Into the Woods

On today’s episode, Kate and Paul travel to 1843 Rhode Island where the richest man in town is found dead out in the woods. After investigating who could possibly benefit from the death and some clever crime scene forensics, surprising suspects emerge. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the
last twenty five years writing about true crime.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I'm Paul Hols, a retired cold case investigator who's
worked some of America's most complicated cases and solve them.

Speaker 1 (00:16):
Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most
compelling true crimes.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring
new insights to old mysteries.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime
cases through a twenty first century lens.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
Some are solved and some are cold, very cold.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
This is buried Bones.

Speaker 2 (01:01):
Hey, Paul, Right, Kate, how are you?

Speaker 1 (01:03):
I'm doing great? You know, I want to talk about
our backgrounds because I've definitely had some people message me
and ask about different things in my background, but we've
never talked about your background. What's in your background? Is
there anything weird or significant?

Speaker 2 (01:17):
Well? You know, behind me is my bookshelf, and it
contains most of the books that I read throughout my career.
Some of them are academic texts, some of them are
your true crime. You know, a lot of the paperback
stuff is the true crime you know, stories on various cases,

(01:38):
and I've been somewhat changing it up. I don't know
if anybody's noticed it, but you know, one of the things,
you know, over to my left, I have another little
bookshelf and I had hidden away, you know, probably one
of the most significant books to my career, which is
this one here up to my left, sexual Homicide Patterns
and Motives. And this is the academic test for the

(02:01):
Netflix SERI mind Hunter.

Speaker 1 (02:03):
Oh yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:04):
So when the FBI was going around interviewing the caught
serial killers, they compiled all of that into this book.
And my parents actually gave me that book for my
twenty fifth birthday. Could you imagine giving your son a
book called sexual homicide? You know, But one of the

(02:25):
things I've been thinking about doing because I decided I
wanted to highlight that book because it was so significant
to me. And then we recorded a little while ago,
and you had asked me about rapist typologies, and you know,
one of the books that's again very significant to me
was Bob Kepple's book called Signature Killers, which is this

(02:49):
book up here. You could see Ted Buddy's face on it.
But doctor Kepple, who was an investigator with King's County
Sheriff's Office during the Ted Bundy investigation. He ended up
becoming a profiler, and he wrote this book where he
took the gross rapist typologies and put that onto the
categories of serial killers. And so that I decided why

(03:13):
I wanted to highlight that book, and I thought, you
know what, there may be something I changed from time
to time, just like little easter eggs, to see if
you or the viewers yet are able to spot different
different changes. And of course I've got this little buried
bone saying here, you know, so you know, maybe maybe
pay attention from time to time I might change things

(03:34):
up on you.

Speaker 1 (03:35):
Okay, I go seasonal.

Speaker 2 (03:38):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (03:38):
When we first started taping, I had a nutcracker up
in one of my top shelves. Okay, but now what
I do? I mean, nobody noticed this is stuff but me.

Speaker 2 (03:48):
But I.

Speaker 1 (03:50):
I started putting like a different animal on. So if
you look at my fireplace, I don't know if you
can tell what's on there right now.

Speaker 2 (03:58):
Is it a duck.

Speaker 1 (03:58):
It's a duck. It's a sentimental duck. It's my dad's duck.
It's a wooden duck that his back flips open and
it has paper clips and little odds and ends for
a desk, and so I had that. But for a
while I had a pig, which was a Victory Bank pig.
Oh really, that was my mom's growing up. Okay, if

(04:20):
you look on the bottom of that poor pig, she
had chipped it out when she was a kid because
there's no opening to it. You just put your coins in,
and there's no way you're going to get it out
without smashing this pig. So she had tried to chip
it open, and she stowed. Her dad probably stopped her.
And then I tried to chip it open, and then
finally Quinn got it open about three years ago and

(04:40):
all of these coins from like the nineteen fifties came out.

Speaker 2 (04:44):
Oh that's cool though, I like that, that's very cool,
So I tried.

Speaker 1 (04:48):
I also had a mouse there for a while, a
little a little brass mouse that my mom had that's
very very old. That's a that's a more difficult one
to switch up because it has to fit perfectly. It
has to fit on this kind of like round that
I have there. But I definitely switch up books a lot.

Speaker 2 (05:03):
Yeah, your books are I would never be able to
tell because they're so far in the background. If you
switch something out.

Speaker 1 (05:10):
That's why I do the animals, the pigs. I can
switch up my Pendleton blankets that actually Karen and Georgia
sent me for Christmas. They're a wonderful quality will blanket,
and so I had that one back there, but I
bought a different kind that I might I might switch
things up a little bit. You know.

Speaker 2 (05:29):
I'll try to pay attention and call you out on
something if I see it switched.

Speaker 1 (05:35):
I hope that these stories aren't boring, so that you
are paying more attention to the animal that I have
never that would never happen.

Speaker 2 (05:45):
No, not at all, never never.

Speaker 1 (05:48):
Okay, we are going to be in Rhode Island today.
Love Love, Love Rhode Island. My last book was said
in Rhode Island time period in the eighteen hundreds, and
we're going to be back in Rhode Island in eighteen
forty three. You're going to learn even more history than
you ever thought or cared to learn about some things

(06:09):
that were happening in this time period. So let's go
ahead and set the scene. I try to think about
these cases and think, what is the one liner that
I can say to listeners' viewers at the very beginning
about what I think this case is, and this is
I know we always kind of talk about this, sometimes
more than others, but for me, this is a case

(06:29):
of what they could prove then and what we can
prove now, and just the tragedy of it seeing all
of the tools we have now where we could have
solved so many things, so many wrongful you know, convictions
and executions happened just because we didn't have the right tools.
And so then it makes me hopeful for everything that's
going to come in the future. What more are we

(06:50):
going to have at our disposal to solve crimes and
keep people safe?

Speaker 2 (06:54):
Well? And we're seeing that today. You know, ever since
the really the end advent of modern DNA technology, you know,
people who were convicted of you know, the nineteen seventies,
nineteen eighties, or even more recently, how DNA has exonerated

(07:14):
you know, individuals that put decades of their time, of
their lives in prison and they were absolutely innocent. So
just imagine you know, what they were working with back
in the eighteen hundreds, and quite frankly, how many innocent
people probably were incarcerated and or sentenced to death for
something they didn't do.

Speaker 1 (07:34):
Absolutely. I talk about this with my second book, American Sherlock,
about the forensic scientist, and you know, I read in
his notes where he said somebody asked him in a letter,
have you ever had doubts about anything you've done. This
is somebody who worked on two thousand cases in his lifetime,
and he said, no, I got them all right, got
them all right? That's wrong. He obviously didn't, you know,

(07:57):
and he was using some bad science, and that's worries.
I think you'll always have to like the das who
it's very clear they prosecuted and incarcerated the wrong person
who still refused to open up these cases for whatever reason.
That was alarming when I read that about Oscar hinrich.

Speaker 2 (08:15):
Well, I think, you know, that's where, like I know,
from my career, everything I did, I felt that I
abided by ethics. I did everything. I formed my opinions
based off of what I felt was right. But the
biggest fear is is did I conclude something that ultimately

(08:37):
put the wrong person in prison? You know, that really
is a huge fear by anybody who really cares about
what they're doing. And so for Heinrich. You know, for
him to say why I was always right, that's a
lot of ego. Oh yeah, I would have liked to
hear him. I did everything to the best of my abilities.

(09:00):
Mm hmm, with the knowledge that I had, my expertise,
you know, the facts that I had available to me.
But you know, I think if you know, if you've
worked in this field for a long enough period of time,
you know there is going to be that uh oh,
you know, I sure hope everything I concluded over thirty

(09:20):
plus years of working in this field that it was
all right, But it's we're humans, right, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (09:28):
And like I said, you know, I had interviewed Daniel Westcott,
who is the head of the Texas State Anthropology, a
forensic anthropology lab where they have the body farm. I
think it's the largest one in the United States. And
I said, what is your job and he said, it
is almost always to exclude, never to include, he said,
I everything that I have. It's basically saying this didn't happen.

(09:50):
I can't tell you one hundred percent what did happen,
but I can tell you what didn't happen based on
what I have. And so I thought that was important
you know.

Speaker 2 (09:58):
Yeah, that's that's definitely the proble upper forensic philosophy, no
matter what forensic discipline that you're working in is you're
always looking for that exclusion. You're always looking for, you know,
something that benefits whether it be a suspect or benefits
the defendant to exclude them from the crime. But after,
as you know, you get so far in and you

(10:20):
can't exclude that. Now you know, it's like, well, how
strong is the inclusion? You know, and that's where you
see with DNA, well you can't exclude matches across the
entire DNA profile. Well how strong is that inclusion? And
that's where you start getting the statistics. So you know,
the try or effect, whether it be the judge or
the jurors, can put weight on the testimony that is

(10:43):
being you know, put in front of them that's pointing
at the defendant. I couldn't eliminate them, you know. So
this is how and so that's where as we've talked
in the past, that's where some of the comparative sciences
have gotten into trouble. You know. My perspective is there's
there's no doubt that you know, fingerprint comparisons and ballistics all,

(11:05):
you know, firearms comparisons, these comparative sciences have value, but
it's like, okay, what is the strength of the finding,
you know, And that's where some of them are struggling
to kind of give that objective statistic. So the court
can and the jury can go okay, and now I
understand you know what it is from a factual standpoint.

(11:27):
From a scientific standpoint.

Speaker 1 (11:29):
Yeah, what do you weigh more? What should we really
pay more attention to? Yeah, okay, Well let's go back
to eighteen forty three, where I would say forensics is
very weak, and we're going to see that. So this
is sundown, four fifteen pm on New Year's Eve. We
just did a story set in early January in New

(11:53):
England in Massachusetts and cold, cold, cold, So we're in
the same situation here, very very cold, New Year's Eve,
December thirty first, eighteen forty three, four fifteen pm. And
we're in a place called Spragueville, Rhode Island. And it's
a village that's full of mill factories, boarding houses, schools,

(12:14):
and most of them are owned by a family called
the Spragues. So this is a very influential family around
New England and I'll tell you a little bit more
about them in a little bit, but this is, you know,
this is a kind of setting the scene here. The
family lives in a huge home which has been called
Sprague Mansion, and they have a servant named Michael Costello.

(12:37):
He's heading home from the mansion. He's west on Cranston
Road and he crosses this swampy area known as Hawkins
Hole and he approaches a footbridge over a river. I'm
going to show you a photo of the footbridge, which
is small, and the river, which is a really generous
term for what this is. It's almost a creek essentially,

(13:00):
in the river quote unquote is not yet frozen. So
in the middle of the bridge, Michael notices blood and
there's a trail. So he follows the bloody trail fifteen
to eighteen feet past the other side of the bridge,
and he kind of goes below the bridge. But this is,
like I said, it's a creak. Nothing's very high up.
So he kind of crosses over this little creek and

(13:21):
he goes down and he finds the bludgeoned body of
a middle aged man. So this is a man who's
laying face down with his head on his hands, his
legs are extended, and there are blood pools around his head.
So Michael doesn't touch the body. He races to alert
a doctor named Israel Bowen who lives really close by.

(13:44):
We've seen in other cases where somebody races to go
find the medical examiner and they show up three or
four hours later. Bowen comes immediately apparently, but nobody's turned
him over yet this man. By the time that they
return to the crime scene, there is a small crowd
that has gathered and they're searching the area contaminated crime

(14:04):
scene right there, So you know you have these curious
onlookers who are taking it upon themselves looking for whoever
did this to this man. There is a guy who
notices scattered blood drops continuing in the snow sixty to
eighty feet up the footpath. And another guy finds a
pistol underneath the northeast corner of this little footbridge, a

(14:29):
few yards from the body. So you have pedestrians finding
these two things. Go ahead and look at the photos
that I sent you so mad when you got that
page up.

Speaker 2 (14:38):
So I'm looking at the second photo in this document,
and so this appears to just be a photo of
a trail, just a walking path through a forest.

Speaker 1 (14:53):
This believe is the footpath that the man found. The
sixty to eighty drops of blood like the exit route
basically for whoever did this, is was what they're thinking.

Speaker 2 (15:04):
Sure, So if that is truly the escape route that
the offender took, and you've got dripped blood for sixty
to eighty feet, he's bleeding himself. He's leaving his own
blood behind. Now, if it's just a dripped blood, that
could be, you know, from his nose, that could be

(15:24):
from a hand. You know. In essence, it's he's just
walking or moving maybe more swiftly along this trail away.
Of course, today this is a huge source of evidence
that could ultimately be used to identify the offender. In
eighteen forty three. You know, now they're just going, okay,
we have to if we interview any suspects pretty shortly

(15:47):
after the crime, we have to look to see if
that suspect has an injury that's fresh.

Speaker 1 (15:53):
The reason I really wanted you to see the footpath
is the isolation part of it. It's just like if
you read a book, a novel, and you're picturing the
characters in your head and then you see what the
author used as inspiration. You think this looks nothing like
who I was picturing in my head. I don't know
why I was thinking of a clearing or kind of
in town. This looks isolated to me, at least based
on the footpath.

Speaker 2 (16:14):
Well along this particular stretch. You know, this is reasonably
dense vegetation and forest. The footpath kind of curves out
of you, so it's not like you can, you know,
look right down the path and just see forever. You know,
it's you can only see roughly. You know, I don't
know how long that would be. Let's say fifty to

(16:34):
fifty to one hundred feet down this trail before it
curves out of sight.

Speaker 1 (16:39):
Now, if you look at page three and page four,
you see this footbridge, and I think the fourth one
will give you kind of a perspective of this is
not a large river at all. This footpath is substantial.
But you know, you tell me what you think. I
don't know where he is. I think he's on the
other the side that says, not the Cranston side, but

(17:01):
the other one. But regardless, this is not like pushing
somebody off of a big incline or something.

Speaker 2 (17:08):
No, so you know, looking at these two photos, you
know this this appears to be really more of a
primitive it's hard to even call it a bridge, even
though technically it's crossing a body of water. But it's
it's small, it's the bridge has been composed of stacked
rock in addition to what appears to be some wooden planks.

(17:32):
Maybe is three to four feet above the level of
the water the top of the bridge. And this is
just a creek in my.

Speaker 1 (17:42):
Opinion, I said that the river is generous.

Speaker 2 (17:46):
Yeah, I that. I mean it looks like maybe it's
i don't know, ten feet across. Yeah, and I can
see the bottom in this this one one photo where
this is not deep at all. It's only you know,
twelve inches maybe two feet deep at most, So you

(18:07):
know it is Yeah, I'm not seeing snow on the ground,
but I know it's this is a time of year
in which it would be very cold, for sure.

Speaker 1 (18:15):
Also, these are photos that are not from then. It
was probably from later, maybe when they were demoing it
or something. But yeah, you're right, So what does it say.
I know, we don't know anything about this case yet,
but people use this footbridge. Michael's using this footbridge in
the afternoon. So who ever killed this guy just sort

(18:35):
of left him wherever whatever happened happen. He's not trying
to cover him up. He's face down and that's it.
In an area literally next to a bridge where people
will definitely cross at some point. Whoever did this is
not trying to cover this up or hide his body,
which seems like could be easy in this area to do.
You just rack him somewhere.

Speaker 2 (18:54):
Well, I think that's where, you know, first, it's getting
into you know, some of the crime scene aspects. You've
got this middle aged male that's face down, he's got
a blood pool around his head. You know, part of
it is as you said, he was bludgeoned, but then
a pistol had been found nearby, so this is where, okay,
was he actually bludgeoned? Because oftentimes people who are shot

(19:16):
in the head and the amount of blood coming out
of the head can mat the hair and obscure facial features,
and so you know, it could be a gunshot victim.
At this point, from my perspective, I'd be looking to
see is there any indication of blood spatter from repeated
blows to the victim's head. To This is where now

(19:39):
victimology comes into play. Is this whoever this victim is.
Is this somebody that would routinely walk along this path
for one reason or another? Is this a victim of opportunity?
Was this a robbery gone bad? You know, where you
had somebody an offender that confronted the victim at this location.

(20:00):
Things went sideways, and now the offender kills the victim
and gets hurt in the process, and now escapes along
the footpath that has the dripped blood. Or was this
a meeting point? Was this a pre arranged meeting point
between you know, the victim and the offender and things
went sideways, and you know, eighteen forty three, I doubt

(20:21):
it was some drug deal going on, you know. So
this is where victimology becomes huge in terms of, okay,
what is what is going on here?

Speaker 1 (20:34):
When they turn the body over, doctor Bowen recognizes the victim.
So he's forty five. His name is Amasa Sprague, as
in the town name. He is the richest and most
influential man in this town. He was very politically connected,
kind of all powerful, anti Catholic, you know, very much

(20:56):
kind of a nativist attitude. He was A, which is
a political party. In the eighteen hundreds, he and his
brother William had served on the Rhode Island Legislature, and
William was a US Senator and a governor, so very
very powerful, very very wealthy. So Michael Costello was apparently
his servant at the Sprague Manor.

Speaker 2 (21:18):
Okay, so here you have a very wealthy individual. And
now it gets into Okay, does this look at the
crime scene? Does it look like a robbery because he
may have you know, financial assets on his person that
somebody would want to get access to and take those
assets by force and in the process, you know, killing

(21:38):
a massa? Is that how you say his name? M Yeah,
And that's where it would come. Is a massa routinely
walking along this path and it is targeted because of
who he is, you know? Or is there something more
devious going on? Maybe there's a business transaction, you know,
And why would a massa go and purposely meet with

(21:59):
a business partner or somebody out at this particular location.
The victimology of a massa is important, for sure, but
is not necessarily That's not the reason he got killed. Yeah,
It's just again this could he could just literally be
a victim of opportunity. You had a stranger out there
just lying in wait, or just happened to coincidentally run

(22:21):
across a massa and pulled a gun and a fight ensued,
and a Massa got the bad end of the deal.
And maybe his pockets are turned out, and you know
you've got coins or a wallet or whatever a massa
would be carrying back in eighteen forty three that the
guy took off, and it's just again it started out
as a robbery and ended up as a homicide.

Speaker 1 (22:41):
Well, they find a silk handkerchief, an apple, loose change,
and an envelope. The envelope is marked one hundred dollars,
but it only has sixty dollars inside, which is twenty
five hundred dollars today. And he is also wearing a
gold watch, a very expensive gold watch.

Speaker 2 (22:57):
Yeah, so the offender doesn't sound like he took anything
away from Amasa.

Speaker 1 (23:02):
It doesn't sound like it. And he was discovered by
Michael Costello at four fifteen, But multiple people said they
saw a Massa in town up until about three thirty five,
So there is what less than an hour to work
with there. If everybody's doing you have multiple people agreeing
on the time.

Speaker 2 (23:23):
Right, So if he's last seen like three thirty five
in town and his body's found at four point fifteen,
that's twenty five that's forty minutes. And he wasn't killed
just maybe a minute before his bodies found. He could
have been killed ten to fifteen minutes prior. So it's
a very narrow window. So I don't know how long

(23:44):
it would take a maasa to get from the town
to this particular location. That has to be factored in,
but it sounds like once a massa is at this location,
his death occurred pretty quick.

Speaker 1 (23:56):
And you know, we were talking about people who might
have known schedule. Is this a normal thing? I don't
know that necessarily, but this is New Year's Eve, and
I wanted to know was New Year's Eva thing in
the eighteen hundreds, It was a big thing. So this
is not a business day for him most likely, And
you know this is this is if he's going to

(24:18):
have an unusual schedule, probably this would be one of
those days.

Speaker 2 (24:22):
So now, in terms of assessing the offender, this is
where the autopsy could prove to be important because right now,
you know, I could I could throw out just the speculation.
Did a Masa meet up with some woman at this
location and she killed him? You know, I want to
know a little bit more about what happened to Amasa.

Speaker 1 (24:42):
Okay, well let's get onto that. We have a corner.
So we've got the doctor who just happened to be
there living nearby, but we have a corner named Robert Watson.
He shows up, but it's starting to get dark at
six fifteen. The town sergeant is there and they haven't
paneled a corner's They all show up and they use
a lantern back to kind of the weird atmospheric part

(25:05):
of the eighteen hundreds with no lights. They're examining the
wounds that were identified for doctor Bowen. It's kind of complicated.
So here's what they find. The corner says that he
believes that Amasa dyed by blunt force trauma, probably the
edge of a musket guard to the head. Now, I

(25:27):
don't even know what a musket guard is. Do you
know what part of the gun that is musket guard?

Speaker 2 (25:32):
I know what a musket is.

Speaker 1 (25:34):
A musket guard is called a flash guard, a safety
device used on flint lock muskets to deflect the flash
and hot gas is produced when the weapon is fired.
They are typically small metal plates, often made of brass
or iron, that attached to the musket lock, redirecting the
flames upward or downward instead of outwards.

Speaker 2 (25:54):
You know. So this musket guard, if that is correct,
it's right on the rifle or the musket, right where
the hammer basically is sort of in the middle of
the musket. So that's where i'm a little bit. I think.

(26:15):
For me to have confidence that they can conclude that,
I need to see what kind of patterned wounds they
were seeing to say, oh, yeah, I agree with that,
because that seems like it seems like a weird spot
on the along the length of the musket that is
being used to do the bludgeoning. Not necessarily think if you.

Speaker 1 (26:35):
Grab if it's a musket and you're grabbing the barrel
and using it almost like a bat, yep, probably that
musket guard would catch the side of the person's head
and it's kind of sticking out.

Speaker 2 (26:46):
Right possibly, and I can visualize that that's speculating, I
don't really know, but for the corner to come to
that conclusion, that tells me that they are looking at
a patterned wound and if he's correct that either a
masa or the offender brought a musket to this location. Yep.

Speaker 1 (27:07):
And they're saying that all of the wounds that they
see are one inch one to one and a half inch,
which you know, looking at the photos from what we saw,
that looks about right. They're about a one and a
half inch and they're hard, so you know they're of
a metal, So you're right. I mean, you know, you
say that all the time you're looking at the person
in that time period, and if they know what somebody

(27:30):
looks like who have been hit by a train, then
you kind of have to go with what they've seen.
A lot of that's what they think happened. So let
me let me tell you about the injuries. There's one
blow to the left side of his head. It fractured
his skull and ruptured his brain membrane. There is brain
matter and blood sprayed out of the one and a

(27:52):
half inch gash on his forehead. Another blow to the
right side of his head, which has fractured his skull,
and the corner says each one of these would have
killed him. There are other gashes as well, two parallel cuts.
They think all of this I believe is from the
musket two parallel cuts, each measuring about an inch on
the upper back of a moss's head. A three inch

(28:15):
wound reaches from the first gash to about an inch
above his ear. There's a contusion that runs from his
cheekbone to his temple on the right side. This was terrible.
This was an awful fight for him. I mean, that's
what I'm getting. His nose is shattered, and then there
are some gunshot wounds also, I can tell you about.

Speaker 2 (28:32):
Well and right now, Yes, you got blunt force trauma.
And this sounds pretty typical when you see a significant
weapon like a musket being used as a blunt force
weapon because it's hot and this is a lot of energy,
and so yes, the skull fractures, you know, suggest that
these are significant blows. You know. My question would be,

(28:52):
as he receiving these blows while he's upright being confronted
by the offender, or these blows being delivered while he
is down on the ground and an essence, the offender
is finishing him off.

Speaker 1 (29:05):
Well, listen to the scenario, and the corner has a theory,
and you give me your scenario first. So this is
what else they find. So, you know, the theory was
that he was on the bridge and now all of
a sudden he's faced down off the bridge and dead.
He's got all of these contusions all over the place.
He also suffered one bullet wound. A shot had entered

(29:26):
a Massa's right fore arm and traveled four inches, breaking
the small bone of the arm, and the bullet is
still embedded in Amasa's wrist. I guess it sounds like
it wasn't a musket, it was a pistol, and I
don't think those are interchangeable. I'm pretty sure those are
not interchangeable. No, so you tell me what that sounds like,
and that you know that is not, of course, not

(29:47):
what killed him, but somebody shot him.

Speaker 2 (29:49):
Well, the shot into his arm sounds like a Massa
possibly assumed a defensive posture. You know, I had recognized
that there was a gun point to at him, you know,
put his arms. We see this, you know in shootings,
and now hands or forearms are being shot or sometimes

(30:09):
you have you know, sort of a covering, you know,
and then the bullet ends up going through the arm.
So that's kind of how I'm envisioning what you told
me about this shot to his forearm and the bullet
ending up in his wrist. Sounds like kind of a
weird he's maybe reflexively kind of covering himself up and

(30:31):
he gets shot and that bullet lodges in his arm,
and they're saying that that's a pistol round that they recover,
and we have a pistol that is found at the scene.

Speaker 1 (30:43):
Yep, second weapon, right.

Speaker 2 (30:45):
It's a second firearm. Now eighteen forty three. Are people
just normally walking around with muskets and pistols, you know?
Or unusual? So? You know, so is this where I
mean you think about it. You got two guys walking
over this bridge and opposite directions, and one gives the
other a bad look, and now you got words exchange
and they pull their guns out, and a Massa is

(31:07):
a loser. You know. It could be as you know,
basic as that, but his victimology, high profile, wealth, everything else.
It seems like there's probably more to the story than
just some random crime.

Speaker 1 (31:21):
You're correct sir, There is a lot more to the story.
The corner thinks that Amasa was confronted on the bridge
and bludgeon from behind, knocked off the bridge and that
the person on the bridge had an accomplice who had
that pistol. But then what would that mean because the

(31:42):
pistol is not what killed him, it's the blunt force trauma.
So what the guy jumped off the bridge and finished
him off with this with this muzzle thing, That's.

Speaker 2 (31:50):
What I'm envisioning. Yes, you know, so this confrontation, if
the confrontation occurred up on the bridge, a massa, it
sounds like put up enough of fight to where at
least if there's multiple offenders, one of the offenders got
hurt to the point where now is leaving a sixty
to eighty foot long, you know, trail of dripped blood.

(32:12):
You know, so this is where now you know, taking
a look at a Massa's hands, you know this is
do his hands suggest this you have bruising or you know,
like if you think about somebody hitting somebody in the mouth,
the teeth will cut into the knuckles or you get
bruises as somebody is is fighting torn fingernails. So that's
something I would be looking at to go, Yes, you know,

(32:33):
now you have you know, basically a physical fight. A Mass'
shot he could have been shot right away, but the
shot to his arm is not going to capacitate it.
He could still physically fight his offenders, but eventually maybe
there's a significant blow to his head, or he's pushed
off the bridge and an offender or both offender, you know,

(32:53):
get down to where his body is, and that's where
you get the all the the blows being inflicted by
the musket.

Speaker 1 (32:59):
Well, and then we'll let me tell you what happens
with this pistol. You know, he's got that one shot
that's still in his wrist. The jurors look at the
pistol on the scene and they find signs that it
had misfired the percussion. Now you're gonna have to tell
me about this. The percussion lock had been snapped, but
the gun is still loaded to the muzzle and the
barrel is packed with snow and jammed with a wad

(33:22):
of paper. What is the percussion What does that mean?
Percussion lock had been snapped.

Speaker 2 (33:27):
I don't know what the percussion lock is.

Speaker 1 (33:30):
That.

Speaker 2 (33:31):
So there would be with these black powder weapons. You've
got the black powder that goes down into the barrel.
Then you've got the projectile that is then packed down
on top of that black powder. But then you have
what I think is called a percussion cap, and this
is in essence what the hammer hits that causes There's

(33:51):
that force of the hammer hitting the percussion cap is
what causes the ignition because it contains material sort of
like modern firearms the primary has. When the hammer strikes
the firing pin, the firing pin hits the primer and
that's what causes the gunpowder inside the cartridge case to burn,
which the gases forced the bullet out. So a percussion

(34:15):
guard sounds like it's a mechanism, part of the firing
mechanism that somehow protects the percussion cap until the trigger
is pulled. That's my guess. But this is where, like
as I always say, I have a little bit of knowledge,
this is where I would be reaching out to a
firearms expert and go, tell me what you know about this,

(34:38):
and how do I interpret this particular type of weapon
within the circumstances and the evidence of this crime.

Speaker 1 (34:45):
I guess, really, in some ways, I'm not sure this
really matters. If a gun is jammed at a scene,
it's fired once. I guess that explains why he wasn't
shot again. Is that kind of the takeaway you have.

Speaker 2 (34:59):
Well, it could be. You know, run with modern weapons,
we run into this all the time, especially especially when
somebody's got a pistol today and they get into a
physical fight and they try to pull the trigger, but
they're not supporting that gun, and so the gun doesn't
cycle the normal way, and so now you can get

(35:20):
jams and misfires, if you will, with these older weapons,
with snow being packed up into the pistol. You know,
is this where a massa and the offender are fighting
over this gun, that gun gets you know, driven down
into the snow on the ground. You know, I don't
know enough to be able to say, well that in

(35:40):
and of itself that packed snow would prevent that pistol
from firing. Probably could. But you mentioned that there's this
wat of paper that's stuffed up in there. That might
be something that is normally packed into these types of weapons.

Speaker 1 (35:56):
So let me tell you about the rumors, because now
they're trying to look at motive. Who is this person?
There's no evidence of any of this, but they wonder
was a massa having an affair, had his mistress's husband
discovered it and killed him in revenge. There was a
disgruntled worker at the family mills, a guy named Big

(36:17):
Peter Dolan at the mill who had just been fired
for destroying a loom that had torn his nephew's fingers off.
So this all seems to be on the table, and they're,
you know, obviously going to look at the family. The
person who probably gains the most is his brother William,
who's this powerful senator and you know he was a
governor and so there's a lot going on with this

(36:38):
man and their servants too.

Speaker 2 (36:40):
Yeah, well, right now, this is wide open. Like in
our one of our previous episodes that we just talked about,
I talked about how you can interpret offender behaviors at
the crime scene to get a sense as to who
the offender might be. Right now, there is not enough
information because there really isn't a lot of offender behavior
being expressed at this crime scene. This is where now
the big demology, you know, starts to become so much

(37:03):
more important.

Speaker 1 (37:04):
Okay, well, let's get into this the villagers. There are
some villagers who think all of that is stupid. They
think this was a political assassination. So this is a
sign of the time. So get ready for a history lesson.
I've known this is a big one, okay, and you've
probably not heard of this man in particular, but he's
very famous. So two months before Amasa was murdered, there

(37:26):
is a well known political reformer who's actually popped up
in a couple of my books. His name is Thomas Door,
and he was arrested for treason. So the Spragues do
play a part in all of this. In eighteen forty one,
Thomas Dorr wanted more Rhode Islanders to be allowed to vote.
So at that point, only native born, meaning born in

(37:47):
the United States property owning white males had voting rights.
This is what the Spragues believed in, and this is
what they campaigned on both of these brothers. So Thomas
Door wanted to establish what was called universal white males suffrage.
After one year of residency, then you could vote. So

(38:08):
that meant, you know, that immigrants could vote. That meant
that Catholics could vote, because many of the immigrants were Catholics,
and this is not what the majority of white men
wanted in Rhode Island, you know, And this was a
time period where nobody trusted the Catholics. Everybody thought Catholicism
was very odd, and you know, Christ's blood and everything else.

(38:30):
The mistrust was there very much, and so nobody wanted
this to happen. So the Spragues kind of kept getting
in the way of Thomas Door in Rhode Island. But
now he is arrested for treason and he's imprisoned. But
it's the politicians, like the Spragues in Rhode Island who

(38:51):
did it. So he himself was in prison, Thomas Storr.
But there were an awful lot of supporters who hated
the Spragus and the white male nativists just like them,
and there were a lot of Irish Catholics in Rhode Island.
So as I said, Dora is in state prison. He
will not stay there forever. He'll be out within a

(39:12):
few years. But people do want to know if he
hired somebody like an Irish Catholic group to murder a
Massa Sprague. So this sets the stage for the murder
to be penned on three Irish Catholic brothers, Nicholas, John
and William Gordon. So let me tell you about these guys.
Nicholas Gordon came first, and he's a little bit of

(39:35):
the center of the story. He arrived in Providence, Rhode
Island in the mid eighteen thirties, so just a decade earlier.
Unlike a lot of immigrants, he didn't work in the mill.
He opened a general store and sold groceries and candies.
Nicholas's general store was undercutting the prices of the mill
shops that all of the Spragus owned, and Nicholas made

(39:57):
a huge profit. Then he opened up a tavern and
it was incredibly popular and all of the mill workers
would go to the tavern. The money that he made
was enough to bring over the two brothers who I
had mentioned were John and William and his mother from Ireland.
They came just a couple of months before the murder.
But the city council started to target Nicholas at the

(40:21):
request of Amasa Sprague and his brother, and they ended
up revoking the tavern's liquor license. And the excuse was, well,
Nicholas Gordon is getting these guys drunk and sending them
back to the mills where they're getting their hands ripped
off and everything else. If I were Nicholas, I'd be pissed,
and this sounds like a great motive to me. He

(40:41):
had his liquor license and it shut down the whole tavern.

Speaker 2 (40:45):
Sounds like he has direct motive versus being hired by
Thomas Dorr.

Speaker 1 (40:51):
Yep, it could be a bonus. I hate that guy. Anyway,
I'm willing to do it, and it would help Thomas door.
But we'll see. So New Year's Day, the next day,
there's a town meeting and there's a reward of one
thousand dollars to anyone with information about the murder. One
thousand dollars was about forty three thousand dollars today.

Speaker 2 (41:11):
Yeah, a significant amount of money. Now that you know,
the experience that we've seen in law enforcement with rewards,
particularly if they're pretty big rewards, is you get a
lot of false tips coming in because people are just
rolling the dice hoping they stumble across something in order
to get that money. So it can be very distracting
to the investigation.

Speaker 1 (41:32):
Well, you're right on the nose because a lot of
villagers came forward to say that they had seen animosity
between Amasa and Nicholas over the tavern, which doesn't sound
like something that would be disputed. But you do have
an awful lot of people who want that money, and
there is a lot of anti immigrant, anti Catholic tension
in this town. There is no piece of physical evidence

(41:56):
linking Nicholas to this crime. It's you know, a well,
he was really mad and plus he's you know, an immigrant,
and so that would have been the motive. So at
six o'clock that night, the next day, after this man
is found, Nicholas and his brother John are arrested on
suspicion of murder. And for John, he just has a
bruise on his chin and that's it. But with the corner,

(42:19):
you know, saying there were two men, they focus in
on these two brothers, and you know, the next day,
the sheriff, who is a guy named high Sheriff Potter,
I'll just say Sheriff Potter, searched the Gordon's shop and
upstairs apartment and they find a tin box and a
canister that contained powder as in gunpowder. Dirty clothes. There

(42:42):
is a wet blue coat, a wet pair of pants,
wet boots. The elbow of one shirt is stained with
what appears to be blood. In its pocket is a
grocery bill. In the pocket of a dark stained vest.
The party discovers caps in flint and six pistol balls
and powder wrapped in brown paper, and a few drops

(43:04):
of blood are present on the undershet of the bed
near the head. Now, let me say this, about eighteen
forty four, they could tell whether this stuff was blood.
They could not tell if it was human blood or
you know, dog blood or anything, but they would have
been able to identify blood. Twenty years later, they will
know how to identify the difference between human blood and

(43:26):
animal blood. They did not test any of this, so
we don't know if this stuff was blood or who's
blood it was. But this is what they find. They also,
in the attict find a bayonet and a sword. Quite frankly,
I mean, this is a laundry list of what pretty
much any family in the eighteen forties probably would have
had in their house. And I know the insinuation is,
you know, the clothes are wet and he must have

(43:48):
gotten into the quote unquote river. But again, I mean,
it's snow on the ground. That's what they have.

Speaker 2 (43:54):
Yet I think it's unimpressive in terms of trying to
tie any of that evidence back to the crime scene.
I mean, that's ultimately what we have to do, is
you're trying to make associations to connect these suspects to
the crime scene, to the victim, et cetera. And these
items right now, this were the interviews of Nicholas and John.

(44:18):
You know, it's like, well, do they have an explanation
for the blood the blood staining on the elbow of
the clothing. Is that a wound that they can see
a fresh wound on either of the suspects? Does that
wound appear to be something that could bleed enough to
leave a sixty to eighty foot long trail of dripped blood.

(44:40):
You know, so there's a lot more digging that needs
to be done to figure out if anything that they
found during this search has any relevance to the crime.

Speaker 1 (44:50):
Well, let me ask you. Let's just say there is
an injury, and it's an elbow injury, but that's the
only injury one of these guys has. Let's say, Nicholas,
is that enough Is there enough blood in that area
of your arm to actually drip sixty to eighty drops
up a trail that's visible.

Speaker 2 (45:07):
Well, it's not just sixty eighty drops, it's dripped blood
that goes for sixty to eighty feet along the trail.

Speaker 1 (45:14):
Oh, that's true.

Speaker 2 (45:15):
So you know, of course, you can have an injury
to the elbow that can bleed significantly, you know. Now
dripped blood. This is where we have no information in
terms of really how much blood is present in this
dripped trail, you know, but generally when you see dripped blood,
oftentimes you'll you'll have blood. Let's say it there's an

(45:37):
elbow injury, and now it's as you're walking that bleeding
is flowing down your arms and dripping off of your hand,
you know, So that's a possibility to create that type
of trail. Does one of these suspects actually have, you know,
a recent wound, because they're being arrested within a day

(45:58):
two days, you know, they're going to have a fresh wound,
and then what is their explanation for the blood inside
the residents? You know, And it could be yeah, you know,
I was working in the yard and I hit my
elbow and I was bleeding. You know. So right now
this is just all very superficial. There needs to be more.

Speaker 1 (46:20):
Well, let's keep going. There is a group of concerned citizens.
We've talked about these people. They never do any good
almost ever. They go to the crime scene and they're
chomping around. The snow is melting, but there's a guy
named Walter Beattie. He's the head of this vigilante I
don't know what to call them group. They're able to

(46:41):
see shoe tracks and paul prints like a dog. They
follow the tracks from the bridge across dire pond, through
the swamp and to the Gordon's apartment, and the link
of the tracks matches the soul of the boots that
they find an apartment, except the width of the track
are about an eighth of an inch wider. But still

(47:03):
they think this has proof positive that the Gordons are
the ones who did this. Can you really track things
through a swamp, I mean melted snow, a swamp, across
the bridge through a pond.

Speaker 2 (47:14):
Yeah, that seems a little convenient, I guess is the
way to put it. When you can most certainly have
Let's say at the crime scene, you have a shoe impression,
and you can see how as you follow the direction
of that, you know the trail of shoe impressions. There
will be moments in time in which there are surfaces

(47:35):
that that person was walking across that doesn't leave any impressions,
and then you can pick up that trail on the
other side of it. That's where you know, looking at
the swamp, you know, what were they really seeing in
order to try to track something through that is there
a lot of just impressions in mud without having any

(47:56):
details of let's say, the soul pattern of this particular
and then you know, from my guess is that you
know today, of course we have all sorts of different
types of outsold designs, right, all sorts versus back in
eighteen forty three, I bet most people probably had the

(48:17):
same boots, you know, with the same types of soul patterns.
So that's where now the veracity of the tracking aspect,
you know, gets questioned. From my perspective, what.

Speaker 1 (48:28):
If Nicholas had walked there, you know, the day before earlier,
you know, who knows. Okay, this is what I need
to remind you of. So when we talked about that
elbow bleeding, it was a shirt that they saw was
stained with what appeared to be blood. While they're tramping
through this citizens group and they're trying to follow these tracks,

(48:51):
they find two significant pieces of evidence. In the thicket
on the east side of the swamp. They find a short,
well worn blue coat. There appears to be dried blood
on the worn out right elbow. It's exposed lining and
on the breast of the coat. So if they're right

(49:12):
and no one's lying and trying to set up this
Irish Catholic guy, then that is the jacket that matches
the bloody elbowed shirt at Nicholas's house. And then let
me tell you this. There is wax and black hair
stuck to it. On one of the coat pockets. There
contains a box of powder, which has to be shooting powder.

Speaker 2 (49:35):
Obviously, if you find bloody clothing on the escape route
of the offender, I mean that's significant. The location of
the blood staining on the blue coat being consistent with
the apparent blood staining on the shirt found within the
Gordon's residence. I mean maybe you know. The frustrating part
for me, of course, is well, this would be easy

(49:56):
to answer, you know, let's just do DNA on it, right,
you know, back then it's like, well it's consistent, but
you still, even the blue coat, you can't say that
that blue coat was worn by the killer or the
killers of a massa. You still have to connect it

(50:18):
back to the actual homicide. And this is where I'd
be going. Okay, so I know that a Maasa was
bludgeon multiple times in the head, and based off of
what you described, the doctors saying, you know, where you
have blood and brain matter that is being exposed, and
you're probably having you know, blood and potentially brain matter

(50:41):
being spattered. You know, does this coat show that type
of blood pattern, if you will, some spatter pattern, as
this is the offender that is yielding let's say, the
musket while he's giving these blows to the offender. So
the blood on the blue coat, the blood on the
shirt from the Gordon residence, it's something, but it's still

(51:05):
not connecting back to the actual homicide. Not yet.

Speaker 1 (51:09):
Well, here's another place where DNA would be supremely helpful.
Just a little bit further past the coat, they find
a gun, which is the musket broken off at the breach.
The barrel is bent and it's not loaded, and the
lock is gone and covered with blood.

Speaker 2 (51:26):
Now you got the murder weapon. So it's the close
association with the murder weapon to the blue coat definitely
raises the association of the blue coat to the homicide.
So now it's a matter of whose coat is this,
whose musket is this? And how do they prove that
In eighteen forty three.

Speaker 1 (51:46):
Well, let's move along and let me tell you about
what happens at the end of the day. William Gordon
is arrested, so he's the third brother. So you have
Nicholas and John arrested, the third brother arrested, the mother
Ellen arrested, and another brother named Robert arrested. I'm going

(52:08):
to try not to laugh at this. The dog is arrested.
What And I looked this up. It happened in the
eighteen hundreds and the seventeen hundred they put animals on trial,
like actual trials.

Speaker 2 (52:18):
The paw prints and snow by the bridge.

Speaker 1 (52:21):
Yes, I mean, I know, I pulled this whole thing
up for you. I'll be brief, and actually, you know,
it turns from to me I thought was amusing at first,
but you know, they would be executed for things they did.
It could have been, you know, hurting a sheep or something.
But in the early eighteen hundreds, you know, there was

(52:41):
a different understanding of the law and animals. They could
be charged with murder, property damage, even being a nuisance,
and they actually had human witnesses. They had human witnesses,
and they had attorneys and judges. You know, and they
could face execution like hanging or being burned alive, exiled.
So you know this went out the door eventually. But

(53:05):
in this case, the dog is put under arrest.

Speaker 2 (53:07):
Also, that's just stupid. It's like, come on, So, I mean,
it really underscores just how silly you know some of
these laws were. So was the dog standing guard while
Amasa was killed, and now the dog is an accessory
to the murder. I mean it's it's like I'd like

(53:29):
to see, you know, the investigator's affidavit supporting probable cause
to arrest this canine. I know that's.

Speaker 1 (53:37):
Laughable, silly to you, laughable to you, not to the dog. No,
So they arrested one of Nicholas's friends. Man, they just
round up all of the Irish kids in this town.
And Ellen and Robert are let go later on, and
so is the friend. And then my question was what
about the freaking dog? Did the dog get out? I'm
assuming the dog's okay, but they had a did the dog?

Speaker 2 (54:01):
So basically they arrested an entire family.

Speaker 1 (54:04):
And a friend and a dog. Correct. So this gets serious,
especially because William Sprague, the third who is Amasa's brother,
resigns from the Senate US Senate. He resigns to watch
over the family business and over the investigation. John and
William are indicted for murder and they're scheduled to be

(54:25):
tried together in the Rhode Island Supreme Court. Nicholas is
considered the mastermind, and he's indicted as an accessory before
the fact and scheduled to be tried after John and William.
So what is that? That means they think John and
William were the ones who did the killing, but that
Nicholas is an accessory because he was the planner only.

Speaker 2 (54:48):
Yeah, that's what it sounds like to me. You know,
if they're indicting John and William, I think they're putting
John and William out there on the bridge with a maasa.
And obviously Nicholas had motive with you know, this whole
business conflict that he had with a masa. Yeah, so
that is what it sounds like to me.

Speaker 1 (55:07):
Okay, Well, you know, I guess they didn't do their
research because William, one of the two so called murderers,
had an alibi, the best alibi ever. He was in
mass when this all happened. He was in a Catholic
Mass in Providence, a gazillion witnesses, including priests, saw him.
Even though William does have an alibi, he's still going

(55:28):
to go on trial. Unfortunately, his brother John does not
have a good alibi, so John goes it alone and
Nicholas will go it alone in his own trial. Before
we talk about the evidence, which there's some really good
interesting evidence here, let me just kind of set up
the politics of this. So one more history lesson, probably
not just one more, but one more. So we've got

(55:50):
a defense team of two, and we've got prosecutors who
are political opponents, and they take this very personally because
these prosecutors and these defense attorneys ran against each other
for attorney General and only one of them won. One
of the prosecutors, so the defense attorneys hate the prosecutors.
The prosecutors are Whigs, which is a political party who

(56:13):
is fervently against Thomas Dorr, who you know, wants immigrants
to have rights too, the immigrants who are fighting for
voting rights and for the respect of the Catholics. The
Whigs don't want any of this. So Amasa's brother is
calling the shots over these prosecutors to a point where
he appoints essentially the prosecutors because he's a Senator of

(56:35):
Rhode Island. The defenses led by Thomas Door supporters, and
you know this is probably not good news just in general,
the political fight that happens between all these these four men.
So the judge presiding over the case is Chief Justice
Job Durfey. Durfy shows up in my book for the

(56:57):
Center's all about because the Derfeys were very famous in Tiverton,
Rhode Island, which is now Full River, Massachusetts. And Durfey
was anti Door, anti immigrant. He was a Whig, and
he said, listen to this, Paul. He encourages the jury,
which includes no Irish or Catholic men, to give greater
credence to testimonies from the native born witnesses than from

(57:20):
the immigrants.

Speaker 2 (57:21):
Judges did that, there's no prejudice there.

Speaker 1 (57:23):
Yeah, in my book, that was that in nineteen fifty
three about the Great Smog when the serial killer I
profiled went on trial. Afterwards, you know, in closing statements,
the judge essentially said, you need to believe the prosecutor,
not the defense attorney gave you a terrible case, go
do the right thing. So, of course it was predictably
a very short deliberation with this jury. Yes, okay. Murder

(57:47):
trial starts April. The brothers say they are not guilty.
They plead not guilty. The prosecution argues that Nicholas pressured
John and William to murder Amasa because of the liquor license.
So nobody at this point is acknowledging the possibility that
Thomas dor sent these three brothers out to be hitman
to take out a political rival. And you know, a

(58:09):
lot of this is based on dubious witness testimony. But
I think the most damning argument here is that when
the investigators go to the store, the brothers own the store,
the general store, and then they live above it, the
whole family. When they go, they're searching for a gun,
and now both guns are president at the scene. It

(58:30):
sounds like, but Nicholas is I have a missing My
gun is missing, And so they immediately say, if your
gun is gone, then your gun is the one that
we found under the bridge or the musket one of those.
What actually happened is one of the other brothers got
scared and they hid Nicholas's gun under the floorboards, and
nobody would cop to it. Nobody would say Oh, yeah,

(58:50):
we hit his gun. They were just scared, is what.
That's what they say. Okay, the prosecutor produces witnesses that
testify that they had seen John two days before the
murder with this gun. Now the gun is missing. It
must be missing, according to the prosecutors, because the Gordons
couldn't admit that it had shattered. I guess they're talking

(59:12):
about the musket had shattered while they were bludgeoning a Maasa.
And you know what's interesting, William doesn't disclose that the brother.
He doesn't disclose that he had hidden the weapon or
that the weapon was available. I don't know why, but
he doesn't.

Speaker 2 (59:27):
My thought is is that these guns probably are not
They're not registered. There's no serial numbers associated with them,
so you almost have to rely upon other people saying
I recognize that gun, that's Nicholas's gun or William's gun,
versus having some paperwork proving what gun they had.

Speaker 1 (59:46):
So I'll tell you a funny story. So just to
get this out of the way, the serial numbers on
guns were not mandatory until nineteen sixty eight, and it
was sporadic. There were before that, there were you know,
Colton Winchester would put cereal in nons number on guns,
but it wasn't lost, so not everybody did it, and
that's why the defense said, you cannot prove that that

(01:00:07):
gun belonged to any of the Gordons because you can't
trace it to them, there's no serial number on it.
An American Sherlock Heinrich was investigating the case of there
was a train robbery and he had a gun that
had been recovered and the robbers had scratched off the
serial numbers, so you can identify it. He knew. Heinrich

(01:00:28):
knew that this cult weapon in particular because it had
been used in robberies in the past, cult started printing
another serial number on the inside of the barrel so
he could look and identify and find real serial number
inside the barrel.

Speaker 2 (01:00:43):
I've actually done serial number restorations really hot in my career,
where you have stolen guns in which you know the
serial numbers have been defaced in a variety of different ways,
and there's a variety of chemicals typically asked that will
preferentially react where the serial number had been stamped into

(01:01:06):
the gun, and so by utilizing a process of both
polishing as well as this chemical etching, you can sometimes
bring up the serial number even though it's been completely
defaced from the firearm. It's a very very common service
that crime labs do across the nation.

Speaker 1 (01:01:28):
Well, that's super interesting because you know, I have heard
that so many times, scraping off the serial number and
how it works. It doesn't work, and so they are
not able to definitively say that the Gordons own this gun.
William for some reason is not saying I hid the gun,
because I think they had a lot of guns. You know,
they found a banyonet, there's all this stuff, but I

(01:01:50):
guess this is a particular musket that they're focusing in on.
It sounds like the bloody coat does not that was
found in the woods, does not belong to the Gordons.
I call this an o jasonson moment the defense asked
John to put on the coat and it's too big
for him. It's way too big for him. And I
think it sounded like the shirt belonged to John. Nobody

(01:02:11):
had bloody elbows from what I could tell, no scraped
up elbows. Okay, you know, of course they didn't analyze
the blood. So it's a very confusing scenario.

Speaker 2 (01:02:20):
Well, and that's what's you know, critical, is you need
to have evidence that matches with the actual homicide scene.
And you know you have somebody on the escape route
that is dripping blood. You know, unless the dog is
dripping blood, you know, it's these guys were arrested so
quickly that you're going to see wounds that you could go, yeah,

(01:02:44):
that could be the source of this type of blood
trail at this crime scene. And they don't have that.

Speaker 1 (01:02:49):
Well, and I'll tell you what else that somebody brings
up a great point. Remember, nothing's tested. As I said
there was. The defense calls witnesses who take the stand
who work with John on John works at a print
factory and they use something called Matter's dye, which is
a red dye used in printing calico cloth and it
stains clothes. And these witnesses said, we all have red

(01:03:12):
stains all over our clothes because we use that dye.
And because they didn't test it to determine which they
could have whether this was blood. There you go. The
defense says, you can't prove.

Speaker 2 (01:03:22):
This well, and that's where I mean, And I've talked
about this before. I've looked at so many pieces of
evidence that had red stains on them, and to my eye,
I go, yeah, that looks like blood. And then I
test it with presumptive blood testing chemicals and it's like,
it's not blood. You can easily be fooled. That's why

(01:03:43):
you have to do the testing. You can't just conclude
based off of a visual appearance. You need to do
the testing because in this particular case, it sounds like
it's very possible this bloody elbow on the shirt that
was found in the Gordon residence is from the occupation. Yeah,
that he's involved with. It's not blood.

Speaker 1 (01:04:03):
Well, the defense is doing the best it can, of course,
they are discounting the shoe prints, the track marks, the
poor dog Paul Prince and saying, you know, there's just
a way you can't say that considering how many people
use that footbridge, that these guys first of all, that
the tracks even go to their apartment, but that these
were made that day. And the defense had said that

(01:04:26):
there were witnesses that said there were two men who
had been in the vicinity of the murder scene fifteen
minutes before the gunshots were heard. They were carrying a gun.
They claimed to be hunting and one man was shorter,
not wearing a coat even though it was cold. Now
do they ever identify these guys? No, but people said

(01:04:47):
they saw them and they didn't know who they were,
and they would have known Nicholas and the Gordon brothers.

Speaker 2 (01:04:52):
Well, if it's not the Gordon brothers, then who is
it who killed Amasa?

Speaker 1 (01:04:58):
I know? And that's I think is what's the most
confounding thing about this case. Let me tell you kind
of where we go. So after a nine day trial,
which is long for this time period, the jury announces
its verdict. William is acquitted. He was the one in
Mass with the great Alibi. Okay, John's found guilty. After

(01:05:19):
a series of denied petitions for a retrial, he is
sentenced to hang, and he does hang for this and Nicholas.
Nicholas goes on trial in October of eighteen forty four
and then again in April of forty five. So John
has hanged in between these two trials. They were both hung.
Juris you know, John didn't recant his innocence even when

(01:05:42):
he took his last rites, which would have been a
big deal. And Nicholas dies on October twenty second, he
never went to prison. There were two hung juries. He
never goes to prison. So he dies. I don't know
of what. I don't know if this was, you know,
taking his own life or natural causes or whatever. But
here's just another I mean, this family, Nicholas had debt,

(01:06:06):
and in the seventeen hundreds and the eighteen hundreds, if
you had debt and you died, your nearest family member
was responsible for that debt. And that is how a
lot of people got into trouble. I think Thomas Jefferson
had to pay off his father in law's debt and
it was terrible. So if your family member, you have
to repay that debt. And William was the one tapped

(01:06:26):
to repay Nicholas's debt and he couldn't do it, so
he went to prison and he dies in an asylum
after he was battling alcoholism, and so then they transferred
to an asylum and then he died in the asylum.

Speaker 2 (01:06:42):
Now did they ever establish a connection with the Gordon
family to Thomas door Nope. So fundamentally it's Nicholas was
done wrong by a Maasa over the business conflict, and
the whole family conspired to kill Amasa to get back
at him. That's where we're at.

Speaker 1 (01:07:03):
Yes, let me tell you kind of a further down conclusion.
So in eighteen fifty two, seven years after that happened,
the state abolished capital punishment, and there is less anti
Irish sentiment, and the people in the town and in
the state start to acknowledge there was a miscarriage of
justice in the trial. And then there is a trial

(01:07:26):
one hundred and fifty years later. There's a play called
the Murder Trial of John Gordon, and there's a state
representative of Newport who in twenty eleven sponsors resolution to
exonerate John posthumously, of course, and it's successful, so he's
officially pardoned. I'm the one brother who I don't know.

(01:07:48):
I just feel like he was screwed over by various people.
I have no idea why William didn't say that he
had hidden the brother's gun. I actually don't think that
would have made a difference. I think they would have
you figured it out either way, as you said, if
the brothers didn't do it, who did kill him.

Speaker 2 (01:08:04):
I can't say whether the Gordons were involved or not.
You know, I don't think I definitely don't think that
they had a case against the Gordons, maybe because of
the the motive that Nicholas was that business conflict with
a Masa. Yeah, I mean you could you could say motive,
but there's plenty of people, particularly with Amasa's pedigree, there's

(01:08:24):
probably plenty of people in his past that could have motive. Yeah,
you have to prove a case, and I just don't
think they've they've proven the case. And with your history
lesson if you will, with Thomas Dorr and this, uh
you know, immigrants having you know, voting rights and a
Massa being on the opposite side, you know, was this

(01:08:45):
a hit? And did the assassins get away with it?
I mean, I think that's just as reasonable a possibility
as the Gordons at this point, right.

Speaker 1 (01:08:55):
And my thought was, you know, Nicholas Gordon, he was
not Sprague wealthy. He had money from his two businesses.
But if your fifty percent of your business has just
closed down because of these asshole Spragus, when you take
that money, you know, the watch you probably wouldn't be
able to sell, but you know, thousands of dollars, a

(01:09:15):
couple thousand dollars, when you just take the money, it
would help making it look a little bit more like
a robbery. And I'll tell you, Paul, it's been floated
that Amasa's brother might have done it too, because he
was the one who had the most to gain because
he inherited everything after that.

Speaker 2 (01:09:31):
No, we see plenty of homicides that occur between family
members because of that very thing. This would be a
very easy case to solve today. You know what the
evidence left behind.

Speaker 1 (01:09:45):
That's why I started this episode like that. This is
an example of what we couldn't do in eighteen forties
and what we can do now.

Speaker 2 (01:09:53):
Well, it's interesting that as recently as twenty twenty eleven,
you know how you're getting John No kind of exonerated
if you will. Yeah. That so obviously this is a
case that kind of resonated within that community.

Speaker 1 (01:10:09):
Yes, absolutely, And I think I told you in the
case in Rhode Island, also from the sixteen hundreds, about
a son who was accused of murdering his mother to
get all of the property that was left to her,
and she died in a fire, you know, and a
lot of people, including me, believed he actually didn't do it,
that she most likely had a heart attack, and kind

(01:10:31):
of you know died with the fire around her. The
family contacted me. This is from the sixteen thirties and
they emailed me and said, we heard the podcast. We
have written two or three letters to King Charles in
England and said we believe that he was innocent. Please posthumously,

(01:10:53):
you know, exonerate him. And it hasn't happened yet, but
that was a lesson for me. And when I talk
to people about why this matters for a family for
five hundred years ago almost you know, to reach out
like that and continue to want that it's a stain
on their family and they want it removed. And so
people care about their families. It says something about who

(01:11:14):
you are and what you've become.

Speaker 2 (01:11:16):
No, I didn't realize that that had happened. That's amazing.

Speaker 1 (01:11:19):
Actually, yeah, it's amazing. I mean, I hope they get
it because I do believe it was Thomas Cornell's story,
and I do believe that he was innocent and he
got reil roaded. This is the one. I don't know
if you remember the story, but you and I didn't
go through it. But his wife saw a dog, you know,
a black dog leaped towards the woman and it wasn't
a real dog, and that was like the sign of

(01:11:41):
a poltergeist and witches, and it was a very like
fearful time. And it was also where I learned that
they would in that time period have the murder suspect
put their hands on the murder victim and it's the
victim bled, that was the victim indicating who their or was.
So that's where that's what I was dealing with the case.

Speaker 2 (01:12:04):
Oh good God, yes, I know.

Speaker 1 (01:12:07):
I'm gonna make you do one of those cases just
to see what you say. Murderers black dogs is a
bad omen and all kinds of stuff. But I hope
that everybody turned out okay, especially the dog. The dog
literally did nothing wrong, and I shocked that they would
arrest animals. But there you go, different times.

Speaker 2 (01:12:27):
All right, Well, once again, you know, this was a
fascinating case and some interesting quirky things going on in it.

Speaker 1 (01:12:35):
That's the goal. Murder mayhem, an interesting conclusion in quirky things.
That's it. Okay, I'll see you next week with more
of the same. I'm pretty sure.

Speaker 2 (01:12:45):
All right. Sounds good Cape.

Speaker 1 (01:12:50):
This has been an exactly right production for our sources
and show notes go to exactly Rightmedia dot com slash
Buried Bones sources. Our senior producer is Amrosi.

Speaker 2 (01:13:01):
Research by Alison Trumble and Kate Winkler Dawson.

Speaker 1 (01:13:04):
Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.

Speaker 2 (01:13:07):
Our theme song is by Tom Bryfogel.

Speaker 1 (01:13:09):
Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.

Speaker 2 (01:13:11):
Executive produced by Karen Kilgarriff, Georgia hard Stark, and Daniel Kramer.

Speaker 1 (01:13:16):
You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at
buried Bones pod.

Speaker 2 (01:13:21):
Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, a Gilded
Age story of murder and the race to decode the
criminal mind, is available now, and.

Speaker 1 (01:13:28):
Paul's best selling memoir Unmasked, My life solving America's Cold
Cases is also available now.

Speaker 2 (01:13:34):
Listen to Barry Bones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.