Lore - Episode 97: Misplaced

Episode Date: October 8, 2018

For thousands of years, humans have built rules and procedures for handling the various curveballs that life throws our way—and we place a lot of trust in those systems. Most of the time, it all works properly, but there are moments when human nature and our belief in the unusual throw a wrench in the gears.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Two centuries ago, the county prison in Gloucester, England installed a treadmill. It wasn't for exercise, though. In an era when many of the inmates there had been sentenced to hard labor, authorities had been finding it very difficult to deliver on that promise. That is, until January of 1823. That was the year a man named William Kubit got involved. He came from a long line of millers, people who understood better than most how to build machines that ran continuously on the power of water or wind.

In Gloucester, though, he was tasked with tapping into a different source of energy. The prisoners. When it opened, the Gloucester prison treadmill had enough room for 36 men at a time. They would step onto the wooden slats and do a sort of walk mixed with climbing. The power they generated wasn't wasted, either. In Gloucester, it was harnessed to grind corn, but in other prisons who adopted the same form of punishment, it sometimes pumped water. Many, though, did nothing at all, so they called it grinding the wind.

Or as odd as that punishment sounds, it was actually pretty mild compared to a lot of methods used over the centuries. In medieval times, they used the picket, where a criminal would be hung by their thumb or wrist with a sharp spike beneath their foot. Deciding between standing on the painful spike or hanging from just their thumb created a painful dilemma for those subjected to the picket. Fans of The Game of Thrones might recognize rat torture, another real punishment pulled right out of darker times.

Criminals wouldn't have a bucket strapped to their chest with a rat inside. When the bucket was set on fire, the rat would attempt to dig and chew its way out. I'll leave the rest of that process to your imagination. Punishment today almost feels like a walk in the park compared to the past, doesn't it? At the core of it all, though, is the propensity for humans to punish the criminals among us. We spent thousands of years creating laws and expectations that guide human behavior and have placed punishment around it all like a pit filled with snakes.

And for the most part, it's worked. Today we trust that the justice system will help us find the truly guilty and deliver a just punishment for their crimes. But when long years of imprisonment, hard labor, and even painful or deadly consequences await those who pass through the halls of justice, it's reason enough to take pause and wonder, to ask ourselves the question that might be infinitely more frightening than treadmills or angry rats. Justice might have run its course, but what if we got it wrong?

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. Folks didn't think too highly of Russell. Some of it was based on his personal qualities. He was known to be feeble-minded and weak of intellect among the people of Manchester, Vermont. But he was also lazy and in an age when everyone needed to work to keep their families alive, that was viewed as a character flaw. Russell had this tendency to go for long walks in the middle of the workday.

Sometimes those walks would last many days, and the people of his community would begin to wonder where he'd gone, only to have him stroll back into town, happy as a clam, ready to pick up where he left off. In a town where there was always a field to work or repairs to make to the barn, Russell wasn't respected much. And he somehow married a woman just like himself. Sally came from a local family, the Bourns, and was one of five grown children. But while her four siblings all worked hard and toiled in the expected way, Sally had

taken on a bit of her husband Russell's personality. She, like Russell, would go on walks of her own, although never for quite as long. She also seemed to always be pregnant. She and Russell had married in 1794, and by 1812 they'd had six children. For a long while, they had all lived with Russell's parents. But when Russell's father walked out in 1801 and never returned, they lost the farm and had to go elsewhere. Russell's mother was cared for by the town, but he and his growing family ended up knocking

on the door of Sally's own family, and they took them in. By 1812, they'd been living with the Bourns for over a decade. That was a long time for Sally's brothers, Stephen and Jesse, to watch Russell fail to carry his own weight. Over 10 seasons of hard work in the fields, while Russell took long naps or disappeared for a week at a time into the woods on one of his unannounced walkabouts. And I don't think I'm projecting when I say that it would have been incredibly frustrating to everyone else.

On May 12th of 1812, the family tension reached a boiling point. It was one of those rare days when Russell was actually out in the field with Stephen and Jesse, along with Russell's 10-year-old son, Lewis. They were clearing stones from the rocky New England soil, perhaps to get a piece of new land ready for crops. A neighbor named Thomas Johnson happened to be walking by and claimed that he saw the three men arguing. Being a polite man, he turned a blind eye and continued to his own house, where he stepped

inside. But the tension that had been in the air didn't sit well with him, so he came back out a while later to check on them. These seemed to have returned, and the three men, along with the boy Lewis, were still out in the field, hard at work clearing away the countless stones in the soil. Satisfied that nothing bad had happened, Johnson went back inside. And I mentioned him not just because he was a witness to the arguments, but also because of something else.

Thomas Johnson was one of the last people to see Russell Colvin alive. Many years later, Russell's son Lewis would explain what happened that day. According to him, his uncles, Stephen and Jesse, continuously attacked his father for a variety of reasons. He was lazy, he spent too much time at the tavern, he wasn't a responsible father. On and on they went, and as they did, the tensions rose with them. That's when Russell lashed out. Lewis claimed that his father used a small writing stick to take a swing at Stephen,

to return the favor with a hard blow from a wooden club. Russell fell to the ground, but immediately stood back up and launched another attack on Stephen, who swung his club even harder at the second time, knocking him back down. This time, Russell didn't get up. Lewis ran to his father's side and shook him, but the man was unmoving and silent. There was no blood, but to a ten-year-old boy, I doubt that mattered. Brightened by what had happened and perhaps to escape his uncle Stephen, Lewis bolted for the house and vanished inside.

The following day, according to Lewis, his uncle Stephen cornered him with an angry expression on his face. Russell had run off on another of his long, unannounced walks, he told him. This one, though, was probably the result of the fight they'd had the day before, and Stephen felt guilty about that. He threatened to beat Lewis to death if he told anyone about it, and so the boy remained silent. It would be seven years before anyone was ready to put the pieces together and ask the

burning question that had been on everyone's mind. Where in the world was Russell Colvin? I said it took seven years before they started looking for answers, but in reality, people were wondering from the moment he vanished. They always wondered when it came to Russell. Seeing as how his own father had walked out on the family back in 1801, it wouldn't be a stretch to expect Russell to do the same. So every time he walked off and didn't come home for dinner, people wondered.

This time he didn't return with that innocent grin on his face, as if nothing had happened. He just didn't return, period. Maybe they held out hope, or perhaps they wrote him off as long gone and never coming back. The fight could very well have frightened him away, after all, triggering whatever it was inside him that loved to escape the world. The years that followed were filled with some unusual experiences, though. No, this isn't where I tell you that his ghost haunted the farm, and how Steven or

Jesse or Sally's parents weren't able to sleep due to all the wrappings and levitating objects. Those things never happened, but other things did. In the spring of 1813, the barn on the Bourne family farm burned to the ground. No one was ever able to figure out how the fire started, so it was all chalked up to an act of God and eventually cleaned up and rebuilt. Two years later, in the spring of 1815, Sally vanished on one of her rustle-like excursions and returned many days later. When she reappeared, she was pregnant again.

And of course, that created a few problems. First, knowing Russell had been gone for three years at that point, someone else had to be the father of the child. Even Sally herself admitted to that. The trouble was, she had no legal standing for receiving financial help from him. At the time, Vermont law stated that only an unmarried woman could do that, and since Russell had only vanished, Sally was still technically married to him. So, she went to her brothers, Steven and Jesse, to ask for help.

Steven, true to his hot-headed nature, was angry with his sister, but he also delivered a startling revelation to her. She was free and clear to request financial support from the baby's father, because Russell was long dead. He knew it personally, to be a fact. That little detail was certainly informative, but it most likely got lost in the chaos of the coming months. In the summer of 1815, that polite neighbor of theirs, Thomas Johnson,

ended up buying the born farm to extend his own land. Sally, her parents, and all her kids, ended up finding a different place in Manchester to live. But Steven saw the sale of the farm as his chance to move on to new adventures, and he moved west to upstate New York, near the shores of Lake Ontario. In the spring of 1816, Johnson's children were out exploring their new land, when they found something interesting. When they handed it to their father, he immediately recognized it.

It was the hat Russell Colvin had been wearing on the day he'd seen the argument in the field back in 1812. It was odd, but not odd enough for him to say anything about it to anyone else, it seems. Then something truly unusual happened. Sometime in 1819, Sally's uncle Amos paid her a visit. He seemed visibly upset, as if something disturbing had happened to him. When she asked about it, Amos told her about the dream he'd had the night before. In it, her lost husband Russell had reappeared beside his bed,

and told him that he'd been murdered. He even named the killers, too. Her own brothers, Steven and Jesse. But the vision of Russell did more than that. He told Amos that the proof of the crime was in the cellar beneath the old-born house. Right away, the authorities were brought in to examine the cellar. After sifting through the dirt floor, they discovered a few items of interest. A pen knife, a button, and a few small bones.

And while the bones could have belonged to any number of animals, the pen knife was a dead giveaway. No pun intended, I promise, because the knife belonged to Russell. Amos immediately warrants for the arrest of both brothers were issued. But because Steven had moved away, only Jesse was brought in by the authorities. Despite having very little physical evidence, he was thrown in a jail cell to await his trial. Then that's where he met a career criminal named Silas Merrill, and told the stranger his own version of the events.

According to Merrill, Jesse confirmed that there had been a fight that day back in the field in 1812. After Lewis had run inside, the born patriarch, Barney, came out to see what had happened, and discovered Steven and Jesse standing over Russell's body. The older man asked if his son-in-law was dead, but Steven shook his head. Barney seemed rather disappointed at that news. Jesse claims that they helped the old man carry Russell's unconscious body to the cellar, where he told them to cut the man's throat using his own pen knife. Then they hid the corpse in the barn where the sheep were kept.

After a few months, they purposely burned down the barn to destroy the body, and then moved the remains to an old tree stump on the property. Silas Merrill was set free in exchange for sharing the story with the authorities, but Jesse was left to clean up the mess. He denied it all, and instead claimed that Steven had acted alone, clubbing Russell to death, and then moving the body to the cellar for a time. Maybe Jesse thought this was his ticket to freedom. Maybe he thought that because Steven had moved away and was out of reach,

it was better to blame him than take the fall himself. If they couldn't locate the true killer, surely Jesse would get to go free. But that's not how it played out. Soon enough, Steven was in custody as well, and he denied all of the accusations. Neither of them had killed Russell Colvin, and he would swear to it in court if he had to. The court, to their credit, was more than happy to give him that chance. But there were other things on the horizon that no one could have planned for. Everything was about to fall apart, and in the most spectacular way possible.

The people of Manchester, Vermont had had seven years to fantasize about what had happened to Russell Colvin. That's a long time, and as you can imagine, they'd become rather creative in their assumptions. But that's the thing. Assumptions are a house of cards, and if the wind blows just right, it will all come crashing down. The first winds blew into the courtroom in October of 1819. That was when a number of significant testimonies were given by witnesses on the stand. Steven, Jesse, and Sally had another brother, William Bourne, and he stood before the courtroom and told everyone about how Steven had once told him he wished Russell was dead. Russell's son, Lewis, now 17 years old at this

point, also testified, as did former neighbor Thomas Johnson. Even Sally had a chance to speak, bringing back up that conversation she'd had with Steven four years prior about the father of the baby and how he was certain Russell was dead. There were others, too. All of them took the stand and reported on the character of Steven Bourne and on the history he had of violence and threats toward Russell. One of those witnesses was a lawyer named William Wyman who claimed that Steven had come to him for legal advice in 1801, wondering if he and his brother really had to take Sally, Russell, and their kids into their home. In the process, he swore an oath that if no one else would stop it, he would personally do it himself. The jury left the courtroom on

October 26th to meet and discuss the case, and when they returned, they brought their verdict with them. Steven and Jesse Bourne were guilty of murder. They were both sentenced to execution by hanging, but in the days that followed, Jesse's punishment was changed to life in prison. Justice, it seems, had won the day or had it. You see, in the lead up to his date with a hangman in January of 1820, Steven and his attorney made a strange request. They wanted to place an advertisement in as many newspapers as possible to see if anyone had seen Russell Colvin alive. These ads informed readers of Steven's plight and described Russell's physical appearance. I doubt that anyone expected the ads to net any results, so when someone came forward with information, it was a complete

shock. Tabor Chadwick was a Methodist minister from Shoesbury, New Jersey who had seen an account of the trial in the New York Post. When he reached out to Steven's attorney, he claimed that he knew of a farmhand in the nearby town of Dover who went by the name of Russell Colvin and spoke often about Vermont. A second man, James Welpley, read about Chadwick's claim and decided to go to Dover, New Jersey to see for himself. Sure enough, he found the farmhand, but when Welpley mentioned the story and court case, the man denied being Russell at all. Not willing to give up so easily, Welpley enlisted the help of a female friend to lure the farmhand onto a train, a train that was headed north to Vermont. Upon arriving in Bennington, Vermont,

where the court was located, Welpley managed to deliver the farmhand straight into a packed courtroom. Despite being a completely unrelated trial, there were enough people in the room who knew about the case that a stunned silence descended over the crowd. After that, Welpley sent a telegram to Manchester and told them that he was bringing Russell Colvin back home. When they arrived later that day, a crowd was waiting for them, including a large number of Russell's former neighbors, and all of them smiled in recognition. Russell Colvin had finally come home. The rest of that day was a bit of a blur for everyone, including Russell Colvin.

When he was taken to visit Stephen in jail, he took one look at the shackles on his brother-in-law's wrists and asked why he was locked up. Like I mentioned earlier, he wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed. I feel the need to point out that there were no photographs of Russell to look at or compare, but his children recognized him, as did his neighbors. He even had a pair of scars on his forehead, most likely from that fight in the field back in 1812, so there was no reason to doubt his reappearance for a moment. Soon enough, Russell went to the courthouse to swear he really was who he claimed to be, and as a result, the charges against Stephen and Jesse were dropped. There was some conversation about Russell packing up his family and taking

them back to Dover, and that's eventually what they did. He returned to work on the farm where James Welpley had found him, but that new chapter of his life was short. At the age of just 46 years Russell Colvin passed away. This time, though, he really was dead. We place so much trust in our justice system, and for the most part, it's well-founded. Setting aside the debates about what constitutes justice or how far punishment should go, there is a beautiful simplicity in the judicial process. When crimes are committed, the evidence needs to be examined, and that informs who is punished and how. But there are no perfect systems, especially ones that involve human beings. We tend to be

biased people, and sometimes that bias finds its way into the courtroom. Looking around today, it's easy to find modern examples of times when that's happened. Adnan Syed, the key figure in the first season of the podcast serial, is one of the most prominent examples, but there are others. Joey Watkins, Freddie Gray, Terrence Lewis, and so many others. All of them are at the center of debates about political bias and imperfect justice. These are all cases where we've had to step back and confront the possibility of wrongful conviction and the devastation it can lead to. Looking back, many historians believe that the imprisonment and planned executions of Stephen and Jesse Bourne

represent the first of those missteps in US history. Thankfully, it was corrected before it became too late. I'm certainly not suggesting that every case can be easily resolved, and I'm certainly not placing the blame on any particular people. But the story of Russell Colvin is full of those flaws. I mean, this was a courtroom that allowed a ghostly dream and a handful of character witnesses to act as evidence. It's impossible to hand out precise and comprehensive justice with that kind of bias. Bife after the trial was a gift to Stephen and Jesse Bourne. They'd been cleared of all charges and set free to do what they wanted. Stephen, from what I can tell, returned to New York, where he'd been found before the trial. I have a feeling he welcomed slipping back into obscurity.

Jesse, though, squandered his new lease on life. He traveled the country and fell in with a bad crowd, eventually becoming part of a gang of counterfeiters based out of Cleveland. In 1860, he was approached by a man named Hackett, who had heard about Jesse's work and wanted to join up. Jesse sat down with the man, had a few drinks, and when the alcohol really started to flow, bragged about all his past crimes. Hackett turned out to be a U.S. Marshal. Then all of the stories Jesse told him that night landed him in a stretch in prison. Well, most of them. There was one tale that Hackett didn't really know what to do with, but he passed it along to the court nonetheless. You see, after getting suitably drunk, Jesse bragged about an older crime.

He and his brother, he said, had murdered someone. He didn't name the victim or provide enough details to nail down where the crime had taken place, but he described it in a way that's left everyone wondering ever since. He and Stephen killed a man, he said, but eventually got caught. To help get them out of jail and to avoid the frightening sentences that had been passed against them, they did something bold and risky. They hired an imposter to pretend to be the victim, and it worked. The story of Russell Colvin's disappearance, death, and resurrection is full of many surprising twists and turns, all of which contribute to the power of the story. But there's one detail,

the dream reported by Amos Bourne, that stands out as particularly unusual. And it's not the first time something like that has happened. Stick around after this short sponsor break to hear one more tale of deadly dreams. Before moving to Portsmouth, Rhode Island, Thomas and Rebecca had owned a popular inn and tavern in Boston. Thomas was actually one of the earliest settlers of the city, arriving there in 1638 from England. But in 1643, they packed up and left town due to some tense religious infighting that was taking place. Technically, Thomas was what they called an antinomian, but what's important to know is that as a result of this infighting,

Thomas and others who agreed with him all headed south to escape. He and Rebecca packed up their lives and started over in their new home on a peninsula of land along New York's East River. Today the area is known as the Bronx, but back then it was forest and farmland, and Thomas Cornell's original four-mile tract of land is known today as class and point, but his time in the Bronx was brief. A year after they arrived, conflict with the local Native American tribe forced Thomas and his family to head back north, where they settled in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. That was 1644. By 1655, though, Thomas had passed away, leaving Rebecca and her son Thomas Jr. to fend for themselves. And they did well. Thomas Sr. had been very well connected,

and their Boston Inn had earned them a good amount of money. Most of the kids had grown up and left the house, but Thomas Jr., who was their oldest, had stuck around, along with his own wife and children, to help manage the house. That's when things fell apart. On the 9th of February 8th of 1673, a lot of things happened. Rebecca stayed in the sitting room to smoke her pipe while the rest of the family ate in the dining room. A short while later, Thomas sent his son Edward to check on her, but he became distracted by one of the family dogs that bolted out of the room. It was Thomas who came into the sitting room next, and when he did, he found his mother on the floor. She was dead, and her body was covered in burns from head to toe. A later inspection by the local

physician tried to put a tidy bow on an unfortunate event. Rebecca Cornell had most likely fallen asleep, dropped her lit pipe in her lap, and burned to death. It was resolution, but it was also short-lived. Just four days after her death, Rebecca's brother John went to the authorities with a story. He'd recently had a vivid dream in which his sister was standing beside his bed, her body covered in flames. In the dream, John claims that she looked at him and cried out that someone had burnt her with fire. That was it. No actual proof. No physical evidence. Just an old man's dream. And yet somehow, that was enough to cause the physician to take another look at Rebecca's body. What he found was a wound in her stomach that was unrelated to the fire, causing the

authorities to make a leap in logic that even Spring Hill Jack would be proud of. Thomas Cornell had killed his mother. The trial was brief. Character witnesses were brought in who claimed that there was no love between Thomas and his mother. His uncle John's dream was admitted as official evidence, and Thomas was sentenced to death. Unlike the Russell Colvin case, there was no miraculous reappearance of his mother to save him. Thomas was hanged a short while later, and all because a few people had a bad opinion of him. Well, and that dream, of course. I have no pithy ending for you today. The trial of Thomas Cornell Jr. was an insult to the justice system we place our trust in. But even though his life was taken,

his family line continued. And it's amazing just how well known his family has become. Yes, Cornell University was founded by one of his descendants, Ezra Cornell. Others include one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, a Revolutionary War General, Amelia Earhart, Bill Gates, and Presidents Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon. Oh, and Lizzie Borden, a young woman thought by many to have used an axe to murder her mother and father. But that's a story for another time. Perhaps there really is a lesson here for us. You never know what people are capable of. This episode of lore was written and produced by me,

Aaron Mankey, with research by Marsat Crockett and music by Chad Lawson. I make two other podcasts that I think you'll love, Cabinet of Curiosities and Unobscured, and both are available everywhere you download podcasts. And each of them is another slice of the weird and dark underbelly of history, written and hosted by me. Lore exists outside this podcast, too. There's a Lore book series in bookstores all around the country and online, and a Lore television show on Amazon Prime. The second season arrives on October 19th, and if you want a little more lore in your life, those are all good things to be looking for. You can always learn more about everything going on over in one central place,

theworldoflore.com slash now. And if you're a social media person, you can follow the show on your favorite network, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. It doesn't matter. Just search for Lore podcast, all one word, and click that follow button, and be sure to say hello when you do. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening. you