On the night of October 14, 1911, young women staying at a Boston boarding house heard groaning coming from the bathroom of their friend, Avis Linnell. When they forced open the door, they found her unconscious. A physician was summoned, but by the time he arrived, he could only confirm that the seventeen-year-old was dead. An autopsy revealed the cause: cyanide poisoning.
It also revealed that Avis had been pregnant. The tragedy might have remained a private one, but the man at the center of it was Clarence Virgil Thompson Richardson, a Baptist minister once regarded as a promising voice in the church, and the investigation that followed would expose a life marked by repeated mental collapse, broken engagements, and a fatal secret. Clarence Richardson was born on February 15, 1876, in Amherst, Virginia, the third of thirteen children raised on his father’s tobacco farm. From an early age, he hoped to become a clergyman.
At seventeen, he became engaged to two young women at the same time, but both engagements ended when they discovered he had a third fiancée in Kansas City. That engagement ended too. He went to work for his cousin in Carrollton, Missouri, where he continued his studies at a local academy. In 1895, at twenty years old, he became engaged again, this time to a young woman he met while traveling through Missouri.
It ended like the others. Later that year, while staying with relatives in Potosi, he suffered what appeared to be a severe mental breakdown, wandering outside in a delirious state and speaking incoherently. A doctor gave him sedatives and declared him insane. Acting on that advice, his cousin arranged for him to be admitted to the Missouri Baptist Sanitarium, where he remained for several weeks before returning to Virginia.
By 1899, he appeared recovered and enrolled at William Jewell College in Kansas City, later studying at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. In 1901, he was ordained as a Baptist minister and served at the Bud Park Baptist Church. But in 1904, his ministry ended abruptly when several young women separately claimed he had proposed marriage to them. Alarmed church trustees requested his resignation.
He resumed his studies, but those who knew him described him as emotionally unstable and prone to nervous collapse. In the autumn of 1906, he entered the Newton Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. The following year, he accepted a temporary invitation to serve at a church in El Paso, Texas, where he lodged in the home of a man named Milton Estes. In July, his mental health deteriorated again.
He fell into a cataleptic state and insisted that unknown men were trying to harm him. Estes told the attending doctor that Clarence seemed detached from reality. He recuperated in Georgetown, Massachusetts, where he became engaged once more. That engagement also came to nothing.
In June 1908, he became the minister at a Baptist church in Hyannis on Cape Cod. There, he met Avis Linnell, a sixteen-year-old described as one of the brightest pupils at the local high school. He baptized her into the church, and before long, village gossip linked them romantically. Though no formal engagement was announced, Avis gradually withdrew from her social life and devoted herself to church work, openly defending Clarence during disputes over his increasingly forceful preaching.
His fiery sermons divided the congregation. One night, a doctor was urgently summoned to his boarding house, where church members were struggling to restrain him. Witnesses described him shifting between partial awareness and complete confusion, speaking irrationally and displaying unusual physical strength. The doctor administered morphine, and by morning Clarence appeared exhausted but outwardly composed.
In the summer of 1909, another physician, Dr. Charles Harwood, examined him after police began investigating a strange incident involving a supposed robbery from Clarence’s room. Dr. Harwood concluded that his state of mind appeared seriously disturbed and showed signs consistent with insanity.
By Christmas 1909, Clarence proposed to Avis and gave her a diamond engagement ring. She was seventeen, and her family seemed pleased that she would marry a man with such a respectable position. In April 1910, Clarence resigned his position in Hyannis, having accepted a ministry in Cambridge. According to Avis’s friends, the couple intended to marry and travel to China as missionaries.
Avis moved to Boston to study music so she could better assist her future husband in his ministry. She still wore her engagement ring. In Cambridge, Clarence’s ministry prospered. His plain-spoken sermons made him popular with many who admired his directness.
At a church reception, he was introduced to Violet Edmonds, the daughter of Moses Grant Edmonds, one of the wealthiest residents of Brookline, Massachusetts. Violet possessed a considerable inheritance and moved in distinguished social circles. She was confident and accustomed to wealth, the opposite of the quiet country girl Avis had been. Clarence began devoting much attention to her, and before long, their attachment became widely known.
Violet confided in others that they intended to marry. Whether Avis fully knew of the new engagement is uncertain, but by early summer, she had removed her diamond ring. There was no formal announcement of a broken engagement. In August 1911, Avis returned to her family home in Hyannis.
Soon afterward, Clarence arrived to spend part of his holiday there. In the months before this, he and Violet had been seen dining openly in Boston restaurants. Yet back in Hyannis, Clarence devoted much of his attention to Avis instead. The two were frequently seen walking together and calling at local homes, and townspeople began to speculate that they had resolved their differences and would finally marry.
In September, Clarence returned to his church duties in Cambridge, while Avis resumed her music studies in Boston. Friends noticed that she often appeared anxious and emotionally troubled. On Saturday, October 14, she told a friend at the Young Women’s Christian Association boarding house that she intended to dine that evening with a gentleman friend. She did not name him, but her companions understood whom she meant.
That evening, Avis returned to her room alone. Later that night, the women in neighboring rooms heard her groaning in the bathroom. They knocked and asked if she was all right, but heard only continued groaning. They forced open the door and found her unconscious.
Police investigators soon focused their attention on Clarence. One of Avis’s friends told officers that when Avis was found dying, she telephoned the minister. Instead of showing concern, he asked whether Avis had spoken about him before losing consciousness. She replied that she had not.
He told her she should not have contacted him and that she needed to speak to Avis’s family and the police. Officers became suspicious when they learned that immediately after being informed of the death, Clarence left his lodgings at the Edmonds mansion in Brookline and traveled into Boston to speak to an attorney. Then he announced he would remain in seclusion. On October 19, a chemist in Newton named William Hahn told police he had sold cyanide of potassium to the minister.
Hahn claimed Clarence said he wanted the poison to kill a pet dog. Hahn told him he should not use it on an animal, but Clarence insisted and asked him not to mention the purchase to anyone. On the morning of October 20, officers entered the Edmonds residence after being refused entry the night before. They formally charged Clarence Virgil Thompson Richardson with the murder of Avis Linnell.
He insisted he was innocent. The Edmonds family announced they would support him and pay for his defense. Violet sent flowers and chocolates to his prison cell and declared her confidence that he would be freed and the pair would then marry. Clarence pleaded not guilty before the grand jury.
On November 2, the jury returned an indictment against him on five counts connected with Avis’s death. Prosecutors alleged that he had administered the poison himself, probably telling her it must be taken for medical purposes. His trial was scheduled to begin on January 15, 1912. On December 20, he was discovered unconscious and bleeding heavily in his cell.
He had fashioned a crude blade from a sharpened piece of tin and used it to mutilate himself. A doctor was summoned, and for a time physicians feared he might die from blood poisoning. Afterward, Clarence became subdued, mentally exhausted, and increasingly detached from the proceedings around him. On January 5, 1912, he abruptly withdrew his plea of not guilty and admitted that he had poisoned Avis Linnell.
Four days later, he formally confessed before Judge George A. Sanderson, issuing a public statement declaring himself deeply penitent. He insisted he sought neither mercy nor personal advantage, but wished to spare Avis’s family the ordeal of a public trial. Speaking with remorse and religious anguish, he described himself as tortured by guilt and said he hoped, if allowed to live, to spend the remainder of his life seeking redemption behind prison walls.
It later emerged that his legal counsel had advised him that pleading guilty might allow him to escape the electric chair and receive life imprisonment instead. But when the judge passed sentence, he told the court that the only punishment permitted under the law was death by electrocution. Clarence collapsed at the hearing and had to be assisted from the courtroom to the prison van. Only after the death sentence was imposed did his defense team seriously pursue the claim of insanity.
Governor Eugene N. Foss ordered an examination of Clarence’s mental condition and appointed Dr. Lloyd Vernon Briggs of the Massachusetts Mental Health Society to investigate his background. Dr.
Briggs built a detailed picture of a man long troubled by physical and psychological instability. He found a family history of mental illness: an uncle on his mother’s side had died in a Virginia state mental hospital after being committed to a ward for violent patients, and a cousin had been confined to an asylum in Missouri. Several other relatives were also described as insane. Dr.
Briggs concluded there was a hereditary history that had contributed to Clarence’s condition. He also discovered that Clarence had suffered a series of head injuries throughout his life. As a child, he fell down the front steps of his home, leaving a permanent swelling on his head. In later incidents, he was struck in the head, thrown from a horse onto a rock, and knocked unconscious after being hit by another child.
The injuries left him with headaches, weaknesses, and periods of strange behavior. In April 1911, he hit his head while stepping out of an elevator, causing weakness in his legs, confusion, and emotional instability. One physician advised that he be placed under the care of specialists in a mental institution, and soon afterward Clarence was granted two months’ leave from his church following what was described as a mental breakdown. Medical specialists reported that Clarence had suffered from sleepwalking, memory lapses, nervous attacks, and episodes described as hysterical insanity or delirium.
Yet none of the doctors consulted believed the murder itself had been committed during one of these episodes. They concluded that Clarence understood the nature of his actions at the time of the killing. On May 16, 1912, Governor Foss rejected the petition for clemency, ending Clarence’s final hope of avoiding execution. Public fascination was enormous.
Crowds gathered outside the prison in the days before the execution. On Sunday, May 19, so many people were present that extra police patrols were assigned and the outer entrances were closed. Despite heavy rain the following day, more than two thousand people remained outside the prison walls for hours. The execution took place shortly after midnight on May 21, 1912.
Many stayed through the night, and the crowds did not fully disperse until morning. After his execution, public opinion became increasingly divided over whether justice had been properly carried out. While many initially supported the death sentence, largely due to sensational newspaper coverage, others argued that Clarence had been executed without a proper trial, because his guilty plea prevented a full examination of the evidence and his mental state. Critics believed his obvious psychological instability should have led to deeper medical investigation rather than a rapid execution, raising broader concerns about how mentally ill offenders were treated by the legal system.
In 1921, Dr. Briggs revisited the case, arguing that Clarence had been mentally ill for years, suffering from hysteria, hallucinations, memory lapses, and emotional breakdowns that several physicians had recognized long before the murder. He criticized the authorities for allowing him to continue in public life without proper treatment, and he later used the case to advocate for reforms in the early recognition of mental illness.
