“Throughout my travels this year as I see other parts of the country, it just reminds me how much I love it here.”

            Rochester resident Grace Morrison-Hartley is talking about her cross-country tours as the town’s most-accomplished singer-songwriter versus pining for the homebase she has shared with her husband Scott Hartley and three-and-half-year-old son Brayton Hartley for the past five years.

            “Every time I travel, I realize I love it here more,” the Wareham native explained. She said it’s the reason one song on the album she will release early next year is titled “Massachusetts.”

            “The song is just about that feeling,” she said.

            But travel she has had to accept in order to grow a career that is blossoming more within the last year than in any of the 20 years before it. She said she manifested her career growth by deciding one day to do more than just teach music lessons to 65 students a week and perform in local bars. “I decided to fully go after what I wanted to do,” she said. “I decided to walk through the doors already open for me.”

            Morrison-Hartley signed up for songwriting contests, acquired a booking agent and cultivated the relationships she was starting to have with fellow artists. “It’s a relationship business,” she explained.

            The strategy has worked very well. In January, she went to Nashville, Tennessee, to do some songwriting and recording. In February, she was back home to perform at the Zeiterion Theatre in New Bedford. In March, she drove to New Mexico and Arizona for concerts in the southwest.

            Out there, she learned she had been nominated for awards in two songwriter competitions. In May, at the first of those, the Songwriters Serenade competition, in Austin, Texas, she met Susan Gibson, who wrote the song “Wide Open Spaces” for The Chicks. Gibson was a judge in that competition.

            Morrison-Hartley said she was honored when Gibson said to her, “I have no critique for you. I’m just a fan.”

            “To have that said to you by someone like her was pretty validating,” Morrison-Hartley noted.

            Then came regional concerts in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and locally in Onset, followed by the Gatlinburg (Tennessee) Songwriters Festival in August. There, she shared the stage with singer-songwriter Dana Hunt Black, who has written two number-one hits for country star George Strait.

            In September, she had her Bluebird Cafe debut in Nashville, then played the Whitefish (Montana) Songwriter Festival, closing out the month in Austin as an Official Showcase Artist at the Southwest Regional Folk Alliance Conference.

            In the middle of that, Morrison-Hartley got a call from the “Blast on the Bay Songwriter Festival” in Port St. Joe, Florida, inviting her to perform on October 20th. “All thanks to songwriter Dana Hunt Black championing me,” Morrison-Hartley said. “Truly a ‘pinch me’ moment! She said she loved what I did and wanted to write with me. We’re planning to get together while I’m in Florida.”

            On Thursday, November 3rd, Morrison-Hartley will perform at The Spire in Plymouth (tickets are now on sale at spirecenter.org. On Saturday, November 5th, she’ll perform with Connor Garvey at the Linden Tree Coffeehouse in Wakefield; and on Tuesday, November 15th, she will be back at The Spire to open for Chris Smither. And soon her new single, “Fumbling In” will be released.

            In March 2023, Morrison-Hartley will return to Austin for a tour timed to the release of her new album, “Maybe Modern.”

            Meanwhile, you’ll be able to find her in Rochester. The day she spoke to The Wanderer, she was heading to pick cranberries with her father-in-law Woody Hartley. Look for her YouTube video of her song “Daughter.” It was partly filmed at Eastover Farm in Rochester.

            What are the other secrets to her success?

            “The old trope about entertainers is that they are lazy and not good at business,” she said. “My way has to be good at those things.”

            Morrison-Hartley said she treats her career everyday as a full-time job, with morning vocal practice and two hours of songwriting. She also points to her family support. “The support of my husband and in-laws and my mom,” she said. “I couldn’t do all this without them. They are a great gift.”

By Michael J. DeCicco

Well, you know Halloween season has arrived when stories of mass murderers, true crime real drama, are on offer. That was the case on October 6 when the Mattapoisett Museum hosted Chris Daley.

            By day, a history teacher and by night, a researcher and author, Daley has specialized on researching the gory, bizarre and unexplainable details of mass murders in New England. For some 30 years, he has been providing crime-hungry seekers with what they want: details, horrific details of true crimes.

            In this presentation, a Zoom audience heard the backstories of four infamous killers, one very well known in this area, Ms. Lizzie Borden, and the others less well known until now. There was “The Boy Fiend,” Jesse Pomeroy of Boston; “The Merry Widow,” Grayce Asquith and “The Angel of Death,” Jane Toppan.

            Skipping to those murderers who might be lesser known locally, let’s first focus on The Boyfriend, Jesse Pomeroy. As one can guess, murderers have backstories, histories that one may find equal to the evil thrust upon the victims.

            Pomeroy was an abused child, Daley said. He suffered beatings that were really a form of torture from an early age at the hands of his own father, an alcoholic. Pomeroy would display frightening behavior by today’s standards, killing animals for instance, but by the age of 12, as several young boys went missing and subsequently found dead in states too horrific to write here, Pomeroy was found to be the culprit.

            Due to his young age, he wasn’t sent to jail but to the Westborough Reformatory where he excelled as a student and model resident. Within two years, he was released. Soon thereafter, the young Horace Millan was found dead. Pomeroy was soon fingered as the perpetrator. During the police interrogation, Pomeroy confessed to also killing Katie Curran, a missing little girl later found in the basement of the home that the killer shared with his mother.

            Pomeroy was convicted and sentenced to life in solitary confinement. He spent 43 years alone and another 15 years at Bridgewater Hospital until his death in 1932.

            Jane Toppan started life deprived of warm, nurturing parents. Her mother died when she was very young, leaving her to a father more interested in drinking than fathering. Jane Toppan would be placed in an orphanage by the age of six and then indentured to the Davis family, which by all accounts treated her well. Her relationship with the Davis family seemed the best solution, and she’d spend many years with them after her indentured status had ended. She called the Davis’ daughter her sister, so close was the relationship.

            But unbeknownst to all, Toppan had been secretly mixing toxic medications together and injecting her charges at the old-age home where she worked as a nurse. Because of the age of the residents, no one thought their sudden deaths were suspicious, leaving Toppan to use their bodies for her sick and twisted experiments. She’d inject just enough anesthetics to keep them teetering at the edge of death before seeing through their demise.

            Daley went on to share that when one of the Davis family members met Toppan at her home in Cambridge to collect summer rents owed, she served an innocent-looking cup of tea. The laced beverage did its job, killing off Mattie Davis. In a twisted sense of duty, Toppan accompanied the corpse back home to Cataumet. Within a short period of time, the remaining members of the Davis family would be dead.

            After an investigation of wrongdoing championed by one of the Davis family friends, toxicology studies proved they had all died from strychnine. Toppan was found guilty by reason of insanity and committed to the Taunton State Hospital. Before her death in 1938, she would admit to killing 31 people before wiping out the Davis clan.

            “The Merry Widow,” as dubbed by the press in the 1930s, was Grayce Asquith. Before sharing her tale, Daley said that Asquith by the 1930s standards was a bit of a wanton woman until she met her fiancé John Lyons. This is a story not really of serial killings but of a killing under mysterious circumstances and a disappearance that has never fully been solved.

            Asquith would go missing, as would Lyons. When body parts began turning up in Whitman Pond and Boston Harbor, police were able to identify the victim as Asquith. Daley said she had very small feet, which was confirmed by her friend. An investigation of her home confirmed that a dismemberment had taken place there. Evidence at the scene clogging the bathroom pipes – well, better left to your imagination.

            Police learned that at the home had been a visitor named Oscar Bartolini. At his apartment, police found the same materials that had been used to wrap up Asquith’s body parts. He would subsequently be found guilty of her murder and sentenced to death, which was commuted to life. He was released from custody in 1961 and summarily deported to Italy.

            As for the case of Lizzie Borden, Daley reviewed known facts of the case and the public sentiment towards the accused at the time. The mystery remains: Even though Borden was found not guilty, did she do it and, if not, who?

            To learn more, visit daleyhistory.com.

Mattapoisett Museum

By Marilou Newell