Neighbors hadn't seen Willian Druse for days, but little did they know that his wife and daughter were exacting their revenge with rope, a hatchet, a revolver--- and several cauldrons of boiling water.
On December 18, 1884, a man named Eckler noticed plumes of black smoke rising in the direction of the home of William Druse, a Herkimer County farmer who lived with his family about three miles from Richfield Springs. Other neighbors noticed the smoke, which carried with it a foul odor and lasted nearly two hours. They also noticed something very strange-- all the windows had been covered with newspaper.
Concerned neighbors knocked on the door asking for William, but his wife, Roxalana, said that he had gone to New York City to take care of some business matters. From that day forward, William Druse was never seen again.
Charles Pott and Mrs. Eckler, neighbors of the Druse family, eventually pulled aside 14-year-old Frank Gates and asked about the mysterious smoke. Frank, who was Mrs. Druse's nephew, lived a half mile west of the Druse farm and often helped out with chores. Frank insisted that he didn't know a thing, but the locals needled him with questions and accusations until he broke down and told a remarkable tale that brought to light one of the most shocking crimes ever committed in upstate New York.
There was a reason why Frank Gates helped out around the 60-acre farm. Because of their constant fighting, the Druses found it impossible to hire a farmhand wiling to live under the same roof. Fifty-four-year-old William Druse was known to be rather abusive toward his wife, Roxalana, their 19-year-old daughter, Mary, and their 7-year-old son, George. There was also another daughter, Nellie, who was mentally handicapped and had died at the age of 10.
Those know knew William from childhood recalled that he always had a hot temper. He wasn't a bright boy and was teased because he never learned to read. As an adult he hoarded newspapers, staying up all hours of the night trying to make sense of the words, as if literacy could be gained through osmosis. It was said that he had once beaten his wife so badly with a horse whip that she was left unconscious, and had, on occasion, disciplined his children in the same manner. Naturally, over time, his entire family came to hate the very sight of him.
Seven-year-old George Druse had grown quite close to his teenage cousin, Frank. On the morning of Dec. 17, Frank had decided to skip school, and he spent the night at the Druse farmhouse. Early in the morning he put a fire on the stove, but William, awakened by the noise, had stern words with his nephew. The argument awakened Mary and Roxalana, and after a brief argument, William Druse stormed out of the house to do some chores in his barn. He returned a few moment later for a cup of coffee, and began complaining about a bill from Chet Crimms' general store near Little Lake. As the family sat at the table, Mrs. Druse whispered to the two boys to leave the house. As soon as they were out of sight, the boys heard a gunshot.
Frank and George ran back to the house and found Mrs. Druse in a wild and excited state. She pointed the revolver at Frank's face and told him to finish off her husband, or else she would shoot him. The boy looked at his uncle, who was twitching in the dark as his daughter, Mary, strangled him with a rope. Blood was pouring from a gunshot wound in the back of William's neck. Frank Gates obeyed Mrs. Druse's command and fired the revolver at his uncle until it was empty. But William Druse was still alive.
Mary grabbed the gun from her cousin's hand and tried to reload it, but in her panic one of the cartridges exploded, the bullet narrowly missing her. Then Roxalana grabbed her husband's axe that was standing near the stove. Holding his head to the hearth of the fireplaces, she struck him on the head once, then twice, but it was the third blow severed his head from his neck.
The women wrapped William's head in an old newspaper and Roxalana ordered the boys to go upstairs and get a blanket, upon which they laid the body and dragged it into the parlor. Next, they covered they windows with paper. Mary and Roxalana then instructed the boys to chop some firewood. The boys built a fire while the women scrubbed the bloodstains from the floor.
By morning, all that was left of William Druse was a pile of ashes and chunks of unburned bone. After wrapping the remains in a bundle they drive drove a wagon to a nearby swamp and disposed of the evidence.
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| Mary Druse |
After Frank Gates admitted to his role in the murder of William Druse, neighbors notified District Attorney A.B. Steele of Herkimer, who arrived at the scene of the crime on January 17 and took charge of affairs. A search was made for the remains, and these remains revealed additional gruesome details. The flesh had been boiled from the bones before the bones were incinerated-- a long, messy and arduous process which implied that a considerable amount of planning had gone into disposing the evidence. The boiled flesh, it turned out, had been fed to William Druse's pigs. No longer could the suspects argue that their actions were based on impulse or temporary insanity.
Roxalana Druse and her daughter, Mary, were jointly indicted by a grand jury. They went on trial for their lives in September of 1885, and on October 4 the jury returmed a verdict finding both women guilty of murder in the first degree. Mary Druse was sentenced to life in prison, while her mother was sentenced to hang by the neck until she was dead.
With the execution fixed for August of the following year, all eyes turned to Herkimer County to see if an appeal or commutation might spare the farmer's wife from the ignominious fate of being the first person to hang in the county. While her attorney fought vigorously for a new trial, curious reporters visited the Herkimer County jail regularly, and remarked that Roxalana appeared to be in good spirits. She and her daughter, safely locked away at Onandaga Penitentiary, exchanged letters several times each week, and it was noticed that Roxalana had decorated her cell with plants and flowers, and had hung curtains over her window. She even made a picture to hang on the wall of her cell; it was the lid of a cigar box, which she had painted and covered with the words: You was not there. Judge not, for you do not know it all.
Her attorney, H. Dwight Luce, was able to secure a new trial, and he tried to convince Mrs. Druce to plead guilty to the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter, as this would not only save her neck (quite literally), but would also most likely allow her to become a free woman in a few years. But Roxalana was adamant that she had acted in self-defense. But the evidence against her was just too strong; Frank Gates had testified that he had seen the Druse women strangling their victim with a rope, before they convinced him to take the revolver and fire the final fatal shot, and that the windows had been papered over to hide the butchering and boiling of the body that soon followed. No, Roxalana Druse may have had share of her supporters among legions of embittered housewives suffering at the hands of their abusive, drunken husbands, but, in the eyes of the law, she was a cold-blooded killer.
Nonetheless, H. Dwight Luce appealed to the governor for a commutation of his client's sentence in December of 1886, pleading for mercy. District Attorney Eugene Sheldon strongly objected, stating that Mrs. Druse's crime had no parallel in the country for its barbarity, that the law is the same for a man as for a woman, and that if the crime had been committed by a man not even the most radical opponent of capital punishment would dare beg for clemency. Ultimately, Governor David B. Hill agreed.
On a cold bone-chilling night, the final night of her life, Roxalana Druse was unable to sleep. She was fortified by shots of brandy, given to her once an hour by jail physician, Dr. Cyrus Kay. She sobbed constantly; she ate nothing for dinner, and nothing for breakfast. And when dawn broke bleak and bitter on the morning of Feb. 28, 1887, Mrs. Druse knelt in prayer with her spiritual adviser, Rev. Powell. At ten o'clock she was marched to the gallows in the jail yard, where the death warrant was read by Sheriff Cook.
The thermometer registered just nine degrees, and while only 25 witnesses were permitted inside the jailyard, hordes of men and women, bundled in fur, braved the strong winds and surrounded the jail, satisfied to look at the county officials as they passed in and out of the building. At 11:42, Mrs. Druse, in a black cashmere dress, ascended the scaffold, clutching to her chest a bouquet of flowers from her daughter, Mary. One deputy pinioned her arms, knees and feet while another drew the black cap over her head and placed the rope around her neck. Mrs. Druce lost her composure; she cried, then shrieked like a wild animal-- her voice so loud that it was reportedly heard on the streets of Herkimer. At 11:48 the 213-pound weight was dropped, and Roxalana's body was jerked about three feet above the floor of the gallows, where is swung silently in the wind.
Her neck wasn't broken, and she died a slow, agonizing death due to strangulation. It was an unsettling spectacle, and Roxalana's botched hanging helped bolster the case for the electric chair, which New York would put into use just three years later.
After Roxalana's execution, her body was laid to rest at Oak Hill Cemetery in Herkimer. Her husband, having been cremated against his will and dumped into a swamp, of course, does not rest in peace alongside her. As such, there is no gravestone marking her final resting place, and because of a fire that destroyed the cemetery's burial records, no one is quite sure where her grave is located.
Mary Druse was released from prison after serving just nine years of her sentence. She married a man named John Gannon and lived out the rest of her life in quiet obscurity on East Taylor Street in Syracuse, until her death from pneumonia in 1915. But as for her mother, Roxalana, she earned her place in history as only the second woman executed in New York, and the first person executed in Herkimer County-- thereby securing her 15 minutes of infamy.