The Disquieting Death of Emma Gill: Abortion, Death, and Concealment in Victorian New England

Prologue

THE EXPERTS SAID A WOMAN couldn’t have done it alone, and they were right. The family had done it together, as they’d always done things. They’d jointly made a mess of it. All their efforts at concealment were undone in a moment. It might have been comical if it hadn’t been criminal.

It happened in early September 1898, on one of those last summer vacation days when children tend to bore easily. On this warm Monday at four o’clock, three boys had spent the day doing nothing in particular. As they walked home over a bridge, two white bundles on the mudflats below caught their attention. Another boy and some men joined them. The carefully shaped objects—one round and one rectangular—made a sharp contrast with the muck of nature. It was strange.

The adults seemed content to marvel, but a boy decided to investigate. Johnny Jackson descended from the bridge and found a long stick. Another twelve-year-old, Stephen Kelly, came to assist. The objects lay close to the shore of Yellow Mill Pond in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Although called a pond, it was a tidal inlet, filling and draining in delayed synchronization with the ocean’s ebb and flow.

The family had thrown the packages off the bridge at high tide, painstakingly weighting them down with stones to sink them in six feet of water. Now, at low tide, almost the entire pond floor was exposed. Anyone who lived here could have explained that would happen, but the family didn’t live here, at least not in the way other families did.

The stones, at least, had worked as intended. Applying the stick to the larger package, the rectangular one, the boys couldn’t make it budge. One of the boy’s uncles, a blacksmith, lived near the bridge. Recruited to the effort, the uncle spliced the stick to a rake handle, attaching a hook to the end. Now properly equipped, the team retrieved its quarry. Cord held the cloth covering together. As if handling a Christmas present, the children brought the bundle onto the bridge for unwrapping. Complicated knots threatened to slow their progress, but one boy lent a knife.

The heavy white cloth fell away, and I saw a foot in it, ¹ Johnny later told the coroner.

Perhaps shamed by all this juvenile initiative, an adult retrieved the second package. In his retelling, a head rolled out ² with blue eyes open, but that was probably an embellishment. The neck was still attached, down to the third cervical vertebra, making free rotation unlikely. Long auburn hair indicated that these were the barely decomposed remains of a young woman.

At this point, the amateur detectives of the Seaview Avenue Bridge summoned the police, who found that the package with the foot contained both legs, severed below the knee. The four dissected parts of the lower limbs were bound together neatly in linen, apparently ripped from a man’s undergarment.

Cloth was also bound around the dead woman’s mouth, suggesting to some that she’d been gagged before being murdered, but the police never seriously considered that theory.

It was too late for the evening edition of the papers. With sixty-five thousand inhabitants, Bridgeport was one of New England’s largest cities. Nevertheless, word spread quickly, all the way to the North End. A search began for the missing body parts. As the waters rose, boaters were placed on alert, and volunteers in hip boots scoured the pond.

As they searched, journalists and thrill-seekers flocked to the private funeral home that served as the city morgue. The police had placed the head on display, hoping someone could identify the victim, described in one paper as having an aquiline nose ³ and in another as possessing a wealth of hair. ⁴ It was a spectacle worthy of the showman P. T. Barnum, formerly a mayor of the city.

As night fell, correspondents and illustrators from the big New York papers queued up at the morgue, eager to see the head in a bucket. Just blocks away, a phaeton drawn by a hired team of horses rolled down a street, preceded by a cyclist.

It was the family again, oblivious of the commotion around the corner from their home at Cullinan’s Funeral Home. The phaeton headed for a lonelier part of town. All was quiet on the bridge, where the search parties had paused their work when the tide came in. Again, two bundles splashed into six feet of water, and the family separated. The cyclist pedaled east toward Stratford and New Haven, and the hired carriage returned to the stable.

The police had planned to dredge the pond, but that proved unnecessary. In the early hours of Tuesday, a young man delivering newspapers saw the two parcels in shallow water. Guessing their contents, he and a friend rowed out for them. Unwrapping again proved irresistible. By the time the police arrived, most of the torso had been found in one package, with arms still attached. The other contained the lower section of the body’s trunk. All internal organs had been removed except the lungs and heart. Fatefully, a small bit of uterus had survived the disembowelment. ⁵

By Wednesday, the national press was all over the story. Bridgeport’s city prosecutor, V. R. C. Giddings, had several announcements. By now, thousands of local men and women had viewed the head, but no one recognized it. From this, Giddings concluded that the victim must have been an out-of-towner.

He said it was now clear that the mutilation was intended to cover up the consequences of a criminal operation, by which, as everyone knew, he meant abortion. Citing the medical examiner’s findings, he said the woman succumbed to sepsis after an illness of several days.

In an exclusive that ran in the sensationalist New York World under his byline, the prosecutor asked the public to help find the culprit. According to Giddings, the person who committed the crime was knowledgeable about anatomy and autopsies. More importantly, this was someone who could handle a knife and saw. That led him to another significant conclusion.

A woman . . . though she be a midwife or a physician, would, in my opinion, not be skilled sufficiently to make the clean cuts found on the various portions of the body, Giddings wrote. He added, No old resident of Bridgeport had anything to do with it. The locals wouldn’t have picked Yellow Mill Pond as a place to hide evidence of murder.

For it was murder, or at least it could be prosecuted as such. The headline over Giddings’s words said, DEATH RESULTING FROM CRIMINAL PRACTICES IS MURDER IN CONNECTICUT. ⁶ If a jury found it to be first-degree murder, the penalty would be death, he added.

As the story continued to fascinate, many medical experts would chime in. Not all would share Giddings’s high opinion of the cutting and sawing. At best, the perpetrator had experience in butchery, some would say. A journal of forensic medicine would pan this crude dissection of a body into seven sections, contrasting it with the masterwork of a man who reduced his wife’s body to 153 morsels. Sliced that finely, a corpse couldn’t easily be identified, and there might even be the question of whether all parts came from the same body.

In the Bridgeport case, the two batches of body remnants were easily fitted together. They formed the corpse of a 105-pound woman around twenty-five years old, five feet one in height, with long arms and slender fingers. Raising the dead was a matter of easy assembly.

Distrusting newspaper sketches, people across the nation formed their own versions of the face. A parade of parents, husbands, and lovers insisted it was their absent daughter, wife, or romantic partner. Described as slender and graceful in figure, ⁷ the reconstructed form became an American Everywoman. Within weeks, the Bridgeport police received more than three hundred letters from people believing they knew the person she once was. Only one-third were mailed from Connecticut. Hundreds of people in dozens of places thought someone they knew might seek an illegal abortion.

The murderer was a fool to leave the face intact instead of pouring acid on it, said a Bridgeport police detective. Speculating why the body wasn’t minced more finely to hinder identification, the Medico-Legal Journal credited the impelling force of fear, typical in cases in which the victim dies, not from murderous intent, but as the result of some illegal act, as rape or abortion. ⁸

There was fear of detection, to be sure, but also the fear of separation. A daughter and a son, both embroiled in this, had been torn from their mother in childhood. As adults, both were devoted to her. There was a father—violent, philandering, and, at this critical time, imprisoned. He stood by the others, at least publicly.

They were the typical crime family of modern-day television and film, loving one another while wreaking havoc on society—except that dismembering a body wasn’t a serious crime, and many of their neighbors weren’t sure that abortion should be either.

Nancy Alice Guilford didn’t know the waters of Bridgeport, but she’d been seeing women patients there for years. Dozens of ads for Dr. Guilford listing her Bridgeport office hours had appeared in Connecticut papers and even a public-library bulletin. Naming her specialty as diseases of women, ⁹ the ads were barely encrypted. They also gave her address: 51 Gilbert Street in the center of Bridgeport, near city hall and police headquarters.

This was no back-alley operation. A brownstone with bay windows on the second floor and dormers on the third, it was judged by the press to be a handsome dwelling. Cleaned by a live-in housekeeper, it defied the stereotypes of abortion-parlor filth and squalor in the era before Roe v. Wade. Indeed, police noted later that the hallway had a strong odor of carbolic acid, an antiseptic favored by germ-theory pioneer Joseph Lister.

When finally cornered, after a chase spanning two continents and three countries, the midwife threatened to expose the names of her four hundred Bridgeport patients, many known to the best society, ¹⁰ and twice that number in New Haven, from which she’d come. She promised revelations that would shake the pillars of the courts, the clubs, and the churches. ¹¹ Or so said the newspapers, and no one doubted it.

After all, Nancy Guilford herself was said to move in the best society, ¹² and her husband’s roots stretched back to the American Revolution. Indeed, the story that ended with a head in a pond began with baptismal waters, as a young evangelist set forth to save sinners.

1

Before Henry

Met Nancy

FOR ONE YOUNG EVANGELICAL, the early months of 1840 were heady times in northern New England, even if the cold had frozen a dead man to the ground. As twenty-two-year-old Henry Pittman Guilford paid visits to the people of Kittery, Maine, he appeared to be sent of the Lord, ¹ an older clergyman noted.

Religion was taking hold here, nearly as popular with some people as alcohol was with others. Suddenly, a backload of prayers were being answered, or so said many at church when the spirit moved them to testify, often rambling on about mundane matters just to get them off their chests. Shipyard workers lined up for baptism in Kittery, hundreds braved snowy roads to attend a New Hampshire chapel dedication, and quiet meetings erupted into raucous revivals all along the coast.

Amid this joyful noise, young Guilford became Rev. H. P. Guilford, ordained on the New Hampshire island of New Castle. Preparation for pastoral duty was a casual matter in Guilford’s branch of Protestantism, which called itself simply the Christian denomination or sometimes the Christian connection. We make no boast of a learned ministry, wrote one official of the loosely organized church. Some pastors have only a common education, he added, while others have educated themselves. ²

H.P., as he signed himself, was in a category all his own. The son and brother of Massachusetts shoemakers, he nonetheless met the high standards for clergy set by his religion’s leading newspaper. Less tolerant than the church itself of the common touch, the Christian Herald and Journal favored a literate voice from the pulpit. Its editors embraced Guilford, printing his overwrought letters, praising his work, and charting his frequent moves on the preaching circuit. They also made him a sales agent, paying a commission for each subscription sold. Thus, the paper encouraged H.P.’s twin interests, in business and religion, that he maintained throughout life. His firstborn son would join him in the first interest and spectacularly reject the second.

But child-rearing still lay in the young minister’s future. As he wrote his first letter to the Christian Herald, he’d been married only a few months. His bride was Lucy Ann Wells, a native of Hampton Falls, New Hampshire. It’s not clear where they met, but her village was in Rockingham County, on the route of his evangelical travels. At age twenty, Lucy was nearly three years younger and probably no taller than her shorter-than-average husband. Whether or not marriage had anything to do with it, H.P. seemed flushed with excitement as he took up his pen.

Since arriving in Portsmouth fresh from ordination, the minister had roamed its streets in wonder. Religion appears to be the general topic of conversation, he wrote, noting approvingly that few spoke of anything but this blessed theme ³ in public or private. Here to assist an older pastor, he’d postponed his planned departure date. A highly charged atmosphere agreed with him.

Lengthy stays were not in H.P.’s nature nor suited to his dual professions. Soon the enterprising pastor was on the move again, armed with scripture and a subscription ledger. In New Hampshire, he’d briefly led the congregation that had witnessed his ordination, but he took a step back after Portsmouth. Returning to his native Massachusetts for several years, he assisted other pastors but had no flock of his own. At home, too, he and Lucy had lighter tasks than most. Four years into their marriage, there were still no babies.

They’d eventually have eight children, not unusual for the era. Given their religious beliefs, their late start on parenthood was probably not by choice. Still, other women of the time may have envied the childless young Lucy. Many, whether married or unmarried, used pills and herbs to try to reverse menstrual stoppages, as early pregnancies were viewed. Until fetal movement or quickening was felt, usually in the fourth month, pregnancy didn’t seem definite. Few people cared if a woman managed to terminate it.

However, as H.P. and Lucy began their married life, more effective abortions—involving physicians, instruments, and overnight stays—were gaining popularity and drawing legal scrutiny. For the most part, churches stayed out of the fray, but the Christian connection thought the procedures immoral. Covering the widely discussed case of Mary Rogers, whose body was found in a New Jersey pond after a physician-assisted abortion, the Christian Herald called her a voluntary criminal who came to her death by endeavouring to hide her shame. ⁴

As the young pastor sold subscriptions to that paper, Lucy experienced quickening. She was carrying her first child, whose name would someday be connected with another pond, another abortion, and another body—this time sawed into sections.

Meanwhile, Lucy’s husband became a voluntary criminal of sorts. Not satisfied with selling religious papers, he decided to publish one himself. It would be a bold new magazine for Sunday schools, a substitute for the dusty books that had bored children for generations. Through boundless enthusiasm and extravagant sales projections, H.P. enrolled subscribers before even one line had been printed.

Predictably, it went bust, leaving printers unpaid and subscribers disappointed. Still, H.P. couldn’t leave the gaming table. Changing the name of the publication and switching to another printer, he deepened his embarrassments, as debts were called. However, he wasn’t too embarrassed to publish a plea for financial help in the Christian Herald, ready cash preferred. Presenting his failure as noble, he blamed it on factors beyond his control. His firstborn would borrow from that playbook.

If H.P.’s open letter didn’t clear all his debts, it at least brought a job. The North Christian Church of Swansea, Massachusetts, made him its pastor. He was there for the community’s late August clambake, a tradition started by Native American people and appropriated by the churches. Wearing ribbons that signified their religious affiliation, children marched from the churches to a shoreline oak grove.

Now four years old, Henry M. Guilford likely marched with the smallest scholars. In his family’s first year in Swansea, he and a younger sister, Ellen Eudora, were joined by a brother, Lester. Like their deceased grandmother and many others, Lucy would continue having babies at this rate throughout her childbearing years. At the same time, her church took some small steps toward gender equality. Its Sunday schools enrolled girls, unlike those of some other denominations, and women could preach in certain circumstances.

Lucy’s son Henry would grow into a man who attracted women but abused them. Any thought he gave women’s issues, including his mother’s pregnancies, was probably in marketing terms. As the century advanced, white Protestants would increasingly seek to limit family size, sending married women to his practice. Meanwhile, industrialization drew single women from farm to factory, a social shift that not infrequently produced unintended pregnancies.

Henry grew up like a modern-day military brat, always relocating. When he was about six, the family left Swansea for a rural river town in western New Jersey’s Alexandria Township. Uprooted from New England for the first time, the Guilfords were far from friends and family.

Over the next seven years, the preacher’s family would leave the quiet of New Jersey, where their daughter Annie was born, for the bustle of New York City. There, H.P. moved the Second Church of Christ into a building on West Twenty-Seventh Street near Ninth Avenue, where he served as minister, with the times of his sermons announced in a city newspaper.

The family next appeared in Danbury, Connecticut, only fifty miles from New York yet in an entirely different world, with its white buildings surrounded by picturesque hills. They were finally back in New England, albeit the southernmost portion of the region. The only mark they left here was the birth of a third Guilford son, Frank. A history of Danbury that traces the growth of its Christian denomination fails to mention H.P., suggesting that he was but one of many preachers who revolved through its doors.

As a clergyman in an evangelical religion, H.P. could hardly have expected to stay in one spot. But now, he and the church were changing. The young preacher, once enraptured by the revivalist spirit of Portsmouth, was now a middle-aged father of five. The Christian denomination in Danbury had arisen from a similar impulse; the town historian described it as a small struggling band of adherents to a simple faith. ⁵ But around the time the Guilfords arrived, its appearance was acquiring more polish, moving from the fringes to the center of town and occupying a church formerly owned by the Methodists.

Some well-heeled donors embellished the new quarters with memorial windows and a pipe organ. Although the deed indicated that the remodeled building would be called the Church of Christ, it opened as the Disciples of Christ. Elsewhere, too, the denomination was undergoing name changes amid disagreements about its future direction. In Danbury, the church was enjoying its new financial security. Founded by lay preachers, then reliant on visiting preachers, the Disciples could finally employ their own ministers.

H.P. was not one of their long-term hires. He soon moved the family to Maine, where their sixth child was born. This son was named Millard, most likely for David Millard, one of the Christian brethren who’d preached alongside H.P. in the days before stained-glass windows and church organs supplanted revivals and testimonials. But as the new baby came into the world, his father had returned to a secular cause. The 1856 presidential campaign was on, and the new Republican Party was rallying behind John C. Frémont, staunchly opposed to the western expansion of slavery. In one of the last weeks of summer, Frémont supporters organized a clambake in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts. A crowd estimated between six thousand and ten thousand gathered on a bluff of land jutting out into the sea.

This clambake was no Sunday-school affair. A carriage arrived carrying young women representing the various states. They wore white for the free states and black for the slave states. One woman wore red to symbolize Kansas—Bleeding Kansas, as it was then known—the scene of violent battles between pro- and antislavery factions.

The clear day afforded a stunning view of surrounding harbors, islands, and picturesque towns. But storm clouds were gathering over the nation as Kansas bled. Frémont did not appear, but a half-dozen speakers presented his antislavery positions. Among them were a senator, an ex-governor, a newspaper editor, and one H. P. Guilford of Maine.

For the first time in decades, the title Reverend didn’t precede H. P. Guilford’s name. He was taking a break from clerical duties. In fact, he had left the Christian denomination altogether. When he next used the title, he’d do so after ordination as a Baptist.

It was a startling sea change for a man who’d taken visceral delight in his former denomination, devoted his life to spreading word of it, and, at his lowest point, thrown himself upon its mercy. Thanks to Southern support, James Buchanan was elected president. His supporters fought a dirty campaign, lumping Frémont supporters like H. P. Guilford with free love advocates, supporters of women’s rights, and other undesirables. Soon after the inauguration, the US Supreme Court’s decision on the Dred Scott case galvanized antislavery sentiment.

In the spring of 1857, as the national mood darkened, a Baptist newspaper ran a brief item:

Rev. H. P. Guilford, formerly a minister with the Christian Connection, but who recently united with the Baptist church in Eastport, has taken the pastoral charge of the Baptist church in Fredericton, N. B. ⁶

Fredericton was the capital of New Brunswick, then a British colony but familiar to many in the American clergy. It was an optional extra stop on preaching tours of New England. However, for the Guilfords it would be home for the next seven years, as the rumbles from their country intensified and civil war began.

Two more Guilford children were born in New Brunswick, where the family eventually left Fredericton for a small lobstering community. When the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, seventeen-year-old Henry was still living with his family. The New Brunswick census, taken that year, gave his occupation as farmer while all of his younger siblings were at school.

As the war progressed, the Guilfords were undoubtedly aware of the inevitable consequences for a family with sons. Even men born in New Brunswick were volunteering for the Union Army. In 1863 the family returned to their divided country, and H.P. took charge of a makeshift church in Maine’s Aroostook County.

A year later, Henry was in Boston, volunteering for the Union Navy. It was hardly surprising that a son of Rev. H. P. Guilford, adamantly against slavery, had entered the fray. Yet young Henry’s choice of branch, navy over army, suggests that he planned to expose himself to a minimum of danger. Enlisting a few months before becoming conscription-eligible at age twenty, he chose port blockading over land battles.

Three years into the war, romantic notions of battle had faded. Newspapers daily listed the dead, and veterans with amputated limbs were a common sight on village greens. Some men still volunteered for ideological reasons or from a sense of duty, typically choosing the army as their branch. They marched off with others from their towns or villages and fought beside others from their states.

The navy was different, often recruiting near urban taverns. Volunteers for this branch of the service were often immigrants or native-born discontents seeking food, shelter, and risk mitigation. The Confederacy’s weak naval force made sea battles relatively rare. Most sailors passed their time enforcing the Union blockade and hoping to catch vessels that dared to penetrate it. Capturing blockade-runners brought big prize money, or so the recruiters promised.

Henry M. Guilford felt drawn to this milieu. The prize money might have appealed to the gambling instincts he shared with his enterprising father. Enlisted as a landsman ⁷ because of his lack of nautical experience, the former farmer did well. He learned to handle himself among the tough urban jacks, as the Union sailors were called. Indeed, he flourished.

His first ship was the USS Massasoit, a gunboat propelled by steam. On a sidewheeler like this one, tinkerers counted for more than old salts, and Henry’s farm work would have made him handy. Within months he became a petty officer, a boatswain’s mate, overseeing men older than himself in the endless cleaning of the ship and maintenance of its hundred-pound guns.

Like other ships enforcing the Union’s blockade, the Massasoit patrolled the North Atlantic, scouting for ships bearing supplies for the Confederacy. The task involved long stretches of monotony punctuated by hectic chases. Frigid night watches on the deck would have been part of Henry’s duties, but there were rewards, too. He and the other petty officers would have shared a cook and mess, eating apart from the sailors. They would also have been attended by one of the Massasoit’s stewards. Among them was at least one formerly enslaved person or contraband.

Blockading was not without its hazards. The raiding vessels fired back and laid mines. One of the Massasoit’s targets was a deadly rebel ship, the CSS Tallahassee, which had been sinking Union craft along a long stretch of coast.

The preacher’s son must have acquitted himself well. Soon he was promoted to master’s mate and transferred to the USS Dumbarton, also a steam gunboat. At age twenty, Henry Guilford wore a star above the stripe on his uniform, signifying that he was in the line of command. Full charge of the ship could fall to him in the absence of senior officers.

The river gunboats saw more action and were generally more effective than the coastal blockaders. In addition to intercepting rebel boats, they transported personnel and fortified ground troops in battles. An ensign who’d served in the squadron on a James River gunboat a year earlier wrote of enjoying oysters, fresh fruit, and daily newspaper deliveries. He also remembered drilling endlessly to prepare for action. When rebels attacked a badly outnumbered army brigade on the Virginia shore, the crew nearly instantly swung the guns into position, and the cooks left their pots to pass the ammunition. Meanwhile, the ensign wrote,

the ward-room has been converted into an hospital, and there stands the surgeon and his steward with their instruments spread out on the dining-table, ready to make a clean job of any jagged limb that may have been roughly amputated by a cannon ball. ⁸

Such scenes might have become familiar to the future Dr. Henry M. Guilford, encouraging him to take up the scalpel himself, or at least making the thought of it less