How NOT to Get Away with Murder

By Evan J. Albright

Clarence Richeson probably thought he had committed the perfect murder.

By profession he was automatically one of the last persons anyone would ever suspect -- a minister. Richeson, a native Virginian, had come north to Massachusetts in 1906 to preach the gospel. While a student at the Newton Theological Seminary, he was called to minister the congregation at the Hyannis Baptist Church. There he met the Linnell family of Hyannisport, a mother, father and four beautiful daughters. The soon-to-be Reverend Richeson fell for one of the young girls, 17-year-old Avis, a student at the new state teachers college in Hyannis.

Richeson was soon preaching in both Hyannis and Yarmouth, duties he happily carried out for four years. He employed a Southern style of preaching, filled with energy and exuberance. It proved too much for his conservative Cape Cod congregation and in April 1910 he resigned.

By that time he had given Avis a ring and the two spoke of being wed in October. The Rev. Richeson had found new employment at Immanuel Baptist Church in Cambridge. He convinced Avis, who possessed an angelic soprano voice, to apply for admission at the New England Conservatory of Music. In the early fall of 1910, she moved into the Y.W.C.A. in Boston to continue her education and to be near her true love.

The two never married. In early 1911 Avis told her mother that she and the reverend were no longer seeing each other. In March the Rev. Richeson announced his engagement to a wealthy Brookline woman, Violet Edmands.

On October 14, at the beginning of her second year in Boston, Avis committed suicide. They found her near-lifeless body in one of the Y.W.C.A. bathrooms. Before anyone could call for an ambulance, she was dead.

"She had appeared much depressed in mind for the past few weeks," the Cape's Yarmouth Register reported. An autopsy revealed Avis was several weeks pregnant and that she had taken cyanide. Authorities wrote off young woman's death as just another good girl who found herself in bad fix.

In truth, Avis had been murdered by the Rev. Richeson. Avis was carrying Richeson's baby, and earlier that day the minister had given the young woman a chemical preparation that he assured her would cause the fetus to abort. Instead it had killed her.

Richeson would gotten away with it, except that he had made one small mistake. One of the matrons at the Y.W.C.A. had placed a call to the reverend less than two hours after Avis died.  The Rev. Richeson demanded to know why he was being called when he barely knew the girl. "We felt that, since you are her fiancé and that she was out to lunch with you during the day, it is right that we should notify you," the matron replied.

There was a pause on the other end. "Did she say anything before she died?" Rev. Richeson asked in a dull voice. His question caught the matron by surprise. She replied that Avis had not regained consciousness after her limp body had been discovered.

The minister must have known he had made a mistake. He had assumed that Avis had kept their affair secret. Still, he must have been confident that no one could directly connect him with her death. What he did not know was that one man stood in his way -- a Cape Codder named Edwin Grozier.

Grozier's father was a ship captain, and he had been born aboard his father's ship. Although the family's hometown was Provincetown on the Cape's tip, Grozier in truth grew up aboard ship. Although he had saltwater in his veins, Grozier knew at a young age that he would not be following his father into the shipping business. Instead he wanted to be a writer.

He earned a degree from Boston University, and began writing for several Boston newspapers. In the 1880s, he moved to New York and went to work for world-famous publisher Joseph Pulitzer. There he became Pulitzer's right-hand man, working as an editor for various incarnations of Pulitzer's pride and joy, the New York World. In 1885 he decided to break out on his own by buying a broken-down newspaper, the Boston Post.

Within a few short years, Grozier built the Boston Post from a measly 20,000 circulation into one of the largest newspapers in New England with circulation in the hundreds of thousands. One way he did that was by finding stories that that public wanted, and milking every drop of interest from them.

In 1911, the story that got Grozier's attention was Avis Linnell. After learning of the Y.W.C.A. matron's odd phone conversation with the Rev. Richeson, Grozier assigned every available reporter to the story. It was the Post that called for police to investigate Avis Linell's suicide. It was the Post that found the druggist in Newton who had sold Clarence Richeson the cyanide. It was the Post that called for the Rev. Richeson's arrest, which occurred 10 days after Avis's death.

The Post with its blaring, front-page headlines, worked all of New England into a fever pitch. The Rev. Richeson never stood a chance. After spending several months in jail and failing in a suicide attempt (he had tried to castrate himself with the sharp edge of a tin can lid), Richeson changed his plea to guilty and confessed. His lawyers had convinced him that if he went to trial and the jury went against him, he would get the electric chair for sure.

What Richeson's lawyers had not counted upon was the power of the press. The Post demanded justice for Avis Linnell's murder. The judge sentenced the Rev. Richeson to die.

The minister then tried to recant his confession. He kept trying, right until May 21, 1912 when he was strapped to the electric chair and executed. The murder of a young girl from Hyannis had finally been avenged, thanks to the bulldog determination of fellow Cape Codder, Edwin Grozier.

Much of the information for this column came from a nifty history of Boston journalism entitled Newspaper Row: Journalism in the Pre-Television Era  by Herbert A. Kenny.

© 1999 Mystery Lane Press

rev. 4/17/01