The Saga of Bessie Webster – Part V

This postcard image shows Wethersfield Prison in 1911. Bessie (Webster) Wakefield, sent here after her 1913 sentencing, worked in the prison laundry. (Middlebury Historical Society scan).

By DR. ROBERT L. RAFFORD

Part V of V – By November 1913, the fates of Bessie Wakefield and James Plew had been sealed by the court: death by hanging. Suffragists from across the nation had already begun their attempts to save Bessie, mother of three, from the gallows. Petitions for commutation were submitted to Governor Simeon E. Baldwin of Connecticut, the Board of Pardons and the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors.

Most suffragists (as they were known in America; their British counterparts were called suffragettes) were opposed to capital execution entirely. Many suggested that Bessie received less justice because she was a woman.

A prominent women’s rights activist, Alva Erskine (Smith) (Vanderbilt) Belmont (1853-1933) delivered an impassioned view: “A woman is sentenced to be hanged in Connecticut. The verdict is rendered by a jury of men. The judge is a man, the lawyers are men. The laws are man made. Therefore we have a one-sided view of the question of justice. No woman has been consulted, yet we are dealing entirely with woman nature – a woman’s life … Do you know any man who would stand for such injustice? Give us the woman nature in the making of the laws for woman crime. Give us half of the woman nature in the jury box … give us a sensible judge who will know or understand something of that woman nature. In fact, give us justice, which I claim this Connecticut woman has not had.” (The New York Times).

Bessie’s mother, (Mary (Corliss) Webster (1856-1929), pleaded for her daughter’s life in a letter to Governor Baldwin: “I am praying as I write that God will direct you to save my daughter from death. The law is harsh and cruel. We have no money, no influence, no hope but that which God gives to all His Children. Do not hang her. Let us work the penalty out. I am old now, and my children do not need me. Let me come to New Haven and live in the prison with my girl. Together we shall work to pay the state what Bessie owes.”

Because Bessie’s appeals were not complete, her date with the gallows was postponed. However, James Plew, her paramour, was hanged on March 4, 1914, for the murder of William O. Wakefield.

A few days, later, First Lady Ellen (Axson) Wilson (1860-1914), received a letter asking her to speak with her husband, President Woodrow Wilson, to consider intervening for the life of Bessie Wakefield. She showed him the letter and he turned the matter over to the National Department of Justice. In April, the Connecticut Supreme Court found errors in her trial and ordered a new one the following July.

In July 1913, Bessie Wakefield was found guilty of second-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison. Jurors would later state they would have voted to convict her of manslaughter only. She was committed to Wethersfield Prison in Wethersfield, Connecticut, built in 1827, where her uncle Daniel Webster (see Part I) had died in 1895; she was assigned to the prison laundry.

Each year Bessie’s lawyers petitioned the Connecticut Board of Pardons for clemency, asking them to shorten her sentence or pardon her. In 1930, all women prisoners in Wethersfield Prison were removed to the state’s new facility in Niantic, a section of East Lyme, Connecticut, now called York Correctional Institution. From 1928 to 1933, socially prominent men and women continued to call for clemency, including the Rev. John M. Lewis, prominent minister of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Waterbury, who stated “the life that was sentenced for the crime has ended; she is mentally, morally and spiritually a new woman.” (Hartford Courant)

To her stunned silence, then followed by tears of joy, on November 6, 1933, Bessie Wakefield was told she had received a full pardon, and was released from the Niantic prison. Bessie, then 44, would go to live with an elderly couple in Reading, Pennsylvania. No details about her future life were ever reported in newspapers.

Thus ends the story of one of the most famous criminal cases in our nation’s history, a cause célèbre involving a love triangle, domestic violence, politics, genetics, and ethnic and social disparities from a tiny New England town – Middlebury.

You are urged to join the Middlebury Historical Society by going online at MiddleburyHistoricalSociety.org or visiting them on Facebook. Questions about membership can be sent to Bob at robraff@comcast.net.

Note: This column appeared in print in the August 2023 issue of the Middlebury Bee-Intelligencer.