Joshua Spooner was a wealthy farmer living in Brookfield, Massachusetts who met his untimely end due to a murder plot by his wife and three soldiers, two that were British and one of whom was an American.
The story starts in the spring of 1777 when Ezra Ross, a sixteen year old Continental soldier fell ill and was nursed by Joshua Spooner’s wife, Bathsheba. Following his recovery, Ross made subsequent visits to the Spooner home and an affair between Ross and Bathsheba began.
When Bathsheba became pregnant by him in mid-January 1778, she began urging Ross to murder her husband. Ross was hesitant but agreed and accompanied Joshua Spooner on an extended trip to Princeton in February with the intention of carrying out the crime. He backed out of the first murder plot however by deciding not to poison Spooner with a bottle of nitric acid. Instead, Ross returned to his home in Linebrook, MA.
While both Ross and Spooner were away, Bathsheba, whose father General Timothy Ruggles was a prominent tory and loyalist to King George III, invited two escaped prisoners of war, British soldiers James Buchanan and William Brooks to stay at the Spooner home. She talked them into the plot of murdering her husband and wrote to Ross informing him of the news. Ross returned just a few days before the murder took place. Brooks committed the actual murder, killing Spooner when he returned home from a local tavern on March 1, 1778. Ross and Buchanan helped him hide the body by stuffing it down the Spooner well.
The crime was discovered after Brooks and Buchanan went to Worcester and Brooks showed off the silver shoe buckles with Spooner’s initial at one of the taverns there. They were arrested shortly after along with Ezra Ross and Bathsheba Spooner and tried for Joshua Spooner’s murder. Bathsheba was blamed for enticing the soldiers to commit the crime and all were found guilty and sentenced to hang.
Bathsheba asked for a postponement of her execution, citing that she was pregnant. She was examined twice. The first panel concluded she was not pregnant but a second panel upheld that she was. Perhaps owing to her loyalist connections and the general anti-tory sentiment of Revolutionary War Massachusetts, Bathsheba was hung alongside James Buchanan, William Brooks, and her lover Ezra Ross in Washington Square in Worcester, Mass, on July 2, 1778 in front of a large crowd of spectators.
The Spooner case was the first capital murder case tried in the United States under the newly formed American government.
Joshua Spooner was reburied in Brookfield Cemetery sometime after his brutal murder in 1778. His gravestone is near the retaining wall at the cemetery. It is believed his headstone was most likely installed several years after his murder based on the style of grave-carving used.
(The information used to write this article was primarily drawn from the Wikipedia article on Bathsheba Spooner. For those interested, there is a book entitled "Murdered by His Wife" concerning the Spooner murders. I have not had the chance to read it yet though.)
You can also listen to the CBS radio drama version of this crime by searching for Crime Classics. It is under the case of Bathsheba Spooner, the first woman executed for capital murder under the American system of government.
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Grave reads as follows:
JOSHUA SPOONER
Murdered Mar. 1, 1778.
by three soldiers of the
Revolution.
Ross, Brooks, and Buchanan
at the instigation of
his wife Bathsheba.
They were all executed
at Worcester.
July 2. 1778.