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| Avis Linnell (Tacoma Times. December 29, 1911) |
Avis Linnell was nineteen when she died at
the Young Women’s Christian Association building on Warrenton Street in Boston.
She was engaged to the Reverend Clarence
V. T. Richeson. After they married, the couple planned on doing missionary work
in the Orient, maybe in China or India.
Clarence Virgil Thompson Richeson came
from a well-to-do Virginia family. His father ran a profitable farm near
Lynchburg, and his brother, Dr. Walter A. Richeson, had a thriving medical
practice.
Richeson was born in 1876. When he was
fourteen, he traveled to Amherst and attended high school there. After that, he
moved to Carrollton, Missouri, and attended the Carrollton Academy.
A friend described him as handsome,
courteous, and proud, with black hair. The Boston Globe said Richeson
was a “tall, handsome, smooth-faced, and smooth-voiced man.” His voice was
“soft” and “musical,” almost too much for a pretty young girl to resist.
Richeson entered William Jewell College at
Liberty, Missouri, developed his oratorical skills, then cheated on an exam. A
smart man would have walked away. Richeson sued the school for slander and was
forced to confess. The school agreed to hush everything up if he dropped the
suit, so Richeson walked away scot-free.
He moved to Louisville, Kentucky, to
attend the Southern Baptist Seminary. Along the way, he did some preaching at
back-country churches.
Women liked him and showered him with gifts. Patsey Peltz of St. Louis loaned him $700 so he could continue his studies. He told his college friends “that women attracted him so much and were so much attracted by him as to make his life difficult to keep straight.”
But there were problems. One time at
William Jewell College, he loved a girl too much. She told him to go, but he
would not leave her house, saying he would stay there until she changed her
mind. The family had to call his friends to take him home.
(Evening Star. October 22, 1911)
In 1906, he moved east and enrolled in the Newton Theological Seminary, from which he graduated by the skin of his pants in 1909.
While Richeson was a student there, Moses
G. Edmands, a trustee of the seminary, invited him to his home in Brookline,
where he met his daughter, Violet. She was young, pretty, and rumored to be
worth a half-million dollars on her own—more if something happened to her
father.
Richeson met Avis Linnell when he was
preaching at the Baptist Church in Hyannis in 1909. She sang in the church
choir, and over time, they wound up spending more time together.
Avis was born in 1891 in Hyannis,
Massachusetts. She was young and beautiful, and from all accounts, had a great
singing voice.
Whether she attracted Richeson or him her,
no one can say. Maybe Richeson heard Avis singing in the church choir and
complimented her on her voice. They talked about music, people, and the
church—it doesn’t matter. Avis got more involved in the church, assuming big
and small projects. She followed the minister around and asked questions.
It began innocently enough.
They took a walk around town. Avis
introduced Richeson to the people and businesses, helping him get a feel for
the area.
When the townspeople saw them riding a
bicycle together or swimming at the beach, they whispered to each other about
the budding relationship between the young girl and the pastor.
There was a thirteen-year difference in
their ages, but she was a good girl, and he was the minister, so it seemed like
a perfect match.
It did not take long before Richeson’s
mouth got him in trouble. He modernized his sermons, used poorly chosen words
to address his audience, and, worse still—spoke critically of the church
deacons.
(Perth Amboy Evening News. October 27, 1911)
In April 1910, the church board had enough of Richeson and forced the junior minister to quit or be fired, so Richeson resigned rather than suffer the humiliation of being removed from the pulpit.
He returned to Boston and became pastor of
the Immanuel Baptist Church. That brought him closer to Violet Edmands, and he
soon rekindled that relationship. It put the good Reverend in a quandary. “The
poor devil didn’t know which he loved,” wrote The Boston Globe, “the
little Cape Cod girl who loved him so desperately and so simply, or the
accomplished Brookline young woman whose very pride he dreaded if disclosures
should come.”
And then, in the winter of 1910-1911,
Richeson asked Violet Edmands to be his wife. Now, he was on the hook to two
women—one secretly and the other openly. The situation could be embarrassing
for any man—more so for a minister.
Richeson went to Hyannis and told Avis’s
family it was a mistake—he was not engaged to Violet Edmands. Avis believed
him.
Avis stopped wearing her engagement ring
that summer. When friends asked about it, she said Richeson was getting it
reset and cleaned. Pretty soon, talk about their marriage dried up.
That fall, Avis moved to Boston to study
vocal music at the New England Conservatory of Music. She got a room at the
Young Women’s Christian Association on Warrenton Street.
Avis’s friends said she seemed out of it.
She went to Boston to study music but invested less than four hours a week in
her studies—two hours of voice training and two hours of piano lessons.
October passed, and the lovers still had not married. Richeson dropped a bombshell in the Spring of 1911 when he announced his engagement to Violet Edmands.
When asked about the announcement, Avis told her friends and family it was a mistake. Richeson spent most of that summer in Hyannis, much of it with Avis, so people believed her.
What they didn’t know was that Richeson sent Violet Edmands a bouquet every Saturday while he was away. Other times, Richeson slipped away on business for days or a week at a time. He visited Violet at her family’s summer home in Dublin, New Hampshire, where they were seen bicycling and horseback riding together.
(Star-Gazette. October 23, 1911)
When Avis returned to Boston in the fall, she was quiet and reserved. If anyone asked about Richeson or her engagement, Avis shutdown or walked away.
In mid-October, the Richeson and Edmands
mailed out 500 wedding invitations, so if Avis had doubts about Richeson’s
intentions, that should have settled them.
The afternoon she died, Avis and Richeson
ate lunch at the Oak Grove Farm Café near Berkeley Street. They walked out in
the Back Bay toward the Fens, and he explained he had a solution to her
problem. It would get rid of the baby, and no one would know.
He handed her the cyanide of potassium
powder and told her to mix it in the water while taking a hot footbath. Why
wouldn’t she trust him? She loved him.
Avis told her friends at the Y.W.C.A. that
she had been given some medicine to cure her headaches. Investigators assumed
she thought Richeson had given her some sort of abortion potion.
On October 14, Avis took a bath at the Y.W.C.A.
Soon after she entered the room, the other girls heard moans and groans from
within the room.
They broke the door down and found Avis
sitting in a chair with her feet soaking in hot water. The matron called the
City Hospital for an ambulance, but it was too late. They carried Avis to her
bed, where she died.
When the Y.W.C.A. notified Richeson of
Avis’s death, he seemed upset—not because she was dead, but because they had
bothered him.
“Why do you tell me?” he asked. “Did she
say anything before she died?”
The doctor said it looked like suicide,
but he did not think Avis intended to kill herself in the bathroom. Maybe she
took the poison by mistake—believing it was something else.
The autopsy showed Avis ingested potassium
cyanide in crystal form and died almost instantly. The doctor told the police
he believed foul play might have been involved.
A week after Avis’s death, the police
learned Clarence Richeson bought cyanide of potassium at the Newton Center drugstore.
When police questioned druggist William Hahn, he said Richeson bought the
poison to “kill a female dog that was about to have pups.” The druggist
suggested chloroform, but the reverend wanted nothing that left a smell. Hahn
found the purchase unusual because Richeson bought enough to kill ten people.
When he left, Richeson “cautioned me not
to tell anyone of the purchase,” said Hahn.
Detectives arrested Richeson at his
fiancé’s home in Chestnut Hill. His hearing was set for October 31, Richeson’s
wedding day.
“The circumstantial evidence seems to
indicate that Richeson is guilty,” said Police Chief Dugan. “He toyed with the
affections of nearly every young woman who fascinated him without regard for
results.” And then, the chief added a little-known piece of evidence. Avis
Linnell was three and a half months pregnant at the time of her death.
Clarence Richeson stabbed himself in the
groin with a jagged piece of tin on December 22, 1911, at 2:30 a.m., just as
the guards were changing. They found him lying on the floor in a pool of blood,
writhing in pain.
Later, doctors decided Richeson did not
try to kill himself, but wanted to castrate himself as punishment for getting
Avis pregnant and then killing her.
Richeson confessed to killing Avis Linnell and
her unborn baby on January 3, 1912, and accepted responsibility for the crime
but would not say how or why he did it.
When detectives searched Richeson’s room in
Cambridge, they did not find any telltale signs of his relationship with Avis
Linnell—no love letters or notes—just a gelatin capsule filled with headache
powder. That explained how Richeson gave the poison to Avis.
Medical Examiner Timothy Leary found traces of
a gelatin capsule at the autopsy. It would have been easy for the pastor to
substitute the poison for the harmless headache powder before he gave the
capsule to the girl.
Richeson admitted he gave Avis a capsule filled
with cyanide and told her to take the medicine when she went to bed that night.
He withdrew his not-guilty plea and pleaded
guilty to murder. Judge Sanderson explained that because Avis took the capsule,
not knowing what it was, the crime “could be nothing but first-degree murder.”
He sentenced Richeson to be electrocuted during the fourth week of May 1912.
On May 14, Richeson was taken to the death
house at the Charlestown State Prison. His cell was just twenty feet from the
electric chair. He changed into a black suit worn by those about to die and was
escorted to his cell. Richeson smiled as he walked out of his cell, shook
hands with his attorney, William Morse, then walked to the death chamber.
Richeson closed his eyes as he sat in the
electric chair and kept them closed until the end. The current was turned on at
12:10 a.m. He was dead by 12:17 a.m.
Clarence Richeson left no public
statement. But before he died, he told his attorney, “That he had failed here,
but he had suffered enough to know he would be forgiven. He was glad to go and
have the opportunity for a larger service in another world.”
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