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Toyota, let's go places. - The chilled windy air of the Atlantic Ocean surrounded the ship past midnight on July 14th, 1896. Bells rung out across the deck every half hour with consistency. Two bells signaled that it was one hour past midnight, four bells that it was two. With every four bells, a change in the shift aboard the Herbert Fuller began.
Nine days into its voyage between Boston, Massachusetts and Rosario, Argentina, all was well aboard the ship, which carried 12 passengers and a boatload of lumber for trade. Just past four bells, however, a single shriek rang out through the back cabin where the officers of the ship resided, the afterhouse. Silent to all but its victims, yet impactful to many beyond those who died, an axe repeatedly fell.
With the exception of the wind, silence returned to the Herbert Fuller. Lester Hawthorne Monks, a young man on leave from Harvard University, hesitated in his cabin, unsure of the source of the scream. When he finally left his room, he found the bodies of Charles Nash, the captain of the ship, his wife Laura, and the second mate of the ship, August Blomberg.
The next week on the Herbert Fuller was tense, full of suspicion. As the remaining crew returned to the closest port in Halifax, Nova Scotia, little was solved. Accusations flew, but many questions were difficult to answer. Who murdered Charles, Laura, and August? And why? I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is the historic case of the murders aboard the Herbert Fuller on Dark Down East.
The year 1896 in the United States was a time of immense change. The Industrial Revolution had begun two decades earlier and was having a tremendous impact on life in America. The United States was finding its place in the world, and trade was especially important since the country was not self-sufficient.
While technology had begun to take over in many ways, ships remained the primary means of transportation for cargo that needed to be sent across the ocean. For those who owned and captained ships, the sea represented a tremendous opportunity. It came with adventure, a reliable job, and the potential to make a fortune.
This was also true for the sailors aboard the ship until the middle of the 19th century. By 1896, the opportunities associated with sailing and trade had begun to dwindle.
While owners could still be successful, crew members on trading ships began to develop a poor public reputation, they were not paid well, and it offered little opportunity for promotion. Life on ships could be dangerous, and sailors would sign up for long voyages for low wages, often leaving their friends and family behind for extended periods of time.
As a result, many sailors in the United States were originally from other countries, seeking a better life on the ocean.
In the case of the Herbert Fuller, the ship was just six years old, having been built in Maine in 1890. In "Murder Aboard," C. Michael Hyam describes the Herbert Fuller as "an attractive sight and a graceful vessel." It was a large boat that could be operated by eight, but for this voyage held 12 people alongside its cargo of white pine boards.
When the Herbert Fuller set sail on July 5th, 1896, its 12 passengers represented a wide variety of individuals. In the forward house, there were men from France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden.
There was Charlie Brown, which was actually a pseudonym. His real name was Justice Leopold Westerberg. He was from Sweden. There was Jonathan Spencer from the British West Indies, and he was the ship's steward, his primary job consisting of cooking and cleaning as service staff. The afterhouse was on the stern of the ship and served as housing for the mates, the leaders of the Herbert Fuller.
August Blomberg, the second mate, was from Finland. He had come to the United States and had been a sailor for just two years, but was a hard worker and had quickly risen up the ranks from sailor to second mate.
But a man named Lester Monks was aboard the Herbert Fuller for reasons that were quite different from most. Monks was from a fairly well-off family in Brookline, Massachusetts, part of the Boston metropolitan area. He had attended Harvard University, but had fallen ill before completing his degree. Due to his declining health, his family had recommended that he take some time off from school.
Based on familial connections, it was arranged for Monks to sail to Argentina as a guest on the Herbert Fuller. The rooms on the ship were all previously assigned, and rather than ask Monks to sleep with the crew or find a bed elsewhere, the captain of the ship allowed Monks to sleep in the captain's room. As for Captain Nash, he slept on a bunk in the chart room for the duration of the voyage. Thomas Bram, the first mate, was from St. Kitts.
He had left home at a young age to pursue the sea and had led a life of adventure ever since. When Bram was not sailing as mate or captain, he was actually working in or managing restaurants. At one point, he pursued opening his own restaurant, but the venture did not last. Bram was a deeply religious man whose faith was important to him. He was married and had two children, but when he returned to life on the sea, his contact with his family became much less frequent.
until his wife hardly heard from him at all. At the helm of the Herbert Fuller during the summer of 1896 was Charles I. Nash, accompanied by his wife, Laura Rae Nash. Charles and Laura had grown up together in Harrington, Maine, and had been married since 1880.
Harrington, which is also where the Herbert Fuller itself had been built, is a small town on the northeast coast of Maine within the Downeast region. Today, the population of Harrington is under 1,000 people, which has not changed much since the late 19th century. Since its founding in the late 18th century, the families residing in Harrington have largely been deeply connected to the ocean. The town is known for shipbuilding, along with some agriculture and trade.
In the 1890s, the Nash and Ray families led lives on the sea, with many of their children following in those footsteps.
In their 16 years of marriage, Charles and Laura did not have children. It was because of this that Laura often accompanied her husband as he fulfilled his duties as a ship captain, the two traveling the world together from Maine to Europe to South America. On the Herbert Fuller, they could often be seen walking the deck together in the evening as the sun was going down over the horizon. According to the Boston Globe,
Both Charles Nash and his wife were deeply respected in their hometown. Charles was known to be very committed to his work and to take great pride in building and captaining his ships. His wife was described in the paper as quiet and pleasing, with absolutely correct habits and the highest character. She was also known to be kind to the sailors on the ships that her husband captained. It seemed that no negative words could be spoken about either of them.
These positive descriptions of Charles Nash, Laura Rae Nash, and August Blomberg only make their deaths more confusing. Aboard a ship afloat in the middle of a voyage in the Atlantic Ocean, filled with individuals, many of whom knew each other well, why would someone commit such an atrocity? The Herbert Fuller set sail for Argentina with 12 individuals on board on July 5th, 1896.
Nine days later, in the early morning hours of July 14th, only nine of its passengers were still alive. All that is known about the events that took place on board comes from the often conflicting accounts of the survivors who were aboard the ship that night.
Many sources lean on the story of Lester Hawthorne Monks, the young college student who was a guest on the ship during that voyage. Interestingly, a great deal of Lester's narrative matches the book that he was reading at the time, A Voyage to the Cape by William Clark Russell, who wrote thrilling stories of dangerous events on the sea.
That night, after falling asleep reading, Lester Monks was awoken by the scream of Laura Nash, who was sleeping just two rooms over in the afterhouse. Though Monks often paraded himself as a hero later, in that moment, he acted from fear. He stayed quiet in his room, not knowing the best course of action.
Finally, after several minutes, Monks decided that he should check in with the captain, who was sleeping in the chart room just outside of Monks' quarters. When Monks found the captain, it was already too late. Some members of the crew later described the state of Charles Nash as "on the brink of death," using the term "death rattle." Nash had been brutally assaulted and had wounds all over his body, though Monks did not yet know the cause.
Seeing this, Lester Monks returned to his room, grabbed his revolver, and left the afterhouse in search of assistance. The first person he met was Thomas Bram, the first mate. Bram was on duty on deck during that time of night, keeping lookout over the ship while Charlie Brown was at the wheel. Monks quietly shouted the mate's name, keeping his revolver pointed ahead of him.
When Bram noticed Monks and his revolver, Bram held up a wooden board and pointed it at Monks, throwing it in his direction. Surprised, Monks lowered his weapon and let Bram know that the captain was dead. The two men went into the afterhouse, finding the body of the captain and of his wife. Both Charles and Laura Nash had been severely injured, wounds covering a majority of their bodies. By this time, both were near death if they hadn't already succumbed to their injuries.
Though the murder weapon had not yet been found, the gashes on their bodies and the amount of blood clearly indicated that an axe was used. According to Monks, he suggested to Bram that they find the second mate. He would have been next in rank after Bram on the Herbert Fuller, but Bram said that he'd already seen the second mate walking towards the quarters at the bow of the ship. There was no need to check in on him, Bram implied.
Before speaking to any other members of the crew, Monks and Bram feared that there may be a mutiny in progress that had resulted in the murder of the captain and his wife. If this were the case, Bram told Monks, he was afraid that he would be the next subject since he was the first mate. And he confessed that he had not always been kind to the members of the crew.
The following hours were tense. The two kept out of sight, but in their waiting for sunrise, Bram actually located the axe believed to be the murder weapon. He later claimed that he threw it overboard for fear that the crew would use it against him. The two men sat together through the night until the sun came up, when they decided to speak to Spencer, the steward.
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Spencer joined Monks and Bram, and the trio investigated the room of August Blomberg, where they found the second mate also dead. The area above his door damaged with the blade of an axe and his body in the same state as the captain and his wife.
The three finally went to the remainder of the crew to deliver the horrible news about what they'd found. After some debate, the crew decided that in light of the circumstances, they would forgo their voyage to Argentina and return to the nearest port. Considering the waves and the wind, they chose to sail to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Concerned with keeping all three bodies on board, the men decided against a burial at sea,
and instead chose to use one of the small boats on the Herbert Fuller to keep the deceased with them. They laid the three in the boat, covering it with a tarp and lowering it to tag along behind the ship on the remainder of their voyage.
Once they had laid their plans, the crew contemplated a theory regarding what may have occurred that night. Though suspicions were high, either from fear or an unwillingness to believe that a murderer could still be aboard with them, the group chose to pursue a theory where no living people were implicated.
The nine men wrote their theory as an entry in the ship's logbook, which is kept on trading vessels to maintain record of the ship's passage and occurrences aboard. Lester Monks wrote it out, ostensibly because he had the best handwriting, though several spelling and grammatical errors occurred in the entry. All nine men signed the paper. According to this entry, the remaining crew and Monks theorized that the second mate, August Blomberg, had been
had gone to the room of Laura Nash that night to assault her. When her body was found, her dress had been pushed up to her knees, which fueled this theory of assault, though no other evidence indicated that was the case, and the position of her dress may have been a result of her fighting back when she was murdered. Regardless, the entry states that when Laura awoke, she screamed, and her husband came to her defense, attacking Blumberg with an axe.
They wrote that Blomberg and Nash had fought and injured one another, as well as Laura, so extensively that all three had died.
Though all nine men signed, several later stated that they were not fully on board with this theory. After all, this would hardly make sense and would not explain how Blomberg had made it back to his room without leaving a trail of blood, or why the cot in the chart room where Captain Nash had been sleeping had been tipped over, or how all three had perished. These remaining suspicions would show up in the following days.
Before long, and despite the official theory entered into the logbook, suspicion began to fall on Charlie Brown, or August Leopold Westerberg. Brown had been at the wheel that night, meaning that he had been alone and therefore could not provide an alibi. Members of the crew also remarked that Brown was "odd." He often spoke or sang to himself, and told the other men on board that he had once been "institutionalized" for shooting a man.
The crew took action and captured Brown, chaining him to a mast for several days until Brown had a new story to share.
He told the crew that, while he was at the wheel of the ship on the night of the murders, he watched as Thomas Bram raised an axe above his head in the chart room. That accusation alone was apparently enough for the surviving crew of the Herbert Fuller. Shortly thereafter, Bram was also tied up to a mast. One week after Lester Monks had woken to the sound of a scream and discovered the bodies of most of the residents of the afterhouse dead on board,
the Herbert Fuller arrived to port in Nova Scotia. The ship and its passengers were immediately taken into custody as law enforcement decided how to move forward. The police in Halifax kept everyone from the Herbert Fuller under lock and key as the investigation began.
Without the murder weapon, and with little evidence beyond the stories of the crew and of Lester Monks, it was difficult to know anything for certain. Interviews began, but from the beginning, not everyone was treated equally.
Nicholas Power was the police officer in Halifax at the time. Power was well-known and highly celebrated during this time period. According to a book called The Bad Detective, recently published by author Bob Gordon, Power was the longest-serving member of the Halifax Police Department, with 43 years serving his community, but few records to show for it. Most of Power's reputation was based on stories and myths.
which both cemented Power as an important historical figure, but also a controversial one. Gordon gives the example of Peter Wheeler, a black man in Nova Scotia who was accused of the murder of a white child in 1896 based on no evidence. He was persecuted by Power, Gordon argues, based primarily on the racist views of the time. Thomas Bram, who Nicholas Power immediately became suspicious of, was also a man of color.
While he was described by contemporaries as anything from Italian to Portuguese, Bram's dark features and dark skin likely played a key role in implicating him in the eyes of power and of the public.
While Nicholas Power kept all members of the Herbert Fuller crew in prison, this did not look the same for everyone. Most were in the jail as Power took testimonies, immediately believing the witness accounts of Lester Monks and Charlie Brown. But for his part, Lester Monks did not stay in the jail. Instead, he was housed in the courthouse and was allowed to call his father. Meanwhile, Power interrogated Bram, using the testimony of Brown against him.
Power said that Charlie Brown had seen Bram murder Charles Nash in the chart room from his post at the wheel of the ship. When Bram replied, he could not have seen me from there, which could be interpreted in many ways, Power took this as an implicit confession.
Thomas Bram would be charged with murder. The Herbert Fuller itself was searched, and evidence and photographs still remain of the state of the afterhouse. The belongings of members of the crew were kept under lock and key, while Monks' items were returned to him almost immediately.
Soon, the whole crew was extradited to Boston, where the trial would be held. All except Lester Monks and Spencer, whose bail was paid by a local politician, remained in jail as they awaited their day in court.
The trial of Thomas Bram began in Boston on December 14, 1896, five months to the day after the deaths of Charles Nash, Laura Nash, and August Blomberg. James Cotter, who was a well-known attorney, worked in defense of Thomas Bram with Asa French, his junior counsel. Sherman Hoare represented the state side in prosecution with the assistance of John Casey and Frederick Cabot. Two judges, Colton Webb, presided.
While much evidence was presented against Thomas Bram during the two weeks of the trial, most arguments centered on his character and on inconsistencies in his story and behavior. Prosecutors pointed to the fact that Bram had thrown the axe overboard, that he had told monks that the second mate was at the front of the boat when he was dead in his room, and that he had suggested burying all three of the deceased at sea.
Some witnesses from his past came forward at trial to testify that Bram wanted badly to be a ship captain and had previously spoken to other sailors about staging a mutiny against the captains of ships he had previously worked on. They argued that his plan had finally come to fruition and that he had murdered the other officers in order to gain control of the boat and had ensured that there was no evidence.
The fact that Bram had not seen his wife and children in some time contributed, for the prosecution, to the attack on the character of Thomas Bram. The defense drew a strong case for reasonable doubt, however. They hammered home the idea that others on board were more likely suspects, namely Charlie Brown.
The defense drew attention to the fact that Brown had previously been institutionalized and often spoke to himself and had moved his mattress to sleep on the deck just days before the murder so that no one in the forward house would have noticed if he were gone. The defense further argued that he may have been taken by a quote-unquote homicidal mania and attacked the officers of the ship, perhaps without motive.
Throughout the trial, coverage in the media, especially the newspapers in Boston, was extensive. The public looked on as justice was decided before their eyes, and public perception was swayed depending on the characterization of each individual in the paper. Arguments closed on January 1, 1887, and both prosecution and defense waited with bated breath for the verdict and the fate of Thomas Bram.
Any doubt that the defense may have introduced was apparently not enough for the jury. After much deliberation, the jury returned with their verdict, finding Thomas Bram guilty of the murders of Charles Nash, Laura Rae Nash, and August Blomberg. He was sentenced to death. Throughout the trial, Bram's lawyers had taken a significant number of exceptions or objections, many of which were based on the admissibility of evidence.
His lawyers took these objections to the Supreme Court, where Bram was actually awarded a second trial. The second trial resulted in much of the same evidence being rehashed, and the jury found the same verdict, with one difference. In the time between the first and second trial, new laws had been introduced in Massachusetts.
A return of guilt on murder charges no longer necessitated the death penalty. Instead, at the end of his second trial in 1898, Thomas Bram was sentenced to life in prison. Thomas Bram was incarcerated in Charlestown at the Massachusetts State Prison for almost 10 years. In 1906, due to overcrowding in the prison, he was one of a few prisoners transferred to a federal prison in Atlanta.
Bram remained in Atlanta until 1913. That year, after 16 years incarcerated, a few factors came together that resulted in Thomas Bram's release.
In 1911, Bram had formally petitioned President Taft for a pardon. According to Hayim in his book Murder Aboard, these pardons are routinely sent to the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., which asks for feedback from the office of the district attorney where the crime was prosecuted. That year, Asa French, who had assisted with Bram's defense years before, was the district attorney in Massachusetts.
French responded in favor of the pardon, given he had defended this client years earlier. But movement was slow due to the complexity of Bram's case. Though he was not yet pardoned, in August of 1913, Bram was released from prison on good behavior.
Based on the restrictions in his parole, he remained in Atlanta and pursued several occupations there, though he was landlocked and unhappy. In 1915, Thomas Bram wrote to President Woodrow Wilson for a pardon yet again. This time, Bram had an interesting figure on his side.
Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt had been convinced of Bram's innocence when he had read The After House by Mary Roberts Reinhart. Reinhart was a mystery writer from Pennsylvania, and she had taken an interest in the case and did not believe that Bram had committed the murders.
She shared in an editorial with the Boston Daily Globe on March 22, 1914, that she did not see a motive for Bram to have committed the murders, and that she was interested in the inconsistencies in Charlie Brown's story. In The After House, narrated by a character inspired by Lester Hawthorne Monks, Reinhardt glamorized the story of the Herbert Fuller. In her version, the vessel was not carrying lumber, but was a yacht for the wealthy.
Reinhardt added romance for the character of monks and wrote in additional deaths and intrigue, yet the primary storyline remained the same.
In Reinhardt's version, the first mate did not commit these murders. Justice Leopold Westerberg, better known as Charlie Brown in real life, and in the afterhouse, the character named Charlie Jones, was the murderer. It was said that Roosevelt was a fan of Reinhardt's work and lobbied President Woodrow Wilson to pardon Thomas Bram. By 1919, Thomas Bram's pardon was granted.
He returned to the courthouse in Massachusetts, where his fate had nearly been decided for good, and finally picked up the belongings that he had left on the Herbert Fuller so many years before. He went on to live a long and storied life, leading several ships across the sea, and lived until his 90s.
Lester Monks remained fairly private for the remainder of his life. He never graduated from Harvard University, but is often referred to as an alumnus of the school nevertheless. Monks worked in the shipping business for the remainder of his life, passing away at the age of 51. Charlie Brown himself, the man many suspect of being the true murderer, seemingly disappeared into the mist.
If he was the one who committed these atrocities on the Herbert Fuller, then he did get away with murder. August Blomberg had come to the United States from Europe to pursue a better life for his family. He was murdered before he could send for his parents and his girlfriend, and his family found out about the end of his life through the newspaper. Nevertheless, his parents and sweetheart would forever remember him fondly.
In Harrington, Maine, flowers remain on the graves of Charles Nash and Laura Rae Nash in Forest Hill Cemetery. Though they did not have children of their own, they are still remembered by descendants of their family. Those who tell stories of Charles and Laura emphasize their love story, beginning in childhood and persisting until death. They tell of their nightly walks along the deck, watching the sun set over the ocean.
As for the Herbert Fuller itself, it changed hands and continued to sail for another 20 years. In 1916, the vessel caught fire and was sold to the highest bidder. It was renamed the Margaret B. Roos, and less than a year after the sail, the ship sank to the bottom of the ocean, its stories drowning in the waves.
The story of the murders that took place on the Herbert Fuller in July of 1896 is one of imperfect characters, elitism, and racism among other societal and social issues. And it's a story often forgotten. Whatever truly happened that night on the ship may forever be lost to the Atlantic Ocean.
Thank you for listening to Dark Down East. This episode was researched and written by Natalie Jones, with additional research, writing, and editing by me, Kylie Lowe. Sources cited and referenced for this episode are listed at darkdowneast.com. Please follow Dark Down East on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening right now. And the best way to support this show and the stories I cover is to leave a review on Apple Podcasts, and then to share the episode, this episode or any episode, with your friends.
If you have a personal connection to a case I should cover, please contact me at hello at darkdowneast.com.
Thank you for supporting this show and allowing me to do what I do. I'm honored to use this platform for the families and friends who have lost their loved ones, and for those who are still searching for answers in cold missing persons and homicide cases. I'm not about to let those names or their stories get lost with time. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is Dark Down East.