Arsenic Under the Elms Murder in Victorian New Haven

Subjects:

• History » American History -- Nineteenth Century
• Popular Culture » American Studies
• Women's Studies » Women's Studies (General)
• Crime & Justice » True Crime

Reviews:

• Her painstaking reconstruction, both of the murders of these two young women and of the trials in which their alleged killers were acquitted, reveals fascinating insights about law, justice, and the position of women in post-Civil War Connecticut. Recommended.
  —Library Journal
• Arsenic Under the Elms meticulously reviews the evidence, the personalities involved, and the society that produced them, resulting in a contribution to the literature of true crime...all the more compelling for being fact rather than ficition...
  —Crime & Justice International Oct/Nov 2001
• Attorney/college teacher McConnell's debut is an accomplished re-creation of two notorious murders of young women in the rural gentility of 1880s Connecticut, with a remarkable sense for the inequities and dark places of that vanished era....Her crisp prose and comprehensive research make for a lively presentation of many remarkable details as she unfolds a disturbing tale of class-oriented gender discrimination and dramatizes the state criminal justice system in its infancy....An intimate, compelling portrait of seamy and disturbing (thus 'forgotten') aspects of the Gilded Age that, in its narrative of yearningly naive young women and socially respectable male predators, offers a sobering augury of our own violent, sexually stratified times.
  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
• The author places the events firmly in cultural context, providing a fascinating glimpse into the arenas of late-19th-century law, journalism, morality, and social structure. A superb piece of historical detection that will gratify true-crime buffs.
  —Booklist
• Ms. McConnell pulls no punches as she dissects the cases and presents her arguments on who she thinks was really guilty. She also wonderfully recreates the dialogue and lifestyles of 1880 Connecticut.
  —New York Law Journal

• Endorsement From Robin W. Winks, Yale University
  author of Modus Oparandi: Here are two fascinating crime stories, all the more compelling for being fact rather than fiction, both involving riveting trial scenes and both filled with revelations about law, justice, and the position of women in post-Civil War Connecticut. the author is both historian and detective, and she writes with verve and conviction.
• Endorsement From Daniel A. Cohen
  Associate Professor of History
  Florida International University: Drawing on exhaustive research in late-19th-century newspapers and popular crime pamphlets, Virginia A. McConnell has meticulously reconstructed the mysterious murders of two young women in the vicinity of New Haven, Connecticut--and shrewdly anatomized the botched prosecutions of their probable killers. With deft sketches of such memorable Victorian characters as a hard-working unwed mother from an impoverished rural family, a lecherous Methodist preacher who never quite mastered his Latin, the flirtatious daughter of a German immigrant tobacconist, and the effeminate only son of New Haven's wealthiest merchant, Arsenic Under the Elms will engage social historians, legal scholars, lovers of New England "local color," and True Crime aficionados alike.
• Endorsement From Gregg Olsen, Author of Starvation Heights: Absolutely spellbinding! Like the faded pages of a family album brought into clear focus, McConnell delivers a mesmerizing true tale of murder from a seemingly more innocent time. Through the author's wonderful rendering, a story that has quietly begged to be told for more than a century is reclaimed. Arsenic Under the Elms is a haunting book.
• Endorsement From Patterson Smith
  Antiquarian bookseller specializing in criminal history: Murder cases from the Victorian past fascinate us because they illustrate how fatal incitements of sex, lust, debauchery, frustration, and fear--all too familiar in the major murder cases of today--played out on the stage of a bygone era. Despite the wide attention these murders received in the press, readers of that day were in ignorance of many of the facts that Virginia McConnell's careful research has unearthed for us. Where pieces of the puzzle remain lacking, she offers her carefully constructed conjectures--an intriguing exercise in which the reader themselves will also wish to participate.

Table of Contents:

• Preface
• The Murder of Mary Stannard
• Mary
• The Reverend Herbert H. Hayden
• The Stannard-Hawley Clan
• Discovery: The Rockland Community Takes Over
• Justice Court Trial: Prelude to "The Great Case"
• Interim: Preparing for "The Great Case"
• The Great Case
• Arsenic at Center Stage
• Experts on Parade
• Lay Testimony
• Verdict and Aftermath
• The Belle of New Haven: The Tragedy of Jennie Cramer
• "Drifting with the Tide"
• Jennie, Jimmy, Wall, and Blanche
• Boys Will Be Boys
• An End and a Beginning: Inquest Verdict
• Justice Court Trial in West Haven
• Superior Court Trial in New Haven
• What Happened to Jennie Cramer?
• Aftermath
• Bibliography
• Index