Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (32 page)

I
N THE EARLY DECADES OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, WHEN A WAVE OF REVIVALISM
swept the land, the teachings of William Miller—an upstate New York farmer and amateur biblical scholar who believed that the Second Coming of Christ could be determined with mathematical precision—gained thousands of adherents throughout the Northeast. Based on his interpretation of Scripture, Miller calculated that Christ would return on Wednesday, October 22, 1844. As the great day approached, as many as a hundred thousand Millerites (as they were then called) eagerly awaited the end of the world and the inauguration of the Millennial Kingdom. Many had sold their homes and quit their jobs in expectation of Christ’s return.

The failure of Jesus to appear at the predicted time—“the Great Disappointment,” as it quickly came to be known—did not, as might be supposed, spell the end of Miller’s sect. Miller himself conceded that he had been wrong to fix an exact time for the Second Coming but continued to insist that it would take place on some imminent, if indeterminate, date. The “Great Disappointment,” he told his followers, was a divine test of their faith, analogous to the experience of Abraham. His adherents remained devoted to his prophetic vision long after his death in 1849. They became known as the Second Adventists.

By the end of the Civil War, a small group of Second Adventists had set up a
church in Cataumet, Massachusetts, a picturesque little village at the extreme western end of the Cape Cod peninsula, on the shores of Buzzards Bay. Among its members was a man named Charles Freeman, a local farmer who lived in the neighboring town of Pocasset with his wife, Harriet, and two young daughters—six-year-old Bessie Mildred and four-year-old Edith, her father’s favorite.

A man of “upright life and conduct” (as the newspapers would later report), Freeman was much admired—even revered—by his fellow believers for the fervency of his convictions. He had frequently spoken of the need to prove his faith through sacrifice, and declared that “he had given his whole family to God.” None of his associates doubted his sincerity—though they could hardly have guessed at the dreadful fixation that was growing stronger in him by the day.

Charles Freeman murder pamphlet

(
Courtesy of New York State Historical Association Library, Cooperstown.
)

D
URING THE LATTER
half of April 1879, Freeman became obsessed by the notion that God required an ultimate test of his faith. He was perfectly willing to offer himself in sacrifice. After two weeks of prayer, however, he decided that God was demanding something even more extreme: the life of one of his children.

He shared this revelation
with his wife, who did all she could to dissuade him—but to no avail. On the evening of April 30, 1879,
after attending a gathering at the home of a fellow Adventist, Freeman returned to his own “large and comfortable” cottage, where he tucked his daughters into the bed they shared and kissed them good night. “They never seemed so dear to me as then,” he would later testify. He then retired to his own bed and quickly fell asleep.

Charles Freeman prays at the bedside of his doomed daughter, Edith.

At about half past two in the morning, he awoke with a start, shook his wife’s arm, and told her that the time had come. “The Lord has appeared to me,” he said. “I know who the victim must be—my pet, my idol, my baby Edith.”

Weeping, her teeth chattering in horror, Harriet made one final plea. Her husband, however, would not be deterred. “The Lord has said it is necessary,” he declared.

In the end, it was she who relented. “If it is the Lord’s will, I am ready for it,” she said at last. Her words seemed to lift a terrible burden from his heart.

Singing praises to the Lord, he rose from bed, rapidly dressed, then repaired to the shed, where he got a large sheath knife. With a buoyant heart, he returned to the house, lighted an oil lamp, and stepped inside his daughters’ bedroom. Bessie, the older child, awoke at his entrance. Freeman instructed her to go into the other room and get into bed with her mother.

He then placed the lamp on a chair, pulled down the bedclothes covering Edith, and lowered himself to his knees. Silently, he prayed that Edith not awake, and that God might stay his hand at the last moment, as Abraham’s had been stayed. Getting to his feet, he stood over the body of his four-year-old child and raised the knife high above his head.

At that instant, Edith opened her eyes and gazed up at her father. The look on her face did not stay Freeman’s hand. Nor did divine intervention. He drove the blade deep into her side.

“Oh, Papa,” she gasped. A moment later, she was dead.

Climbing into bed beside his child’s corpse, Freeman took her into his arms as though lulling her to sleep and remained there until daybreak. For the first two hours—as he would later state—he suffered “a good deal of agony of mind.” Eventually, however, a great feeling of peace, even exultation, came over him. “I never felt so happy in my life,” he said afterward. He had been tested and found worthy. He had done God’s will.

T
HE FOLLOWING DAY
, several dozen of Freeman’s neighbors were summoned to his home, where—according to his message—they would be vouchsafed a great revelation. In the end, about twenty-five people, nearly all of them Adventists, showed up at his home at the appointed time.

The group crowded into the parlor, where Freeman proceeded to deliver a rambling, hour-long harangue, interrupted by stretches of silence and bouts of weeping. He spoke of the imminent coming of Christ, as foretold in the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew, and of the overwhelming conviction that had taken possession of his soul during the preceding fortnight. Then—with his sobbing wife beside him—he led them into the adjoining bedroom, where a little form lay draped beneath a stained sheet. Reaching down, he drew back the covering and revealed to his neighbors the glorious sacrifice that he had made at God’s behest.

As his fellow church members looked on in confusion, Freeman assured them that they need have no concern for the child. In three days, Edith would rise again. Her resurrection would be a sign that the Son of Man had come.

Shaken by the sight of the butchered child—but inspired by the rapturous intensity of Freeman’s belief—the crowd soon dispersed to their homes and, without mentioning the awful scene they had just witnessed to anyone outside their little sect, returned to their daily affairs.

“It is almost impossible to conceive of an assembly of people in such a state of mind as to attempt to conceal such an atrocious deed,” the Boston Journal would later report, “but they told no one and went about their usual vocations.”

D
ESPITE THE SILENCE
of Freeman’s co-religionists, it didn’t take long for word of the atrocity to reach the ears of the constable. By the following day, Freeman and his wife were under arrest and lodged in the Barnstable jail.

The horrific nature of the deed—combined with the complicity of Freeman’s fellow Adventists, several of whom were highly vocal in their support of the filicide—set off a firestorm of outrage throughout New England. The pulpits rang with sermons on the dangers of religious fanaticism, a phenomenon seen as a growing social threat. The New England Adventist Association, put on the defensive, quickly distanced itself from any association with the Pocasset sect, denouncing Freeman’s act “as red-handed wickedness, diabolical bigotry, and inexcusable religious frenzy.” Throughout the Northeast, newspapers trumpeted “The Pocasset Horror” in lurid headlines, “The Fanatical Father!” “Freeman’s Ghastly Crime!” “Sheath-Knife into the Bosom of His Sleeping Child!” “Oh, Papa! Dying Words of the Martyred Girl!”

From his cell, Freeman calmly, even cheerfully, assured visitors that he would soon be vindicated. “I can’t conceive of such a thing as God failing to justify me,” he proclaimed. “His power is about to be revealed in an astonishing manner to the world, and all disbelievers will be humbled in the dust at His feet.” Edith, he insisted, would shortly be “restored to earth-life.”

Contrary to his expectations, however, his slaughtered child did not reawaken. Three days after her murder—on the morning of her promised resurrection—the dead girl disappeared forever into the sod of Pocasset cemetery. A plaque on her coffin read:
Little Edie—lived only 57 months. She shall surely rise again—John vi. 39.

O
NE DAY AFTER
the burial of their daughter, Freeman and his wife—displaying “not the slightest regret at the commission of their sacrificial act”—were brought before Justice Hopkins at Barnstable and charged with murder. They were then returned to their cells to await the action of the next grand jury, which, at its October session, indicted Freeman but set Harriet free.

At a special session of the Supreme Court in January 1880, after listening to the testimony of assorted alienists and other medical specialists, the justices ruled that Freeman was insane and incapable of standing trial. Freeman himself scoffed at the ruling, insisting that, far from being insane, he embodied “the spirit of Truth.”

“I represent Christ in all his parts, prophet, priest, and king,” he declared to reporters. “All good is represented in one person, and that person is me. I feel sure that my name will be honored above any other name except Jesus.”

Asked how he felt about the death of his daughter, he calmly replied, “I feel perfectly
justified. I feel that I have done my duty. I would not have her back.” He was promptly committed to the State Lunatic Asylum at Danvers “to remain until the further order of the court.”

A few years in the madhouse gave Freeman a new perspective on things. Interviewed by some of Boston’s leading alienists in the spring of 1883, he acknowledged that he had in fact been “an insane man” when he slew his daughter and now regretted it “as the most dreadful act that was ever perpetrated.” Having seemingly recovered from his violently delusional state, he was ordered to stand trial. The proceedings, held in Barnstable on Monday, December 3, 1883, lasted all of one day. After hearing from several expert witnesses—all of whom testified to the defendant’s derangement at the time of the murder—the jury took only ten minutes to find him not guilty by reason of insanity. He was sent back to the lunatic asylum, presumably for life. Four years later, however, by order of the governor, he was pronounced “cured of his delusion and harmless” and set free. Exactly what became of him is unknown, though rumors persisted that, like the countless others who heeded Horace Greeley’s call, “he went West to begin life anew.”