The Murder of Dr. Chapman: The Legendary Trials of Lucretia Chapman and Her Lover

One

Bucks County, Pennsylvania

June 1831

EARLY ON THE MORNING of June 19, 1831, Dr. John Phillips, one of the most highly regarded physicians in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, was awakened in his Bristol home by a persistent banging on his front door. Phillips arose reluctantly. It was a Sunday, and he’d hoped to sleep until it was time for church. God knew he needed some rest. But he wasn’t like some of the doctors who were practicing nowadays, the kind who put their own needs first and turned away patients when being called upon didn’t suit them. Some of those shirkers didn’t even have diplomas. Others had them, but from places he’d never heard of, and as far as he was concerned, if a doctor hadn’t been trained as he was, at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, he had no use for him, none whatsoever.

Still sleepy, he threw off his covers and peered out the bedroom window to see who was making the commotion. It was Mina, that Spanish or Mexican fellow who was boarding at the home of his good friend Dr. William Chapman. A handsome fellow, with olive skin and deep-set anthracite eyes. Tiny, though. But many men looked small to the six-foot-tall Dr. Phillips.

Bounding downstairs on his long legs, he let the foreigner in and, hoping the clamor hadn’t disturbed his wife and children, asked him who was sick. One of the Chapmans’ children? One of their students? William and his wife ran a boarding school at which Lucretia taught reading, writing, and comportment, mostly to young ladies, though she had a few male pupils, too, and William gave speech lessons to stammerers who sought him out from all over the country, and even from Europe.

In a torrent of garbled English, the foreigner began answering Phillips’s questions. He was difficult to understand, but after a while the doctor was able to gather that it was William who was sick. He’d been throwing up since Friday night.

Nothing unusual about that, Phillips thought. It was almost summer. Cholera morbus time. In the warm months people frequently came down with that nasty stomach affliction that made them regurgitate all they ate and turned their stool to water. There wasn’t much a doctor could do—just wait till it subsided, which it almost always did.

Still, according to the Mexican, Lucretia Chapman was insisting he come over and have a look at William. So Phillips dressed himself, got into his carriage, and followed the voluble man over to the Chapman house, which was ten miles away in the town of Andalusia.

When he arrived, Lucretia and William’s brood of five children and half a dozen or so of their students were just finishing breakfast. Lucretia, looking harried, was serving them herself. Her housekeeper, she explained, had recently quit.

She was a striking woman, buxom and almost as tall as Phillips himself, with pleasing features and a cascade of fashionably bobbing reddish-brown curls, a head of hair that belied her profession. She offered him some food, but he declined and went upstairs to look at the patient.

William was pale, his corpulent body so flabby and white that, lying in the middle of the big marital bedstead, he looked like a beached whale, and the bedstead itself like an island in an archipelago of beds. It was surrounded by a scattering of the trundle beds the Chapmans used to accommodate very young students.

He felt weak, William said to Phillips. He’d been vomiting copiously. Could it be because of the pork he’d had for both dinner and supper on Friday?

William wasn’t a medical doctor. He was a scientist, but he’d taken a few courses at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school. Phillips respected him. He told Chapman it could have been the pork, but most likely it was cholera morbus, the cause of which no one could say precisely.

Cholera morbus wasn’t the same ailment as cholera, the virulent bacterial disease of the intestinal tract that was, even as William lay sick, advancing relentlessly from its birthplace in India across the European continent. Phillips had heard about that deadly Asiatic cholera, which in a year would reach the shores of America and produce one of the most frightening epidemics the young country had ever known. But on this bright June morning in 1831, cholera, with its notorious ability to kill within hours after delivering its first symptoms, had yet to cross the Atlantic, and cholera morbus was not a killer. Indeed, it generally got better in just a few days. After examining William, Phillips prescribed a light diet.

His plump friend was well enough to be annoyed by that recommendation. A beefsteak, William said testily, would do me more good than anything else.

But Phillips was adamant that he eat lightly. He directed Lucretia to feed William rice gruel. And chicken soup. He might even have a little of the chicken with which she made the soup. Not much, he advised. But the broth would be very good for him. He may eat plenty of that.

Phillips was busy the next few days. He had a great many patients, spread out over the entire area of lower Bucks County, and he was the consultant of choice among the county’s medical men, the doctor they turned to when they had particularly difficult cases. But on Tuesday, after hearing that William Chapman was still sick, he made up his mind he’d drive to Andalusia the next day and check on him again.

When he got there on Wednesday Lucretia informed him, to his surprise, that William had been so violently ill the night before that she’d called in another doctor, his colleague Allen Knight. Knight had given the Chapmans the same diagnosis Phillips had: cholera morbus. He’d also given them a prescription for calomel drops. But she and William had objected to the drops, Lucretia said. Calomel was a purgative, and William didn’t need any more purging. What he needed was for the purging to stop. And it hadn’t. He was purging himself constantly now.

Phillips went upstairs to have a look for himself, and he realized at once that William was considerably worse. His limbs felt cold and clammy. His pulse was barely perceptible. His skin was discolored—a rash of dark spots had sprouted under his eyes and alongside his ears. More, he seemed to have gone entirely deaf. He kept asking anxiously, his brow a web of taut lines, whether he was going to recover. But when Phillips tried to explain his condition to him, he couldn’t understand a word.

Get me a slate, Phillips directed Lucretia.

She brought him one from a classroom, and he chalked out an opinion. William couldn’t read the words. He couldn’t get his eyes to focus.

Worried about the dire turn his friend had taken, Phillips decided to remain at the Chapman house. He ate a quick supper in the dining room, then returned to the sickroom. So did Lucretia. Her boarder and one of William’s older students, a Vermonter, had volunteered to assist with the nursing chores, to apply cold vinegar compresses to William’s aching head and to empty his foul-smelling sick basins. Nevertheless, Phillips noticed, Lucretia was doing most of the chores herself.

Phillips felt sorry for her. She was one of the best educated women in the county. She knew literature, history, even a smattering of science. Knew how to sing and accompany herself on the piano, too. Yet here she was, spending her time bathing a dying man’s clammy limbs, sponging the vomit from his lips, wiping feces off his body and bedclothes. She didn’t seem to mind. She was doing everything most attentively, he noted. Most tenderly.

At midnight she was still up and in the sickroom with him when a neighbor, a crusty farmer, came over to lend a hand. I’m drowsy, Lucretia confided to the man, drowsy from waiting on Mr. Chapman. Phillips heard her, and when, shortly after she spoke, Dr. Knight stopped by again, Phillips took advantage of the younger doctor’s presence by announcing that he would like to rest for a while and recommending Lucretia do the same.

She accepted his suggestion gratefully, said, Call me if I’m wanted, and went into another room to lie down. Phillips lay down, too, stretching out on a mattress in a spare room and falling asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow. But around three in the morning he awakened abruptly and hurried into William’s room. What he saw was dismaying. William had fallen into a coma, and his bowels were emitting a bloody discharge.

The end was in sight, Phillips realized. He summoned Lucretia, who woke the children, and the six of them gathered around William’s bedside. In hushed voices the family prayed, while Phillips bent over his friend to monitor his passage from earthly travail. The coma, he noticed, had brought a peaceful look to William’s face. Gone were the traces of anxiety that had marked it earlier. As to his breathing, it was shallow—barely a breath at all. Then, as the first faint grays of the June dawn began to light up the room, he saw that William had stopped breathing.

Straightening up, Phillips glanced worriedly at Lucretia. The poor woman was a widow now. Just forty-three years old and a widow. A widow with five fatherless children to look after. What would become of her? As gently as he could, he told her that her husband was dead.

But dead of what? he wondered. Of cholera morbus? Now that he’d witnessed the appalling progression of William’s disease, he wasn’t entirely sure.

Two

Cape Cod and Philadelphia

1804–1818

THE FIRST TIME LUCRETIA fell in love, she was sixteen. It was up on Cape Cod, where her parents had been born and many of her aunts and uncles still lived. She herself was from Barre Plains, in an inland part of Massachusetts, but she adored the Cape, its gilded northern light, long beaches, and wild ocean that washed the very wharves of the villages and the seaside gardens of her relatives, and her parents often allowed her to spend the warm months there. The spring in question, the spring of 1804, she was visiting her aunts and uncles in Harwich when a boy named Mark Holman began courting her and telling her how comely she was.

She was comely, auburn-haired, tall, and with the erect bearing of her father, Zenas, who’d been a militia colonel in the Revolution, so pretty that Harwich had chosen her to be its Queen of the May.

As for Mark, he was bright and bold and seventeen. In the middle of the Maypole festivities, the two of them slipped off into the piney woods. They stayed there, blissfully alone, for several hours, and when they returned, there was a terrible commotion among Lucretia’s aunts and uncles. They were Winslows, descendants of the pious Edward Winslow who had helped found America’s first permanent settlement, and the Winslows were famously upstanding. Lucretia’s great-grandfather Kenelm Winslow had been the keeper of the Sabbath peace in Harwich. Her grandfather Thomas Winslow had been both a physician and a judge. Her father had been a justice of the peace, at least before he’d moved to Barre Plains and taken up land surveying. The Winslows didn’t approve of girls going off unchaperoned into the woods. But when Lucretia told the family that she and Mark were figuring to get married, she was forgiven her transgression. Her relatives gave her their blessings, and she went home to her parents and began planning her wedding.

She was grappling with whom to invite, and whether to wear the traditional wedding dress of gray or brown silk, and whether to hold the ceremony up on Cape Cod or in the local Congregational church where Zenas and her mother, Abigail, worshipped, when at summer’s end Mark changed his mind. He sent her a letter saying he didn’t want to get married after all, that instead he wanted to go to college. And he went off to Yale and left her in the lurch.

She was a figure of disgrace after that, not so different from the girl one of her neighbors in nearby Worcester had written about in a book, a girl who was so ashamed at being jilted that she went out and hanged herself. Lucretia wasn’t the type for such a desperate, depressive measure. She lived with her shame, remaining at home, in sight of the twisty road she’d imagined would carry her far away, looking after her younger siblings, and hoping that sooner or later she’d find another young man to love and marry.

But she didn’t, and finally, when she was twenty, an age well past that at which most of the girls she knew were not just already married but already mothers, she realized that, married or not, she wanted to leave Barre Plains. She also realized that if she was going to do so, she’d best have some way to support herself. Fortunately, there was newly a way. All over the fledgling country, schools were mushrooming. There weren’t enough educated men to teach the press of pupils, so unmarried women, provided they had some education, were suddenly in demand to fill the gap. Lucretia had received an education, had even shown a particular aptitude for reading and writing. She took a job as a schoolteacher. Up at the Cape.

She taught there for five years, correcting numbers and alphabet letters on the slates of a roomful of children, most of them boys, some just out of their cradles, others great gangly fifteen-year-olds. But Mark never again asked her to marry him, nor did any other young man, and in 1813, when she was twenty-five and well on her way to being a spinster, she decided to go to Philadelphia and take a teaching job there.

Philadelphia! Lucretia had been jouncing for nearly a week along log-lined corduroy roads and crudely surfaced turnpikes when, in September, she caught her first sight of the prosperous city on the Delaware. Steamboats had recently begun to ply their way down the river, and she could have boarded one in New Jersey and gone at least part of her way on the water. But it was wartime. British ships were stationed downstream. Lucretia had chosen a stagecoach company that advertised overland routes that were safe despite the war, then endured such a rattling and shaking that, at times, she’d feared she and her fellow passengers would be hurled to the bottom of their cramped carriage or tossed up against the roof so hard their skulls would be crushed. But they’d made it to Philadelphia without calamity, and now, through the carriage’s tall, leather-shaded windows, Lucretia started seeing gleaming white marble buildings; wide, regular avenues; and an extraordinary crush of people—merchants in frock coats, women in stylish high-waisted gowns, soldiers in blue and scarlet uniforms.

The vision excited her, and when the driver reined the horses to a stop, she stepped eagerly from the coach, ready to start what she was certain would be a new and better life. How could it not be? She would be living in Philadelphia, the largest, wealthiest, and most culturally vibrant city of the new American republic, and she would be teaching at a new French school, an evening school for adults. Her French was rudimentary. But she’d taught herself enough to be able to instruct beginners, and Jean Julien Bergerac, the man who had hired her, had been happy to offer her a job. Everything French, from the couture to the quadrille to the language, was in fashion now that France had allied itself with America in the war against the English. Indeed, so popular had France become that it seemed as if everyone wanted to learn the country’s language—four new French schools were due to open in Philadelphia that very autumn. Bergerac had been hard-pressed to find teachers with any French at all.

He was there to meet her. He kissed her hand, inquired after her health in heavily accented English, and told her he’d rented elegant and spacious quarters for his academy on an excellent corner, New Market Street and Stamper’s Alley. Then he accompanied her to the baggage shed to retrieve the luggage she had sent on ahead.

It wasn’t there—not her bundle of bedding, or her case of toiletries, or her trunks, the two trunks she had packed so carefully with all her dresses, cashmere shawls, and lamb’s wool petticoats and drawers. Somewhere en route, all her possessions had disappeared.

Distraught, Lucretia asked Bergerac what she should do, and he told her not to worry. He’d advertise her loss in the local papers, he said, and with luck the bags would turn up. With luck they’d not been stolen, but had merely fallen off the baggage wagon; whoever had found them would happily return them once he knew their rightful owner.

Lucretia doubted it. She had reason to distrust the honesty of her fellow men and women. But she kept this to herself and accepted Bergerac’s offer to pay for an ad for her, several ads if necessary.

A short while later, ensconced in a room on Pine Street the Frenchman had arranged for her to occupy, she unpacked the meager few things she had carried with her and made ready to start her new and better life. Her teaching duties were not due to commence for another few weeks. She would have time to prepare her lessons. Time to explore her new city. Time to get used to the idea that she would be starting her new and better life considerably poorer than she had hoped and planned.

During the next few weeks Lucretia got to know Philadelphia. She sauntered from her quiet neighborhood down to the bustling port, where the river was thick with three-masters under sail, and over to Center Square, where the waterworks were disguised by a little Greek temple, and out along Market Street, where so many wagons and horses were tied up, it looked as if some vast caravan out of Asia had just arrived. The city was astir with war activity, and nearly every day she encountered soldiers on parade or marching toward the wharves to board ships bound for battles in Canada. But civilian life was not much disrupted. On the brick-lined sidewalks, chimney sweeps and sidewalk scrubbers were still yodeling their services, and streetcorner food peddlers were touting their pepperpot soups, roasted corn, and molasses-drenched pears. Head shielded in a plumed bonnet and feet sheathed in thin-soled embroidered walking shoes, the provincial Lucretia took in the cacophony of sounds and gazed with ever-widening eyes at the city’s profusion of theaters, music schools, and professional offices—the chambers of doctors boasting that their consulting rooms were private, the chambers of dentists offering high fees for human teeth so that they could try to transplant them.

She passed luxury, three-story houses that were rumored to possess flushing toilets and bathtubs that could be filled with hot running water. She passed squalor, too, waterside streets that were ankle-deep in mud, crowded alleyways where pestilential odors wafted from overtaxed privies, and tiny yardless houses draped with so much drying laundry they resembled tents.

It was the luxury that most impressed her, the things that money could buy in Philadelphia. Fine velvet cloth and leather boots from England, perfumes and rouge from France, shawls from India, vases from China, even lion skins from Africa. You could buy just about anything in Philadelphia, and you could fill every spare moment with something interesting to do—see a circus, hear a concert, watch a great actor perform Shakespeare.

One day Lucretia went to Peale’s Museum to see the fabled mastodon skeleton that had been dug up in the mountains of New York, and one night—it was just before she started her teaching duties—she saw the town at its most glorious, its public buildings and even many of its private mansions ablaze with a brilliant fiery light. The spectacle had been arranged to honor Commodore Perry, who two weeks earlier had routed the British in the Battle of Lake Erie. No Philadelphian—no American, for that matter—had ever seen so much light, so much banishing of night’s gloom. For Lucretia and all who witnessed it, the illumination of Philadelphia was at once both sight and symbol: the future would be boundlessly bright.

On the day of the illuminations a thirty-five-year-old Englishman named William Chapman opened an office on Arch Street. The office would specialize, he announced, in arranging clients’ financial records and collecting overdue debts. A short, heavy-set man with a severe stammer, William had immigrated to the United States twelve years earlier, sailing from Bristol to Philadelphia on a vessel called the Roebuck, a three-master with a tiny crew, and undergoing numerous hardships on the voyage. The Roebuck wasn’t built to accommodate passengers—it was a cargo ship that took on voyagers only when it needed some extra ballast. William and a half-dozen other travelers had been given a place to sleep on a small wooden platform in the hold. They’d had to bring their own bedding, and even their own food—the only sustenance the captain promised to provide was bread and water from emergency supplies, should his vessel be shipwrecked. William had equipped himself with a barrel of biscuits and a few other foodstuffs, and taken turns with his fellows at cooking simple meals on a brick hearth on the deck. But a tumult always ensued around the fire, with the weak being pushed out of the way by the strong, and William, whose garbled speech made it difficult for him to assert his rights to a turn, had frequently found himself shoved aside. Still, like so many immigrants before and since, William had suffered his hardships gratefully. He had been poor in England, but was expecting to be rich in America.

After six long weeks his fortitude had been rewarded. On October 3, 1801, he’d stepped off the Roebuck’s swaying boards onto the firmness of a Philadelphia wharf and made his way into town, his feet unsteady and his arms clutched tightly around his sparse posessions—his bedding, the single box of clothing he had brought with him, and a little portable writing desk. The writing desk was his prized possession. It was through that desk that, somehow, he intended to become rich.

An educated man, he’d worked first as a schoolteacher. But because of his stammer schoolboys often taunted him. And eventually, although still listing himself on official documents as a schoolmaster, he’d begun to pursue bookkeeping, a more behind the scenes occupation.

Even that proved a struggle for him in the beginning. Although he was skilled with numbers, many people declined his services, finding his way of speaking tiresome, or worse, unintelligible. He couldn’t blame them. When he spoke, his arms would flail, his head would jerk, his lips would twist into fearsome grimaces. Some who met him even viewed his stammering as a sign that he was a man of low intelligence—A stammering tongue signifies a weak understanding, and a wavering mind, Americans had been warned by a prominent physician of the time. Still, William was a man of great persistence, and gradually a few merchants had placed their accounts in his care and come away impressed by his precision, orderliness, and ability to keep a closed mouth about business secrets. He was still considered, William would later write, a subject of painful commiseration. But even so, by the time he opened his new office, he had garnered numerous clients, enough to make him advertise proudly on the day Philadelphia was illuminated that he could provide the most respectable references.

He had also applied to become a citizen of America. Naturalization was in some ways a less formal process than it is now—Philadelphia’s Committee on Naturalization sometimes interviewed prospective citizens in a popular local tavern—but then as now it was a slow-moving one. Those who wanted to become Americans had to reside in the country at least five years before filing papers indicating they intended to become citizens and had subsequently to wait another three years before they could achieve that goal. William had applied in 1811. But in 1812, when the war with England broke out, he was still officially an alien, and as such, forced to register and to endure the constant suspicion that he might be a spy. Then, as the war continued, Pennsylvania offered its so-called friendly aliens the opportunity to prove their loyalty to America—they could enroll as volunteers in the militia. William promptly signed up.

In the summer of 1814, almost a year after he had opened his new office, he was called to an onerous duty. The war had been going badly. The British had captured Washington, burning many of its principal buildings. Now they were heading north toward Baltimore. Philadelphia’s officials, afraid that if Baltimore fell, the British would march on their city, mobilized the volunteers, and William and hundreds of other unlikely soldiers—shopkeepers and silversmiths, lawyers and laborers—were dispatched to encampments south of Philadelphia to help the regular army protect the imperiled metropolis.

For the next few weeks the untried soldiers engaged in fatiguing marches up steep rough hills and, guns in arms, endured interminable drills. Sometimes they hefted their weapons for eighteen hours a day, becoming so exhausted they fell asleep the moment they lay down on their straw pallets. Soon they were sleeping through the booming of the cannon that was used to awaken them, its ear-shattering sound, at first so electrifying, no longer even penetrating their dreams.

The weather, too, oppressed the men. It was a rainy autumn. Not a stitch of dry clothing in the camp, one soldier wrote in his diary. Never rained harder since the flood. Worse, food rations were short. Sometimes the men, even the regulars, received nothing but a thin, eight-inch-long slice of beef and a single loaf of bread for an entire day’s sustenance. But the situation of the volunteers was particularly desperate. One day they were given no rations at all. Nor were they fed the day after that.

On the third day the volunteers mutinied. Starving and dizzy, they gathered in the center of their camp and refused to do any further duty. After all, they shouted, the men of the regular army were being fed. Why were they being left to drill and march on empty stomachs? Were they not American soldiers, too?

The protest grew rowdy and vehement. Some volunteers