The East Hill Murder (Marietta Ball, Part 1)
George Ball was in his fifties, a widower. For years he’d worked as a butcher and produce dealer in St. Albans, but in 1871, his health was failing. His sons were grown and living in California and his daughter Marietta was learning the dressmaker’s trade.
Marietta was 17 or 18 when it happened. One evening she attended to an errand in the Village but lingered overlong, it seems, and didn’t start for home ‘til after dark. She followed Main Street south past Parsonsville then onto the bridge over Rugg Brook.
A stranger accosted her, a man. She heard his footfalls behind her, heard them quicken. He chased her and she ran, sprinting for home in petticoats and crinoline.
She got away. She reached her father’s house where she collapsed, exhausted. Her assailant was never identified, and it seems the incident wasn’t investigated.
Her family was left unnerved, fearful, but Marietta remained undaunted. She walked about town the same as she had always done, alone and without escort, even after dusk.
“Whom should I fear?” she asked. “I have injured no one, and what have I that any one should want?”
* * *
Marietta didn’t become a dressmaker. Two or three years later, in the spring of 1874, she accepted the job of schoolmistress at St. Albans’ No 2 schoolhouse. This was on East Hill, around 1½ miles from the Village. A farmer named Wanton Abell offered her the position and she took up lodgings at his house on the Hill.
The No. 2 schoolhouse was situated at the intersection of Hill Road and an unnamed track that ran south to the Fairfield Road. The Abells lived on Hill Road, not far from the schoolhouse, and it was Marietta’s habit to walk to school each morning, passing farm-fields and pastures and the houses of her neighbors.
In 1874 the Hill was home to Aldis Brainerd’s lumber mill as well as numerous French Canadian families, who worked at the mill or farmed the land and whose children attended the No. 2 schoolhouse. Marietta was young and energetic and proved quite popular with her pupils, though there was some unpleasantness with a French family named Revor, who became angry with Marietta after she punished one of the Revor children. While this was an isolated incident it suggests she may not have felt entirely at home among the French families on the Hill.
Perhaps for this reason she didn’t weekend there but instead spent every Saturday and Sunday at the house of her friend Mrs Clara Paige on the Fairfield Road. The Paige farm was around 1.5 miles from the schoolhouse, a brisk walk of half-an-hour along the connecting road.
On Friday, July 24, 1874, Marietta dismissed her class for the week and closed up the schoolhouse. As usual she intended to pass the weekend with Clara Paige and left directly from school, carrying her nightdress, slippers, and underclothes in a bundle under arm.
The day was fine and hot. The Collins farm lay along the way and Marietta walked a few of the Collins children home before parting from them at around 3:30 pm. She said goodbye and continued on her own, following the road into a swath of cleared land and broken timber.
Marietta never reached the Paige farm. Clara Paige was surprised, if not especially alarmed when Marietta failed to show. Her friend was young and sociable: something, surely, had come up. She thought she might hear from Marietta the next day, Saturday, but the afternoon came and went and still no word and Clara grew concerned.
She thought of the previous weekend, which Marietta had spent at her house, and of an incident that had taken place on Monday the 20th. That morning they woke to the sound of rain and Clara offered to drive her friend to school. Marietta agreed and the two women set off in the carriage, taking the road north through fields and clearings.
At one point in the journey Clara spied a man off in the distance. He was crossing the farm-fields, approaching the road and drawing near to it. The women expected to meet him farther along, but he never appeared. Clara was frightened. She thought the man was hiding, lying in wait. She dropped Marietta at the schoolhouse then sent word for her husband to meet her there as she didn’t wish to make the journey home on her own.
Five days later, July 25, and Clara must have felt the same fear, for she drove to the Collins farm that evening. Oh, yes, they informed her, Marietta had passed the house on Friday afternoon. She was going to your place. Didn’t she arrive?
By then it was dusk, getting on toward dark. Marietta had not been seen in over 24 hours. A search party was raised and dispatched, consisting of various local men including Clara’s husband Foster Paige as well as Frank Harris, a young African American man and former slave who rented a house on the Paige property.
The men searched the track south of the Collins farm. Near dark they discovered a place of ambush or “ambuscade” behind some bushes where the branches had been cut back to give a view of the road. A nearby fence-rail showed signs of whittling, as though a man had killed time while hiding, and there were willow-withes and carpet fibers found nearby.
This ambuscade was situated ⅓ mi south of the Collins farm, around 30 paces north of a dry stream-bed crossed by a simple plank bridge. Here the searchers spotted a crude mask beside the roadway, ill-concealed beneath a stone. The mask was fashioned from a square of rough carpeting that had been rolled into a cone. Holes were cut for eyes and mouth and the corners secured with willow-withes. The fabric reeked of damp, of old barns and rotten hay.
Night fell. The men lit lanterns and continued the search, separating from one another and spreading out through the woods. Around 1 am, Frank Harris gave a cry and the others came running to join him in a stand of broken timber around 80 yards east of the road.
The body lay beside a birch stump. Marietta was arranged as though for burial with arms at her sides and ankles neatly crossed. Her hat lay beside her, undamaged, but her skirts were torn and disarrayed and her over-skirt was pulled up over her face.
No one touched the body: no reason for it now, nothing to be done. A messenger ran to the Village to summon authorities while the men settled themselves to wait. They kept watch over Marietta’s body while the east turned violet, then blue, summer dawn coming.
Authorities reached the scene at around 4 in the morning. Marietta’s body was placed in a wagon and transported to the Paige farmhouse, where a coroner’s inquest was opened under the direction of H.H. Farnsworth.
Farnsworth was a carpenter by trade who had lately moved into the insurance business. He was Justice of the Peace for St. Albans but had no legal training and his experience as a criminal investigator was rather limited.
Doctors Fassett and Hall performed the autopsy. They determined that Marietta was killed by a blunt instrument, probably a rock. Her skull was broken, caved in one side, and the bones of her left hand were shattered where she had attempted to defend “her virtue.” It was of no use. Marietta was raped then murdered and there were numerous bruises and scratches on her body where she had been dragged through the underbrush.
The autopsy must have lasted much of the morning. During this time news of the murder began to spread. At his home in the village, Aldis Brainerd learned of the killing and set off at once for the Hill.
Brainerd owned the steam mill and chemical works on East Hill and would later be a co-owner of the tray factory in West Jay. His father was a U.S. senator and his older sister Ann Eliza had married J Gregory Smith, a former governor of Vermont. The city of Brainerd, Minnesota was named for his family.
According to Brainerd’s account, he reached the crime scene early that morning and found a crowd had already assembled. Brainerd had been an officer in the Union Army and served as Marshal for Vermont at the Gettysburg exercises where Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. Now he pressed the onlookers into lines and set them marching through the fields and woods.
They found blood, footprints. A fragment of hair ribbon. A broken watch stopped at 4:20. Marietta was known to have parted from the Collins children at half-past-three and had likely reached the ambuscade at around 3:45. The evidence suggested her killer had waited for her to pass before stepping out from the bushes in a crude mask.
Marietta fled. Again she ran but this time the man was too quick. He caught up with her at the plank bridge and tackled her over the side. This was in late-July, high summer, and the stream was running dry. They hit the ground together and wrestled in the gravel. Marietta fought hard. She tore off the mask and scratched at the man’s face but he took up a rock and battered her with it until she lay quiet, unconscious.
Her attacker feared discovery. He hid the mask under a rock then dragged Marietta across the streambed to a stand of sapling trees, where the assault continued. Afterward he broke her skull with a heavy stone then dragged her body deeper into the woods.
This was difficult work, evidently, for he’d stopped at one point to rest against a fallen tree then dragged her a little farther before his strength failed him. He may not have intended to kill her, not at first, but she had removed his mask and seen his face. Now he covered hers, pulling up what was left of her skirt then crossing her ankles before stealing away with her nightshirt and linens. He slipped into the woods and cut through farm-fields, avoiding the roads, making for the Hill.
* * *
St. Albans was in an uproar. Marietta’s murder was actually the second such crime in the span of a single week following the murder of a French Canadian man named Joe Menard on July 20. These two crimes weren’t thought to be related but no doubt both contributed to “a general feeling of insecurity” and “intense excitement” as described in the newspapers.
The town spared no expense in its investigation. A reward of $3,000 was offered for information leading to an arrest and a criminal inquiry was launched under H.H. Farnsworth’s direction with the assistance of Sheriff Price and numerous town officials.
Frank Harris was immediately suspected. Hardly surprising: the 19th Century was an era of widespread racial prejudice and Harris was a black man who had found the body. He was arrested later that same day and confined in the jail at St. Albans, though this may have been for his own safety. One report describes a near-riot in which Harris’ house was targeted and vandalized and authorities may well have feared a lynching.
Harris was released the next day without charge as it transpired he had an alibi for the time of the murder. Soon afterward he took himself off to Maine — likely fearing for his safety — and remained there for some years before returning to St. Albans.
Attention turned to other suspects. An old French Canadian tramp was arrested in Swanton and quickly released for lack of evidence while members of the Revor family were also questioned and released due to their prior disagreement with Marietta.
A more promising lead came from neighboring Richford, where a stranger had appeared on the morning of Monday, July 27 and asked the way to Canada. This man mentioned the murder in St Albans, though word hadn’t yet reached Richford, and it would seem his appearance closely matched that of a former freight conductor — never named — who had courted Marietta around a year prior to the murder.
Except that Marietta had rejected him and the man had made threats against her. Word had reached the railway and he was dismissed from his position. It’s unclear from reports if the man in Richford was, in fact, the rejected suitor, but in any event, investigators were able to find the freight conductor, who proved an alibi.
That same day, July 27, Marietta’s funeral was held at George Ball’s house in the village. Ball’s grief can scarcely be imagined, his anger. He was 53 years old and infirm of health, nearing the end of a life in which he’d already lost so much.
His first child, a son, died in infancy while another son, Edwin, died in 1858, aged 2. His wife died in 1862, aged 41, but Ball didn’t remarry, raised his six children on his own. In later years his three sons moved away to California and Ball was left dependent on his three daughters.
Now Marietta was dead and he wanted justice, vengeance. Like many in St Albans, he suspected Frank Harris at first but soon changed his mind. Ball confided in his friend Dr. John Branch that he didn’t suspect anyone on the Hill, citing as evidence the killer’s decision to wear a mask.
As he saw it, Marietta knew everyone on the Hill and saw many of them each day apart from weekends. They couldn’t have expected to escape identification, not realistically, not even with a mask. More likely, he thought, the killer was a resident of the Village.
Ball wasn’t alone in this belief, but Farnsworth continued to focus his resources on the Hill, assisted by private detective Noble Flanagan, perhaps the preeminent investigator in the Champlain Valley. Flanagan was a former sheriff and police chief, who had previously investigated the 1865 Griswold murder as well as the 1868 Russell killing.
Flanagan learned of the murder at home in Burlington on June 27 and approached authorities in St Albans the next day while he was in town on unrelated business. He offered his services and they accepted.
Justice Farnsworth also received assistance from an altogether more unlikely source. Spiritualist medium Lucy Cook, better known as “Sleeping Lucy,” directed investigators to question employees at Brainerd’s mill. It seems the spirits had informed Lucy that Marietta’s killer worked at the mill and would be found with scratches on his face.
As it happens, investigators did question the lumbermen, but no doubt they would have done so anyway. Three weeks after the murder, the town selectmen released a public statement confirming that “every person, man woman or child, living within the distance of one mile in either direction from the scene of the murder […] has been subjected to a most thorough examination […]”
Among those questioned were the French Canadian mill-workers, who were interviewed before Justice Farnsworth. One of these men, known as “LaPaize,” was observed to have scratches on his face, but LaPaize testified he had acquired these while berry picking and another French Canadian man alibi’d him for the time of the murder. All were released.
Marietta’s landlord Wanton Abell was also swept up in the inquiry. Abell had known his lodger planned to walk to the Paige Farm that afternoon and furthermore he was unable to provide investigators with an alibi. He explained he’d spent the afternoon at work in one of his fields near the schoolhouse but the heat must have got to him for he lay down in the shade and slept. Marietta was killed between 3:30 and 4:30 that afternoon at which time Abell was, by his own reckoning, fast asleep. No one saw him.
Farnsworth remained suspicious but ultimately was forced to release Abell for lack of evidence. Abell, naturally, was upset. He feared for his reputation and called on his friend and former employer Aldis Brainerd for advice. At this meeting, Brainerd advised Abell
to watch carefully any occurrences in the vicinity of the crime, particularly the departure of any person from that neighborhood, and to report any developments to me, but to no one else, impressing upon [Abell] that it was to his own advantage to clear up the matter, if possible.
In truth it was to Brainerd’s advantage as well. The investigation had stagnated in the weeks since the murder and rumors were now in circulation that the killer wasn’t a resident of East Hill at all but rather Brainerd’s own nephew George Gregory Smith.
Smith was an attorney in St Albans as well as the eldest son of J Gregory Smith, the former governor and a highly successful railway magnate. The Smith mansion was an impressive structure on Hill Road not far from the No. 2 schoolhouse. In 1864 the mansion was famously a target of the Confederate raid on St Albans, as Smith was, at that time, the state’s governor. The Confederate bank robbers attempted to enter the mansion but were met in the doorway by Ann Eliza Smith — George’s mother and Aldis Brainerd’s sister — wielding an unloaded pistol. The robbers fled and Ann Eliza was later breveted a colonel for her role in organizing the pursuit.
Families like the Smiths or the Brainerds enjoyed a degree of comfort and prosperity unimaginable to most residents of the Hill. The gulf could not be bridged. A young girl was murdered and authorities in the Village turned to the Hill even as folks on the Hill looked to the Village. The story that emerged from these rumors went something like this:
George Smith, a 29 year-old bachelor, met Marietta while attending a dance at a hotel in Bakersfield. Smith had insulted Marietta — or was it that Marietta had insulted Smith? — but either way this incident had somehow precipitated the events of July 24.
Marietta’s father George Ball was among those firmly convinced of Smith’s guilt. The Ball family was on familiar terms with the Smiths, though not overly friendly with them, and Marietta certainly did attend dances in Bakersfield. The story seemed plausible to him. Possibly he was also thinking of that earlier incident in 71 or 72 when an unknown man had chased Marietta through the streets of the Village.
Ball discussed the rumors with his friend Dr. John Branch, a resident of the Hill, who took it upon himself to communicate Ball’s suspicions to authorities. Detective Flanagan questioned George Smith and confirmed the young man had an unimpeachable alibi for the time of the murder, as he was playing billiards with a friend at the Welden House hotel.
That wasn’t enough. The rumors persisted, spread by Branch and Wanton Abell as well as George Ball, though Marietta’s father wouldn’t remain in St. Albans for much longer.
In mid-August George Ball’s eldest son returned to Vermont for a visit. Presumably he encouraged his father to join him in California, because it wasn’t long afterward that Ball decided to relocate. Farnsworth’s investigation was stalled and he might have felt he had no reason to remain. His circumstances were as straitened as ever, but he came into money, somehow, and settled his affairs before leaving for California in November 1874.
Dr Branch spoke with his friend not long before his departure. Ball, it transpired, had changed his mind: he no longer suspected George Smith, believing, instead, that Frank Harris was responsible. Branch was taken back. Possibly Ball had interpreted Harris’s flight to Maine as proof of his guilt, but in this aboutface the doctor saw instead the evidence of a larger conspiracy.
Soon afterward a new rumor emerged that George Ball had been paid off by George Smith’s father. Noble Flanagan, too, was the subject of gossip as Branch and others believed he had been bribed to confirm Smith’s alibi and eliminate him from the inquiry.
And Branch didn’t limit himself to spreading rumors, either. In late 1874 or early 1875 Branch met with H.H. Farnsworth to urge further investigation into George Smith. Farnsworth declined. As far as he was concerned Smith had been cleared and that was an end of it.
It should have been, anyway, but local elections in 1875 and the formation of a district No 2 vigilance committee resulted in a flurry of new accusations against Smith, obliging the young lawyer to attempt to clear his name. In a letter dated July 3, 1875 he wrote to the selectmen of St. Albans and requested a public hearing into the allegations against him.
This hearing took place over two days on July 20-21, 1875. As part of these proceedings, Detective Flanagan was called and questioned. Flanagan confirmed he had interviewed the young lawyer and verified his alibi, and no, he had not been bribed. George Ball wasn’t paid off, either. It emerged that Ball had borrowed a sum of money from a family friend prior to moving and his sons had subsequently repaid the debt.
The hearing also examined the nature of Smith’s relationship with Marietta, though it quickly became apparent that there was, in fact, no relationship. William Chadwick, Bakersfield hotelier, confirmed Marietta had attended dances there, but he didn’t know Smith, hadn’t seen him before, and a friend of Marietta likewise testified she had never mentioned Smith.
Smith himself addressed the selectmen on July 21. He denied he knew Marietta and protested the indignities to which he had been subjected, “feeling that it was beneath the dignity of any gentleman to submit to a public examination when not a particle of proof existed against [him].”
By this point Smith’s innocence was obvious to all assembled and his statement met with general applause. The young man went on to excoriate the gossips, calling out Dr. Branch by name and challenging them to provide evidence for their accusations:
“Any one who thinks they are in possession of any fact or circumstance that tends to connect me in any manner with this crime, I want them to produce it now.”
No one came forward. Smith wasn’t cross-examined and the hearing concluded with his absolute exoneration. “With this examination,” announced Selectman Newton, “the investigation of the murder so far as the town is concerned, ceases.”
Authorities had followed every clue, eliminated each suspect. They had taken each path to its end and found no thoroughfare, no way forward.
The public hearing ended on Wednesday, July 21. The 24th was a Saturday -- one year to the day since Marietta closed her schoolhouse and met her killer on the road.
That morning a group of some 150 persons assembled on East Hill near the site of the attack. Prayers were said and the Rev. W.B. Howard delivered “an impressive discourse” in remembrance of Marietta in which he urged the St. Albans community to “unite for the common defense, and for the suppression of crime.”
The sermon concluded. The mourners formed themselves into a solemn procession and advanced through the broken timber to the place where she was killed. They laid flowers and wreaths, arrayed the trees in black crape. They beautified that place of horror and then they said goodbye.
Two weeks later on August 7, 1875, a monument was placed at the site consisting of a white marble column with the following inscription:
MARIETTA N. BALL MURDERED JULY 24th 1874, AGED 20 YEARS
Passing along this highway, from the school which she was teaching, it is supposed that she was assailed by a masked villain from an ambuscade, was taken to a thicket midway between the road and this spot, and killed by blows on her head. Her body was then taken here, laid out, and was found at 1 o'clock A.M., July 26th.
A masked villain. They cut the words in stone, as though they’d never know his name. The mask would never slip, they thought, never fall away. They were wrong.
—to be continued—
* * *
This episode was sourced from public records and from newspaper accounts of the time appearing in The St. Albans Advertiser, The St. Albans Daily Messenger, The Burlington Free Press, The Burlington Democrat, and The Vermont Journal, among others.
Researched and written by Daniel Mills. Music and theme by Jon Mills.
