Imagine, if you will, the following scene: A somewhat frail, but a very attractive and oh, so, so very young girl is standing on the curb outside of Myron Newman’s Alta Cliff Cottage, located at the west end of Park Street in this village. It is July 1906. The girl is crying uncontrollably, quite near hysteria, the tears pouring across her face as though the heavens had opened, releasing a torrent of rain drops. Did she have a presentiment that this was to be her last day on this earth? What had transpired the night before when she had shared a bed with her lover for what would be the very last time? Had the lad refused to do the gentlemanly thing and marry her, as she so fervently wished? For was she not with his child, unwed and frightened and beginning to show signs of her pregnancy in an unforgiving society that marked the mores of that time?
We will never know the answers to those perplexing questions because no written record exists that could help us. We can only speculate. It would seem, however, that the girl’s elusive hope for marriage, which had flared briefly like a nova, was now dark.
Let’s quickly note that the original intent of this three-part article was a modest attempt to show what it was like in this community in 1906 through the eyes of two visitors on vacation. The residents worked diligently to recover from the disastrous fire that only a few years before had virtually leveled their town.
That episode must perforce, go to the back burner. It suddenly becomes more compelling to follow the tragic paths of Grace Brown and Chester Gillette, the two visitors, as they board the southbound train at the junction to travel to remote Big Moose Lake, forty-four miles away, by rail.
Briefly, then, it is known that upon arriving in Big Moose, the couple rented a boat described as a St. Lawrence skiff. This is a boat not unlike a guide boat. It is a bit heavier with a wider beam and more stable and, like the guide boat, is propelled by oars.
Big Moose was (and remains) a beautiful lake about a mile wide and four miles long. Cottagers along the lake remember seeing Chester and Grace in several different locations about the lake that fateful day. They were last seen entering Punkey Bay; no other boats were in the bay at that time, about six o’clock in the evening.
Exactly what happened in that bay will probably remain a mystery forever!
The facts that are known for certain are that Grace ended up at the bottom of the lake with a gash across her forehead (and, according to some reports, a loose tooth). Chester ran away into the woods without telling anyone what happened. The boat was found floating upside down with Grace’s black jacket on the keel. When all the evidence that was known then and is known now is taken into account, it is very difficult to believe that Chester was not somehow responsible for Grace’s death. This, according to Craig Brandon, who has meticulously researched this tragedy in his non-fiction book entitled “Murder in the Adirondacks.” Gillette certainly had a sufficient motive and had much to gain by Grace’s death. Brandon states: “Whether he verbally abused her to the point that she jumped out of the boat or actually struck her or just threw her out of the boat and let her drown makes little difference morally. He was responsible for the death, no matter how it occurred. But legally, the difference between letting her die and planning her death in detail was the difference between life in prison and the electric chair.”
During the last ninety-three years, dozens of people have tried to find once and for all how Grace died that day but so far the proof has eluded them. There is proof that Chester swam to shore and then walked six miles to the Eagle Bay community along the present-day Big Moose highway. He then went to the public dock there and boarded the steamboat “Uncas.” Chester was only on the steamboat a short time before getting off at the next stop, the Arrowhead Hotel at Inlet at the end of Fourth Lake.
At this point in the story, we can only ask ourselves, “If he was innocent, why didn’t he tell someone about the drowning?” Instead, he registered at the Arrowhead and used it as a vacation base. Twice he climbed Black Bear Mountain. Once he canoed to Seventh Lake and visited Cortland girlfriends he knew were in the area, and he dined at Seventh Lake House.
Meanwhile, when the rented boat didn’t return to the livery the next day, the steamboat “Zilpha” lit off its boilers and started a search of the lake. It circled the lake periodically blowing its whistle, a standard procedure to guide persons lost in the woods back to the lake.
When the overturned skiff was discovered in South Bay, the steamboat secured and began to search the water. “The thirteen-year-old purser of the tiny forty-foot steamer Roy Higby. Peering over the side, Higby spotted a white blob in the dark waters of the bay. Men in row boats grappled for the sunken form and hauled on board the steamer the body of the dead girl. It was Grace Brown.” The crew searched the rest of the day, but, of course, there was no sign of Chester, his suitcase, his tennis racket, or his umbrella. After receiving the coroner’s report about the bruises to Grace’s head and a tentative conclusion by the coroner of “foul play,” a land search was started to find Chester. It didn’t take long. Two days after the drowning, using good detective skills and by some luck breaks, when Chester stepped out of the dining room of the Arrowhead Hotel, Herkimer County undersheriff Austin B. Klock stepped up and arrested Chester Gillette, aka Carl Graham, for the murder of Grace Brown. (Sheriff Klock had accompanied district attorney George W. Ward from Herkimer. George Ward was a lawyer of considerable courtroom skill and a healthy political ambition, with his eye on the post of county judge. There was much to be gained from the publicity surrounding the prosecution of what he sensed could be a sensational murder case. He was to be 100 percent correct in that assumption. The trial was soon front-page news throughout the nation and the world.)
Chester spent the next four weeks in a Herkimer jail cell. Next came a three-week sensational trial.
“He struck her over the had with a tennis racket and tipped over the boat,” argued the prosecution.
“Saying she was going to end it all, she jumped into the lake,” contended the defense. “Gillette got scared and fled.”
“Guilty as charged,” said the jury.
The sentence: Chester was to be taken to Auburn prison and put to death by electrocution.
On March 30, 1909, the signal was given and the electrician at Auburn Prison closed the switch. Chester was jolted by 1,800 volts at seven amperes. After one minute, he was declared dead.
Postscript
1) Meyer Neuman (Alta Cliff owner), Clara Greenwood (waitress), and Dan McDonald (livery owner) all of this village, were called to Herkimer as witnesses in the sensational trial held there at the Herkimer County Courthouse.
2)Meyer Neuman later moved to New York City, engaged in the family owned jewelry business, and disappeared, apparently killed in a kidnapping after the family tried unsuccessfully to deliver the $10,000 ransom demanded.
3) George Ward won the county judge position. Later, he went into private practice and was a prestigious member of the Herkimer community.
The primary source for this article is “Adirondack Tragedy: the Gillette Case of 1906” by Jos. Brownell, Patricia A. Wawrzasezek, 1986, Heart of Lakes Publishing.