At about a quarter to one on the afternoon of February 18, 1820, John and Lavinia Fisher were brought out of the Charleston District Jail on Magazine Street under armed guard, put into a carriage, and driven to a place in what the newspapers called the suburbs of the city, near the scene of their crimes. An immense crowd was waiting. At two o'clock, in the paper's phrase, the Fishers were launched into eternity. It was a year to the day since their arrest. She was about twenty-seven. By Bruce Orr's account she died at once and her husband struggled for several minutes. Both had insisted to the end that they were innocent.
Their crime was highway robbery. In South Carolina in 1820 that was a hanging offense, and it is what the Court of General Sessions for Charleston District had convicted them of in May 1819. Lavinia Fisher was never tried for murder, never convicted of murder, and no contemporary record connects her to a killing. She is nonetheless described, in a great deal of published material and on the ghost tours that stop at the old jail, as America's first female serial killer. Nic Butler, historian at the Charleston County Public Library, has put it plainly: the Fishers were real, there is a paper trail of their trial, conviction and execution, and it is completely different from the story that has been fictionalized.
She was born about 1793; no birth record survives, and the year is worked back from her age at death. She and John ran the Six Mile House, a roadside inn about six miles north of Charleston on the Neck. The wagon trade coming in and out of the city mattered to its economy, and by early 1819 robberies on that road had become bad enough, and hard enough to solve because victims could not identify anyone, that a party of citizens decided to deal with it themselves.
In February 1819 they rode out. At the Five Mile House, run by another family, the occupants resisted, and the mob burned it down. At the Six Mile House the Fishers and their lodgers left when told to. The vigilantes searched the place, left a young man named David Ross behind to watch it, and moved on. When the Six Mile crowd came back, Ross was beaten, dragged before the gang, and brought to Lavinia Fisher, who, on the account that reached the court, took him by the throat and put his head through a window. He got away and went to the authorities.
A traveler named John Peeples, riding in toward Charleston, then stopped at the Six Mile House. Accounts differ on whether he got as far as a cup of tea. He was robbed of about forty dollars, and when he reached the city he swore that he had just cause to believe his attackers included William Hayward, John Fisher and his wife Lavinia Fisher, Joseph Roberts and John Andrews. With Ross's story and Peeples's affidavit together, the sheriff's deputy, Colonel Nathaniel Greene Cleary, got a bench warrant from Judge Charles Jones Colcock and rode out. The Fishers and several others, among them James McElroy, Seth Young and Jane Howard, gave up without a fight on February 18, 1819. More of the gang were picked up over the following days.
The Fishers were indicted for assault with intent to murder and for common assault, over Ross. The case that went to verdict was highway robbery, over Peeples, and they were convicted of it in May. Historians have pointed to the irregularity of convicting them on a charge that was not the one in the indictment. Only one other man arrested at the Six Mile House, William Hayward, was convicted and sentenced to death, in a separate trial.
While they waited, a grave was found about two hundred yards from the inn with two bodies in it, a white man and a Black woman, thought to have been dead some time. With so many people passing through the house, nobody could say who had killed them, and nobody was ever charged. Those two are the only human remains ever found at the Six Mile House.
The appeal kept them in the Charleston jail for most of a year, sharing a cell about six feet by eight. On September 13, 1819, they tried to escape down a rope of knotted linen. John reached the ground. The rope broke before Lavinia could follow, and he would not leave without her. Both were recaptured, and the guard on them was tightened. In January 1820 the motion for a new trial was refused, and on February 4 they were sentenced to hang. John took the counsel of a local minister, the Reverend Richard Furman; Lavinia, by the accounts that survive, only grew angrier. At the gallows Furman read out a letter John had written, saying that as a Christian he could not go to his death with a lie held to his account, that he was innocent, and that he forgave those who had wronged him in the courts. John then argued his case to a crowd of some two thousand and, in the same speech, asked their forgiveness.
What came afterward is the story most people know: guests plied with poisoned tea, a bed rigged to tip sleepers into a pit beneath the inn, hundreds of skeletons in the cellar, a bride hanged in her wedding dress. Even Peeples is folded into it: in the version most often retold he pours away tea he dislikes, sleeps in a chair by the door, hears the bed crash into a pit in the night and escapes through the window. What he swore to in Charleston was that he had been robbed. None of it appears in the trial record or in the newspapers of the time, which were interested in robbery, not in disappearances. Houses in the South Carolina Lowcountry do not have cellars to hide hundreds of bodies in. The most repeated line of all, that she told the crowd to give her any message they had for the devil because she would be seeing him shortly, comes from later retellings and has never been verified.
The most careful modern account is Six Miles to Charleston, published in 2010 by Bruce Orr, a former detective with the Charleston County Sheriff's Office, who worked from the documents rather than the tours. What the documents show is a married couple who ran a roadhouse that sheltered a gang of highway robbers, who were caught after a vigilante raid, a beating and a stolen forty dollars, and who were hanged together for robbery.