Dead Men Walking: A Parade of Cape Cod Executions

By Evan J. Albright

After almost four centuries of white inhabitation, Cape Cod has sent only 15 to the executioner -- and almost half came from one pirate ship alone.

In 1999, Daniel Allen Hearn, an amateur historian from Connecticut, published a revealing little book he called Legal Executions in New England: A Comprehensive Reference, 1623-1960. Hearn, after conducting extensive research, compiled a comprehensive list of every man, woman, child and farm animal executed within the six New England states.

Hearn's book only concerns itself with legal executions. It eschews those killed in legally sanctioned ways, such as in war, or those killed in quasi-legal manner, such as shot by a police officer. His book took years of research, and professional historians have found it to be a valuable reference.

Hearn's book, which lists hundreds of executions, contains only 15 with a close connection to Cape Cod. Those 15 are described below. This list includes crimes committed on Cape Cod, crimes committed by native Cape Codders and criminals arrested on Cape Cod (although the crime may have occurred elsewhere). Some on the list hit the trifecta - Cape Codders who committed the crime on Cape Cod and were arrested there. There are even a few who were executed here.

For the first 90 years of white human habitation Cape Codders managed to avoid the hangman's noose. A few came close, but it wasn't until 1717 that the trapdoor opened and rope snapped tight. It couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of fellows: pirates.

Seven bucanneers from the pirate brigand Whydah and a ship they had commandeered, the Mary Anne, washed up on Cape Cod in April of 1717 during a ferocious storm. The seven were taken to Boston, tried and hung. The infamous captain of the Whydah, Samuel Bellamy, along with 141 of his crew, had the good sense to avoid a messy public trial and execution by drowning.

The first native Cape Codder to be executed was a Wampanoag, Joseph Pease. His crime was burglary, which was only a hanging offense if you committed the crime at night. In 1720, Pease found himself a prisoner aboard a convict ship (the reason he was there has been lost to history). He somehow escaped and made his way to Yarmouth where in a single night he stole two lambs from one resident, and a sheep and two more lambs from another. Pease apparently was not a follower of the Atkins Diet, because he later broke into a tavern and made off with a bottle of rum, some sweetcakes and ten silver coins. When Pease was caught the next day, he confessed, and on the basis of his admission he was executed a month later in Barnstable.

Two years later another Cape Cod Wampanaog, Joseph Ewitt, murdered a woman named Hosea Pilate who lived in the Indian village of Santuit. According to Hearn, there is no record as to how Ewitt committed the murder or even why. Perhaps the courts had little or no interest in the details when it involved Wampanoags. Ewitt was hanged almost a year later in Barnstable.

The first white Cape Codder executed was Joseph Fuller of Falmouth. Fuller, descended from Mayflower stock, operated a ferry between Falmouth and Martha's Vineyard. On Nov. 29, 1729, Fuller snapped and murdered his wife Martha with an ax. He then chopped his wife's body into pieces. Although he was probably insane (and insanity was a viable defense strategy, even back then), the court decided he was competent enough to swing by the neck until dead, which he did on May 20, 1730.

On July 18, 1733, Amaziah Harding of Eastham beat his wife to death, than tried to pretend she died of natural causes. When a neighbor arrived to prepare the body for burial, she found Harding's wife, Hannah, lying neatly under the covers of her bed as if she had expired in her sleep. The neighbor became suspicious when she undressed the body and found Mrs. Harding's corpse covered in cuts and bruises. The coroner was summoned and he, too, came to the conclusion that Hannah Harding was not a violent sleeper, but a victim of a violent husband. Amaziah was executed in Barnstable on June 5, 1734.

The first woman executed in the newly formed United States originally was from Sandwich. Bathsheba Spooner, who will be the subject of a future column, arranged for the murder of her husband. The couple were living in Brookfield of the time, and Spooner persuaded her 16-year-old lover, Ezra Ross, and two deserters from the British Army, James Buchanan and William Brooks, to bludgeon her husband Joshua Spooner and throw his body down a well. The quartet was easily caught, and the three men confessed. Bathsheba pleaded that her life be spared because she was pregnant. The court did not believe her, and July 1778 she was executed. An autopsy revealed later that she had been telling the truth.

Another native Cape Codder, this time from Chatham, also met his doom after leaving the Cape. Samuel Godfrey killed the warden of a jail in Windsor, Vt., in 1814. Godfrey had three trials, each resulting in a finding of guilty and a order of execution, but it was not until 1818 that gallows were erected in nearby Woodstock and he was executed.

It would be almost another century before there would be another execution with a Cape Cod connection. In 1911, Clarence Richeson, a minister from Virginia, was called to lead a church in Hyannis where he courted one of his young parishioners, Avis Linnell. The Reverend Richeson later took a pastorate in Cambridge, and he persuaded Avis to move up there to be near him. At some point Richeson began a relatioship with a woman of means, but before he could dump Avis she told him she was pregnant. To clear his social calendar, permanently, the Rev. Richeson tricked Avis into taking poison by telling her it would abort the baby. Richeson's hope was that authorities would think her death a suicide, and it almost worked, except for a crusading newspaper, the Boston Post. The Post hounded police and Richeson, eventually resulting in the minister's arrest, conviction and sentence to death, which was carried out May 21, 1912.

The last Cape Codder executed was Sylvester Fernandes of Mashpee, who murdered his cousin, John Alves, on Dec. 23, 1931, so he could get money to buy his wife presents for Christmas. He was executed the following year.

Massachusetts continued executing prisoners until 1947, although the death penalty would not be stricken from the books until 1982, when the state Supreme Judicial Court ruled that executing prisoners was "cruel and unusual punishment." Paradoxically, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the death penalty is not "cruel and unusual." As historian Lawrence Friedman observed, "The English words cruel and unusual meant something different in Boston than they did in Washington, D.C." Blame it on the Boston accent.

For more information about the death penalty in Massachusetts, you might want to visit the Massachusetts Department of Corrections Web site, which has posted a slight, but interesting history of the electric chair in Massachusetts. You can find it, along with a list of all the Massachusetts electrocutions in the 20th century, here

© 2001 Mystery Lane Press

rev. 12/08/01