The House of Hall
Calvin Fuller and Edward Cooley arrived at Jesse Hall Jr.'s house in Tolland, Massachusetts, around 9:00 a.m. on Sunday, July 2, 1837.
Jesse was sitting inside his house reading from a bible; a bottle of rum sat on the table next to him. He invited his visitors to partake in the drink.
Drinking alcohol was frowned upon in certain circles, especially on the Lord's Day. About an hour of drinking had passed, and not wanting to be known for keeping an ill house, Jesse would later claim that he asked both men to leave, which Edward did. Before Calvin could go, the pair, at least according to Jesse, started conversing about Jesse's second wife, Lucy, whose whereabouts were unknown.
The topic of Lucy appeared to have started (again, according to Jesse) after Calvin mentioned that he was heading to Granville in the morning. Jesse requested that Calvin stop at Noah Cooley's store to inform the clerk that Lucy had deserted him and that he would not be paying any debts she may try to obtain on his store credit account.
Lucy, tired of her husband's alcohol-fueled abuse, recently fled. Not expecting her to return, Jesse drew up a notice on June 30 for publication to alert the community of Lucy abandoning him without reason. The gist of his note forbade anyone to harbor or trust her on his account.
Folks in Tolland who knew Jesse would later testify that he had been a man of good character. But in the same breath, they said when he was about 30 years old, he started drinking excessively and continued to do so for the past 12 to 14 years. And when Jesse drank, he sometimes became quarrelsome and saucy, hurling insults.
It turns out that what really happened on Sunday was that Edward Cooley left after Jesse told him that he had a private matter to discuss with Calvin. Calvin, now drunk, attacked Lucy's character -specifically, her infidelity - with him.
When Calvin failed to return home by Monday morning, his wife and the couple's six children started to worry. With each passing hour, suspicion grew, and on Wednesday, locals began searching for Calvin, entertaining the notion that he may have met his fate by being murdered.
Early Thursday morning, more than 100 people gathered and set out in search of Calvin, centering their efforts around the House of Hall, his last known whereabouts.
On Friday, some searchers found Calvin, his body having floated to the surface of a pond not far from Jesse's property. They fished his body out of the water; it lay on the shore until an inquest the following morning.
Calvin's severely mangled head substantiated the local townsfolk's worst fear, for it confirmed with zero doubt that he had met a very violent end, a murder most foul.
Calvin's body was still dressed in the same clothes he wore when he arrived at Jesse Hall Jr.'s place: a cotton shirt, a light-colored vest, blue wool pantaloons with matching stockings, suspenders, and boots; his light fur hat appears to have gone missing.
Calvin's clothes were badly torn, almost to the point of being naked on his backside, leading authorities to conclude that something dragged him along the ground for some distance. They also believed that the killer or killers may have used Calvin's suspenders to attach a weight to sink him as they were hanging loose on his body, and a piece had broken off.
Upon closer inspection, Calvin's skull showed multiple fractures, with one side broken into many fragments driven into his brain, and his left shoulder was bruised and swollen. The rest of his body remained largely untouched, with only some sporadic bruising.
Authorities turned their attention to Jesse Hall Jr.
Jesse had joined in the search for Calvin, offering assistance and showing great interest in locating the missing man as the townsfolk combed the woods and fields around his property. However, Jesse kept making disparaging comments and contradictory statements, which were amplified when the searchers directed their attention to the pond; he also got highly agitated at the prospect of them dragging it.
As the searchers neared the pond, Jesse, largely unnoticed, perched himself on an incline on the west side of it. It provided the perfect vantage point where he could observe and hear everything happening. And when he knew Calvin's body would be found, he quietly fled: northbound.
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| Map of Tolland, 1831 |
through the woods, Jesse cut his throat, thinking such a move would disappoint them. The self-inflicted four-inch wound, however, turned out to be superficial, and Jesse, weak from losing about a quart of blood, made his way to a house and was eventually brought to a doctor's house. Authorities took him into custody there on Saturday, about ten miles from his home in Tolland, in the adjacent town of Blandford.
Jesse Hall Jr.'s murder trial started in December, with Patrick Boise, who became a distinguished lawyer and statesman, representing the accused. Jesse offered little to his defense; speculation was that he wanted to spare the Widow Fuller of the information he had surrounding her late husband's adultery, but perhaps more so, his horrific demise.
Jesse was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. The governor and his council scheduled Jesse's execution for Valentine's Day, 1838, at the Charlestown State Prison between ten and one o'clock.
Facing the gallows, Jesse seemed unfazed. In an attempted last-minute reprieve, Squire Boise visited Jesse at Charlestown to secure his signature on a petition for commutation. When Jesse hesitated to sign the document, Boise became provoked and reminded him that he was facing certain death. Jesse reasoned that death was a better option, as the state prison was no place to live. Boise angrily responded that the prison was "A great deal better than any place you ever lived-in in Tolland," and Jesse signed the paperwork. Soon after, Jesse's punishment was commuted to imprisonment for life at hard labor.
At the time, legal scholars and others formed the opinion that had Jesse chosen not to spare the Widow Fuller of the details of her husband, he more than likely would have been found guilty of manslaughter instead of first-degree murder due to Calvin Fuller's provocation.
