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I'm Kate Winkler-Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the last 25 years writing about true crime. And I'm Paul Holes, a retired cold case investigator who's worked some of America's most complicated cases and solved them. Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most compelling true crimes. And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring new insights to old mysteries.

Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime cases through a 21st century lens. Some are solved and some are cold, very cold. This is Buried Bones. ♪♪

Hey, Paul. Hey, Kate. How's it going? It's going well. How's your week been? Been okay? It's been good. This year has been such a whirlwind, I think, for both of us. I've, of course, have been bouncing all over the country, traveling, you know, filming for TV, had the book tour. You've also had the book tour, right? I have. Yeah. You and I have met in London and in Colorado. And then I just asked our producer to flag me anytime you come to Texas. Yeah.

Because I never go to Colorado. So when you come to Texas, I'm going to drive wherever you are and you and I could sit down and have some sparkling water or something. Well, and don't forget Vegas. We briefly bumped into each other in Vegas. Oh, yeah. Vegas. Yeah. I don't know about you. I am not a huge fan of traveling. It's just I don't like to be away from my family. I like to be at home. What about you? For me, when I travel, the fun part is seeing different parts of the country.

And then if I'm doing something for a case, of course, that's what I like to, I need to get out and see. So I look forward to going out and seeing these things. But the amount of traveling, something I didn't realize until I got into this, it is a surprisingly lonely existence. You're by yourself on an airplane. You're by yourself at an airport. You're by yourself at a hotel. It really is something that can wear on you and then just a constant living out of a suitcase.

It's something that I enjoy for a period of time, but then I want to be home. I want to be in my Jeep. I want to be on the mountain. I definitely need to have that break. Yeah, I feel like that too. I have tried to structure all of my tenfold seasons around places where my family's willing to go. So we have two seasons in Virginia and I taped both of them while we were on a vacation a couple of summers ago. I really just try to incorporate them as much as I can. But the traveling that I enjoy the most is

is through New England. Have you been to New England before? No, in fact, that's the one part of the country I really have never been. I think the furthest north on the East Coast I've been was up to Stanford, Connecticut. Of course, I've seen the online photos and it just looks gorgeous and all the history. I've just never had a reason to be up there. Well,

One of the things I've mentioned to you is my love of history and particularly of the time period in the 1700s around the American Revolutionary War. And I went to school at Boston University. And I specifically went there not because it's a great school. It is a wonderful school. But because I loved Boston, I was enamored as a teenager with Boston and all of the history there because of that time period.

So I am super excited about this story that we're going to talk about because it's set in New England during the Revolutionary War time period and involves some politics. And the thing that I keep hammering home to you that I know you know now, which is number one, you'll get to know these people from a couple of hundred years ago. And actually, you'll care about what the outcome is because we'll understand their personalities a little bit.

And really, it's because all of these themes in crime just keep coming up over and over again. And you will recognize this theme, I'm sure, very quickly when we talk about this story. So I think by the end of this, you're going to say, I'm ready to take that trip. You've got to go to New England. It's just such a one. It's an electric place for me.

Well, you know, over the summer, I was out in Washington, D.C., taking my younger set of kids to some of the historic sites, including the American History Museum and then down to Mount Vernon. And so, you know, it's been a long time since I've studied the American Revolution in school. And so it was a good refresher.

to actually go through the museum and go, oh yeah, I remember this, or find out George Washington's role. So I'm very interested to hearing this case and the history behind it. Well, and I will tell you, this is from 1778, and it is not going to be the oldest case we do. It's going to...

We're going to go pretty far back. And I love these characters because they're put into situations that I just could never imagine being put into. And I'll flag those as we get closer. I'm going to keep this a little bit of a mystery. I don't think that the killers are going to be a mystery, but really the way that this story unfolds is...

so interesting to me and the way that they handled politics in the 1700s. So let's just jump into it. Let's set the scene. And then I will ask you again at the end, does this convince you, Paul Holes, to go visit New England? ♪

So I said before, 1778 Massachusetts, but this starts actually a few years before that. And this is a woman with a very interesting name, Bathsheba. It is a very old name, and I had never heard of it. Even with all the research I've done, I've never heard of anybody named Bathsheba. So this is about a woman named Bathsheba Ruggles Spooner, and she was born in 1746 in Sandwich, Massachusetts.

And the reason that I think probably the name is significant and the reason why this story in some ways is significant is what researchers found later on about this story, which was that the significance of the politics was very, very important in this time period. So Revolutionary War, we have the Patriots versus the Loyalists.

So let's just talk about Bathsheba and her upbringing. She was born to a man named Timothy Ruggles, who was a really well-known figure in New England leading up to the American Revolutionary War. And I had read about Timothy Ruggles. So I remember reading about him in high school when I was studying American history. He was a brigadier general, a judge, speaker of the House, a

really, really powerful man. So Bathsheba grew up kind of with a luxurious upbringing. She was very well-educated. Of course, the way that she's described is as beautiful. We don't have photographs, paintings, and sketches, but just someone who seemed to have certainly a certain amount of entitlement and wealth because of her father. And the politics behind this is really important. Ruggles was a loyalist person.

which meant he supported the crown. He wasn't a patriot, and he was very outspoken. And obviously, you know, before the war, he was really a part of the government in New England. And these are the people, just as a reminder, who wanted the English to stay in power. They didn't want to be independent. And, you know, as the war is really gearing up,

People are being very vocal, and Timothy Ruggles was one of those vocal people. Would Timothy have been born over in England or born here in North America? He was actually born in Massachusetts. Oh? Yeah, Timothy Ruggles was born in Massachusetts, and Timothy Ruggles was someone who really was proud of his heritage, proud to represent the crown, and very outspoken. I don't think Bathsheba, his daughter, was particularly political about

But she was ready to get out of the house, and she married a man named Joshua Spooner. This is going to seem very familiar. Spooner came from a very good family. He owned a decent amount of land. So this was something that would have been common. It's suspected that this was an arranged marriage.

which, you know, in the 18th century and also in the 19th century, arranged marriages were not between a couple. It was between two families who were making an agreement to kind of consolidate their land and consolidate their wealth with this young couple. So Bathsheba married Joshua Spooner. And I will say...

This is often a recipe for disaster, particularly in the 1700s where women had very little rights and they were essentially, you know, given over to a young man who had a family with a high reputation. This did not please a lot of the women. And so you could see already that

where this is heading, that this is going to be problematic, this marriage. And I think from my perspective, you think about a relationship that forms between two people and there's an emotional attachment prior to the commitment to marriage.

Here, there is no emotional attachment. It is literally, this is what's going to happen because of the property and the financial benefits to both families. So that plays a part when I start assessing, you know, motive moving forward, how these people were forced together to,

could provide insight in terms of what ultimately happens. And I think that there are historians that theorize that Timothy Ruggles did this also as a political move, not just monetary, because of the approaching war, not knowing how this was going to turn out. The safety of being a part of another family as affluent as the Spooners would have been good for him. There's also the very slight possibility that Bathsheba and Joshua Spooner were actually in love

I'm going to say that's doubtful as we move forward, but you never know. She was 20, so she's awfully young. 20, though, in the 1700s was about the right marrying age and maybe actually a little older than some other women would have been married. How old would Joshua have been at the time? 37. So she was 20 when they married and he was 37 when they married. Big

Age difference, I think, 20 to 37, this would not have been unusual in the 1700s. And actually, he being twice the age would not have been particularly unusual either. No, but, you know, I think there's still that difference in terms of life experience at that point, and particularly in the 1700s, you know, where life expectancy for, you know, the men was much shorter than what it is today. For me, that is a startling age difference in terms of assessing their relationships.

And I think as we move forward, we'll see the cracking of their relationship a little bit. And again, I'm still trying to preserve the mystery about who the victim is and who the killer is. So Bathsheba and Joshua actually live in a comfortable life. They come, both of them, from affluent families. And Joshua's family was farmers. They had a lot of agriculture. And in the 1700s, farm

and agriculture were very, very profitable, particularly in the South where I've done some work in Virginia. There were tobacco fields everywhere. And, you know, in the North, they had not quite built the factories and the mills. So agriculture really was where the money was, owning the land.

It did make you cash poor. You didn't have a lot of cash on hand, which got a lot of people in trouble in the aristocracy. They couldn't pay debts because everything was tied up in their land. But regardless, the Sheba and Joshua lived a comfortable life. They were in Brookfield, Massachusetts. They had four children living in a nice two-story house.

Everything seems to be going well. The father, Timothy Ruggles, is happy. As we're approaching the war, this is 1766 when they're married and they have these children. It seems like they were unhappy behind closed doors relatively soon after their marriage, which is why I doubt the whole they were actually in love theory. I think this does sound like an arranged marriage. And it seems very acrimonious from the start, right?

Some allegations of abuse, Joshua to Bathsheba, lots of yelling, lots of disagreements. She sounds very spirited, meaning she wasn't putting up with this. She was not going to be a complacent wife, probably partially because of how she was raised with a lot of affluence and maybe some entitlement. She really stood up for herself. Joshua seemed like a cad, I guess would be the old term for it.

Well, and you throw four kids into this mix. Children definitely add a level of stress into any relationship. I imagine these kids were probably very close in age. Yeah, I think it was one after the other. And they were married in 66.

And all of this really starts to happen in 77. Can you imagine having four children? I mean, let's assume they immediately started having kids. Four children in an 11-year span. I'm sure it was very overwhelming, but they probably also had domestic servants. Oh, sure. Yeah, that makes sense. But still, screaming kids, you know, and all of that doesn't help. Sounds like he was a big drinker. Mm-hmm.

Alcohol in the mix is not going to be helpful, of course. But it's interesting to think that these people with all of the money and all of the opportunity that they have are still struggling to have a relationship that's going to work when on paper, they probably should have a good marriage. You know, everything lines up. They're from the same socioeconomic background, same politics. So it seems like a personality difference and abuse on top of that at the same time.

And you also have two people who were potentially just forced together. Yeah, yeah. And so now they're trying to live a life that neither one of them wants. And now we're going to introduce a third person into this relationship. And this does not go very well. This is where things get spicy. This is where things get spicy in a way that let's just,

remember the time period. We have a 16-year-old young man who is a soldier who comes through in 1777, and he is coming from a hospital camp in New York.

to his home in Ipswich, Massachusetts. So listen to this. This young man, Ezra Ross, was on a 240-mile journey by foot during the war. Could you pull that off? 240 miles by foot. Wow.

I couldn't pull it off. And imagine what he must be carrying on his back. Yep. Yeah, I'm sure you're right. I'm sure tons of provisions and weapons and everything else you could think of. 16 years old, and he was pulled into the war. So we have the war breaking out. This young man is kind of broken down himself. He's incredibly weak, which I think is an understatement, in poor health.

He had just finished a campaign in the Continental Army, which would be the patriots, so the people who are vying for independence. And he is walking by the Spooner house on this long journey, and Bathsheba spots him, and she beckons him in and nurses him back to health.

So this is some sort of omen or something. It's 16-year-old young man who has just come out of a hellish war battle, and he enters the home of a woman who is 31 years old. Bathsheba's 31, he's 16. And I would say what's interesting about this dynamic here is

Joshua knew him. Joshua Spooner, the husband, knew him just from being around because he lived in Massachusetts. And I guess they had seen each other as a family friend and invited him in the house and said to Bathsheba, go ahead and nurse him back to health. Okay. So...

This was so common, inviting perfect strangers into your home, giving them all the food that you had. It was just part of being part of a community, particularly during a war. It was surprising to me.

But this is what happened all the time, particularly in the 1700s and the 1800s. So Bathsheba is nursing the 16-year-old man back to health. She has her four kids. Her oldest kid is, is he, do we know, like 10, 11 years old? Yeah, no older than 10, for sure. Okay. Yeah, because I was just thinking she, as a mom, has a child that's probably not much younger than Ezra. Yeah.

Correct. Okay. The oldest that their child could be could be, you know, 11 years old because, again, things start to happen here in a year or two. So I think, though, that being in the Army and being in battle most likely has weathered him. Certainly it has matured him. And I don't know how she views him at this point, but Ezra sounds just grateful to have someone taking care of him. She nurses him back to health.

and he goes back home. He is then told he needs to go back to the front lines. Poor guy. He goes back and every time he keeps going back and forth between New York, where he's supposed to report to, and Massachusetts, he stops at the Spooner home and he creates a friendship with Joshua Spooner and with Bathsheba. And...

he grows closer and closer. And then he makes visits when he's not in battle, when he's sort of off duty. So he's creating this, you know, relationship with this couple that seems very supportive at the start.

But I would guess this is, I don't know why Joshua thinks this is a good idea or not. Maybe he doesn't suspect that Bathsheba would fancy a 16-year-old man. Maybe he just had a certain feeling about the character of Ezra, but he does not oppose Ezra spending the night at the house. Doesn't this seem like a mistake? Yeah.

So obviously, you know, things start to happen between Ezra and Bathsheba, right? Right. And Joshua, this does not help his relationship with his wife. Joshua and Bathsheba continue to have a bad relationship. He still drinks a lot. And Ezra and Bathsheba, actually, they begin to have a physical relationship.

And unsurprisingly, Bathsheba gets pregnant, she says. She says she's pregnant. And I'm going to put a little question mark on that because this plays into the story later on. In January of 1778, she is pregnant and...

And she realizes this, I'm assuming, when she misses her menstrual cycle. I can't imagine there's really any other way that she would know in that time period. So she realizes that she's pregnant, and she is not acknowledging really who the father is, but we're going to assume that her claim is that it was her husband's, but it doesn't sound like they were sleeping together at the time. So we're also assuming it was really Ezra's baby.

Okay, because she's at this point, this relationship between her and Joshua, it's on the outs. They're not having a sexual relationship. Right. You've got Ezra coming over by his own admission. Him and Bathsheba are having a sexual relationship. So it's entirely possible Ezra is the father of this child. Yeah, and there had been rumors that Bathsheba was having affairs with other people. Nothing substantiated, but one of the friends of Bathsheba had quoted Ezra

her as saying she had an utter aversion to her husband, which is a very polite way of saying, yeah, we have no physical relationship at all. So she realized that she's pregnant in January of 1778.

And I can't imagine doesn't cause panic with Bathsheba because of the society they were in. To get a divorce in the 1700s, women almost never initiated them. It was literally an act of the legislature to be able to achieve a divorce. So what frequently happened was if the two people agreed that they didn't want to be married anymore, they just lived separate lives. And that was not what was going to happen in this case. So she's pregnant.

she's panicking and she realizes that this is going to be problematic. That's a bad setup. It is. And the way that I'm thinking about this is her panic has got to be because of Joshua. Yeah. If her and Joshua, let's say, were having sexual relations in the months prior to her finding out that she's pregnant...

She, during this timeframe, could easily convince him it's his child. The fact that she's panicking tells me they weren't having sexual relations. And so when it does come out, it becomes obvious she's pregnant. Joshua's going to go, I know it's not mine. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

And just to put it in context, in a colonial America, when a woman was found to be an adulteress, whether it was true or not, she would be stripped down to her waist and publicly whipped. So she has a legitimate reason to panic. And Ezra is now panicking also. So this is problematic and...

And they don't think there's any other way out except to kill Joshua Spooner. So they begin to plot to kill him. Okay, so we have a little conspiracy going on. We do, not so little because they start to expand it pretty soon. So this is where I need your input because I don't understand the way people think sometimes. So they brainstorm and we've talked about how people used poisons much more often in the 1700s, particularly in the 1800s when they became more commonplace poisons.

But in the 1700s, they also used poison to kill people. Ezra and Bathsheba believe that this is the most efficient way to kill Joshua. I don't think Ezra felt confident enough to attack him. I'm not sure they could figure out a plot where it would seem like an accident or anything. So they think they're going to poison him, which would not have been uncommon. So Ezra goes out

and buy something called aqua fortis, which is a very old term for nitric acid. And let me tell you what they used aqua fortis in the 1700s for. It was a liquid that they would use to dissolve maybe rust or dissolve down parts of silver. So this was very acidic. So tell me about nitric acid and how would you ever use it to kill someone?

You know, nitric acid is a very powerful acid. You have your nitric acid, hydrochloric acid, these really strong acids that each has their own properties.

I've used nitric acid in the lab. It's something that you do not want to get onto your skin. It burns. It's got a very strong smell to it. It almost has, from my recollection, and it's been decades now, but there's almost a syrupy component to it. It's almost thicker than water, but it is a very strong acid. So they're planning on trying to poison it.

With nitric acid? Yes. Okay. I'm assuming it's going to taste bitter when you taste it. Is that a good assumption? If you were actually going to taste it, it would taste terrible. You need something to cover it up, right? Well, you know, of course you can dilute down acids. We drink acid all the time. You think about, you know, some of the sodas that we're drinking. They can be quite acidic.

So I'm wondering if nitric acid has some toxic component to it that if taken over time, it would poison Joshua. But if it is given to Joshua with any level of strength, he's going to know it immediately. This is not going to be something that you can just ingest and not feel the ramifications right away.

Yeah, and I think at least Ezra and Bathsheba are smart enough to know that they're going to have to put this in something that's going to be covered up. So, you know, he's not going to be able to detect that there's any poison in it. So they choose grog, which I love a good story involving grog. Grog? Yeah.

I know, I know. It feels like Beowulf, which was one of my favorite books, Beowulf. It sounded like something out of Harry Potter to me, but okay. So grog is real. I don't know if anybody in the audience has had grog, but it varies. I mean, I had always associated grog with a beer, you know, old-fashioned term for a beer, but it does vary. I looked up a Royal Navy grog recipe just for you, Paul Hulls. Okay.

So it is water, dark rum, lemon juice, and cinnamon. And this was from the Caribbean. This is what the Navy folks would bring in from the Caribbean and drink. But it varies, very strong drinks to sort of a real simple beer. So something that is alcoholic with a very strong taste that Ezra and Bathsheba are just crossing their fingers that this is going to cover up the taste of the nitric acid. That grog doesn't sound too bad. No.

You know, the dark rum with cinnamon. It ain't whiskey, but yeah. But now that you know what that drink could have potentially been, something strong, or you can even think of mulled wine, something very strong, something that would be acidic. I still don't know if it's going to be enough to cover up that nitric acid taste, depending on how much they put in. That's really going to be the question. So did they test it out?

Did they sample it before they gave it to Joshua? I mean, I've got a case in which a poisoner ended up making poison chocolate turtles with cyanide and actually tried to poison the pet cat as a test. But that's sometimes what you will see these poisoners do is if they're thinking, okay, we have to somehow disguise the taste, they'll make up their concoction.

and then test it themselves, say, okay, that's passable. I can't detect that there's something wrong with this. They won't obviously ingest a lot.

And so I'm wondering, did they make up a grog nitric acid mixture and then just do a quick sample of it and go, okay, he'll be fooled? I don't believe they did because what they did did not work. Joshua took one sip and spewed it all over the place and said, this tastes off. So I don't think a trial run was in the cards for Ezra and Bathsheba. This is what happens when you put a 16-year-old in charge of poisoning your husband because it was his idea. Yeah.

This is why I say over and over again, if you are going to poison someone, you have to be educated about it because if you don't do enough of it, you make them sick and suspicious. If there's too much, it's going to pop up with an autopsy. Even in the 1700s, they would have been able to spot something off with certain poisons, certainly something like cyanide. Yeah.

No, for sure. There's obvious visual clues with certain types of poisons, whether it be cyanide or carbon monoxide poisoning. It becomes very obvious once you open a body up.

But this really does underscore that, you know, many people get into this idea of homicide, but they have no experience. They make mistakes. And here in the 1700s, it's not like they're watching a TV show, CSI, and even getting, you know, feedback on that. They're left to their own devices, I'm sure, on how to go about to get rid of Joshua.

And they start getting frustrated because we are on a time clock here. If you remember, she's pregnant. This happens, I would say, about a month after she discovers she's pregnant. So let's say she's maybe two months pregnant at this point. And she probably is panicking. She's had four children. She knows when she's going to start showing.

And I think that time is of the essence for the two of them. And so they keep brainstorming. Joshua does not seem alarmed by what happened. I'm assuming things go bad food-wise and drink-wise all the time in the 1700s. If it's not preserved well, he's probably been sickened before. He probably had a bad taste in his mouth and just blew it off because he didn't seem alarmed.

Well, this grog probably has high enough alcohol concentration. It's not going to go bad due to, you know, bacterial contamination. But for sure, I could see where it would be easy for Joshua just to assume that this grog, for whatever reason, was bad and not to have any suspicion that somebody was trying to off him at that moment. As the Sheba continues on and, you know, she says, I'm pregnant and I'm getting desperate here.

She has more and more erratic behavior. She's really upset. Her husband continues to be abusive. Ezra is still there off and on. And they say that this needs to happen soon. Something fortuitous happens. The war is still raging, which is not the fortuitous part, but the war is still raging, which means there are soldiers dragging themselves out of battle all the time. And

In Massachusetts, where they're living in Brookfield, they meet two deserters from the British Army, from the Loyalists. And this is James Buchanan, who is a sergeant and a private named William Brooks. So I'll just call them Buchanan and Brooks.

And this is just, again, common. They pay to stay at the Spooner home. Joshua Spooner seems like he's fine with it. So you've got these two loyalists who are fighting on behalf of the British Army. You've got Bathsheba, who is the daughter of somebody very affluent, an affluent loyalist. And so now they're coming together, and Brooks and Buchanan say almost immediately, shush.

She is saying that she wants to kill her husband. And Ezra has said, forget this. I'm out of this. I don't want to have anything to do with it. He chickens out. He doesn't want to do anything else. So she realizes she needs to bring in some freelancers, essentially. And these two men seem to fit the ticket. And she says, I will give you money to kill my husband because the poisoning attempt didn't happen.

I still am confused by people who hire other people and don't think that they're going to get caught. Isn't that the rule? The more people you involve, the higher the chances is you're going to get caught. Yeah, and that's something that investigatively we're always looking for. I'll tell you what's interesting, though, about the 1700s. It probably was very difficult to find a way to catch hitmen. Because think about it. You're not tracing phone calls anymore.

You're not checking bank accounts. These are two people who were wandering in and wandering out in the middle of a war. So if they indeed do follow through with this plot to kill Joshua Spooner, they are gone in the wind very quickly if they can just keep their mouths shut. Experience the glamour and danger of the Roaring Twenties from the palm of your hand.

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turns, and catchy tunes, all leading you deeper into the thrilling storyline. This is your chance to test your detective skills. And if you play well enough, you could make it to the detective club. There, you'll chat with other players and compete with or against them. June needs your help, but watch out. You never know which character might be a villain. Shocking family secrets will be revealed, but will you crack this case? Find out as you escape this world

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Do you know, is Ezra aware of Buchanan and Brooks being at the house? Yes, and he's all for it because he doesn't know

He doesn't want to do it himself. Okay. He is done with this. He thinks that this will be the solution. He's happy to be involved in a way where he's not the one plotting it and he's not the one that has to fully execute it. He needs partners. So Bathsheba uses her money and power that she has to offer these two men a huge sum, $1,000, which in 1778 is $30,000. Okay.

to kill her husband, as well as Joshua's watch, his belt buckles, his clothing, all to murder the husband. So, okay, I get the money, but I have done cases, Burke and Hare is a really good example of a case where you have serial killers who are killing all of these people and then taking the clothing of the victims, which was,

Wouldn't it be a problem if they would go a couple of towns over and sell the clothing? But when you give them to people and all of a sudden these folks who have gone missing are wearing the clothing of these missing people, then it's a problem. Yeah. Basically, they're passing evidence of the homicide around. And eventually that's going to get back to the investigators.

So what Bathsheba says is she says, I have a plan once Buchanan and Brooks agrees. She says, what I think you should do is kill him however way you think is the most efficient, beat him to death is what her suggestion was, and then drop him down a well as a sign of the times. I guess it was dangerous in the middle of the night to go out and get water out of a well because if you tripped and fell, boy, you would just go to the bottom. She said, easy, man. This is what happens all the time. Let's just make that happen.

On the surface, not a bad plan. You know, the beating could replicate the types of injuries, blunt force trauma that, you know, the fall down the well would have if they do it right. But, you know, oftentimes things go wrong because the victim fights back.

And remember, Joshua was a big drinker. So nobody would be surprised if he were drunk in the middle of the night going out to get water or not, just walking by a well and tripping and falling down. So it'll be interesting when you hear about the injuries. So Joshua does what he had always done. He goes out, he goes drinking with friends at a tavern. It's March, it's cold outside, it's

fairly late around nine o'clock. It's still dark outside. And he comes home and he's holding a lantern in one hand. So one hand is occupied and he's walking through the dark. And I often say this phrase, there's no other lighting in the 1700s or 1800s usually except starlight and moonlight.

And he's walking with this oil lantern, walking home from the tavern. And he's got this dark pathway he's trying to navigate. And he is ambushed by Buchanan and Brooks and Ezra. Ezra feels safe enough with two other men for all three of these people to jump him.

So he has jumped. He has one hand occupied. He's trying to drop the lantern. They are all beating him severely. And then one person is strangling him until he's dead. So I already know what you're going to say. There's marks on him. So if they do find the body, you'll at least see strangulation marks and that this wasn't an accident, right? You know, it's not so much the marks left from the strangulation. So there most certainly could be that, right?

it's more of what happens internally to the body if they were sophisticated enough to understand what happens during a strangulation. When the blood vessels in the neck are compressed, initially the jugular veins are going to be compressed, but the arteries are still open, the heart's pumping, and now you have arterial blood that's still flowing up into the brain, into the head area, but because the primary blood vessels that

allow the head to drain are closed off, you get this big pressure buildup. And so now you get the small blood vessels bursting. This is where you see the petechiae in the eyes. It looks like bright red just points in the whites of the eyes. You can see this sometimes in the oral cavity and the lips. You

You can even see it internally in the heart. And so at autopsy, even without seeing marks on the neck externally of strangulation, the eyes will give away the possibility that strangulation occurred. And there's no other way that would have happened, I guess. I wonder if a medical examiner would have known that in the 1700s, if there's no other way to replicate that.

That would be, I think, a diagnostic feature, a strangulation that back in the 1700s they would have been aware of. It's something that didn't require any special testing. It's an observation. Yeah, and just over and over again seeing the same thing, seeing the same kinds of poisoning over and over again, like mercury, like mercury poisoning that we might not see very often now, but they saw all the time, I'm sure, in the 1700s. Yes. Okay, so they ultimately end up killing him. There's three of them versus one Joshua, right?

And they dump his body as planned down a well. And they went to tell Bathsheba what happened, all three of them. And she seemed very confused. She didn't know what they were talking about. So the question will be a little bit later whether she was acting or whether she was really confused and having some sort of mental breakdown.

not remembering any of this. The men later on reported in their interviews with police that she seemed very off, like she was not happy or anything like that. She acted oddly. Yeah, and that's hard to say what's going on there. She most certainly could be now distancing herself from the homicide, especially if law enforcement is onto this right away. Mm-hmm.

But also, is there a level of regret that it went to this point? Yeah. Now she's having emotional distress over it. Yeah. Father of her four children, but a man who was also abusive. Yeah. This is the part of the story where I would say this is a cautionary tale for people who are thinking of hiring hitmen to say these were not good hitmen at all. Not only did they show off Joshua's buckles

at a tavern when they all went drinking, they were also just bragging in general of having his things, of making a deal with his wife. Of course, they were drunk, let's say on grog, I'm assuming on grog.

They were revealing themselves with alcohol. And again, these are just young men who were in the army that she picked up and said, let's go ahead and do this. Inexperienced, obviously. Yeah, inexperienced, not understanding how a criminal investigation was going to occur, how their statements, their bragging inside this bar is ultimately going to be their undoing. Because now you have people who are not detectives.

tied to the crime, who aren't concerned about their right to freedom if they're caught, going, I know something and I can report it without risk of anything happening to me. And it doesn't sound like they were saying, we killed this guy. It was just saying, look at all his great stuff and now we have it. And it was suspicious.

Because this got word to one of Joshua Spooner's friends, who was a physician named Jonathan King. Jonathan and Joshua had been drinking the night that Joshua died. He was one of the people at that tavern, and he was very concerned. In the meantime, the men had not picked, apparently, the right well to dump Joshua's body in because his body was discovered the next day.

And I don't know if it was floating or how it was discovered, but it was spotted fairly easily. And they pulled him up just in time for Jonathan King, the physician, to examine his body and make a prediction about what happened. So first, let's tackle picking the wrong well. Again, inexperienced, and there certainly would have been better ways in a war, I would have thought, to figure out where to deposit this man's body so he wouldn't be found ever again.

Well, there's so many ways in order to dispose of a body. I'm wondering this well, I mean, if it's an active well, maybe it's being used on a daily basis. And if you throw a body down into this well, and I don't know what the diameter of this well is, but is this something where he's just floating in the water and they're looking down into the users of the well or looking down going, hold on.

There's a body down there. Or does he get stuck? Is it a narrow enough diameter to where the body gets stuck? And now the people who use this well aren't able to use it and look down and go, hold on. So that's part of it. They would have been better off taking him out into the middle of the woods, way out in the middle of the woods and leaving him on the surface and let the animals get to him.

But if he's in the well with enough time and without discovery, maybe they picked a well that was not currently in use often, wouldn't the water have disfigured him enough over time? It's March. It's not hot anymore.

I'm just trying to think of what water, what going down the well would have aided in this covering up some kind of evidence. A body being submerged in water for a period of time, of course, there is an impact in terms of how the tissues are affected during the decompositional process.

But it strikes me that these wells are dug deeper into the earth. This is going to be a very cool environment. That water is going to be very cool. So it likely is going to be slowing down decomposition. It's going to be slowing down the release of the gases that somebody might smell if they're walking by the well. Mm-hmm.

is still going to occur nonetheless, you know, and eventually if he wasn't found right away, if this is a well that's being used, that water is probably going to start tasting pretty bad. I don't even want to go through the stories that I know about that, numerous stories. So regardless, Joshua is brought up, his body is laid out, his friend Dr. King comes over and he does an examination and he says, and this is the only information I have,

that Joshua's face above his nose and his temple were very bruised and the scalp was cut an inch and a half long. And I wonder if that was, because nobody's mentioning weapons. It looks like he was just strangled and beaten. I wonder if that's just from being in the well and being knocked on sharp rocks, I'm assuming. I mean, we're not talking about bricks. We're probably talking about slate wells.

Well, you know, the descriptor, Dr. King is not coming off as a trained forensic pathologist utilizing, you know, the types of terminologies that would really describe what this wound is. It's a cut. That could be a laceration. This is where, you know, maybe the side of Joshua's head ends up hitting against a hard surface and the skin splits. It could be from being beat, you know, where now a blunt object has hit Joshua's temple area.

But what strikes me is that this is not for the amount of three men beating on him. This does not sound like a lot of damage done to Joshua. Dr. King is not describing abrasions to the body. Imagine a body falling down a well and scraping along the wall.

You're going to have abrasions to show that kind of movement and the rubbing up against this rough surface on the skin that is exposed. And he's not making any mention of that. Yeah.

You're right. I mean, I don't think that he was particularly trained in any sort of forensics. But what he said was enough to convince the authorities to arrest Ezra with the two men who were bragging, all three are arrested. They all confess. So that is not the interesting part of this. They were all intimidated. You know, they all said, we did it. Here's the evidence. And Bathsheba is the one who convinced us to do it.

Bathsheba is arrested. She is arrested for inciting, abetting, and procuring the manner and form of the murder. So what is in now terms, what would she be arrested for now if you're hiring to kill your husband?

Oh, jeez. Is that an accessory? I wonder what that is. Well, she could most certainly, like in California with the felony murder, she potentially could be charged with the murder just straight up front, even though she's not the one that is committing the act of violence. But I'm not sure what the actual charge would be today for, you know, because...

This is such a rare thing in terms of working a case where somebody is truly hiring a hitman. That is something we don't run into very frequently at all. What's interesting about this is Bathsheba, it's really hard to get a handle on her as a person and now as a defendant.

She did not want to identify Joshua's body. She said she was too upset. She said, yes, I did ask them to kill my husband, but I didn't think they would actually go through with it. And her attorney said, why would she do that? She admitted to hiring these men. She must have been insane because why would she essentially kill the golden goose? She has this husband who has

a lot of family money, she's got children. Why would she sacrifice her entire social status? Which tells you a lot about what people thought about in the 1700s, that they cared much more about social status than the fact that this woman says she was being abused, maybe her children were being abused, and she was trying to find a way out. Not the right way out, but she was trying to find a way out. Did the investigators find anything that proved

Bathsheba had passed on to these men in exchange for their services, something that could lead directly back to her. Well, the buckles and the clothes, I mean, they were wearing this guy's clothes, this dead guy's clothes, which I think was the big thing. I don't know if the money were still on them. I can't imagine even three soldiers could blow through $1,000 in 1778 at a tavern. But

I think that the clothing and the manner of death, and then they confessed, obviously. But the big thing was she was saying, listen, I told them to do it. I didn't think they were going to do it. And I'm not in my right mind anyway. And so she is going down a insanity plea, which we know is a legal term. It's not a medical term. When I say insanity, it is the legal term that they were trying to reach to see if she would be put into a mental health facility rather than being hanged with the other three men.

who ultimately were going to be convicted and sent to the gallows. And maybe she was thinking ahead, you know, when she is initially being contacted and she's got the strange behaviors, maybe she is trying to set up this insanity defense. And also her claim is that she's pregnant.

And oftentimes, women who were pregnant, when they would act erratically, it was treated as if they had a mental illness. And so she just said, I am off balance and I didn't know what I was doing and I should not be held responsible. And the attorney said, why would she hire these three guys? Well, the boyfriend and the two men, why would she do that? It just doesn't make any sense.

She said she was also concerned that her father, she was going through a lot of emotional stress because her father was going to be run out of Massachusetts. Her father was a loyalist. At this point, the loyalists were being removed in the war. And she was saying this is a breaking point for already a woman who's in a difficult mental state to begin with. Yeah.

She is put on trial, and ultimately, she and the other three people, Ezra and the two other soldiers, are all found guilty, and they're sentenced...

to be hanged, they're given the death penalty for this, which is not surprising, of course. Right. And I know from my perspective, I'm just trying to figure out who does the defense have to convince? Right. Jurors of her peers, or is it going to be an appointed individual, such as a judge, that would be the lone decider of their fate? Right.

I believe it's a jury, and the jury didn't believe that this was an insanity defense that was viable, and so they convicted all four of them. They were all sentenced to death, but there's an issue. Remember Bathsheba is saying that I'm pregnant. That's the claim. I'm pregnant, and you cannot execute a pregnant woman alive.

On top of this, if they go through with this, Paul, she will be the first woman executed in what is now America, because we're post-war and we have independence. First woman to be executed in America. If they execute her, she says she's pregnant. Yeah. Things get complicated now. Absolutely. Because now you're taking the life of this unborn child as the state.

So I think that is a very strong argument that she couldn't be executed until after she gave birth. And here's where politics plays in because this is where the story gets really odd. We have to have some medical exams to determine is she lying or not.

because I don't always believe the Sheba. Is she making up things? Did she really know that they were gonna kill the husband? Whose baby is this if there is a baby at all? So the government says, okay, we're going to order an exam and we're not gonna execute her until we figure this out.

So they order an exam. There are, now I had never heard this phrase in all of my digging around in the 17 and 1800s. I've never heard the phrase men midwives, men midwives. So men who were midwives. Okay. I had no idea, but I mean, I guess male obstetricians would be it and female obstetricians, but two men midwives examined her and 12 matrons determined she was not quick enough.

with child. Quick with child is a 1700 phrase, which means that the fetus could be felt moving inside the womb, which meant an advanced state of pregnancy, a viable pregnancy in the eyes of 1778 Massachusetts. So they said, if she is pregnant, we can't tell and the child is not viable. Wow. Okay. So in essence, now she is no longer considered pregnant and eligible for execution. Right. So

So here's the thing that's interesting. Women have either faked pregnancies or gotten pregnant on purpose in the past. So we're trying to sort out here whether or not she's manipulating the system and if she's pregnant. But we have now 14 people who say that she was not quick with child so that the pregnancy could be felt in the womb and that this was going to be a viable pregnancy. So Bathsheba, of course, protested.

and said, we need another exam. There was one other exam given. Whoever did the exam, the person, the matron who did the exam, said that she could tell that she was pregnant and this was a viable pregnancy. So you've got 14 people versus one person. And this is important because as we're saying, this would have been in the 1700s, 1800s, and now would have been horrifying to execute a woman who was pregnant.

And this is an example of, you know, a battle of experts in a legal proceeding. You have individuals that have specialized training and they're coming to different conclusions while examining the same patient. And even the woman who examined her who said, yes, she is quick with child still couldn't determine how far along she was. But the estimate would have been five to six months if she were telling the truth to begin with.

The government said, this doesn't matter. We have 14 people who say that she's not pregnant or not quick with child, and we're going to proceed with execution. And Bathsheba finally gave up and said, okay, but I demand that you do an autopsy on my body after I die because I'm right, and you are essentially all going to go to hell for doing this.

So all four people, so Spooner, Ross, and then the two soldiers, Brooks and Buchanan, were all publicly hanged, of course, on July 2nd, 1778, because public hangings were so common. And there were 5,000 people. I can't even say this enough, how common public hangings were in the 1700s and 1800s to the glee of people who sat there and wanted to see it. It's incredible when you look at some of the photographs from the 1800s of people watching public executions today.

how happy they are to see it with picnics and fried chicken and everything that you could think, children running around all over the place. It was a huge social event to see somebody hanged. Yeah, it sounds like it's like the Saturday afternoon matinee. You know, everybody's coming for entertainment. You know, it's just so bizarre that that mentality existed back in the day. Yeah.

So this was a big part of the social scene. And this is, you know, 5,000 people coming to the public square with their children. A storm broke out, of course. This really feels like the Salem witch trials. And it's just sort of this real gothic feeling of,

It's July, but there's this huge summer storm that comes through. And one newspaper said later on, God is in his wrath protesting in vivid lightnings and awe-inspiring thunder because there were a lot of people who did believe that she was pregnant and that this was not a just execution. So all four were hanged and people leave. And as requested, Bathsheba has a autopsy done on her body. And

It turns out she was five months pregnant with a boy. Wow. And by all estimates, totally healthy, would have gone to full term. Boy is what they believed. Right.

Yeah. They hanged a pregnant woman, five months pregnant. And it really shows the state of midwivery. I'm not sure if that's the way to say it. That could be a verb, yes. You know, but back where you have 14 of these experts all saying she wasn't, and she's five months pregnant. I mean, she's in her second trimester. And certainly showing, I would assume, at this point. Yeah. Yeah.

Wow. Okay. So here's the stinger here. As I said, first woman officially in the new United States in America to be hanged. And hundreds of years later, people have looked at this case and reexamined it. And it's not forensically looking for different evidence. What historians are saying they're putting together is looking at people who signed the death warrant, people who were pushing for this to happen. The officials who signed the death warrant said,

not only were patriots who had a disdain for Timothy Ruggles, but also one of the main people who signed the death warrant was Joshua Spooner's stepbrother. So the idea was that these 14 people who all said she did not have a pregnancy that was quickened, that there was a baby moving around, and then you have someone else who says, yes, that's the truth.

The idea and the accusation now is that you have 14 people who were lying and that she wouldn't have been executed, at least at that point. The politics that play in here, the loyalists versus the patriots, someone trying to get away with a crime, they end up executing a woman. All they would have had to do is wait three or four more months. Mm.

But they couldn't. They wanted to make an example of her. And it sounds like specifically because of her father, because of his connections, because he was a loyalist and a powerful one. The prejudice is so obvious from the political side. And then these 14 midwives and matrons, were they paid off in order to come to a certain conclusion?

And then you had the one that her team hired going, no, she's pregnant. Regardless, though, the proof is there, five-month-old baby boy. This isn't a whodunit case. You know, the right people were caught. And she sounds like she had her own role in the death of Joshua.

The thing that I think is so interesting and why I thought the story was really important is you have a woman from an affluent family married to an affluent man, maybe a marriage out of convenience, terrible marriage. It sounds like an abusive man. She has an affair with a young man. She gets pregnant. She's scared to death of the pregnancy. And now we know it was a real pregnancy. She was not making this up. She's a woman.

Mm-hmm.

for women in the 1700s that she felt trapped. She made some pretty big mistakes and surely there would have been a different way for her to get out. But executing her while pregnant, even if she was lying, all they had to do was wait four months, put her in jail, which would have been a terrible jail in the 1700s,

She might have died on her own there, but the anger towards the loyalists in that time period after the war was incredible. And they were out to punish people. So politics, again, plays a part in women's roles and how, you know, women are perceived in society. Let me throw a thought out at you. Uh-oh. And, you know, today, of course, I would want proof.

that the unborn child was in fact Ezra's. Yeah. You had mentioned that there is a chance that Bathsheba had potentially had other affairs during the course of her marriage. Considering her status in the community, I would imagine that these other affairs would probably have been with men who also had status. Yeah. Is it possible that

Another high status male is indeed the father of the child. But Bathsheba knew she could convince Ezra because he's so young. Yeah. Basically to be the one to take out Joshua. In some ways from looking at this from a different perspective, is there a powerful and influential male who's trying to hide the fact that he had an affair with Bathsheba?

that could also be influencing the speed in which she's executed. It could be, yeah. Boy, that's quite a conspiracy, even bigger than the one that we've been talking about. And also, to go back over to the Shiba side a little bit, there is a very distinct possibility that

she has repeated to friends over and over again that they really dislike each other, it does not mean that he's not making her have sex, that there's no sexual assault. So that could have even more deeply influenced her because there was no definitive proof of this being Ezra's child. And just because they have a terrible marriage certainly does not mean that it's not possible for her to have gotten pregnant through rape. So this is another mystery, but I think that the significance of this case has been pretty great just because

This is the first woman to be executed. It's always startling to me to read about women being executed, regardless of the time period. But I've also said many, many times that when we say people are surprised that women kill, it's not giving women very much credit. Women are as capable as men are of anger and murder and plotting and deviousness. And Bathsheba, I suspect, knew exactly what was happening, but...

The fact that she was pregnant really threw an interesting twist into this story for me. And so I was glad to share it with you. I think it's a really interesting case. It is. And however you feel about what ultimately happened with Bathsheba, it seems clear that she was made an example of by the Patriot government.

So I am expecting to hear you give me details next week about booking your next flight to go to New England and to check out the area. It is absolutely beautiful. And then we'll have some more stories. So boy, by the end of season one, if you don't go to New England, I'm just going to tear my hair out.

One of the things that's possibly going to draw me to New England is Bathsheba was buried in an unmarked grave and they don't know where that's at. Right. And I'm like, well, I want to see if I can figure out where that's at. You know, let's solve that mystery. Sounds like a road trip. Let's do it. Let's get Cora in the car and we'll go. We'll take our families up there and see. Okay. So we'll talk again next week with another compelling episode of Buried Bones.

This has been an Exactly Right production. For our sources and show notes, go to exactlyrightmedia.com slash buriedbones sources. Our senior producer is Alexis Amorosi. Research by Maren McClashen and Kate Winkler-Dawson. Our mixing engineer is Ryo Baum. Our theme song is by Tom Breifogle. Our art

work is by Vanessa Lilac. Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer. You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at Buried Bones Pod. Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, a Gilded Age story of murder and the race to decode the criminal mind, is available now. And Paul's best-selling memoir, Unmasked, My Life Solving America's Cold Cases, is also available now. ♪