Young & Wicked: The Death of a Wayward Girl

By Maureen K. Wlodarczyk

Young & Wicked is the true story of star-crossed Irish-American lovers Willie Flannelly and Polly Sexton who started down the wrong path early as petty criminals. In 1893, they fled Jersey City to escape arrest, intending to disappear into the shadows of Manhattan's Bowery district. Just months later their fast life together in NY met a violent end, one a victim and the other an accused murderer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Maureen K. Wlodarczyk
• Release date: Oct 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781311602473

Maureen K. Wlodarczyk

Maureen Wlodarczyk (www.past-forward.com) is an author, columnist, genealogist, speaker and admitted history and genealogy addict. She is a member of the Irish American Writers & Artists organization along with several genealogical societies. She was selected for a 2014 and 2015 Excellence-in-Writing awards by the International Society of Family History Writers & Editors (ISFHWE). Maureen currently writes a genealogy column "History & Mystery: Perfect Together" for the e-magazine Garden State Legacy (gardenstatelegacy.com). She is also a contributing writer for the genealogical e-magazine Irish Lives Remembered (www.irishlivesremembered.ie).Beyond researching and writing about her own family history, Maureen searches for true stories of people and events lost to time, rediscovering and sharing those tales through her books, magazine articles, and her presentations to genealogical and historical groups. These fascinating stories of 19th century Americans, including immigrants, entrepreneurs, social activists, and “regular” people persevering in the face of daily challenges, transport us in a time machine to days long past, intriguing and informing us while bringing context to our own lives. Her 6 books are:Birthless: A Tale of Family Lost & Found - a novel about the power of friendship. Is it ever "too late" to confront long-kept secrets and life-altering decisions? Author and Genealogist Maureen Wlodarczyk takes us on a heartfelt journey from New York to Scotland and Ireland with three women whose friendship helps them face a reckoning with the long-concealed secrets of their youthful pasts. Memories of first love, young motherhood and painful decisions are resurrected as each of them searches for reconciliation and peace after decades of self-imposed silence. What awaits them are unexpected discoveries that will redefine their understanding of love, loss, motherhood, friendship and the meaning of family.Scarlet Letter Lives - a work of historical fiction inspired by the true stories of the owners of three 1850s copies of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter: a Mississippi boy of thirteen who, along with his two brothers, is destined for the battlefields of Virginia during the Civil War; a New England sea captain's daughter, newly-married and living in Alexandria, Virginia when that war breaks out; and a transplanted Virginia man living in New Orleans who must flee the Union occupation there. Their family stories converge over the ensuing decades as their copies of The Scarlet Letter and their lives intersect in one woman who will tell their tales and then reveal the secret that defined her own life.Jersey! Then . . . Again - a collection of 36 short stories about New Jersey historic people and events. Suffragettes, boxers, hurricanes, gangs, hot air balloonists, con artists, politicians, inventors, women in the war effort, military heroes and more -- it all happened in New Jersey!Past-Forward: A Three-Decade & Three-Thousand-Mile Journey Home - the story of her 30-year search for her grandmother's Irish ancestral roots and the surprising and poignant discoveries made along the way.Young & Wicked: The Death of a Wayward Girl - the true story of star-crossed first generation Irish-American lovers and petty criminals growing up in 19th century Jersey City. As the police close in, they flee to the Bowery in New York City in 1893 and soon after their life together meets a violent end.Canary in a Cage: The Smith-Bennett Murder Case - historical fiction based on a shocking true story: In 1878, a policeman is found bludgeoned and stabbed to death in his own bed, supposedly while his young wife lay beside him unaware. Did a twenty-something Jersey girl and farmer's daughter turn city-girl killer?

Book preview

Young and Wicked:

The Death of a Wayward Girl

By: Maureen K. Wlodarczyk

Young & Wicked: The Death of a Wayward Girl

All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2011 Maureen K. Wlodarczyk

This book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means, including graphic, electronic, or mechanical without the express written consent of the author or publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

ISBN: 978-0-9825504-8-9

First Published by Ultra Media Publications May 2011

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look back to their ancestors.

Edmund Burke

Contents

Foreward

Preface

Life and Death on the Lower East Side

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

Birthing and Burying in the Horseshoe.

Beginning Very Young

The Other Mr. & Mrs. McCarthy

Extra, Extra, Read All About It

Going Home

The Cast of Characters

A Diamond-Studded Defense

Life Goes On

Bibliography

Foreward

From the Evening Journal of Jersey City, February 17, 1883:

Juvenile Thieving – Its Cause and the Remedy

Every reader of the daily newspapers in this city must have observed the great increase in petty thieving committed by juveniles during the past year. Boys, as young as even 10 years of age, have been mixed up in them, but the majority of the work has been done by half-grown lads of from 14 to 17. From that age the boys regularly drift into the County penal institutions, and when they emerge from these places, as a rule, they are prepared for heavy work. In certain parts of this city, gangs of young men, armed with revolvers, slungshots and burglar tools, are ready at a moment’s notice to undertake the most daring and villainous kind of work, in an emergency, reckoning life of no account in its accomplishment.

By the time these young men have reached manhood, 50 percent of them are confirmed drunkards; nearly all of them are confirmed thieves, of different degrees, depending mainly on the nerve they possess, and but a fraction are smart thieves. Seventy-five percent of them are Irish, or of Irish extraction, and they compose almost entirely, the sluggers.

A Journal reporter yesterday afternoon visited a number of the haunts wherein these fellows hang out, and made a number of inquiries concerning them. Mixed up with grown men were lads who should be under their parents’ control, who were listening to the most ribald conversation. Many of the men showed signs of having been at Snake Hill, the County Jail, and even State Prison.

Inquiring of a real estate agent, the reporter was informed that one reason for these children mixing up in deeds of theft was because one or both of their parents were either locked up, or because they started the ball rolling by sending the young ones out to steal coal and wood.

Meeting a school teacher, the reporter fell into conversation with him and asked what percentage of these children attended school regularly. A very small percentage, regularly, the teacher said. You see, the schools are now crowded all over the city. In fact, in none of them is there any spare room. As a matter of course, under these circumstances, not as much attention is paid to the education of these youths as there should be, and they are allowed to drift about at their own sweet will without question. Then, as a general thing, that class do not care particularly about going to school. In the summer time they prefer to lounge around the docks, where they are easily made the prey of older boys and young men, who use them for their own purposes. Once they have acquired the habit of loafing it is almost impossible to make anything of them, and they grow from bad to worse, winding up in the County Jail, where they obtain an experience which lasts them for life. The proper plan, to my mind, would be to have enough school room, and then compel the children to attend, up to a certain age at least, but that’s where the trouble is. More attention is given to contracts than elevating the hoodlum element.

The reporter called at the residence of two small boys known to have been mixed up with a bad gang, and saw their mother. The house was in a filthy condition, and the woman was drinking beer with a neighbor. When not sipping beer and gossiping with her neighbors, the woman’s time was spent scolding a two-year-old child which sat upon the floor crying. The woman said she did not know what her boys did during the day, except that they brought in fuel. "Oi [sic] have too much wurruk [sic] to do meself [sic], she said, to be traipsing about after them." She appeared to have no curiosity about the reporter’s visit, but continued sipping her beer.

In another case the scribe was informed that both parents of a notoriously bad boy were at Snake Hill. Judging from these specimens it is clear that Jersey City is not improving in morality among the lower classes. With parents neglecting their children, churches paying little or no attention to them, and the public school system as good as ignoring them, there is nothing in the shape of a guardianship left but the police. The consequences can be imagined; it is bound to be deplorable and from day to day boys and girls, who are now mere children, will grow up to be jests in the community.

Preface

Man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start. Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is an inherent conflict between waxing nostalgic for the good old days and the fact that those very days were often rife with human suffering, societal failure and immoral or amoral behavior. We like to talk about them as simpler times, when values were more important, there was honor among men and mankind was just more pure. Generalization is always fraught with danger and these good old days generalizations are not exempt.

What the past does do, undeniably, is give us the opportunity to walk a bit in the shoes of those who came before us . . . with the benefit of hindsight to light the way. I believe that all of it, the good, the bad and the ugly parts of the past, are fascinating and come together to tell the complete story of people, places, and events. I believe this not only in the context of non-personal forays into history but also in the context of genealogy and our search for family history and ancestral connections.

Sometimes I feel like a history shock-jock or some shameless purveyor of familial dirty linen, particularly when I encounter someone who is taken back by my unfiltered telling of my Irish family history, warts and all. My theory is that I am not put-off or embarrassed by my colorful family past for two reasons. First, those Irish ancestors, saints and sinners, eventually led to the birth of my beloved grandmother Kate. I cannot disown a family line that could produce such a person. Nor can I find it in my heart to shrink from the realities of their lives that included poverty, religious persecution, emigration to avoid death by starvation, poverty (again), ethnic discrimination, alcohol abuse, illegitimacy, carousing and brawling, suffering and death by tuberculosis, tragic loss of children, and even some petty criminality. Second, I myself come from what used to be called a broken home, the term used to describe a household divided by divorce in the olden days before troubled homes were labeled dysfunctional, a term that covers a whole cornucopia of bad family conditions. Divorce is a non-event these days, as are unwed mothers or gay couples. Drug addiction hardly shocks or raises an eyebrow. Using the lens of modern sensibility, an alcoholic father who deserts his children when their mother dies seems nothing of note. Not so a hundred years ago when my own great-grandfather did just that.

Whether we are talking about our current living, breathing, family or the dusty, distant, dead family who preceded us, the old maxim - you can’t pick your family - says it all. If we wouldn’t turn our back on a wayward parent, sister or brother, why should we sit in judgment of or hide a wayward ancestor? At least we can be sure those dusty old relations won’t show up at our door with their hand out . . . nor will the police come to our door looking for them.

What follows is the story of a distant relative of mine (probably a second cousin of my great-grandmother Mamie Flannelly) named William Flannelly and his girl Mary (Polly) Sexton. They started down the wrong path very early and spent (or more properly misspent) their youth slaloming down the slippery slope of anti-social behavior and petty criminality. They left their homes in Jersey City in early 1893 with the intent of disappearing into the shadows of the Bowery in Manhattan. In the end, they not only disappeared, but lost themselves, one in body and the other in soul.

Chapter One:

Life and Death on the Lower East Side

The New York Times described her as a not very attractive brunette. The Evening Journal of Jersey City described her as a pretty but wayward girl. One thing both publications agreed on: she was dead . . . murdered in a Bowery flophouse in the early hours of May 13, 1893. Who was she? Mary Sexton, age nineteen, born about a mile from where she was shot dead. Her short downward-spiraling life did not, however, follow a straight line from her birthplace to the site of her violent death. Her life’s journey took her from Manhattan to Jersey City’s tough Horseshoe neighborhood at an early age. There the sad pattern of her young life took shape: poverty, violence, petty theft and an attachment to a young man whose influence would lead to her personal disgrace and death. In the following pages, I will tell you her story, his story, and so, their story.

Mary Ann Sexton, called Polly by those who knew her, was born in New York City in 1874. She was the daughter of Irish immigrants John Sexton and Mary Shea Sexton. The family is found in the 1880 United States census, living at 21 Cherry Street in Lower Manhattan. The census-taker recorded forty-year-old John Sexton, wife Mary Sexton, age thirty-six, daughters Mary, age six, and Maggie, age twelve, and sons James, age four, Thomas, age two, and Timothy, six months. All five children were born in New York. Also in the household was a Michael Shea (spelled Shay), age seventy-five, very possibly Mary Shea Sexton’s father, born in Ireland. The census indicated that Maggie Sexton was attending school.

The tenement house at 21 Cherry Street was home to ten families and a total of fifty-three residents. Nine of the ten heads of