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Extractions from “The Prostitute and the Somnambulist”
Albert Jackson Tirrell – trials for murder, arson and adultery
Cousins Marjorie and Chet Oberlander sent me three
more booklets regarding another black sheep in the Tirrell family of
Weymouth. I’ve extracted materials from the 100+ pages of
the primary book to present a broad overview of the events surrounding
the charges of adultery, arson and murder against Albert Jackson
Tirrell (1824 –1880.) The extracts are from
many pages and are not meant to create a cohesive storyline but rather
an overview of the major events surrounding Albert Tirrell.
Albert was the son of Leonard and Abigail (Nabby) Thayer Tirrell and
was born and died in Weymouth. He married Orient Humphrey
Tirrell, the daughter of Noah and Susan Holbrook Tirrell.
The book describes Albert as a rounder who was often unfaithful to his
wife and one who squandered his monies in revelries associated with his
aberrant actions. His defense against the murder of his mistress,
Mrs. Maria Bickford was that he killed her in his sleep and was a known
sleepwalker (somnambulist). He escaped the murder and arson
charges, but did receive a three-year sentence for adultery. He
was wanted for adultery before the murder took place and frequently
moved with his mistress using false names when renting.
Mrs. Bickford is reported to have been a lady who had loose morals and
did not object to the use of sex to obtain material gifts and their
apparent status. Although still married to her husband, she had
other lovers in addition to Albert Tirrell. Some of her letters
to friends detailing her activities are part of the information in the
booklets. After his trial for murder and subsequent prison
term for adultery, Albert moved in to his father-in-law’s home
where his wife and two daughters were living. They quickly
conceived yet another daughter. His wife died before he did and
his daughters never married. The daughters lived lives of poverty
and survived due to the kindness of others and by working in various
domestic and related jobs.
The Extracts
The legal troubles of Albert Tirrell were first reported by the Boston
press in a mildly satirical squib appearing on Monday, September 29,
1845, in the Daily Evening Transcript. The brief story, entitled "A
Love Affair." contained the report of one Colonel Hatch, a
correspondent to the Boston newspapers. Concerning the arrest in New
Bedford the previous Saturday of an unnamed "young blood" accused of
"some indelicacies with a young woman.' According to Hatch's
report, the young man had been armed with a six-barreled pistol and a
dirk and had only been apprehended after "a hard chase of about a
mile." The report concluded by noting that the suspect was to be
brought to Boston that Monday to stand trial. The trivial scoop was
promptly picked up by two of Boston's most widely circulated penny
newspapers, the Daily Times and Daily Mail whose editors were always on
the lookout for engaging filler to pad their spacious sheets.
The following day the Boston Post's regular Municipal Court column
offered a more detailed account of the arrest in New Bedford,
identifying the captured man as "Albert J. Tirrell, gentleman, of
Weymouth." According to the Post, Tirrell had been indicted the
previous May for an adultery allegedly committed in Suffolk County He
had eluded arrest at the time and had remained at large until his
dramatic flight and apprehension by the New Bedford officers. His
unnamed paramour, reportedly present with him at a house in New
Bedford. had successfully fled in another direction. Following his
arrest and transfer to Boston, Tirrell was formally arraigned on the
adultery charge and committed to jail pending trial at the next term of
the Municipal Court.
As it turned out, Tirrell did not have to spend much time in jail,
posting bail on October 2. About a week later, a number of his friends
and relatives, including his young wife, wrote letters to Samuel D.
Parker, the county prosecutor, requesting a stay of proceedings on
the adultery indictment in the hope that Tirrell might be reformed.
Parker presented those letters to the judges of the Municipal Court,
who agreed to suspend prosecution for six months, with Tirrell paying
court costs and posting bond as a guarantee of his good behavior. On
October 21 Tirrell came to court, paid costs, and posted bond. Then, in
defiance of the terms of his recognizance, he went off to meet his
paramour, joining her the following day at a disreputable lodging house
on Cedar Lane, near the western end of Beacon Hill.
Less than a week later, at nine o'clock on the morning of Monday,
October 27. the second edition of the Daily Mail reported the initial
details of a gruesome case of murder and attempted arson. It seemed
that a woman named Bickford had been killed several hours earlier at a
house on Cedar Lane: the victim's throat had been "cut nearly from ear
to ear." and her bed had been set on fire. Later that same day, at two
o'clock in the afternoon, the Mail produced an "extra" edition
providing more sensational details on the fast-breaking case. The
disreputable dwelling where the mutilated body was discovered had long
been occupied by one Joel Lawrence and his wife, who had used it in
recent years as a "house of assignation." The victim was
identified as Maria A. Bickford, a young married woman from Maine.
separated from her husband for some time. According to the Mail, she
had been a woman of "slight, graceful figure, and very beautiful.
At about five o'clock that morning, Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence and another
young woman living in the house had heard a shriek upstairs, followed
by a heavy thud; immediately afterward, someone had stumbled down the
stairs and rushed out the door of the building. Bickford's body was
discovered in an upstairs room shortly thereafter. The dead woman's
jugular vein and windpipe had been completely severed, her hair
had been partly consumed by fire, and her face bad been "charred and
blackened" by flames. A number of fires had been set in the room where
the body was discovered, the walls of the room were splattered with
blood, a nearby washbowl contained a quantity of bloody water, and a
bloodstained razor was found at the foot of her bed. Some articles of
mews clothing were found in the room. along with a letter initialed A.
J. T to M. A. B. According to the Mail reporter, the murder had almost
certainly been committed by Albert J. Tirrell.
Additional details provided by the Boston press over the
following several days only strengthened that inference; a number of
particularly damaging facts emerged at the official inquest, held the
day after Bickford's death. The proceedings were closely covered by
local newspapers, a few of which provided nearly verbatim
transcripts. Nine witnesses testified before the coroner's jury,
including Joel Lawrence, his wife, his teenage son and Priscilla Blood
a young woman living with the family. According to those members of the
Lawrence household. Maria Bickford had come to stay with them nine or
ten days before and had frequently been visited there by Tirrell, who
stayed overnight on at least one or two occasions. On the afternoon
before the murder, Priscilla Blood heard the couple exchange angry
words shortly afterward. Bickford explained to Blood that she liked to
quarrel with Tirrell because "they. had such a good time making
up.”
Tirrell left the house early that evening but was back in his
paramour's bedroom within a couple of hours: at about nine o'clock, as
the Lawrence family was preparing to retire for the night, Bickford
came to Priscilla Blood's room and asked her for some water for Albert.
That was the last anyone saw or heard of the couple until early the
next morning, when the Lawrence household was roused by a commotion
upstairs, followed by billows of smoke and fire. At about five-thirty
that morning, a young man matching Tirrell's description came to a
nearby stable and requested a horse to carry him 10 Weymouth. Tirrell's
hometown, explaining that "he had got into a little difficulty and
wanted to go to his wife's father." During the course of the inquest, a
number of witnesses identified a vest and a cane subsequently found at
the scene of the crime as belonging to Tirrell. On the basis of that
web of purely circumstantial evidence, the coroner's jury concluded
that Bickford had been murdered by her paramour, Albert J. Tirrell.
As the newspapers printed a succession of false rumors concerning
Tirrell's whereabouts over the following weeks, they also began
examining the life and character of his alleged victim. While all
seemed to agree that Maria Bickford had been young, beautiful, and
fallen, competing accounts offered very different versions of tier life
and suggested widely varying degrees of sympathy. One early and largely
inaccurate account in the Daily Mail of October 31 claimed that Maria
was an "unsophisticated girl" who had been lured into adultery shortly
after her marriage by a depraved companion. Although her conduct and
character had deteriorated thereafter, she had managed to pause before
the brink of "utter degradation and ruin" and was about to be reclaimed
by an old lover--who planned to elope with her to western New York--at
the time of her death. Bickford had allegedly told an acquaintance that
"she was tired of the way she had been living, and was resolved that
her future life should atone for her past follies."
The narrative continued with a poignant description of various article
found in the dead woman s room, including several rings and trinkets
worn by her on the day before her death, a collection of perfumes and
cosmetics neatly arranged on the mantelpiece, a bundle of letters
containing an endearing epistle from her mother, a number of
gilt-framed prints, and a daguerreotype of Bickford herself in which
she appeared "uncommonly lovely and innocent.'' That inventory, of
genteel feminine possessions was clearly designed to arouse sympathy
for the fallen woman. The reporter finally speculated on Maria's
thoughts during the hours before her sudden death· "Who knows
the joys, the promised hope, that revealed itself for future life'?" he
asked rhetorically. "She was the victim of jealousy and revenge,
and he who committed the bloody act, cannot go unpunished.''
An anonymous poem that appeared on November 10 in the Boston Post
· offered a similarly sympathetic view of Maria Bickford as a
"sentimental victim·" It began by describing the fallen woman
asleep in bed dreaming of her long lost days of childhood innocence, as
a sexual predator prepared t0 cut her throat with "cold, cold hands and
ruthless steel." While acknowledging Maria's faults, the poet
attributed far greater depravity to her killer.
Early on the morning of October 27, Albert Tirrell had fled from the
burning house on Cedar Lane and gone to a nearby stable to hire a horse
and wagon. He drove to the house of some relatives in Weymouth who
concealed him from pursuing officers for the next day or so and
provided him with money to escape from Massachusetts. The following day
be headed west with his brother-in-law and then continued north on his
own probably through the state of Vermont into Canada. On November 8,
he wrote his family from Montreal, announcing that he was to sail that
day for Liverpool. But the vessel was forced to turn back by bad
weather, and later that month he boarded a ship in New York City bound
for New Orleans. After receiving a tip that the fugitive was headed
their way, authorities in Louisiana arrested Tirrell on board a vessel
in the Gulf on December 5.
Meanwhile. Bostonians were outraged by the seemingly successful flight
of a suspected murderer. Although Samuel Parker, the prosecuting
attorney for Suffolk County, had quickly engaged a number of officers
to pursue the suspect, other branches of the local government responded
more slowly. The mayor, near death from illness, apparently did
nothing, and the city council waited several days before offering a
reward of one thousand dollars for the apprehension of Tirrell. The
Daily Times noted widespread public complaints over the sluggish
official response and blasted the city government as "essentially
and thoroughly imbecile. During November and early December. Boston
newspapers occasionally reported rumored sightings or arrests of
Tirrell; some of those stories seemed to presuppose the guilt--and even
the eventual execution--of the absconded suspect.
On December 20 news of Tirrell's arrest in New Orleans reached
Massachusetts and was widely reported in the Boston press. On
December 24 the Daily Times indicated that the governor had dispatched
two officers to Louisiana to retrieve the suspect. Less than a
week later, it reported that the witnesses against Tirrell had
been called by the Supreme Judicial Court to arrange for their
appearance at a future trial. In mid-January Boston papers reprinted a
letter from Tirrell to the New Orleans Picayune in which he asserted
his innocence, complained Of his unfair treatment in the press, and
denied earlier reports that he had attempted suicide. On February 5 the
Times announced that Tirrell had safely arrived in Boston and been
placed in the Leverett Street jail. The following day hundreds of
Bostonians flocked to the Police Court--mistakenly believing that
Tirrell was to be examined there--in hopes of catching a glimpse of the
suspected murderer, who had already become something of a celebrity.
On February 7 the Daily Times cited unconfirmed reports that Daniel
Beginning on the Monday following the verdict--and for weeks
afterward--the trial of Albert Tirrell was the subject of intense
editorial scrutiny both in Boston and throughout the country. Responses
ranged from forthright endorsements of the acquittal to outright
condemnations. When the respectable Evening Transcript, edited by
Cornelia W. Walter, launched an editorial campaign against the verdict,
the boisterous Daily Times countered with its own sustained defense of
the outcome, assailing the Transcript's crusade as "NEWSPAPER TWATTLE
AND OLD WOMANISM." Although sexual issues were not at all
prominent in the substance of the post trial debate, that choice of
epithets--along with Waiter's status as the only female newspaper
editor in the city--suggests that at least some of the men and women of
Boston may have been responding to the case along gender lines.
Several of Boston's other newspapers seem to have adopted a
conciliatory middle course, expressing some discomfort with
aspects of the trial--especially the outcome--without actually
condemning the local tribunal. Although newspapers throughout the
country also adopted various views on the case, most seem to have
ridiculed the defense of somnambulism and deplored the verdict.
While editors fussed and fulminated in print, other Americans responded
to the verdict in a variety of ways, with somnambulism suddenly
emerging as the defense of choice for petty criminals from Boston to
Baltimore.
Meanwhile, as the public furor swirled around him, Albert J. Tirrell
remained in a Boston jail, awaiting trial on the pending charges
of adultery and arson. On Monday, May 18, Tirrell was arraigned in
Boston Municipal Court on the morals charges, pleading nolo contendere
to two counts against him and not guilty to three others. Sentencing
was delayed until the next court term, and Samuel Parker agreed not to
prosecute Tirrell on the three additional counts. In failing to
contest the two counts of adultery and lascivious habitation, Tirrell
made himself liable to a term of six years in the state prison. About a
month after his arraignment on the adultery charges, on June 16,
Tirrell was brought before the Supreme Judicial Court on the capital
charge of arson. However, the proceedings were delayed until a
subsequent term because of the illness of a key defense witness.
Although the judicial proceedings had been delayed, the case of Maria
Bickford and Albert Tirrell continued to be addressed in print. On
April 12. 1846, just a couple of weeks after the conclusion of
Tirrell's first trial. James Bickford handed his late wife's
correspondence over to a friend who would arrange its publication. He
also provided the friend with biographical information about Mrs.
Bickford, explaining that he wanted the material made public in order
to refute other fictitious accounts, probably the pamphlets of Silas
Estabrook.
(Note: The murder and trial elicited a large following by
the citizens and newspapers of Boston and Massachusetts. It was
so popular that some individuals wrote their own dramatized storyline
in booklet format for sale to the general populace.
…. LD)
Choate's (Tirrell’s attorney) closing speech, delivered on the
seventh day of the trial, largely recapitulated his argument in the
either case; if anything, it was even more melodramatic. Once again he
conveyed sympathetic images of his client, disparaged the characters'
of opposing witnesses, and offered hypothetical reconstructions of
disputed events. His characterization of Bickford and his description
of Tirrell's feelings for her were particularly powerful and evocative.
The deceased was a Iow prostitute. Choate insisted. "a woman of dirks
and knives, like a Spanish girl, coarse, strong and masculine," who had
repeatedly attempted suicide; and vet the prisoner had "loved her
with the love of forty thousand brothers." To Choate, it all seemed so
obvious! "How much more likely that she should have taken her own
life," he explained. "than that he should have deliberately murdered
her."
After resurrecting the old suicide defense--which was not strictly
relevant, since the current charge was arson, not murder--Choate
went on to savage the credibility of the new witness for the
prosecution. Caroline L. Warren. He contended that her testimony should
be completely disregarded by the jury. "A more base and more lying
wretch never existed" he insisted; a more coarse and reckless
prostitute never lived." How did he know? Surely it was proved by her
"flippI7922ant and saucy expression, by her brazen countenance and
every shade of her prostitute manner." Choate was hardly more
gentle in his treatment of the Lawrence’s, conceding only that
they probably had not murdered Bickford themselves. In addition
to exhibiting his undiminished talent for character assassination, the
romantic advocate demonstrated his masterful ability to sketch an
imaginative scene:
We will thus state the case: Albert J. Tirrell, if he was there [in
Bickford's room], was awakened from the insanity of sleep by the warm
blood of the desperate suicide: half-awaking he sees the object of his
licentious affection or love gasping by his side--he springs from the
bed--takes the body in his arms and lays a upon the floor--stoops over
her and presses upon her lips the last kiss of love and affection and
then crazed, half-sleeping and half-waking, seizes his clothes, rushes
out into the yard and cried.
The lawyer's scene was dramatic, compelling, and essentially irrelevant
to the charge of arson: as for the last kiss. It was a touch of pure
genius, worthy of the pen of Ormond Bradbury. After entering
"heart and soul into the case" and haranguing the jurors for five and a
half or six hours. Choate finally subsided, leaving the floor to his
older opponent.
When Samuel Parker rose to offer his own closing speech, he could
hardly contain his frustration. He pleaded with the jurors to "take a
calm and common sense view of the cause" and begged them to be
"guided and governed by the plain truth, divested of all metaphor or
rhetorical flourish." He also "trusted that they would estimate the
arguments by their weight, and not by the vehemence with which they
were urged." In trying to disenthrall the jurors, his scorn for
Choate's theatrical tactics was obvious. "And may I not beg you to
consider carefully what I say," he asked the jurors, "Although I resort
to no violence of gesture or tone, and do not advance up to you and
scream in your faces what I consider important parts of the case?''
After ridiculing Choate's courtroom manner, Parker proceeded to build
his usual methodical argument on a series of numbered questions:
Ist. Was the house mentioned in the indictment, on fire on the 27th of October 1845?
2d. Was it Joel Lawrence's house, and was his family in it at the time?
3d. Was the fire accidental or designed?
4th. Did the prisoner maliciously and willfully set it on fire?
5th. Was it in the night time or day time?
6th. If the prisoner did it, was he then and there an accountable and moral agent'?
It was all quite logical and all completely futile. The following day,
after a balanced three-hour charge by Chief Justice Shaw, the jurors
deliberated for another few hours and returned with a verdict of not
guilty. As after the first trial, upon hearing the decision the usually
cool prisoner reportedly burst into tears.
Just two days after his acquittal on the capital charge of arson.
Albert Tirrell was brought into Boston's Municipal Court for sentencing
on the charges of adultery and lascivious cohabitation to which he had
earlier pleaded nolo contendere. At the hearing Amos B. Merrill,
Tirrell's lawyer, asked for a postponement of sentencing and a
reductioI7922n in bail to allow his client an Opportunity to visit friends
and put his business affairs in order. In making that request, he
adopted tactics similar to those used in the capital trials: "The
eloquent counsel was going on to paint the arts and witchery by which
his Unfortunate client had been seduced into adulterous connection with
Mrs. Bickford." But the judge abruptly interrupted Merrill's argument,
refused the motion for a postponement, and announced that sentencing
would take place at two o'clock that afternoon.
When the hearing reconvened, Merrill tried to
retract Tirrell’s earlier plea and obtain a full trial on the
adultery charges, but the magistrate again rejected his motion.
Merrill then attempted to have the sentence reduced to a fine. Although
the judge rejected that idea as well, he did suggest that the two
counts be merged into one, so as to effectively halve the prison
sentence. The county attorney, Samuel D. Parker, who had vigorously
opposed the earlier attempts at mitigation, agreed to the judge's
suggestion. And so Tirrell was sentenced to three years at hard
labor in the state prison. Although apparently disappointed by the
outcome, he received his sentence calmly. As he was taken out to the
carriage, he was followed by a "general rush oft' the spectators''
eager for a last took at the guilty man. Near the end of the following
month, the Daily Times completed its coverage of the affair with a
brief and anticlimactic squib: "It is said that Tirrell is put to work
in the copper plate engraving in prison--a very good and pleasant
business. That same day, the traveling wax museum on Washington
Street finally closed its doors.
Despite two appeals for pardons to the governor. Albert Tirrell was
forced to serve out the full three years of his sentence for adultery'.
His release, at the end of January 1850, sparked a renewed flurry of
notices in the Boston press. Albert promptly returned by train to
his hometown of Weymouth, where he took up what must initially have
been an uncomfortable residence with his wife Orient and two young
daughters in his father-in-law's house. Despite past infidelity,
Tirrell wasted little time in reasserting his conjugal rights: Orient
became pregnant within a few weeks of his return. In November 1850 she
gave birth to their third daughter. Perhaps in a symbolic attempt to
patch up their frayed marriage, the little girl was named after both
parents: Orient Albertine Tirrell.
Aside from a stint in the Union army during the
Civil War, Albert seems to have stayed in Weymouth for the rest of his
life, as did his wife and three daughters. One somehow doubts that they
were a happy family: they certainly were not a prosperous one. In the
census of 1850, taken shortly after his release from prison, Albert was
listed as a "shoe manufacturer." Shoemaking was the dominant industry
in Weymouth, introduced to the town early in the nineteenth century by
a member of the large Tirrell family. Albert's own father had also
prospered in that line of business, as would his older brother. Yet
unlike his father, brother, and many other Weymouth Tirrell’s,
Albert did not manage to secure great wealth through shoes or even
maintain a foothold in that thriving and rapidly expanding industry'.
His employment listings in the state and federal censuses suggest a
record of gradual decline. In 1850 Tirrell was described as a "shoe
manufacturer," in 1855 as a "speculator," in 1865 as a "trader," in
1870 as a "huckster," and finally in 1880, just a few months before his
death of a brain hemorrhage, as "unemployed."
As it turned out, Albert was much less efficient in accumulating money
than he had been in squandering it. According to the federal censuses
of 1860 and I870. Tirrell owned no real estate and only one hundred
dollars in personal wealth. It was the same amount of money that
he had once lavished on a single gaudy dress for Maria Bickford, the
sort of estate one might have expected of a factory worker just
starting out in life, not of the middle-aged son of a wealthy
manufacturer. At times economic distress must have even forced the
family apart. In 1860 Albert's three daughters, aged nine, fifteen, and
seventeen, were all living in the home of a neighbor, while two boys of
similar ages and an elderly woman were living with Albert and Orient.
That was a curious arrangement, possibly designed to generate family
income by putting the daughters out as household servants and taking in
paying boarders. But perhaps it also reflected some underlying tension
or discomfort within the family circle. In any case, none of Tirrell's
daughters were sufficiently impressed by the delights of matrimony ever
to try it for themselves. Or maybe nobody was willing to marry the
daughter of an impecunious huckster and presumed murderer.
For whatever reason, the three daughters of Albert
Tirrell remained single and largely dependent, living out their years
in Weymouth, shuttling occasionally between the homes of parents,
neighbors, and relatives. The eldest, Catherine Augusta, was the last
to die. The Weymouth Gazette reported her passing in August 1917 with a
brief notice: "Miss Kate Tirrell died at the Town Home on Monday. She
was 74 years old a daughter of the late Albert J. Tirrell. She was born
and always lived in this town. There is no way of knowing
whether, during her last years of obscure poverty, Miss Tirrell had any
recollection of her experience in a crowded Boston courtroom more than
seventy years earlier· Did she remember how "a beautiful little
girl, just three years old, had caused such a stir simply by walking
into the chamber clasping her mother's hand'? Did she recall standing
bareheaded on her mamma's lap, flitting her gaze over the assembled
multitude, and beaming at her handsome father in the dock? And did she
retain any memory whatsoever of the uncouth and flamboyant man who had
saved her father's life? Any hope of answering those questions died
with Albert's eldest daughter.
If you need more detailed events on the actions and trial of Albert
Tirrell, please contact Lee Drew or Marjorie and Chet Oberlander.
The Oberlanders do not have e-mail access at the time of this writing
but I can forward their address to you if you want to correspond with
them.
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