Episode 146: Reverend H.H. Hayden
On Tuesday, September 3rd, 1878, 22-year-old Mary Stannard was last seen by her father leaving their home in Rockland, Connecticut, with her tin pail to go pick blueberries at around 1:00pm. The bushes of blueberries weren’t that far from her home, so when she didn’t come home after several hours, her father went to look for her. At around 6:00pm, he came across her body. Mary was lying in the path leading towards the blueberry bushes, on her back face up with her hands over her stomach. She had been stabbed multiple times in her throat.
A postmortem examination revealed that Mary had been hit over the head and suffered a star-shaped wound and skull fracture on the right side of her head. The blow to her head had occurred before she was stabbed in the throat. Her jugular vein was completely severed.
Within two days, all of the town gossip was revolving around one person: Reverend Herbert H. Hayden.
Mary Stannard was incredibly sweet and kind and was described as being naive and simple. This made her easy to manipulate, and at the age of 19 she gave birth out of wedlock to a baby boy she named Willie. The townspeople did not turn their backs on Mary for this and instead supported her as they saw her as a victim of manipulation from the child’s father, a married man who lived in a neighboring town. The newly appointed Methodist minister, 28-year-old Reverend H.H. Hayden, had also supported Mary and taken a special interest in her. He hired Mary as a servant to help his pregnant wife Rosa with the home and their two children.
Neighbors observed Herbert spending a lot of time alone with Mary, and on one particular evening in March of 1878, Herbert left his wife at a church oyster supper to go home, saying he wanted to check on the children. Townspeople gossiped that instead he returned home to be with Mary, who was babysitting. Just a few months later in August, Mary arrived at the home of her friend, Jane Studley. She was very upset and confided in Jane that she had been “criminally intimate” with Herbert in March and she believed that she was pregnant. After writing to her half-sister Susan Hawley telling her of her predicament, she enclosed a letter to Herbert where she asked him to take her to New Haven to get an abortion. Jane’s husband heard of this and kicked Mary out of the house, so she went to see Susan in person and burned the letters.
Herbert promised Mary that he would see a doctor to get her abortion pills. On September 3rd, Herbert told his wife that he was going to Durham, Connecticut to buy some oats, but instead told a friend in Middleton he wanted to come by to have some tools made. While in Middleton he went to Tyler’s Drugstore where he purchased an ounce of arsenic for $0.10, saying that he had rats in his barn. On his way home he stopped at the Stannard house and asked for a drink of water, leading Mary to the spring near her house. He told her he would meet her at nearby but secluded Whippoorwill Rock later that afternoon to give her the pills. Instead he gave her a cup of water with the ounce of arsenic in it, and when she began screaming in pain he hit her over the head with a large piece of wood, knocking her to the ground. He then fatally stabbed her in the throat with his knife before arranging her body with her hands over her stomach.
Between the evidence from the postmortem exam and the gossip of the townspeople, all fingers pointed at Herbert and he was arrested. A hearing was held on September 9th with a significant amount of back-and-forth between prosecution and defense. The prosecution had a knife belonging to Reverend Hayden which, according to their expert witness, had traces of human blood. They wanted to admit it as evidence, but only if the defense attorney couldn’t have access. When the judge said that everyone should be able to have access to that piece of evidence, the prosecution didn’t enter it at all.
Three more autopsies and postmortem exams were done that resulted in Mary’s organs being preserved in glass jars. After all this, they revealed two major pieces of evidence. The first was that Mary was not pregnant, nor was she ever, and likely had an ovarian cyst. The second was that she had enough arsenic in her stomach to have killed at least twenty people.
It was then revealed that Herbert had purchased the ounce of arsenic on the day of Mary’s murder. He told the court that the arsenic could be found in his barn and he did not use it to poison Mary, but multiple experts testified that when examining the arsenic under a microscope, the pattern of the arsenic crystals from the sample in the barn did not match the sample of the arsenic purchased from the drug store in Middleton. The arsenic sold in Middleton, however, matched the arsenic found in Mary’s stomach.
After a drawn-out hearing and even longer trial, the jury began deliberating on January 16th, 1880, and after 82 hours, they told the judge that they were a hung jury. One of the jurors, a farmer named David Hotchkiss, believed that Herbert was guilty and didn’t believe him or his wife’s testimonies. As a result of this, the State Attorney agreed to release Reverend Hayden upon payment of bond, and he was welcomed back into the Methodist church with open arms. He stayed there for a bit before going back to being a carpenter. He was never retried and died of liver cancer at the age of 57.
No one was ever convicted for the murder of Mary Stannard.
Image sources:
mail.murderpedia.org - “Rev. Herbert H. Hayden”