15 Minutes of Infamy

Lydia 'Lida' Beecher Fourteen miles north of Utica, New York, lies the sleepy village of Poland. On the Saturday morning of March 28, 1914, a farmer driving along the road leading out of this little Herkimer County village noticed something strange in the freshly fallen snow. It was blood, and an assortment of random objects haphazardly strewn about, as if scattered by a violent struggle. When the farmer realized that one of the objects was a woman's hair comb, he followed the tracks into the woods, past a barbed wire fence, where he found the mutilated body of a young woman. Lydia Beecher, known to friends and family simply as Lida, was the 21-year-old daughter of Reverend William A. Beecher, a Presbyterian minister from Cayuga County. Lida, who was a teacher at the one-room schoolhouse in the village of Poland, lived in a rented room in a boarding house not far from the spot where her body was discovered. According to her housemates, Lida had gone out to mail a letter on ...