The McCaffrey Murders

Tressa was up. Lillian Gallup heard movement upstairs and assumed it was her houseguest Tressa Dustin. It was just after eight in the morning. Lillian waited but Tressa didn’t come down. An hour later, Lillian went upstairs and found the guest room empty. 

A nightdress lay on the floor, its sleeves inside out, as though removed in haste. Tressa’s coat and hat were in the room as were her shoes and clothing. Only a brown shawl was missing. Evidently, she had wrapped this about herself before leaving the room in her stockings and Union underwear.

Tressa McCue Dustin was 28 in the spring of 1906. For much of her life she had worked as a schoolteacher in central Vermont. She was popular with students and within her community, described as “bright and capable” and possessing an “attractive personality.” Almost certainly she enjoyed the work as well, for she refused to give up teaching, even after her 1905 marriage to the farmer William Lyon Dustin of East Craftsbury.

Tressa was reportedly excited to begin her married life but something, somehow, had gone crooked, and by the winter of 1905-1906, she was said to be “greatly depressed,” afflicted with debilitating headaches. William Dustin later remarked she “acted peculiarly,” and “didn’t look at things right.” Her doctor recommended a short rest, perhaps a stay away from home.

The necessary arrangements were made, and on February 28, 1906, Tressa traveled to West Berlin with her brother Martin to attend the wedding of their cousin Mary. Likely she stayed over in West Berlin after the wedding before traveling on to Barre in the morning and coming south by train to visit her friends the Gallups, arriving in Brattleboro on Tuesday, March 1.

Once in Brattleboro, her condition didn’t improve. She consulted a doctor and received a prescription, but it was of little use. At the Gallups’ house she would sit with her head in her hands for a long time unspeaking. If pressed she would only say her head pained her. 

Siblings B.S. and Lillian Gallup lived with their mother on Tyler Street in Brattleboro north of the town center. A railroad embankment lay just behind the house with the Connecticut River beyond.  March 12, 1906. Late winter, early spring: snow on the ground and the river near-freezing, its surface choked with drifting ice.

Lillian left the guest room and descended the stairs. She opened the back-door and looked out, observing fresh footprints in the snow off the porch. 

The tracks, plainly, were those of a woman in her stocking feet, widely spaced as though she were running. The prints were partly filled with snow, suggesting they had been made around six o’clock that morning -- a time frame later confirmed by a local milkman, who had noticed the tracks when making his deliveries.

The Sheriff was contacted and arrived at the Gallup house in the company of a town selectman. These two men followed Tressa’s footprints away from the house and down the railroad bank to the water’s edge where they vanished into the river. 

Word was sent to Tressa’s husband in East Craftsbury. The next day he came down to Brattleboro with Martin McCue, Tressa’s brother. A search of the river was already underway. Men braved the current in rowboats, using rakes and grappling irons to probe beneath the ice.

Six days passed before the body surfaced. A local man found her floating in the shallows at the southern end of Root’s Island. She whirled on the current, trapped by a jutting rock. 

Her cause of death is recorded as suicide resulting from “probable temporary insanity.” From Brattleboro her remains were transported to East Craftsbury and interred under her maiden name of McCue.

Rest in peace, her gravestone reads. Erected by her brother and sister. 

It is a curious inscription, suggesting her husband was unable or unwilling to pay for a headstone himself. Possibly this was due to the stigma surrounding suicide or perhaps it was on account of her family name and the shame it carried with it, even after 24 years. 

Because McCue was in fact an adopted surname, assumed after Tressa was taken in by her mother’s relations. Her birth name was McCaffrey and she was the fourth of seven children born in Waterbury to Anna McCaffrey and the murderer Matthew McCaffrey.

*   *    *

Matthew M. McCaffrey was born in 1836 in County Tyrone in what is now Northern Ireland. It’s unclear when his family immigrated to the United States but he was a resident of Waterbury in August 1864 when he enlisted as a Private in the 6th Vermont Infantry.

The 6th Vermont spent the winter of 1864 at Petersburg, Virginia, where Union and Confederate forces were at stalemate, entrenched behind miles of fortifications and earthworks while the rain beat down, unrelenting, turning their trenches into muddy pools and streams.

Late winter, early spring, the fruit trees in flower when fighting resumed in earnest in March 1865. A series of decisive engagements rendered the Confederate positions untenable and a general assault was ordered to begin at dawn on April 2.

The Union guns fired through the night of April 1-2, pounding the enemy positions. The noise would have made sleep difficult, probably impossible, and there was scant time for it, anyway. The 6th Vermont were assembled in their marching positions by 4:00 am, observing strict silence so as not to compromise their position. The men waited, Matthew McCaffrey among them: he watched the sky for signs of light.

The attack commenced at 4:40 am. The Vermonters overran the Confederate pickets but their advance slowed when they came under fire. Shell and canister-shot burst among the running men, mangling limbs and faces. Losses were heavy but the attack succeeded. The enemy lines breached, then crumpled. Lee abandoned Petersburg and withdrew to Appomattox where he surrendered.

Matthew survived the war unwounded or at least without obvious injury. The 6th Vermont mustered out on June 19, 1865 and Matthew left the army with the rank of Private. He returned to Vermont, where in 1866, he married Bridget Ann or Anna McCue of Albany, Vermont, an Irish woman previously employed as a household servant.

Matthew McCaffrey’s farm was at Cotton Brook in Waterbury, around six miles from Waterbury Center. The country was one of high ridges and plunging slopes, lumber camps and hill farms. The climate was cold, inhospitable, and the soil was worse, providing little save the boulders which farmers regularly plowed out of the earth and fashioned into stonewalls with which to pen their livestock.

Matthew kept cattle and probably pigs. He had an orchard on the property and a garden in which he grew potatoes and other vegetables. Likely he cultivated some cash-crops as well, rotating pasture and cropland. 

A farm like this was impossible for one man to maintain. For this reason Anna’s brother Peter McCue took up residence in the house and worked for Matthew as a hired man. Anna herself could be of only limited assistance about the farm due to pregnancy and childbirth. In the ten years between 1868 and 1878 she bore five children: John (1868), Martin (1872), Annie (1873), Tressa (1876), and Mary (1878).

The hardships of such a life are difficult to imagine. Winters in the mountains regularly lasted 4-5 months with heavy snowfall and frigid temperatures increasing the family’s isolation. 

The first of the incidents occurred in March of 1880. At that time, Matthew, already exhibiting signs of mental distress, traveled to Montpelier, where he obtained three gallons of alcohol and drank it all over three days. The alcohol is said to have aggravated his already fragile mental state, resulting in an apparent psychotic break.

Matthew had previously agreed to care for a sick neighbor’s livestock. In his delusion Matthew became convinced the local doctor had maliciously driven the spotted fever out of his neighbor and into this man’s cattle which were now housed with his own. Terrified of a spreading contagion, Matthew smeared his cows’ noses with tar “as a preventative” and even went so far as to kill two heifers for fear they were infected. 

His family did not escape his attentions either. He rubbed his children’s faces with tar to protect them and locked his wife out of the house. The situation was spiraling. When he took up a revolver and pledged to revenge himself on the local doctor, his friends and family intervened. He was brought to Brattleboro and institutionalized at the Retreat until the delusions receded and he was declared to be recovered. 

He returned to Waterbury. Not long afterward Anna became pregnant, giving birth to the twins Josephine and Juliet in April 1881. Anna was at that time 37, exhausted after a lifetime of privation and childbearing. She was decided: there would be no more children. Matthew was made to stay in a different bedroom, and it was apparently around this time that Anna induced Matthew’s mother Ann to live with them.

With the introduction of Matthew’s mother, there were now three individuals named Ann McCaffrey at the Cotton Brook farm, each of them known, variously, as Ann, Anna, or Annie. For the sake of clarity Matthew’s mother is referred to here as “Ann,” his wife as “Anna,” and his eldest daughter as “Annie.”

The arrival of Matthew’s mother placed a strain on the McCaffreys’ marriage. Matthew started drinking, became violent. He took to beating his wife and children, often without reason, and relations with his brother-in-law Peter McCue deteriorated in consequence. 

Winter came. The snows drifted round the house, penning the family inside like so much livestock. Inside, the atmosphere, surely, was poisonous. The house was small, too small, and home now to eleven persons: four adults, seven children. 

March 1882. The days lengthened, warming. The deep snows softened into crumbles, and on March 5, Peter McCue borrowed a horse and sleigh to visit his brother in Greensboro, a distance of around 40 miles. He intended to stay with his family for several days before returning to Cotton Brook. The younger boy Martin, 10, accompanied him.

Six days later, Matthew McCaffrey rode bareback to Waterbury Center. The horse had no bridle save a chain about its neck and Matthew carried a stout stick in place of a horsewhip. For the dogs, he explained to Samuel Partcher. “For you know I’m death on dogs.”

Partcher encountered Matthew on the road to the Center. Matthew was agitated, irrational. He complained that his “hired boy” had run off with his son and taken the horse and sleigh. Partcher endeavored to put Matthew’s mind at ease and assured him that Peter would return. 

The two made their farewells and Partcher had gone some distance up the road when Matthew called out to him.  “I met a donkey up there on the hill,” he said. “He had lost his father. If you see him tell him he has gone along.”

Others reported similarly strange interactions with McCaffrey. He expressed anger at McCue and lamented, again, the “loss” of his child. He spoke ominously about a coming “invasion” and noted, cryptically, “I am in the fur business and have been in it for twenty years.” 

The townspeople paid little mind to Matthew’s erratic behavior, supposing him drunk on cider, as was his wont. His family, too, noticed nothing amiss. While Matthew and Anna had argued for much of the day, they made up by evening and were reportedly “good friends” when they retired to bed. In Annie’s words: “I never saw them better than they were that night.”

The women slept as they always did in a small room off the kitchen. Anna occupied the bed with one of the twins while Matthew’s mother Ann slept with the other twin in a separate bunk. Matthew was alone in the next room. Mary, 3, typically shared her father’s bed but that night she slept upstairs with the other children, presumably because Martin was away, making room in the bed with her siblings. 

Annie awoke. It was still dark, not yet morning, but she heard voices from downstairs. Her father shouting, cursing. Her mother screaming. “Don’t!” she cried. “Don’t, Matt!” 

Annie roused her brother John, 14, and the two children tiptoed downstairs, leaving Tressa and Mary asleep in the bed. Their mother’s screams grew louder, Matthew’s shouting. He cursed his wife as a “ghost” and a “witch,” punctuating his oaths with an awful, arrhythmic smacking.

The children entered the moonlit bedroom. Anna lay on the floor at the foot of the bed with Matthew bent over her, yelling incoherently as he pulled her head back by the hair then smashed it down against the floorboards again and again. 

The twins, 11 months old, were awake and screaming as was Matthew’s mother, 88. She felt blindly about the room.

John wrestled with his father, or tried to, but he was only 14. Matthew overcame him with ease and forced him to lie on the bed with the twins and Annie too. He ordered the older children to hold on the babies and to keep them quiet or he would “kill them too.”

Too.  Anna lay dazed and bleeding on the floor, unable to stand, but she lifted her head to whisper goodbye to her children. She wanted to kiss them as well but Matthew would not allow it. He beat her with his fists until she lost consciousness. 

Then he went into the kitchen. A moment later, he came back, carrying a length of firewood. He shattered Anna’s skull, striking her even after she was dead, and all while his mother fumbled at his bloodied nightshirt, pleading with him to stop, to come to his senses. 

“Don’t kill her, Matt,” she said. “Don’t kill the mother of your seven children.”

He wheeled on her, dashing her to the floor and kicking here where she lay. She moaned. The air rattled in her throat, enraging him, and Matthew went back to the kitchen and retrieved another stick from the woodbox. Ann was blind but must have sensed what was coming. She asked him for time to pray but Matthew refused her, saying, “You would not let me pray under like circumstances.” 

Annie and John saw everything. Matthew attacked his mother, killing her, and they sheltered the twins with their bodies, holding them still as best they could, though Tressa and Mary were awake upstairs and howling, too scared to leave the bed.

Ann was dead, Anna too, but Matthew’s rage hadn’t passed. He took up a chair and shattered it over his wife’s corpse then mutilated the bodies with a butcher knife. He hacked at Anna’s face, obliterating what was left. 

Finally, the clock struck four and Matthew returned to himself. He heard the girls upstairs and sent Annie up to calm them but bid John remain with him in the bedroom. Matthew would have been covered in blood but he made no effort to clean himself but merely stretched out in his mother’s bunk with one of the twins on his chest.

John couldn’t sleep. His mother lay at the foot of the bed, his grandmother on the floor alongside him. Hours passed. He held his infant sister, heard her even breathing. He watched the moon sink, the sky lighten. 

It was Sunday, March 12.

*   *   *

Matthew McCaffrey awoke at dawn. He saw the bodies: his wife Anna, his mother Ann. He bundled them into quilts then forced John to help carry them down the cellar, draping them with a sheet before returning upstairs and nailing the cellar-door shut.

Then he cleaned the bedroom. He mopped up the blood and scoured the walls and boards with ash. The girls came down from upstairs and he prepared for them a breakfast of pork and tea, chopping the pork with the same knife he had used in the killings. 

The children couldn’t eat. Annie choked down tea and threw it up again while Matthew paced and brooded. 

For the next two days he kept the children as prisoners in the house, threatening them with violence if they should tell anyone what had happened. Friends and neighbors visited the farm and were turned away. One such visitor, upon leaving, looked back toward the house and glimpsed Matthew in the window, cradling a baby.

The children had fallen into nightmare: they could not awaken. Matthew stalked the farm by day, wielding a gun and butcher-knife and waiting for Peter McCue to return. At night the wind rattled the doors and shutters and he raved of “witches and spirits in the house.” 

John tried to seek help. He bridled the horse, thinking to ride to the nearby Ladd farm, only to be discovered by Matthew and forced back into the house. Later, the boy was asked if he were afraid of his father. 

“Afraid of him?” he replied. “I guess I was.”

They all were. Annie mothered the younger children as best she could but she was only a child herself and their supply of cooked food was running out. By Tuesday morning, March 14, there was nothing to eat and Peter McCue had not yet appeared. Matthew directed John to ready the sleigh. They were going into town.

The weather was bitterly cold. Annie helped the younger girls to dress for the journey, likely layering shawls and blankets over their clothes, while Matthew circled the exterior of the house and nailed the doors and windows shut. 

He drove them all to Waterbury Center, arriving in town at 1:00. In the Center, he called at the house of family friend Charles Hopkins. Charles was out but his wife answered the door, whereupon Matthew pressed one of the twins into her arms. She was, naturally, astonished. Matthew explained there had been a “terrible accident” at the farm and they had to get away. 

Mrs Hopkins ushered the children inside. The girls, she observed, were freezing, “thoroughly chilled,” but early reports of frostbite were apparently untrue. Such was the care Annie had taken. 

But Matthew continued to act strangely, arousing Mrs Hopkins’ suspicions. She settled the girls in the kitchen with Matthew then stole out to the barn where John was tending to the horses. She confronted him and John told her everything. 

Matters moved quickly after that. Mrs Hopkins alerted her husband, who contacted the town’s Justice and Constable. Hopkins was dispatched with another man to the McCaffrey farm to verify John’s story. They drove hard for Cotton Brook while Mrs Hopkins fixed the children their dinner, their father pacing all the while. 

Charles Hopkins returned to the Center by 4:00. Matthew sensed his crime had been discovered and beckoned Hopkins into the woodshed. There he produced a butcher knife he had hidden about his person. 

“I had to do it,” he said.

Matthew’s agitation had passed. He was pliant, even docile, and agreed to accompany Hopkins to the train station in Waterbury. There they were met by Sheriff Atherton who made the arrest. Matthew took the manacles without protest and boarded a train that would take him south to Montpelier and the County Jail.

The Sheriff questioned him aboard the train. In response to his questions Matthew told Atherton a furred and shapeshifting beast had come into the house on the night of March 11-12. He described to Atherton a “curious animal, changing from hairy skin to smooth.” He killed the beast, he said, before it could devour his children. 

A coroner’s jury was empanelled and traveled to Cotton Brook that same night. Dr. Washburn assisted the men in bringing up the mutilated bodies from the cellar and performed the autopsy inside the farmhouse while the jurors looked on by lantern-light. The Vermont Watchman newspaper provides this description:

It was a trying time for men of sensitive nerves. The hour, the lonely situation, the darkness visible, the ghastly surroundings needed no other element of horror. The cattle in the barns near by seemed inspired with the dread influences of the occasion, lowed incessantly and manifested every symptom of terror.

The funeral was at the house on Thursday, March 15. The coffins were left open, the mangled faces on display, and it is reported the McCue and McCaffrey families nearly came to blows, with Matthew’s own brother vowing to kill him for what he had done to their mother.

He never had the chance. Matthew spent the rest of his life in custody. He was confined at the Retreat in Brattleboro and tried for the murders in 1883, only to be acquitted on grounds of insanity. He remained in custody in Brattleboro for at least 8 years prior to his transfer to the new State Asylum in Waterbury, around 10 miles from Cotton Brook. He died there on March 9, 1909: late winter, early spring, the deep snow retreating.

He is buried in neighboring Duxbury. It is not recorded if any of his children attended the burial, but it seems unlikely. Quite possibly they had not seen him since that afternoon of March 14, 1882, when he went with Hopkins to meet the Sheriff.

“You can’t go,” he told the children. “I ain’t through with you yet.”

And he wasn’t. 

John McCaffrey, the eldest, moved frequently in the years that followed. Some family members blamed him for the killings, for failing to stop them, and John proved similarly unable to cope with the relentless questioning he received from “unthinking and curious people.” 

He ended up in Lebanon, New Hampshire, where his health declined. He suffered from night terrors and “nervous prostration” resulting in paralysis on one side. He died on September 13, 1885, aged eighteen. His cause of death is recorded as “heart disease.”

The girls are more difficult to trace. In May 1882 they were sent to St. Joseph’s Orphan Asylum in Burlington and were adopted together or separately, changing their surnames. Mary, for instance, is known to have taken the name of Goodwin. 

Documents relating to their father’s 1909 probate list Annie as a resident of Newark, New Jersey, Mary as a resident of California, and Josephine as a resident of Buffalo, New York. Josephine’s twin Juliet is not mentioned, suggesting she may have died before 1909.

By then, of course, Tressa was dead as well. Like Martin she had taken her mother’s maiden name and was adopted by the McCue family of Greensboro. She became a schoolteacher then a farmer’s wife but always she was haunted by her memories of that night in 1882 when she clung to her sister, crying, and their mother didn’t come. 

In March 1906, following her cousin’s wedding in West Berlin, she traveled by train to Brattleboro, where she stayed with the Gallups on Tyler Street, less than a mile from the Retreat. She passed the long night of March 11-12 in the Gallups’ guest room prior to stealing outside at first light and making for the river at a run. 

It was around 6:00 am on March 12, 1906, twenty-four years to the day -- very nearly to the hour -- since her father had murdered her mother and grandmother. 

But Matthew wasn’t through with them, not yet. 

His second son Martin was 10 years old at the time of the killings. Unlike the others he was not present at the farmhouse that night, having accompanied Peter McCue to Greensboro, and it would seem he remained in Greensboro after the murders as well, likely on the same farm to which his sister Tressa would later come. 

Martin and Tressa were close. They traveled together to West Berlin on February 28 and it was probably Martin who brought her to the station in Barre on March 1. 

News of Tressa’s suicide reached him in Craftsbury late on March 12. The body surfaced six days later. 

His guilt must have been overwhelming. Twice he had failed her, was absent when she needed him. In early April 1906 he experienced a delusional episode and was found in the woods near W.L. Dustin’s house in East Craftsbury, “violently insane,” carrying a revolver in a handkerchief, and “threatening to make trouble.” 

He was taken into care. His father was at that time still alive, a resident of the State Hospital in Waterbury. Perhaps for this reason Martin was transported to Brattleboro and committed at the Retreat where he remained for several months prior to release in the fall of 1906.

He sold off his farm. He left Vermont and lit out for the West, probably in the company of his sister Mary Goodwin. Ultimately, he settled in Kent, Washington, outside Seattle, where he married a local woman in 1914. 

Cotton Brook was 3000 miles behind him, his father dead and buried twelve years, when in 1921, Martin suffered another nervous collapse. Again he was committed and released, only to experience a third and final breakdown in December of 1923. 

According to the Kent Advertiser-Journal, Martin sneaked away from the house on December 10 at around 5:00 am, daybreak. He took a razor with him. Once outside, he slashed his throat. He died quickly and was discovered four hours later. He was 51.

*   *   *

137 years later, it is unclear where Matthew McCaffrey’s madness began or what events, if any, might have precipitated his actions of March 12, 1882. Matthew himself described shapeshifting beasts intent on devouring the twins, but The Vermont Watchman of March 22, 1882 suggests another motive, perhaps in closer accord with the known facts.

Anna McCaffrey was 37 when the twins were born in April 1881 and 38 the following winter. At her age, she feared becoming pregnant again, what it might do to her, and had implemented the family’s sleeping arrangements accordingly. It is reported that husband and wife quarreled on March 11 but had made up by the evening, becoming “good friends again,” according to Annie.

Possibly Matthew interpreted these circumstances as an invitation to rejoin her in the marriage bed, entering her bedroom in the early hours when his mother was asleep. Except that Anna had rejected him, didn’t want him, and Matthew killed her, savaging the face until there was nothing there. 

In this version of events he wasn’t necessarily insane at all, at least not at the time of the killings. Certainly his actions immediately afterward seem rational enough. He hid the bodies, cleaned the bedroom. He swore his children to secrecy and confined them at the farm for two days before relenting at the last and bringing them into town.

His children were adopted and changed their names but they were always his children. He fashioned for them a prison from which they could not escape, trapping each of them as surely as Matthew himself was caught by circumstance, the era he inhabited. 

He was a child in Ireland in a time of hardship and famine, a young man in the fighting at Petersburg, and finally, a Vermont hill-farmer in a period of economic and agricultural decline. For fifteen years he reared his children, raised his cattle, plowed his acres of stones into pasture. Meanwhile the winters stretched, longer each year, and Matthew was alone and drowning, his mind like a current turned inward, drawing him down. 

Late winter, early spring. The ice on Cotton Brook thinned, cracked, broke. 

* * *

This episode was sourced from contemporary newspaper accounts appearing in The Burlington Free Press, The Vermont Phoenix, The Brattleboro Reformer, The Orleans County Monitor, The St. Johnsbury Index, The Vermont Christian Messenger, and The Vermont Watchman.

Written and produced by Daniel Mills. Music and theme by Jon Mills.