Wicked Salem by Sam Baltrusis

Author:Sam Baltrusis [Baltrusis, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Globe Pequot
Published: 2019-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

Richard Crowninshield

It’s arguably Salem’s crime of the century. The murder of Captain Joseph White, an eighty-two-year-old shipmaster and slave trader, riveted the nation in 1830 and inspired literary giants like Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The crime scene, a three-story brick mansion built in 1804 and located at 128 Essex Street, is believed to boast a residual haunting, a psychic imprint of sorts replaying the savage murder of White, who was whacked over the head with a twenty-two-inch piece of refurbished hickory, also known as an “Indian club,” and stabbed thirteen times near his heart. According to several reports, a full-bodied apparition peeks out of the second-floor window. A female spirit rumored to be White’s niece, Mary Beckford, who served as his housekeeper in addition to being his next of kin, is also said to haunt the Essex Street house. Beckford’s daughter, also a Mary, was formerly part of the household in the 1820s but moved to Wenham with her husband, Joseph Jenkins Knapp Jr.

As far as the murder, it’s a complicated puzzle that has been twisted over the years. Captain White’s grand-nephew, Joseph Knapp, learned that the retired merchant had just completed his will, leaving $15,000 to Mrs. Beckford. Knapp believed if White died without a will, his mother-in-law would inherit half his fortune of $200,000. So, Knapp and his brother John hired a black sheep from the respected Crowninshield family, Richard, to slay the captain in his sleep for a mere $1,000. Knapp had access to White’s Essex Street home, and in April 1830 he stole the will and left the back parlor window unlocked. Beckford and her daughter Mary were staying in Wenham.

Richard Crowninshield slipped into the mansion at night and “entering the house, stealthily threaded the staircase, softly opened the chamber door of the sleeping old man.” He killed him with a single blow to the left temple, according to an account in the April 1830 edition of the Salem Observer.

Crowninshield hid the murder weapons under the steps at the former Howard Street meetinghouse. The bludgeon, a hickory-stick club, was “fashioned to inflict a deadly blow with the least danger of breaking the skin. The handle was contrived as to yield a firm grasp to the hand.”

As far as the crime scene, White was in his bedchamber lying diagonally across the bed on his right side. Blood strangely didn’t ooze from the thirteen stab wounds because he died from the bludgeon, and no valuables in the house were missing. Because there was no theft, police detectives were baffled at first. The Knapp brothers falsely claimed they had been robbed by three men en route to Wenham, which added some initial confusion to the murder mystery.

A gang of assassins in Salem? Yes, there were three, but it was the Knapp brothers and murder-for-hire crony Richard Crowninshield, who later hanged himself with a handkerchief tied to the bars of his prison cell before he was convicted. The Knapp brothers were then put on trial after the prison suicide.

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