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Bridgeport Unmasked
Bridgeport Public Librarian Adam Cleri hosts talks & interviews on all things about Bridgeport, CT, the Park City!
Bridgeport Unmasked
The Disquieting Death of Emma Gill
In the late 1800s, abortion practitioner Nancy Guilford gets caught up in the death of a patient in Bridgeport, and then flees the country, before being returned to face her trial. Marcia Biederman comes into our podcast studio to talk about late 19th century intrigue, society, & medicine, as in her book, The Disquieting Death of Emma Gill.
Thanks for listening to Bridgeport Unmasked. Want to make your own podcast? Beardsley Branch Library in Bridgeport has a podcast studio, open to anyone with a library card from a Connecticut city. For more information, see https://bportlibrary.org/podcast-studios/
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Bridgeport Public Library's podcast, bridgeport Unmasked. We are recording from the podcast studio at Beardsley Branch Library in Bridgeport. I'm librarian Adam Cleary and today I am joined by writer Marcia Biederman, author of the Disquieting Death of Emma Gill, which we will be talking about today on Bridgeport Unmasked. So, hi, marcia, thank you very much for braving the deluge outside to be here today to talk about your book. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:Very well, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Cool, cool. So we were actually talking a little bit about earlier that this is your first time here at the Beardsley Branch Library, our new technology library here. Our new technology library here. This is the library branch that has, like the podcast and you know, we're actually the other studio. We'll get that up and running. That's more like for recording guitar stuff and stuff like that. So when was it that you were writing this book and, like you were regularly in Bridgeport doing research and stuff like that?
Speaker 2:Well, I can't say I was regularly in Bridgeport because it was during the COVID restrictions. Okay, so I had to make an appointment and there were rules about when I could come into the Bridgeport History Center at the main branch, but I was delighted to come in. I think it was 2021 when I did heavy research there, because the Bridgeport Public Library main branch has historical copies of the Bridgeport Post and the much forgotten Bridgeport Morning Union, which was also important to my research.
Speaker 1:Absolutely we do. Thank you for bringing that up so everybody out there can know that we have Bridgeport papers which have gone under a number of names over time, reaching back to the Civil War and a little before, so you can actually research those in person. Come on in and we will set you up with those Microfilm is the fancy word for it of these newspapers. So, yeah, that's awesome that the Bridgeport History Center, which is in Bridgeport Public Library, was able to help you out with that. So I figured I'd give you a shot to talk about this and other books you have, and you know where people can find you, online or offline or anything else you want to plug about your stuff.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you. I write about extraordinary American women who should be better known, and I started by writing about Patricia Murphy, who had a chain of restaurants that reached their zenith in the 1950s and 1960s and Yonkers, new York and Southern Florida. She also, during her lifetime, had nine different locations and when I grew up in Bridgeport, everybody I knew went to Patricia Murphy's. It was like an experience, not just a dinner, and they would send me picture postcards of their outings with their families at these gorgeous restaurants. The one in Yonkers covered acres. It also had gardens, a gift shop that was almost as big as Macy's with Patricia Murphy perfumes, and I never got to go there, but I did get to write her biography. And then my second one was about the speed reading marketer, evelyn Wood, who promised that you could read you know entire novels in 10 minutes with better comprehension than if you had read them slowly. So that's called Scan Artist.
Speaker 2:The first one, about Patricia Murphy, is called Popovers and Candlelight. She was known for the endless servings of popovers. The second one, scan Artist and how Evelyn Wood convinced the world that speed reading worked. And then my third one is called A Mighty Force, dr Elizabeth Hayes and Her War for Public Health, which is set in western Pennsylvania in 1945, just as World War II is winding down, company-owned coal towns where, if the war brides would leave in five minutes if they saw these places, with sewage running through the street, no way to get clean drinking water and no running water. And so she led a strike she was like Joan of Arc in Pennsylvania of 350 coal miners, not for higher wages or shorter hours, but for clean drinking water in their company-owned town. Wages or shorter hours, but for clean drinking water in their company-owned town.
Speaker 2:And this one is my fourth the Squieting Death of Emma Gill. To find me online, you can just look for Emma Gill, which is easier than my name, marsha Biederman. But if you can write down Marsha Biederman, I have a website, marshabiedermancom, and it's M-A-R-C-I-A, which is how we used to spell it in Bridgeport. Biederman is B like boy, i-e-d like David, e-r-m-a-ncom, and that's where you can find them. But just search Emma Gill for this one about Bridgeport.
Speaker 1:Yes, and you certainly could search, emma Gill, but obviously we will be putting that website into the notes below and so, yeah, those notes being on the podcast web page for you to use. We have other references too today, so those will all be down in the notes, and okay, so I wanted to get into Emigil, but first I have to ask so, evelyn Wood, was that a scam? I only bring it up because, in talking about Emigil, you can't talk about this book that you wrote without talking about scam artists, for reasons that will become evident to the folks out there pretty darn soon. So, like, was there any truth behind Emigil's claims or was it just nonsense?
Speaker 2:Evelyn Wood's claims. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:I'm already fusing words. It's going to be a long podcast episode.
Speaker 2:That's quite all right. You're very forgiven. The Evelyn Wood speed reading method, which, unfortunately, I begged my parents to pay for. I took a course in Los Angeles. I begged my parents to pay for it, I took a course in Los Angeles and it has been debunked by many reading experts. But it was one of those ideas that just took hold and because it was endorsed, people thought it was endorsed by John F Kennedy. He didn't endorse the Evelyn Wood method by name, but he did believe that everybody should take speed reading and browbeat his little brother, ted, into taking it. Yes, it has been debunked. I mean there were measurements on iMotion that showed that at that rate you can't even look at every word on the page. So one debunker after another would spend their career practically trying to bring down Evelyn Wood and she was impervious to it all because it had caught on with the popular imagination. It was endorsed by very important celebrities and politicians and therefore she had Teflon.
Speaker 2:And it's just an interesting chapter in the Cold War period, I think because this was the time when Americans were very, very worried about not keeping up with the Soviet Union and really JFK presented this as a matter of national security that we just had to get smarter. We had to study more science. There were all kinds of science programs. My brother attended one at the University of Bridgeport for high school students while he was at Central, to try to catch up. So because we didn't have the internet then we didn't have search engines, we didn't have Google. This was supposed to be a way of plowing through the explosion of print matter that was happening at that time. At that time, the Library of Congress added another building.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting Solid yeah.
Speaker 2:Right Printing technology had become cheaper, and there were the Disquieting Death of Emma Gill.
Speaker 1:First off, just two things I feel that I should throw out there. So this book, if it were just a historical curiosity, would have been interesting and worth the read for that. But its themes, its topics are going to be, are very evident to what is going on in the world today. You know you're going to forget sometimes that this is a book that happens in the 1880s and the 1890s. So I just want to throw out there that the Bridgeport Public Library does not take a position on any of the topics that we talk about today. We're just going to talk about them freely on matters, because that's what libraries are all about is freely talking about things, but the library itself, no positions. Also, I do want to throw out a trigger warning to everybody. We're going to be talking about some troubling topics here. We're going to be talking about abortions, death from medical complications, sexual abuse, rape and the blatant chauvinistic social and legal structures that allowed all this nonsense to happen. Hey, everybody, it's Adam here. I also wanted to include that this discussion also touches upon manslaughter and the dissection of a corpse. So you know, if you think that's a bit much for you to chew, then don't worry, you won't offend me, you can stop the podcast now and you can bump to other, maybe other, podcasts on our webpage if you want to listen to those, but just throwing those out there that we're going to be talking about some serious stuff today and with that let us dig right in Now. The the whole, the whole book is is has got very interesting stuff. That being said, the book doesn't move the scene. The scene of the book doesn't move to Bridgeport until Chapter 7. The chapters before that have lots of interesting things going on and you need to read that first to get a backup of Nancy's Nancy Guilford's, that's a name you'll be very familiar with soon practice, abortion practice in Bridgeport. The way I was thinking we could tackle that is, I could give a few bullet points about the first six chapters and then, obviously, marsha, if you think I glossed over something or I missed out on something important, feel free to just jump in at any time and correct me, just so we can get the audience to.
Speaker 1:When Nancy takes her two kids and her stepkid to Bridgeport. So Nancy enters into this story when a charming quack named Henry Guilford, then a shoe salesman, comes to her town and so so Henry has is a master of all types of artificial medicine. In fact, in one year he was able to complete a medical course that took two years to complete, and also he went on to be a doctor from many universities, including those that do not exist. So yeah, so we kind of get a background of what Henry is like. So Henry ends up having two children with Nancy, even though he is married and has a kid at home, and Nancy and him don't get married until much later. Henry kind of supports the family with his, with all those prestigious medical degrees of his.
Speaker 1:So the thing to know is that in the late 1800s New England is full of medical quacks and they just jump from one cure-all to another, you know, as one becomes more profitable than the other, suddenly the whole medical community is like oh, that's more effective as soon as it becomes more profitable, right. So that's Henry. That's Henry in a nutshell, except of course he also, you know, loses all the money through his gambling and other ventures, right? So the biggest thing that Henry does for this story, in my opinion, is he introduces Nancy to the world of abortion and gets her involved as an abortionist, which is incredibly illegal at this time If you perform an abortion in the late 1800s. You are looking, if you're caught, at one to seven years and if your patient dies, five to 20. And on one occasion excuse me, two, including Emma herself, but I'm getting a little ahead of myself she actually faces those charges. She gets arrested like I don't know Marcia, like four or five times, something like that. That seems like about how many times she gets arrested.
Speaker 2:Well, between Massachusetts and Connecticut. Yes, it would be at least that many times. Okay, yeah absolutely Absolutely.
Speaker 1:And so, yeah, and so Nancy does. One of those arrests actually does lead to a conviction. She serves, I think, eight years of a 10-year sentence to a conviction she serves, I think, eight years of a 10-year sentence, two years off, for good behavior. And then she moves to Bridgeport with her two young children and her stepson and they settle in Bridgeport and that's where our story, for the purpose of this podcast, really begins, because that's where the you know, the Bridgeport branch of this story goes on. So, yeah, so, marcia, that was a bit of a whirlwind. I tried to do six of your chapters in about six bullet points. Anything I missed that you think we need to throw out there.
Speaker 2:No, that was great, adam. I really appreciate that. I just would say also that Bridgeport does figure in the prologue of the book, before chapter one. But since we're doing this podcast for a family audience, do you want to be the one to talk about the discovery in Bridgeport of remains, or should I?
Speaker 1:So I would never take that away from you. I imagine that's like what you were waiting to do. Come here, I can't wait for that part, can't wait for that part. But before we do that, I would actually like to hear the background of the Emigil story, how Emigil came to be under Nancy's knife.
Speaker 2:Yes, it all happened really because of a crackdown on illegal abortions. That is what I discovered by researching this book that Henry and Nancy and several other abortion providers I'm not going to call them abortionists because it's such a loaded word, there's really no difference between abortion provider and abortionist so they were operating illegally and I'm not here to defend them. But they had many happy customers, or anyway satisfied customers In New Haven, where Henry and Nancy Guilford lived, on Worcester Square, where Pepe's Pizza is and Sally's, if I have the names right. I lived in New Haven.
Speaker 1:Oh yes, Pepe's and Sally's is definitely the—I didn't think we would be talking about pizza today, but yeah, no, they're staples.
Speaker 2:Well, that neighborhood is very beautiful and upscale, and it was when they lived there, also in the early 1890s, and they were two people who had illegal practices in New Haven and were becoming very wealthy from them. And one of their competitors was a Yale Medical School trained physician who also had a traditional medical practice, but he saw nothing wrong or maybe like lining his pockets with doing illegal abortions. So he was one of their competitors. He was even more expensive than they were and also one of Henry's old quack partners who had been doing electromagnetic medicine which claimed to cure incurable diseases. He was in business too and it was all very open.
Speaker 2:In New Haven there was like a private hospital run by a woman named Gertrude Vaughn who had been a vaudevillian in Hartford and she would provide post-abortion care. All of this was going along for years and everyone knew it because all of these practitioners advertised in New Haven or Meriden papers. Henry had a branch office in Meriden and then there was something called the Law and Order League of New Haven. It was actually a national movement of citizen vigilantes who said that they didn't want new laws, they just wanted the laws on the books strictly enforced and their focus was really temperance and Sunday drinking, because in Connecticut Sunday drinking was against the law actually for a very long time, but we're talking about in the late 19th century. So they would take it upon themselves to go surround bars and taverns that were open on Sunday and serving drinks and closed them down and for a while the state government supported them and even gave them a budget. So they decided to focus also on illegal abortion and there was a crackdown.
Speaker 2:There was an investigation into the police who had been turning a blind eye to abortion and a lot of the abortions that had gone awry, where patients would say that they had felt ill for years after the abortion. But they had some very good lawyers, including Isaac Wolf of New Haven and Jacob Klein, for whom the Klein Memorial Auditorium is named at Bridgeport, who got them off. Auditorium is named at Bridgeport. Who got them off? But in this atmosphere it's just Henry had to serve a three year term in prison and Nancy ended up in Bridgeport and I think did I answer your question?
Speaker 1:You very much. You very much supplemented the, the outline that I gave there and I think, yeah, that tells, that, tells us, uh, uh, you know how how things were for society and for Nancy and Henry, uh, leading up to when, uh, one one, uh one woman uh came in from Southington, southington, yes, okay, yes, absolutely From Southington, to get an abortion. And in a bit of an ironic twist at the beginning, you know, this seems like a slam dunk the man who got her pregnant, you know, was getting money to her regularly. This should have been a fine thing, but it was not a fine thing. Wait, let me just jump in and say Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Because of the heat in New Haven and the fact that Henry had been in prison, his Meriden office was closed down. Ordinarily, southington is a small town in Hartford County. She would have gone to Meriden and she and her intimate partner Harry Oxley the man you're referring to did try to go to Meriden only to find Henry's office closed down. Did try to go to Meriden only to find Henry's office closed down, and Nancy in a lot of panic because Henry did provide income and he was in jail doing full-time work in Bridgeport. So Emma Gill of Southington first of all had to travel very far, farther than usual, across the state, instead of to Meriden, to Bridgeport, farther than usual across the state, instead of to Meriden to Bridgeport. And she's finding Nancy all discombobulated because although she and Henry had a very troubled marriage, they did count on each other's incomes and they had had to sell their house on Worcester Square in New Haven.
Speaker 2:And so here is a woman from Southington, far out of town, going to Bridgeport and a very upset practitioner is now demanding all of her payment and she has hiked up her fee to make up for Henry's loss. The loss didn't come from her husband Henry and Harry Oxley of Southington. Husband Henry and Harry Oxley of Southington. They're both in their mid-20s. You know, they're both young people, harry and Emma Gill, and they are in different social strata but both young. Neither of them is married, anyway.
Speaker 1:Emma's engaged, though, which I'm going to touch on later Right, and not to Oxley, incidentally. No, no, no, no, no. Yeah, so we'll get to that. Sorry, I do want to just throw that in there. No, thank you, you're welcome.
Speaker 2:Yes, and now Harry Oxley is being asked to pay an enormous amount of money up front before Nancy will start operating Now. Years ago Nancy would take in-kind payment. She had practically sliding scale for lower-income patients. No more. Now she wants more and more money paid in advance. It's a tremendous pressure on Harry Oxley, and meanwhile, the person most affected by this is the patient, Emma Gill, whose pregnancy is advancing while Nancy waits for the money.
Speaker 1:Yes, obviously there's a biological timetable that needs to be taken into that. So, yeah, no, no. For like three-quarters of a chapter the plot is driven by is he going to get the money in time and all that jazz, and then on a dime it turns to Nancy, does the abortion. It goes horribly wrong. And I think one of the more poetic lines in the book I love how you put it you said that one of the nurses, clara and we're talking about Clara, don't worry about Clara, don't worry would watch Nancy's daughter, eudora, bring in water and coffee to Emma, and then one day she didn't bring water and coffee to her because there was no one alive in the room to drink it. So do you really want me to take on what happens next?
Speaker 1:I mean, I'll let you know, if you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2:Yes, okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so so Emiguel is dead and under unlike other situations where in one of the other past situations they she got a dead body out Cause this is like this, what is this? And like maybe the third or fourth time at least in the book that Nancy had a patient die on her.
Speaker 2:This is the third death.
Speaker 1:This is the third death.
Speaker 2:And the first one. The family just didn't want to pursue it. It was a married woman. There was an inquest and the woman's husband appeared at the inquest with other relatives and they just dropped it. That was in Lynn Massachusetts, because the family just wanted to close the books on the matter. Their relative was dead and there may have been other deaths, but in this case, if people don't want to testify about it, there's really nothing that the authorities can do further. Now the other one you're referring to. Yes, this is when Henry and Nancy would get at their craziest. Yes, this is when Henry and Nancy would get at their craziest. There was another death in Lynn Massachusetts, where the woman lived very far away from her father, who had no idea if she was alive. In case the police were looking into into the carriage that they were driving to her father's house and they would say that she had died along the way, when really they had. They had addressed a cadaver in jewelry and an evening gown strapped her to a board.
Speaker 1:yes, uh, yes, I agree, gracie, but also completely different than how Emma Gill left the house on Guilford Street. And yes, nancy Guilford had her practice on Guilford Street.
Speaker 2:Gilbert Gilbert.
Speaker 1:Oh, that changes things a little bit. Okay, never mind. Never mind, I know, misread, misread that one.
Speaker 2:That's quite all right, it doesn't exist anymore in Bridgeport, from what I understand. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's where the Barnum Museum now stands on Main Street, correct?
Speaker 1:Yeah, like two or three blocks away from the main library downtown.
Speaker 2:Yes, but it's been covered up because it was a People's Bank Plaza and in the 70s Gilbert Street, I think, was completely paved over for the bank plaza, but that is where Nancy Guilford had her office on Gilbert Street. This is nonfiction, folks, it's real stuff.
Speaker 1:There are too many people named Henry.
Speaker 2:also, I used to write novels, and a fiction writer would never name three or four characters Henry. But I have to work with the facts.
Speaker 1:Yes, such as writing what actually happened. Yeah, okay, so Nancy dissects the body, you know, the arms off, head off, torso off, just chops up the body. Incredibly intensive work, exhausting, few hours just chopping up there. In a weird twist, the chauvinism of the day actually helped her, because a lot of people were like no woman would be able to make the cuts that Nancy did. So you know silver lining there, I guess. And then, yes, so now you got the parts of the body and what they do is she and her son, son Harry. They, on two different nights, they go out to Yellow Mill Pond, yellow Mill Pond, and they had the body parts wrapped up. And they had the body parts wrapped up. It was over two days, so that Nancy wasn't traveling with a whole bunch of stuff, which could have been suspicious.
Speaker 2:Yes, because she actually didn't own a carriage of her own at that point, because the family had fallen on hard times with her husband in jail, so she rented one and it would have looked suspicious to have taken too many bundles out at the same time. And they went to the Seaview Avenue Bridge which again doesn't exist, probably because of the construction of the highways which was over a thumb of yellow mill pond that has since been filled in, so it was a north-south bridge on the east side. And what do they do there?
Speaker 1:Absolutely yeah. So, yep, they go there on two east side. And what do they do there? Absolutely yeah. So they go there on two consecutive nights. They see the water's nice and deep, they throw the body and they figure that's the end of it, right, the body parts are going to just sink to the problem.
Speaker 2:Right, because they attach sinkers also.
Speaker 1:Yes, Thank you. Thank you for that. Yeah, they covered their bases. Now a lot of people botched the investigation that followed right. The press got a lot of things wrong. The police followed a lot of wrong ends. There was one father who misidentified the body as her daughter and as his daughter, rather, and that was a lot of fun. Honestly, I think, nancy, I'm not calling murder good and cover-up book good, but they did a good job at it. They just got really unlucky because the body of water that they chose completely ran out of water at low tide. And that's exactly what happened. The body of water ran out of water at low tide. Some kids, you know, found the raft bundles and, you know, eventually they found they were human body parts and that is how the investigation of Emma Gill's death got underway.
Speaker 2:Right, but nobody knew she was Emma Gill or who she was.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, no, no, that was a nightmare in and of itself. That was like a chapter and a half of just like, who is this person?
Speaker 2:Yes, they put the head on display at the Bridgeport morgue and hundreds of men, women and children from Bridgeport filed past it and correctly said that she couldn't be a resident of Bridgeport because nobody recognized her. There was no fingerprinting technology for ID at the time, never mind DNA, so they had to do that technology for ID at the time, never mind DNA, so they had to do that.
Speaker 1:One of the biggest reasons I don't murder other than the fact that I'd like to think I'm a decent person is that I don't see how anyone could get away with murder today and, you know, 30 years from now, I can only imagine what's going on.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, back then they were relying on dental records was one of the big things and, just like you know, I witnessed testimony. That's my daughter, which in a. You know let's not spend too long on this because I want to focus on Nancy but essentially, guy came in, oh, my poor daughter shipped the body parts. They had the funeral. His living daughter showed up and they had the body shipped back. A little little bit of an embarrassment there. There was one piece of evidence, a letter that Nancy wrote that she tried to burn and it didn't burn correctly and the press found it. You know, the press actually does a few impressive things in this story and that's the basis of finally identifying this woman as Emma Gill. And that brings us to the investigation. So, marsha, you know of the investigation. I have a few points, a couple points I wanted to bring up. What points do you have?
Speaker 2:Yeah, in a lot of ways the story turned out to be like a police procedural. It was very interesting. Dental records were new at the time so this was one of the first times that they were used. And that mistake about the Massachusetts young woman who came home just in time to stop her own funeral. The dentist had talked to the Bridgeport police over the phone but the phone connections weren't good so they had misunderstood the dentist in Massachusetts, had misunderstood what they were saying in Bridgeport. What did the Bridgeport cops you want me to comment on their investigation?
Speaker 2:That would be amazing. Yeah, they had made some mistakes. They never should have the coroner in Bridgeport, never should have released the body to the wrong family. But he felt he said the father was so sure. And then there was. You know, the telephone connection, which is just the technology of the time was faulty. It's interesting that in 1890, they had to be just as careful about not arresting Nancy until they had a preponderance of evidence as they would today. I thought that that was interesting. The half-burnt paper that they found was actually found by a reporter, not the police, in Nancy's yard, because people used to have incinerators or burn things in their backyard, and that was actually a money order that had Oxley's name on it.
Speaker 2:So it's hide, you know they had the police still had no idea who the deceased woman was. They you know for weeks and that was the key that somebody in Southington named Oxley had been wiring Nancy Guilford money for something, and that led them to Southington. And then, when they were closing in on Southington, there was this almost comical competition between the New Haven cops, the Bridgeport cops and the Hartford cops. So they all converged sort of at the same time because this was very high profile and they all wanted to take credit for it.
Speaker 2:They had incorrectly arrested Emma's fiancé, who had nothing to do with this and in fact had said he had never been intimate with Emma so he couldn't have been involved in her pregnancy, and that probably was true.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so obviously the only victim in all of this I mean the one true victim is Emma Gill. Right, she lost her life. That being said, my heart goes out to Foster.
Speaker 2:And that is her fiancé, yeah.
Speaker 1:And yeah, so yeah. And I mean like I just feel for this man, I mean like there is a good shot that when he learned that I mean I'm speculating, but either he just learned it or he learned it when the police showed up that oh hey, your fiancé is dead. She died from an abortion practice gone horribly wrong and we're arresting you for it. So come along. And it was bad. He spent four days in jail.
Speaker 2:Yes, here in Bridgeport, the chief of police, Birmingham. I'm wondering if Birmingham Avenue is named after Eugene Birmingham, who figures in this book as a principal character. We call them characters even though they're real people. He made a big deal out of frisking Walter Foster personally. We've caught him, we know who's responsible and it was all that. Yeah, they all. It was. It was all wrong and they had to release the guy four days later.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and there was, there was. There was nothing to it. They had no evidence.
Speaker 2:Yes, and luckily he wrote a. Walter Foster was such a conscientious worker he worked for the Fleischmann's Yeast Company that he had documented like every minute of his work days for the past four days. Oh and there were witnesses Fascinating, yes, so he had airtight alibis and had to be released. But then the Bridgeport police ended up at square one again, until that half-burned money order was discovered by a reporter.
Speaker 1:That's fair there. So, yeah, he had an alibi and there was really no evidence against him. You brought up my favorite late 1800s head of Bridgeport Police, Superintendent Eugene Birmingham. He's a fun guy, so avid listeners of this podcast this might have a little bell ringing in their head, uh, that this is not fella, who always thought it was the masked bandits who you know Big Tom Kinsella and William Mahoney who murdered James Beardsley. And then so he becomes, through a stupidly comical scenario, which I will link the article to down in the comments. A stupidly comical scenario put him in charge of the Bridgeport police and one of the first things that happens is this guy who always thought it was William Mahoney and Big Tom. One of the first things that happens is he's going through paperwork or he's having one of his officers go through paperwork in the basement of a city building and they find a confession just hanging out there. That implicates William Mahoney and Big Tom. So yeah. So pop back to our first episode if you wanted more on this.
Speaker 1:Birmingham's big thing in this was he kind of got it right and got it wrong because he kind of guessed everything at different points in this investigation. So, yeah, she thought Nancy did it, but he also had a lot of other wrong theories. But he also had a lot of other wrong theories and he was slow. He was uncharacteristically slow to arrest Nancy because he was worried about a lawsuit. But there were a couple of suspects for whom nothing about it was comical, and I was hoping, marcia, you could give us a little more down-to-earth notion on Rose and Clara Drayton, who were treated horribly for reasons that are bad but simple. Yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. Nancy carved up the body, but she didn't do it by herself. She probably had the assistance of her housekeeper, rose Drayton, who was a black woman who lived on Cannon Street. And also Nancy hired her first to do laundry and then general cleaning. Nancy hired her first to do laundry and then general cleaning, and Rose had a young daughter about middle school age named Clara, and Clara Drayton also worked for Nancy and may have had something to do with the dissection of the body and certainly aided in the cleanup and cover up, because these women were not in a position to refuse their employer.
Speaker 2:Rose had had a very rough life. She had been divorced from a guy who did deliveries you know of course, as a horse and carriage or horse and wagon age for Howlands. So he had left the family. She had lost a child in a horrible house fire, and so then she had Clara and a young son named Hannibal, and she was arrested. Yes, you're right that Birmingham took his time, but when he did reconstruct what happened, he had every detail of what happened, except not exactly what Rose had done.
Speaker 2:Now, rose and Clara Clara being a minor at the time spent time in jail. Nancy had left Ridgeport immediately and was nowhere to be found, even though her lawyer, jacob Klein, kept saying she has nothing to do with this. She knew she was under suspicion. So you can't say that just because a person is a fugitive that they're necessarily guilty. But she did become a fugitive and her son, harry, were. Eudora went to Western New York where she had relatives where Nancy was from, and Harry stayed at his job at the Yacht Club in New Haven. So they were all arrested but they were treated very differently, but Rose and maybe Claire. The records are not about Claire but because she was a minor I think she eventually got out of jail. But Rose was there until the—she was there for months.
Speaker 2:She was the only one and there was a, you know, a not very nice police officer who was huge and he was known for his methods of interrogation, which would not withstand scrutiny today and shouldn't have then, and he was trying to get Rose to tell him everything that happened. I don't know she was very resistant. I don't think she said anything conclusive about Nancy, but it helped him reconstruct what was going on. But she was not released until Nancy was sentenced.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, rose held her own. Rose was a slave, incidentally, you know she was, is that correct?
Speaker 2:I was unable to. She was born in the era of slavery in.
Speaker 1:Virginia, oh, okay.
Speaker 2:So she was probably an enslaved person.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:I believe so. It's very hard to trace black Bridgeporters. I could imagine. Yeah, I believe so, it's very hard to trace black bridge porters.
Speaker 1:I could imagine. Yeah, I could imagine. But you know, clara and Rose, you said there were questionable tactics. The big one that stuck out to me was the completely false evidence. Like we found this saw with human remains at the house and it was just a saw. You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2:Oh, yes, and they found another. Saw under an icebox later, so, that was fabricated evidence to try to get her to turn.
Speaker 1:yes, About as fabricated as that confession Birmingham found in the other case. But anywho sorry had to throw an extra punch at him. Yes, so, marsha, as you said, you're right. Nancy ran away extensively. This was a transatlantic situation. She was eventually caught in London or another English city, london, it was London, okay, cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, she landed in Liverpool. I think I forget my own book. I'd have to look it up, but yes, she was found in London.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so yeah, in a weird legal switch situation they had to actually change her charge from manslaughter to murder because England would not extradite on manslaughter to end the book again. As a non-fiction writer you don't always get to choose the most dramatic plot line, uh, to write the book as uh. The trial ended in a plea deal where nancy said um, you know, I'm willing to, uh, I, I plead guilty of manslaughter, uh, with the biggest concession being that her kids and also the Draytons got and Oxley got, roped into this. They all would have their charges dropped as a result and that leads to.
Speaker 1:So this is very much to me as, like a literature guy, nancy's story Emma Gill is in the title, but to me, just as personal opinion, this was nancy's story and like. So there it's hard to know who nancy really is because she lies all the time, like there are some just like blatant lies, like no, I never did this, where we just learned she did it. But the one thing I really believe nancy is I can't shake that she is is loyal to her kids and wants what's best, or at least what she sees is best for her kids. In the previous arrest she took the sentence and had Henry take no sentence, so Henry could care for the kids and for a person who it's hard to say anything truthful about. I think that's one that you won't convince me otherwise about.
Speaker 2:about Nancy yeah, I'm not here to defend her, and some people who have read the book are disappointed that there are no clear heroes. And I'm not making Nancy into a hero. Yes, she did. I agree with you that she did have true, true, sincere feeling for her children, but Emma Gill was somebody's child also.
Speaker 1:Absolutely yeah, and I don't know, We'll save opinions for off the air. In fact, I hope all of you chit chat about opinions after we're done. That would be like the biggest compliment that you like this so much that you kept talking about it. That does bring us to the end of the story. Is there anything we jumped over or what have you or you want to reiterate before we start wrapping this deal up today?
Speaker 2:Well, because I'm in Bridgeport, I would just like to note that Bridgeporters, they were shocked when Emma Gill's body was found and closely followed what was going on with every step of the way until Nancy was apprehended and brought back to Bridgeport. But a lot of that coverage was from the New York papers. This was the age of the yellow press. Everybody was reading newspapers. You know it's pre-radio, so that's where you got all your news and also you got your entertainment. There were these lavish pictorial papers. Photographs and papers were unusual, but there were all these illustrators. So the New York press was converging. I was constantly taking the train into Bridgeport writing about every aspect of this.
Speaker 2:But after they disappeared a Boston reporter who was very anti-abortion came down and he was appalled that Bridgeport had sort of settled into thinking. Well, what Nancy Guilford did was not so bad because she also provided a service to needy women and that is part of the story that she had for every death you know, and this is called abortion, death and concealment. In Victoria and New England she probably had hundreds of customers who didn't suffer any injuries or ill effects from their abortion and were able to end an unwanted pregnancy. So this Boston reporter said he quoted actually the New Haven leader as saying there's a wishy-washy sentiment around Bridgeport. A wishy-washy sentiment around Bridgeport, it's the kind of sentiment that prompts women to bring flowers to wife murderers in prison. In other words, he was appalled that Bridgeport didn't want to hang Nancy Guilford and also the prison matron at the Bridgeport who worked for the Bridgeport Police Department who had gone to England. She had gotten a free voyage to England to help identify Nancy Guilford. There she was saying I know cases in which she's done a lot of good.
Speaker 2:And that leads us to believe that this prison matron, who knew very low-income people, sex workers in Bridgeport, et cetera, et cetera, knew that some women really desperately wanted to end their pregnancies, and Nancy there was no legal way to do it. So Nancy had done it and the Bridgeport Herald was way ahead of its time it was a weekly paper at the time and after Nancy was sentenced they said well, what she did was illegal and you should not break the law. But a lot of people would say and this is because the editorial writers of the Bridgeport Herald were saying it that what she did was simply her only mistake really was to get caught doing a procedure that goes on every week in every corner of the state, so that all shows you that abortion was commonplace at the time. You have to remember that contraception reliable contraception was not yet available, that the size of the American family had changed from the census of 1800, when the average American woman had seven children, to 1900 when the average American woman had about half that many children.
Speaker 2:And how did this magically happen? Probably because abortion was illegal underground but advertised in newspapers the way it wasn't in the 50s and 60s, in the immediate pre-Roe, epic or decades. And it was not something in a back room, it was not a back alley kind of business. Nancy had a permanent office, or she worked in her home at a fixed address, and of course it was clean. Who wouldn't you know? She lived there. She wanted it to be clean and well furnished.
Speaker 1:If you want to tell the folks more and more time where they can find you, your books, et cetera, before we head out today.
Speaker 2:Okay, so all of my books are on my website MarshaBiedermancom and that's M-A-R-C-I-A Like MarshaBiedermancom, and that's M-A-R-C-I-A just like in the Brady Bunch. And Biederman B like boy I-E-D-E-R-M-A-Ncom. Or the Disquieting Death of Emma Gill. If you just search Emma Gill, it's on Amazon, barnes Noble, sold by many independent bookstores. Rj Julia has it at some of their stores stores. Rj Julia has it at some of their stores. And thank you so much, adam, for giving me this opportunity and for your careful reading of the book. It's just so exciting for an author to talk to someone who actually read the chapters. I can't tell you how gratifying this is.
Speaker 1:You're very welcome, marsha, marsha, marsha, I wonder how many of our Gen Z viewers will get that. Well, anywho, everybody, this has been another episode of Bridgeport Unmasked. I'm Librarian Adam and I've been talking with Marsha Biederman, author of the Disquieting Death of Emma Gill, a Bridgeport story from the late 1800s, which you can purchase at links that I'll put below. Tell your friends, your enemies and total strangers you run into to listen to all episodes of Bridgeport Unmasked. We'll meet real soon to record another one of these right here.