Murdered By His Wife
In March 1778, Joshua Spooner, a wealthy gentleman farmer in Brookfield, Massachusetts, was beaten to death and his body stuffed down a well. Four people were hanged for the crime: two British soldiers, a young Continental soldier, and Spooner's wife, Bathsheba, who was charged with instigating the murder. She was thirty-two years old and five months pregnant when executed. Newspapers described the case as "the most extraordinary crime ever perpetrated in New England."\ Murdered by His Wife...
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An absorbing tale of crime and punishment in eighteenth-century Massachusetts Virginia Quarterly Reviews Review This history "of the murder of Joshua Spooner in Brookfield,Massachusetts,in March 1778 and the execution of his wife Bathsheba and three accomplices four months later recounts a case as sensational to contemporaries as the O. J. Simpson trial was to us....Bathsheba found herself trapped in a loveless marriage to an abusive husband. Becoming desperate after discovering she was pregnant by a 17-year-old Continental soldier whom she had boarded during his trip home,Mrs. Spooner recruited two British Army deserters to help kill her husband.... Navas provides insights into Bathsheba's psychological state and also considers the political,cultural,and gender prejudices that prevented the state from staying her execution until she could give birth. The author also provides the full texts of newspaper accounts,trial records,and other primary sources dealing with the crime. This readable book introduces an infamous local episode to a wider popular readership.
\ ChoiceThis well-written book exposes the harsh realities of life in revolutionary New England.\ \ \ \ \ John DemosNavas has produced a little gem — rock hard and glistening. Her story itself has great intrinsic fascination (sex,violence,betrayal,even a kind of 'redemption'. But her telling of the story is best of all: so simple,so direct,so utterly compelling.\ \ \ Virginia Quarterly Reviews ReviewThis history "of the murder of Joshua Spooner in Brookfield,Massachusetts,in March 1778 and the execution of his wife Bathsheba and three accomplices four months later recounts a case as sensational to contemporaries as the O. J. Simpson trial was to us....Bathsheba found herself trapped in a loveless marriage to an abusive husband. Becoming desperate after discovering she was pregnant by a 17-year-old Continental soldier whom she had boarded during his trip home,Mrs. Spooner recruited two British Army deserters to help kill her husband.... Navas provides insights into Bathsheba's psychological state and also considers the political,cultural,and gender prejudices that prevented the state from staying her execution until she could give birth. The author also provides the full texts of newspaper accounts,trial records,and other primary sources dealing with the crime. This readable book introduces an infamous local episode to a wider popular readership.\ \ \ \ \ BooknewsFiction writer and independent scholar Navas reconstructs a little-remembered incident during the US war for independence. Bathsheba took in and nursed a 16-year-old Continental soldier returning from a year under Washington, and became pregnant by him. Because divorce was nearly impossible and adulteresses were publicly stripped and whipped, she, with help from the boy and others, beat hubby to death and stuffed him in a well. It did not help her case that her father was the state's most prominent and despised Loyalist. There is no index. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)\ \
