War of 1812. Since then he’d gone from merely binding and selling the books of other publishers to acquiring and publishing titles of his own. In 1818 he’d acquired the rights to Captain James Cook’s exciting narrative of his voyage to the Pacific. In 1819 he’d bought the memoirs of the Revolutionary War general Nathaniel Greene. In 1824 and 1831 he’d brought out profitable Philadelphia city directories.

DeSilver told Lino that the fact that his manuscript was written in Spanish presented no problem for him. He would see to it that the work was rendered into English by a skillful translator.

Lino gave him the rights to his manuscript, and eventually DeSilver would indeed get it translated—and would publish it, under the title The Life and Confession of Carolino Estradas de Mina, along with a translator’s note explaining that useless tautology and repetitions had been expunged and numerous indecent passages eliminated in order to make the narrative inoffensive to “the most delicate ear, to make it more more acceptable to the female portion of the community.” In the meantime, Lino kept working. Months before when Lucretia’s youngest son had offended him, he’d frightened the boy by telling him that he never forgave injuries and that he delighted in revenge. Now it was Lucretia, walking free while he awaited hanging, upon whom he hoped to wreak vengeance.

In pursuit of that goal he added to his portrait of her as a con artist details that limned her as so unsavory and cruel that after she inveigled him into marriage he decided to punish her by acting “as freely as it pleased him in her presence, and when her punishment would be sufficient to abandon her and return to Cuba.”

Part of the punishment he devised was to seduce her daughter Mary. He and the girl kept their relationship hidden, but eventually Lucretia caught wind of it and in his absence beat Mary barbarously. “Her body [was] lacerated and torn over its whole surface by the blows of her mother.” That a mother could so abuse her child caused Carolino, upon his return, to be “suddenly struck by the thought that Mrs. Chapman had murdered her husband.” So he pointed a knife at her throat and demanded she confess, which she did, in the process telling him just how she’d gone about the murder: she had “purchased [a] phial of poison from a doctor in the vicinity and had given him one hundred dollars for it, and a promise of secrecy on his part as to his having sold it.”

DeSilver didn’t bring out Lino’s memoir until after its author died. But prior to his death Lino showed parts of his manuscript to the Germantown Telegraph’s reporter, who had taken to visiting him frequently, and on June sixth the Telegraph printed a story saying the paper had learned from an “official” source that “Mrs. Chapman called upon a physician in the city a short time previous to the illness of her husband and desired his advice as to the effect of arsenic. She wished to know the quantity which was administered in cases of sickness and the smallest quantity which could possibly produce death. She enquired fully and particularly as to the general properties of arsenic; and, as we understand, gave the Physician a fee for the information which she obtained.”

The story went on to imply that the attorney general’s office might soon be charging the unnamed physician with having been an accessory before the fact.

No such charges were ever leveled. But this didn’t prevent Lucretia’s neighbors from believing what they’d read, and by mid-June she’d realized that it might be wise for her and the children to leave Andalusia.

Virtually penniless now that she no longer had students, she thought first of going back to her ancestral home. Her father, the old Revolutionary War colonel, had died, but her mother was still alive, and although strapped for money, she had offered to take in Lucretia and the children, provided they could pay their own way up to Massachusetts. In pursuit of an inexpensive way of getting there, Lucretia asked one of the few neighbors who still had some pity for her to drive her into Philadelphia and once there solicited help from the captain of a packet boat that sailed to New England frequently.

“My children and I have suffered unparalleled affliction,” she told the captain. “If you would convey us on more moderate terms than the usual ones, it would be an act of holy charity.”

The man seemed sympathic at first. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“Lucretia Chapman.”

“Mrs. Chapman?” Suddenly the captain’s expression turned ugly, and, throwing up his hands as if to make her keep her distance, he told her to clear out. “All the wealth in the world would not induce me to take you aboard!” he said. Then, as if she didn’t know, he added, “The way of the transgressor is hard.”

Execution followed hard on the heels of conviction in the 1830s, and despite Lino’s plea for a few extra months of life, George Wolf, the governor of Pennsylvania, had not granted a delay but issued a warrant for prompt execution. Benjamin Morris gave Lino the disappointing news, and showed him the ornate calligraphed document that specified he be hanged on June twenty-first.

Lino took the news calmly. “The governor writes a very good hand,” he said indifferently.

He wasn’t always so calm, Morris had noticed. Indeed, often when night came, Lino talked to himself in Spanish for hours on end, sometimes whispering in a supplicating tone, sometimes shouting manically. One night he’d asked Morris to come into his cell and see the Devil. Morris had gone in to investigate, but spotted nothing out of the ordinary. “In what shape,” he’d humored Lino, “does the Evil One appear?”

“In the shape of that cricket,” Lino replied, pointing to a cricket hovering in a corner of the cell. The cricket was the Devil, he asserted, the Devil himself.

A moment later he began talking to the cricket. He told it to sing, he ordered it to keep still, he cursed it, he praised it, and finally, when the insect started to leap away, he said, “Be sure to call and see me again.” He said this so courteously that it seemed to Morris that he truly believed the poor creature was some higher order of being.

Another time he asked Morris to send for his lawyer because he had something of the greatest importance to convey to the man. Morris dispatched a messenger to McDowell’s office, the lawyer hurried over to the jail, and Morris took him into Lino’s cell. Then suddenly Lino flung a piece of paper at McDowell and demanded that Morris lock up the lawyer. It was an arrest warrant, Morris discovered when he’d safely gotten McDowell out of the cell. Lino had somehow managed to get his hands on a blank copy of the embossed court document, and he’d forged a judge’s signature on it.

The man’s always up to something, Morris told the reporter from the Germantown Telegraph after the incident. He’s especially fond of taunting clergymen. Men of the cloth come to give him solace regularly. They aren’t all Catholics like he is. Some are Baptists, some Episcopalians. Lino listens to them politely when they’re in his cell, but as soon as they leave he makes obscene gestures behind their backs.

“My dear Thomas,” the kindly Mary Ross wrote to her son one day while Lino was awaiting his execution. “I saw the death warrant … you have performed a duty, I think with honor to yourself. No doubt you feel satisfaction in acquitting yourself so well, and very justly, and every man ought to feel pleased when he can reflect that he has done with credit what was entrusted to his care. That past, how much more agreeable would it be to relieve suffering humanity. That pleasure will remain when many others have vanished.” Then she begged Thomas, for the good of his own soul, to go to see Lino, “a stranger in a strange land, not a friend to sympathize, pity or console him.” If Thomas obeyed, if he went to the prisoner and showed him some compassion, “It might happily give him more consolation than others [could], and you would be forgiven, and if you should give one ray of comfort to so miserable a stranger who must soon meet his horrid, dreadful, awful doom, believe me it will not only be lasting but stronger than any other pleasure.”

On June sixteenth, five days before the date on which Lino was scheduled to be executed, Ross decided to honor his mother’s wishes and demonstrate compassion for the condemned man by paying him a call. He greeted Lino, who was still secured by the two-foot-long chain he had had to wear ever since his jailbreak, and politely but stiffly said he was sorry that he would soon be facing death, but that it was the law of the land that murderers be executed.

“But I am entirely innocent of Mr. Chapman’s murder,” Lino interrupted. “I am innocent of everything except a love of mischief.”

He sounded so sincere that Ross was taken aback. Had he in fact convicted an innocent man?

“I am not even really married to Mrs. Chapman,” Lino went on. “I just pretended to marry her. I tricked her. In order to get her money.”

Ross studied the candid expression on the face of the man whose death would be on his hands, no matter who pulled the rope at the hanging, and suddenly it seemed possible to him that the prisoner was telling the truth. Possible, too, that unless he investigated his story, he, too, might be a condemned man, sentenced to a lifetime of doubt and an afterlife of anguish. He told Lino that he was inclined to believe him, or at least that he believed him enough to ask the governor to suspend the execution while he looked into his allegation.

Lino thanked the deputy attorney general effusively, and Ross left his cell feeling almost as pleased as the prisoner. He had, just as his mother had advised, offered the unhappy man a ray of comfort, and that ray had curiously comforted him as well.

He went immediately to the slant-topped desk in his little law office and penned a letter to Governor Wolf, requesting a stay of execution. Then he leafed through the papers he had put into evidence in the trials of Lino and Lucretia. His letters to her. Her letters to him. Their marriage license. Picking up the license, he began to examine it more closely. “I hereby certify,” he read, “that on this fifth day of July, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and thirty-one, Lino Amalia Esposimina and Lucretia Chapman were by me united in holy matrimony agreeably to the form prescribed by the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America.” The words seemed authentic enough. So did the signature at the bottom: “Benjamin Onderdonk, Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the State of New York.” But perhaps the document was a forgery. Perhaps, as Lino had just said, he hadn’t actually married Lucretia. If he hadn’t, then perhaps he’d even been telling the truth when he said he wasn’t guilty of Chapman’s murder. Ross wanted to know. Needed to know. For the good of his soul.

Abruptly, he placed the license in a carrying case, hitched up his carriage, and set off for Philadelphia. He knew of a man named Onderdonk, a brother of the New York bishop, who was living there. He’d pay a call on Mr. Onderdonk and see if the fellow could identify the handwriting.

When he reached the city, Ross pulled up first at the office of the recorder, Judge McIlvaine, having realized it would be wise to have the judge along when he questioned Onderdonk. He explained his mission to McIlvaine, helped him into his carriage, and knowing that if Lino was to be reprieved, he had precious little time, drove hastily to Onderdonk’s home.

Once there, the two officials introduced themselves breathlessly and spoke almost simultaneously, directing Onderdonk to look at the marriage certificate they had brought with them and tell them if he recognized the handwriting.

Onderdonk studied the license. Then, without hesitation, he said that the handwriting on the document was his brother’s.

Was he sure, the two men asked him.

Onderdonk nodded. “The signature is genuine.”

Ross and McIlvaine talked to him a few more minutes, long enough to find out that his brother had told him that he had officiated at the marriage of Lino and Lucretia. “He mentioned it to me several times,” Onderdonk said.

Ross’s misgivings were satisfied. He put the certificate back in his case, dropped McIlvaine back at his office, and in the evening dusk headed straight for Doylestown. He no longer felt the least bit troubled. Indeed, he felt foolish, as if Lino had conned him, tricked him just the way he’d tricked the people who’d lent him money in Washington, the sheriff who’d vouched for him up on Cape Cod, the Brewster woman who’d followed him to Boston expecting to be his bride. As soon as he was back in his office he fired off another letter to the governor, this time retracting his first note and saying he no longer wanted Lino’s execution postponed.

That done, he walked the few yards that separated his office from the jail and once again asked to be let into Lino’s cell.

Sheriff Morris complied, deferentially unlocking the heavy door. It was dim in the cell now. A tiny window framed a sliver of ebony sky, and a small oil lamp cast more shadows than light. Ross faced Lino angrily, determined to tell him he was a liar. But before he could speak Lino asked Ross—demanded of him, Morris would later tell the reporter from the Germantown Telegraph—“Have you done anything for me?”

“No,” Ross answered coldly.

Lino flew off the handle. “You are a contemptible miscreant!” he shouted. Then, scurrying forward to the full extent of his chain, he thrust out an arm and socked the deputy attorney general. Slammed his first right into the prosecutor’s long square jaw.

Ross, rubbing his face, stumbled out of the cell, his jaw aching but his conscience no longer paining him at all.

Lino spent the next few days writing poetry. He had finished his memoirs, but the creative spirit that had fueled them was still coursing through his brain. He composed a melancholy ballad about his oncoming death—“Flowers! Learn from me,” he wrote, “What happens between yesterday and today. Yesterday I was a wonder. And today am not the shadow of myself.” The world would miss him, he went on. Dumb creatures like the fish in the sea, the birds in the trees, even “the sorrowful whale … in the bottomless waves” would be saddened, while America’s youth, its “nobility,” and “the ladies of Pennsylvania” would weep.

The grandiosity of his sentiments was stirred by the commotion taking place outside the jail. The ordinarily quiet streets of Doylestown were resounding with martial music, the tooting of fifers, the pounding of drummers. Lino could hear them practicing for the execution. For his execution.

He wrote a sonnet, a farewell to love. He was, he wrote, like the great god Jupiter who’d been willing to don human form to woo his beloved, like the hero Orpheus who’d been willing to descend to the underworld in pursuit of his. Like them, he longed to demonstrate his “sincere love.”

The object of his testimonial was a woman in Baltimore. Just as Lucretia had long ago suspected, he had fallen in love there. He’d had an affair with the woman, an attractive young widow, and promised to marry her, then gone off on his travels. Now he was sorry, he wrote, for he had truly cared for her and yet “robbed her of the inmost jewel of her soul.” But she would come to know that his last thoughts had been of her. He would ask DeSilver to include with his memoirs his “Soneto,” composed “for the young lady at Baltimore.”

Lino’s moods swung drastically in his final hours. The day before the execution he twice attempted to kill himself. The first time he smashed his ink bottle, pounded the glass until it was powdery, then sprinkled the finely ground shards over his food. The second time he extricated a nail from a piece of his cell’s wooden furnishings, sharpened it on the irregular stone walls, and plunged the point into a vein in his arm. Neither attempt proved fatal, however, and by nighttime, with a jailer stationed right in his cell so that he couldn’t cheat the state of Pennsylvania out of doing away with him, he was claiming that he had not actually intended to commit suicide but simply to weaken himself in the hopes that this would make hanging easier to endure.

Doylestown was aswarm with military men, foot soldiers and cavalrymen decked out in their blue tunics and stiff-brimmed varnished hats. Lino had gossiped that he was such an important citizen in his home country that his government would be sending an armed force to rescue him. The rumor had spread widely and wildly, and Governor Wolf had ordered up for execution day the largest body of uniformed men Bucks County had seen since the Revolution.

The town was also overrun by ordinary citizens. Lino’s hanging was to be the county’s first since 1693, and all day the prurient, as well as peddlers, promoters, and pickpockets, had been flooding into the county seat. They’d filled the six hotels, jammed the inns and boardinghouses, imposed on friends and distant relatives, and even persuaded reluctant farmers to rent them sleeping space in their sheds and barns. Nevertheless, there weren’t enough quarters to go around, and visitors who’d been unable to find any sort of indoor accommodations were camped out on the winding streets, so many of them that the little town resembled, said the Germantown Telegraph’s reporter, Philadelphia on the Fourth of July.

The reporter had, like everyone else, come to town to witness the execution. But he was hoping to get an interview with Lino on this inauspicious night. By ten o’clock he had succeeded in arranging one, and Sheriff Morris let him into Lino’s cell.

The prisoner looked unusually pale, the reporter thought when he saw Lino. But aside from his pallor, he seemed well enough, seemed, in fact, quite cheerful and animated. He asked the reporter how he was feeling, and talked gaily and even proudly about the troops and military bands that were turning the town into a veritable battlefield, with him as the sole enemy.

“I myself used to be a soldier,” he bragged. “And I gloried in the profession. I was in active service for five months in succession, fought almost every day, received several severe bullet wounds! One in particular nearly proved fatal.”

The Telegraph’s man spent an hour with Lino, then went to his inn and wrote, “My own reflections after the interview were by no means pleasant or agreeable. [The prisoner’s] total unconcern about his end, now so near at hand, seems more than extraordinary, and his levity in speaking of his death not less. A similar instance, I believe, can scarcely be found on record.”

Lino stayed up the whole night, nibbling on cakes and candy, and in the morning ate a big breakfast. Then he put on his still-chic frock coat and a pair of striped pants and spoke at length with a bilingual Catholic priest named Father Tuljeaux, who had come to hear his confession.

“I am innocent of murder,” he told Tuljeaux. “But I am penitent and ready to die.”

When the priest finished hearing his confession, Sheriff Morris added to Lino’s smart appearance the accessory that was deemed essential to a condemned man’s final excursion—a rope—and positioned it loosely around his neck.

Not wanting to look disheveled, Lino smoothed down his shirt collar where the rope had rumpled it. “It’s cruel of you to hang me up like a dog,” he said to Morris. “But I’m determined to die without flinching, like a soldier.”

At nine-thirty, Morris placed him, with the rope dangling from his neck, in an open carriage and, accompanied by a troop of cavalrymen, escorted him a couple of miles out of Doylestown to a grassy field alongside the Neshaminy Creek. Morris had chosen the site by default. He’d hoped to find a spot close to the jail, one that wouldn’t require him to drive the prisoner a long distance and thus prolong his anticipation of hanging, but none of the owners of nearby fields had wanted the crowds and chaos of an execution, not in their backyards. So Morris had had to settle for the field near the Neshaminy. It wasn’t private property the way the farmers’ fields were; it was town property, part of the land allotted to the almshouse.

Throughout most of the drive through the early summer morning, Lino was silent, and Morris hoped he was making his peace with God. But as the carriage neared the site and they saw the thousands of soldiers and civilians gathered there—ten thousand people, according to the newspapers—Lino reverted to his usual bravado. The military men, he told Morris, were lacking in spit and polish.

A few moments later Lino spotted the gallows. It was on a small rise in the center of the field, and it was surrounded by another detachment of cavalry and a phalanx of infantrymen. He let Morris hand him down from the carriage, and walked resolutely to the scaffold.

From up there, Lino could see the river, a thin band of silver that glistened in the boisterous golden sunlight. He could also see faces. Unsmiling faces. Mostly men, though here and there he spotted a female face looking up at him with curiosity. He could see the tops of trees, too, trees bursting with June leaves and swaying in a breeze that was like a whisper from on high.

Sheriff Morris was whispering, too. He was saying that it would be he himself who would be pulling the rope. Then Morris read out his death warrant and asked if he had anything to say.

“I do,” Lino answered, and directed Father Tuljeaux to translate what he had to say. “Americanos!” he yelled. “Mira una víctima inocente!”

“People of America,” Tuljeaux echoed him in English. “Behold an innocent victim!”

Lino went on speaking in Spanish and Tuljeaux went on translating. “You thirst for my blood,” he heard the priest say after he had shouted out the phrase in his native tongue. “And you shall have it. But you chastise a poor innocent. To whom have I done wrong? If I have done wrong, let all pardon me. If I ever did wrong to any, let him forgive me, because I forgive myself to all my enemies, in order that God may pardon me, and grant me everlasting life in heaven. I do not fear death. I am not a feeble, but a courageous man. I am able to show that I am strong and not feeble.”

His own words, sailing back to him in the language he understood but had never fully mastered, made him feel every bit as brave as he had just declared himself in Spanish to be. He was a strong man. A hero not a scoundrel. There must be people in the crowd who recognized this, people who might like to touch him, to take him by the hand before he died. He thrust out his fingers and asked if anybody wanted to ascend the scaffold and shake his hand to bid him farewell.

Several men rushed forward and climbed the stairs. He clasped their hands gratefully, clasped them firmly. He didn’t tremble. Then he knelt on the scaffold, bowed his head, and prayed.

When Morris fixed the rope over the beam and drew a cap over his head, Lino turned in the direction he thought the crowd had been thickest, bowed twice, and, his voice muffled now, called out in English, “Farewell, my friends. Farewell, poor Mina, poor Mina. He die innocent. He die innocent.”

It was the end. The trap was knocked away and he swung up into the sky.

Lino was the penultimate prisoner to be publicly executed on state charges in Pennsylvania. By 1834 the legislature had passed a law forbidding such execution. But in June 1832, not only was hanging considered a fit and proper sight for the public to view, but all its grisly details were considered a fit and proper subject for newspapermen to dwell on. They described in full how Lino’s body had convulsed in the breeze, his chest heaving and his limbs flailing, and how the convulsions had lasted a good ten minutes because the amount of rope used had turned out to be insufficient to break his neck at once. They described, too, how dry-eyed the crowd had been, and how after being exhibited for a full half hour, the body had finally been cut down and handed over to a group of Philadelphia physicians.

The physicians had come to conduct an experiment on Lino’s dead body—common practice in those days, when medical students routinely dissected the organs of executed prisoners and doctors tutorially displayed their skeletons in their offices. The experimenters had with them a large battery. They intended to use it to deliver an electric shock to the dead man, to see if he could be revived. They attached their device to the corpse and pressed down on the lever. But nothing happened. The battery had malfunctioned, the doctors concluded. Either that or they’d been made to wait too long after the strangulation to try out their device. Next time, they assured the public, the experiment of raising the dead with electricity would most likely work.

Lucretia, hiding away in the big stone house in Andalusia, read about Lino’s demise with eyes as dry as those of any who had witnessed the hanging. Lino’s death was like something that had already happened to her. He had died, for her, months ago, back when she had first realized that he intended to abandon her.

Since then she had felt empty and diminished, she who had once dreamed of uncommon love and untold wealth. Since then she had become not just a pariah but a nobody, no longer the proprietress of a prosperous school, no longer the wife of an acclaimed scientist let alone of a rich grandee, no longer even so much as a schoolteacher. Nor likely ever to be one again, she suspected, for who would entrust their children to her care?

The house was silent, the play yard no longer ringing with the cries of students, the big classroom empty not just of pupils but of the grammars and globes and slates she had long ago so enthusiastically purchased. She had sold them to make ends meet. She had sold, too, her cherished piano, the extra beds with which she had furnished the slate-roofed mansion’s many bedrooms, and whatever had remained, after Lino’s predations, of William’s valuable scientific tomes. She was subsisting, she and her children, on handouts from the few local people who still felt some Christian charity toward her.

But there must be a way out, she reasoned, a better way out than living on alms or even of returning to Massachusetts and burdening her aged mother. After all, she was an educated woman, good at reading and recitation. Surely such a woman didn’t need to take charity or live off a parent; surely such a woman didn’t even need to be a schoolteacher. Perhaps she could find other work, go into the theater the way other educated women were doing, women like Fanny Trollope, who launched dramatic productions; women like Frances Wright, who got up on the stage and gave lectures.

The idea revived Lucretia. She began picturing herself on a stage and imagining herself applauded and appreciated, a breadwinner for her children and a woman of substance once again.

Soon after Lino’s death, she closed up her house in Bucks County and, with her children in tow, lit out for the West and there embarked on a second career as an actress.