We pray that the young girl never knew who and what struck her. At the moment of her death it would have been best if she were preoccupied with a toy or a household chore. At worst, she would have turned her head at the last moment, reacting to the sound of a creaking floorboard perhaps, and seen both her mother’s face and the rapid descent of an ax.
It was late November 1862 and this was the second killing on Islesboro in only six years. Both killers were named Brown. They were not blood relations though both spilled blood and are the only known killers in the history of Islesboro.
Joseph Brown slashed his wife Ann’s throat with a large household knife in the spring of 1856. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to hang. While incarcerated at the state prison in Thomaston, Joseph broke the mirror in his cell and with a shard of broken glass cut his own throat. The prison doctor wrote that Joseph’s was the only death in the facility that year.
A little more than six years later Joseph’s sister-in-law Esther Brown, formerly Esther Boardman, killed her four-year-old daughter with an ax, “almost cleaving the head in twain,” reported the Belfast Republican Journal. Esther was never prosecuted.
Though the murder of Ann Brown is recorded in the History of Islesboro the killing of Lucinda Brown is absent. There may be two reasons for this omission. First, Joseph Brown was publicly tried and found guilty of murder. His jury believed that was mentally capable of planning his wife Ann’s death and of carrying it out rationally and with malicious intent.
Esther Brown, on the other hand, had a well-known history of insanity and had been an inmate of the Insane Hospital in Augusta for at least two years. A coroner’s inquest did not conclude that Esther acted rationally and with malice aforethought when she killed Lucinda. Esther was not tried and was probably returned to the hospital for life. Though Esther admitted the deed, the inquest attributed Lucinda’s death to “the hands of some person unknown.”
Joseph P. Farrow, author of the History of Islesboro, apparently did not include Lucinda’s killing in his work because his ethics restrained him from recording it. According to the jury in the coroner’s inquest an unknown hand had swung the ax, but Farrow couldn’t say that Esther murdered Lucinda without sounding like an island gossip. Murder is a legal term. Esther was never arrested for murdering Lucinda. Esther was a killer but not a murderess. So when Farrow wrote that there had been only one murder in the history of the island – the murder of Ann Brown by her husband, Joseph – he was expressing the perspective of a precise and ethical historian.
Farrow might also have sensed community reasons for not recording the killing. It may have been that the island people pitied Esther and were not inclined to humiliate a seriously mentally ill person. And Farrow might not have wanted to spare Capt. Royal Brown – Esther’s husband – and his descendents perpetual embarrassment or shame.
By 1860 or about midway between the two Brown killings, Islesboro was as populous as it has ever been, with 1,276 inhabitants. Royal Brown was born on the island in 1826. He was eight years younger than his bother Joseph. Royal and his two other brothers, Oliver and William, lived near each other on a southern part of the island. Joseph lived near the middle of the island on a site near where the public library stands today.
Esther Boardman was born in Hope, Maine. She was the daughter of William Boardman, a sea captain out of Islesboro but originally of Hope. Esther’s mother was Jane Ames of Islesboro. Royal and Esther married in 1847 and had six children, three of whom lived no longer than two years. The three surviving children were Elvira, Royal Jr. and Lucinda, ages 14, seven and four respectively.
Despite the coroner’s verdict, two local newspapers reported the story a little more than a week after it happened. The reports are brief but gruesome.
The Republican Journal reported that Esther Brown had been insane for several years before the killing and that she had been an inmate of the Insane Hospital at Augusta for a two-year period. The Progressive Age, also of Belfast, reported that when Esther returned from the hospital she had accompanied Royal on voyages at sea and that “nothing unusual was noticed in her conduct up to the time of the killing.” By late 1862, Royal concluded that Esther was well enough to care for Lucinda and Elvira while he returned to sea. Royal Jr. is not mentioned in the accounts so he might have accompanied his father.
On a Sunday afternoon, Elvira went to visit the family of one her uncles who lived nearby, leaving Esther and Lucinda alone. She spent the night at her uncle’s house and upon her departure Monday morning her uncle sent her home with a pair of shoes to give to Lucinda. When Elvira returned to the house only her mother was present. She asked for Lucinda but Esther’s responses were ambiguous. She said that Lucinda was around the house somewhere, or that she was out and wouldn’t need the shoes. Elvira began to worry and searched the house. Shortly she found a pool of blood in a cupboard underneath a sink. Fearing the worst and not able to find her sister, Elvira quickly left the house and alerted her neighbors. They came immediately, and after a search they found Lucinda’s body under the floor of the house. An ax covered with blood was also found.
The coroner concluded that Lucinda died from a single blow from the ax. The blade penetrated three inches into the girl’s skull, stopped just above her ear and nearly split her head in two. The Progressive Age reported that after the initial attack, Esther extracted the axe and twice pummeled the girl’s head with the axe handle.
At the inquest Esther at first said that she knew nothing about the death, but soon afterward confessed that she was sorry that she had killed the child. “Her conduct indicated decided insanity,” reported The Progressive Age. It is very likely that Esther was returned to the hospital in Augusta. Nothing is known about how and when Capt. Royal Brown learned about his daughter’s death and his wife’s culpability.
People talked. Though Esther was not arrested and prosecuted, everyone on the island knew she was insane and that she killed Lucinda. In a letter dated December 11, 1862, Sabrina Seely of Islesboro wrote to her sister Lukey, “I read an account of Esther Brown’s wickedness in the paper, poor old crazy wicked and depraved woman, it seems a mystery that Heaven don’t cut short her wild existence.”
The author of the History of Islesboro used discretion by omitting the story of Lucinda’s death from his work and, as a consequence, the story was forgotten. Records of the tragedy endured elsewhere, preserving the memory of an event that long ago shocked and distressed an island community.