Living in an area so steeped in local history with everyday reminders of the past – the historical homes, narrow village streets, open pastures and gristmill ruins – it’s likely that while walking about the Tri-Town we’ve paused to imagine what our neighborhoods were like long before us.
We might imagine the ladies in their fine dresses and hats strolling about town, the men with their closely-groomed beards and formal attire congregating to discuss politics or business, the whaling ship workers bustling towards the wharf, and the schoolchildren with their books walking to the old schoolhouse to the ring of the church bells that still sound today.
We’ve wondered about the individuals who used to inhabit these old homes, who built them, what must have gone on there both outside and behind closed doors. The lives, the deaths, the loves, the quarrels, the very hearts of the people and the deeds they’ve done – good and bad – inside the very walls we now inhabit where the past seems as palpable as the present.
We humans have a way of keeping the past alive in the form of tradition and the preservation of what remains, the physical evidence of where we came from. Whether it is in books, in museums, or in monuments – statues in parks, plaques on walls, even headstones in cemeteries – the past is never that far behind.
We humans also share an inherent appreciation of a good mystery; we ponder them, probe them, and once in a while we conjure up our own. Some mysteries endure, obscuring the truth buried like scant remains beneath the sands of time in a shallow grave that, when unearthed, produce not a period to a question mark, but rather an ellipsis to a story’s end that was never written, only supposed.
We humans also possess an inherent preoccupation with death, maybe a degree of existential angst of danger and mayhem and a fascination with crime and, especially, murder. But why?
Local author John B. “Red” Cummings, Jr., who recently released his latest work, Volume One of Murder, Manslaughter, and Mayhem on the SouthCoast, says, “Murder is not a pleasant subject.” Nonetheless, when your grandfather was once an attorney, one who was solicited by Lizzie Borden to represent her during her trial (but declined), it was a subject that was sometimes explored during family meals and dinner parties.
Cummings’ new book features the murders that occurred in the SouthCoast between 1800-1969 (a second volume will focus on 1970 and on), from the 1832 murder by the married Minister Ephraim Kingsbury Avery of a pregnant Sarah Maria Cornel, 29, who was found hanging from a stack pole in South Park in Fall River (once a part of Tiverton, RI), to the infamous Lizzie Borden in Fall River accused of bludgeoning her father and stepmother to death with a hatchet in 1892, all the way to the 1969 shooting of Russell Goldstein, an antiques shop owner in Fall River, still unsolved today.
Murder, as Cummings stated, is not a nice topic. “Neither is manslaughter and mayhem, but they were prevalent in the SouthCoast, especially between 1937 and 1969.” And, just like the specific aforementioned unsolved murders, sadly, so are many within Cummings’ book, including a murder-suicide on November 21, 1926 that occurred right here in the Tri-Town.
Chances are you’ve driven by the house, or maybe you walk by it every day. Perhaps you’ve even been inside it or maybe even live in it! Although there was never any true closure to the tragedy, what is known to this day is that at 8 North Street in Mattapoisett, James Ebenezer Norton Shaw, 50, shot his wife Helen Macomber (Sherman) Shaw, 46, to death in her upstairs bedroom and then shot himself. The housekeeper found them both lying dead on the floor.
Because the incident was deemed a murder/suicide, no trial ensued and no evidence was collected and reviewed openly. “[A]nd the public was left to their intense speculation as to the motive for Shaw’s actions in the tragedy” (Page 139).
Initially, the incident was declared by the medical examiner to be an accidental shooting and suicide. The housekeeper recalled in her statement that Mr. Shaw “took a gun he had in the house and remarked that he was going to shoot a rat” (Page 137). After the first gunshot, the housekeeper ran to the bedroom and, seeing Mrs. Shaw on the floor, Mr. Shaw claimed he accidentally shot his wife and instructed the housekeeper to get help. While on the telephone, the second shot rang out and the housekeeper found Mr. Shaw lying dead in his own blood.
At the inquest held in January of 1927, the judge stated, “Mr. and Mrs. Shaw were a singularly devoted couple and there was not a lack of harmony between them” (Page 138). So what went awry?
The details and documents Cummings uncovered during his two years researching and writing the book with the assistance of colleague Stefani Koorey, PhD, reveal Mr. Shaw, a prominent New Bedford attorney, may have had dubious financial entanglements with the estate of a client, of which Shaw was the executor of the will, and the young, married, pregnant woman his client loved, who paid the woman $40,000 “to name the child after him” (Page 138).
Cummings’ book, the only one written on the comprehensive history of murder in the SouthCoast, provides enough details of the case, as well as many others, to allow the reader to make their own assumptions.
So, again, why are we so aroused by mystery and murder? Perhaps from the victim’s perspective, it stems from an inner vulnerability, acknowledging (against our will) our impermanence here and the impermanence of our loved ones and the inability to protect them from their own mortality. Or maybe our fascination with murder is rooted in repressed guilt. A fear of the inner shadows of the self or the disturbing possibility that inside the soul is a subjugated seed of evil that if exposed to just a speck of light could propagate out of passion and emerge out from us or onto us from another like in this book that documents the dark pages of history, the bloody words written by the hands of the wicked, an ellipses ending for us to read into the faded details of the forgotten names of SouthCoast slayings.
“I enjoy the fact that I’m going to give some peace to the people, the family members and the people who were murdered to give them some attention, not just to the ones who murdered,” said Cummings, who led an author’s talk on the book at the Mattapoisett Library on June 28. He reveals in the book that he had no idea that so many murders had occurred on the SouthCoast – 250 featured in Volume One and 75 slated for Volume Two.
Cummings dedicated this work to law enforcement officials, honoring the men and women who bring about justice for the victims – cops killed in the line of duty, children slaughtered by their mothers, women who died during illegal abortions and were chopped up into pieces – who were murdered during crimes that went down along the very streets on which we now dwell, the very buildings we visit.
“I wanted to keep their memories alive and not simply recall them as statistics,” wrote Cummings in his preface to the book. “The time is now to stop the hate. Stop the brutality. Stop the Murder, Manslaughter, and Mayhem on the SouthCoast.”
Murder, Manslaughter, and Mayhem on the SouthCoast is published by Hillside Media, 245 Old Harbor Road, Westport, Massachusetts. The author can be reached at John@hillsidemedia.net.
Mattapoisett resident Susan Wainio, who admitted that she just finds reading stories about true-life murders fascinating, bought her copy on Amazon.com. “It’s a quick, great read,” she attested.
By Jean Perry