Meet Joshua Spooner, a wealthy farmer from Brookfield Massachusetts, who in the year 1766 entered into an arranged marriage with twenty year old Bathsheba Ruggles. The couple had four children together, but over their 11-year marriage Joshua became more controlling and abusive toward his wife, to the point she despised her older husband and wanted him gone. That was the motive, now Bathsheba just needed the means and opportunity.
Both these came in the form of a young soldier named Ezra Ross. In 1777 Ross was making the long walk home from an army camp in New Jersey to Linebrook Massachusetts, which is apparently something people just did 200 years ago. He became sick along the way and Bathsheba took the stranger in and nursed him back to health, another thing people apparently just did back then. Ross became friendly with the couple, Bathsheba more so than Joshua, and began having an affair with the young mother. Eventually she became pregnant.
An adulteress pregnancy in the 1700's could be dealt with by such level-headed responses such as public flogging or exile, so in a move that would have made Pamela Smart proud Bathsheba enlisted her young lover to kill her husband. Ross chickened out on the first attempt, so Bathsheba brought in two other soldiers and the three men carried out the grizzly murder, beating Joshua to death and stuffing his body down a well that once sat on this patch of earth.
Things unraveled quickly for the masterminds and all 4 were arrested within 24 hours. This was before the days of decades long trials and appeals, and four months to the day of their arrest Bathsheba and the 3 men were publicly hung in the nearby city of Worcester. She tried to stay her execution on the grounds that she was pregnant, but an exam by several housewives disputed this claim. A postmortem inspection showed she actually did have a fetus in her stomach, however, and left her with this unique footnote in our country's history books.
Bathsheba Ruggles Spooner, the first woman put to death in the United States following the Declaration of Independence, was pregnant during her execution.
Spooner Well can be found on East Main St., Brookfield Massachusetts, east of downtown
Transcript:
SPOONER WELL
JOSHUA SPOONER, MURDERED
AND THROWN DOWN THIS WELL
MARCH 1, 1778 BY THREE
REVOLUTIONARY SOLDIERS
AT THE URGING OF HIS
WIFE BATHSHEBA
ALL FOUR WERE
EXECUTED AT
WORCESTER JULY 2, 1778
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Macabre Memorials Part #1 - Josie Langmaid
Interesting story!
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