The Official Report of the Trial of Sarah Jane Robinson for the Murder of Prince Arthur Freeman, in the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, From Notes of Mr. J. M. W. Yerrinton. [With autograph letter by the murderer]

The official report on the first of two trials of Sarah Jane Robinson, the "Massachusetts Borgia," who murdered her landlord and seven of her own family members, with a brazen letter from the murderer herself to Massachusetts Justice Waldbridge A. Field, requesting a private meeting.

After the death of her parents, Sarah Jane (Tennant) Robinson emigrated from Ireland to the U.S. at the age of fourteen, and at nineteen married Moses Robinson, a carpenter. They lived in poverty, dogged by creditors and moving frequently to escape unpaid rent. She gained notoriety in the 1880s for committing a series of murders, beginning with her elderly landlord in August 1881 and followed by her husband (1882), their young daughter (1884), her sister and brother-in-law (1885), an older daughter, her seven-year-old nephew, and her son William (1886). Most of Robinson's victims were insured-some thanks to her own urging-and she found ways of becoming the beneficiary: in the case of her sister and brother-in-law, whose insurance benefited their young son, she simply adopted her nephew and "put [him] out of the way" ("A Bay State Borgia").

Robinson was tried twice-first for William's murder, and then for those of her sister and brother-in-law, their son, her landlord, and her husband. This volume is the report on the first trial. Robinson's letter, dated May 30, 1888, was written from "E. Cambridge Jail" after the second trial. It reads in full:

Judge Field Dear Sir:-

As you well know I am here charged with one of the highest crimes known to the law & convicted by false evidence since my trial I have not felt able to be off my bed having been quite sick.

Would it be asking too much if you could find time for me to have a short interview with you I want to see you very much hoping you will grant me the favor of seeing you I remain

Respectfully

Sara J Robinson

Excised from a different sheet and affixed above the letter is the autograph of Judge Walbridge A. Field (1833-1899). Originally from Vermont, Field studied at the Harvard Law School and practiced law in Boston in between periods of service as the Assistant Attorney General of the United States, Republican Representative to the House of Representatives, and justice-eventually Chief Justice-of the Massachusetts Supreme Court (1881-1899).

Accounts differ as to what finally tipped off the police to Robinson's guilt-the increasingly frequent insurance payouts to her, or the fact that William, after being struck on the back by a falling object at work, became, in his mother's care, seriously ill with the same stomach convulsions that had carried off his siblings, aunt, uncle, and cousin. A suspicious doctor, Emory White, sent a sample of William's vomit to Harvard chemist and toxicologist Edward Wood, who found it to contain arsenic. Eventually, all Robinson's victims were exhumed, and all were found to have been poisoned with arsenic. While "nursing" her victims, Robinson apparently had several premonitions and prophetic dreams about their imminent deaths, which soon-or at least, as soon she confirmed that their life insurance was in order-became reality. After her imprisonment, newspapers reported the discovery of a box of rat poison in a hole in the wall of her former basement: "That it may have been there before Mrs. Robinson took the house of course is possible, but the police firmly believe that Mrs. Robinson placed it where it was found" ("Circumstantial Evidence").

Naturally, newspapers were inclined to sensationalize Robinson's story, the interest of which was no doubt increased because she had an "intelligent" face and "the appearance of a refined woman" ("Arsenic Grains Found"). Around the time of her sentencing in November, 1888, however, "public sentiment had turned in Mrs. Robinson's favor and a petition to commute her sentence [from death by hanging] to life in prison" was submitted to and granted by the Governor (Wilhelm). Her sympathetic bearing in court, as well as her gender, may have had something to do with this. A modern author, also sympathetic, put it this way: "If there is shrewd calculation in such long-range plans as her elimination of Annie [her sister] to get at Prince [her brother-in-law], there is also a desperate necessity in picking off one insured worker after another. In the circle of poverty, no person's work was as valuable as life insurance; and even that lump-the sum of a person's life-was never, in the long run, enough" (Jones, p. 156). Robinson died in prison on January 3rd, 1906.

REFERENCES: "A Bay State Borgia," Morning Journal and Courier, [New Haven, CT], 13 August 1886; "Arsenic Grains Found," Fall River Daily Herald, 13 August 1886, p. 1; "Circumstantial Evidence," Boston Evening Transcript, 31 May, 1888, p. 1; Jones, Ann. Women Who Kill (New York: The Feminist Press, 2009), pp. 149-157; Wilhelm, Robert. "The Massachusetts Borgia," Murder by Gaslight online.