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THE FAMILY

A Wife Immaculate

Frank Howard Sheffield was born in Woodstock, Connecticut, on August 9, 1850. His mother, Charlotte Delana (Howard), was a homemaker, and his father, John Franklin Sheffield, was a Methodist preacher.

The family moved around quite often, answering the call of Reverend Sheffield’s chosen career wherever it came from. In 1860, the family resided in Enfield, Connecticut. Ten years later, they were in East Greenwich, Rhode Island. By 1880, they had moved to Cumberland, Rhode Island.

Frank grew up listening intently to his father’s powerful sermons about the fundamental aspects of being graceful in the eyes of God. The Methodists did not believe that one was saved by merely doing good deeds but by the strongest faith in the Lord. Redemption would come, preached John, and all who believed in the Lord would be awarded it, even if they had not been able to shun evil or avoid committing wicked deeds while here on earth.

For a time, Frank himself considered going into the ministry and even began studies in the field. However, he changed his mind before becoming ordained and never revisited that righteous path again.

Ironically, considering the shocking events that would come to pass in the future, Frank and his siblings, Mary Charlotte and Charles, would spend time living in a house that neighbored the East Greenwich County jail. In that town, their father served as pastor of the East Greenwich Methodist Church.

Frank’s mother died on February 2, 1875, at the age of fifty-two, and his father later married Mary Segur. All three of John and Charlotte’s children grew up to become schoolteachers, and in the mid-1870s, Frank took on the position of principal at East Greenwich School.

On December 15, 1876, Frank married Miss Mary Ann Hill of Mystic, Connecticut. Mary’s father, Mason Crary Hill, was a master shipbuilder, well known for designing and building the clipper ship Alboni. Launched in 1852, the vessel was named after the Italian opera singer Marietta Alboni and carried a figurehead of a dove with an orange branch in its beak. Weighing 917 tons and measuring 156 feet in length, the ship was originally commissioned for trade voyages to Cape Horn. Its worth at the time was over $50,000.

Frank’s new father-in-law was well respected and much acquainted with a life of prestige and wealth. However, he had also known the pain of loss and great personal tragedy. His first wife, Mary Ann Williams, was accidentally drowned at the age of twenty-eight when a boat on which she was a passenger overturned on the Mystic River on the Fourth of July 1853. His love for her was evident by the mournful etching he had placed on her gravestone, which reads, “A wife immaculate.”

Mason next married Miss Margaret Wheeler. The couple had many children together, including Mary Ann, who was named after her father’s first wife.

After Frank and Mary Ann were united in marriage, they took up residence next door to her parents on Greenmanville Avenue in Mystic. On January 11, 1880, Mary Ann gave birth to a dark-haired, blue-eyed baby boy, whom they named Mason Howard Sheffield.

Later that year, the couple moved to Pawcatuck, Connecticut, a small village in the town of Stonington, where they rented a segment of the three-family tenement house at 24 Liberty Street. No immediate relation, the owner of the tenement house was sixty-five-year-old patternmaker and former ship’s carpenter Amos Thompson Sheffield, who resided with his own family at 27 Liberty Street.

Frank obtained a job as principal of the recently built Palmer Street School in Pawcatuck. While employed in that position, he was engaged in a freak accident that resulted in an apparent long-standing injury. As he was in the process of ringing the large school bell, the bell somehow maneuvered itself to strike Frank violently on the head. According to all who knew him, this accident caused Frank to have severe headaches on a regular basis for years afterward.

Mary Ann gave birth to the couple’s second child, Maggie Segur Sheffield—the middle name perhaps honoring Frank’s stepmother—on January 31, 1888. However, her daughter’s entrance into the world would bring about her own demise. On February 7, 1888, just one week after Maggie’s birth, Mary Ann died at the age of thirty-three. On the day prior to her death, it became clear to those around her that Mary Ann was not recovering from the birth very well. The painful effects of peritonitis, a condition caused by a hemorrhage of the membranes in the lining of the pelvic wall following the baby’s arrival, were setting in.

The birth certificate of Maggie Segur Sheffield. Courtesy of Stonington Town Hall.

The inflammation in Mary Ann’s abdomen became so severe that it caused her lungs to swell. Already in immense pain, she struggled to breathe, which was at first difficult and then impossible. Frank lost the wife he loved, and Maggie lost the mother she would never know. Mary Ann was buried in the large Elm Grove Cemetery, located right down the road from her parents’ house.

Out of nowhere, Frank was faced with a future he had never even imagined. Suddenly, he had become a widower with two small children to raise on his own. He decided to let Mary Ann’s parents take Mason into their care. As for his newborn daughter, she would go to live with Frank’s parents at their own Danielsonville, Connecticut home. He would remain, alone, at the 24 Liberty Street house.

The death certificate of Mary Ann Sheffield, who died shortly after giving birth to Maggie. Courtesy of Stonington Town Hall.

The grave of Mary Ann Sheffield at Elm Gove Cemetery in Mystic, Connecticut. Photograph by Kelly Sullivan Pezza.

The year after Mary Ann’s death, Frank resigned from his position at Palmer Street School, believing that making some changes in his life would do him good. He took a new position as principal of Liberty Street School, which stood very near to his residence. However, later that year, he contracted erysipelas, a bacterial infection, and began to feel unwell on a regular basis. His employment was terminated in 1890. By that time, he was married again.

On November 27, 1889, Frank had exchanged vows with Nancy Armeda Sheffield, the thirty-seven-year-old daughter of his former landlord, who had passed away eleven months earlier. A professional dressmaker by trade, Nancy knew the mournful feeling of loss that her new husband surely carried with him. She had already lost four sisters, as well as her mother and now her father.

Frank moved into the 27 Liberty Street house with Nancy and secured a position as a clerk in the freight department of the New York, Providence & Boston Railroad’s depot in Westerly, Rhode Island. However, his poor health continued to plague him, and he was soon let go from his employment there due to the fact that he could not perform his job efficiently.

On October 14, 1890, Nancy gave birth to the couple’s first child, whom they named Sarah Elizabeth Sheffield. Frank began working for W.D. Sheffield of New Haven as a rent collector, and it might have appeared to some that he had started life anew. But for Frank, it was not that easy to push the past behind and look toward an untainted future.

Those who knew him best could clearly see that something was wrong. All that had been instilled in him by his religious father seemed to have drained away. He wanted nothing to do with religion any longer and refused to even speak about Christianity with anyone unless it was in the form of an argument in which he could try to fray the beliefs of those who were followers.

Frank showed a growing interest in agnosticism and spent time studying the science of its ambivalence. His father was shocked and hurt by the transition his son had made and later, after Maggie’s murder, claimed that because Frank had absolutely no reason to commit such a crime, the killing had obviously been the work of a demon.

Despite his ongoing dismissal of deep religious beliefs, Frank would appear at a Methodist meeting a few weeks before that fateful day at Rocky Point and surprise everyone by standing up and asking for their prayers.

What was truly going through Frank Sheffield’s mind in those years that followed his wife’s untimely death no one close to him seemed to know. Perhaps he needed an explanation that Christian beliefs did not provide or a soft place to fall when such an answer wasn’t available. Perhaps he needed to blame someone for his loss. The small child who would have her young life bludgeoned out of her as a result of Frank’s despair had been the ultimate cause of Mary Ann’s death. Maggie’s existence had replaced that of her mother. Frank possibly wrestled with that thought amid the confusion in his mind.

Nancy may or may not have realized, or accepted, that something was dreadfully wrong with the man she had married. Regardless, on August 2, 1892, she went on to give birth to the second of their children, a son whom they named Amos Thompson Sheffield, after Nancy’s father. However, little Amos would never get the opportunity to know his father. The boy had just celebrated his first birthday when Frank committed the unspeakable act that would cause him to be locked away for life.