Atherton and Almon (Alice Meaker, Part 2)
The house was quiet. April 23, 1880 in the Little River District of Waterbury, and Delphine Ashley waited up alone, “working to pass the time.” At around 10:45 pm she heard a team outside. A black mare passed the house at a walk, pulling a buggy with two passengers inside. She saw them only in profile, their features indistinct for the moon that shone behind them.
Lina Foster lived up the road from the Ashleys. That night, at around eleven o’clock, she started awake. A scream had roused her, a girl crying for her mother. She thought of her own daughter, who was ill, but the cry came again from outside the house as a horse and carriage clattered onto Barber’s Bridge, then stopped.
Her neighbor Betsy Mynhart heard the same team. Betsy lived across the Little River from the Fosters and was awake at eleven when a team entered the covered bridge and halted inside. Fifteen minutes elapsed during which Betsy heard the sounds of “people quieting one another” and of two voices talking. At last the team emerged and halted briefly at the pasture above the bridge before continuing north toward Moscow.
Past the Demeritt farm where Louisa Demeritt waited up for her husband Daniel, who was due back from Montpelier. At around 11:30, she heard a carriage outside. Daniel, she thought, but it wasn’t. The team didn’t stop but continued upriver toward the Risley Farm, where Samuel Mansfield had just finished his supper.
Mansfield saw the buggy twice. The first time was at around midnight when it passed the Risley farm, traveling north. Five minutes later, Mansfield heard the same team traveling south. He looked out. The night was “dusky,” as Mansfield recalled, but he could make out a dark horse and buggy, a man and a woman he didn’t know.
Five witnesses to the same team in the late hours of April 23, 1880 and not one of them understood what they’d overheard or what had transpired inside of Barber’s Bridge. Because there were, in fact, three passengers in the buggy when it passed the Ashley farm at 10:45. An hour later, there were only two, “a man and a woman,” as Mansfield took them, or rather, a boy and his mother: Almon and Emeline Meaker.
* * *
Frank Atherton left Palmer and Dillingham’s law offices in Waterbury village. It was eight o’clock on Monday, April 26, and the deputy was tasked with finding nine year-old Alice Meaker, missing since Friday night.
He called first at the drugstore and spoke with W.E. Carpenter, who confirmed Almon Meaker had purchased a quantity of strychnine on Friday evening. Atherton left Carpenter’s and walked to the general store where he chanced upon Almon himself. They needed to talk, Atherton told him, and Almon agreed to accompany him to E.F. Palmer’s office.
Atherton asked him about Alice, where she was, and Almon repeated the same story Emeline had told. She ran off, he said. Emeline had entered Alice’s bedroom on Saturday morning and found the bedclothes tumbled and no sign of the girl. They all assumed she’d gone to her birth mother and Nellie had sent letters to Charlotte to make inquiries.
And what of the team he’d hired?
Almon explained. He’d needed the buggy, he said, to meet his cousin Flora Meaker, driving east from Waterbury and meeting his cousin on the road. Almon also claimed to have encountered a young girl of about Alice’s age. He didn’t know her, he said, but agreed to drive her ten miles to Stowe so that Almon and Flora didn't return to Waterbury until close to 4 am. They dropped off the team and walked home and Flora breakfasted with the family before leaving the next morning.
The story made little sense. Atherton didn’t believe it and told him as much but Almon insisted he was telling the truth. “I am innocent,” he declared, “and I can prove it.”
They let him go. Almon left the office and Atherton followed him out, Palmer too. The two men visited Bates’ stable where Bates confirmed Almon had returned the buggy at around 3:40 am, but no, he hadn’t seen a young woman, reckoned the boy was on his own.
Nine o’clock. Almon and Nellie were still in Waterbury, hadn’t yet been home, and Atherton and Palmer took this opportunity to cross to Duxbury Corner. They hitched at Eber Huntley’s just opposite the Somerville farm. Palmer went inside while Atherton knocked at the Meakers’ and asked Horace to join him across the street.
Atherton, Palmer, and Huntley were all present at this interview. They asked Horace about Alice’s whereabouts, but the old man “manifested so much innocence, and told such a straightforward story of his knowledge of her disappearance, that they could not help believing him.” They asked him also about Flora Meaker. Had she breakfasted with them on Saturday morning?
No, Horace said, she hadn’t. In fact Flora hadn’t been to Duxbury for some time.
Atherton accompanied Horace back to the Somerville House. By this time it was around 9:30, full-on night, no lights inside but that of candles and oil-lamps, the red glow of a kitchen stove with the darkness curled around it.
Emeline was in the kitchen. Atherton attempted to question her, but the matter proved difficult. The woman was profoundly deaf, completely reliant on lip-reading and the slate she carried. With much effort Atherton was able to make himself understood, but Emeline only repeated the same story she told previously, denying again that she was “guilty of any crime.”
Almon and Nellie returned from Waterbury. They joined Horace and Emeline in the stove-lit kitchen and Atherton saw his chance to disprove the boy’s story. He asked Nellie if she’d written letters to Charlotte as Almon had stated. She hadn’t. Then he inquired after Flora Meaker, if she’d breakfast with the family on Saturday, but Emeline, like Horace, denied it.
Almon must have realized what was happening, what Atherton was doing, but he was scared, maybe, couldn’t think or offer any explanation when Atherton rounded on him at last and accused him of inventing his account of the buggy ride to Stowe.
The boy said nothing. He hung his head so the shadow fell with it, hiding his face, and Emeline, his mother, retreated to another room. Nellie followed. A few minutes later, the younger woman returned and asked Atherton to join her mother in the parlor. Atherton went inside and closed the door. He was alone with Emeline. She said: “I will tell you where the girl is.”
From The Argus and Patriot:
“She is in Canada. She is all right. I will bring her back tomorrow, if you will let me go after her.”
“I am afraid you can’t bring the girl back alive. Almon doesn’t tell a straight story, and I think there is foul play with the girl. You had better tell me; tell me the whole truth.”
The old woman lost her self-control at this, and cried bitterly.
“Mr. Atherton, I can’t tell you the whole truth.”
“Why?”
“You don’t know what they would do to me.”
“Is the girl dead?”
“No, I will bring her back tomorrow, if you will let me go.”
“Whereabouts in Canada is Alice?”
“I can’t tell.”
“How can you get her back from Canada in one day, if you don’t know where she is?”
Emeline couldn’t answer. It was a lie, Atherton knew, all of it, but Nellie came back into the parlor and the older woman stood to rejoin her family. Atherton was left with Nellie. Alone among the Meakers Emeline’s daughter enjoyed “a good reputation among the most respectable people” and was said to be “prepossessing in appearance.” Nellie was aware of the ongoing abuse, certainly, but paid little mind to it, later testifying that Emeline had “chastised Alice as she had her other children” and that she “let [Alice] play, as I thought, too often.”
More importantly Nellie had an alibi for the night of the 23rd as she’d been in Barre, hadn’t arrived in Duxbury until the evening of 24th. Atherton didn’t question her, then, but only asked her to show him Alice’s bedroom.
Nellie fetched a light and led Atherton through the ground floor bedroom where Emeline and Horace slept into a small room with only one window and no exit but through the larger bedroom. Atherton looked around but there was nothing to see and he returned to the kitchen with Nellie where he questioned the family concerning their whereabouts on Friday night. In response, Horace claimed he was in bed by eight while Emeline said she’d stayed up to ten or eleven, as was her habit, and had smoked a pipe before joining her husband in bed. Almon went out, she said, but only to buy more tobacco.
Almon said nothing, either to confirm or deny his mother’s account. “It would be better,” said Atherton, “if he told the whole truth” but the boy choked up and couldn’t speak.
Atherton escorted him into the lamplit parlor. They sat alone in the half-dark, Almon’s skin gone sallow, his eyes black.
Where’s Alice? Atherton asked.
Montreal, he replied. The boy claimed he’d collected the team from Bates’ stable then driven with Alice and Emeline to the depot in Richmond. They left Alice at the station, trusting her to the care of the attendant. The girl was to travel on to Canada as arranged and the Meakers had even given her $6.70 to pay her way.
Another story, another lie. Probably they had worked it out between them, mother and son, while Atherton was with Nellie.
He changed the subject.
From The Argus and Patriot:
“What did you do with the strychnine you got at Will Carpenter’s Friday night?”
Almon seemed astonished, as this was the first intimation he had had that Atherton know anything about any strychnine.
“Didn’t you give it to the little girl?”
No answer.
“Didn’t you give the little girl the strychnine, and throw her into the river?”
Almon denied it. “We carried her to Richmond,” he said, but proved unable to describe the area around the depot. The boy was floundering, sinking. He clung to his lies as to a lifebuoy, insisting that Alice was alive, that she was in Canada.
Atherton excused himself, went outside. He crossed the street to confer with Huntley and Palmer and afterward returned to the Meakers’ house where he “induced” Almon to join them at Huntleys’, presumably to provide a formal statement in the presence of witnesses.
The men gathered in Eber Huntley’s parlor and Almon repeated the same story he’d told to Atherton. The Richmond depot. The train-ride to Canada. But the boy fell quiet upon further questioning, choking back a sob as he felt the buoy slipping from his grasp.
“Almon,” Atherton said. “You want to tell me the whole story, don’t you?”
And that was all it took.
Almon, drowning, said he’d talk, but only to Atherton, and the deputy showed him into the Huntleys’ kitchen where they could be alone.
“Go on,” said Atherton, “and tell me just as it is, is she alive?”
“No,” Almon replied. “She had gone to a better land.”
“Did you murder her?”
“We gave her that strychnine.”
“Why did you do it?”
But Almon didn’t know, not really. “She wasn’t a very good girl,” he told Atherton. It was “hard to get along with her,” he said, and he “thought she would be better off,” but he failed to offer the deputy a convincing motive for the murder.
Presumably because he didn’t have one. Unlike his mother, who detested Alice and wanted rid of her. We gave her that strychnine, he’d said, leaving Atherton little doubt that Emeline was involved for all the boy tried to shield her.
The questioning continued. Though Almon had confessed to murder, he proved strangely reluctant to disclose the location of the body, and it was late, after midnight, when he finally admitted to burying Alice in a “muck-hole” near the Little River settlement in Waterbury. They’d needed the buggy to transport the body, but Atherton recalled Almon had arranged to hire the team on Thursday, a day before the killing, indicating the murder was premeditated.
Most likely Emeline had conceived the plot then convinced her “feeble-minded” son to help carry it out. It would have been easy enough, but the same weakness that allowed his mother to manipulate Almon now led him to confess everything. He even offered to take Atherton to the burial site, provided he told no one where they were going, not until after they’d returned. Atherton agreed. The request was strange but Almon likely feared his mother and didn’t want her to know he had confessed, though here, again, his weakness caused him to incriminate her.
From The Argus and Patriot:
[Atherton] then asked him which gave the strychnine to the girl, he or his mother?
His answer was: “I don’t want to bring my mother in; it is too bad, Frank.”
“Your mother was with you all the time?”
“Yes.”
Atherton had heard enough. It was time, he said. They were going to get the body. Almon asked if he could retrieve his coat and the deputy assented. They crossed the street. Half-past-twelve, but the Meakers were awake and waiting: Emeline, Nellie, Horace.
Almon took down his overcoat. He told his family he was only stopping in, that he’d be back in “two or three hours,” but Emeline must have understood what had happened, because she collapsed into incoherent moaning, weeping for her son or the noose she’d placed about his neck. “Take me, Mr Atherton,” she said, “for I am the guilty one.”
Almon attempted to comfort her. “Don’t feel bad, mother,” he said. “I have told them all. There is nothing left back. I am going with Frank.”
They embraced. “My darling boy,” Emeline said.
Nellie was present and Horace too. Both witnessed this strange scene and might have wondered at its meaning, though it’s unclear how much they understood. Horace spoke to Atherton but only briefly and only to ask that he bring the boy home when they were finished.
They went outside. The night air was damp but not unpleasant, wind blowing from the southwest as they crossed to Huntleys and made ready the team. Eber Huntley produced some coarse wraps and sacking which Atherton placed into the wagon’s box before climbing up and sitting himself next to Almon. Huntley crossed the street to join the Meakers while E.F. Palmer climbed into the wagon beside the deputy. Atherton drove, letting Palmer off at his house in Waterbury then continuing west with Almon, following the Winooski River.
Slow going, no doubt. The track was muddy, deeply rutted, and the dark pressed close about the lanterns. Visibility was limited, all sounds sharpened. Clopping hooves, creaking wheels, the river beside them whispering, shushing him, but Almon wouldn’t be quiet. They neared the road to Little River and the boy began to talk.
* * *
Years later, in his published confession, Almon described his mother’s hatred of Alice, how she had beaten the girl and once she had even asked Almon to drive Alice into the mountains and abandon her. He refused, wanted no part of it, but Emeline kept at him. She told him it was his religious duty to help his mother. Besides, she said, Alice would be “better off” in heaven, and strychnine poisoning was painless, an easy death. When that failed Emeline threatened to leave, telling Almon “if [he] did not consent to help kill Alice, she would go away and [they] would have to make the butter and cheese all summer.”
He caved. Purchased the poison, arranged to hire a team. In his own words:
Friday night, the night of the murder. I went immediately to Mr. Bates, a livery keeper, and got a team, and went over home and put the team back of the barn. Mother had put Alice to bed with her clothes on; and Mother took her out of the window, telling her that we were going to ride. My father was in bed. Mother and Alice walked a short way up the hill through the field and came to the road where I had the team. They got in and I drove through the street.
The night was cold, clear, moon and stars like glass shards glittering. Alice wore a red calico dress and apron with the hat from her aunt and a cloak to keep off the chill. “Going to ride,” Emeline had told her and now they were driving west toward Richmond and the railway depot. Alice might have been excited or frightened or perhaps just resigned, beaten and starved beyond all caring.
On Henry Hill in Waterbury, near Thorndyke’s, Almon stopped the wagon and produced a bottle of “sweetwater,” likely maple sap, which he’d brought with them, along with Alice’s drinking cup, a gift from her mother. Remember me, it said. He poured sweetwater into the cup then mixed in powder from a glass vial. He handed the cup to Alice. Drink, he said, and she did.
That’s what he told Atherton, anyway, but this version of events is potentially contradicted by the testimony of one Charles Thompson, an acquaintance of Almon, who had chanced to see the buggy on the Henry Hill in Waterbury at around 9:15 pm and later testified:
[...] they went out of sight about 10 rods from me after I first saw them; when I got to the knoll I saw them again, and when I got near them they started the horse, which had been standing; I saw the child’s hands flying up, but heard nothing.
Three nights later and Almon passed over the same place with Atherton. He told the deputy how it had happened. How Alice had taken the poison in sweetwater. How he’d thrown the bottle into the Little River where it shattered.
“Did she suffer?” Atherton asked.
“No,” Almon said. “She died very easy. Didn’t struggle but once or twice.”
It wasn’t true, couldn’t be, but Atherton didn’t challenge him. Death by strychnine poisoning, as he would have known, is slow and intensely painful. Symptoms typically appear within fifteen to twenty minutes of ingesting the poison and can include sweating or irregular heartbeat, muscle spasms and uncontrollable shaking that worsens with time. The jaw clenches. The lips curl up to bare the teeth and the body arches backward.
The lungs fail. The brain asphyxiates.
“If I had thought her death would have been so terrible,” Almon later admitted, “I never could have consented to aid her.”
Alice didn’t die “easy” as Emeline had promised. Witness accounts suggest she ingested the poison between 9:15 and 9:30 but was still conscious as late as 11:00 when Lina Foster woke to a commotion outside: a girl crying for her mother, a team on Barber’s Bridge.
The same covered bridge toward which Atherton drove them, following River Road past Randall’s Mills toward Ricker Mountain, traveling five miles in around forty minutes. They crossed over Barber’s Bridge and took the north fork toward Moscow with the Little River to their left and Ralph Barber’s pasture on their right.
“This is the place where the girl died,” Almon said. “Right here.”
Betsy Mynhart had seen the buggy there at around 11:15 on April 23. Western corn and oats were later discovered on the ground, spilled from the horse’s feedbag, and Alice’s hat was found there as well, evidently discarded when Almon covered her head with a sack.
Atherton asked the boy what he’d done with the body, where he’d put her.
“Drive on,” Almon said, but Atherton pressed the reins into his hand.
“You will know where to stop,” he said.
Almon walked the horse through farm-fields and wetlands, a stand of trees without bud or leaf, branches overhead like a net closing round. The lamps threw shadows before them, black and impenetrable where once all about was moonlight, silver and gleaming round the edges of John White’s watering troth.
Again the tub appeared out of the dark, and Almon drew up on the reins. “This is the place,” he said, and so it was, though later witness statements would indicate Emeline and Almon had driven past the White property initially and continued north beyond the Demeritt and Risley farms before turning around.
Almon pulled off to the left and drove up to the rails of John White’s pasture. Atherton hitched the buggy to the fence while the boy dismounted. Opposite the pasture was a stretch of swampy bottomland toward which Almon began to walk. He crossed the road and Atherton followed with the lantern. The deputy stepped from the highway, sank into the muck.
Fifteen feet, twenty. The water swirled black about his ankles and Almon loomed up ahead, elongated, a shadow at the lantern’s edge. He’d stopped, Atherton noticed, stood with one arm extended, pointing. Atherton approached. His light revealed a pile of loose muck, fresh-cut from the ground, and beside it, a jumble of stumps and alder branches with a fence-post thrown across the top.
Atherton set to work. He removed the stumps and branches then plunged his hands in the water, digging with his fingers in the muck until he felt her head, limbs, trunk. He braced himself, pulled. The mud sloughed off the body and Alice was in his arms.
Three days dead. Fetid and stiff, an awful burden. Atherton carried the body out of the swamp and laid her on the ground. Alice was dressed in shoes and stockings and a red calico dress, while her head was covered by a small sack --in some accounts a cloak -- which hid the face so he couldn’t see her eyes, the accusation in them.
Help me, he said, and Almon came over. He took hold of Alice’s feet while Atherton hooked his hands beneath her armpits. They carried her to the wagon. Spread sacking on the ground, secured the wraps about her. With his horsewhip Atherton measured the inside of the box against the length of the body, but it was no good: she wouldn’t fit.
2:30 am. Five miles from Waterbury with the dark hills surrounding and no light but the lantern’s beam or Ambrose’s face where it hung over him, pale and shining, another moon.
From The Argus and Patriot:
[Atherton] told Almon to get into the buggy. He did so. Then he unhitched the horse, and turned the team round. Almon asked him what he was going to do with the body. In reply, Atherton lifted the corpse of the murdered child towards her murderer, and commanded him to take it in his arms. Whining like a dog at the terrible punishment, he obeyed and sat with the ghastly object by his side. Said Atherton “Put your arms around it and hold it up, so it will not be marred,” With brutish cries of terror, the miserable wretch clasped the rigid remains of this innocent victim, and in that way they rode to Meaker’s home in Duxbury.
Atherton’s trial testimony describes the same events, if in less colorful terms:
I then took my whip and measured box to body; could not get body into box; then requesting Almon to get into buggy; put body into buggy beside him; body between us, the head on his shoulder; he had his arm around it [...]
The decision was a practical one, Atherton claimed, necessitated by circumstances outside of his control, but it’s possible his actions were also punitive, motivated by his anger at Almon or himself.
“She died easy,” the boy had told him, lying, unable to admit to the consequences of his actions, the harm he’d done. A means of coping, presumably, but Atherton had no such recourse, could not escape his responsibility for Alice’s death. His own inaction had placed her in that muddy hole as surely as he had dug her out of it, and still the guilt remained, twisting in his gut then striking outward: he pressed the corpse into Almon’s arms.
“Hold it up,” he said.
Almon took the body. Always he did as he was told. Hire a buggy, his mother said. Buy strychnine from the drug store. An easy death, she’d told him, but it wasn’t. He mixed the poison into the sweetwater, forced Alice to drink from her cup. After twenty minutes she began to convulse, shaking violently, and wouldn’t die though an hour passed and more while Almon drove north along River Road and under the roof of Barber’s bridge.
For fifteen minutes they remained inside while Alice spasmed and screamed and gasped for air. Emeline covered her mouth but would have struggled to hold her as the seizures worsened. Almon must have helped, pinning Alice down with his body as her back arched and the breath went out of her. It hung like smoke inside the bridge.
He told none of this to Atherton. He couldn’t admit it, maybe, not even to himself, though he clung to the girl’s body as he’d held her in death and the stench of decay was in his mouth and nose. They passed Barber’s pasture, drawing near to the covered bridge and the Baptist church with its view of the river, where the faithful would gather for baptisms.
They waded in soiled, came out clean, but some sins can’t be forgiven: some stains can’t be erased. Almon sat in the buggy with Alice beside him, her head on his shoulder and face pressed close. The bridge appeared ahead of them, its open mouth, but Atherton didn’t slow. He drove them into the dark.
Episode 11: Alice Meaker Part 2 was sourced from public records and newspapers of the period, including The Vermont Watchman and The Argus and Patriot as well as author W. Patrick Yaeger’s That Beautiful Vale Above the Falls: The Little River Region of Waterbury, Vermont Comes Alive Once Again published in Waterbury in 1995.
Music by Jon Mills. Researched and written by Daniel Mills.
