Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (6 page)
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Authors: Harold Schechter
“THE INHUMAN BUTCHER”
A
VETERAN OF THE
W
AR OF
1812
KNOWN FOR HIS GRUFF MANNER AND QUICK
temper, William Brown had just turned thirty-seven when he married his first wife, Rosanna, in 1817. Eleven years later, the couple settled in Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania, purchasing a 126-acre farm on the east slope of Jack’s Mountain. By then, they were the parents of two girls and four boys, the whole family sharing a crude one-story log house built by Brown.
In the spring of 1840, only four of the children still lived at home: seventeen-year-old Betsy and the three youngest boys, David, Jacob, and George, whose ages ranged from ten to sixteen. Their big brother, twenty-one-year-old John—after years of increasingly violent quarrels with his father—had moved four miles away to Shirleysburg, where he worked for a farmer named Samuel Carothers. The oldest of the Brown siblings, twenty-two-year-old Peggy, lived in a small cabin on her father’s land with her husband, Robert McConaghy, and their three small children.
Apart from his age—thirty-one at the time he perpetrated what his contemporaries called “the most awful atrocity in the annals of crime”—little information has come down to us about Robert McConaghy. We know that he could barely read, occasionally drank to excess, and was much given to coarse language. He was also filled with a seething resentment toward his father-in-law. Though hardly rich, William Brown was a man of substance in his little community. His farm—including house,
barn, and outbuildings—was valued at roughly $4,000, more than $100,000 in today’s dollars. McConaghy not only coveted his father-in-law’s property but felt entitled to it. “I thought I had as good a right to it as any of them,” he would later confess. He knew it would never be his, however, unless his wife inherited it.
For that to happen, the rest of her family would have to die.
B
Y THE MIDDLE
of May 1840, McConaghy had concocted a plan to wipe out his wife’s entire family at a single awful stroke. The first step was to lure young John Brown back home.
Among the Browns’ livestock was a handsome year-old colt. From the time it was foaled, John had been eager to own it. Owing to the bad blood between them, however, his father had refused to sell it to him.
Late Friday afternoon, May 29, John was out plowing corn for his employer, Samuel Carothers, when his brother-in-law suddenly appeared. To the young man’s surprise, McConaghy announced that he had been sent there with a message from John’s father. The old man had decided to let John have the colt for $15. Though the price was slightly higher than John expected, he quickly agreed to the terms and said he would come fetch the animal in a few days, when he was done with the plowing. McConaghy persuaded him, however, that he had better get there sooner, before the old man had a change of heart. John promised he would come the next day.
B
Y THE FOURTH
decade of the nineteenth century there were more than one hundred iron furnaces operating throughout Pennsylvania. One of these was the Matilda Furnace, located in Mount Union about ten miles from William Brown’s farm. To supplement his income, Brown worked regularly at the furnace, often remaining in Mount Union for days at a stretch. Early in the afternoon of Saturday, May 30, having been away from his farm nearly a week, he packed his few belongings and started for home by foot.
He took his time, stopping along the way to shoot the breeze with some acquaintances. It was close to 5:00 p.m. when he approached his farm. As he crossed the boundary line separating his land from his nearest neighbor’s, he heard his “dog bark and howl.” The dog kept up the noise as Brown continued toward the house. “I was surprised to hear it,” he later testified.
He got another surprise when he stepped onto the log stoop and reached to open the front door. The handle was missing. Puzzled, he turned to look around. As he glanced toward the barn, he saw a flash from the hayloft, heard the crack of a rifle, and felt a bullet whistle by his head. An instant later, a second shot rang out. This time, the bullet grazed his jaw and sheared off part of his ear.
Leaping from the stoop, Brown ran toward the barn. As he did, a bareheaded man in dark clothes jumped down from the hayloft and bolted for the woods. “You damned infernal rascal,” Brown screamed after him. “What are you doing there?” By then, the man had vanished.
Inside the barn, Brown found the missing front-door handle lying beside his own two flintlock rifles, normally kept in his house. Grabbing the firearms, he ran back to the house for his shot pouch, intending to reload the guns and take off after his would-be assassin. When he burst into his front room, however, he saw a body lying facedown on the floor. “It was my son John,” Brown said later. “I put my hand to him and turned him round on his back. He was all stiff. His face was black, and blood was running out of each side of his mouth.” He had been shot through the chest.
Leaving the rifles, Brown ran up the road, where he found two of his neighbors, William Atherton and John Taylor, chopping wood in an orchard. “My God, what’s happened to you?” cried Atherton, seeing Brown’s frantic look and mangled ear. Brown told them he’d been shot and his son John killed. While Atherton hurried off to raise the alarm, Taylor and Brown returned to the latter’s farmhouse. It was Taylor who first spotted the bulky form beneath the quilt in the bedroom. “Brown, you had better look in that bed,” he said grimly. Stepping to the bedside, Brown pulled the quilt down, uncovering (as he put it) “my old lady’s head laying on the pillow.” Her skull had been crushed and her throat slit with an axe blade.
The four youngest children weren’t located until the following day when neighbors scouring the property found their corpses, partly covered by old leaves and sticks, in different places on the farm. Fourteen-year-old Jacob had been shot through the back of the head. Sixteen-year-old George had been savagely bludgeoned with a blunt instrument, then strangled. Betsy, eighteen, had had her skull crushed with stones. Eleven-year-old David had died of strangulation, though a bullet passing through his pants between his legs had also (according to the testimony of the physician who conducted the postmortem) “circumcised him, as it were.”
Surrounded by his neighbors, Brown wept openly. “I don’t know what injury I ever done to the man that he should kill off my family so,” he said through his tears. As for
the man’s identity, Brown had no doubts at all. He had gotten a clear look at the killer “from his breast to the top of his head” before the man leapt down from the hayloft and fled. It was his son-in-law, Robert McConaghy.
T
HE DRIED BLOOD
of his victims was still caked beneath his fingernails when McConaghy was arrested the following day. Locked up in the county jail, he tearfully protested his innocence but could give no convincing account of his whereabouts at the time of the slaughter. He was convicted after a brief trial in mid-November 1840 and sentenced to die in November. “Your case is without parallel in criminal jurisprudence,” the judged intoned on delivering the dread sentence. “For barbarity, treachery and depravity, your cruelty and wickedness have not been surpassed by the pirates of the West Indies or the savages of the wilderness!”
He continued to maintain his innocence right up to the day of his execution, having somehow gotten it into his head that “he would not be hung unless he confessed to the murder.” The exhortations of his spiritual advisors, the Revs. George L. Brown and John Peebles—who assured him that God would have no mercy on his soul unless he made a clean breast of his sins—were unavailing. “He denied it again and again,” Rev. Brown wrote later.
On the morning of Friday, November 16, 1840, after a sleepless night spent in agonized prayer, McConaghy, dressed in his grave clothes, was led to the scaffold. His legs were so unsteady that he had to be supported by Sheriff Joseph Shannon and a deputy. Taking him by the hand, Rev. Brown made one last attempt to elicit a confession. “Oh, do not bother me,” McConaghy cried. “I can tell no more!” A moment later, the hangman released the drop.
Then something happened that, in the view of astonished observers, seemed like an act of God—a “Providential occurrence,” in the words of Rev. Brown.
As the condemned man’s bound and hooded body plunged through the air, the rope snapped. McConaghy hit the ground on his feet, then toppled onto his back.
Stunned but still very much alive, McConaghy was infused with sudden hope. “They ought now to let me go clear,” he exclaimed to the clergymen. It was not until he was informed that “he must try it again” that he finally accepted the inevitable. While another noose was made ready, he asked the Revs. Brown and Peebles to “stoop low, put your faces close to mine.” Then, speaking in a tremulous voice, he offered a
brief, chilling account of his methodical slaughter of his father-in-law’s wife and five children:
I was not long in making up my mind to commit this murder—about a week as near as I can recollect. I killed George first. I beat him with the supple of a flail and left him wounded. I thought he was dead but I found he was not. I then choked him to death.
I then took little Dave out into the woods. I knocked him down with a little stick and choked him to death. I then went back to the house and took Jacob and told him the boys were gunning back there. I then shot him as he was going on before me. I killed him dead. I went back to see if the two boys, George and Dave, were dead. I found them dead. After I had killed George, I would not have gone any further if little Dave had not come out to me.
I then went to the house and took Elizabeth and led her out to gather strawberries; she had a little bucket and me a pan. I beat her on the head with stones and then put my foot upon her neck and choked her to death. I then went back to the barn and sat there a spell, waiting for the old woman to come out. She came near the door and I shot at her and hit her in the arm, and she ran about the house holding her arm. I then ran to the house and asked her if she knew who done it. She said she did not know. I told her to go into the room and go to bed. I said this for fear she would faint. I then brought her a drink of water. God bless her, but I have pitied her since. I thought a heap of her. I don’t know whether I can be forgiven for being so wicked. I then got the axe and hit her above the right eye with the pole or the right side of the axe, I am not certain which. She then fell over on the bed on which she was sitting. I then cut her throat with the axe to put her out of her misery. I then threw a quilt over her.
I then went to Brown’s chest and took from between seven and eight dollars from it—this was all I could find. I also took some tobacco, a box of percussion caps, and some lead. I then took them to the barn and hid them. I then washed the blood off the axe. I then fastened the window down, shut the door, took the handle off and went to the barn.
I then went up to my house, got some water to drink and also some water and soap to wash my clothes. I then took my shirt, pantaloons and
vest off; they were spotted with blood. I washed them and hung them up in the sun to dry. I put on an old shirt and pantaloons which I brought from my house while the others were drying. I sat there until John came home. When he came, he got off and hitched his beast in the lane. He then went to the door but as I had the handle, he could not get it open. He turned around with his face toward the barn. I shot and hit him in the breast. He started to run, and climbed over the fence and hallowed and made a great noise. He ran up the hill about twenty-five or thirty yards and laid down. I went to him with the gun in my hand, intending to shoot him again if he was not dead. I found him dead. I took hold of him to drag him to the house. I had a hard siege in getting him in. I dragged him across the floor into the little back room and pushed him under the bed. I found eleven dollars on him, some in his pocket loose and the rest in his pocket book.
I then went to the barn and waited for Brown. After a while the old man came home. I shot at him and missed him, and then I shot again. He then ran towards me. I then jumped down and ran away.
I did not like Brown and murdered them for their little bit of property. I thought I had as good a right to it as any of them. If I had killed Brown, I intended to put him in the house and burn them all up. I was near making a confession three or four times before but didn’t like to do it because it would be a disgrace to my family.
Having finally unburdened himself, McConaghy fixed the two clergymen with a desperate look. “Oh, can I be saved?” he cried. They “directed him to Christ, the Savior of Sinners.” McConaghy then reascended the scaffold. Before the black hood was drawn over his head, he called William Brown to his side and begged his forgiveness. A moment later, the drop fell again. This time, the rope held.
Four years after the presiding judge condemned Robert McConaghy for committing a crime more atrocious than the cruelties of any pirate or Indian, another shockingly similar massacre occurred in Pennsylvania. This time, the perpetrator actually was a Native American.
A thirty-five-year-old inhabitant of the Seneca Reservation in Cattaraugus County, New York, Samuel Mohawk worked sporadically as a lumber raftsman, transporting logs to Pittsburgh from the upper Allegheny Valley. In late June 1843, he was making his way home by stage from one such voyage when he stopped for the night at the Stone House Tavern in Butler County, Pennsylvania. At around 1:00 a.m., after having imbibed one too many whiskeys, he got into a violent argument with the proprietor, John Sill, who ended up breaking a chair over Mohawk’s head and shoulders and forcibly ejecting him from the tavern.
The following morning, June 30, Mohawk was seen wandering up the road in the direction of the Wigton farm, situated about two miles north of the tavern.
Several hours earlier, at daybreak, the farm’s owner, James Wigton, had gone off on an errand, leaving behind his thirty-five-year-old wife, Peggy, and their five children, ranging in age from one to eight years old. He had been gone for about an hour when his nearest neighbor, Lemuel Davis, arrived at the farm to borrow a wagon. Inside the house, he found Wigton’s wife, Peggy, sprawled in a puddle of gore, her skull having been shattered with a fireplace stone, which now lay bloody beside her. Nearby was the cradle of her year-old infant, John Wallace. At first Davis thought the child was sleeping. When he went to lift him up, however, “the brains fell out in the cradle” (as he later testified). He discovered the other four children upstairs, the three girls on their shared mattress, the boy alone in his trundle bed. All had had their brains beaten out with such force that the ceiling was splattered with blood.
It was around 8:00 a.m. when James Wigton—who had hiked to his father’s farm a few miles away to borrow a horse for plowing—came riding back on the beast. He was startled to see a crowd of his neighbors gathered around the entrance to his house. As he dismounted, Lemuel Davis’ wife, Margaret, came running over to him. “James, you mustn’t go in,” she said, seizing him by the arm. “Your family are all murdered.” Wigton, it is said, never entered his house again.
By then, Sam Mohawk had made his way across Slippery Rock Creek to the farm of Philip Keister. Spotting a little boy playing in the yard, Mohawk threw a rock at the child’s head, knocking him senseless. Then, grabbing up a large stone in each hand, he fled into Keister’s house. At that moment, a crowd of about sixty enraged farmers, who had followed Mohawk’s
trail from Wigton’s farm, rushed up and began pouring into the house. Mohawk, who had retreated to the top of the stairs, hurled one of his stones at the first man through the door, Thomas Blair, who dropped heavily to the floor, blood gushing from his forehead. Charles McQuiston, a brother of the slain Peggy Wigton, was next up the stairs. Mohawk flung his second rock, but McQuiston dodged it and leapt at the killer. The two grappled desperately until another man, Joseph Donegy, ran up the stairs and knocked Mohawk out with a club.
He was bound with ropes and dragged outside, where James Wigton and several others were bent on lynching him from an oak tree in Keister’s backyard. Mohawk begged them to shoot him instead. In the end, cooler heads prevailed. At the coroner’s inquest, held at the scene of the massacre, he confessed to the murders, expressing his remorse and explaining that he had gone on his rampage because he had “been mad at white folks” because “they treated him so bad.” At his four-day trial in mid-December, his lawyers pleaded insanity, claiming that he had committed the crime while suffering from alcohol-induced delirium tremens. The jury took less than an hour to convict him. He was hanged on March 22, 1844. Though he was baptized while awaiting execution, no cemetery in Butler County would permit him a Christian burial. His body was interred in the woods.
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Source: Case of Samuel Mohawk, an Indian of the Seneca Tribe, Charged with the Murder of the Wigton Family, in Butler County, Penna. with the Charge of the Court, as Reported for The Spirit of the Age (Pittsburgh: Foster, McMillan & Gamble, 1843).
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