One swift blow to the head with an ax handle while he slept and Elisha Wilson, of Great Island, was dead.
Later, his young wife, Louisa, and her ex-lover, Thomas Thorn, who was renting a room in the couple’s house, claimed Elisha Wilson died after falling out of bed. The gaping wound behind his ear told another story, one closer to the truth.
Thus, two murder trials followed that spring of 1843, one for each lover. Because they were sensational, statewide news, Maine’s growing cadre of newspapers covered every detail. Louisa Wilson eventually was acquitted and faded fast into obscurity. Thorn, her former beau, originally sentenced to hang, became one of the longest-serving inmates of the 19th century at the state prison in Thomaston, attracting periodic newspaper coverage for the next 30 years.
“The man and woman charged with the murder of Elisha Wilson, at Harpswell, on Sunday morning last, were brought into the city yesterday afternoon,” read the lead story in Portland’s Eastern Argus newspaper on Thursday, Feb. 9, 1843.
Thorn, a 24-year-old seaman from Long Island, New York, had courted the then-teenage Louisa Alexander two years earlier in Harpswell. However, when Thorn went back to sea, she’d married Elisha Wilson, who was about twice her age. Then, in November 1842, Thorn returned to Harpswell and began renting a room in Elisha and Louisa Wilson’s home. That’s when people began to talk.
“The neighbors have been a little suspicious that too great a degree of familiarity existed between Thorn and Mrs. Wilson,” wrote Bangor’s Daily Whig and Courier while awaiting the court dates.
Thorn’s trial got underway May 3, 1843.
Elisha Wilson’s brother testified he’d once caught Thorn and Louisa Wilson alone in a room with the door closed. On a different occasion, he said, he’d seen Thorn with his arm around her, sitting in her lap.
A Brunswick druggist then testified that he’d sold Thorn some arsenic.
Another witness said Thorn told him Elisha Wilson wouldn’t live to see the spring.
Three doctors who’d examined the corpse said the deadly, skull-fracturing wound near one of Elisha Wilson’s ears could not have been caused by a fall from bed and was most definitely caused by an external blow.
Prosecutors maintained that Thorn, having motivation and opportunity, must have killed Elisha Wilson in hopes of having Louisa for his wife.
Then, an intercepted jailhouse letter from Thorn to Louisa Wilson was read into evidence.
“When you come to court you must mind how you talk, or they will hang me,” Thorn wrote. “I want you to clear me. If you don’t, I shall be willing to die for you.”
But neither Louisa Wilson nor any other witness was called to testify in Thorn’s defense. He was found guilty and sentenced to death on the morning of May 10.
“We rejoice that the majesty of the law has been asserted,” concluded the Argus before continuing with Louisa Wilson’s trial, which began the same afternoon.
She stuck to her original story — that her husband, not feeling well the night before, awoke in the night and began to rise, but collapsed and hit his head before she could light a candle. Two witnesses who came to the house later that morning, however, claimed it looked as though Louisa had never slept in her bed at all.
Still, by noon the next day, the judge called a halt to the trial, citing no real evidence against Louisa Wilson. Prosecutors shrugged and, with the jury’s approval, she was acquitted.
“She never in the least degree, we think, aided and abetted in the violent death of her husband,” the Argus opined. “Thorn was the Spirit of Evil in this business.”
But the paper then slapped a shocking, late-breaking twist into that day’s edition, stating that shortly after leaving court, Louisa Wilson confessed to knowing all along that Thorn killed her husband.
She’d found him on the stairwell, just outside her bedroom, moments after Elisha Wilson expired. Louisa Wilson also swore she had nothing to do with planning the awful deed and that the killer coerced her into repeating the “falling out of bed story” under threat of violence.
Not to be outdone, Thorn then admitted to the murder in a written confession, but said Louisa Wilson had put him up to it.
“She asked me several times, when I would kill him,” Thorn wrote. “She kept at me and would not let me rest until I consented to do it.”
The Augusta paper stated it didn’t believe either one of them and that the exact truth, other than the fact Thorn did the killing, would never be known.
Although sentenced to death, Thorn was never hanged for his crime. Instead, he languished in prison for decades. Maine governors, who served one-year terms at the time, rarely signed death warrants, and Thorn’s sentence was ignored by 19 of them.
In July 1862, The Lewiston Falls Journal ran a front-page story on Thorn, 19 years after his time on death row began. By then, at age 44, he was the oldest man at the prison.
“Poor Thorn,” the journal wrote, “a victim of love and jealousy.”
The paper also reported that Thorn had become a model inmate who’d learned the shoemaking trade and was holding out hope of a pardon. It eventually came, 10 years later, in 1872, when Gov. Sidney Perham set him free.
Belfast’s Republican Journal newspaper noted that much had passed in the world while Thorn was behind bars, then waxed grimly poetic.
“Outside the narrow limits of his prison the events of the great world moved on,” it printed on Page 2. “Summer and winter, seed time and harvest were naught to him. … He was dead to them all.”
The Whig and Courier wondered aloud what would become of Thorn after his release.
“Is he to suffer a double condemnation — the double punishment that community too often inflicts upon the criminal?” it pondered. “Is he to stand among men with the stripes of his prison garb burned indelibly into his flesh?”
It’s a question the Whig and Courier, along with Maine’s other newspapers, left unanswered. None ever again reported fresh news about Thorn or Louisa Wilson. Even their gravesites remain unknown.
