Mary Stannard and the Rev. Mr. Hayden

The Longest and Most Famous Murder Trial in the History of Connecticut

EDMUND PEARSON

THE place is a lonely pasture in the village of Rockland, near Madison, Connecticut; the time, late in a pleasant afternoon of September. Through the grass and blueberry bushes comes a rather tattered, stupid-looking man, a farmer named Stannard. He peers into the thickets, looks behind trees and rocks, and now and then shouts the name of his daughter:

"Mary! Mary! Where be you, Mary?"

This is the final anxiety which his daughter has brought upon him: to wander from home, and get lost. Stannard is wretchedly poor, and it cannot be said that his children have been of much comfort to him. Mary is what some of her neighbours probably call a fallen woman; although only twenty-two, she is the mother of an unwanted and unauthorized child, three years old. This fact has been more or less forgiven, however, and she has been working in another village for about a year. Lately she has come back to her father's house, and there are rumours that again she has ceased to "go straight". Stannard knows nothing of this, and has not asked. She went away into the pasture early this afternoon, on some mysterious errand, and her absence has caused her family to worry.

There was, at this period (it was the late seventies) a poem in great repute with ladies who gave recitations in public: a deep purple, passionate poem, called Ostler Joe. It told about some siren or other who "lured men's souls to the shores of sin, by the light of her wanton eyes". I do not know if Mary Stannard was guilty of any such misconduct as this, but I think it unlikely. If she was a temptress, some one has more than evened the debt with her. Toward sunset her father discovers this. At a place called the Whippoorwill Rock he finds her at last: her body is lying composed, her clothing tidy and in order, although her straw sun-bonnet, placed nearby, is stained with blood. Her arms are folded over her breast. And with the usual strangely ironical result of such an event, the name of Mary Stannard, known at this moment only to a few people, in one or two villages, is to become familiar throughout the country, and her death is to agitate dozens of learned men for more than two years to come.

ONE of these learned men is a brilliant young teacher at Yale—Professor Edward S. Dana—and he, over a year after that September afternoon, is standing in a Court at New Haven, day after day, discussing, and trying to make clear to a jury, "the microscopic measurements of arsenical octohedrons."

"This is a queer business, and one apparentlv far removed from Stannard and his dead daughter in the blueberry pasture. But it appears that Mary had talked on the days before her death, to her sister, and to others. Again, so she thought, she had cause to fear for her reputation, and she blamed no less a person than the Methodist minister of Madison, the Rev. Mr. Hayden. It was to meet him—so ran the talk that she went to Whippoorwill Rock, and there he was to give her some "quick medicine".

Mr. Hayden was a young country parson, very poor, married and with two children; a fiery preacher at camp-meetings. At one time Mary had been a servant in his house. The report of her accusations against him, together with the fact that his occupations were not wholly accounted for on that afternoon, caused him to be put under arrest. While he was in jail it developed that in addition to the knife-wounds and a fractured skull which had caused the girl's death, she also had fifty grains of arsenic in her stomach. Whoever had killed her believed in being thorough. Now, Mr. Hayden had bought arsenic on the day of her death,—but, so he said, for the ancient and familiar purpose of "killing rats". During the hearing in the magistrate's court, a friend of the minister went to his barn, and there, although others had searched the place, found the full ounce of arsenic, the amount he was shown to have bought. Whereupon, for that and for other reasons which seemed sufficient, the magistrate (a good Methodist, it was remarked) spoke and said:

"If I was sure as of Heaven as I am that Mr. Hayden is guiltless, I should rest content. Mr. Sheriff, release the prisoner."

Other law officers, however, were not sure of anything whatever about the case. They suggested that Mr. Hayden's packet of rat poison (to be known henceforth as the "barn arsenic") had been planted there by his well-wishers, and that it was not at all the arsenic administered, ostensibly as medicine, to Mary Stannard. The minister was arrested again, and this time stayed in jail all winter, while Professor Dana was looking through his microscope at samples of the "barn arsenic", the "stomach arsenic" and numerous other varieties. Nobody in this country, it appeared, knew very much about this common poison, and in the summer Professor Dana went to England to visit the factories where it was produced. When he returned he knew a tremendous deal about arsenic,—enough to give him material for four days of the most curiously minute expert evidence which had ever been offered in an American court of law.

Briefly, it was this. Arsenic condenses in eight-sided crystals, and is afterwards ground under a roller. Some of the crystals are so small that they remain unbroken. The number of them so remaining, the shape and size of the broken particles, and other aspects of them, vary in arsenic coming from different sources. By microscopic examination it was possible to say that the "barn arsenic" was different from some bought at the same time and from the same druggist of whom Mr. Hayden said he procured his arsenic for the destruction of rats. Some arsenic from another shop in that town was identical with that which had been given to Mary Stannard.

THIS did not prove the minister's guilt, but to those who followed the Professor's careful demonstration, and looked at his fascinating little pictures of eight-sided crystals, it tended to show that Mr. Hayden had lied about the source of the arsenic found in his barn. It also served to strengthen the State's contention that the latter had been bought to replace poison which was used to further some felonious plans.

It was the theory of the prosecution that Mary had become suspicious or violent after swallowing the poison given her under the pretense that it was an abortifacient, and that her assailant then struck her upon the head with a rock, and finally cut her throat. A pocketknife of Mr. Hayden's was produced, and day after day was devoted to argument in proof and disproof that it bore traces of human blood. The measurement of corpuscles was considered at tragic length.

A gentleman who, as a young law student, heard Professor Dana give his testimony on these four days in October, forty-seven years ago, tells me that it was an excellent example of scientific reasoning, extraordinarily precise and convincing. The young professor's testimony marked the highest point in the case for the State of Connecticut.

October changes to November, and that month (in a very regular custom of its own) into December, and still the trial goes on. Every day, folk all over the country look at their papers to sec what is happening at New Haven, and New Yorkers turn each morning to the third page of The Sun to read Amos Cumming's two columns upon "The Great Hayden Trial". One day they read, on the front page, of the arrival in New York of two makers of light opera, Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan, and a few weeks later there is a column about the opening night of The Pirates of Penzance.

On a day in December, just before the prisoner goes on the witness stand in his own behalf, his lawyers play their best card: Mrs. Hayden gives her testimony. Every day she has been in Court, serious, devoted, grief-stricken to tears, and usually carrying a bouquet of flowers from her admirers, or from her husband's friends. Now she stands in statuesque pose, her hand raised to take the oath: a handsome and noble looking woman, gowned in black. She wins the Court by her apparent truthfulness. She alone, of all living persons, had some opportunity to know what her husband was doing in the crucial hours of that afternoon, from one to four, when the murder was committed. He was, so he says, in the wood-lot, piling a very small amount of wood in a very long period of time. He was, so the prosecutors aver, the unidentified man whom another witness saw going toward Whippoorwill Rock. The village is so small that it is possible for the State to show what every other inhabitant was doing that afternoon.

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Mrs. Hayden's testimony does not prove a complete alibi for her husband ; perhaps it is the more convincing for that reason. But it does corroborate his story at many of the points. When the cross-examiner attempts to ask her if she would tell the truth against her beloved husband, even if the truth should destroy him, the question is excluded by the Court, and Mrs. Hayden is excused from the witness stand.

The 1870's vanish on the night The Pirates of Penzance is first sung—and the eighties come in, and the Hayden trial is soon in its third month. The long suffering jury has listened to one hundred and seventy-six witnesses. There were twelve professors, eight of them from Yale, who talked about arsenical octohedrons, and about the corpuscles in the blood of goats, pigs, dogs, rabbits and men. Some of them supported Professor Dana, while others contradicted him. There were witnesses both for and against the theory of Mr. Hayden's undue intimacy with Mary Stannard. There was Mr. Hayden himself, who made a good impression as a witness.

On a Friday afternoon in the middle of January, the jury goes out to consider their verdict. They have heard a charge from the Court, which Mr. Hayden's friends and counsellors indignantly describe as an argument for the prosecution. The spectators in the court room remain to hear the result. Monday has come; the jurymen have not gone home, as they had hoped, for the Sabbath. Let us look into the jury-room.

It is a queer sight. The floor is ankle-deep with wood-shavings, for these twelve Connecticut Yankees live at a period before the old American custom of whittling has gone out. Nearly every one of them has a jackknife, and as there is a fire in the room, (it is cold mid-winter weather outdoors) there are plenty of sticks to whittle. So, as they talk, and argue, and chew tobacco or smoke pipes, as they ballot and ballot again and again, and finally rage and roar at the obstinate juror, they dissect these sticks of wood into long, sweet-smelling strips of soft pine, until the carpet disappears and the jurors wade in shavings.

Some of them are toasting their stockinged feet before the fire; sonic are asleep on the benches; a few of them ceaselessly walk, like panthers, round and round the table. Others play tic-tac-toe, or discuss the political situation in Maine, which happens to be exciting at this moment. One or two take turns in shaking their fists and shouting at the obstinate juror.

This person is named David B. Hotchkiss, a brown-haired farmer of thirty years. He is of middle height, he has a thin face, his complexion is tallowy, and, like Mr. Hayden, lie has adorned his chin with a scragglv goatee. He has ill-fitting clothes and old-fashioned spectacles: I fancy the lenses are rectangular, and that they have brass rims. Altogether Hotchkiss is a comic figure, and an object of loathing to the other eleven men. On Friday afternoon he "hunched up" on a chair in one corner of the room, and "fended himself with both hands" when the others approached. He makes his few remarks in a squeak, and his favorite utterance is "No! No! No!"

lie wishes—most uncharitably, think the others—to see the Rev. Mr. Hayden in prison for life. For one day and a night, with two or three others to support him, he held out for a verdict which would have sent the clergyman to the gallows.

On only one matter were they all agreed. With the sound common-sense of the American farmer (or the base stupidity of yokels, if you prefer) they had thrown the expert testimony overboard at the start. All of Professor Dana's travels among the arsenic works of England, all of his days and nights with his microscope, all of his learned testimony, as well as that of the other professors and doctors, were a total waste of time so far as these twelve citizens were concerned. The sole point which interested them was this: was Mrs. Hayden to be believed?

"Yes", said eight of them. "No", said Hotchkiss, and three others. But the three dwindled to two and then to one, and finally the ridiculous looking Hotchkiss was left alone, squeaking out his defiance, and sticking to his guns.

On Monday they file into Court, cross and dishevelled. They cannot agree, and they are discharged. And ten days later the Rev. Mr. Hayden is released on bond; ruined, but free to go back to his wife, who has saved him. She was a woman of noble appearance, and apparent honesty. The eleven jurymen would put no trust in expert testimony, but they relied on their plain common-sense.

All, that is, except the egregious Hotchkiss. He alone mistook her character. He was—so they all said—a fuss-budget, a crotchety old crank. He was certainly not an attractive figure, but as one reflects upon his obstinacy and wrong-headedness, there rises to mind the favourite remark of so many characters in the polite English comedies:

"I wonder!"