Was it a ghost? The murders in Bussey's wood

by Henry Johnson Brent

PRELIMINARY REMARKS.

The main circumstances that form, in part, the topic of my recital, excited, at the time of their occurrence, a feeling of unprecedented horror. They came upon the public sensibility with a force that even the previous recital of the bloody events of the civil war could not lessen. Habituation to horror had not deadened the public susceptibility; for there was around the incidents a belt of mystery and affright that defied the approach of justice, and baffled private speculation.

No necessity, even in the tortuous excuses of crime, was apparent for the deed; for the victims had had no opportunities to establish, individually of themselves, hostile relations with any one, and their condition placed them beyond or beneath the chance of social importance. They were claimants to no estate in litigation, stood in no man’s way to advancement, could have produced no rivalry, had inspired neither revenge, nor jealousy, nor love. They had, in fine, none of those means that men and women have to incite to crime; for they were children, and yet they were subjected to a fate that few, if any, children, had confronted before.

The commission of the deed was a barbarity; its motives, apparently, a paradox.

Everything, indeed, about the transaction was unusual. The hour, the circumstances, and the locality, all contributed to inspire a greater horror of the act; and yet, up to this moment, no man’s name, of high or low, bears a blemish of continued suspicion. Justice seems to rest, after the excitement of the instant search,—a search that, I have every reason to know, was intricate and thorough; but, at the same time, it is well to know that the intelligent Chief of the police department has only seemed to pause. His eyes have never been entirely withdrawn from the contemplation of the subject; and I feel assured, from what I know, that his vigilant and nervous grasp will, at the appointed time, be placed upon the shoulder of the atrocious criminal. The murderer may have perhaps, ere this, caught glimpses, from his abode of gloom in another world, of those two spirits whose bodies he hacked so butcherly. If that be so, the Chief will have naught to do; but if he be alive, wandering a desolate path through a desolate world, it may be that justice will not have waited with an energetic patience in vain.

THE NARRATIVE.

I.
THE ROADS.

There are two roads direct by which the scene I am about to describe can be reached from Boston. One is the steam-car road, passing through Roxbury, and dropping way-passengers at Laurel Hill Station. The other is the horse-car line, that, for some portion of the route, runs parallel to the steam. The third, and more picturesque, is another horse-car line, which passes through Jamaica Plain, and drops the passengers some several hundred yards west, and farther removed from the official terminus of the two other routes. It was by the second of these routes, that, on the 12th day of June, 1865, two children, Isabella and John Joyce, started from their home in Boston, where they were temporarily boarding, to spend a few hours in May’s wood, intending to return, according to the elder one’s promise, in time for her brother to attend his afternoon school. Thus it is established that the sister never intended to go farther than the wood first proposed; and in this we have the first glimmering of the series of mysterious circumstances in which the wretched affair is enveloped from the beginning to the end.

This girl was not sixteen years old.

The boy was barely eight.

Whatever happened after they took their seats in the car, and who accompanied them, or joined them afterward, is a matter simply of conjecture; and yet, as they sat there, these two young things, who, of all the rest of the passengers that looked upon their fresh, pleasure-anticipating faces, could have dreamed that, in a section so civilized, a community so guarded, a population so abundant, in the marginal outlines of a great city, that ere the sun went down, within a few short hours, indeed, that girl and boy would be lying stiff and stark, pierced,—the one, the girl, by twenty-eight poniard stabs, and the boy by enough to have killed the captains of a full regiment; the girl dead in the hollow of a rock within thirty feet of a public road, the boy less than a quarter of a mile away, in the dense shrubbery, by a tiny stream that flows through the shades of Bussey’s wonderfully beautiful woods!

Now, this wood of Bussey’s—at present in the possession of Mr. Motley, one of the heirs by marriage—is a subject of frequent thought to the writer of this narrative. It was so before it became the witness to the murder of these two children; after that, while of course losing in sentiment and by association some of its innate and sympathetic loveliness, it ever wore the weird aspect of a mystic realm; but now is added that terrible consciousness of a fright, a terror, pervading all its recesses. The wood lies about six or seven miles southward of the Boston State House, on a county road, and its summits are lofty enough to afford a view of the city and the rattlesnake infested Blue Hills back of the Mattapan, more southwardly yet.

The wood, as you approach down the road from Mr. Motley’s gate, presents the aspect of a hill of pines, dark and massive; but, crossing the fence that keeps it from the highway, you are almost at once in the midst of a mingled growth of birch and beech and willows; beneath these passes the brook, near to whose bank was found, farther up, the body of the boy. Old Mr. Bussey, it would seem, was a man of droll, yet picturesque fancies, mingled with a sturdy sense of the useful; for no sooner are you free of the pasture land, and in among the trees, than you discover traces of his handiwork. The path you are upon is broad and well constructed, leading to a solid bridge of masonry; and well may you pause here to take in the full effect of the scenic entanglement. On your right is a fish-pond, fringed with the swamp willow, and of sufficient capacity to contain fish enough for a council of cardinals during the abstinent days of Lent; and near by a spring of water, so cold that ice is never needed by those frequent picnic parties that, up to the period of the murders, sought these delicious retiracies for holiday festivals, or love’s deeper and sweeter plans of recreation. Crossing this lower bridge, and passing over a road with velvety grass borders, you turn to your left, and if you have the time from sandwiches and other condiments, or are not too absorbed in emotions that beat marches to the field of matrimony, or much elaboration of flirtation, you will see the steep ascent, bearded with huge pines, and covered with abutting rocks, looking like the base of a minor incident of Alpine precipice. If you choose, there is a wild pathway made among the zigzags, and this you can pursue until the summit meets you, with the recompense of a noble prospect, but with your muscles somewhat demoralized. Did those children take this route?

Along the ridge, a broad walk leads to the spot where the wounded-to-death body of the unhappy girl was found. But, if you think otherwise, in your humor of unsettled choice, you can turn to your right, and, winding around the base of the hill, through dwarf pines at first, and heavy timber afterward, stroll on until you reach the scene of the primal tragedy. Did they go by this way? The wildness, the solemnity, and total seclusion of the place, even in the broad daylight, are oppressive to the imagination, if you happen to be alone. Company in a graveyard, at midnight, destroys in some measure the unpleasant sense of other than human propinquity; and it is the same in a modified form, in this umbrageous condensity. By all but hilarious picnic parties, the solitude and seriousness of a wood is admitted; and this wood is one of the most unique I have ever visited. But, since then, it is no simple congregation of trees and rocks and mysterious paths,—no longer a sylvan asylum of perfect repose, inviting to reverie, to pleasure, or the interviews of love, sweetened by the security that shadows of leaves throw upon the blushing hieroglyphic of the cheek, or the deeper and softer and better understood language of the eyes. A gloom is here established forever. It is a witness of that most terrible of tragedies to which our human condition is liable. The knife of the murderer has gleamed here,—the cry of the victim been uttered. It is haunted! Haunted by what? Who can tell? By ghosts, or the idea of ghosts? It makes no difference which. In such cases, where logic is shattered over a catastrophe, imagination lifts up the fallen form of contracted reason, and ministers to its inability. Man does not always demand facts; or, rather, in the solving of the many difficult problems that are suggested by special and eccentric occurrences, he does not demand an iron-clad testimony,—a testimony not in accordance with the fact under inquisition. The existence of a thing is to be proved by evidence that can apply to the nature of its existence. The intention of Byron’s brain cannot be proved by the same process you would take to prove that the ocean over the Banks of Newfoundland is not so deep as in its centre. If we waited for facts in proof of what we cannot directly understand, we should starve mentally, or go mad. Air is invisible, but it exists. It is here; it is yonder. It is more keenly felt by animals whose skins are thin. The armadilla, possibly, doubts its existence, unless he has the gift of seeing it; but the hairless dog of China is no sceptic on the subject of atmospheric changes and attacks. Man, exposed to the blast, feels it more sensibly than the elephant placed in the same current. The opinion of the armadilla, or of the elephant, has nothing to do with the fact of the air’s existence. The former animal recognizes a tempest, not by what he feels, but what he sees; and if he sees wind, then I give up my illustration, but not my argument. He sees a vision of flying dust, broken branches, prostrate trees. Possibly he draws his deductions from the theory of the sliding faculty of sand,—which phenomenon he has, perhaps, suffered from; and he has seen trees overturned by sand-slides, and, as the tempest beats unfelt upon his adamantine scales, he thinks the sand-power is at work, and would debate all day with any thin-skinned animal who would assert that it was done by a tempest of air. “I never saw it, I never felt it,” Signor Armadilla would perpetually growl forth; and, so far as he was concerned, the air would be sand, and his neighbor a credulous, half-crazy believer in a thing perfectly intangible. He never could attribute the results of a tempest to any force which is not within the range of his experience. He is where he was, but the oak is where it was not. He stood upon a sound place, the oak upon a slide,—that’s all. There was no hurricane. Thus it is that while a thing may exist, it may not always be apparent, and if apparent, only to a few. Men take views according to the texture of their mental cuticle, mercurial or otherwise, thick or thin; and can decisions based upon such capricious contingencies be accepted as a philosophic solution of a doubt, or a truth? But I shall, farther on in my recital, have to deal more practically with this topic, because I shall be drawn to its revelation by the inevitable force of circumstances and incidents.

II.
THE INCIDENTS.

Two months previous to the murder of the Joyce children I had been residing at the house of an acquaintance, a mile away from the village of Jamaica Plain. The front of the house looked out upon the road leading from Boston and passing through the village of Jamaica Plain far away into the back country, and onward,—a pleasant drive for those city dwellers who had only afternoon opportunities for rural inhalation. The rear of the house gave view of a meadow watered by a tiny rivulet and up to the woods of Bussey. This rivulet was the one that went by the body of the boy, and where it was concealed by its woods and weeds. The distance from our back porch to the spot where the body of the boy was found, was about four hundred yards, and to where the body of the girl was discovered, probably twice or thrice that number; so I was rusticating near the footlights of the theatre, little dreaming that, when the curtain rose, how terrible would be the drama that would drip the stage with blood.

I have long since made up my mind that the most extraordinary events transpire from a condition of repose, else we would never be startled. The first earthquake is the terror; the residue are but affairs of mercantile and architectural speculation. Whatever is striking is struck quick. The practice of the prize ring is the theory of wonders. The shoulder of a man propels a complex system of muscles, and a man in front has his countenance smashed. The suddenness of the experiment accounts for the surprise at its result. Preparations for great deeds are not always apparent. A coup d’etat is such because it is a coup. The killing of Mr. Lincoln was more astounding as a positive deed than the beheading of Charles the First, or the razoring of Louis the Sixteenth and his Queen, daughter of the Cæsars. In the case of the President, silence and mystery kept pace with the public confidence in his personal safety; in the case of Charles and Louis, the politics of a people had long been disturbed and outraged with regard to the traditional sanctity of kings, and there was preparation almost evidently looking to the final result, and the prelude, from the very nature of those governments, admitted of hardly any other epilogue; but with Mr. Lincoln it was different. He sat in his box at the theatre, secure, in a war brought to a result suitable to his designs, with pleasant painted scenery before him, a comedy of brimming humor in course of acting, altogether in the very last place he or any one expected that the blow upon his life would fall; but it fell, and the world was astonished. Thus,—with the meadow and its brook before me, with the grand belt of woods bowing over the fence, with the soft air of summer in the boughs, with the mowers in the grass, with the sunlight blinking through flower-stems and vegetables of homely nomenclature, but admirable qualities,—I sat in the porch of my summer dwelling; and while I sat there, musing and idling, a deed was done, so wicked, so ruthless, so hideously unessential, that even now, after the lapse of so long a time, I feel the need of a new word,—a word with the thunder and the lightning in it, with the curse of man and the anathema of God in it, to express the sensation it produced.

Those woods were to me a delight beyond all computation. To look at them, to go into them, to sit underneath them, to watch by the hour the veins of moss and the bark of the tree boles, to follow the curvature of the limbs as they grasped at the white clouds passing, to see the blue eyes of the sky peeping at me as I stared at them, to listen to the nothings of sounds that all men have heard in the sylvans, to forget in the balm of the scene the bitterness of memories and knowledge,—furnished me a mighty feast of harmless and negative enjoyment. With these feelings which I have not exaggerated,—keeping in view this sanctity of nature, for so many centuries uninvaded by any crime, save and except that doubtful one, of lovers meeting there to love outside of domestic parlors,—I perhaps more than anybody else was personally outraged at the act which not only destroyed human life, but smote the peace of the presence which Heaven had bestowed upon the scene, sublime in its ministering to a waif out of the wreck of revolution. I feel confident that to those persons who indulge in the faculty of thought beyond counters and desks, I need make no excuses for these digressions; for they will at once perceive that I am at least exhibiting one phase of the prelude to those terrible atrocities. The incident of my vicinity to the spot has great weight with me in the writing of this narrative, as it would be to those persons, who, though not being able to witness the actual battle, see the smoke of the conflict and hear the reverberation of the dread artillery.

III.
THE SCENE.

It was on Sunday evening, the 18th of June, that we had the first intimation of what had been going on in those great shadows opposite to our house. I was sitting on the eastward porch,—which I said before gave a lookout toward the wood,—and had been sending up my quota of cloud to mingle with the fraternity of vapor around the setting sun (my pipe, my laboratory), when, as the shades grew purplish down in the ravine by the brook, I heard repeated shouts. When an ordinary stillness is violently broken, there follows a shock to the nervous system, repeated upon it by sympathy with the divinity of silence whose reign has been disturbed. Sometimes terror commences at once her frantic flight over all the barriers of reason; and again, anger beats back the blow with imprecation. But when the long-continued hush of a great forest, the mystic sleep of rocks and trees, of air itself pervading a radius of miles, is suddenly and sharply interrupted by that peculiar intonation of human outcry, which declares an event out of the ordinary train of circumstances, and when those outcries reach us out of thick concealment, wonder and dread assume control of our faculties, and make us pause almost in our breathing, to catch some other cry of different character by which we can determine the cause and nature of the first. I had heard from the paths and shades of those woods, during the summer, various kinds of human noises; but none of them ever reached the mad gamut of the one which had smitten the air but a moment since. Those other cries came from children, grown and ungrown, romping in happy energy along the glades,—from picnic parties calling to each other and replying as they separated after the feast of sandwiches,—and I had got to understand them all; but here was a yell that had in it the modulation of groan and spasm, uplifting of hands and straining of eyes, relaxing of muscles and whitening of faces, with stops put upon it by the fluttering pulses of the frightened heart; and imagining nothing of anything terrible that could have happened under that so pleasant roof of waving foliage, I sat paralyzed in the abruptness and terror of the interruption. But I was not kept long in such suspense. The news now came up from the dell that the body of the missing boy was found. The search of police and citizens had been conducted on the principle of an open fan with the handle held by the chief at the house where the children had been living. Thus the whole region on either side of the route known to have been taken by them was thoroughly gone over and examined, until the pursuit, almost despairing of success, reached the Bussey wood, expanded around the base of the hill, leaving no clump of bushes unexplored, until, upon that quiet Sabbath evening they found the poor boy lying dead in the midst of a thick screen of alder-bushes. Soon afterward the girl was discovered, but not, I believe, by parties actually engaged in the search. Two men unsuspectingly, perhaps unknowing of anything about the missing ones, strangers, it is to be supposed, and in the woods for a Sunday’s stroll, came upon a group of rocks lying a little off from the path at the southern terminus of the hill, and overlooking the common road of the county that leads to Dedham. Here, stretched in the rugged fissure of the rock, or rather in a basin at its base, lay the stabbed corpse of the sister. Another alarm, and the second part of the drama was concluded.

IV.
THE BROOK.

So this much of the mystery was explained.

These children had left their home a week before, purposing a little trip, that was to last only a few hours, to May’s wood, midway or thereabout between their starting-point and Bussey’s wood, where they were subsequently found dead. During all that week of vigorous and unwearied search by the police of Boston and Roxbury, joined in by that of the rural localities; while the sun shone so bright and peace seemed so perfect over and within that green glory, while hundreds of people as usual, suspecting nothing, came into and went out of old Bussey’s groves; these two dumb humanities lay,—the girl, with her poor fright-marked face towards the sky, appealing to it for testimony and redress, the brother prone to the earth by the sly little running stream, both stabbed over and over again,—for thirty-four times did that mad arm rise and fall,—their bodies rough with the clotted gore of their hideous wounds. The public stood awe-struck in the presence of this spectacle, and parents trembled when they saw such evidence of duty neglected in allowing these waifs to wander so far away from home. (Or were they accompanied, and by whom, when they went away?) For a time the junior members of families had to confine themselves to a more restricted sphere of locomotion, and the thought of murder haunting them drove them like curfew to their homes at dusk. The latitude heretofore extended to, or wrenched by, Young America underwent a revision, and the juvenile eagles and doves of the social roosts were forced to bend to the yoke of a new dispensation, the justification of which was found in the fate of those two hapless wanderers who had been found slaughtered in the woods of Bussey. Seldom, in the annals of crime, was there so great an excitement as was manifested, not only in Boston, but throughout the entire country, when the fate of the lost children was made known by the public press. In one week afterward the woods were daily crowded by people from the city and the suburbs, with parties from the distant towns, and I met one man, wandering about in a white state of nervousness, who said he had come from Maine to look at the localities. An artist of one of the New York illustrated papers, with whom I went over the woods, in company also with a policeman who had been detailed for the purpose of pointing out the spots to the man of wood-cuts, told me that in New York the murder of these children had caused a greater excitement than the killing of Mr. Lincoln. I could well understand that,—for the one was in its chief features, a political event, while the other appealed to the commonest sensations of our nature, through the avenues of mystery. On one Sunday alone, I was told by one of the rural officers, that more than twelve hundred people, men, women, and children, had visited the blood-stained places of the murders.

One great misfortune was inevitable from this sudden and continued irruption, and that was the total extinction of any foot-track of the murderer, or any vestige of his garments which might have been torn from him in the struggles with the stronger girl, or the conjectured chase he made in pursuit of the fleeing boy; for strange it was, that the bodies were found separated by several hundred yards of distance, an interval of dense wood and shrubbery closing in in all directions.[1] The one, as I said before, was killed on the summit of the hill; the other, at its base. As strict an examination as it was possible to effect was instituted, by the police authorities, of all the paths leading to the two spots of deepest interest, of every brake and shaded place; and very useless was it soon found to be in the vicinity of the death-scene of the girl,—for there the ground was dry and rocky; but where the boy was found the soil was moist, and had not the paths been constantly travelled over during that silent week and afterward, it was there that some clue might have been found, the footsteps of the assassin evident, kept there by that inscrutable and puzzling fatality that frequently attends on such events. The party of discovery, however, not having the police presence of mind at the moment when they came upon the desolate object, obliterated, by an unconscious complicity with the assassin, and demolished, in their eager rush, any marks he might have left; for at least to that body no one had approached, and the footmarks of the only living witness and actor must have kept company with the bloody corpse throughout that interval. Thus everything tended to shield the doer of the deed. The dry ground and flints around the girl; the very solitude of the boy’s last asylum, to whose protection he had fled with the breath of his pursuer hot upon him; the rain that fell afterward, and that fatal week’s concealment,—gave him ample time to perfect his plan of evasion; and well did the demon use his opportunities; for, up to this moment, the public is in possession of no clue by which he can be brought to the expiation, if human expiation be possible, of his unparalleled offence. Whatever may be known to the mysterious agent of legal vindication, the keen-eyed chief, we cannot discover; possibly there is nothing to discover, though I do not agree to that; he may be waiting for one of those redressing incidents by which the chain of evidence is united,—incidents simple of themselves and reaching forward out of doubt and difficulty, and helping the law to a fulfilment of its intentions.