Agnes Willis: The Cherry Court Murder
Nightfall, mid-December, the dark after a day of rain.
On Cherry Street in Burlington, the tenements gleamed with candlelight, lamplight, their windows shuttered against the cold. Louisa LaCruse lived with Julia Brace Bennett at number 18, a tenement off Cherry Court. On December 11, 1899, the two women took supper in the basement with their neighbor Agnes Willis.
Agnes lived upstairs. Her daughter was at the neighbors’ for the evening while her husband was at the barbershop working, and she’d passed the afternoon with a young man named Gilbert Farmer, who joined the women at the supper table.
Lousia and Julia had prepared a chicken but the meat needed cutting and Gilbert offered up his knife, a folding dirk with a long blade. Louisa had seen it before. On Battery Street one evening she’d happened upon an argument between Agnes and Gilbert and glimpsed the knife in his hand, the light the steel flashed back from it.
Nothing happened, not then. Louisa intervened, Gilbert backed down, and a few days later, she served up supper with his knife. The blade cut clean and easy, keen as a straight razor. Firelight glittered down its edge like the sparks in his eyes across the table watching her, then looking at Agnes.
* * *
Eva Carasaw arrived at Cherry Court at around 8:15 pm. A staircase off the courtyard led to the second floor apartment her sister Agnes shared with husband Edward Willis and 11 year-old daughter Elfreda.
Eva lived nearby and was often at her sister’s. Earlier that evening she passed by 18 Cherry Street and chanced to overhear an argument between her sister and Gilbert Farmer. They were outside, apparently, and Agnes told Gilbert to leave her alone, to “never come back.” Now Eva mounted the steps to her sister’s rooms and called ahead of her, receiving in response the clatter of footfalls from above as of someone running for the back-stairs.
She let herself in. The Willises’ apartment was divided into two rooms with a small kitchen area inside the doorway that opened to a darkened living room with the bedroom situated just beyond. The bedroom door was ajar, Eva noticed, an oil-lamp burning inside.
The apartment was quiet, empty save for sounds of rain, tapping on the roof and windows, mixing with snow as the temperatures dropped.
“Ag?”
Eva spoke the name to the silence, heard a moaning from the bedroom. Through the doorway she glimpsed her sister’s feet upon the floor, planted firmly on the boards, as though she were sitting on the bed.
She wasn’t sitting, though. Eva entered the bedroom and found Agnes half on the mattress with her feet on the floor and her throat slashed open. Blood was everywhere. It had soaked through Agnes’s clothing into the blankets then spilled onto the floorboards, pooling in the cracks.
Eva fled outside. She screamed and the neighbors came running. It was too late for the doctor but Eva’s son went for the police while someone ran to the barbershop on North Champlain Street to inform Agnes’s husband.
Edward Willis didn’t believe it, said he had to see for himself. He hurried home to a neighborhood in uproar and Agnes dead across the bed they’d shared, mired in blood with her face turned to one side, her eyes open. Edward’s portrait hung opposite the bed. His wife had died looking at his face or perhaps at the lithograph beside it, a framed copy of their marriage certificate.
The Willises’ wedding was in Bristol but registered in Burlington and the city’s registry shows a marriage date of May 8, 1882. Edward’s profession is listed as “barber” while Agnes’s maiden name is given as “Alfretta A. Day.” A note in parentheses reads col’d.
Colored.
Agnes and Edward were African American. They all were: Louisa, Julia, Gilbert Farmer. In 1899, Burlington was home to slightly more than 100 black residents, most living in the neighborhoods north of Cherry Street along North Champlain.
Many were native Vermonters, as was Agnes Willis, born and raised in Bristol. Her great-grandfather Amos Morocco was a slave in Connecticut who’d gained his freedom and settled in Vermont with brothers Peter Freeman and Edward Shelton and a sister named Lemon. The four siblings acquired a tract of land in Charlotte where they prospered for a time before drifting away, disappearing, leaving a line of planted chestnut trees and the name “Guinea Road.”
By 1850 the Moroccos had moved to Lincoln along with granddaughter Angeline Freeman, who married farm laborer Alonzo Day. Amos Morocco died in 1855 and the family re-settled in Bristol with Amos’s widow Rhoda -- known as “Aunt Morocco” -- keeping house.
Angeline and Alonzo Day had three children: Eva, Arly, and Alfrida, called Agnes or “Ag.” Arly was 15 when he succumbed to typhoid fever in 1876. Two years later, Eva Day married Floyd Briggs with whom she went on to have a son, Harold, in 1881.
The next year Agnes wed Edward Willis and moved with him to Burlington just as the situation in Bristol began to deteriorate. Agnes’s father deserted her mother to marry another woman, while in 1884, Eva’s husband Floyd was arrested on charges of “assault with attempt to kill” following an altercation at Angeline’s house. He was ordered to pay a fine or to serve a short custodial sentence, and later that same year Agnes’s great grandmother Aunt Morocco died at the age of 102. The news was reported statewide, prompting The Landmark newspaper to quip: “Who says Vermont is not a healthy state?”
Then Floyd died of blood poisoning, aged 34, and Eva was left a widow with a five year-old to clothe and feed. Angeline Day, her mother, was also without a husband or obvious means of support and the women had little choice but to move on from Bristol. Like many others, they moved to Burlington, but opportunity eluded them and the women resorted to sexwork. During this period Eva served multiple sentences in the House of Correction on charges of adultery and “keeping a house of ill fame” while Angeline was arrested with her on at least two occasions.
Eva also incurred numerous fines for intoxication. Possibly she was an alcoholic, though it’s difficult to say for sure, as State prohibition laws were in effect and the city’s minority neighborhoods were likely subject to over-policing. She drank, maybe, but she could hardly be blamed. Her situation was desperate enough, and her sister’s too.
Agnes’s daughter Ednah was born in 1885 followed in 1888 by a second daughter, Elfreda, presumably named for her mother. But Ednah died before her third birthday and Agnes turned to drink. In the years after Ednah’s death Agnes was arrested multiple times on charges of drunkenness or furnishing alcohol, culminating in a five month stint in the House of Correction.
Angeline Day died in 1897. The body was returned to Bristol to be buried with her son Arly, but Eva and Agnes remained in Burlington. Eva Briggs remarried, becoming Eva Carasaw, but the sisters’ relationship remained close, if also volatile, as evidenced by an 1894 incident in which Eva attacked Agnes with a stove-poker.
On a different occasion Eva was fined $2 for attacking one man then arrested after robbing a second man to pay the fine. Finally there was the September 1899 party at Cherry Court that degenerated into violence. Police were called and Agnes and Eva were taken into custody, though they were both released without charge.
Also present that night was a cousin of Agnes and Eva, a young woman named Fannie Farmer. Her older brother was in the House of Correction, serving six months after breaking into his sister-in-law’s trunk. His name was Gilbert Farmer and he’d be getting out soon.
* * *
Gilbert was born in Charlotte to Gilbert and Paulina Farmer in 1873 or 1874. Gilbert, Sr. was a gardener by profession and was in this capacity employed by the Mayor of Burlington prior to accepting a job as a janitor at the University of Vermont. He was working there when he contracted what was likely tuberculosis and died in July 1889 after an illness of several months.
His death meant substantial financial hardship for the family and probably for this reason Gilbert, Jr. forged his employer’s signature on a $3.75 clothing repair in December of the same year. The forgery was discovered and Gilbert was sent to the Vergennes Reform School where he spent at least nine months, during which time his mother Paulina married Daniel Prince of Burlington, an acquaintance of Edward Willis.
Gilbert was released and returned to Burlington only to be arrested again in January 1892 after breaking into a neighbor’s house with a skeleton key. For this crime he was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in the state prison, putting him back in Burlington by 1894, though it seems he stayed out of trouble, at least for a time. Long enough, anyway, for him to find work as a florist and marry Alice May Edwards of Hinesburg in October 1898.
Like Gilbert, Alice was a native Vermonter. Her father Warren Edwards was born and raised in the black settlement on Hinesburgh Hill (later Lincoln Hill) as was Alice herself though the family moved to a farm at nearby Rhode Island Corner in 1891.
Gilbert moved in with his wife’s family but the marriage proved short-lived. In April 1899 Gilbert burglarized his sister-in-law Annie Farmer’s trunk and stole $1.25. The was discovered in Burlington and reported to the police who directed the Sheriff’s Office to make an arrest.
In Hinesburg Gilbert was taken into custody then transported to Burlington. He was found guilty in city court and received a fine of $5 plus $10.81 in costs or around $500 in today’s money. Gilbert didn’t pay, or couldn’t, and was sentenced to six months in the House of Correction.
This incident seems to have marked the end of Gilbert’s marriage. He was released from the House of Correction in November 1899 but didn’t return to Alice’s family. He ended up in Burlington again where he lodged with his stepfather on LaFountain Street or perhaps with his brother Ernest Farmer on Oak Street.
Gilbert was 28. Since his father’s death in 1889, he had spent time in the State Reform School, the State Prison, and finally, the House of Correction. His photograph was displayed in the “rogues gallery” at the Burlington Police Department and he drifted about town with few prospects of employment but with nowhere else to go. Somehow he fell in with Agnes Willis -- his cousin, eight years older -- and the two were often seen together in November and December of 1899.
The nature of their relationship is unclear. Edward later accused Gilbert of “tempt[ing]” Agnes, suggesting a sexual relationship between them. This seems likely, if not quite a certainty. Perhaps Gilbert had pursued her, a married woman, only to be rejected, prompting the violent outburst witnessed by Louisa LaCruse on Battery Street.
December 11, 1899 dawned gray and chill, rain blowing in waves with the winds up Cherry Street. Agnes and Edward left home together and walked as far as the barbershop where they parted.
Agnes continued on to a house on North Union Street where she worked as a “scrub woman,” or cleaner. In the afternoon she met up with Gilbert Farmer and returned to Cherry Court with him. They took supper in the basement of the tenement. A blade was needed to carve the chicken and Gilbert offered Louisa LaCruse his clasp-knife.
But the mood turned sour. Agnes and Gilbert quarreled, as they often did, and Gilbert showed his knife to Julia Brace Bennett, saying he meant to use it that night. Julia warned him against it, told him he would be arrested, but he didn’t care, said he “would use the knife just the same if he did go to jail.”
Then Agnes left, and Gilbert too. They had it out in the courtyard and Eva Carasaw, passing by, heard Agnes tell her young cousin to “leave her and never come back.” She returned inside and seated herself on the windowsill. She lingered a moment, as if to collect herself, before exiting to the courtyard where Gilbert was waiting for her.
It was 7:00 or perhaps half-past and she must have invited him upstairs because a neighbor saw them together, climbing the steps to the Willises’ rooms. They went inside. The door closed behind them and Agnes never came out.
* * *
Eva Carasaw’s son Harold entered the Burlington police station and spoke with Chief L.J. Smith. Agnes Willis was dead, he said, murdered. Quite by chance the city’s mayor Robert Roberts was also present at the station. He might have recognized Agnes’s name or perhaps was merely curious because he accompanied Chief Smith to Cherry Court.
Half-past-eight now, still raining, and friends and neighbors crowded the halls and staircases at 18 Cherry. Edward Willis paced in the courtyard while his daughter Elfreda remained in the living room of their apartment. From The Burlington Free Press:
The one child of Mr. and Mrs. Willis, a pretty little colored girl only 11 years old, remained in the house during the examination of the rooms and body and its removal. [...] She sat in the arms of some of the women present and sobbed out her grief and during a few moments when no one gave her attention seated herself upon the stove in which there was no fire.
Police telephoned the city’s health officer, H.R. Watkins, who arrived at Cherry Court and pushed past the onlookers to reach the Willises’ bedroom. Chief Smith and Mayor Roberts remained for the examination, assisting Dr. Watkins as he rolled Agnes onto her side.
She had been dead for less than an hour. Her eyes were open, shining with a “lifelike brightness,” and she wasn’t yet cold. Watkins confirmed the cause of death as a single wound to the left side of the throat exactly six inches in length. The trachea was intact but the killer had sliced through the jugular. She would have died quickly, within two minutes.
An undertaker arrived. He cut away Agnes’s sodden skirts and waist and washed the blood from her body before clothing her in white, ready for burial. Coffin and wagon waited in the street below. The funeral was to be at 21 South Champlain, Eva Carasaw’s house.
Agnes’s sister had already spoken with investigators. She told them of the argument she overheard and described her 8:15 arrival at 18 Cherry Street, the din of footsteps pounding toward the back-stair.
Police followed this up and determined a man had jumped from the rear staircase to the roof of an adjoining shed before leaping from there to the ground. Near the shed they discovered fresh footprints as well as blood-smeared wrapping paper, suggesting the killer paused to clean his knife before fleeing on foot toward Battery Street.
Gilbert Farmer was immediately suspected. Eva Carasaw gave his name to authorities while Julia Brace Bennett recounted the threats he had made earlier in the evening.
Edward Willis likewise had no doubt who was responsible. From The Burlington Free Press:
His grief found little expression in the words. Once or twice he uttered threats and curses upon the head of Farmer and charged him with having tried to tempt his wife. [...] He also said that he knew Farmer killed his wife and that he believed he did it because he was jealous of her.
Three police officers proceeded to Daniel Prince’s LaFountain street residence. Gilbert was out, but they spoke with Paulina Prince, who claimed her son had missed supper, that she hadn’t seen him since three o’clock.
Gilbert’s brother lived on Oak Street. The officers continued to Ernest’s house and found Gilbert sitting with his brother’s family. His clothes appeared clean, but he was visibly agitated, sweating profusely, and he didn’t have his clasp-knife with him. Upon questioning he said he’d left it in a drawer at his mother’s house. He was taken into custody, placed in the county jail.
The next day, December 12, was a Tuesday. Colder now, temperatures in the thirties. News of the crime dominated the papers with the Free Press describing Agnes’s murder as “the most ghastly crime which has occurred in this city in many years.”
In the morning, police searched the homes of Daniel Prince and Ernest Farmer. At the Prince house they found a dull jackknife in Paulina’s bureau-drawer as Gilbert had indicated, but Louisa LaCruse didn’t recognize it, said it wasn’t the clasp-knife Gilbert usually carried.
Police also discovered a pair of Gilbert’s wraps or leggings that he was known to have worn earlier in the day which he had removed upon reaching his brother’s house. The leggings appeared to be mostly clean but for a lone spot of blood no larger than a thumbnail.
From this evidence investigators formulated a theory of the crime. Agnes was tall and strong and they were of the opinion that Gilbert had surprised her, cutting her throat while standing behind her to avoid blood spatter.
At this stage, the case against Gilbert Farmer was compelling if not conclusive. Authorities questioned the young man, who admitted he was at Cherry Court with Agnes, though he claimed he’d left by 8:00. The murder weapon, too, was missing, but police spoke with a boarder on LaFountain Street who remembered seeing Gilbert outside his mother’s house on the evening of the 11th.
His mother denied it. Paulina Prince held out under questioning for a day or more until the evening of Wednesday the 13th when Chief Smith called at LaFountain Street in the company of Sheriff Thomas Reeves. In Reeves’ words:
“I told [Paulina] she could give us the knife or tell us where it was, or I would bring her down to jail, inasmuch as she had told so many lies about the crime, and that she could produce the knife or put on her things and come with me.”
She caved, told them everything. Yes, Gilbert had been there on the 11th and had begged her to hide his clasp-knife before running north toward Oak Street. The knife was bloody, Paulina recalled, and she’d placed it in a pail and buried it beneath an outbuilding. Show us, Reeves said, and she did.
Early the next morning, Sheriff Reeves visited Gilbert in his jail-cell. “Well,” he said, “we found the knife, Gibbie.”
Gilbert had slept badly, woken early, hadn’t had his breakfast. He held his head in his hands, perhaps, or rose and paced the cell before coming to a decision: he confessed. He told Reeves he had killed Agnes but insisted it was an accident.
Reeves asked:
“How could you cut Ag Willis’s throat and not have a fight with her? Knowing her as well as I do I think she could handle you. My idea is that you must have come up behind her to do it the way you did.”
“I didn’t come up behind her,” said the murderer. “She was almost in front of me.”
Farmer, as he said this, raised his right hand to his throat and made a quick downward movement in imitation of his stroke at the woman, striking as if almost in front of the imaginary object and slightly downward.
“Were you having any trouble,” asked the sheriff.
“We were fooling,” replied Farmer.
“Did she think you were going to injure her?”
“I don’t think she did,” was the reply.
Reeves left Gilbert in his cell, had business to attend to in Colchester. In the afternoon he returned to the jail and asked the young man to change out of his clothes. He examined Gilbert’s trousers, turning out the pockets to reveal bloodstains on the inner lining where he carried his knife. Reeves produced a pair of shears, intending to remove the pocket as evidence, and Gilbert asked if he intended to destroy all of his clothes?
The young man had only one other suit, it transpired, and it was at the cleaners. His brother should have picked it up on the 11th, but didn’t, and for this reason, presumably, Gilbert was still wearing his bloodstained clothes at the time of his arrest. To Reeves this indicated premeditation. That Gilbert had planned to murder Agnes prior to skipping town, wearing different clothes to disguise his identity.
The Sheriff questioned him again, but Gilbert’s story had changed, kept changing. Now he claimed Agnes had killed herself. She’d taken his knife, he said, slashed her own throat. He panicked. Pocketed the knife and ran.
This account was dismissed as unlikely and authorities moved to prosecute. A hearing scheduled for January was delayed and then canceled on account of the judge’s illness and Gilbert remained in jail until September 1900 when a grand jury returned an indictment for first degree murder.
Police had witnesses, blood evidence, a murder weapon. Gilbert’s case was hopeless or near enough to it. He must have realized this because he pled guilty to murder in the second degree to avoid the death penalty. There was no trial. A judge sentenced Gilbert to life in the State Prison, and Sheriff Reeves traveled with him to Windsor.
Edward Willis was already there. He had been arrested for intoxication but perjured himself in court, resulting in a sentence of “no less than one year” in the state prison.
That was in April 1900. Gilbert arrived at Windsor in October and the two men were likely to have encountered one another, though no record survives of such a meeting.
Edward was out by 1901. He moved to Rutland and then to Wallingford where he ran a barbershop from his house and worked at the nearby railway depot, loading the milk-train to Boston. His house was just over the tracks from the depot and it was his habit to walk there whenever a train was expected.
Around noon on April 24, 1910, Edward heard the whistle and crossed the tracks. Some accounts suggest he was drunk but it’s also possible he simply misjudged the distance to the depot or the speed at which the train was traveling because it smashed him with its cowcatcher and sent him flying. He recovered consciousness but his internal injuries were extensive, and he died just three days later. His body was sent to 21 South Champlain Street in Burlington where John and Eva Carasaw still lived with Edward’s daughter Elfreda.
In 1910 Elfreda was 22 and unmarried, mother to a two year-old son and heavily pregnant, besides. Despite her condition she would have helped to lay out her father’s body, perhaps in the same room where Agnes’s funeral had taken place in 1899 and where they would hold Eva’s funeral just one year later when she died after a stroke.
Elfreda was alone at 23. Her parents were dead as was the woman who had raised her from age 11 and she was left with two young children to support. Like Eva before her she fell into sexwork and was arrested multiple times in 1914-15 for which she received a sentence of one-to-three years in the House of Correction. After her release she married in 1917 and moved to New York, one hundred years or more since her great-great-grandfather had first settled in Charlotte.
Gilbert Farmer left Vermont too. In 1923 he was pardoned and released after 23 years and moved to Claremont, New Hampshire, where he married a local woman. The 1930 census records his profession as “gardener,” the same as his father. He’s buried in Claremont.
Agnes Willis is interred in the “free ground” at Burlington’s Lakeview Cemetery. Her daughter Ednah lies nearby as does her husband. Agnes and Edward are buried without headstones in lots 254 and 343, respectively. In death they have become mere numbers, recalling the generations of black farmers who lived and died in the Champlain Valley, who worked the land and melted away.
Cherry Court is a parking lot now, deserted tonight as the hours pass and the rain turns to snow. The pavement shimmers with a “lifelike brightness” and Agnes Willis is climbing the stairs to a room that no longer exists.
Gilbert follows her in. Thirty minutes, an hour. They talk until they’re hoarse and there’s nothing left to say. Agnes is tired, has work in the morning. She retreats to the bedroom but Gilbert won’t leave her alone.
He’s shaking, fumbling at his pockets as she lights the oil-lamp, adjusts the wick. Their outlines flicker across the curtain, a shadow play in which the two stand face-to-face, unmoving.
Until he steps toward her. Until she turns around.
* * *
“The Cherry Court Murder” was sourced primarily from public records and newspapers of the period. Other resources consulted include Discovering Black Vermont by Elise Guyette published in 2010 by the University Press of New England as well as academic papers by Harvey Amani Whitfield and Jane Williamson that appeared in the journal Vermont History in 2007 and 2010, respectively. Complete citations appear below. Information concerning plot numbers at Lakeview Cemetery was obtained from findagrave.com.
Music by Jon Mills. Researched and written by Daniel Mills.
Guyette, Elise A. Discovering Black Vermont: African American Farmers in Hinesburgh, 1790-1890. University Press of New England, 2010.
Williamson, Jane. “African Americans in Addison County, Charlotte, and Hinesburgh, Vermont, 1790–1860.” Vermont History Vol. 78 No. 1: 15-42, 2010.
Whitfield, Harvey Amani. “African Americans in Burlington, Vermont, 1880–1900.” Vermont History Vol. 75, No. 2: 101-123, 2007.
