Mrs. Dodge and the House Painter: A True Story of Death in New England

By George Garrigues

in September 1911 a handsome, middle-aged widow in a small New England town is quietly doing her chores on a Saturday morning — she has the ironing board out, and maybe she has already sprinkled the curtains she is about to press, and she is chatting with the guy she’s hired to paint a bedroom. The next thing you know, all hell has broken loose: There is blood, and chaos, and neighbors tromping in and out, littering the floor with golden leaves from hemlocks and maples, and there are police, doctors, the local Congregational minister and his wife, and an open bottle of brandy. Nothing is ever the same for the widow from that day forward. The painter is dead, shot through the heart.

This story is told in an creative and artful way through the actual reporting from newspapers of the past. Follow the fascinating tale just the way people did it before the days of radio and television. Did she do the crime, and must she pay the time? Fully illustrated.

This is the second book of the Read It Again! series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: George Garrigues
• Release date: Nov 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370695744

George Garrigues

George Garrigues started out in journalism back in the 20th century and has worked as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, a public relations specialist for the International Labor Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, and a journalism professor at several universities. With his Read All About It! series, he now brings you real journalism about real people of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when automobiles were nudging horses off the road and women were struggling for the right to vote. Each book tells the story of a different person, through the actual news stories of yesteryear as they were written, moment by moment, edited and curated by George himself.

Book preview

Preface

This is an extraordinary story about an ordinary woman.

I was drawn to it by its essentially humdrum quality — in September 1911 a handsome, middle-aged widow in a small New England town is quietly doing her chores on a Saturday morning — she has the ironing board out, and maybe she has already sprinkled the curtains she is about to press, and she is chatting with the guy she’s hired to paint a bedroom.

The next thing you know, all hell has broken loose: There is blood, and chaos, and neighbors tromping in and out, littering the floor with golden leaves from hemlocks and maples, and there are police, doctors, the local Congregational minister and his wife, and an open bottle of brandy. Nothing is ever the same for the widow from that day forward.

The painter is dead, shot through the heart.

If you’ve never been in New England, you should go: In the far northeastern niche of our nation six states are nestled together like kittens in a basket — Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. (In the map, Vermont is colored red.) Their great swaths of verdant green lands, their fine, intellectual cities, and their rolling mountains are interspersed with ancient little villages dominated by freshly painted Congregational churches, always white and always with a bell that rings the daytime in and rings it out again in the evening. There may be an old schoolhouse or library that’s been turned into a museum or historical center.

That’s New England today. Imagine it a hundred years ago, at the dawn of the twentieth century, in, say, 1911. Most people still get around by horse and buggy, though motorcars are churning up dust everywhere. A lot of folks have telephones and talk to each other on party lines.

Politically, most everybody is a Republican. Once a year those who live outside of cities (most Vermonters are like that) are summoned together via public notices which are, oddly enough, called warnings to attend a town meeting to pass a budget, elect local officers, and then socialize afterward. It is the annual ritual observance of New England democracy in action.

Vermonters live in places named Island Pond, or Barre (pronounced berry), or Bennington, or St. Johnsbury, or Lunenberg, or Norwich (pronounced, reasonably enough, nor-witch). About eight thousand of them live in the state capital, Montpelier (pronounced mont-PEE-lyer).

There are fourteen counties in Vermont, which is a small state, so each county is very small. Essex County is in Vermont’s northeast corner, spang against the state of New Hampshire on the east and Canada’s province of Quebec on the north. Essex’s capital city, where much of our story takes place, is named Guildhall, and you can read about it and see a photo of its three principal white buildings here; you should look because the middle one is the courthouse, really important to our narrative.

In 1911, there are newspapers everywhere in New England; every county has to have its official publication. Often they trade news back and forth when not much has happened locally. Some are connected to the outside world through news agencies like Associated Press, and so you could read the same articles in newspapers all over the nation. Our story makes extensive use of these newspaper articles, and I have edited them severely for the modern reader, always with an eye to comprehensibility but with the knowledge that I must not play false with you. All of them are from Vermont, unless I tell you otherwise. They are all dated, so you can look up the originals if you want.

Our story is, in effect, a courtroom drama, but we open it outside the courthouse, on