Early in 1644, somebody found a fellow named Richard Cornish floating in the York River with his head knocked about and a pole sticking out of his side.
His canoe, “laden with clay,” was found sunken nearby, Gov. John Winthrop in Boston recorded in his journal.
A 1655 map of Agamenticus, the former name of Old York. British Museum
It surely wasn’t the first murder to take place in Maine – people had lived here for thousands of years by then – but it led quickly to the first court-ordered execution in what became the Pine Tree State nearly two centuries later.
The supposed guilty party?
Cornish’s wife, Katherine, called “a lewd woman” in Winthrop’s informal but graphic telling.
The evidence against her fell well short of “beyond a reasonable doubt” and rested mostly on an apparently well-earned reputation for having affairs.
But that wasn’t quite all.
“Evidence” also involved the wife being forced to touch the corpse, in the age-old but bizarre notion that a murdered soul would single out the killer by bleeding if the responsible criminal touched the body.
Winthrop noted that in “comminge to her husbande, he bled abundantly.”
And that may have sealed Katherine Cornish’s fate.
A Scottish ballad of the era, collected in 1872, offered a description of what transpired in these cases.
Here’s the relevant passage: “The maiden touch’d the clay-cold corpse, a drop it never bled; But when the ladye touch’d the corpse, the blood came rushing red.”
Guilt by blood, though, only went so far.
A man named Thomas Footman, with whom Cornish was allegedly having an affair, was also hauled over to the body in the river.
A rendering of Gov. John Winthrop, who recorded the details of Maine’s first court-ordered execution. Courtesy National Park Service
Winthrop said it bled at Footman’s touch, too, then added “but no evidence could be found against him.”
Cornish denied she’d killed her husband, though readily admitted to “having lived in adultery” with other men in the tiny municipality of Agamenticus in York County.
According to Winthrop’s journal, during the effort to confirm Richard Cornish’s killer “something was discovered against” the son of the town’s minister, 23-year-old Joseph Hull Jr., and against Roger Garde, the town’s mayor, whom the governor had cited earlier in his journal when he described Agamenticus as “a poor village” that had lately made “a tailor their mayor.”
That “something” discovered against both men may have included Katherine Cornish’s own contention that she had affairs with both of them, making them suspects.
Winthrop’s journal also mentions resident Edward Johnson, who later admitted he’d had an affair with Cornish.
When it came time for the trial, Garde, who denied having relations with Cornish, served as the judge because he was mayor, and “gave some likelihood that he was not guilty because he had carried himself very zealously and impartially in discovery of the murder,” Winthrop wrote, though he also added that Garde was “a carnal man and had no wife in the country.”
What exactly convinced Garde and any others with a say in the verdict to convict Cornish is impossible to say.
A page from Gov. John Winthrop’s lengthy journal of colonial Massachusetts in its early days. Massachusetts Historical Society
Winthrop’s account merely states that “strong presumptions came in against her whereupon she was condemned and executed” despite her denials.
There is reason to believe that Cornish’s troubles didn’t start in Agamenticus.
At least twice in Massachusetts, where she lived with husband Richard in Weymouth, she was hauled into court facing adultery-related charges, including incontinency, basically the crime of having an uncontrolled sexual appetite. One judge warned her “take heed” of her behavior, according to records of the Massachusetts colony.
In one instance in 1634, Richard Cornish had to put up a bond of 10 pounds to assure his wife’s appearance in court. In another, in 1638, she showed up to pay a fine.
Adultery wasn’t a hanging offense, however much the Puritans, who ran things in those days, frowned upon it.
In 1640, for instance, the General Court at Saco found Ruth Gouch, a married woman, guilty of adultery with one George Burdett.
As punishment, the court declared that six weeks after the birth of the child she was bearing, Gouch would be required “to stand in a white sheet publicly” in the church at Agamenticus for several Sabbath days and also at court for a day.
However, killing your husband, as Katherin Cornish was found guilty of, was a hanging offense. Details of her execution don’t appear to exist, though colonial authorities typically tied a rope around a tree and hanged convicted killers.
But it’s possible that authorities burned her alive.
William Blackstone, the great English legal chronicler of the common law, wrote that “the natural modesty of the sex forbids the exposing and publicly mangling” of women sentenced to die “so they ought to be dragged to the gallows “and there to be burned alive.”
Whatever her fate, nobody seems to have bothered to record any details.
And with that, Cornish vanished from the scene, rarely recalled in the many years since, a clear case of injustice in the only example of a woman executed for murder in New England in the 17th century.
The writings of Gov. William Williamson, one of Maine’s early historians, only briefly mentions the murder and execution in Agamenticus. Maine State Archives
One of Maine’s first historians, William Williamson, who also served a stint as governor in 1821, wrote extensively about the early years of the state’s settlement.
But he barely noticed the state’s first recorded murder trial.
In a footnote, Williamson mentioned only that “a woman was tried in the mayor’s court” in Agamenticus “for the murder of her husband, condemned and executed.”
One volume that took notice of the case, Charles Edward Banks’ “History of York Maine” in 1931, called Cornish “a married hussey” and speculated her husband had moved to Maine in a bid “to start life anew.”
Banks declared that when the body turned up in the river, his wife was “the only one interested in his taking off,” so suspicion naturally fell on her, though it is unclear how his existence inhibited her activities.
Following the execution, the Rev. Hull’s son, who was accused of having an affair with Katherine Cornish, died that same year in 1644. There is no known record of what happened to him.
Garde, the other man accused of having an affair with her, didn’t fare well either.
The 1881 “New England Historical and Genealogical Register” dismissed the possibility that Garde had also kept company with the woman he found guilty, calling it a “malignant slander.”
Even so, it said, “many people” in the town eyed him suspiciously.
“With nothing else but gossip to occupy their minds,” the register said, “the villagers were ever ready to bandy this story about.”
It cited a 1645 letter by a James Parker to Gov. Winthrop that said Garde had died after many people had “broke his heart.” Why that occurred was left unsaid.
The Rev. Hull preached at Garde’s solemn interment.
All that can be said at this point in history is that within a year of Richard Cornish’s murder, his adulterous wife and at least two of the men she accused of having affairs with her were also dead.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
