From the Middlesex County Historical Society, authored by Jesse Nasta, Executive Director
One hundred and eighty-two years ago, in 1843, the murder of Mrs. Lavinia Bacon shocked Middletown, Connecticut, and made national headlines. The murder and subsequent trial, detailed in newspapers and a pamphlet, horrified readers and sparked a thirst for vengeance, leading to a semi-public execution that highlights nearly two-century-old debates over the death penalty, crime, and punishment in Connecticut.
Mrs. Bacon and her husband, Ebenezer, lived on the family homestead in the Westfield section of Middletown. Their house, which still stands on Country Club Road, was built by Ebenezer Bacon’s ancestors around 1760. The farm remained in the Bacon family until well into the 20th century, when Lavinia and Ebenezer’s descendants sold off most of the land for the building of Moody School.
On a Sunday morning in September 1843, that home was the site of a shocking murder. Lucian Hall, a 26-year-old farm laborer who had already served time in the state penitentiary in Wethersfield for “house breaking” (burglary), was living on a neighboring farm with his wife. Hall knew Ebenezer Bacon to be a “man of property” who would “probably have money” kept in his house. He decided to rob the house that Sunday morning, when he believed Mr. and Mrs. Bacon and their three children were all at church.
After climbing in through an open window, Hall fixed his attention on a desk in the front room (pictured at left). Finding it unlocked and containing cash, he was pocketing the money when Mrs. Bacon, who had unexpectedly stayed home from church that morning, approached him and asked, “Is this you Mr. Hall?”
In a gruesome scene, Hall killed Lavinia, a 47-year-old wife and mother of three, to avoid detection.
Hall fled with the money, which he hid in a barn. Authorities quickly rounded up and arrested two local “drunks,” William Bell and Bethuel Roberts, falsely suspected of the murder. Only later did several witnesses come forward to testify that Hall had been spotted walking towards the Bacon farm on the morning of the murder.
The three men- Hall, Bell, and Roberts- stood trial before the Superior Court at Middletown, a sensational event that involved over 40 witnesses.
At the last minute, Hall confessed all to his attorney and swore that he acted alone, saving the innocent William Bell and Bethuel Roberts from the gallows.
Hall was sentenced to be hanged on the afternoon of June 20, 1844, at the Middletown jail. Hall’s murder trial came on the heels of a long campaign against public executions, led by abolitionists and other human rights reformers. Previously, in Connecticut and throughout the 18th and early-19th-century United States, executions had been public events that attracted thousands of spectators of all ages. But, shortly before Hall’s trial, the campaign resulted in a new Connecticut state law banning public executions. Technically. Instead, Hall, dressed in white and attended on the scaffold by local Episcopal and Baptist clergy, was hanged behind a 15-foot wall, the first “sequestered execution” held in Connecticut. Still, within minutes of Hall’s death by hanging, the sheriff allowed the fired-up crowd to parade by the corpse while a military band played “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”
The sad tale, and maybe even the ghost, of Mrs. Lavinia Bacon live on nearly two centuries after her murder. Tenants in the former Bacon house on Country Club Road swore that they were haunted by nighttime footsteps on the stairs and drops the texture of blood oozing from the roof singles. Only later did they learn about the gruesome murder that had taken place in the house a century and a half earlier, the Middletown Press detailed in its front-page Halloween story in 1996.
Mrs. Bacon and her family are buried in Middletown’s Miner Cemetery. Miner Cemetery’s Facebook Page can be found HERE.
