The Hanging Judge (14 page)

“Light’s fading,” Moon said.

“I hear you,” Rashid said.

“You can see in her eyes how scared she is. She’s bound to pack. You know what I’m saying?”

“They always do,” Rashid said. “They have to.”

“I’ve told her so many lies, her head’s upside down and backward.” Moon tapped the table lightly with his hand. “One way or another, I’m dead and gone unless my lawyer can kick up some problem with my trial. That’s all that matters now. Except for that, I’m just, like, dust in the wind.”

A female correctional officer, Hispanic, with a large round face and a brown uniform that fit tightly across her ample breasts and belly, stepped briskly into the room.

“Time to be shoving off, fellas. We’re bringing in the D-boys.”

“Sure thing, Miss Rosa,” Rashid said, getting up slowly. “We’re all done.”

“All set for now,” Satan said to Moon. He rose, wincing slightly. “Don’t forget about Pinball. Don’t wait even five minutes.”

Moon nodded, started to say something, nodded again, and walked off.

Satan and Rashid trailed behind down the hallway, their heads together.

“Make sure folks know,” Satan said. “Leave that boy alone for now.”

“Breeze’s cousin’s in here, looking for him.” Rashid shook his head with a worried expression.

“I know.”

“You think he aced that white girl?” Rashid asked.

“Who knows?” Satan scratched his bristly cheek. “But if he didn’t, he might as well have.”

16

T
he newspapers covering Moon Hudson’s trial made much of the fact that an ancestor of the murdered nurse Ginger Daley O’Connor was an Irish immigrant by the name of Dominic Daley, who was tried in 1806, along with his friend James Halligan, for a killing that occurred no more than fifteen minutes’ drive from the site of the Walnut Street Massacre. The fairness of the Daley/Halligan prosecution and the justice of its outcome have been matters of debate in western Massachusetts for more than two hundred years.

Dominic Daley’s fate began to unwind on Saturday, November 9, 1805, when John Bliss of Wilbraham, a suburb today of Springfield, Massachusetts, noticed a strange horse in his pasture. Its saddlebags contained a supply of bread and cheese, as well as letters confirming that the horse was owned by one Marcus Lyon of Woodstock, Connecticut. Puzzled at the sudden appearance of the animal, Bliss tied it up to await the return of its owner.

By the morning of Sunday, November 10, no one had appeared to claim the horse, and residents of the area, fearing that something had happened to Lyon, began a search. At about eight in the evening, Bliss and a party of his neighbors saw something submerged in the shallows of the Chicopee River. Upon further examination, the group discovered it to be the body of a man about six feet tall, pinned face-down by a large rock. On the bank of the river nearby, the searchers also found a broken pistol covered with blood, as well as torn shrubbery suggesting that the corpse had been dragged from the adjacent Post Turnpike into the river. The search party hauled the body out of the stream and brought it to the stage house of Ara Calkins where it proved to be that of the horse’s owner, Marcus Lyon.

In recounting the incident,
The Hampshire Gazette
described Lyon, who was twenty-three and unmarried, as “a young man of peculiar respectability.” He had been journeying from Cazenovia, New York, where he was employed as a farm worker, back to his home in Woodstock, Connecticut. He had last been seen riding a handsome horse on November 9 on the Post Turnpike passing through Wilbraham.

The murder of Lyon threw the community into turmoil. On November 17, 1805, the Sunday after the discovery of the young man’s body, Pastor Ezra Witter delivered a sermon in Wilbraham, in which he asked: “And hath it come to this! Have things gotten to such a pass, in this infant country, that it is dangerous for a man of decent appearance and equipage, to travel on the highway in midday, through fear of being murdered and robbed for his money?” Ominously, he suggested that “we are doubtless justified in saying that a great portion of the crimes abovementioned … are committed by foreigners.” As a result of the influx of immigrants, he said, “we have ripened, apace, in all the arts of vice and depravity.”

Everyone hearing Pastor Witter’s sermon would have known what he intended with the reference to “foreigners.” He meant Catholics. Despite sharp doctrinal differences, the dominant Protestant sects of New England in 1805 were united on one thing: a deep abhorrence of Catholicism. The spiritual leader of the roughly 1,200 Catholics living in New England at this time, Father Jean-Louis Lefebvre de Cheverus of Boston, noted that “the Catholic Church in New England is the object of execration, detested utterly, the name of a priest held in horror.”

As recently as 1801, Justice Theophilus Bradbury of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, joined by Justice Samuel Sewall, had penned an opinion that expressed the icy magnanimity of the prevailing mood: “Catholics are only tolerated here, and so long as their ministers behave well, we shall not disturb them. But let them expect no more than that.”

The Massachusetts Attorney General, James Sullivan—himself the son of a Catholic and bitterly outspoken against his father’s faith—had brought charges against Father de Cheverus for the crime of performing an illegal marriage, that is, a Catholic marriage, between two Catholic parishioners. Although the indictment was eventually thrown out, Father de Cheverus had been jailed for a time, and Justice Bradbury, who had presided at the unsuccessful trial, publicly expressed his disappointment at losing the opportunity to consign a priest to the pillory.

Within hours of the discovery of Marcus Lyon’s corpse, a Jury of Inquest convened in Northampton, the county’s shire town at the time, to determine the cause of death and the possible perpetrators. At the inquest, the coroner stated that he’d found a deep indentation over the body’s left eye, the back of the head “smashed to a pulp,” and a ball fired from a small pistol lodged in Lyon’s ribs.

By far the most important witness at the inquest was a thirteen-year-old boy named Laertes Fuller, who lived a short distance from where the body was discovered. He testified that while picking apples he’d seen two strange men “in sailor garb” leading a horse in the area where the body was found, heading in the direction of Bliss’s pasture. One of the men rode off, while the other lingered behind, leaning on a stone wall and eyeing the boy, but saying nothing. After about fifteen minutes, Fuller said, the first man returned without the horse, and the two strangers departed on foot in a westward direction toward New York on the Post Turnpike.

Based on this information, Major General Ebenezer Matoon, the sheriff of Hampshire County at that time, immediately organized a posse to locate and apprehend the two suspects. His Excellency Caleb Strong, the governor of Massachusetts and a Northampton resident, issued a proclamation, noting that “a horrid MURDER was committed on one Marcus Lyon, who was there traveling on the highway and it is presumed that divers valuable articles were then and there feloniously taken from the said Lyon.” On behalf of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, he offered “a reward of Five Hundred Dollars”—a considerable sum at the time—to anyone who apprehended and confined the responsible party or parties “until him or they be convicted of the said murder.”

The posse organized to apprehend the murderers set out immediately, following the Post Turnpike toward New York, in the direction that Laertes Fuller had told them the two strangers in sailor suits had taken. On November 12, one of the posse’s members, Josiah Bardwell, encountered two men who appeared to be the suspects at Coscob Landing, fifty miles west of New Haven, near the present-day city of Rye, New York. Dominic Daley and James Halligan were waiting at a tavern, on the main Boston-to-New York Post Turnpike, about to board a packet boat to take them down to New York.

Daley was in the barroom shaving, when Bardwell approached and told him that he held a warrant for his arrest on a charge of murder. Neither Daley nor Halligan was wearing nautical clothing, and both men immediately protested their innocence. They admitted that they had passed through Wilbraham on the Post Turnpike, but they insisted that they were merely en route from Boston to New York, where Daley expected to collect a sum of money owed him, and Halligan intended to meet up with a cousin. Despite these denials, the posse immediately clapped the men in chains and returned with them to Springfield.

Dominic Daley was thirty-four years old at the time and had been living in South Boston with his mother; his wife, Ann; and his son, Edward, since his immigration from Ireland in 1803. Halligan, who had been in Massachusetts only six months, was twenty-seven, unmarried and without connections in the country. Both men were Catholics and suspected on that account. No contemporary description of the Irishmen’s physical appearance is available, beyond the detail that the faces of both men were pockmarked, evidence that each had survived the smallpox.

Authorities swiftly conveyed Laertes Fuller from Wilbraham to Springfield to confirm whether Daley and Halligan were the suspicious men he’d seen near where Lyon’s body had been found. When brought before a hastily assembled lineup, the boy picked out Dominic Daley as the one who’d stood near the fence staring at him. He failed to identify Halligan, however, despite the fact that Halligan and Daley were the only men in the lineup in irons. Even with this omission, Fuller’s testimony satisfied the officials that they had the killers. Daley and Halligan were transported to Northampton and locked up in the Hampshire County Jail pending trial before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court that spring. From the date of their incarceration in November 1805, until April 22, 1806, two days prior to the commencement of their trial, the prisoners were held virtually incommunicado, having no contact with any outsider except the specially appointed prosecutor, John Hooker, one of the two attorneys representing the Commonwealth.

Contemporary records make it clear that even their internment did not entirely reassure the local people. Nearly two months after the apprehension of Daley and Halligan, on January 7, 1806, the editor of the
Hampshire Federalist
wrote that “the panic excited by this event goes to an extreme. It magnifies every assault to a manslaughter—every sudden or accidental death to a bloody assassination.”

The upcoming trial of the two Irishmen acquired added significance in the turbulence of the prevailing political climate. During the most recent election, Governor Caleb Strong, a Federalist, had narrowly defeated Attorney General James Sullivan, the Democratic-Republican candidate and outspoken anti-Catholic. A rematch between the two was slated for the fall of 1806. Recognizing the importance of the case to his own prospects, Sullivan parried Governor’s Strong’s offer of a reward of five hundred dollars for the capture of Lyon’s murderers with his own promise to come to Northampton and personally assist Hooker in prosecuting Daley and Halligan, to ensure that justice would be done.

PART TWO

17

N
ot long after their dinner at the Pratts, David did manage to call Claire and invite her to an art exhibit at the Smith College museum. His memory of his undergraduate survey course in art history was dim, but it seemed like a respectable Saturday outing, and he was delighted when Claire agreed. He’d be getting a break from reading pretrial memoranda for a few hours, with all day Sunday still in reserve to prepare for the coming week.

During their drive to the museum, David took the opportunity to impress Claire with more of his amazing Donald Duck imitations. She tested him by making him pronounce tough words like “licorice” and “xylophone,” and, best of all, “sexual intercourse,” which provoked such an explosion of laughter from both of them that the car careened over the rumble strip.

The afternoon, as far as David could tell, was a reasonable success, with lots of easy conversation and eye contact as they wandered through the museum’s galleries. Twice, their hands brushed and, once, magically, she leaned against him as they examined some nineteenth-century landscapes. They managed, in dribs and drabs, to exchange summaries of their former marriages—Faye’s death and Claire’s awful divorce—without getting into too much gory detail.

As they were heading back to the car afterward, Claire asked casually, “So how are things shaping up with your big trial?”

This topic was off-limits, but David did not want to come across too stuffy, so he muttered, “Fine” and quickly added, “Can I show you something fun that hardly anyone knows about?”

“Fun? Sure.”

They drove west from the museum for a few minutes and parked on the broad shoulder of a sloping grade. On the far side of the road was a knoll, steep enough that David used it as an excuse to take Claire’s hand and draw her up to the top.

A crude monument stood on the crest, its base awkwardly constructed of mortared stone, square slabs, and pink granite bricks. The bricks formed a boundary around a rectangle of dirt in which an upright rock, five feet tall and vaguely penile in shape, had been fixed.

“It’s a monument to a couple of Irishmen,” David said. “See the plaque?”

Claire dropped David’s hand and bent to read. The brass plate contained the names Dominic Daley and James Halligan. Underneath, it read: “Executed 1806” and, beneath that, “Exonerated 1984.”

“This is your idea of something fun?” she asked. “Remind me to invite you to my next funeral.”

“You’re right, you’re right. Not fun exactly, but interesting. Two men were hanged on this very spot two hundred years ago.” He raised his hands and looked up at the sky. “They were probably innocent, and eventually Dukakis pardoned them.” He gazed around the area. “Sheriff Garvey’s crew keeps the lawn mowed, but not that many people come here.” He looked up at the sky again. “I sort of feel them looking down on me these days.”