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

by Henry Johnson Brent

In the mean time, the inquest had been convened, and their verdict of murder, with the words, “Done by some one unknown,” blazoned to the world, and stating that twenty-eight stabs had been planted in the body of the girl, and also announcing a grievously erroneous theory of the deed. The wounds upon the girl were chiefly in the back, as if the first assault had been made while she was stooping over her work, her wreath, perhaps; but afterward, as she despairingly confronted her assailant, the remaining stabs were given, while she could yet see the rapid lifting and falling of his arm. It is not an assured belief in the police theory of the deed, that she was killed upon the spot where she was discovered; and what specific reasons they have on that point, I cannot readily get hold of, unless it be based upon the fact that, had she been attacked only a few paces from a frequented road, her cries would have exposed the culprit to the risk of detection, and of that he naturally would have considered; and in that view the theory has some force, for it certainly was a better place in which to conceal the body dead, than attack it living. All around this spot, the trees, as I have previously described, grew densely, and a new visitor could easily lose his way, so that the deed may have been perpetrated in the wood, and the corpse drawn to the concealing formation of the rocks, as they were away from the path, and not very likely to be visited. However near the truth may be the theory of the police, there was evidence discovered at the time the body was revealed of a struggle, and a violent one, at that very spot among the rocks. There was a sapling bent and broken at the westward end of the rock, and its breaking was recent,—not done by any strong current of air, for there had been none, and if there had been, no wind would break that pliant stem and leave the vulnerable trees untouched. Had nothing of importance happened at this very spot, we would have to look for an explanation somewhere else, if we deemed it of importance. It evidently had been broken within a few days. Was it broken by some one who had visited the spot ere it was invaded by the two strangers on that Sunday when the body was discovered? That is hardly possible, for if it had been so, the body would have been seen, and the fact disclosed at once of her murder. Was it broken in the struggle that ensued between the murderer and his victim? How could she break so tough a bough? Why should he? But at all events, there it was, some four feet from her body. I saw it, and testify to its being there, and to the fracture being of recent date. It might have been broken by the man as he ascended from the road to the rock, for it stood where he might grasp it in his ascent; but that could hardly be; and there was no need to break it to give passage to her body if it was drawn from the spot where she fell, farther off. It was evidence of something that had happened, but a testimony of nothing that could properly and naturally attach itself to the murder. Cattle could not have done it, for they never were permitted in these woods, though a lad, who guarded a drove down on the pasture lands below the hill, was examined upon the idea that a madman had committed the deed in his frenzy, and he happened to be not of the sound order of brains. He was exempted from further suspicion, as well he might be.

The spot on which she lay was the convexity of an abrupt whale-backed rock, running some fifteen feet east and west, and guarding any object at its base from the sight of persons passing along the road. Crumbled flints abounded thereabout, and a hard and cruel bed it was for a sleeper, dead or alive. When I first visited it there were no marks of so terrific a scene as must have been enacted in her killing, save the doubtful sapling that lay broken and prostrate; but above the spot where her piteous head had fallen, some pious visitor had placed a cross, with a card affixed, that informed the public of the name of the poor sufferer, and a prayer in her behalf.

One week after the discovery of the body of the boy, the thick coppice and bushes that had concealed him were stripped away as memorials of the incident, and the ground about trampled by more than a thousand people; while the slimy mud oozed up as if eager to suck in more of the ghastly nutriment that had flown so freely in the first and final struggle of his death.

IX.
SUSPICION.

As a matter of course, several arrests were made after the delivery of the verdict by the coroner, and rumor plied her busy trade with an increased variety of tones. Our rural neighborhood rose at once into the importance of a public spectacle; and full-orbed curiosity roved the highways, questioning all kinds of people with all kinds of interrogatories.

There is always a plentiful supply of ready-made murderers in almost every well and long-established settlement,—men who look cross and act cross; who come home at mysterious hours and in mysterious ways, with slouched hats and shabby shirt-collars; who are not often if ever seen in church; suspicious fellows; just the sort of fellows to be talked about whenever anything bad has happened; but, perhaps, after all said and done, as good as their neighbors, indeed, sometimes better than the gossips who prate so lavishly about them. But they serve a purpose; and to that purpose some of them were put at once; and they bore it, and will have to bear it again. It is pretty much a matter of clothing. One day the whole thing was out,—the murderer was known. A neighbor’s farm-hand had fallen in with another neighbor’s farm-hand, steering his ox-cart upon some errand of slothful industry, and from the ox-driver he had learned that the said driver, on the noon of the murder-day, had met the boy and girl (boy and girl described) on the road between Mr. Motley’s house on the hill and the blood-stained rock, and soon afterward he was overtaken by, or he met, a swarthy man with a black mustache, heated and in haste, pursuing the same line of travel on which he had met the children. Yes, he could identify that man. He looked eager and fierce, with his dark skin and twisted moustache; and those were the real children, and he their murderer. He had seen the lambs, and he had looked upon the wolf. This story bore the semblance of possibility; and we were all prepared to hear of an arrest and identification. By night, however, the narrative had undergone some modification, but not losing in the vigor and picturesqueness of the original drawing,—rather otherwise. I immediately sought out the author of the bulletin, intending, if there was any substance in it after thorough investigation, to report the facts without delay to the proper authority.

True, the clodpoll had seen two children on that road; but it turned out, on cross-examination, that he saw them on the day after the murder; but the portrait of the eager and mysterious swarth, with his curled mustache, had been inserted by the more imaginative brain of the man who repeated the intelligence. So all that card-castle of discovery fell to pieces. Then, again, a gallant and bullet-maimed officer was put under the ban; and wonderful items grew into robust legends, that would have delighted the immortal Sylvanus Cobb, Senior. The bloody tunic of the man of Mars had been washed by the terror-stricken nymph of soap-suds, and she was, inasmuch as she had “talked” of that red evidence, forthwith discharged from the wash-tub of the family. This belief in the guilt of the maimed officer took such emphasis of accusation as to enforce from his friends a proof that he was, on the day of the murder, far away in a Virginia city, engaged, among other things, in writing his name in a lady’s album. One evening, after the Sunday’s discovery,—it might have been ten days,—as I was riding up the hill that led to Mr. Motley’s mansion gateway, and when I had reached the summit, I came upon a young man standing a little off the main road. He stood there but a moment; but in that moment I saw that his eyes swept in that section of his view which embraced the accursed trees of Bussey’s blood-dyed hill, but with no look of white affright in them; and then, with his one arm swinging,—the other maimed in some battle-field of the South,—he went onward to the gate. That was the officer who had with one arm committed those dual murders, even while he wrote his name in the album of a lady in the old city down in the Southern country.

From such things does the monster Gossip make up a verdict, driving in shame the innocent to a defence, while giving to the one of guilt the benefit of an arrested search, or a postponed accusation. Driven from this stronghold of suspicion, away went greedy Accusation down among the shanties of the Irish workmen, along the line of the railroad; but nothing there was brought to light beyond the existence of pigs, poverty, and all the other poetries of Hibernian habitations.

In the midst of this confusion of assertion and contradiction, of hope and disappointment, a luckless house-painter, of a religions turn of mind, and a taste perhaps of fluidical enjoyment, fell into the hands of the inquisitors, and, at the time, it must be confessed, with some circumstances attendant on his movements and position that gave color to the theory of his criminality. At his house the boy and girl had boarded last; from his house they started on their terrible adventure; and it was said that he was engaged on that day to do some work at or about May’s wood; and so they linked him with the two pools of blood out in the shades of the fearful woods. There was a judicial examination; but naught came out of it to warrant his detention, and so he was sent about his business rejoicing, with a clear skirt, and a eulogistic letter from the clergyman of his parish. The incident seemed rather to have worked to the advantage of the window-sash artist; and, in the full enjoyment of his acquittal, and the continued performance of his grave religious duties, this history must leave him.

And yet another. A young fellow was arrested, and lodged in the county jail at Dedham, of whom there was not the slightest doubt of his being the man. When arrested, it was proved that he had been absent from work on the fatal day; that his hands were scratched, and his clothes spotted with blood; and that he had been drunk on that night, driven, it was religiously and philosophically construed, into that beastly condition by the reproaches of his conscience. Ah, he was the very man! He looked, in his dimness of drunk and tatterdemalionism of garb, like a real Simon-pure unadulterated murderer. The rope was ready, and the coming carpenter dreamed of a gallows on which he was to swing. But the rope had not yet been twisted, and the carpenter had only dreamed; for it was established as follows of his biography: He had been absent from work because he had no work to attend to; he had been drunk because he loved bad whiskey and good company; he was scratched and blood-tinted because his valor and his bottle had led him, at an ill-reputed tavern, some two or three miles up the road, to attempt the vindication or assertion of his philosophic, philanthropic, political, or religious opinions and dogmas, by quotations from the library of his fists and muscles. So he, too, got out of the clutches of the law, and stands, or staggers, now, ready at any moment to be arrested upon the same grounds for any similar offence, or other offence, that his neighbors may think him fit for.