Bathsheba Spooner

Bathsheba Ruggles Spooner (February 15, 1746 – July 2, 1778)

Bathsheba Ruggles and Joshua Spooner published their intention to marry in Hardwick, Massachusetts on January 15, 1766. He was a well-to-do Brookfield farmer, the son of a wealthy Boston merchant. The Spooners lived in relative affluence in a two-story house in Brookfield, and had four children between 1767 and 1775. Spooner was later described as an abusive man for whom his wife developed "an utter aversion."

Plotting murder In the spring of 1777, 16-year-old Ezra Ross, a soldier in the Continental Army, fell ill en route to his home in Linebrook, a village in Ipswich. Bathsheba nursed him back to health. On his travels to and from army service, Ross visited the Spooner home in July and December 1777. On the latter occasion he stayed into the new year, traveled with Spooner on business trips and had an affair with Bathsheba. She became pregnant mid-January and began urging Ross to kill her husband. In February 1778, Ross accompanied Spooner on an extended trip to Princeton, bringing along a bottle of nitric acid given to him by Bathsheba with the aim of poisoning Spooner. Ross backed out of the plan and returned directly to his Linebrook home.

While Ross and Spooner were in Princeton, Bathsheba invited two runaway British soldiers—escaped prisoners of war Pvt. Williams Brooks and Sgt. James Buchanan—to stay at the Spooner home and discussed ideas for killing her husband with them. When Spooner returned, she recruited them to assist her. She also wrote to Ross to inform him of these developments, and he returned to Brookfield on February 28. When Spooner returned home from a local tavern the following evening, Brooks committed the murder and Buchanan and Ross helped hide the body in the Spooners' well. Bathsheba distributed paper money from her husband's lockbox and articles of his clothing to the three men, who then took one of the Spooner horses to Worcester, fourteen miles away.

Brooks and Buchanan spent the remainder of the night drinking, and the next morning Brooks showed off Spooner's silver shoe buckles engraved with his initials. Once the murder was discovered, the three men were arrested in Worcester within 24 hours. All swore that she was not "quick with child." When Bathsheba and her confessor, the Rev. Thaddeus Maccarty, protested the report, four of the examiners joined by another midwife and Spooner's brother-in-law, Dr. John Green, conducted a second examination and supported the claim of pregnancy. The court did not accept those findings and Bathsheba was hanged alongside Ross, Brooks and Buchanan on July 2 in Worcester's Washington Square before a crowd of 5,000 spectators.

Assessments Shortly after the executions, on July 5, Rev. Ebenezer Parkman, the minister of the nearby town of Westborough, delivered a sermon entitled The Adultress Shall Hunt for the Precious Life in which he said:

One historian says the judgment of the first panel that examined Spooner–"they refused to acknowledge what must have been obvious"–and blames "vindictiveness". Others question the motivation of the Massachusetts Executive Council. Some suggest Bathsheba was executed because the community opposed her father's Loyalist stance. Bathsheba Spooner's case was also featured in Season 11, Episode 10 of Deadly Women in 2017.