Latest / PNW Haunts & Homicides / Two Deaths, One Date: Patience Boston & the Purrinton Family | York & Augusta, Maine

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Two Deaths, One Date: Patience Boston & the Purrinton Family | York & Augusta, Maine · PNW Haunts & Homicides

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: When I had the moment, I had the epiphany. I
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: was like, this very specifically has to be my next
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: one because of the.
• 0:09
  Speaker 2: Date, because it's my birthday.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: Yes, barring any unexpected circumstances, this episode is going to
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: come out on your birthday, July nine.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday.
• 0:23
  Speaker 3: Do you so?
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: This episode pairs two unrelated tragedies that happened exactly seventy
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: two years apart on the very same calendar date. Hi Cassie,
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: Hi Caitlin, Hi creepy people. Oh hellou hell. This is
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: PNW Hansen Homicides, where we chat about true crime, the paranormal,
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: and all the spooky things that happen in the Pacific Northwest.
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: All of them, all of them or the PNW I
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: f you're nasty. Oh yeah, And we do a tarot
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: reading at the end of every episode for a little
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: deeper insight into our topic.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: Oh right, that old thing. So this is like kind
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: of a little late in the game sort of. But
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: do you remember it? You know, it was like last summer,
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: I think right around it was. It was a holiday weekend.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: I want to say it was the Memorial Day weekend.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: I went and did an interview for a true crime
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: TV show.
• 1:39
  Speaker 3: Yes, I remember, I wasn't there, just Caitlin exactly.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: Well, I bet you remember it because they sent me
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: with some goodies.
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah they did. Yeah, it got drunk.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, those Irish flag pins and then we were gifted
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: a bottle of Jamison.
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: Each yo, thank you.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So the show is actually it's it's called Bloodline Detectives,
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: and I had to do a little poking around to
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: find out where I could watch it. I'm sure it's different,
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: like in all different regions and stuff. I think I
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: ended up finding it on to Be and it was free.
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: To watch, so oh okay.
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: So it's actually two episodes that aired actually all the
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: way back in I think January that I'm in. It's
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: season six, episodes fourteen and fifteen. Pretty exciting. I think
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: it goes without saying that at some point I will
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: have to cover the two cases that the show talked about.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: They're very interesting. It'll probably be a while because now
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: that I've I've talked about it, I don't you know,
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: I want to surprise.
• 3:04
  Speaker 3: Everybody, right, I haven't watched it yet, so I have
• 3:08
  Speaker 3: to go find it. I tried, and I could only
• 3:11
  Speaker 3: find it on like YouTube, but then that they didn't
• 3:14
  Speaker 3: have those episodes or that season out yet.
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it is recent enough that probably you would want
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: to watch it on TB or it's on like Pluto TV.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: There's there's actually a bunch of places you can watch it.
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: Caitlyn's famous.
• 3:31
  Speaker 3: I wonder if anyone like watched it and was like, hey,
• 3:35
  Speaker 3: that's Caitlin.
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: That would be really to be a hopeful homicide. Why
• 3:39
  Speaker 2: didn't you tell us that you watched it? Yeah, female us, Yeah.
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: If you watch it, let us know and just know
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: that the camera adds ten pounds and I think they
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: had at least three cameras on me. And it was
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: very hot. So if i'm if I'm like listening at all,
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: you know, just a couple of disclaimers.
• 4:07
  Speaker 3: You're beautiful. Your skin is just glowing. That's the style
• 4:11
  Speaker 3: right now, glowy skin.
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: So you're yeah, Well, I will say that after kind
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: of taking a break from doing video for the podcast,
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: coming across the episodes in that timeframe, I was like, wow,
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: I've I guess I didn't realize how I'm like just
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: not used to seeing my face and stuff. Yeah, I
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: was like self conscious in a way that I haven't
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: been since we first started doing video for the podcast,
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: and I was like.
• 4:47
  Speaker 3: Oh god, I know I would be too, but that's
• 4:50
  Speaker 3: not what it's about exactly.
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: I was like, well, listen, hopefully I don't look like
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: a swamp troll or something. But yeah, it's really not
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: about how good or bad I look. But selfishly, you know,
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: you do hope that you, you know, look reasonably well put
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: together when you appear on camera.
• 5:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, I don't know.
• 5:16
  Speaker 3: I've watched a lot of documentaries and some people look
• 5:20
  Speaker 3: questionable on camera.
• 5:22
  Speaker 2: But yeah, it's fine.
• 5:24
  Speaker 3: Yeah, well, everyone go watch it and tell Caylen how
• 5:28
  Speaker 3: beautiful she is and what a good job she did.
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: Yes, please, Well I'm excited for this. Obviously. We talked
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: about this offline before we started recording. I had an idea.
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: Last night. I had an episode that was completely ready
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: to go. It actually has show notes prepared when we
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: upload it to Apple and everything. And then I thought,
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: you know what, this pattern of like seemingly kind of
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: having my shit together for a little bit, it's really
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: rubbing me the wrong way. Love that, so let's introduce
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: some chaos. But I'm like, I wasn't looking for this.
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: It just happened.
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: Okay, it was meant to be.
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: It was meant to be. I was watching a show
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: that at this point it's like kind of a historical democracy,
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: and they were talking about like colonial days in America,
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: like back when it was the thirteen Colonies.
• 6:37
  Speaker 2: Not Pacific Northwest.
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: No. No, But something that I googled last night while
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: I was watching this documentary set me off down this path,
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: this rabbit hole.
• 6:51
  Speaker 2: I love if you will, I love it.
• 6:53
  Speaker 3: I love when plans just get switched last minute. It's
• 6:58
  Speaker 3: my favorite thing.
• 6:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, so I knew it all the time.
• 7:03
  Speaker 3: We talk about this all the time, Like I had
• 7:06
  Speaker 3: this other episode and I just wasn't feeling it and
• 7:09
  Speaker 3: I had to go find something else.
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: I mean, I was totally feeling that episode. But the
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: thing is, when I had the moment, I had the epiphany,
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: I was like, this very specifically has to be my
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: next one because of the date, because.
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: Because it's my birthday.
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: Yes, barring any unexpected circumstances, this episode is going to
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: come out on your birthday, July ninth.
• 7:41
  Speaker 2: Happy birthday to me, Happy birthday to you.
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: So this episode pairs two unrelated tragedies that happened exactly
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: seventy two years apart, on the very same calendar date,
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: Oh creepy July ninth. That date lines up with, as
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: I've already said, a certain co host birthday, and both
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: stories are set in and around Portland. That is Portland, Maine.
• 8:19
  Speaker 4: Oh you trickster, a city to whom Portland, Oregon is
• 8:25
  Speaker 4: considered the coin toss sibling city on the opposite coast.
• 8:32
  Speaker 2: That's right. Do you know the other name?
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: Oh? I do. I'm about to get into what Okay.
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: When Francis Pettygrove of Maine and Asa Lovejoy of Massachusetts
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: decided to make the Oregon Territory their new home in
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: eighteen forty five, both wanted to name it after their
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: own hometown. A Yeah, they did.
• 8:55
  Speaker 3: I feel like every time I go on any type
• 8:57
  Speaker 3: of tour of this in Portland, we get this story
• 9:01
  Speaker 3: and I just love it.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: I honestly, I don't think I had ever heard this before. Really, dude,
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: Like it was like being hit with a lightning bolt repeatedly.
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: Every time I was like looking at and like I'm
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: not even to the actual topics yet, but like, holy shit,
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: it was like being hit with lightning bolts repeatedly. Everything
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: about this was just like, oh, and this and this.
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: I was so excited.
• 9:32
  Speaker 3: I'm a vote for coin toss the other direction. But
• 9:35
  Speaker 3: it's fine.
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: In the end, it was a coin toss that decided
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: between Boston and Portland, and the rest is history. But
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: did you know, Cassie Today the eighteen thirty five Portland
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: penny is preserved by the Oregon Historical Society and on
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: display at their downtown Portland Museum.
• 9:59
  Speaker 2: Oh well, okay, the penny they used for the coin toss.
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: Yep C, I know right, want to see it. That's
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: an old Niosh pany. So, the two cases that I'm
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: going to be talking about today are a deliberate, intentional
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: choice for this episode, precisely because of the odd parallels
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: and connections. My research even turned up an additional, genuinely
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: unplanned synchronicity. I realized there's another one as I was
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: finishing writing the case literally today. What the first one
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: is a death that is very, very sad, and I
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: feel weird sounding excited about it right now. But in
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: the second case, the death occurs at around three am
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: on July thirtieth, eighteen oh six, and that is the
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: date that was anticipated to be my own date of birth, Aka,
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: it was my doo date, but just obviously centuries later, right, Yeah,
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: no one else that old. It's me to be born
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: in eighteen oh six.
• 11:10
  Speaker 2: She actually is a vampire.
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: Right. Just strange things like that cluster around this story.
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: There's all these like kind of little syncreticities. And I'm
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: going to tell you about a couple little things that
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: got me going down this road. Both cases also share
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: a second, quieter thread. They rely on documents written by
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: the people closest to them. In patients Boston's case, two
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: Puritan ministers shaping her words into a conversion narrative. In
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: the Puritan case, a midwife named Martha Ballard, writing in
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: her own diary the same week of the event, with
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: no agenda at all beyond bearing witness. In seventeen thirty four,
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: Maine was not yet its own state. It was a
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: remote district of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and York was
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: one of its oldest English settlements, first established in the
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: sixteen twenties, repeatedly burned and rebuilt through decades of conflict
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: between English colonists and the region's native nations. By the
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: time this story takes place, York had a courthouse, a
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: meeting house, and a jail, which in the source material
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: they referred to it as the old jail, but it's
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: spelled gaol, which all, yes, huh, it's apparently an archaic
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: or traditional British spelling of jail, but it's literally just
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: pronounced jail.
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: Okay, fancy jail things in the.
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: UK be wild. It was built in seventeen nineteen and
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: still stands today as one of the oldest public buildings
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: in the United States. Wow, over fifty years before we
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: became a country. Yeah, I mean before we even tried
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: to become a country. It sets a tone that the
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: oldest building still standing today is like, oh, one of
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: our earliest jails.
• 13:33
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel so lico civilized. We are proud of
• 13:37
  Speaker 3: ourselves that we can put people away.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: Well, you know, the trend definitely continued, I guess, so
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: there's that. It feels like that really captures our vibe.
• 13:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: This was also a world built on two intertwined systems
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: of forced labor and forced belonging. Native indentured servitude an
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: African enslavement. Patience Boston's life touched both. She was indentured
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: to an English family as a small child, after her
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: mother's death, she would go on to marry an enslaved
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: black whaler.
• 14:18
  Speaker 2: Oh yes, okay.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: Nearly everyone she lived among, worked for, or was bound to,
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: held some form of power over her that she had
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: no say in or very little say in her story.
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: It's important that that doesn't get separated from the structure
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: of it. It's the frame the entire tragedy sits inside.
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: Patience was born December twenty sixth, seventeen eleven on Montamoy
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: Island to a couple that were members of the Nauset tribe.
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: The pronunciation guide that I found says it literally looks
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: like it says, nah sit, you know, nah sit, you know,
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: go ahead and sit down.
• 15:09
  Speaker 2: I am.
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: Her parents, John Samson and Sarah Jethrow, are described in
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: at least one source as coming from high ranking families
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: within their community, which is I feel like kind of
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: a significant detail about her history because whatever standing her
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: family held ultimately really meant nothing within the colonial system,
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: especially when you think about that's the same system that
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: would go on to indenture patients as a young child.
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: So I mean, these are people that are of some
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: you know, whether it may have been more fractional for
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: you know, one or the other of her parents, but
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: they are of Native descent. I get the feeling that
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: they were both like full native. Sarah Jethro died when
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: Patience was just three years old. After her mother's death,
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: Patience's father indentured her to a man named Paul. Though
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: it's not a critical detail in the story, his last
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: name either Krowell or crow. I just couldn't really confirm
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: definitively across historical records. Okay, kind of fuck that guy though, anyway,
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: because who's like, yeah, I want to indenture a three
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: year old.
• 16:35
  Speaker 2: I have questions about that.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: And I do feel like this next little section here
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: is probably gonna have some answers for you, because I
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: kind of had the same reaction. Actually, wait, I don't
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: want the answers.
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: I changed my mind. I don't want to take it back.
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: Well, I'm afraid we're already into deep.
• 16:55
  Speaker 2: It's my birthday.
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: Why nothing bad has even happened on your birthday yet?
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: So the fact that Patience is indentured to presumably a
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: you know, maybe not even wealthy, but essentially an English family,
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: it says a lot about the precariousness of Native family
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: life under English colonial law, her father grieving the loss
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: of his wife, handing his daughter over to an English
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: household because the system really gave him few other paths
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: to ensure she'd be fed and housed. Oh, I don't
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: know that it was necessarily a situation where he couldn't
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: care for her outright, or maybe more so that just
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: like I can't deal. I don't know that it was
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: necessarily that he didn't have the resources. It might have
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: just been more like, personally, I don't have the bandwidth.
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that would be really hard.
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah. In either case, it's ultimately like Sucksville for patients,
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: I will say, uh.
• 18:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: So after the death of Paul's wife, patients began to
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: exhibit what most would categorize as either typical teenage behavior
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: kind of keeping bad company and sneaking out.
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: Okay, she could have been a kid of.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: The nineteen nineties. When I read some of that they
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: did back then, I honestly was like, we're teenagers sneaking
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: out in the seventeen hundreds. I guess, yeah, probably since
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: the dawn of time.
• 18:48
  Speaker 3: It's probably easier because they didn't have cameras or cell phones,
• 18:52
  Speaker 3: right alarm system exactly.
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, though perhaps In hindsight, these behaviors may have been
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: the earliest signs of her childhood trauma and unprocessed grief
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: experiences and feelings that she had neither the language to
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: express nor the tools to heal from. Patients began drinking
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: heavily as her term of servitude ended. Later, she would
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: marry Caesar Boston, who was well acquainted with the struggles
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: of bondage as a literally enslaved black man working on
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: whaling ships.
• 19:30
  Speaker 2: So that would be just crazy. You have to be
• 19:35
  Speaker 2: a whaler.
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: Like to listen, there's sh there's a lot that like
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: intellectually from like looking back through like a twenty twenty
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: six lens that I'm like, like, my head doesn't really
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: I can't go there. Yeah, Patience was a real one
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: choosing to bind herself in servitude along inside him. Wow,
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: though Massachusetts law did not require it of her as
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: a free native woman. And at this point, like I said,
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: her you know, indentured servitude, like that term had ended
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: from when her dad basically you know, handed her over.
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: But if she wanted to stay with her husband, binding
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: herself to the same household was practically speaking, kind of
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: the only way to do it. Because Caesar, as an
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: enslaved person, uh literally had no say in the matter
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: of like where he went, what he did, had no
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: bodily autonomy.
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: So it's interesting to me that he could get married though.
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the documentary that I was watching, you know, they
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: talked quite a bit about the Transatlantic slave trade, but
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: they also, i mean just about slavery in general in
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: the colonies. And one of the things that kind of
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: obviously we know about the three fifths, it was designed
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: basically to give the South more votes, oh, because they
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: had a ton more people, but just most of them
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: weren't even really counted like people.
• 21:20
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: I'm just trying to do like a super service level
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: explanation here. But one of the things that kind of
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: the Founders and the Framers had to sort of negotiate
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: was there were a lot of people in northern States
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: that were like very adamantly opposed to slavery. I think
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: we all, you know, intellectually understand that on some level,
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: but seeing how passionate the debate was as they were
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: writing the Constitution, and seeing how close our country in
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: the very very early days came to like very nearly
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: just not even like just dissolving because they're like, hey,
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: this is you know what, we can't agree on anything,
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: so fuck it.
• 22:07
  Speaker 2: Wow weird. Yeah, I know, not a lot's changed.
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, strange. One of like the really like the sticking
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: points was sort of the South did not want to
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: do away with specifically the Transatlantic slave trade, which meant
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: they were still actively kidnapping people from Africa and bringing
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: them here versus you know, having to essentially depend on
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: your enslaved workforce reproducing to kind of maintain.
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: That makes sense. Yeah, this is gross.
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah. When they were writing up the Constitution, one of
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: the things that was negotiated was that Congress would not
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: make the Transatlantic slave trade and bringing in new slaves.
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: They could not outlaw that for twenty years. And the
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: reason is that the plantation owners in the South firmly
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: believed that if they could keep bringing importing essentially more
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: humans for the next twenty years, that once that twenty
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: year period ended, either they would just you know, they
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: would just basically like, oh, well, we're going to either
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: convince or browbeat the Northern States, or worst case scenario,
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: if they do end that aspect of you know, slavery
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: and you know, new trading, we will have enough literal
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: humans that we own that they will just reproduce. We
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: won't have to bring in more because we'll have enough.
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: Then twenty years is a long time.
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: It's so upsetting, it's so gross. Oh my god, so gross.
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: And I say all I mean just the timing of
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: like coming across this case as I was watching that
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: documentary about like you know, the formation, the founding of
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: America and you know, our War for Independence, like so
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: many unique and interesting like details about like America's history,
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: like from basically like day one. It's like, uh BC
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: versus a D.
• 24:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, oh jeez.
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: But it's like it's such a huge component of her
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: story because she's a native woman who was you know, crazy,
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: She actually was supposedly part of a family that had
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: some sort of status and standing in society, and she
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: ends up becoming an indentured servant. Then she goes on
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: to marry a black man who is enslaved. Literal bondage
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: was such a huge theme in her life from from
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: start to finish. It just is like, I don't know, anyways,
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: I really went I really went hard there for a
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: little bit. And probably some of.
• 25:17
  Speaker 3: That nobody you've explained it good because I had the question, right.
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: I know, but it like I was, like, this is
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: totally off book. I have so much here, but like
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: I just I found it so interesting watching that and
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: then like the tie in with this, I can't I
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: can't help myself. I don't know how to shut up.
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: It's not in the script, but here we are.
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: That's okay.
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: The couple had two children together, both sadly dying in infancy.
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: Oh oh god.
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot of infant death.
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, on that time. Mm hmm.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: I think between the two famis that were kind of
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: focusing on, like the two kind of main pillar women
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: of these stories, I think they have a combined like
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: at least six infant deaths between the two of them.
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: Why babies, I know.
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: Very very sad. That's why I guess a lot of
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: times they would hold off on naming babies until they
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: or they would give them like a placeholder name. Yeah,
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: Like they wouldn't give them like the you wouldn't become like,
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: oh I'm John's son, you wouldn't become John junior until you, like,
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: you know, prove that you weren't just gonna die of
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: dysentery immediately. Yeah, Or they would name more than one boy,
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: John right, because that's the namesake.
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: Like God, you get one of them to stick.
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: Jesus just so dark. According to the roughly three hundred
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: year old court and church records, Patients told people, including
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: her husband and later even the authorities, that she had
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: thoughts of murdering both children before they were even born,
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: though authorities declined to act on her confession for lack
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: of any evidence that a crime had actually occurred. Twice
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: twice they said, she's confessed and there's no evidence twice.
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: In fact, it was clear that she blamed herself for
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: their deaths, which is rooted in the Puritan religion and
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: culture of the period. Bad things happened for a reason,
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: because you're a goddamn sinner. That's terrible, really awful.
• 27:51
  Speaker 2: But she said that she had thoughts of harming.
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: Them, of killing them before they were even born.
• 27:58
  Speaker 2: I mean, that's rough mental health stuff right there.
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: Mm hmmm, nailed it. It's gonna come back. Perhaps that
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: explains her insistence and the eventual charge for their second
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: child's death. While in jail awaiting trial, she became afraid
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: of dying with what she called a lie in my mouth.
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: This led to her eventually changing her plea to not guilty,
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: and the court actually acquitted her. It's possible that postpartum depression,
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: complex trauma from a lifetime of forced removal and servitude
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: as a child, an undiagnosed mental health crisis, or some
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: combination that honestly none of us are going to be
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: able to readily name or understand from the distance of
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: literal centuries later. It's possible that those were contributing factors,
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: and her bizarre documented pattern of false self accusation occurring
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: years before the actual crime she would ultimately undeniably commit.
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: Oh shit, oh shit. After her acquittal, Patience left her
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: husband and asked to be bound instead to a man
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: named Joseph Bailey of Casco Bay. It seems almost unfathomable
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: Patients essentially chose her own next master, rather than remaining
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: with the husband that she literally married and had bound
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: herself to up to that point. While in Bailey's household,
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: Patients confessed to murdering a third child. Authorities took this
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: confession seriously enough and did investigate. Though midwives examined her
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: and searchers looked for a grave, ultimately they found nothing because,
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: as it turned out, the child had never existed at all.
• 29:57
  Speaker 3: Oh, I was thinking maybe she had like a miscaracter something, which.
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: Would also be another lovely parallel to modern day America.
• 30:07
  Speaker 2: Right, it's not murder if you have a miscarriage.
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: It certainly isn't hot take. I don't whoo call us
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: two hot takes. This is yet another documented instance of
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: patients confessing to a murder that she did not commit,
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: that literally did not happen, and it raises the same
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: unanswerable questions as the first. I mean, what was actually
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: happening inside this woman's mind in a world with absolutely
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: no framework, no vocabulary, and no compassion available to even
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: ask or question seriously, like what is going on in
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: your mind? Like? Yeah, it's so sad to look back
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: on cases like this and just see these stunningly clear
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: examples of like this is some sort of you know,
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: mental health issue that's present, and it doesn't take away
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: from obviously the eventual crime. But it's like, Yo, she's
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: been confessing to murder for like years at this point.
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah help her.
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah they couldn't.
• 31:20
  Speaker 2: I know, there wasn't the tools.
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: There's nothing Joseph Bailey for reasons, the record doesn't actually specify,
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: but can probably be guessed. Eventually sold Patience's contract for
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: her indentured servitude to another master, and that's the household
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: where the story turns from false confession to real tragedy.
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: Patience was eventually transferred to the household of Benjamin's skill
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: Ins in York. Also living in the same household was
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: his eight year old grandson, Benjamin Trott. Basically, he was
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: being raised like he was Benjamin Senior's own son. Not
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: exactly sure what the circumstances were that brought that about,
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: but it's kind of cute. Benjamin being raised by his grandpa.
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: Also Benjamin Benjamin Troll. Benjamin Troll. Patients stated both that
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: she grew to love the young boy and vice versa,
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: while also developing some, as she put it, groundless prejudice
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: against the senior Benjamin. In time, the latter instinct seems
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: to have won. In the fall of seventeen thirty three,
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: in her own words, she bound herself by a wicked
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: oath ooh to kill Skillen's grandson. No, the contradiction of
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: her clearly stated pre medic intent to kill a child
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: she also described as loving is kind of the dark
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: center of this case.
• 33:09
  Speaker 3: Yeah, this makes like no sense so far right. I
• 33:14
  Speaker 3: don't know if you're going to make it make sense.
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: I mean, unfortunately in cases of child murder, I feel
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: like you can't really make it make sense.
• 33:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there ain't no sense.
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: Ain't no sense in that. On July ninth, seventeen thirty four,
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: while both mister and Missus Skillens were away from home,
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: patients lured the boy out into the woods. She intended
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: to beat him over the head with a large stick,
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: but as she attempted to do so, she started trembling
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: and she just kind of lost her nerve.
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: Well, yeah, you're trying to kill a kid that you love.
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: Why would for some reason with a stick?
• 34:00
  Speaker 2: Oh God.
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: She decided instead to drop the stick into a well nearby,
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: asking Benjamin to climb down and retrieve.
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: It for her. I don't this is the worst birthday
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: gift you've ever given me.
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: I'm so sorry.
• 34:17
  Speaker 2: I'm not happy with you.
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: I know, I'm gonnat you. I'm gonna fix this, Okay,
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna make it better. I don't believe you, I promise.
• 34:27
  Speaker 2: Okay, I'm gonna mute you for the rest of the.
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 34:31
  Speaker 2: Rude, I don't want to Okay, go do it. Rip
• 34:35
  Speaker 2: off the band dude.
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: All right, it's gonna get Game of Thrones here for
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: a sec. Only when he reached the edge, she just
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: pushed him in. She used a long pole to hold
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: him under the water within the well until he drowned.
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: I didn't realize how dark this crime was, but the
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: fact that these two stories that we're talking about today
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: have the connection to July ninth. I was like, listen,
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: who am I to tell the universe?
• 35:11
  Speaker 2: Nah?
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: I don't wanna.
• 35:13
  Speaker 2: I would. I don't want this to be in my mind.
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: I know well, regardless of the day that it happened on,
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: it was going to be in your mind, because you
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: know through crime and all that what happened immediately afterward
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: is recorded with unusual specificity for a case. This old
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: Patience raised her hands to the sky and said, now
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: I am guilty of murder. Indeed, though formerly I accused
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: myself falsely, yet now God has left me. Afterwards, she
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: walked to a neighboring house about two miles away. She
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: confessed what she had done and turned herself in.
• 36:02
  Speaker 2: Just so so strange, my mouth is just open.
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you're like, oh man, Patience was arrested and remained
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: in York's Old Jail, Old Gail Jail for roughly a year.
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: As she awaited her trial. She was visited dozens of
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: times by the Reverend Samuel Moody and his son, the
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: Reverend Joseph Moody, pastors of York's Church. Perhaps as a
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: result of their visits, Patience seems to have experienced a
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: spiritual transformation. Something seems to have genuinely shifted in Patience.
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: During that year, she read scripture, and after years of
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: drinking quite heavily, she found sobriety.
• 36:52
  Speaker 2: Well that's great.
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I can't imagine that you have a
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: choice in beverage when you're in prison, so right, some
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: of that may not necessarily have been my choice. Hard
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: to say.
• 37:05
  Speaker 2: There could be toilet wine, could.
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, certainly, she refused it. Yeah, that's what I Yeah,
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: as I feel one perhaps should maybe decline. And this
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: part it's sort of a double edged sword because the
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: implications are a little bit dark. She also gave birth
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: to a child while in custody, a boy who at
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: one point fell dangerously ill with a fever. Patients admitted
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: to a dark thought in that moment that it might
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: be better if God willed it for the child to
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: die before she did. Instead, she asked the congregation to
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: pray for him, and he recovered oh records never name
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: his father. And when I say there's kind of a
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: double edge soared with that, it's like, well, either she
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: was impregnated by someone before she went to prison. I
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: don't know. I'm not digging into the timeline on this
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: that deep. There wasn't enough information about that. Or she
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: was impregnated while she was in prison, which is completely
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: plausible based on what I do know about the timeline
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: and also about incarceration for women, you know, just for
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: the last three hundred years.
• 38:37
  Speaker 2: That's what I was thinking.
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: That's terrible, possibly terrible. I don't it's hard to say.
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: So this is kind of a weird, kind of a
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: weird little aside that I almost just completely left out
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: of my notes. But it's so weird that I was like,
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: I think we have to.
• 38:57
  Speaker 2: Have that, okay, I like a weird fact.
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: Joseph Moody, the younger minister who helped compile her story,
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: he began a strange practice around the same time that
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: he was finishing it. He started wearing a black veil
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: over his face, refusing to remove it except when alone
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: or facing a wall, and apparently this was a habit
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: he kept for the rest of his life. History remembers
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: him today as Handkerchief Moody what in the world hu,
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: and he is the direct historical inspiration for Nathaniel Hawthorne's
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: short story The Minister's Black Veil. It's a strange footnote
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: in the case, but a true one.
• 39:44
  Speaker 2: I mean, you do you But that's fucking weird.
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, do you think she got to him? Like
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't know what, like like I
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: don't know, and like, yeah, it's very weird. It's just
• 40:03
  Speaker 1: it's bizarred.
• 40:04
  Speaker 3: I'm just gonna do that. Then we can do video again. Oh,
• 40:10
  Speaker 3: I'll just wear my black veil.
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: A veil, yeah, why not? Just having a goth moment.
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: Patience went to trial on June nineteenth, seventeen thirty five.
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: Pleading guilty. The judge sentenced her to hang July twenty fourth,
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: seventeen thirty five. On the morning of her execution. Oddly,
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: Patience reportedly slept very well the night before, not the
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: vibe I would have, but it's your last sleep. I yeah,
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: you know. Before the big long sleep. She described having
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: in her own words, a more realizing sense of death
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: and some fears, but her hopes were above her fears.
• 41:01
  Speaker 3: Do you think she was just suicidal like I and
• 41:05
  Speaker 3: she just you know how people like suicide by cop
• 41:08
  Speaker 3: or whatever, but they're you know, maybe that was like her.
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: I don't know her way. I mean, all of this
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: is so strange. It's anything's possible in my book, to
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: be honest, there's certain things that I feel like we
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: can point to and say, like, Okay, well I think
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: like I can make some assumptions or you know, yeah,
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: some inferences, but like it's just bizarre. It's just bizarre.
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: She prayed with several ministers that morning, but when the
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: time came, it was quite hard for her to part
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: with her infant son, who'd been born there in the jail.
• 41:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, which is just really.
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: Sad for so many reasons, but just to think about
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: like that is, you know, the only living child that
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: she had to that point. When the sheriff arrived, patients
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: asked for a few more minutes alone. Then she emerged
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: from her cell and said, simply, I am ready. She
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: walked calmly to the cart that would carry her to
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: the gallows, where a noose hung from a sturdy tree limb,
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: and hundreds of people had gathered to watch, because that
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: was what people did back then.
• 42:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's.
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: I mean, listen, I get it. There's nothing on TV.
• 42:33
  Speaker 2: Back then, I was thinking that there was no Game
• 42:35
  Speaker 2: of Thrones.
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: Yep.
• 42:37
  Speaker 2: Now we just watch fake deaths on TV.
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah. A minister read from scripture to the assembled crowd.
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: Then Patience herself stood and spoke, declaring her love of God,
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: asking mercy for her sins, praying for the child that
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: she was now leaving behind, and then turning to the
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: crowd itself to pray for them that they would take
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: warning from her life and be aware, especially the sin
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: of drunkenness, which she clearly believed had played its own
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: role in everything that led her there.
• 43:15
  Speaker 2: Oh shit.
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: Patience Boston, just twenty three years old, was hanged at
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: York on July twenty fourth, seventeen thirty five. Before her death,
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: she was assured her child had been placed with a
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: family who would care for both his body and soul.
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: Patience's story didn't end with her execution. It became something else,
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: entirely in the hands of the people who outlived her.
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: In seventeen thirty five, around the time of her death,
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: a short pamphlet was published, the Confession Declaration, Dying, Warning
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: and Advice of Patience Samson alias Patience Boston. Then in
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: seventeen thirty eight, the Moody's published a much longer and
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: more elaborate work, and the title is half a paragraph,
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: Oh Sure, Deep Breath. A faithful narrative of the wicked
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: life and remarkable conversion of Patients Boston alias Sampson. It
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: belongs to his genre historians call gallows literature, narratives assembled
• 44:31
  Speaker 1: by Puritan clergy from the words of condemned prisoners, intended
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: less to document the facts of a crime than to use,
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: shall we say, a sinner's spiritual journey toward repentance as
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: a lesson for the living.
• 44:47
  Speaker 2: I thought, I thought that's where it was going. Yeah, yeah,
• 44:51
  Speaker 2: it's still kind of cool. Though.
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: I do think it's cool, and I do think that
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: is still kind of a service to those individuals in
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: a way, if that's something that they respond to, and
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: you know, perhaps also to the broader community. I wish
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: it maybe wasn't tied to like organize religion specifically, but
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: like beggars can't be choosers, right, So the version of
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: Patients Boston that has survived through this work is filtered
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: and shaped by two Puritan ministers with their own theological agenda,
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: men who were, by the era's own standards, more interested
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: in her conversion than in her guilt, or her innocence
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: or any of the conditions in her life. Patience Boston
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: really did kill an eight year old boy. There's no
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: ambiguity about that specific fact, and Benjamin Trott deserves to
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: be remembered as a real child with a life cut short,
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: not just a supporting detail and someone else's tragic narrative.
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: But I mean, god damn, in a very real way.
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: They very much are both victims. She just also happens
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: to be a perpetrator.
• 46:14
  Speaker 3: Of violence, which happens a lot. I mean, it does,
• 46:18
  Speaker 3: I feel like probably most of the time.
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean yeah, I would argue, yes, I have
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: observed a pattern, shall we say, in the last handful
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: of years. And at the same time, Patience's documented history
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: of multiple separate false confessions to murders that never happened
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: involving infants preceding the one murder she actually committed is
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: the kind of pattern that in any modern court would
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: trigger a serious psychiatric evaluation before anyone moved toward a verdict,
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: let alone a death sentence. But obviously that wasn't happening
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: in seventeen thirty five. No, there was no language at
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: the time for what we would describe now as potentially
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: postpartum psychosis, complex trauma, or the cumulative psychological toll of
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: a childhood spent, indentured, orphaned, and passed between households that
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: held all of the legal power over her existence with
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: no say on her part. There was only sin, confession
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: and the gallows. This is also, unavoidably a story about
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: whose voice gets preserved and whose doesn't.
• 47:46
  Speaker 2: Ooh part two, Part two?
• 47:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because I said there's two stories.
• 47:54
  Speaker 2: Oh is this just one episode?
• 47:56
  Speaker 3: Though?
• 47:56
  Speaker 2: Right? It is? Yeah? Okay.
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: In August eighteen o five, Captain James Purenton, a handsome
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: revolutionary war veteran and well regarded farmer said to be
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: of good character, moved his family to a Ballard neighborhood
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: just outside Augusta, Originally known to the area's native inhabitants
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: as Kushnak. Augusta had grown from a fur trading post
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: on the Kennebec River into a small but established town.
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: Maine was still not yet a state. She's out there
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: fighting the good fight. Though it remained part of Massachusetts
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: and wouldn't receive statehood for another fourteen years.
• 48:45
  Speaker 3: It was part of Massachusetts. Wow, apparently I don't think
• 48:49
  Speaker 3: I knew that.
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: I didn't either. Over the following winter and spring, Purenton
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: family settled in The Captain's wife, Elizabeth, known as Beth's
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: see Love, visited neighbors, trading herbs and other goods, quickly
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: becoming part of the fabric of their new small community.
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: As soon as I read trading herbs and stuff, I
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: was like, this, bitch sounds kind of witchy.
• 49:19
  Speaker 3: Oh, I was thinking, she's drug dealer. What kind of herb?
• 49:25
  Speaker 3: You trading their bits?
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: Listen, I'm just saying, technically, this is still part of messages.
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: That's why I think witchy.
• 49:33
  Speaker 2: I think, yeah, No, you're ray. I'm just a pie head.
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess. Hey, listen, two things can be true.
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: Herb means a lot of things to a lot of
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: different people. One neighbor, Martha Ballard, a midwife in her
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: seventies that had delivered hundreds of babies all over the
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: valley for four decades kept a diary and it's actually
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: like a pretty important historical document.
• 50:03
  Speaker 2: WHOA. I love that.
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: Like, her diaries are like kind of a big deal.
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: The entries throughout the winter and spring of eighteen oh
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: six are full of small, ordinary contact, Like all of
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: these details about interacting with the Puritan family, Missus Puringon
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: stopping by for tea young poly Purenton coming for herbs
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: for her ailing mother, even Captain Purington himself once walking
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: Martha home after a difficult birth late at night in May.
• 50:40
  Speaker 2: Wow, she like wrote all this shit down.
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, she wrote a lot of shit down. I found
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: all of these really interesting, like little quoted sections of
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: her diaries, and I was like, bitch, we gotta pick
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: and choose. Like I started out where I was like, oh,
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna take that one, and I'm like, oh boy,
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: we gotta we got to get real. And they're all
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: just like a lot of them are so wholesome. Even
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: the entries that aren't strictly speaking wholesome, maybe they're just
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: so earnest. I feel like I know her now. Martha's
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: my bitch Martha. But by the summer of eighteen oh six,
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: something had changed. The Purentan family's entire crop for the
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: season was threatened by severe drought. And I mean, I'm
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: sure they weren't the only ones, because drought tends to
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: kind of affect everybody, right, but they're who we're talking about.
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: So the family's household of eight living children ranging from
• 51:42
  Speaker 1: eighteen months to nineteen years old roughly.
• 51:46
  Speaker 2: Holy shit, Yeah, that's a range.
• 51:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, that's what we gather kind of from,
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: like the historical records. There's a lot of sources that
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: have like kind of slightly differing ages for different kids
• 52:00
  Speaker 1: in the family. And I'm like, listen, they had basically
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: from toddlers to tiaras and then to teenagers and young adults.
• 52:10
  Speaker 2: And that's just living children. So how I wonder how
• 52:12
  Speaker 2: many they had?
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: At least four children that died in infancy. Oh wow,
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: And that was before they moved. The family's household of
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: eight living children, ranging from eighteen months to nineteen years old,
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: dependent on the farm for survival. The financial pressure was
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: real and immediate, Like, if we don't have enough food
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: that our farm is producing, we will not make it
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: through the winter. Captain Puringon had told neighbors he was
• 52:45
  Speaker 1: concerned about the state of his farm, worried he might
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: soon be unable to provide food for his family or
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: even their livestock. On a Sunday in early July, Purenton
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: wrote a letter and seal it in black with a
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: death's head drawn on it, which is essentially like a
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: skull in crossbones situation. Okay, yeah, Inside he wrote instructions
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: for his children's futures, as if he would not be
• 53:15
  Speaker 1: alive to provide for them himself. And this is from
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: the letter. I cannot see the distress of my family.
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: God only knows my distress. I would have you put
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: Nathaniel to Uncle Purrenton, to a tanner's trade. I want
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: James to go to school until sufficient to attend in
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: a store, Benjamin, to a blacksmith's trade, or to what
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: you think best, but to be sure to give them learning.
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: If it takes all, divide what is left for I
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: am no more.
• 53:50
  Speaker 2: Ooh, that's so ominous, like a suicide note.
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and it definitely could read that way. For sure,
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: It definitely read that way to me at first. His
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: wife Betsy found the letter the following day, Monday, and
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: confronted him. Uh, because you know, she had, of course assumed,
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: like you said, that he meant to die by suicide,
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: but he told her that she had it all wrong,
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: and she's like, uh, pray I do, because if you
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: saddle me with all of these fucking kids.
• 54:24
  Speaker 2: Alone, yeah seriously, you.
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: Know she said something like that, but like it was
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: more like, uh puritanically, yeah, you know.
• 54:36
  Speaker 2: And then just leave a note telling me what to
• 54:38
  Speaker 2: do with all of them, like.
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: Well, and yeah, you'll note that.
• 54:43
  Speaker 3: Uh.
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: I don't know if maybe the source that I found
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: didn't have all of the note transcribe, but you will
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: notice that, uh, he only mentions, let's see one, two,
• 54:57
  Speaker 1: three children. The boys.
• 55:01
  Speaker 3: Oh well, the girls have obvious futures. They just need
• 55:05
  Speaker 3: to get married, right, marry them off to the richest bidder.
• 55:09
  Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, highest bidder, yeah, highest bidder. Yeah yeah yeah yeah.
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: Rather than intending to kill himself, he said he was
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: simply taking precautions as a result of a premonition of
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: his death approaching. He's like, I'm not gonna kill myself.
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: I just I just know that, like I'm gonna die
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: and like pretty soon.
• 55:34
  Speaker 2: I mean, no, how old was he How long do
• 55:37
  Speaker 2: people live back then? I don't know.
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it seems plausible at any rate. Betsy,
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: she was inconsolable either way. She's thinking, my husband is
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: having a premonition about his like approaching death just you know,
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: right around the corner. And then uh, you know, the
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: other possibility is uh or or you know, he's planning
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: to off himself. So really, for a woman in her circumstances,
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: neither is preferable. Whatever happened in the days between Betsy's
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: confrontation and the night of July eighth, we have no
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: further record of, no diary entry, no surviving conversation. Kind
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: of the only blank spot July eighth is sort of
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: I mean, there's there's like a little there's a little
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: bit of information, but not a lot. It's just the
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: outcome and a letter that reads less like a man
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: planning murder than a man planning his own absence. Like
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: it kind of does sound like he thinks he's gonna die. Yeah,
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: he's giving instructions for what to do, you know, for
• 56:48
  Speaker 1: the future of their boys. On the evening of July eighth,
• 56:53
  Speaker 1: eighteen oh six, Captain purrenton ground, his axe sharpened. It
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: feels very deliberate ahead of whatever it is that he
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: has planned here. After his wife and children went to bed,
• 57:06
  Speaker 1: he stayed up alone reading the Bible. His conduct and
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: demeanor had remained calm all day and into the night,
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: but then sometime between two and three in the morning,
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: he moved through the house with the axe. James Purrenton
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: Junior woke to the sound of his mother screaming. He
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: ran toward the noise and found his father standing with
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: a bloodied axe. Purenton swung at his own son, striking
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: him across the back, but James Junior managed to escape,
• 57:43
  Speaker 1: fleeing the house in nothing but his shirt.
• 57:46
  Speaker 2: Holy shit.
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: He ran to the home of neighbor Dean Wyman and
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: raised the alarm. Wyman immediately ran for help to Jonas Ballard,
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: Martha the midwife's son. Small town pretty prey knows, you
• 58:03
  Speaker 1: know a lot of the same last names floating around
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: here books. The two men went to the Puritan house
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: together to find Elizabeth and six of the children's lane.
• 58:17
  Speaker 1: Oh god, only one child was carried back to the
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: Ballard house, where surgical aid was called. There was a
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: quote from her diary about how she had breath left.
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: That was the one that you know they're trying to
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: save it just oh it just it gave me chills.
• 58:40
  Speaker 1: Captain Purrington himself lay on the floor of the outer room,
• 58:45
  Speaker 1: his throat cut with a razor, dead by his own hand.
• 58:49
  Speaker 2: Jesus, fuck, dude, couldn't you've just done that? Yeah?
• 58:54
  Speaker 3: I hate I hate murder suicide. People like just fucking
• 58:58
  Speaker 3: kill yourself.
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Family annihilators are like, I don't want to sound
• 59:03
  Speaker 1: crazy here, but they are a huge fucking bummer. Martha
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: Ballard and her husband walked to the Purenton house themselves
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: before sunrise. That next morning. The bodies of the deceased
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: Purenton family were carried to Jonas Ballard's barn, washed and
• 59:21
  Speaker 1: laid out side by side. Martha Ballard wrote that many
• 59:26
  Speaker 1: hundreds of persons came to behold the scene, a detail
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: that captures something kind of important about how this tragedy
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: was experienced by their broader community. It's not just, you know,
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: this private tragedy and grief, but it's kind of a
• 59:45
  Speaker 1: mass public event and almost immediately. I mean again, it's
• 59:52
  Speaker 1: a very small town, even kind of by eighteen oh
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: six terms, so everybody knew each other. This is I mean,
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: it's got to be devastating for a lot of people
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: that knew this family. Martha Purenton, the daughter, pulled from
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: the house, still breathing, lingered at the Ballard house for
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 1: roughly three weeks under Martha Ballard's own care. Sadly, she
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 1: died at three am on July thirtieth, eighteen oh six.
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: That's the death that was on my due date. And
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: I was like, shit, this has kind of a weird
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: link to both of these synchronicities with important dates in
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 1: our lives.
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah, oh, poor baby, I know.
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: But I mean, god, those three weeks were probably so horrific.
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: Martha Ballard recorded the moment in her diary in exactly
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: those terms. Martha Purenton expired, and she's got it in
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 1: kind of old timey shorthand, but at three am, essentially
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: what it says. The funeral took place the following day,
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: on July tenth, Reverend mister Stone offered a prayer, and
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: a reverend mister Taylor delivered a sermon drawn from Proverbs
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: twenty five twenty eight. He that hath no rule over
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 1: his own spirit is like a city broken down and
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: without walls. Given what the town had just witnessed, I
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: feel like that that particular I'm not a fan strictly
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: speaking of scripture, but that one kind of feels like
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: it makes sense.
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it does.
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: Martha Ballard described a genuinely staggering public turnout. A stage
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: was erected in front of the meetinghouse, the surrounding houses
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: were crowded with onlookers, the street was packed, and in
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 1: her own words, ye, tops of buildings covered with peace people.
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 2: Wow, that's where i'd want to be.
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think in a way, you know, they're just
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: the reverence and respect that you know, was inherent in
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 1: society at that point. It makes sense. And it was
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: such a small town, but you know, for a town
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 1: of Augustus size in eighteen oh six, it was such
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: a monumental event. It was an event on a scale
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: that nothing else that most of them had seen, certainly recently,
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: if ever, would have matched it.
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 2: It just and they can't go home and like watch
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 2: it on TV.
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, true, there is nothing on TV. Captain Purington's body
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: was laid out in the porch of the meetinghouse, separated
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: from his family. I mean kind of significant. I mean yeah,
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: literally physically denied entry into the building where his family was,
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: you know, for lack of a better term displayed.
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 2: I think that's fitting.
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 1: The axe and razor he had used were displayed on
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: top of his coffin.
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 2: Oh yikes.
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: His wife and six children's remains were laid in the
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 1: aisle inside. The funeral procession crossed the Kennebec Bridge, turned
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: up the hill, came down Second Street, passed the jail,
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: and arrived at the burial ground where Elizabeth and her
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 1: children were buried together. James Purenton was interred separately outside
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: the consecrated cemetery walls ha his murder weapons buried alongside him.
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 2: WHOA, yeah, they.
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: Were big into symbolism. Apparently. A coroner's story of eleven
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: local men, with John Evelyth serving as foreman, formally found
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 1: that Purenton had end quote of his mallee a forethought,
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: murdered his wife and children that he had as a
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: felon quote voluntarily killed and murdered himself. That second part
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: feels a little redundant. But for three weeks, as we know,
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: Martha Purenton clung to life at the Ballard house. Martha
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: Ballard's diary tracks her decline almost literally, like, if not
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: hour by hour, day by day. Her funeral took place
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: two days later, on August first, which, as you certainly
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 1: and maybe some people listening will recall, is my wedding anniversary.
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: So no one's getting out of this unscathed.
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 2: Geez dude.
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 1: It's just weird, like all of these important dates. And
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: I picked them because I was like, oh, what if
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: I did something?
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 2: Be me?
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and then the theme got really out of control.
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 2: Okay, next year for my birthday.
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 3: No murder, Okay, no sad child murders, even the worst
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 3: what's wrong with you?
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 1: I didn't think that they were. They didn't look that
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: bad with like the short summary when I first found
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 1: the cases and I was like, oh, it's our coin
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: toss city and it started cute anyway. Martha Ballard closed
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: her account of the entire ordeal with a line that
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: needs I would argue no embellishment. I attended the funeral
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 1: of Martha Purenton, who came to her end by the
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 1: wounds which her father gave her. Oh the dreadful scene.
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 1: Nearly two hundred and twenty years later, it's hard to
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: improve on that as a closing thought.
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 2: Oh the dreadful scene, Like seriously.
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, sums it up.
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 2: Why did he write that letter? Then saying like what
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 2: to do with his kids. I don't.
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: That's kind of another parallel with both of these stories.
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: It's like these kind of inexplicable actions on the part
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 1: of the perpetrator. It's just like.
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 3: What maybe he was just like thinking that at first
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 3: he would just take himself out, and then he's like, eh,
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 3: why not just do them all?
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: I mean, maybe part of him thought that would be
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: cruel to abandon them. I don't know. Obviously, what he
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 1: did do was horrific. In the days that followed, survivors
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 1: and relatives of the Puritan family, James Junior and Hezekiah,
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: Captain Purrington's brother, boarded at the Ballard house while they
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: sort it through the wreckage of the family's affairs. Martha
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: Ballard herself helped prepare burial Linen's, carried supplies between households,
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: and continued tending to the dying Martha Purenton in her
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 1: own home. The same woman who had shared tea and
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: traded herbs with his family for my I mean, arguably,
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 1: like very close small town bonds, was now the one
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: washing their bodies and nursing the gravely injured child left
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 1: behind after the tragedy. James Junior, the family's only true
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 1: survivor chose Elias Craig, the same man who had served
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 1: as coroner, to be his legal guardian. Hezekiah Purenton was
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: made administrator of his late brother's estate. Record show Hezekiah
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: continued paying for James's board as late as July eighteen
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: oh seven, a full year after the murders. By eighteen eleven,
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 1: land records place James back in the family's hometown, the
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: one that they had left six years prior to everything
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 1: that had happened. There's no record of him ever marrying,
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 1: which is kind of sad because I feel like that's
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: unusual for the time.
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 2: I mean, he's got some trauma.
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: But lots of traumatized people still got married because that
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: was just what you did.
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know.
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: Within days, a broadside titled Horrid Murder was printed in
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 1: Augusta by local publisher Peter Eddies, A graphic, heavily bordered,
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: single page bulletin featuring woodcut images of coffins lined up
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: side by side by size, presumably representing the victims. The
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 1: story spread fast and far for pre telegraph era. It
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: reached newspapers along the entire East Coast and reportedly overseas
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 1: as well. The Portland Gazette ran its own account on
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 1: July fourteenth, just days after the murders. The leading popular
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: theory regarding the motive was hereditary insanity, of vague sort
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: of era appropriate term. It's a way of saying that
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: mental illness ran in Puritan's family, which actually several modern
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: accounts do confirm that was documented. Interesting others pointed to
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 1: religious confusion or fanaticism, though he was never explicitly described
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: as a religious extremist or a fanatic by anyone who
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 1: knew him. In fact, they said, like he was pretty
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 1: cash about like religion and spiritual beliefs and stuff.
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 2: So and like, why would that make you kill?
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 1: I mean it wouldn't be the first or the last,
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 1: but I.
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 3: Meant, like, other than for unless your whole family you
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 3: think is like sinners?
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 1: I guess right, which every I mean, Hey, the Puritans
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 1: thought everyone was a sinner and we were all just
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 1: seconds away from the burning hell fire.
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 2: But we're already there, yeah.
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 1: And there we are. Financial ruin from the drought is
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 1: the most consistently cited practical trigger, and it lines up
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 1: with Purenton's own documented fears about being able to provide
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 1: for his family and their future. This was not a
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 1: man who snapped in a single moment of rage. He
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 1: sharpened the acts ahead of time. I mean, within hours
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: of the murders. He sat reading scripture. By all appearances,
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 1: very calmly, very everything about his behavior was deliberate and
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: calm that day, that evening, while his family slept just
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 1: rooms away. The coroner's jury used the phrase malice a
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 1: forethought deliberately because it was premeditated. And I would say
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 1: that's one aspect of this case that feels pretty obvious
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 1: to me, just based on the information we have. The
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: honest answer regarding his motive then and now is that
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 1: no one really knows for certain. As one broadsheet from
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 1: the time concluded, we have no evidence to lead us
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: satisfactorily to the motives for this barbarous and unnatural deed.
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 1: Bars I believe the kids say. In twenty nineteen, the
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 1: Augusta Historic Preservation Commission located the actual site of the
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 1: Puritan family grave, long since unmarked, and placed a memorial
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: marker there, finally giving the victims a recognized resting place
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 1: nearly two and a half centuries after.
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 2: They were buried. Oh wow, I know, isn't that cool?
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 1: Local folklore has long claimed that Boden Bowdwin College secretly
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 1: exhumed Captain Purenton's body from his roadside grave for early
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: medical research, and that's obviously completely unconfirmed. It's a rumor. Honestly,
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: I kind of hope.
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 3: So though, right, that would be crazy, But like, if
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 3: you're going to exhume someone might as well be that guy.
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 2: You know.
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: I'm just saying, there's a song that says, give your
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 1: life to science, and you know, if the true fits
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 1: wear the shit out of it Cinderella, And then there's
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 1: the connection that gives this case it's real staying power.
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 1: Martha Ballard's superhistoric Diary and everything that came after it.
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 1: Over two centuries after she wrote those entries, Historian Laurel
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 1: Thatcher Ulrich used Ballard's diary as the foundation for A
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 1: Midwife's Tale, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: nineteen ninety one and was laid adapted into a PBS
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 1: American Experience documentary WHOA.
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 2: I want to watch it.
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 1: I know, isn't that cool? Can you imagine being a
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 1: midwife in the eighteen hundreds?
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 2: I can't imagine being one now in like oh no.
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 1: Like her career was like the seventeen fifty sixties to
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 1: like eighteen the early aughts of the eighteen hundreds, like
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 1: what an entire chapter of that book is devoted to
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 1: the Puritan murders. This small town main tragedy from eighteen
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 1: oh six has improbably already been the subject of serious
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: prize winning historic scholarship. That's kind of.
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 2: Cool, think goodness, she like kept such good diary entries.
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 1: Seriously though, Two families, two colonial Maine towns, seventy two
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 1: years apart on the same lie date. One story ends
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 1: with a native woman indentured and enslaved by circumstance, literally
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 1: walking two miles to confess what no one had caught
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 1: her doing. The other ends with a respected farmer who
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 1: planned his family's deaths for days, maybe weeks, while sharpening
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 1: in acts and reading scripture by candlelight. Both stories survived
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 1: because someone close to them wrote them down, and in
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 1: both cases it's worth asking who that someone was and
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: what they wanted the story to mean. Two ministers shaping
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 1: Patience Boston into a redemption narrative arc for their congregation.
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 1: A midwife grieving in literal real time writing down exactly
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 1: what she saw. Two very different kinds of witnesses, separated
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 1: by decades, seventy two years, still reaching us today. If
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 1: you're ever in Portland, Maine, our sibling city on the
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 1: other coast, York's Old Jail and the Puritan families marked
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 1: grave near Augusta are both still there, still standing, still
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 1: telling the same two stories they've been telling since seventeen
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 1: thirty four and eighteen o six.
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 2: The history Happy birthday, mey. I do love history, though,
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 2: so yeah, I like that part of it. But it's
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 2: just sad.
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 1: It's horrifically sad. I really truly did not know that
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 1: both of these cases were going to be quite as
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: heinous and dark as they were.
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 2: But the fact that.
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 1: Like, there's so many aspects of I mean, we talked
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 1: about like indigenous culture, we talked about like what slavery
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: and colonial times, what you know, these aspects of religion,
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 1: all of these different things that affected people living in
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 1: America in this like broad swath of almost one hundred years.
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: We covered a lot of ground, Yeah, we did. If
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 1: nothing else, Yeah, they're both really interesting cases. And I
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 1: did start to feel a little bit better when I
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 1: was personally victimized with you know, my own invent dates included.
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: So I just thought these are both such interesting, bizarre,
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 1: truly sad, but just such interesting stories. And you know,
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: I think sometimes we get caught up thinking that so
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 1: much has changed, or you know, the circumstances of today
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 1: are nothing like you know this or that, and it's like,
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 1: I don't know, part of me thinks, you know, the
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 1: more things change, the more they stay the same in
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 1: a weird way.
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 2: I don't know. I hope that means.
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: No, but you know what I think.
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 3: I mean, I know, yeah, I feel like now everything's
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 3: documented on like social media, like that's people's diaries now
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 3: it is.
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 1: I just thought these were really interesting stories, and I
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 1: found like the most bizarre and I don't know, sort
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 1: of tangential ways to kind of tie all of this together.
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 1: I definitely feel like Charlie Day in front of the corkboard,
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 1: like I need a lot of the red string, very
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 1: much my usual, but then also just the historical aspect
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 1: of it and kind of getting to see things from
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 1: a different perspective. I mean, how about that, like at
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 1: the very beginning, Petty Grove and Lovejoy ever heard of them?
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 1: I know right, just saying, and they were both from
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 1: Maine and Massachusetts, and now we know that Maine used
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 1: to be part of Massachusetts. Like, I feel like we
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 1: learned a lot knowledge bomb.
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 2: Should we try to, like maybe learn a little more
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 2: with some taro?
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: Some taro?
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah, wonder what kind of vibes we're gonna get?
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 1: Oh boy, wow, all right, what are you thinking? I
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 1: don't know. I feel like I have an idea.
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 2: But yeah, you pickle, I'm guiding your hands from this side.
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 2: Oh you got the mole? Yeah, two of swords.
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 1: It's a coast mole. It is moll.
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 2: All right.
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: Oh wow, I turned right to it. That's crazy. Oh
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 1: I just realized my working title for this episode is
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 1: two deaths one date or some variation there are ooh, I.
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 2: Didn't even think about the two that we got two
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 2: of sorts.
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 1: Obviously more than two people died, unfortunately.
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 3: But yeah, but you talk about two event two to two. Yeah,
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 3: and you kept saying two events, two events.
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 1: So our keywords are combined resources, courage, faith, friendship, conflict,
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 1: and balance. In the traditional deck, this card depicts a
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 1: blindfolded woman holding two swords crossing over her chest. Twos
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 1: generally signify balance or conflict as well as pairing. I
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 1: think if the two of swords as the blind faith
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 1: card because it can represent courage and making decisions on
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: your own and in some cases spiritual guidance, which is
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 1: interesting because I feel like there's an element of like
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 1: spirituality with both of these cases. There is the upper
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 1: right to can symbolize balancing the right and left hemispheres
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 1: of your brain. It's interesting that we talk about balancing
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 1: your brain.
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there are some imbalances with these two.
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 1: I think so combining intuition with intellect, Drawing this card
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 1: may mean you must make a decision and need to
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 1: call on both.
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 2: This too, can.
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 1: Also advise you to take off your blindfold and look
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 1: at a situation honestly. In a reading about money, the
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 1: upright too recommends trusting your own wisdom and inner guidance
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 1: in a financial matter, pay attention to your intuition as
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 1: well as logic.
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 3: That's interesting that you talk about like intuition because you
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 3: said that he like had like intuition that he.
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 2: Was going to die. Yeah.
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah. If the reading is about your job, you may
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 1: be confused or conflicted about a work related issue. Have
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 1: faith than your own judgment and ideas. Sometimes the upright
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 1: too represents a job that requires both intellect and imagination.
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 1: In a reading about love, this card suggest listening to
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 1: both your head and your heart. It can mean you
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 1: and your partner hold conflicting perspectives, or that you're trying
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 1: to resolve differences and find harmony. I mean the balance
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 1: piece of it, and that it like literally talks so
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 1: much about like kind of the two sides of the
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 1: of the coin, so to speak, with like the head
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 1: and the heart and its soords.
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I know that these people were just kind of
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 3: like listening to a part of them but not really
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 3: like seeing.
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 2: Maybe the whole picture.
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 3: Like how you could you don't have to kill your
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 3: family just because you're in debt.
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 1: Or right, Yeah, I mean, please don't. In fact, if
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 1: you could not, that would be so great. Well, on
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 1: that note, I think we better wrap this up. We've
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 1: got we've got some antsy dogs on both ends of
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 1: this recording. Like that's that's it, they said, all done,
• 1:22:16
  Speaker 1: all done.
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 3: Well, hopefully I can get a quiet second to say goodbye.
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 1: That'd be nice.
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 2: Oh there's deer in the yard.
• 1:22:27
  Speaker 1: Oh it's so cute.
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 2: Well, now I'm not letting you fools out.
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, obviously have a creepy day.
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 2: We'll see you next Thursday. Unless you.
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 3: Ax, murder your family or throw a kid in a well, like,
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 3: don't come back then.
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 1: I just feel like we just yeah, just maybe don't.
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 2: That's terrible. Nobody do that. I feel like it goes
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 2: without saying.
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 1: I almost feel like by saying don't do it, it's
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 1: like we're giving people ideas, you know what I mean.
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 3: No, No, we would never, they would never think to
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 3: do that. Don't. No, but for real, like, hopefully everyone's
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 3: doing okay, check your mental health.
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that feels like that particular sentiment feels kind of
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 1: on point for us.
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 3: Right now, right, I'll go check mine health and look
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 3: at some deer on the grass.
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 1: I know they're so cute. I'm so jealous. My allergies
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 1: have been kind of kicking up for me. So Jesus
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 1: Christ Christ, Oh my god, excuse me. I'm about to
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 1: become part three of this episode. I just in my
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 1: peripheral was like, there is a man outside my window. Yeah,
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 1: she's sot on. We're almost done.
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 3: But