In the summer of 1896, New York City’s Lower East Side was the most densely populated place on earth, its tenements crammed with immigrant families who had crossed the Atlantic to escape the pogroms of Eastern Europe. Somewhere in that vast arriving mass, a young Polish Jewish woman named Annie Brafman met a boy on a steamer and began a connection that would not end for a very long time. By 1896, she was married to another Polish immigrant, Jacob Boach, a cigar maker who was often unemployed, while she supported the household by waiting tables in the cafes of the Tenderloin district. She had managed to put away three hundred dollars in a bank account held entirely in her own name.
On Sunday, the first of August, Annie left Rockaway Beach, where her husband was staying, and returned to the city to pay the rent on their flat at 207 East 21st Street. The next morning, she withdrew fifty dollars, paid twenty toward the rent, and kept the rest. She was seen later that night on Fourteenth Street, walking with a man, and then again with a different man, a swarthy fellow with a black mustache, who entered her building with her that afternoon. She was never seen alive again.
The following morning, the family’s nearly deaf servant opened the bedroom door to find Annie half on, half off the bed, her head in a pool of blood, a dead canary with a torn wing in its cage. The autopsy revealed she had been strangled first, then had her throat cut four times with such force that an artery was severed. Her diamond earrings had been pulled from her ears, tearing the flesh, but the police did not believe robbery was the motive. The pillow bore bloody fingerprints where it had been pressed over her face to muffle her cries, and the sheets were twisted where a man’s heels had struggled against her.
A massive investigation followed, with 113 officers assigned to the case at its peak. The first suspect, a broker who resembled the gray-haired man seen with Annie, was cleared by a solid alibi. A second man, Jacob Levy, confessed to being with her that night with a fabricated story and was almost sent to the electric chair before his alibi held. A third was released after being misidentified.
A man named Victor Roundtree, feared by the women who walked the streets around Fourteenth Street, was named as a suspect but was never found. Then the newspapers uncovered a deeper thread: years earlier, a man named Jacob Frankenstein, who had fallen in love with Annie on the steamer and become engaged to her, had attacked her with a carving knife when she rejected him, scarring her forehead. He had been committed to the insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island, then released during the overcrowded summer of 1896, and he was never questioned or pursued in connection with her murder. Captain Smith, who led the investigation, said there were certain features of the case which made it difficult of solution and declined to elaborate.
The case went cold. Three young women in the Tenderloin were murdered that summer in the same manner, and their killers were never identified. Annie Boach was buried in August 1896, somewhere between twenty-six and thirty years old, her secret plans and secret account buried with her. Sixteen years after Annie Boach was laid to rest, a very different kind of murder case unfolded in Aberdeen, Scotland, on the granite coast of the North Sea.
On Saturday the twentieth of April 1934, eight-year-old Helen Priestley was sent by her mother to the nearby co-op store to buy a loaf of bread. She made her purchase at exactly 1:30 in the afternoon and turned for home, but she never arrived. A massive search began, spanning the city, with radio broadcasts and cinema announcements. By two in the morning, Helen’s father, John Priestley, was persuaded to go home, walking through the close of his tenement building at 61 Urquhart Road and seeing nothing.
At five in the morning, a neighbor arriving to resume the search found a large blue hessian bag against the wall of the close. Inside was Helen’s body. The examination showed she had been strangled, with deep bruising on her upper thighs and mutilation of her sexual organs, suggesting a sexual attack by a male predator. Vigilante groups armed with clubs patrolled the streets as police interviewed all eight families in the tenement.
Suspicion quickly settled on the Donalds, the only family who had not joined the search. Jeanie Donald, a thirty-eight-year-old housewife, and her nine-year-old daughter had been the target of Helen’s bullying for years—the girl had kicked at their door, shouted abuse, and called Mrs. Donald “coconut” until the two families had stopped speaking entirely, five years of absolute silence. The blue bag itself spoke volumes.
It bore a Canadian export stamp, scorch marks from being used as a makeshift tablecloth near a cooking range, and traces of washing cinders, an outdated cleaning method. Police found nine more identical bags in the Donald flat, along with bloodstains on soap flakes, a scrubbing brush, and cleaning cloths, and the place had clearly been scrubbed recently. The barn was dusted for dust. When the twenty-fifth of August arrived, the police had something new to contend with, and a forensic pioneer named Professor Sir Sydney Smith was called in.
He found no evidence of rape. The injuries had been deliberately inflicted after death with a blunt instrument to make the murder look sexual and point the investigation toward a man. He also discovered that Helen suffered from a rare condition involving an enlarged thymus gland, which made her prone to fainting and produced an extremely unusual bacterium. That same bacterium was found on the cloths and surfaces throughout the Donald kitchen, and hairs matching Jeanie Donald’s precisely were found on Helen’s body and inside the bag.
Alexander Donald, the husband, was arrested first, but he had an ironclad alibi: he had been at his barber shop miles away at the time of the murder. The police turned to Jeanie. The prosecution’s reconstruction of the crime was both logical and devastating. Helen returned home with her loaf of bread, passing through the communal stairwell.
Jeanie Donald, whose daughter Helen had tormented for years, grabbed the child. Helen, with her tendency to faint, lost consciousness almost immediately. Terrified, Jeanie dragged her into the kitchen and, believing she might have killed her, staged a sexual assault with a blunt instrument. The first blow woke Helen, who screamed, and Jeanie strangled her.
The child lay hidden in that kitchen throughout the rest of the day and the entire night while her father and neighbors searched the streets outside. Sometime between two and five in the morning, Jeanie carried the bag out into the close and left it against the wall. At the trial in Edinburgh in July 1934, Jeanie Donald pleaded not guilty and offered no explanation. The defense argued that a woman could not have committed a rape-like crime, but Smith’s forensic testimony dismantled that claim.
The most unlikely witness was Jeanie’s own nine-year-old daughter, who told the court that on the day Helen disappeared, the bread in their home was different, not their usual brand. It was the loaf Helen had been carrying when she died. The jury returned its verdict in eighteen minutes. Jeanie Donald was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging, one of the first people in the world convicted on forensic evidence alone.
Her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and in June 1944, ten years after the murder, she was granted compassionate release to care for her dying husband. She was formally freed after his death, given a new identity, and disappeared into England, unreachable and silent, never explaining what happened in that kitchen. She died in 1976 at the age of eighty. Twenty-three years before Helen Priestley was strangled in her own tenement, the city of Cincinnati was the stage for a case that asked what the law decides a woman is worth.
In 1849, Cincinnati sat on the north bank of the Ohio River, a trading and pork-packing city divided between a slaveholding South across the river and a free North behind it, operating under a legal doctrine called coverture. Under coverture, when a woman married, she ceased to exist as a legal person. She could not own property, sign a contract, keep her own wages, or sue. If her husband took the children, they were legally his.
In that world, an eight-year-old girl’s fate was sealed before it began. Margaret Seely was fifteen years old when she eloped with a man she believed to be a steamboat captain. John Howard was, in practice, a professional gambler, a bartender who had once been briefly left in charge of a grounded vessel and had called himself “Captain” ever since. After their son was born in 1842, Howard began beating his wife, brandishing a Bowie knife and threatening her life.
Margaret took the children and left, opening a boarding house in Cleveland, but Howard persuaded her to return, and then did not change. After their second separation, Howard took the children, one at a time, to Kentucky, where her legal pursuit was complicated. He found a woman named Mary Ellen Smith, installed her as “Mrs. Howard,” and had her raise his children under Margaret’s name.
He then systematically destroyed Margaret’s reputation, spreading word wherever she tried to settle that she was a fallen woman. On the second of February 1849, a fellow lodger at Margaret’s boarding house asked her a casual, cruel question: was she really Howard’s wife, or did she only pretend to be? The reference to her children, as she later testified, set her brain on fire. That evening, she walked to Mrs.
Wolf’s boarding house on Front Street and asked to see Mrs. Howard. When Mary Ellen Smith came downstairs and confirmed she was Mrs. Howard, Margaret drew a knife and drove it into her neck, severing the jugular vein.
She walked out into the street, raised her cloak to her own attorney, John Scott, showing him the knife and the blood on her arm, and asked whether she could still pursue custody of her children. Then she turned herself in to the marshals. John Howard, hearing the commotion, knelt over the dying woman and his first words were: “Mary, Mary, who did it? Tell me quick.
I’m a ruined man. ” He then ran upstairs to get his knife, intending to go after Margaret, but the law got to her first. Margaret Howard stood trial in May 1849. She did not deny the killing.
Her defense rested on monomania, the concept that a person could be rational in most respects yet utterly destroyed on a specific subject—in her case, her husband and her children. The prosecution could not easily refute the documented history of beatings, worthless notes, kidnapping, a false wife, and a demolished reputation. Judge John Brough, who later became governor of Ohio, had written a sympathetic biographical preface to the trial record. The jury returned in minutes.
They found Margaret Howard not guilty by reason of insanity. The courtroom erupted in sustained cheering. She was acquitted, but she was also sent to the Ohio State Lunatic Asylum, because the law of 1849 could not declare her rational. What became of her children, who remained in John Howard’s legal custody, is not recorded anywhere that survives.
John Howard was never charged for any of the eight years of conduct that led to the killing. The beatings, the worthless note, the kidnapping, the false wife, the destroyed reputation—all of it was legal. Margaret Howard was twenty-two years old that day.
The only justice the system knew how to offer her was a verdict, a sympathetic preface, and a judge’s name on a document saying this happened and it was wrong.
