The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  One might have expected people to read such accounts with a certain skepticism. Lino’s history of fabricating stories—his lies to the Chapmans, his lies in Washington, his lies in New England—had emerged at both of the trials. But print has an almost magical effect on credulity, a phenomenon that was well known to Lino, who had used print to remarkable effect when setting up scams. Now, as his new accusations against Lucretia began to be printed, many who had championed her after her acquittal began turning against her. Neighbors stopped inviting her to social events. Local children declined to play with her children. Parents refused to send their offspring to her school. And one bright spring morning she found that she could not even travel at will anymore.

  She’d wanted to take her children into Philadelphia for the day, and she’d waited with them on the turnpike for the stagecoach to Philadelphia. But when the coach arrived and they began to clamber aboard, the driver shot her an ugly look. Then he told her and the children to step down. He would not, he said, allow the likes of them onto his vehicle.

  Hurriedly she hustled the children over to the steamboat dock. But there, too, they were turned away.

  We’ll hitchhike, she decided, and she and the children set off on foot toward Philadelphia. But although several times she signaled to passing vehicles that she needed a ride, and several times drivers began reining to a stop, when they pulled up and recognized her they whipped their horses and sped rapidly ahead.

  She and the children, fatigued after a few miles, returned home to Andalusia.

  In Doylestown, Lino was basking in celebrity. An artist from Philadelphia came to sketch his portrait for an engraving and a marble bust. Reporters interviewed him constantly. They described his cell, noting that it was airy and comfortable and contained a writing table on which a letter to a man the prisoner claimed was his father, one Bridgadier General Esposimina in Cuba, was prominently displayed. They also filed numerous and erroneous stories about Lino’s origins: “He is a native of Cuba, where his connections are respectable,” said the Philadelphia Saturday Courier; “He is the illegitimate son of a very rich gentleman of Cuba,” said the Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin.

  Lino was indignant about the Saturday Bulletin’s story. He had been slandered, he complained to a reporter from the Germantown Telegraph; he was many things, but he was not illegitimate, not, he said, an “unnatural” child. Still, all in all, he was pleased by the attention he was receiving, particularly when a distinguished publisher expressed interest in obtaining his memoirs.

  The publisher was Robert DeSilver, who had started a bookbinding and bookselling company back during the War of 1812. Since then he’d gone from merely binding and selling the books of other publishers to acquiring and publishing titles of his own. In 1818 he’d acquired the rights to Captain James Cook’s exciting narrative of his voyage to the Pacific. In 1819 he’d bought the memoirs of the Revolutionary War general Nathaniel Greene. In 1824 and 1831 he’d brought out profitable Philadelphia city directories.

  DeSilver told Lino that the fact that his manuscript was written in Spanish presented no problem for him. He would see to it that the work was rendered into English by a skillful translator.

  Lino gave him the rights to his manuscript, and eventually DeSilver would indeed get it translated—and would publish it, under the title The Life and Confession of Carolino Estradas de Mina, along with a translator’s note explaining that useless tautology and repetitions had been expunged and numerous indecent passages eliminated in order to make the narrative inoffensive to “the most delicate ear, to make it more more acceptable to the female portion of the community.” In the meantime, Lino kept working. Months before when Lucretia’s youngest son had offended him, he’d frightened the boy by telling him that he never forgave injuries and that he delighted in revenge. Now it was Lucretia, walking free while he awaited hanging, upon whom he hoped to wreak vengeance.

  In pursuit of that goal he added to his portrait of her as a con artist details that limned her as so unsavory and cruel that after she inveigled him into marriage he decided to punish her by acting “as freely as it pleased him in her presence, and when her punishment would be sufficient to abandon her and return to Cuba.”

  Part of the punishment he devised was to seduce her daughter Mary. He and the girl kept their relationship hidden, but eventually Lucretia caught wind of it and in his absence beat Mary barbarously. “Her body [was] lacerated and torn over its whole surface by the blows of her mother.” That a mother could so abuse her child caused Carolino, upon his return, to be “suddenly struck by the thought that Mrs. Chapman had murdered her husband.” So he pointed a knife at her throat and demanded she confess, which she did, in the process telling him just how she’d gone about the murder: she had “purchased [a] phial of poison from a doctor in the vicinity and had given him one hundred dollars for it, and a promise of secrecy on his part as to his having sold it.”

  DeSilver didn’t bring out Lino’s memoir until after its author died. But prior to his death Lino showed parts of his manuscript to the Germantown Telegraph’s reporter, who had taken to visiting him frequently, and on June sixth the Telegraph printed a story saying the paper had learned from an “official” source that “Mrs. Chapman called upon a physician in the city a short time previous to the illness of her husband and desired his advice as to the effect of arsenic. She wished to know the quantity which was administered in cases of sickness and the smallest quantity which could possibly produce death. She enquired fully and particularly as to the general properties of arsenic; and, as we understand, gave the Physician a fee for the information which she obtained.”

  The story went on to imply that the attorney general’s office might soon be charging the unnamed physician with having been an accessory before the fact.

  No such charges were ever leveled. But this didn’t prevent Lucretia’s neighbors from believing what they’d read, and by mid-June she’d realized that it might be wise for her and the children to leave Andalusia.

  Virtually penniless now that she no longer had students, she thought first of going back to her ancestral home. Her father, the old Revolutionary War colonel, had died, but her mother was still alive, and although strapped for money, she had offered to take in Lucretia and the children, provided they could pay their own way up to Massachusetts. In pursuit of an inexpensive way of getting there, Lucretia asked one of the few neighbors who still had some pity for her to drive her into Philadelphia and once there solicited help from the captain of a packet boat that sailed to New England frequently.

  “My children and I have suffered unparalleled affliction,” she told the captain. “If you would convey us on more moderate terms than the usual ones, it would be an act of holy charity.”

  The man seemed sympathic at first. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Lucretia Chapman.”

  “Mrs. Chapman?” Suddenly the captain’s expression turned ugly, and, throwing up his hands as if to make her keep her distance, he told her to clear out. “All the wealth in the world would not induce me to take you aboard!” he said. Then, as if she didn’t know, he added, “The way of the transgressor is hard.”

  Execution followed hard on the heels of conviction in the 1830s, and despite Lino’s plea for a few extra months of life, George Wolf, the governor of Pennsylvania, had not granted a delay but issued a warrant for prompt execution. Benjamin Morris gave Lino the disappointing news, and showed him the ornate calligraphed document that specified he be hanged on June twenty-first.

  Lino took the news calmly. “The governor writes a very good hand,” he said indifferently.

  He wasn’t always so calm, Morris had noticed. Indeed, often when night came, Lino talked to himself in Spanish for hours on end, sometimes whispering in a supplicating tone, sometimes shouting manically. One night he’d asked Morris to come into his cell and see the Devil. Morris had gone in to investigate, but spotted nothing out of the ordinary. “In what shape,” he’d humore
d Lino, “does the Evil One appear?”

  “In the shape of that cricket,” Lino replied, pointing to a cricket hovering in a corner of the cell. The cricket was the Devil, he asserted, the Devil himself.

  A moment later he began talking to the cricket. He told it to sing, he ordered it to keep still, he cursed it, he praised it, and finally, when the insect started to leap away, he said, “Be sure to call and see me again.” He said this so courteously that it seemed to Morris that he truly believed the poor creature was some higher order of being.

  Another time he asked Morris to send for his lawyer because he had something of the greatest importance to convey to the man. Morris dispatched a messenger to McDowell’s office, the lawyer hurried over to the jail, and Morris took him into Lino’s cell. Then suddenly Lino flung a piece of paper at McDowell and demanded that Morris lock up the lawyer. It was an arrest warrant, Morris discovered when he’d safely gotten McDowell out of the cell. Lino had somehow managed to get his hands on a blank copy of the embossed court document, and he’d forged a judge’s signature on it.

  The man’s always up to something, Morris told the reporter from the Germantown Telegraph after the incident. He’s especially fond of taunting clergymen. Men of the cloth come to give him solace regularly. They aren’t all Catholics like he is. Some are Baptists, some Episcopalians. Lino listens to them politely when they’re in his cell, but as soon as they leave he makes obscene gestures behind their backs.

  “My dear Thomas,” the kindly Mary Ross wrote to her son one day while Lino was awaiting his execution. “I saw the death warrant … you have performed a duty, I think with honor to yourself. No doubt you feel satisfaction in acquitting yourself so well, and very justly, and every man ought to feel pleased when he can reflect that he has done with credit what was entrusted to his care. That past, how much more agreeable would it be to relieve suffering humanity. That pleasure will remain when many others have vanished.” Then she begged Thomas, for the good of his own soul, to go to see Lino, “a stranger in a strange land, not a friend to sympathize, pity or console him.” If Thomas obeyed, if he went to the prisoner and showed him some compassion, “It might happily give him more consolation than others [could], and you would be forgiven, and if you should give one ray of comfort to so miserable a stranger who must soon meet his horrid, dreadful, awful doom, believe me it will not only be lasting but stronger than any other pleasure.”

  On June sixteenth, five days before the date on which Lino was scheduled to be executed, Ross decided to honor his mother’s wishes and demonstrate compassion for the condemned man by paying him a call. He greeted Lino, who was still secured by the two-foot-long chain he had had to wear ever since his jailbreak, and politely but stiffly said he was sorry that he would soon be facing death, but that it was the law of the land that murderers be executed.

  “But I am entirely innocent of Mr. Chapman’s murder,” Lino interrupted. “I am innocent of everything except a love of mischief.”

  He sounded so sincere that Ross was taken aback. Had he in fact convicted an innocent man?

  “I am not even really married to Mrs. Chapman,” Lino went on. “I just pretended to marry her. I tricked her. In order to get her money.”

  Ross studied the candid expression on the face of the man whose death would be on his hands, no matter who pulled the rope at the hanging, and suddenly it seemed possible to him that the prisoner was telling the truth. Possible, too, that unless he investigated his story, he, too, might be a condemned man, sentenced to a lifetime of doubt and an afterlife of anguish. He told Lino that he was inclined to believe him, or at least that he believed him enough to ask the governor to suspend the execution while he looked into his allegation.

  Lino thanked the deputy attorney general effusively, and Ross left his cell feeling almost as pleased as the prisoner. He had, just as his mother had advised, offered the unhappy man a ray of comfort, and that ray had curiously comforted him as well.

  He went immediately to the slant-topped desk in his little law office and penned a letter to Governor Wolf, requesting a stay of execution. Then he leafed through the papers he had put into evidence in the trials of Lino and Lucretia. His letters to her. Her letters to him. Their marriage license. Picking up the license, he began to examine it more closely. “I hereby certify,” he read, “that on this fifth day of July, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and thirty-one, Lino Amalia Esposimina and Lucretia Chapman were by me united in holy matrimony agreeably to the form prescribed by the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America.” The words seemed authentic enough. So did the signature at the bottom: “Benjamin Onderdonk, Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the State of New York.” But perhaps the document was a forgery. Perhaps, as Lino had just said, he hadn’t actually married Lucretia. If he hadn’t, then perhaps he’d even been telling the truth when he said he wasn’t guilty of Chapman’s murder. Ross wanted to know. Needed to know. For the good of his soul.

  Abruptly, he placed the license in a carrying case, hitched up his carriage, and set off for Philadelphia. He knew of a man named Onderdonk, a brother of the New York bishop, who was living there. He’d pay a call on Mr. Onderdonk and see if the fellow could identify the handwriting.

  When he reached the city, Ross pulled up first at the office of the recorder, Judge McIlvaine, having realized it would be wise to have the judge along when he questioned Onderdonk. He explained his mission to McIlvaine, helped him into his carriage, and knowing that if Lino was to be reprieved, he had precious little time, drove hastily to Onderdonk’s home.

  Once there, the two officials introduced themselves breathlessly and spoke almost simultaneously, directing Onderdonk to look at the marriage certificate they had brought with them and tell them if he recognized the handwriting.

  Onderdonk studied the license. Then, without hesitation, he said that the handwriting on the document was his brother’s.

  Was he sure, the two men asked him.

  Onderdonk nodded. “The signature is genuine.”

  Ross and McIlvaine talked to him a few more minutes, long enough to find out that his brother had told him that he had officiated at the marriage of Lino and Lucretia. “He mentioned it to me several times,” Onderdonk said.

  Ross’s misgivings were satisfied. He put the certificate back in his case, dropped McIlvaine back at his office, and in the evening dusk headed straight for Doylestown. He no longer felt the least bit troubled. Indeed, he felt foolish, as if Lino had conned him, tricked him just the way he’d tricked the people who’d lent him money in Washington, the sheriff who’d vouched for him up on Cape Cod, the Brewster woman who’d followed him to Boston expecting to be his bride. As soon as he was back in his office he fired off another letter to the governor, this time retracting his first note and saying he no longer wanted Lino’s execution postponed.

  That done, he walked the few yards that separated his office from the jail and once again asked to be let into Lino’s cell.

  Sheriff Morris complied, deferentially unlocking the heavy door. It was dim in the cell now. A tiny window framed a sliver of ebony sky, and a small oil lamp cast more shadows than light. Ross faced Lino angrily, determined to tell him he was a liar. But before he could speak Lino asked Ross—demanded of him, Morris would later tell the reporter from the Germantown Telegraph—“Have you done anything for me?”

  “No,” Ross answered coldly.

  Lino flew off the handle. “You are a contemptible miscreant!” he shouted. Then, scurrying forward to the full extent of his chain, he thrust out an arm and socked the deputy attorney general. Slammed his first right into the prosecutor’s long square jaw.

  Ross, rubbing his face, stumbled out of the cell, his jaw aching but his conscience no longer paining him at all.

  Lino spent the next few days writing poetry. He had finished his memoirs, but the creative spirit that had fueled them was still coursing through his brain. He composed a melancholy ballad
about his oncoming death—“Flowers! Learn from me,” he wrote, “What happens between yesterday and today. Yesterday I was a wonder. And today am not the shadow of myself.” The world would miss him, he went on. Dumb creatures like the fish in the sea, the birds in the trees, even “the sorrowful whale … in the bottomless waves” would be saddened, while America’s youth, its “nobility,” and “the ladies of Pennsylvania” would weep.

  The grandiosity of his sentiments was stirred by the commotion taking place outside the jail. The ordinarily quiet streets of Doylestown were resounding with martial music, the tooting of fifers, the pounding of drummers. Lino could hear them practicing for the execution. For his execution.

  He wrote a sonnet, a farewell to love. He was, he wrote, like the great god Jupiter who’d been willing to don human form to woo his beloved, like the hero Orpheus who’d been willing to descend to the underworld in pursuit of his. Like them, he longed to demonstrate his “sincere love.”

  The object of his testimonial was a woman in Baltimore. Just as Lucretia had long ago suspected, he had fallen in love there. He’d had an affair with the woman, an attractive young widow, and promised to marry her, then gone off on his travels. Now he was sorry, he wrote, for he had truly cared for her and yet “robbed her of the inmost jewel of her soul.” But she would come to know that his last thoughts had been of her. He would ask DeSilver to include with his memoirs his “Soneto,” composed “for the young lady at Baltimore.”