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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. It's time for our new weekly series, Women Behaving Badly. That's our tongue in cheek title for interviews about unruly women in New York City. For today's gruesome tale, we are heading to Staten Island. On Christmas night of 1843, villagers were disturbed to find the burned remains of a young mother, Emeline Houseman, and her baby daughter, Ann Eliza. They had been bludgeoned to death before their house was set on fire, and the last person to see them alive, allegedly, was Emeline's own sister-in-law, Polly Bodine. Even worse, Polly was heavily pregnant by a man who wasn't her husband, and she was on the run. The case set off a tabloid media firestorm, with multiple New York publications competing for the latest scoop. Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman both followed the subsequent trials. P.T. Barnum commissioned a Polly Bodine wax figure. The media attention became so intense that it became difficult to find a non prejudiced jury. Polly was eventually tried three times, but did she actually kill her niece and sister-in-law? If she did, what was her motive? Author and constitutional lawyer, Alex Hortis, walks readers through this compelling history in his new book, The Witch of New York: The Trials of Polly Bodine and the Cursed Birth of Tabloid Justice. Alex, welcome to All Of It.

Alex Hortis: Thank you for having me.

Alison Stewart: As I mentioned in the introduction, you are a lawyer. How did you first come across this story?

Alex Hortis: After my first book, I was looking for a new topic, and I came across this New York Times article, and it had mentioned this just bonkers case from the 1840s. I'd never heard of it before. Edgar Allan Poe had covered it, Walt Whitman covered it. Like you said, P.T. Barnum made a circus out of it, and I just couldn't believe that no one had written a full length non fiction history of it. It also just felt so fresh. It felt like today, our tabloid justice of today, so I thought I could use it to critique tabloid justice of today.

Alison Stewart: Well, what sorts of resources were available to you when you were researching this story?

Alex Hortis: Fortunately, because of the intense media coverage and because the press back then, The Herald, The Sun, were trying to entertain their readers, they devoted wall to wall coverage of this, daily transcripts, and included very colorful details. That was a core part of it. I also went to the New York state archives. This was particularly thrilling, to get the legal briefs from 1840s. I don't think anybody had looked at them since then. I had this amazing primary source material, and then fortunately, these famous people wrote about it and talked about it, so I had that to draw on too and also their particular perspectives. You could learn a lot about these individuals, what they brought to the case.

Alison Stewart: What was Staten Island like in the early to mid 1800s when Polly was alive?

Alex Hortis: Okay, erase all perceptions you have of Staten Island of today. It had barely 10,000 people spread out over these green valleys with these gurgling creeks, they're called the Keels, the Dutch called them, primarily Dutch Protestants, French Protestants, and English Protestants, old, old clans. People before the United States was even formed, they could trace their lineage to there. All these small little villages spread across the island, very close knit, and everybody knew everybody's business, and they looked across [unintelligible 00:03:52] Manhattan, like Walt Whitman had described it, and they saw just Sodom and Gomorrah over there, so they wanted to kind of protect their island from the bad island.

Alison Stewart: All right, we know where we are. Let's talk about the people involved. Polly. What kind of family did Polly Houseman come from before she married Andrew Bodine?

Alex Hortis: Polly came from one of the original families to the Americas. Her family came over in the 1650s, and they settled on Staten Island, as they called it. They were oystermen by trade. Manhattan loved oysters, and there was an oyster craze. Staten Island was largely feeding Manhattan oysters. Her father was quite wealthy. He happened to buy land on top of trap rock just as Manhattan was going through a building boom.

It was worth well over 1.2 million. Then he had a prosperous oysters business. She was a bit haughty about all of this. She would sometimes mention that she had all the pleasures of life and that she was very comfortable, and she was very proud to be a Houseman, a Houseman, as they originally were called.

Alison Stewart: All right, Polly Houseman or Houseman. She marries Andrew Bodine on December 1st, 1825. They have two children, but the marriage soon crumbled. What was responsible for their separation?

Alex Hortis: Andrew Bodine was essentially a drunken sailor and a lout. They used euphemisms at the time, but he was [unintelligible 00:05:30] which meant he was drunk, and he was vicious, which meant he abused her. She was very, very young, 16, and had children within two years. Had two children, so she was stuck, because New York law at the time, it was extremely difficult to get a divorce. Basically the only ground at the time was adultery, and adultery is extremely hard to prove. You had to prove intercourse, that your spouse engaged in intercourse in court.

Most women were just stuck in the marriages, but she had a particularly lousy husband, because the guy kind of gradually loses his mind. He eventually marries somebody else while he's still married to Polly-

Alison Stewart: Oh my.

Alex Hortis: -and is eventually convicted of bigamy, but in the meantime, she's stuck in this marriage with him. She leaves him. She goes back to live with her father, Abraham, and they're two small children, and she's kind of stuck. Staten Island is a city of gossips, and there were these rumors that spread about her. I was really taken aback when the press had said that she was a bold and determined woman, and I thought, "Oh, they like her," and said, "No, this was an insult when they said that." She was very independent. She could be seen going around the island. She wore kind of a trademark green veil and a hood. She would drink gin alone. She then starts up an affair with an apothecary in Manhattan named George Waite.

Alison Stewart: All right, that's Polly. We've got a vision of Polly. Let's talk about Emeline. What do we know about the sister-in-law, Emeline Houseman? Then what do we know about the relationship between Polly and Emeline Houseman?

Alex Hortis: Emeline Houseman was a 24 year old woman. Again, comes from an old line protestant family. She is married to Captain George Houseman, an oysterman who is Polly's brother, so that Polly is her sister-in-law. By all accounts, everyone, every witness said that they had a very warm relationship. She has a child named Ann Eliza, and Polly, in fact, delivered her because the doctor was on the other side of the Island. Everyone said she was warm. She would take her into Manhattan, this sort of naive younger woman, and kind of escort her through Manhattan. I always envision what that looked like as this timid girl, everyone describes her as timid, was seeing Manhattan through Polly's eyes. She would stay over with her from time to time, and by every account, they had a warm relationship.

Alison Stewart: What do we know about how Emeline and her small daughter, Ann Eliza, were killed?

Alex Hortis: What we know is, on December 25, 1843, there was a fire that broke out in the island. Villagers get into the kitchen where the fire occurred. They find the bludgeoned bodies. Emeline had defensive wounds that cut down to the bone on her left arm. So it was fairly clear that there was some kind of physical confrontation. Her right arm, she has this black handkerchief scarf that's tied tightly in a sailor's knot. There was speculation on what that might have been for. Is they dragging the body? Are they tying her up? It wasn't clear. Ann Eliza, unfortunately, her body was very badly destroyed in the fire, it was a very intense heat, and her head was literally seared off when they saw it.

The person who saw that was nauseous, of course. They appear, at least Emeline, appears to have been attacked in some way, bludgeoned in some way, and there was medical debate, early forensics, to debate about how exactly it happened, but it appears that the infant's skull was separated before the fire. In other words, when she was alive, she was murdered as an 18 month old child.

Alison Stewart: How quickly did Polly become a suspect in these murders?

Alex Hortis: Breathtakingly fast. She was considered a suspect almost immediately. Now, she did give some somewhat contradictory statements about where she was, what she was doing, but what really fueled it was her reputation. She had a reputation of having, "bad character." There were rumors of an affair, although no one clearly knew that at the time. Nobody knew that she was pregnant. She was eight months pregnant at the time, so when that becomes known, of course, especially in that era, for a woman to be pregnant with a man that was not her husband, is extremely scandalizing. Nathaniel Hawthorne writes The Scarlet Letter in this time, in part, as a commentary on how severe adultery was looked at for women.

What also fuels this is John Van Pelt, the grieving father, he had consulted a fortune teller and he immediately says at the funeral, at the burial of his daughter, he's obviously bereaved, and he turns and he says, "Polly is the murderess." This really fuels the fire. On the Friday after the bodies were discovered, her brother-in-law comes to Abraham Houseman, her father's house, and says, "Polly, everybody in the village thinks you did it." Polly takes her coat, exits out of the house, and then there's a low-speed chase throughout Staten Island and Manhattan, as the press is just loving this. It's like glee, gleeful about everything that's happening.

She's eight months pregnant. It's sleeting and storming. She walks the width of Staten Island. Then she sneaks onto this ferry and walks the length of Manhattan up to Harlem, which was then country estates, and back. I added it up, is essentially, she did a marathon over two days while she was eight months pregnant in a winter sleet.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about tabloid justice. That's a big part of your method. What responsibility did these papers feel to the truth, or did they care about publishing the most fantastical story they could, what would sell papers?

Alex Hortis: This was the penny press. Get out of your mind The New York Times or The Washington Post. It was the first paper for the masses. So they would sell it for literally a penny. That's where it got this name. It was extremely competitive. James Gordon Bennett of The Herald and Moses Yale Beach of The Sun, they had this fierce competition. Moses Yale Beach used to have this fleet of ships that would go out into the ocean and get the early newspapers from the ships to get scoops. He had carrier pigeons on the roof. James Gordon Bennett thought of him as his arch enemy.

They would do almost anything. Their responsibility to the truth was loose, to say the least. I would say, it's a different model. It almost is closer to social media that is today. In other words, he just said what he thought. They didn't have big teams of reporters. They had a few, but they didn't have big teams of reporters. He first says it was a gang, and then he revokes that. He very quickly calls Polly the murderer. He calls Polly the murderess within 10 days after the bodies and before she's ever even arrested. He says that she's the murderess.

You imagine there's no such thing as innocent until proven guilty. He just didn't believe it. His famous quote was that the press is the living jury of the nation. I have to tell you, to me, as a lawyer, that's kind of appalling. I sort of understand how you could put a spin on it, how they have transparency, but clearly he went beyond that. He tried to influence cases. He tried to get cases to have certain outcomes that he wanted.

Alison Stewart: We're speaking with Alex Hortis, author of the new book The Witch of New York: The Trials of Polly Bodine and the Cursed Birth of Tabloid Justice. It's about a 19th century murder that took place on Staten Island. We've arrived at the first. There's three trials. The first one, what concrete evidence existed, if any, to tie Polly to the murders?

Alex Hortis: The case was circumstantial, but fairly strong, is the best way, I think, that it can be described. First of all, she's the last person seen alive with Emeline on Saturday, December 23. There is a neighbor named Mrs. Jane Taylor that said she heard screams coming from the house that night. Unfortunately, at trial Mrs. Jane Taylor is asked if she believes in ghosts, and she says, "Well, I'm not sure. I haven't seen one in two or three months." Her credibility is obviously damaged. No one else in the village hears these screams.

She is witnessed, allegedly, by three to five pawn brokers, depending on the trial, who each said, in fairly vivid detail, that she came into their shops on Christmas, December 25, and pawned the victim's goods. There was no dispute that these were the victim's goods. There was heavily [unintelligible 00:15:14]  that it was her. They only saw her for a few minutes, but the pawn brokers would say, "Well, we have to evaluate, and I was looking at her very closely." She used the name Ellen Henderson of Bergen, this woman. It matches the EH on the spoons that were Emeline Houseman's spoons and gold, there was a gold watch, a gold chain.

The pawn brokers, though, unfortunately their testimony is affected because the authorities had hauled them in into the Staten Island jail and they brought them down and they said, "This is our suspect. Is that her?" They had her dressed up as if she was there. That would never be allowed today. There are other damaging facts to her that come up as well. On Christmas night, she abruptly, she visits George Waite, her paramour, and her son, who was working for George Waite as an apprentice. She unexpectedly just says, "I'm leaving," on Christmas night. Her son Albert says, "Well, where are you going?"

So she gives the name of Elizabeth Strang, which is an acquaintance. Elizabeth Strang then says she hasn't seen her in six months, and she never came on Christmas night. She has no alibi on Christmas night at the time of the fire. Then the next morning, there is these ferry boat workers on Staten Island near the quarantine landing, which was on the other side of where her father was living. They said she comes in at 6:20 in the morning, looks haggard, and this is nearly 2 hours before the ferry actually leaves, and she orders a gin at 6:20 in the morning. The witness, Katharine Jane Henry, who was praised by the press as being very credible because it was very, very detailed.

She said, "I thought it was something wonderful, a lady to come on board and ask for gin." That puts her then on Staten Island in the early morning hours after the fire. She also then, when a reward is being proposed, she's talking with her brother. She says, "I wouldn't do that." The prosecution was saying, "Well, why in the world would you tell your brother not to post a reward?"

Alison Stewart: You're listening to my conversation with author Alex Hortis about his new book, The Witch of New York: The Trials of Polly Bodine and the Cursed Birth of Tabloid Justice. We'll hear more about the trials after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Let's continue my conversation with Alex Hortis, author of the new book, The Witch of New York: The Trials of Polly Bodine and the Cursed Birth of Tabloid Justice. It's about a 19th century murder on Staten Island and the woman who was tried three times for the crime. We pick back up with the jury decision after the first murder trial of Polly Bodine.

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Alison Stewart: The jury gets all this information. People should learn that at that time, jurors were denied food or water until they reached a verdict. It seemed like they reached a verdict except for one man, James Decker. Why was he so steadfast in his not guilty vote?

Alex Hortis: James Decker was a bit of an eccentric. He was one of the wealthier people in Granite Village. He was in the same village that Polly was from, and he was difficult from the very beginning. First of all, he wouldn't take the oath. Then the judge says, "Well, I'm going to put you in jail." He said, "That's fine. I paid for it." He's difficult from the very beginning, but because of the press coverage, it's so hard to get any unbiased jurors, so they let him on. It proved to be a huge mistake for the prosecution. During the jury deliberations, James Decker literally becomes a runaway juror.

He is tired of being berated by the 11 other jurors, the 11 other men who tell him we need to reach a verdict. So he leaps out of the window and runs away until the sheriff comes and hunts him down. Today, that'd probably ended up in a mistrial, but back then, they had to keep the jury together. It was hard to keep juries together. Like you said, this cracked me up when they withheld food and water from them until they reached a verdict. They later asked him, he just wouldn't convict. He said, "I'm not going to." They later asked him, "Why wouldn't you convict?" He said, "Well, I would not render any verdict on less than circumstantial evidence in the fourth degree."

They said, "What is that?" He said, "Four eyewitnesses who swear that they saw the act committed." Of course, that's not circumstantial evidence. That's direct evidence. It's legal gibberish. There's no such thing, but he just was a bit of an eccentric.

Alison Stewart: There was a second murder trial, happened in Manhattan. She was found guilty in this particular murder trial. What stood out to you about this trial? Was it the actual evidence? Was it the media tabloid? What was obviously out of play?

Alex Hortis: What's fascinating to me, first of all, six week trial almost, and that's extremely long for that time. The prosecution went all out. They brought in anyone that had any glimpse of Polly that weekend. What also stands out to me, it was held in City Hall. There's all these beautiful portraits of George Washington and the founding fathers' originals. They're sitting there, but it's not air conditioned, obviously, and so it's sweltering hot. They get visiting dignitaries. It becomes so widely followed. James Harper, which is the mayor at the time, was in a tough reelection battle. He sits in on the trial.

They would get visiting justices and politicians from other states that would sit there. They literally fought to get seats at the trial. It was Manhattan high society treating it like entertainment. They compared it to going to the opera almost. It was just extremely thorough. It was extremely closely followed, and the press just was completely unscrupulous. What also stands out to me, P.T. Barnum has his American museum. It's new, and it's literally a block from City Hall. He creates this wretched wax figure of Polly. She's on trial for her life, for capital murder, and we know that there were thousands and thousands of people that bought tickets. It was very popular. Kids would later say they remember how scary it was and they had nightmares.

He was prejudicing her trial. He's seen as this lovable rogue, but in my opinion, was just reprehensible, what he did here. She is found guilty, as you say. They do reach a verdict. It was a compromise verdict, it appears, at the time, because they said, "We find her guilty of murder, but with recommendation of mercy to the court," which was essentially code for don't hang her, because at the time, first degree murder, the penalty is death. It was in that era, the one thing that helped her in a way was that people were particularly squeamish about hanging a woman.

Alison Stewart: We're speaking with Alex Hortis, author of the new book, The Witch of New York: The Trials of Polly Bodine and the Cursed Birth of Tabloid Justice. Third trial. The judge was unable to find a jury pool that was unbiased in this case. He was forced to move it to Newburgh, New York, in Orange county. We won't say what happened. You'll have to read the book. Did Polly Bodine ever take her own defense?

Alex Hortis: No. She does make a few comments, a quote, so we get an idea of her personality. She was a bit haughty. She never testifies. By the Newburgh trial. Remember, this is two years in, and she's living in 1840s jails, wretched places where the death rate was very high. They said she looked catatonic. Walt Whitman said that he would be surprised if she was alive at the end of the trial. She basically was staring straight ahead the whole time, wasn't registering by now in Newburgh, and she just sits there and stares straight ahead. Fortunately, she had a very good defense team, they were working very hard, and the prosecution was going all out as well, but it was eerie. It was strange, by all accounts.

Alison Stewart: Do you have a theory of what happened?

Alex Hortis: I do have a theory. I have to first give my lawyerly disclaimer that we have to always respect what the juries do. My theory is that there was some kind of argument, because there clearly was a confrontation. There's these defensive wounds. The motive that the prosecution had was weak though. She came from a wealthy family. There was some question that she was doing pawning on the side to get some income, but it's not a lot of money. It's some valuables, but it's well under $1,000. Why in the world would she kill her sister [unintelligible 00:24:52]

I think they had some kind of confrontation, some kind of argument whether she found out that she was pregnant. Emeline found out she was pregnant. Maybe Polly had tried to steal something. George Waite was deeply, deeply in debt. There was some question whether Waite put her up to it. Then, realizing there's some kind of fight and it turns into a homicide, she dies accidentally or recklessly, I should say. Then she sees horrifically, and this is the hardest part of the case for me, she sees this 18 month year old child, and the prosecution asked, they were very clever. They asked the grandfather, was the child speaking? He said yes.

The theory was, the implication was that she could point to Polly and implicate her. In this panic, she kills the child, and then she-- The part I don't understand, she just decides to pawn these items. I do believe she pawned those items. There's too much of a coincidence, and she doesn't have an alibi. Why in the world would she do that? She wasn't thinking clearly. I think what's scary is people are always looking for a rational reason for murder, because it's too scary to think that people just lose their mind. They have passions, they have angers, and they kill their family members. Can I prove that? No, I cannot. So I want to make that clear. I can't prove that, but if you're asking me as historian, I think that that is the most likely scenario.

Alison Stewart: At the end of the book, you draw a direct line between the tabloid coverage of Polly's trial and true crime craze of today, with shows on Netflix and HBO and podcasts. How do you see Polly Bodine's trial as a beginning of a trend that we still see today?

Alex Hortis: To me, it's the birth of true crime. The reason I say that is that people like Edgar Allan Poe, he thought you could solve cases if you just use enough of your brilliance, at least Edgar Allan Poe's brilliance, and if you read newspaper reports, and we see this in true crime podcasts all the time now. I'm going to solve a crime. Occasionally, that happens. I would say it like a thin blue line. He clearly exonerated the defendant, but in most of the cases, frankly, in my opinion, they're skewing the evidence. They're kind of viewing it how they want to view it, or they're trying to service the story.

Trials are really messy. People also project all of these beliefs and morals and ideas onto cases. When cases are actually microcosms, they're not to change society, for the most part. That's not what a trial is really for. It's to decide whether the prosecution has proven beyond a reasonable doubt this person committed the acts that committed a crime. You see how popular it is. Look on Netflix and try to go through the true crime, it would take you months of watching it constantly, at this point. It's just overwhelming, and it's extremely popular, but I think a lot of problems with it. It can't replicate. I experienced this even writing the book.

When you're writing a book or you're doing a story, you have to service the story. I did the best I can, and I'm proud that people have said there's a lot of reasonable doubt here and there's views both ways, but I could have easily tilted the story this way or that way. I can see the temptation. With all due respect, journalists, or I would say, more entertainment producers, when they have the story, they're not being checked by an opposing lawyer, they're not being checked by a judge, they don't have a jury to filter this through. In my opinion, the true crime is really entertainment, and that's fine.

I'm not going to be like a school mom, I'm telling people don't watch it. I watch it. I don't watch the most lurid stuff anymore. I would also say, but don't view it as more than entertainment. Don't think that you're going to solve a case that's extremely rare. Does it happen? Yes, but when you look at that, of the failed attempts that have not worked, it far outstrips it, and it's not reliable. It's not a great way to do justice. There is a place for journalism to exonerate innocent people. Absolutely. Cases have gone to the Supreme Court based on a true crime podcast, but I think for the most part, it's difficult. It also creates a bad perception of the justices, a very disturbed deception of what happens at a trial.

Alison Stewart: The Witch of New York: The Trials of Polly Bodine and the Cursed Birth of Tabloid Justice. My guest has been Alex Hortis. Alex, thank you so much.

Alex Hortis: Thank you so much.

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