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It was just about 9:30 a.m., or maybe closer to 10. In any case, it was Jan. 22, 1875. A Friday. The newlywed was sitting in the kitchen of her two-story farmhouse, sewing in front of the stove.
Though most of her head was splattered around the room, her body remained as it was in her last moments of life: feet propped up on the stove door for warmth, and a threaded needle between her finger and thumb, held against a thimble as if in preparation for her next stitch.
“And it could have only been two people who did it,” Fred Shipman, president of the Piermont Historical Society, said in a phone interview last week.
“And we’ll never know for sure.”
The two possible culprits? “The husband, or the hired hand,” Shipman said. They were the only two people on the property, as evidenced by the footprints left in the freshly fallen snow.
But John Emerson, Alma’s husband of three months, claimed to be working in the barn, just across the road, when he heard the gunshot. And Moses Sawyer, an out-of-towner and acquaintance of the couple’s who was working for John and his family that winter, claimed to be splitting wood in the yard.
So began a murder case that captured the attention, and fed the imagination, of the Piermont community and beyond for a long time to come: The word MURDERED, inscribed on her headstone in Cedar Grove Cemetery, would make sure of that.
Though the exact circumstances of Alma Emerson’s death remain shrouded in mystery, the blind spots have spawned a number of theories over the years that took what the Town History describes as “Piermont’s one crime of violence” and spun it into stories of love, conspiracy, honor besmirched — and the cat who started it all.
Alma didn’t like the cat, you see. She and John had moved into the farmhouse, on River Road about halfway between Piermont and Haverhill villages, just a couple of months before, and already it was a nuisance who was “dirty around the house,” as the United Opinion, a Bradford, Vt.-based weekly, reported at the time.
She wanted it killed. And so, though both men claimed to be inexperienced shooters, they had loaded up the double-barrel shotgun the night before in preparation.
Sawyer and Emerson each testified that when they heard the shot, they’d thought it was the other one offing the unwanted critter. Sawyer also mentioned, somewhat off-handedly and seeming confused about the detail, that while splitting wood he “saw, or thought I saw” something out of the corner of his eye moving in the direction of the house. He thought it might be “some body,” such as Emerson, so he didn’t think anything of the bang, nor did he turn to get a better look.
But Emerson, fearing something was not right, said he hurried from the barn, passing Sawyer along the way, who was doing “nothing” at the time. He rushed into the house — the door was slightly open, he would later recall — and screamed. He couldn’t remember much after that, he said, though the men remembered his initial words: “What shall I do? What shall I do? … My wife! My wife!”
Townspeople, including neighbors who heard the gunshot and others who they rushed off to tell, started trickling into the scene. Someone brought over some local doctors. Someone helped Emerson, who witnesses said just kept screaming and running around, to a neighbor’s house.
Sawyer was arrested that night. The people of Piermont stood firmly behind Emerson: He was one of their own, someone who — as the town Selectmen wrote in a letter to the Mirror and Farmer, a Manchester weekly that closely covered the ensuing trials in February and May — “who has always lived among us.”
Meanwhile Sawyer, an outsider, was unquestionably guilty. The angry mob that gathered outside the Emersons’ house had already decided that, and was calling for his lynching.
“In 1875, they didn’t have fingerprints and forensics,” Shipman said. “They were never able to convict him,” largely because of one looming, unanswerable question: Why? What reason did he have to blow off Alma Emerson’s head?
The lack of apparent motive, Shipman said, was “Sawyer’s greatest defense.”
It was also, some might say, his only one.
Upon hearing the gunshot ring out from his neighbor’s property, John Flanders thought he’d check in to make sure everything was OK. As he approached the house he saw Emerson running toward the road, screaming “like a maniac,” and Sawyer walking toward him in a “common gait,” he testified. Sawyer told him the young woman shot herself — she must have, he said, because there was nobody else in the house at the time.
Multiple witnesses recalled Sawyer repeating this same line to them, even when it was pointed out that Alma’s hands were busy with her sewing work when she died. How would she have pulled the trigger?
And if Alma thought the cat was messy, why would she have chosen such a markedly messier way to go? Testimony from Dr. A.A. Doty, a local physician who was summoned to the scene, illustrates the sheer brutality of taking a double-barrel shotgun blast to the head. (Warning: Graphic content ahead.)
“I went into the kitchen and saw the body of Mrs. Emerson sitting in a chair about 2 feet from (the) stove facing the sink, her head with exception of a portion of the lower jaw was entirely blown off, the walls and parts of the room were besmeared with blood and brains. The left ear was lying on the floor at the back side of the room and nearly behind the body, her hair and a portion of the scalp hung over the back of the chair, one eye was also entangled in the hair; between the thumb and finger of the right hand was a threaded needle as if in the act of using, and in her left hand was her work, in her lap lay some thread and a pair of scissors, a double barrelled gun was lying upon the floor, the muzzle pointing toward the body. A little back and below the left ear there were marks of burnt powder; the shot had entered the mantel about four feet and four inches from the floor. I think the shot took effect in the head about three feet from the floor. I did not at the time make any measurements.”
It was the most exciting crime committed in recent memory, and the “Court House (was) filled to its utmost capacity,” the Mirror and Farmer reported.
Though Sawyer walked free, Shipman said, people remembered the case as a cold-blooded murder — one that ‘most everyone was dead-certain was committed by the gray-haired stranger who, for some reason, must have had it in for the newlyweds.
But why? Alma Emerson, who was 24 when she died, was described by those who knew her as a pleasant woman. Her married life with John was “very pleasant,” as he later testified. She had always spoken to people in a “pleasant” way. Her disposition was “pleasant” and her acquaintanceship with Sawyer was, both men said, always “pleasant.”
But some townspeople called into question whether these pleasantries took on a romantic meaning for Sawyer, who was about 60 years old at the time and unmarried.
“She had been awfully good to him — heating soap stones to put in his bed so his feet wouldn’t be cold, and other little kindnesses,” wrote Mrs. Frank Stetson, a friend of Alma’s family, some 50 years later in an account that appears in the Piermont Town History. “There were people who said he was in love with Alma himself.”
Perhaps she rejected him and he was humiliated, various newspapers speculated. Perhaps he was jealous at the very “pleasant” life Alma and John Emerson were building together, and how many years of pleasure they had before them.
Stetson was certain John couldn’t have committed the murder, based on how grief-stricken he was: “Poor boy, he cried and cried, and before they buried her, he kissed her hands over and over — they were all he had left to kiss. Nobody could see her; the coffin was closed at the funeral.”
But even if the townspeople were convinced of Sawyer’s guilt, Emerson never pointed a finger, a fact that Mrs. Stetson found striking: “Johnny wouldn’t say a word against that old man, and he wouldn’t say a word against Johnny,” she wrote.
She took this as evidence of Emerson’s good character. But if the love of your life was brutally murdered by someone you invited into your home, wouldn’t you want him brought to justice? Wouldn’t you want that closure, that peace of mind?
This segues into another theory, which Shipman entertained over the phone: that Alma’s death was a murder conspiracy between the two men.
“It’s very weird,” he said. “The one thing you can surmise, I suppose, is they both had a play in it. That it was done with the knowledge of the other person, and they both agreed not to say anything.” And both men left town shortly after the second time a jury failed to convict Sawyer, this time in Plymouth, N.H. instead of Haverhill, to ensure a fairer trial. Both times, according to the Town History, jurors were divided on the question of Sawyer’s guilt.
But again, the looming question: Why would they plot to kill Alma, or at least share the secret of who did it? Perhaps it’s true what Sawyer’s defense attorney tried to argue, that Emerson shot Alma by mistake; if so, is it possible that the trauma was so great that he did not remember the event properly, and that Sawyer — being the “inoffensive” man his character witnesses described him as — kept quiet?
A third theory, suggested by a writer at the Boston Globe and reported as a brief in the Mirror and Farmer, posited that neither Sawyer nor Emerson committed the murder — and that it may not have been murder at all, but instead a freak accident.
Remember the figure Sawyer saw, or thought he saw, while chopping wood? What if it was the cat Alma wanted killed, running into the house, perhaps to get out of the snow? What if Alma looked over at the cat — which had by now probably learned to regard Alma as a threat — and it reacted by scrambling over to the wall?
“It is surmised,” the Mirror and Farmer reported, that Sawyer and Emerson, who both claimed to be inexperienced shooters, loaded the gun clumsily, and leaned it haphazardly against the wall. What if the cat, in keeping its distance from Alma, flitted between the baseboard and the gun? What if the gun then tipped over — discharging as it fell?
Though this theory does require some imaginative work to become plausible, it would account for a few odd details, such as why the door was slightly open when Emerson entered, and why Dr. Doty’s measurements suggest that the gun was fired from an upward angle, from lower than 3 feet off the ground where Alma’s head was.
A far-fetched explanation? Perhaps. Perhaps they all are.
But, if this version of the story is true, it offers some practical morals: Gun safety is important. Everyone deserves a fair trial, even if the public has already convicted him. Small-town New Englanders are loyal to their own, potentially to a fault.
And, whatever you do, don’t mess with a cat.
This final, forgotten theory ran in the Mirror and Farmer as a single small paragraph, buried among farm talk and tonic ads in the faded yellowed pages of the paper, easy to miss after the dramatic, sprawling coverage the trial had received earlier that year. Perhaps the excitement had died down, or perhaps it was too late to revise the story of heartbreak and jealousy that the community had already accepted as the truth.
The cause of Alma Emerson’s death, after all, was already written in stone.
EmmaJean Holley can be reached at ejholley@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.