Josiah Jackson feared that the corpse could still harm the prophetess and told the Sanfords to remove it, but after a long night of worship and murder, the Wakemanites needed sleep. Polly Sanford stayed at Beaver Street, but Almeron walked home, returning at nine A.M. with nineteen-year-old Willard Matthews, the eldest of the dead man’s five children, who was out looking for his father; Sanford seems to have brought his nephew there intentionally. (For a detailed account of the morning’s comings and goings, see “Woodbridge and the Wakemanites a Hundred Years Ago,” a paper read by Grace Pierpont Fuller at the annual meeting of the Woodbridge and Amity Historical Society in December 1955.)
Entering the silent house, Willard opened the door to the front room, where:
the body lay upon the floor, with the head towards a bed in the room; and it was found with the face turned towards the window, lying upon the left side, and very nearly in the middle of the room. Clotted blood and hair lay upon the floor around him, and several pools of blood were found near his head. It was truly an awful scene to witness. The throat was cut nearly from ear to ear, and his head seemed to be nearly severed from his body.
The wound was so big it appeared to be inflicted with a hatchet, and
[a] small rope was found on the floor, and marks of a rope were discovered on his wrists, and it was evident that the wrists had been bound by this rope.70
Willard exclaimed, “Oh! dear, father has killed himself.”71 After recovering from the initial shock, he went to the house of a neighbor, who summoned the justice of the peace. With that, the dream world Rhoda Wakeman created and shared with her followers began its fatal collision with the state of Connecticut.
Sheriff Leander Parmalee arrested everyone present the night before and convened a jury of inquest. They heard evidence on Christmas, and continued to sit until the twenty-sixth, when the postmortem was held and Sammy decided to confess. Holding a Bible and speaking in “fear of the Lord,” he told the story to the jurors, who decided to release everyone except Sammy, Thankful Hersey, Josiah Jackson, Abigail Sables, and Mrs. Wakeman; they went back to jail to await the grand jury. Meanwhile, journalists were busy reporting the crime.
For the New York Times the murder was a “Horrible Case of Fanaticism” and one of the “Frightful Effects of Millerism,” but Americans of the period called almost any violence or insanity motivated by religion “Millerism.”72 In fact, Mrs. Wakeman belonged to an earlier generation of mystics, one that included Joseph Smith Jr., founder of the Latter-day Saints movement, and the “Electrical Psychologist,” the Rev. John Bovee Dods, who experienced phenomena similar to the Hydesville Rappings of 1848. Like Smith’s Book of Mormon and Dods’s lectures, Mrs. Wakeman preserved her revelations in writing; she was anxious to have them with her, so a reporter from the New York Daily Tribune agreed to visit Beaver Street in the company of Ephraim Lane and retrieve the “sacred papers.”
Neighbors believed that the murder left the house haunted, but Matthews’s bloody ghost did not rise to disturb the journalist as he climbed the stairs to Mrs. Wakeman’s room. The papers, ten handwritten pages carefully bound with thread and protected by the inevitable witch hazel bark, were under the prophetess’s bed in a square basket and rolled up in paper of a “singular color.”
He returned to the New Haven County Jail where:
The old hag Wakeman then advanced toward me, and, seizing my hand, clasped it in her bony fingers, and with a vacant stare in her eyes and fiendish grin upon her old wrinkled face, congratulated me upon my escape from this tormentor Lane. She said that she had it revealed to her from God that Lane was watching an opportunity to murder me, and she advised me to procure a witch hazel walking stick immediately, which would prevent him from murdering me, or even approaching me hereafter. She added that, “if I should ever shake hands with Lane the evil spirit would enter out of him and into me.”73
For the reporter, it was obvious that Rhoda Wakeman was too old, ugly, and deluded to take seriously, yet she had a remarkable aptitude for getting others to kill. And the next two murders were bloodbaths.
The Mad Woodcutter
Charles Sanford was the unlikely offspring of a family whose name “is an honored one in Connecticut.” As an anonymous note written in the margin of an 1856 article points out, though, “This sad case might have occurred in any family.”74
At twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old, the oldest of Ruel and Sarah Sanford’s seven children was a strange specimen. He had a protruding jaw that stuck out farther than his nose, limped heavily as a result of either a clubfoot or an accident, was chronically insane, and had an advanced case of tuberculosis. What bothered him the most, however, were cramps; Sanford suffered from muscular or abdominal cramps and believed they were being inflicted on him by magic. Whether he reached that conclusion himself or by attending Wakemanite meetings is unknown, but prolonged contact with the prophetess could not have improved Sanford’s mental condition, and two years of relative sanity ended with the violent death of his uncle, Justus Matthews.
On Christmas Eve, Sanford caused a disturbance at the Hamden Plains church by telling the minister that he (the minister) “had said enough, and had better stop talking and let him [Sanford] talk.”75 Despite this outburst and a history of institutionalization, Sanford must not have seemed dangerous. Even when he came hobbling out of his parents’ house with an ax on the morning of January 1, it was normal, for he was a woodcutter. Why he also carried a three-foot-long hickory club that was sharpened at both ends and covered in undecipherable writing is harder to explain.
The Sperry-Umberfield Massacre
The Sanfords lived at Hamden, two and a half miles from the Woodbridge home of Enoch Sperry. Mr. Sperry was known for his integrity in business, a natural genius for figures, and piety; he greeted the first day of 1856 with a prayer that “[m]ade allusion to the incoming of the new year, remarking that to God alone it pertained to guide its import to him and his. His entire prayer now seems to have been an almost inspired allusion to the sad catastrophe which has taken him from the bosom of his family.”76 That was not till later in the morning, though; in the meantime, a neighbor had borrowed the box of his sleigh and Mr. Sperry hitched a pair of sled runners to the farm horse and went to collect it.
At sixty-nine years old, his health was generally good despite occasional fits and a “stroke of palsy” that left his face partly paralyzed; Sperry reportedly visited Mrs. Wakeman for various complaints (according to Sammy, he “used to come to my sister to purchase of her syrups as she made to cure him of little aches”).77 He walked beside the animal down the snow-covered roads, keeping a handkerchief pressed against the paralyzed part of his face as protection from the cold. With hoofbeats muffled and the runners shushing along, it would have been very still: just jingling harness chains, crows cawing overhead, and an occasional snort from the horse. Grandma Moses painted rustic winter scenes like this but her pictures are peaceful and nostalgic and never include an ax-wielding homicidal maniac.
At around eleven A.M. Charles Sanford and Enoch Sperry met by a small brook on the way to Amity Road. Whether it was a chance encounter, or the woodcutter deliberately chose the isolated spot to lie in wait is unknown, but the men were acquainted and might have spoken before Sanford struck,
first on the right temple with the head of the axe; then another blow just above the right ear, both of which produced fractures of the skull. He was then struck with the edge of the axe on his neck, the blow entering just under the chin, which it wounded and nearly severed the head from his body . . .78
Steam was still rising from the exposed stumps of Sperry’s neck when Sanford left.
He tramped off through the woods while the phlegmatic horse continued on its way to Amity Road, where it entered the stable of the Clinton Hotel and halted. One of Mr. Sperry’s neighbors, Samuel F. Perkins, recognized the horse passing by without a driver and, suspecting that the old man had
a fit, resolved to check on him later that afternoon.
Sanford arrived at the farm of Ichabod Umberfield sometime between two and three o’clock. He entered the house, placed the ax and hickory club in the hall, and found the housekeeper, Lucy Deming, washing the kitchen floor. Slipping an arm around her waist, he invited Mrs. Deming into the hallway, whereupon she slapped him and he left the room.
Carrying his ax into another room, Sanford met ten-year-old Eliza A. Deming, who recognized him and fled. She took refuge in a bedroom with Mrs. Deming, who locked the door. Eliza opened a window and called to Mr. Umberfield outside, “Charles Sanford is in the house with an axe and he is crazy—you must come in.”79
Umberfield was seventy-one and could have pretended not to hear her, but he went inside and found Sanford seated by the stove. Pulling up a chair, Umberfield tried engaging the young man in conversation, but got no reply; perhaps he was sulking over the housekeeper’s rejection. After two minutes’ silence, Sanford gathered his tools, stood up, and limped toward the door. This took him behind Umberfield’s chair, where he paused to bring the ax down on the old man’s head.
Umberfield dropped to the floor with his skull splintered, groaned, and was struck a second time. Mrs. Deming opened the door in time to see the third and final blow sink into her employer’s neck, where it left just four inches of skin and the windpipe connecting them. Blood was pumping onto the floor and Eliza began screaming, which annoyed Sanford, who followed the fleeing child, saying, “Stop your noise or you’ll get your head chopped off.” He went outside to clean the ax in the snow and someone locked the door behind him, so Sanford headed back into the forest.80
There he met a black man named Philip Samson, who was busy chopping wood. “Mr. Samson was a tall and very large man. Charles went to work trimming out the wood but did not molest Samson. On being asked why he didn’t kill Samson, he said ‘he was too big for me.’”81
Hew and Cry
Samuel Perkins went to check on Mr. Sperry at three o’clock in the afternoon and found his mangled corpse lying in a ditch by the side of the road, still clutching a handkerchief. The body was carried to Sperry’s home and two doctors were summoned to examine the remains; a messenger also left for New Haven to inform his sons, while neighbors began looking for the killer.
Following his trail through the snow was not difficult, and it must have been near dark when Officer Lucius Doolittle, with a posse of seven men armed with cudgels and farm tools, caught up with Sanford near the junction of Brooks and Downs Roads by the Umberfield house.82
Sanford, as might be expected, fought like a madman. He attacked them all at once and managed to land a glancing blow on Officer Doolittle’s shoulder with the ax; a Mr. Peck, however, succeeded in pressing the tines of a pitchfork against Sanford’s chest, and that gave a Mr. Gorham the opportunity to knock him down with a club. While the men escorted their battered captive to jail, Charles Sanford said he had been en route to slaughtering the remaining Umberfields.
Two inquests were held that day. The first, at six o’clock, heard no direct evidence against Sanford and therefore named some person or persons unknown as responsible for the death of Enoch Sperry. As for motive, “It is evident that Mr. Sperry was not murdered maliciously. For he was not known to have an enemy, and had been specifically kind to his assassin. Neither was there any intention of robbery, for a sum of money was found in his pockets when his body was discovered.” This led to the conclusion that “the murder of Matthews excited Sanford to a desire to copy it. This is more likely, when it is considered that he struck the blows after a similar manner to those inflicted by Sly.”83 (According to one story, Sanford heard that his uncle was possessed and was on his way to kill him, but met Mr. Sperry first.)84 The second inquest at nine o’clock found Charles Sanford responsible for the death of Ichabod Umberfield, but could not suggest a motive; from the woodcutter’s perspective, however, it was self-defense, for “he had a cramp, and if he had not murdered Mr. Sperry and Mr. Umberfield, the cramp would have killed him.”85
Dr. Pliny A. Jewett examined both bodies and found that the wounds resembled each other and could have been inflicted by Sanford’s ax. He also tried, without success, to decipher the writing on the club, which was described as “in the style of much of the revelation documents in the ‘unknown tongue;’ it is therefore presumed to be some extracts from the ‘Wakeman revelations.’”86
Judging by the number of surviving newspaper articles devoted to the crimes, Justus Matthews’s murder received far more coverage than those of Messrs. Sperry and Umberfield. If this impression is accurate, it is also unexpected when the latter involved two prominent victims killed with extraordinary ferocity. Respectable people, however, shunned publicity (“the Victorian standard for a true lady suggests, that one’s name should appear in a newspaper only three times in one’s life: birth, marriage and death”), so after the initial unavoidable headlines, editors may have been less inclined to print stories about Sperry and Umberfield, or perhaps their families were exerting their influence.87 Many believed that Enoch Sperry’s son, the Hon. Nehemiah Sperry, a wealthy businessman and Connecticut’s secretary of state, was working behind the scenes.
On January 3, Charles Sanford provided a “tolerably straight account” of Mr. Umberfield’s murder.88 After confessing, he was apparently put quietly on trial, convicted of both crimes, and found legally responsible for his actions. On the face of it, Sanford is unlikely to have met any standard for sanity, yet he was sentenced to hang.
A reporter for the New York Daily Times visited the jail a few days after the double murder and was greeted by Sanford in cell number seventeen, who said, “Come here, oh come here thou Angel Michael. I recognized you in a moment.” The prisoner wore an overcoat and a bloodstained shirt, and under his sealskin fur cap, both eyes were blackened. His face was bruised and cut from the farmers’ cudgels and he spoke “rapidly but without passion,” saying,
“I am the Lord Emanuel and I am Guyana Kana [?]. I have eaten up what I had, and now you have come to release me from this place of misery; welcome thou Angel of the Lord. I could go to work, I am quite willing to go to work and be a boot-maker with I. W. Wooding [Wooding was a cobbler] (the man who was discharged of the MATTHEWS murder.)” He then showed me two rings that he had on his fingers, and said that “these are my signs and when I sign you with these then you shall be saved for God knows the seal of the Lord Emanuel. You are Michael, and will be saved. You are one of my men, and will be saved. You are one of my men, and I will save. I love you, and you shall go with me to the heaven of bliss when I go, and I am going directly. B-l-o-o-d, blood, blood, blood, who would not have blood?—blood is cheap, it flows freely, and its color is bright . . .
And so on. When the correspondent left, Sanford called out, “If the Angel Michael leaves me will the Lord leave me too?” Those who considered his madness self-evident attributed the death sentence to Nehemiah Sperry but Sanford never hanged. He already had “every appearance of being far gone with consumption” and six months after the murders was dead from tuberculosis or smallpox.90 This gave rise to even more sinister rumors that his death was “helped along” by the contents of a “Black Bottle.”91 Murders, however, often give rise to strange stories. It was also claimed,
[b]y those who were in a position to know . . . [t]hat it was the skeletal remains of none other than Charlie Sanford who for many years afterward, stood as an example of Primitive Man in an anthropological display at the Peabody Museum in New Haven . . .92
In fact, Yale’s Peabody Museum (founded 1866) did have two human skeletons, and one was displayed in the primate evolution exhibit as an example of Homo sapiens, yet neither came from a Caucasian male; one was female and the other Chinese. Sanford’s bones could not have gone to Yale’s College Cabinet Museum, which was dedicated to minerals, corals, and fossils.93 If the reader does not mind speculation piled on supposition, however, ano
ther explanation is possible.
The cadavers of executed criminals were often given to medical schools for dissection, and a specimen that displayed uncommon features like a clubfoot or curious skull was more likely to be preserved in a collection. Nineteenth-century scientists had a passion for gathering and measuring skulls (some museums still have hundreds squirreled away in their anthropology departments), and a protruding “prognathic” jaw was considered an apelike trait characteristic of primitive men, exactly what might be expected from someone who committed shockingly brutal crimes. (At the beginning of the twentieth century, the influential Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso argued that habitual criminals were a less evolved form of humanity that display archaic physical features called atavisms.) So, while Sanford’s skeleton most likely did not end up labeled “primitive man,” the idea that it could have reflects contemporary thinking.
Enoch Sperry was buried on January 11, 1856, in the Westville Cemetery at New Haven, and his epitaph reads, “God knew the time and place to call his servant home.”94 Mr. Umberfield’s grave can be found at Bethany’s Sperry Cemetery. On January 3, 1856, he was laid under an upright gray slab reading:
IN
memory of
ICHABOD UMBERFIELD
Who was murdered
By a maniac
Jn’y 1, 1856.
Æ. 71.
————
A mournful New Year’s Day
To my surviving their friends.
Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist Page 4
