Skip to content

Tag Archives: Execution

Places and Events: Old Jails in Maine

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

I had to duck my head as I passed through the low doorway that led into the dungeon of the Old Gaol in York, ME. The sole electric lamp trying to replicate what the lighting would have been like in the jail cell in the 1700s and the musty smell resulting from a lack of […]

Filed in Places and Events | Also tagged , , , , | Comments (1)

Early American Criminals: The Cuckolded Soldier

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Around 1764 or 1765, Bryan Sheehen returned home to his wife in Casco Bay, ME after serving in the regular army for a long six and a half years. But the joy of his homecoming turned into rage when he learned that his wife had remarried during his absence to a Frenchman. Sheehen made preparations […]

Filed in Criminals | Also tagged , , , , , | Comments (3)

Early American Criminals: “The Wicked Flee When None Pursue”

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

The final chapter in the fall of John Ormsby began when he stabbed a man in the chest with a fork in Boston in 1734. In his Last SPEECH and Dying WORDS, Ormsby says that he was hanging around a friend’s shop when some of the boys who worked there persuaded him that a customer […]

Filed in Criminals | Also tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Early American Criminals: Joseph Quasson’s Repentance

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

When Native American, Joseph Quasson, learned that he would spend eight or nine months in prison before he could face trial for murder, he secretly believed that he could properly repent in a quarter of the time. After all, he had once regularly attended church when he was young. But as the time for his […]

Filed in Criminals | Also tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Crime Poems: Philip Kennison’s Prison Writings

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

When Thomas Fleet, publisher of the Boston Evening-Post learned in 1738 that Philip Kennison was going to be executed in Cambridge, MA for burglary, he sensed a business opportunity. While Kennison waited in prison for his sentence to be carried out, he spent a good deal of time writing “a Narrative of his Wicked Life,” […]

Filed in Poems | Also tagged , , , | Comments (3)