An Axe Murder in Puritan New England

William Tuttle, son of Symon Tuttle and Isabel (Wells) Tuttle, along with his brothers, Richard and John, arrived in the New World aboard the ship Planter in 1635. Now, while his brothers settled in Massachusetts, William and his wife joined the colonists led by John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton and settled in New Haven, Connecticut. Together, William and Elizabeth had children: John, Hannah (Hurd), Thomas, Jonathan, David, Joseph, Sarah (Slawson), Elizabeth (Edwards), Simon, Benjamin, Mercy (Brown), and Nathaniel.

Now, their daughter Sarah had married John Slawson, and the couple had set up residence in Stamford. One evening in November of 1676, John had left before supper to visit a friend, and Sarah and her younger brother Benjamin had quarreled in his absence. Benjamin slammed out of the house, and Sarah asked her daughter to lock the door behind him. However, before she could even close the door, Benjamin returned with an axe! He swung the axe and shouted, "I will take you to be with God!" He continued to savagely pursue his sister into a fireplace and split her head open with one of his blows. Then, realizing what he had done, he fled the house and ran headlong into the forest.

At the trial which followed the evil deed, Benjamin would only say that he was afraid that his sister would kill him. The jury quickly returned a verdict of guilty and declared: "Thou has most wickedly risen up against thy sister Sarah the wife of John Slawson of Stamford . . . and smiteing her with an axe or some other instrument of death thou hast slayne her." He was promptly sentenced to death by hanging. However, before the sentence was carried out, Benjamin bequeathed his estate to his sister Elizabeth Edwards, the grandmother of the famous minister Jonathan Edwards ("Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God")

Interestingly, Elizabeth went on to have a moral scandal of her own in 1691. Her husband, Richard Edwards, divorced his wife after years of abuse and infidelity. Moreover, some have speculated that his grandmother's moral turpitude helped to inspire Jonathan's religious fervor.

That same year (1691) Sarah, Benjamin, and Elizabeth's younger sister Mercy was convicted of killing her son Samuel with an axe! According to the article by Dan Landrigan for the New England Historical Society, "Mercy admitted she had killed her son, but said it was not done out of malice. Instead, she said, the murder was committed 'at the instigation of the devil.'" He went on to note that the court later ruled that "Having weighed the evidences given in, to prove that she hath generally been in a crazed or distracted condition as well long before she committed the act, as at that time, and having observed since that she is in such a condition, do not see cause to pass sentence of death against her, but for preventing her doing the like or other mischief for the future, do order, that she shall be kept in custody of the magistrates of New Haven."

Landigran, Dan. Divorce, Murder and Madness: The Puritan Tuttles of New Haven Colony, New England Historical Society, 2026.

Some of the Ancestry and Descendants of Linda Westlake Hendrix Sito

The above is a snapshot of a chart I created many years ago.

 

Christenia Knouff Westlake