The Suncook Town Tragedy (Marietta Ball, Part 2)
October 6, 1875. Wednesday morning in St. Albans and Aldis Brainerd is reading the paper. He’s at his house on North Main Street or at his offices in the Brainerd Block. He’s taking breakfast, perhaps, or sitting at his desk when he unfolds The Daily Messenger to its second page, a headline reading:
Another New Hampshire Horror
A School Girl Outraged & Murdered
He reads about Josie Langmaid, 17, who disappeared Monday morning while walking to school near Suncook, New Hampshire. Twelve hours later, her body was found in the woods at a place called Gile’s Swamp.
The details are shocking. Josie was beaten and beheaded, her body mutilated with a small knife. The killer cut off Josie’s dress and arranged the torn fabric over her as a kind of shroud. Her head was found the next day, wrapped in her own cape.
Brainerd finishes the article. Maybe he reads it again, thinking of Marietta Ball. How she too was attacked on the road, “outraged and murdered,” her body posed and covered with her own clothing.
He sends for Wanton Abell. The men are likely on uncertain terms following the hearing in August but Abell comes to his office directly and Brainerd questions him, asks after the other residents of East Hill. Had anyone moved away recently?
There was someone, yes, Abel says, a French Canadian family named LaPaize. Or was it LaPage? The father Joseph was something of a drifter, given to wandering the woods of East Hill. He spoke little English, worked as a farmhand and a wood-chopper.
Joseph LaPage. The name is familiar to Brainerd. He recalls a shabby-looking figure shod in moccasins and wearing a tall straw hat. His hair was black, Brainerd remembers. So were his eyes.
Where did they go? Brainerd asks. After they left the Hill?
New Hampshire, Abell says. A place called Suncook.
* * *
Josie Langmaid was born in November 1857, the oldest of her father’s five children. Her father James was among the wealthiest residents of Pembroke, New Hampshire, a township near Concord that encompasses much of the village of Suncook.
Like Marietta, Josie was “universally esteemed and beloved in her community.” She was young and beautiful and active in her church’s Sunday school as well as a gifted student. The principal of Pembroke Academy, where she attended school, later paid tribute to Josie’s “intellectual superiority and loveliness of character.”
The Academy wasn’t far from the Langmaid home, around 1½ miles through woods and swamps. Josie was accustomed to walk there on school-mornings, typically in the company of her friend Lilla Fowler, who’d meet Josie near the edge of the woods on Academy Road.
On Monday, October 4, Lilla Fowler arrived to the meeting place as usual. Josie wasn’t there. Lilla waited, but her friend never arrived, and she accepted a ride from a passing neighbor, supposing Josie was already ahead of her, that they would see each other at the Academy. They didn’t.
In fact Josie was running late. Her brother Waldo, 16, also attended the Academy and left home at eight o’clock, but it was another thirty minutes or so before Josie followed, hurrying along in her blue cape with her schoolbook under her arm.
She passed the Hoyt farm at around half-past-eight and afterward wished a pleasant good morning to Deacon Gile as he drove past her on the road. No one saw her after that. At around half-past-four that afternoon, Waldo Langmaid returned home and asked after his sister.
“Not at school?” his mother Sarah replied. “Where can she be?”
They went in search for her. James Langmaid dispatched “swift messengers” to Suncook to alert the community then called in person on his friends and neighbors. By 7:00 that evening a party of 100 searchers had assembled near the woods on Academy Road.
October 4, autumn’s peak: the trees in their colors and darkness falling early.
The sun went down and the men lit lanterns, searching along Academy Road until they came to a patch of trodden grass beside the roadway. A struggle had taken place there, it seemed, and there were tracks leading into the woods of Gile’s Swamp.
A man named Daniel Merrill found the body. “There ‘tis,” he shouted and the men converged. Their lanterns guttered on a scene of horror. Josie lay on her back with one arm across her chest, the other pinned beneath her. Her head was gone. Her skirts were shredded and saturated, cut away from the body then draped over the corpse.
James Langmaid accompanied his daughter’s body back to his house — the same house from which she had left for school less than twelve hours before. A postmortem examination followed at which it was determined that Josie had been sexually assaulted then decapitated with a small, sharp knife. The body was also mutilated in a manner described by the papers as “too horrible for publication.”
Daybreak, October 5, and the search for evidence resumed. Charles Cilley found a thick club broken in two pieces by the side of Academy Road. One piece was sticky with blood but had been rubbed with sand in an apparent attempt to clean it. Cilley also recovered Josie’s schoolbook, while other searchers turned up her hat, hair-switch, and comb.
Josie’s head was found later that morning, wrapped in her own cape. The face had sustained multiple blunt-force injuries, but the skull was intact. Her cheek showed the clear imprint of a man’s boot-heel, five nails in a semicircle, suggesting he had braced her head with his boot while cutting at her neck.
The attack was thought to be premeditated. Evidence indicated the murderer had lain in wait among the bushes and attacked Josie as she passed by. She had struggled, losing her hat, and the killer had beaten her with the club before dragging her into the woods.
This was rural New England, 13 years before the Ripper murders in Whitechapel. Such crimes were nearly unimaginable. The village of Suncook was in shock and the selectmen of Pembroke offered a reward of $2,000 for information leading to an arrest.
Detectives Clifton Hildreth and Albion Dearborn were hired to pursue the investigation. Their suspicions quickly fixed on 22 year-old William Drew, who lived near the crime scene and was observed in the vicinity on the morning of October 4. Drew had previously worked with his father, a butcher, and had a reputation as a “dissolute fellow.” Perhaps most compellingly, Drew was also known to carry a “sharp dirk knife” that was now missing.
Drew was arrested and transported to the jail in Suncook where he was held in custody while the detectives continued their investigation. They spoke with a Miss Carrie Lake, 17, who claimed acquaintance with Josie and told authorities the girl had confided in her concerning William Drew.
According to Lake’s story, Drew had surprised Josie on her way to school one morning in the summer. His intentions were plain enough and Josie had struck him with her parasol. Drew swore he would “get even with her” and threatened to “cut off her damned head.”
This story was widely circulated but apparently untrue. Drew possessed an alibi for the time of the murder and Lake’s character and honesty were later called into question.
Around this time, the selectmen of Pembroke received a letter from H.H. Farnsworth of St. Albans, Vermont. Farnsworth’s letter read in part:
Gents—I have thought best to write you, after hearing of the terrible affair which has occurred in your midst. One year ago on the 24th day of last July at about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, as Miss Ball was going from the schoolhouse to her house, she was murdered in a small piece of woods. […] Among the persons suspected there was one by the name of Parish or La Page. He was strongly suspected, and was examined, but I was not satisfied. […] Should you have occasion to investigate him, I should be glad to know the result.
The letter itself is not in dispute. However, the circumstances in which it was written remain unclear. In later statements Farnsworth claimed he’d long suspected LaPage in Marietta’s murder but was unable to find enough evidence to prosecute. Ultimately, he said, he was forced to release LaPage but thought of him immediately upon learning of the Langmaid case.
Wanton Abell rebutted this claim, insisting instead that he himself had read of Josie’s death and became convinced the crime was linked to Marietta’s murder. He remembered Joseph LaPage, a French Canadian who had recently moved down to Suncook, and made an appointment to see Farnsworth. According to Abell, Farnsworth had little or no memory of LaPage and was hesitant to contact authorities in Suncook but did so at Abell’s insistence. In later years Abell would attempt to claim the $2,000 reward offered by the selectmen of Pembroke but wasn’t successful. He sued the town and lost in the courts.
Aldis Brainerd’s account of events didn’t surface until 1905 when Brainerd was 81. By then the reward money was long gone and Abell and Farnsworth were both in their graves. Brainerd had little to gain by coming forward — and nothing to lose.
In a letter to The St. Albans Daily Messenger Brainerd recalled how he’d read of the Langmaid murder in the papers and recognized a number of similarities to the Ball murder of the previous year. He sent for Wanton Abell, who came to his office.
Of Abell’s own claim to have solved the Ball and Langmaid murders, Brainerd wrote:
Sometime afterward Mr. Abells [sic] called at my office and told me that he had tried to get a part of the reward offered by the town of Suncook […] I told him he should have known better, that he was working under me, and that both he and Mr. Farnsworth knew I was not working for pay.
Brainerd questioned Abell concerning recent events on the Hill and Abell mentioned Joseph LaPage, who had recently moved to Suncook. That was all Brainerd needed to hear. He went next door with Abell to see Farnsworth, who had his insurance offices in the same building.
As Brainerd has it, Farnsworth remembered LaPage, if only slightly, and didn’t consider him a serious suspect. Besides, he had an alibi, didn’t he? Brainerd didn’t care. An alibi could be invented or broken and Brainerd was by now convinced of LaPage’s guilt. In his own words:
I firmly believe that an overruling Providence gave me the idea that these two murders were committed by the same person and made it possible to bring the guilty criminal to justice.
Brainerd feared LaPage would escape justice a second time and urged Farnsworth to travel to Suncook without delay. Farnsworth was reluctant — thinking, perhaps, of his own reputation and of his failure to solve the case — and settled at last for dispatching a letter with Brainerd’s suspicions.
This message reached Selectman Trueworthy Fowler in Pembroke on October 9 or 10. He reviewed the letter in his official capacity, but even so, he must have been astonished — and disturbed.
Because Fowler’s own daughter Lilla was Josie’s school-friend who walked with her most mornings save on October 4 when Josie was late and Lilla had accepted a ride. Furthermore the Selectman knew Joseph LaPage. In fact he had hired the Frenchman as recently as September to help thresh the rye. LaPage had spent several days at work on Fowler’s farm. Like as not he’d seen Lilla. He might even have noticed Josie.
The Selectman relayed Farnsworth’s tip to investigators Hildreth and Dearborn. The detectives had previously questioned LaPage as a possible witness. He had denied he was anywhere near Academy Road on October 4, but after receiving Farnsworth’s letter, they questioned him again.
At this second interview, LaPage repeated his earlier claim that he was chopping wood at the time of the murder. He said he’d left home early, around six, and visited a local bakery before shouldering his axe and entering the woods. Only he’d lost his way and wandered about the forest until he came upon a group of workmen building a shanty. These men were able to direct him and LaPage emerged from the woods at around two in the afternoon.
LaPage’s satisfied the detectives, and they let him go. Both men strongly favored William Drew as a suspect and saw no reason to hold LaPage in custody.
In Concord news of these developments reached the state’s Attorney General, who had taken an interest in the case. He wasn’t pleased. Bypassing Hildreth and Dearborn, he appointed Detective Moses Sargent to lead the investigation — a turn of events Dearborn later described as “the nastiest trick ever played upon [him].”
Sargent was a highly experienced investigator and formerly Captain of the detective force in Boston. He traveled by train to Suncook and proceeded to the LaPage home, where he placed Joseph under arrest. The Frenchman’s overcoat was spotted with blood, Sargent noticed, and he confiscated the man’s knife and razor as well as his clothes and boots.
Everything was sent for analysis, and here, Sargent’s instincts — and, indeed, Brainerd’s — proved sound. Blood on the overcoat was confirmed to be human while a doctor was able to match LaPage’s boot-heel to the marks on Josie’s face.
Other evidence emerged. Multiple witnesses placed LaPage near Academy Road on the morning of the murder while two women, mother and daughter, identified LaPage as the strange man who had chased after them on an occasion in late-September.
The most damning evidence, surely, was that of Andrew Fowler, Trueworthy Fowler’s son and Lilla’s older brother. Andrew recalled an occasion on September 24 when he was working with LaPage and Lillla came home from school. LaPage asked Andrew who she was. My sister, he said. LaPage wanted to know more. Where she went to school, how she got there. Andrew told him.
Andrew’s story suggested Lilla was likely the intended victim. That LaPage had left the bakery shortly after seven and walked to Academy Road. Along the way he hid his axe and took a stick from a woodpile. He reached the road and concealed himself among the bushes to lay in wait for Lilla Fowler, who never came. The hours passed and LaPage grew impatient, enraged. The school-bells rang and he was ready to give up.
Then he heard footsteps.
* * *
Joseph LaPage was born Joseph Paget in 1835 or 36 in the village of Ste. Melanie in the Jolliette district of Quebec around 50 miles northwest of Montreal. His father was a farmer, and said to be quite respectable, as was LaPage himself, at least in his earlier years.
LaPage was twenty when he married Eulalie Rousse of neighboring St. Ambroise de Kildare. The couple had five children together, three sons and two daughters. Around 1861 the family moved to the village of Chertsey where LaPage’s behavior began to change.
In Chertsey LaPage “contracted bad habits” and took to mingling “with the most vile and despicable company.” In his late 20s now he was becoming violent. He abused his wife and children and once even harnessed Eulalie to a cart and forced her to haul it behind her like a mule.
The LaPage family remained in Chertsey for four or five years until 1865-66 when they returned to St. Ambroise, briefly, before moving from there to Ste. Beatrice, also in the Joliette district.
But LaPage was losing control. In June 1871 he sexually assaulted his sister-in-law Julienne Rousse, choking her into unconsciousness then leaving her for dead. LaPage was arrested but escaped from custody and fled into the woods. A couple of months later he returned to Ste. Beatrice to collect his family before traveling south and crossing the border into Vermont.
The LaPage family arrived in St. Albans in the fall of 1871, where they settled on East Hill under the name of LaPaize, taking lodgings at the Ladieux farm.
Around this same time, Marietta Ball, walking home one night, was chased by a man in St. Albans village. This could very well have been LaPage. He was in the area, after all, and known to stalk and pursue young women. It isn’t impossible.
In St. Albans Joseph quickly developed a reputation as a violent man given to anger and obscenity. He’d left Canada behind him but continued to brood over his earlier arrest, the perceived injustice of it, and in August 1872, he returned to Quebec to take his revenge.
In Ste. Beatrice he set fire to a barn that belonged to a man who had assisted in his 1871 arrest then attacked the man’s sister, beating her savagely with a stick. Probably he intended to assault her sexually but she was able to get away and raise the alarm.
LaPage sought for shelter at a windmill. The miller was out but the miller’s daughter, a girl of 14, served a meal to the fugitive. Afterward LaPage insisted on paying only to reveal he had “lost” his wallet. He asked the girl to come outside to help him look but she was suspicious of his motives and declined. He threatened her but the girl pretended she heard her father, “coming with a big dog,” and LaPage ran off.
He returned to St. Albans and resumed his life of farm jobs and lumberjacking, wandering in the woods. In July 1874 he was one of several men arrested and questioned in connection with the Ball murder. He initially attracted attention due to the deep scratches on his face but testified he had received these while berry-picking. Another French Canadian provided him with an alibi for the time of the murder and he wasn’t questioned again.
In March 1875 the LaPage family left Saint Albans and relocated to Suncook, New Hampshire. Seven months later, Josie Langmaid was dead and LaPage was under indictment for her murder.
Around this time a man named John Real came forward with new evidence in the Ball case. Real lived on East Hill in St. Albans and had employed LaPage as a farm laborer at the time of Marietta’s arrival on East Hill. Real recalled that LaPage had taken an interest in the new schoolteacher, describing her as “good enough to hug.”
Real’s daughter attended the No 2 schoolhouse on East Hill and recounted a separate incident in which LaPage had inquired after Marietta. He asked the girl where her teacher went on weekends, as he’d noticed she didn’t return home on Friday afternoons. She told him of Marietta’s visits to the Paige farm, of her lonesome walks through the broken timber.
On January 4, 1876 LaPage stood trial in Concord for the murder of Josie Langmaid. The sensation can hardly be overstated. Photographs of Langmaid and LaPage were printed and sold as souvenirs and a murder ballad circulated under the title of “Josie Langmaid” or “The Suncook Town Tragedy.”
Proceedings lasted nine days in all. On the first day, jurors were sworn in and traveled to Suncook to visit the crime scene, accompanied by LaPage, who is said to have shown no emotion at all.
Back in the courtroom, Josie’s parents detailed the circumstances of her disappearance while friends and neighbors described the searches of October 4 and the finding of her body in Gile’s swamp.
These facts established, the prosecution presented its case. Witnesses placed LaPage near the crime scene on October 4 and testified to his habit of chasing young women, while experts detailed the physical evidence against him: the blood on his clothes, the marks on Josie’s face. They described her injuries and mutilations in distressing detail and confirmed LaPage’s knife could have been the murder weapon.
The defense sought to cast doubt on the prosecution’s findings through cross-examination, but it seems their efforts made little impression on the jury, and the evidence against LaPage was already overwhelming by the time Julienne Rousse took the stand.
She testified in court to the circumstances of her 1871 assault. At the time she was living in Ste. Beatrice and working as a hired girl for a family named Marion. One morning at around 7:00 she went up to the pasture for milking. A man was waiting for her. He wore linen trousers, a red flannel shirt. A buffalo-hide mask concealed his face and he was carrying a length of pine-root as thick as her arm.
She turned, tried to run, but he was too fast. He tackled her to the ground and she fought against him, pushing the mask up over his forehead. She recognized him immediately.
A woodcut engraving depicts this moment at the trial. It shows Julienne pointing at LaPage as she describes what he did to her. How he beat her, raped her, strangled her until she blacked out.
Jury deliberations were brief. They took only a single ballot before returning with a guilty verdict. The courtroom erupted in applause. The Langmaids clutched each other, weeping, and the Judge pronounced the sentence.
As a servant of the law the court decrees that you be imprisoned in the State Prison at Concord until the 19th day of January in the year of our Lord 1877 and on that day, between the hours of 10 in the forenoon and 2 in the afternoon, you be hanged from the neck until dead. And pardon me to say that all the days to come to you in this life must be full of sorrow.
H.H. Farnsworth had traveled from Saint Albans to attend the trial. At one point he was even called for questioning, though his testimony wasn’t permitted, and ultimately, LaPage was never tried for the murder of Marietta Ball.
After the Langmaid sentencing, a newspaper reporter in Concord spoke with a man from St. Albans concerning the Ball murder. This was probably Farnsworth as he claimed again that LaPage was always suspected but wasn’t charged solely on account of a lack of evidence.
The consequence was that he escaped. We wanted to lynch him then, and, sir, it would have been a lucky thing for this other unfortunate girl, Josie Langmaid, if we had only hung him up on a tree to feed the crows and buzzards.
This would seem to be inaccurate. LaPage’s 1874 arrest wasn’t reported at the time and it doesn’t appear he was publicly identified as a suspect until 1875. Some papers did report a near-lynching on East Hill, but this was after Frank Harris’ arrest, not LaPage’s.
Among those who’d suspected Frank Harris was Marietta’s father George Ball. By the time of LaPage’s trial in January 1876, Ball was living in Oakland, California, a widower of 14 years who’d outlived four of his ten children. His health, long in decline, was failing him at the last, but he must have held on, waiting for news from Concord, because LaPage was sentenced on January 13 and Ball died just six days later. His body was transported to St. Albans and buried in Greenwood Cemetery.
Meanwhile LaPage’s lawyers filed an appeal on his behalf — and won. A judge determined that Julienne Rousse should not have been permitted to testify at trial. LaPage was subsequently retried in 1877 and convicted a second time, sentenced to hang on March 15, 1878.
On the evening of the 14th LaPage was transferred from his cell to a small sitting room where he met with two priests and conversed with them in French. The priests departed just before midnight. For the next half-hour LaPage remained “perfectly quiet” before dropping to his knees before the prison warden, sobbing. “I kill girl,” he said. “I kill two girl, too bad, too bad.”
LaPage admitted he had killed Josie Langmaid and in much the manner Sargent had deduced. His wife, he claimed, realized he was guilty and called him “a bad man” before burning most of his clothing—an accusation Eulalie later denied.
He confessed to Marietta’s murder as well. The warden wasn’t fully conversant with the facts of the case, but LaPage provided a handrawn map of the crime scene on East Hill and described in detail how the murder was committed.
July 24, 1874, LaPage was working in the fields near the Ladieux house on East Hill when he heard school letting out. He’d been watching Marietta for weeks and had learned of her walks to the Paige farm. He slipped away from work unnoticed and another man working the same field later would later provide him an alibi.
From the Ladieux farm he ran south through the woods, meaning to head off Marietta at the plank bridge. He reached the ambuscade he’d prepared previously then concealed himself behind the bushes, waiting. Marietta came down the road, carrying her nightgown and linens. He donned his mask, stepped out from the bushes. She ran and he chased her.
Afterward he dragged the body as far as he could manage, but the time was short, he knew, if his absence were to remain undiscovered. It was tiring work and he made it only 80 yards or so before he abandoned the body beside a stump and made for the Hill at a run.
All this he related to the prison warden and his deputy, along with one other bizarre detail. It seems LaPage was deeply disturbed by “Sleeping Lucy’s” messages from the spirit world. LaPage was illiterate but had learned of her predictions somehow and believed she had identified him as the killer. He made plans to leave St. Albans just as he had fled Ste. Beatrice in 1871 but abandoned the scheme for fear it might attract unwanted attention. He assumed, naturally, that he was under surveillance, couldn’t have known no one was watching.
Unlike the next morning — March 15, 1878 — when LaPage was led to the gallows. Farnsworth was there, as was James Langmaid, Josie’s father. They watched the Frenchman mount the scaffold. Officials covered the condemned man’s face with a hood and fastened the noose about his neck. Sheriff Dodge read the warrant, pronounced the sentence.
And now Joseph LaPage, in accordance with the command, I proceed to execute the sentence of death, by hanging you from the neck until you are dead, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Dodge depressed the pedal with his foot. A trapdoor opened and LaPage dropped through, falling six feet and snapping his neck. He died quickly and didn’t struggle but authorities waited half-an-hour before taking down the body. No one wanted it. LaPage was a Catholic but had been excommunicated after the attack on Julienne Rousse. For this reason he was refused burial in the Catholic cemetery in Suncook and was interred instead in a pauper’s grave in Concord’s Blossom Hill Cemetery.
His story doesn’t end there, though. LaPage was dead and buried and still the papers continued to report on “The French Monster,” as he was known.
In late March, multiple newspapers linked LaPage to an 1867 double murder near the village of St. Alexandre in the Iberville district of Quebec. According to these reports the wife and teenage daughter of a man named George Fountie were murdered and mutilated one evening in October 1867 after taking supper in St. Alexandre. LaPage was supposedly sighted in the village and had chased after the women, but this seems unlikely, as he was living in the Jolliette district at the time, around 80 miles away, and Eulalie didn’t believe her husband was involved in the murder.
If there even was a murder. A cursory search of French language newspapers of the time doesn’t turn up any references to a double murder in Iberville in 1867 while the distinctive surname “Fountie” doesn’t appear in Canadian census records of 1861 or 1871.
That was in March. Two months later, LaPage was back in the papers after his former landlord Tousan Ladieux of East Hill approached HH Farnsworth with new evidence. Ladieux had just torn down an old barn on his property and found a woman’s linen undergarment hidden inside.
This garment, presumably a petticoat or chemise, was spotted with blood, and Farnsworth confirmed it belonged to Marietta, though her nightdress and slippers remained missing. Farnsworth believed LaPage had buried the items, and maybe that’s true, but there were also rumors that Eulalie LaPage had acquired a new nightgown around the time of the murder.
Eulalie never returned to St. Albans. The family left Suncook between 1878 and 1880 and settled in Lowell, Massachusetts, where the children worked in the cotton mills and Eulalie kept house. She never remarried or changed her name and died in Fitchburg in 1898.
New England murder ballad “The Suncook Town Tragedy,” sometimes called “Josie Langmaid,” continued to circulate as late as 1958 when it was recorded in Springfield, VT by the musicologist Helen Hartness Flanders. The ballad describes the murder of Josie Langmaid as well as the trial of Joseph LaPage but makes no mention of Marietta Ball, not even as an afterthought. In 1874 her family had moved to California, and in time, there was no one to remember her.
Wanton Abell died in Massachusetts in 1891 while H.H. Farnsworth passed away in 1902. Three years later, Aldis Brainerd wrote to the Daily Messenger to reveal his role in breaking the case. He’d kept quiet for thirty-one years. Presumably this was because he didn’t wish to embarrass Farnsworth, who’d botched the original investigation so badly, but it’s also true that Abell and Farnsworth weren’t alive to contradict Brainerd’s account. Brainerd himself died in 1906.
George Smith left St. Albans after 1880 and ended up in Florence, Italy, where he spent the final 25 years of his life. He died in 1918. His mother Ann Eliza, Aldis Brainerd’s sister, enjoyed a brief career as a novelist in later life with her antediluvian fantasy Seola receiving acclaim upon publication in 1878. She died in 1905 and the Smith mansion was destroyed by fire in 1924.
East Hill is now called French Hill. The old road is gone, as is the sawmill, and Marietta’s monument is forgotten, lost to the trees and brush. She’s buried in Greenwood cemetery, but her stone looks east to the Hill, where the fall colors kindle and fade and Marietta too, the memory of her.
She’s running, getting away.
* * *
This episode was sourced from various historical sources including public records, newspapers, and the 1876 pamphlet The Trial of Joseph LaPage, The French Monster. Information concerning Marietta’s grave site was found at Chad Abramovich’s Obscure Vermont blog (http://obscurevermont.com/) where I first encountered this story.
Researched and written by Daniel Mills. Music by Jon Mills.
