Clarence Adams
Washington Adams married Dena Hager in the winter of 1854. A son, Marcellus, was born to the couple in 1856 but died nine months later. The next year they welcomed another son, Clarence, and in 1860, the family relocated from Cavendish, Vermont to a farm in nearby Chester.
Clarence grew up in Chester, an only child. In his youth he attended the local schools and worked on his father's farm, laboring from sunup to sundown and usually alone.
He never married, had no interest. Instead he forged close friendships with other young men in the area, including his neighbor Will Dunn and the general store owner James Pollard. He read crime stories by Poe and Gaboriau and fantasized of escaping his father’s farm.
In 1882 he decided to become a detective. He even went so far as to contact the Secret Service in Washington before his parents intervened.
Impossible, they told him, and they were right. Washington Adams was 72 and his health was poor. Clarence was 25, his father’s only son: he must put aside childish things. And he did.
Clarence never left Chester. His parents died and still he worked the farm. He fed the pigs and put the cows to pasture, and in the summer of 1902, he stumbled, as if by chance, into a crime story of his own.
It was July 28, a Monday evening. Clarence, now 44, was driving home from Chester village when two men stopped his wagon. He couldn’t make out their faces but one of them had a shotgun. They wanted money, they said, or they’d shoot.
Clarence was defiant. “I guess not,” he said and stood up in the wagon, meaning to whip the horse. He wasn’t quick enough. The shot struck Clarence through the thigh, knocking him back to the bottom of the wagon. The horse took fright and galloped hard for home.
Clarence reached the house and staggered inside. He lived alone except for a housekeeper, who saw the blood and ran for help. She fetched Dr. Walter Havens, who came directly and tended the injury as best he could.
The town constables arrived. They took down Clarence’s statement, but it was plain to them what had happened. For 16 years a gang of robbers had terrorized the small town of Chester, committing numerous break-ins and burglaries. In 1888 they had held the Allen family at gunpoint and now they had shot Clarence Adams.
Dr. Havens cleaned and dressed the wound, drawing out shards of birdshot, but he wasn’t optimistic: Clarence hadn’t long to live. The pain was intense, intolerable. Hours passed, and Clarence slipped into delirium, near-death, alone but for the dark.
* * *
In 1886 Chester was a town of less than 2,000 residents. Most lived in the villages of Chester, Chester Depot, and North Chester. Outside the villages, the Williams River carved the land into hills and valleys, woodlots and homesteads. Farms were small and scattered and nights were dark, lit only by the moon. In the evening hours the farmhouses of Chester would have appeared as drifting lights, here then gone as their windows flickered and went out. A man could walk the fields at night and remain completely unobserved, following the paths between farms.
The burglaries began on January 22, 1886. That night someone broke into the Robbins & Marsh store. They were after money, presumably, but nothing was taken, suggesting they had been frightened off.
Such happenings were common enough and this first incident attracted little attention until April of 1887 when a thief effected entry to the house of Ira H. Adams, a cousin of Clarence. The family was asleep at the time and didn’t awaken though the robber forced a window to the parlor and escaped with $375 and a gold watch. From Ira Adams’ house the thief proceeded to the train station at Chester Depot and rifled the station agent’s drawer.
On September 23, 1887, a burglar broke into a carriage shop and stole a hand-drill before continuing to the home of general store owner James Pollard. There the thief used the drill to remove a sidelight from the front door. He reached in, lifted the latch. Once inside he slipped into the Pollards’ bedroom as the family slept and stole the store keys from a pair of Pollard’s trousers. He went there next and emptied out the safe.
The next year, 1888, saw the most notorious of the Chester robberies. On August 18th, at around 1 in the morning, two masked men entered the home of George C. Allen in Chester Depot, having previously drugged the guard dog. A third man remained outside, keeping watch.
The masked men carried revolvers and a dark lantern. They proceeded by its light to the bedroom where the Allens were asleep with their four year-old son. They woke the family with the dark lantern, flashing its beam across their faces. One man trained his gun on the Allens and ordered them to keep quiet while the other ransacked the house and opened the safe. They left with around $1,600 in cash, gold, and jewelry.
This incident marked a significant escalation in the robbers’ crimes and the town’s officers took it upon themselves to investigate. Grand Juror F.W. Marsh learned of a guest at a hotel in nearby Londonderry who was said to resemble a wanted burglar. He traveled there and spoke with the hotel’s owner, a man named Jerome Converse.
The next day Converse himself fled the state. Marsh later learned Converse had no alibi for the night of August 18th, that he had left the hotel in the company of a guest. Marsh returned an official complaint against Converse and George Allen paid a detective to trace the hotelier’s whereabouts.
Converse was tracked to Canada and arrested in Maine in 1890. He was returned to Vermont and died in the state prison at Windsor awaiting trial. He never named his accomplices, but one of the men was believed to be a resident of Chester, as he had known of George Allen’s guard dog.
Presumably this same individual was also responsible for the 1887 break-ins at the Adams and Pollard houses, and the robberies continued even after Converse had fled, increasing in frequency. In 1890 George Spear had a revolver stolen while Pollard’s store was robbed on two occasions in 1891 and 1892. In 1894, thieves stole bolts of cloth from O.W. Fletcher’s store as well as a bicycle from the display window of C.H. Walker’s furniture store.
An atmosphere of unease prevailed. From the Burlington Free Press:
Women were afraid to make neighborly calls at night, and people travelling after dark usually took the middle of the road, fearing they might be set upon by the town’s burglars.
On Thanksgiving Day, 1895, a lone burglar broke into the house of Mrs. Lydia Adams. Lydia was Ira Adams’ stepmother as well as Clarence Adams’ great aunt by marriage, the widow of his grandfather’s brother.
Lydia lived alone in a house three miles north of the village but that night she had guests, a married couple named Tarbell. Mrs Tarbell was in bed when she heard someone in the room, crawling past the bed on hands and knees. She roused her husband and the burglar took flight, escaping out the front door.
This was the closest anyone had come to catching the thieves, but the robberies didn’t stop. They didn’t even slow. The Pollard store was burglarized in 1896 and again in 1897 while goods totaling $300 were taken from the Adams & Davis Store in October 1900. In August 1901 a barrel of sugar was stolen from the Chester freight office of the Rutland Railroad and in April 1902 there was a theft of animal feed from the Burdett Brothers’ feed store and the Waterman Brothers mill.
As early as 1901, Charles Waterman had noticed sacks of feed were going missing from his mill. He learned that the burglars regularly entered the mill-building through an un-alarmed upper window accessible from the iron roof of an adjoining shed. Inside the mill the robbers would open the doors and carry out the sacks of feed prior to locking up the doors again and slipping out by the same window through which they had entered. They loaded their wagon and drove away.
By Waterman’s reckoning, the thieves visited the mill as often as twice a week. Following the April 1902 thefts he hired a night watchman, but the burglars didn’t show, and Waterman was obliged to dispense with the watchman’s services. Almost immediately, the thefts resumed.
Waterman consulted the town’s constables. On their advice he laid a trap at the mill, rigging the upper window with a spring-gun. This was essentially a shotgun on a hair-trigger that would fire toward the window if it were opened. Waterman was hesitant to take this step, as he didn’t wish to hurt anyone, but the weekly thefts continued leaving no recourse. He primed the gun with a light charge and loaded it with birdshot, no. 8.
Then waited. The Waterman family lived in a house near the mill. On Monday evening, July 28, 1902, Charles attended a meeting at the town hall in Chester, leaving his 18 year-old son Gardner at home.
Gardner was in bed at 9:00 when he heard a shot. The spring gun. He jumped up and sprinted to town to fetch his father. A few minutes later they returned to the mill, but already, the thieves were gone.
Again they had escaped, but Waterman’s trap had worked. The spring-gun had shot its charge of birdshot and there were bloody streaks on the shed-roof. The thieves were surely be desperate, more likely to make a mistake -- and they did. In fact they already had. Less than an hour after the failed break-in, the constables received word that Clarence Adams had been shot.
Come quickly, they were told. He’s going to die.
* * *
Clarence Adams was 25 when he gave up on becoming a detective. He never lost his interest in crime fiction, however, and in later years, he would become especially fond of the Sherlock Holmes stories.
The burglaries began in 1886. Clarence was 28. Naturally he took an interest in the crimes if only because so many of his friends and relatives were targeted. Among the victims was his friend James Pollard, whose home and store were burglarized on numerous occasions.
In 1889 Pollard urged Clarence to stand for town selectman, which he did, and won election to the post in 1889, 1890, and 1891. In his capacity as selectman Clarence offered a reward for information concerning the burglaries, posting notices about town in the hope that someone might come forward.
No one did. As selectman Clarence failed to catch the robbers, but his three years in the role instilled in him an interest in politics and public service. He went on to serve on the county board of education and was elected town auditor prior to winning election to the Vermont state legislature in 1894 as the Republican representative from Chester.
Clarence spent a single term in the State House, traveling back and forth to Montpelier. It couldn’t last. His mother Dena fell ill with “liver trouble” and Clarence, her only child, was obliged to remain at home, changing bedpans and blankets, hauling slop and spreading manure. He didn’t stand for reelection.
His political ambitions were at an end, but he continued for years as a trustee of Chester’s Whiting Library. His formal education was limited, but Clarence plainly regarded himself as a man of learning, an intellectual, espousing an interests in fields such as spiritualism and mesmerism. He purchased new volumes on behalf of the Whiting Library and maintained an extensive private collection at his father’s farmhouse. His other hobbies included cycling and he is known to have acquired a bicycle in 1894.
The next year he made a chance discovery while at work on the farm. From the Vermont Tribune:
Several pieces of cloth stolen from O.W. Fletcher’s store, when it was burglarized in the summer of 1894, were found recently by Clarence Adams in his pasture, under some spruce trees. One piece of silicia was quite well preserved, considering the length of time it had been exposed to the elements.
It was thought the robbers had dumped the fabric in the pasture not long after the theft, but the find led nowhere. The burglaries continued, much as before, and Clarence, for his part, got on with things.
His mother Dena died in January 1898, aged 77. Clarence’s father Washington followed her in 1901, succumbing to influenza at the age of 88.
Clarence’s parents were gone: he was his own man at last. He could sell the farm and move away but he chose instead to remain. Likely it was too late for him. He was 43 in 1901. Had known no other life, had nowhere else to go.
Mornings he rose for milking and followed his cattle out to pasture. In the evening he drove his wagon between the village and the farm, stopping off on occasion at the Waterman Brothers mill to converse with Charles Waterman.
Such was his life until the evening of July 28, 1902 when he came home dazed and bleeding from a shotgun wound.
Doctor Havens’ examination confirmed Clarence had suffered a single wound to the inside of his left leg about eight inches below the hip. The shot was discharged at extreme close range, burning the clothing, and he had lost a significant amount of blood.
He survived, though, confounding Havens’ expectations. His injury began to heal, if slowly, and Clarence was confined to his bed in the days that followed as Chester’s constables pursued their investigation, near to an arrest at last.
It didn’t take long.
Dr. Havens tended to Clarence’s injuries on July 28-29, and working with another physician, he extracted over 80 fragments of birdshot from the wound. The pellets were misshapen from striking against the bone but they were nevertheless identifiable as No. 8 shot -- the same with which Charles Waterman had loaded the spring gun.
The evidence was clear. Clarence wasn’t waylaid on the road as he claimed but had received his shotgun wound while attempting to break in to the Waterman Brothers mill.
A search warrant was obtained and served on the Adams property. Clarence was in agony, unable even to rise from bed as the constables went from room to room, finding shotguns and revolvers, a dark lantern, a rope-ladder.
His housekeeper told the constables of a room in the farmhouse that was always kept locked and in which she wasn’t allowed. Inside, authorities discovered an astonishing cache of stolen items including roof-shingles, a sugar barrel, and a box of neckties.
Clarence was placed under arrest, a guard assigned to his bedside. The house was in an uproar. Word had spread quickly and Clarence’s many victims converged on the farm. George Spear identified a revolver among the stolen items while J.H. Adams recognized the watch which had been taken from his father Ira in 1887.
Nothing was found to connect Clarence with the 1888 robbery of George C Allen, but authorities were certain he was responsible. On that occasion he had worked with two other men and was thought to have had accomplices in his other crimes as well.
Suspicion soon attached to Will Dunn, Clarence’s old friend and one-time neighbor, now a resident of North Springfield. But Dunn denied all involvement and a search of his home turned up nothing.
Other rumors swirled. The same wagon passed by the Adams farm on two successive nights, provoking fears among the townsfolk that Clarence’s accomplices planned to spring him from the house. His guard was doubled, but no rescue attempt materialized. No accomplices, either.
Clarence was alone, as he had always been, trapped in his bed with two men on watch while newspaper reporters came and went. At first he offered no excuses for himself, no explanations. In time, however, he admitted to at least some of the robberies.
Reporters pressed him for answers. They wanted to know what had motivated him, why he had done it. From The Springfield Reporter:
“Have you ever read Jekyll and Hyde?” That was all [Adams] would consent to say at the time but later he reverted to the subject, saying, “That book fascinated me; when I read it I was fascinated.” He would not assert directly and positively that he was moved to commit his first robbery by reading that startling fiction, but he hinted at it broadly.
It’s certainly possible. The time-frame fits. Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella was first published in the U.S. on January 5, 1886, a mere three weeks before the first of the alleged incidents.
But Clarence didn’t limit himself to referencing Jekyll and Hyde. In conversations with reporters he was eager to portray himself as a man of refinement, a “gentleman burglar” like A.J. Raffles. He detailed the contents of his library and expressed an admiration for Shakespeare, Conan Doyle, Poe.
He would have made a good detective, he said, and told reporters of his frustrated ambitions, the “amusement” he had derived from burglary.
From The Springfield Reporter:
“I never robbed because I needed money, but simply because robbing and afterward listening to the comments of the people amused me. I was never amused by the recreations that please most men. I always sought pleasure in some unusual way and robbing for the fun of it was unusual.”
Perhaps unconsciously, his words recall the opening lines of Poe’s “Alone,” a poem with which Clarence would have been familiar.
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring—
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow—I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone—
And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone—
Clarence was an only child, a lifelong bachelor. All he loved he loved alone -- and all he hated too. Milking cows. Spreading manure. The farm he inherited. A town he couldn’t leave. His hatred festered, and for sixteen years he terrorized friends and relations, revenging himself on the place that was his prison.
Clarence is often called a kleptomaniac but he was never less than meticulous in his crimes. Always careful. Always in control. Probably that was the point. From childhood’s hour he was without future, without agency of his own, except on such nights as he stalked between the houses of his neighbors and watched the lights in their windows blinking out.
There was no trial. After two weeks Clarence was transported to the county courthouse where he pled guilty to six charges of burglary and one of grand larceny, receiving a sentence of nine-to-ten years hard labor at Windsor State Prison.
He lasted eighteen months. During the winter of 1903-04 he contracted pneumonia and died on February 26, 1904, aged 46. He is buried in Cavendish beneath his father’s headstone. He has no epitaph.
Later that year, a rusted-out bicycle was discovered in Chester beside the North Springfield Road. This was quickly identified as the bicycle which had been stolen from C.H. Walker’s store in 1894. It’s unknown when Clarence discarded the bicycle but plainly it had been there some time, secreted between two rocks with the tall grass growing through it.
This discovery preceded and perhaps inspired a rumor in Chester that Clarence was in fact still alive and had faked his death. Townsfolk recalled his interest in mesmerism and theorized he may have hypnotized himself to induce a death-like trance. His old friend Will Dunn had then traveled to Windsor as arranged to collect the body for burial. Once outside the prison walls Clarence had revived himself and escaped to Canada.
Another rumor described how an old friend had encountered Clarence in Montreal in the months after his supposed death. This claim was investigated and found to be without foundation. Similarly an inquiry into the circumstances of Clarence’s death revealed his body had been at least partially embalmed.
The stories persisted, though. The questions too. Like Jerome Converse before him, Clarence had died without naming his accomplices, and there was, of course, the missing money. Clarence had stolen thousands of dollars in cash and goods over sixteen years but comparatively little was recovered in 1902.
But maybe this isn’t so mysterious. Clarence was known to maintain an impressive private library. This allowed him to present himself as a gentleman and a scholar, when in fact, he was a farm laborer with little formal schooling: the appearance was all. Clarence told the papers of his admiration for Shakespeare and Thackeray but locals remembered him quite differently. From The Bethel Courier:
He has a fine library valued at over $4,000 or more, but many of the books have never been looked at. The general opinion is that Adams was never a great reader.
A sum of $4,000 in 1902 would be over $100,000 in 2019. If accurate it suggests Clarence owned thousands of books. Picture them unread, their pages uncut. They would have filled his father’s house, lined up spine-to-spine and shelf-on-shelf, like so many lives un-lived.
* * *
This episode was sourced from public records and from contemporary newspaper accounts appearing in The Burlington Free Press, The Vermont Phoenix, The Vermont Tribune, The Bethel Courier, The St. Albans Daily Messenger, and The Chester Advertiser, among others.
Researched and written by Daniel Mills. Music and theme by Jon Mills.
