(“Then Again” is Mark Bushnell’s column about Vermont history.)
[S]tephen Boorn knew he would die soon. In fact, he knew when – Jan. 28, 1820. That was his date with the hangman.
Everyone in Manchester knew that he and his brother, Jesse, had killed their brother-in-law, Russell Colvin. People had speculated about it for years, and now a jury had agreed. The brothers were sentenced to death, though the Vermont Legislature had reduced Jesse’s sentence to life.
As his execution date neared, Stephen Boorn swore he hadn’t done it. “I am as innocent as Jesus Christ!” he told a visiting minister who had encouraged him to confess. “I don’t mean that I am as guiltless as he was, I know I am a great sinner, but I am as innocent of killing Colvin as he was.”
If Stephen Boorn was so innocent, people wondered, why had he confessed? The answer, like everything else in the case, is complicated.
The trouble started when the Boorns’ sister, Sally, married Colvin. The dating scene in early 1800s Manchester must have been pretty bleak. Colvin wasn’t a great catch. By all accounts, he was a bit deranged and, even when coherent, he was not sharpest ax in the woodshed. Worse yet, people said he drank, a lot, and that was by 19th century standards.
Still, the Boorns’ father decided to help Sally and her difficult husband. They should live on the family homestead, he declared, while the brothers fended for themselves. Jealous, the Boorn boys took to feuding with their brother-in-law.
Then, one day in May 1812, Russell Colvin vanished. At first people didn’t think much about it: He’d wandered away before, though always with his son. This time he disappeared alone, and his absence stretched into months.
After three years, Sally Colvin became pregnant again and people knew it wasn’t her husband’s child. The law prevented her from collecting support from the father if she’d become pregnant while her husband was alive. She needed Colvin dead, at least in the eyes of the law, so she finally began a halfhearted effort to find him.
Stephen and Jesse Boorn assured Sally that she could collect support from the child’s father, because Russell Colvin was indeed dead. He had gone to hell and was “where potatoes would not freeze,” Stephen said cryptically.
He had been murdered, people said, and suspicions naturally centered on the Boorn brothers.
They professed their innocence. The words about hell and potatoes had been just talk, Stephen said. They had been working with Colvin that day in May 1812, he remembered, and Colvin had just walked into the woods and vanished. No, he corrected himself, they had actually been working on different farms that day. Stephen then recalled that Colvin had eaten supper at home that day, had left the house and never been seen again.
As Stephen muddied his account, suspicion grew. And he was all but hanged when his uncle began telling people in town that he had been visited by Colvin’s ghost, who had taken him to the field where the missing man had last been seen working with his brothers-in-law. The ghost then led the uncle to a cellar hole in a potato field.
This, people decided, must have been the place where “potatoes would not freeze,” and they excavated it at once. Inside, they found pieces of crockery, a button, a penknife and a jackknife, but no human remains. But Sally identified the items as her husband’s.
A few days later, a fire broke out in the Boorns’ sheep barn. This must be related to the murder, people figured. Then a dog unearthed some charred bones in an old tree stump. Three local physicians compared the bones to a recently amputated leg and declared them human.
The amateur detectives in town had the case cracked. The Boorn boys had killed Colvin and buried him in the cellar hole. Sometime later, they had decided they should move the body to the barn, where they had tried to burn it. They had then hidden the remaining pieces in the stump. The authorities had all the evidence they needed. Jesse Boorn was arrested, and constables searched for Stephen, who had recently moved to New York state.
Jesse’s cellmate was a forger named Silas Merrill, who told authorities that Jesse had confessed. According to Merrill, Jesse admitted that Stephen had bludgeoned Colvin with a club during an argument. While Colvin was lying on the ground, the Boorns’ father had happened by and decided to finish Colvin off with Stephen’s penknife. Then, Merrill said, the Boorns had disposed of the body just as townspeople had conjectured. For this information, Merrill won his release.
Feeling the noose around his own neck, Jesse confessed but gave himself a smaller role in the deed, perhaps hoping to save his life. Apparently thinking his brother was out of harm’s way in New York, Jesse exonerated his father and pinned most of the blame on Stephen.
But at about this time, Stephen was actually headed back to Vermont. A Manchester constable had tracked him down, and he had agreed to return to clear his name. Learning that his brother had been caught, Jesse recanted.
The trial went badly for the Boorns. It couldn’t have helped that they kept changing their stories. And witness after witness testified about the hostility between the brothers and Russell Colvin, about threats the brothers had made, and about how the three had been working together on the day in question.
Under the strain, Stephen confessed. But he said Colvin had hit him first, perhaps believing that the mitigating circumstance of self-defense would save his neck.
It didn’t work. The jury was undeterred and sentenced Stephen to death, even after the physicians declared that upon further inspection the charred bones, the key evidence, were definitely not human. So Stephen Boorn sat in his cell, praying for a miracle.
As his execution loomed, a series of providential events occurred in New York City. Tabor Chadwick, a traveler from New Jersey, was in the lobby of his New York hotel when he overheard a group of men discussing an article from the Evening Post. The story was about a strange murder case in Vermont in which the killer had been caught with the help of a dream.
What really caught Chadwick’s attention, though, was the name of the victim. Chadwick had known a Russell Colvin, who had been working for several years as a hired hand on a farm in Dover, New Jersey. Chadwick fired off two letters, one to Manchester’s postmaster, the other to the Post, each describing the Colvin he knew.
The postmaster did nothing with the news, which is strange since he was one of Stephen Boorn’s lawyers.
The Post, however, published Chadwick’s letter on Dec. 6. That’s where James Whelpley read it. Whelpley, a Manchester native then living in New York, had coincidentally been part of the hotel lobby conversation Chadwick had overhead, and he had known Colvin in Vermont. Whelpley went immediately to the farm in Dover and encountered the farmhand, who had originally gone by the name Russell Colvin but had since changed it.
The farmhand acted strangely. He said he used to be Colvin, but wasn’t anymore, and that he knew nothing about Manchester. But he proceeded to describe minute details about the town.
Whelpley had his man.
But his man refused to return to Manchester. Whelpley had to devise an elaborate plan to dupe Colvin. First he tricked him into visiting New York to meet a young woman, who quickly deserted him. Then, when it was time for Colvin to return to New Jersey, Whelpley told him they had to take a circuitous route because British ships were threatening the area, this being in the years after the War of 1812.
So Whelpley essentially kidnapped Colvin and escorted him by stagecoach back to Manchester. They arrived on Dec. 22, a month ahead of the execution date. Word of their arrival had preceded them. A crowd gathered at Black’s Tavern, where the stagecoach had stopped, to see if it really was Colvin.
Stephen Boorn was brought before Colvin in leg irons. Colvin seemed surprised to see his brother-in-law and asked why he was in chains.
In the most memorable sentence of his life, the now-vindicated Stephen said, “Because they say I murdered you.”
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