Martha Grinder was executed at Pittsburgh on January 19, 1866. She had been convicted of the first-degree murder of her neighbor Mary Caroline Carothers, who died in Allegheny City on August 1, 1865. The trial dealt with that death alone. Before the sentence was carried out, Grinder admitted that she was also responsible for the death of a young woman, Jane R. Buchanan, in Pittsburgh in February 1864. That second death was never put before a court.
The reference work Dictionary of Women Worldwide gives Grinder's years as 1815 to 1866. The historian Bill Lofquist, who maintains a history of the death penalty in Pittsburgh, writes that she and her husband married in Louisville and moved to Pittsburgh in 1859. Her husband worked as a coal miner. The couple first lived in a modest house in Pittsburgh and later moved across the Allegheny River to a nicer house in Allegheny City. By Lofquist's account, Martha was ambitious for more money than her husband earned, and in Allegheny City she became known for her neighborliness. Her husband came from a family with some property.
Lofquist also notes that Grinder had an earlier husband, who had died before the events of 1864 and 1865. The date of that death is not on record.
The earlier of the two deaths Grinder admitted was that of Jane R. Buchanan, who died in Pittsburgh on February 28, 1864, days after she joined the Grinder household. Nothing about her family, her age or her life before that week is on record.
Her death drew no charge at the time. It came back into view after Grinder was arrested in 1865. Grinder was never tried for it, and her admission, made shortly before her execution, is the only acknowledgment of it on record.
Mary Caroline Carothers lived next door to the Grinders in Allegheny City. She was married, and her husband's suspicions led to the case. She died on August 1, 1865. Grinder was arrested on August 26, 1865, according to Lofquist, and the authorities treated the death as a murder.
Lofquist also records that Mary Caroline Carothers's sister died under circumstances that were later regarded as suspicious. No charge was brought in that case.
Grinder was tried in Allegheny County for the murder of Mary Caroline Carothers alone. Lofquist reports that the prosecution called the victim's husband, neighbors, medical witnesses and a former member of the Grinder household. The names of the judges and counsel are not on record.
The jury found her guilty of first-degree murder on October 28, 1865. The John Osborne entry in the Dickinson College research project House Divided likewise places the guilty verdict in October 1865. It describes the conviction as one for the deaths of two women in what it calls separate and curious cases without clear motives, a description looser than the court record: only the 1865 death was tried.
On November 25, 1865, Grinder was sentenced to death. Two men, August Frecke and Benjamin B. Marschall, were sentenced to death in the same county on the same day, according to Lofquist, who writes that no appeals or pardon requests were undertaken for them. For Grinder, no appeal, application to the state's pardon authorities or petition for clemency is on record.
Grinder was executed on January 19, 1866. Lofquist's list of Allegheny County executions numbers hers as the twelfth entry and gives the same date. Steel City History, a Pittsburgh local-history site, places the execution at the earlier Allegheny County jail in Pittsburgh. The House Divided entry states that she was executed in Pittsburgh and calls her the third woman executed in the history of Pennsylvania. Lofquist writes that she was one of two women Pittsburgh executed within eight years, the only two women the city ever executed.
Before the execution Grinder acknowledged two deaths. Dictionary of Women Worldwide records that she confessed to the death of Mrs. Carothers and to that of Jane R. Buchanan. Lofquist and the House Divided entry agree, and the House Divided entry adds that she denied guilt in the other cases of which she was suspected. In short, her statement was an admission of the one death for which she had been convicted and of the one other for which she had not been tried. The wording of the statement itself is not on record.
The newspapers of the day attributed a larger number of deaths to Grinder. Lofquist's page on serial murder in Pittsburgh describes her as suspected in several deaths of family members who stood to benefit her financially, and his page on her case names other deaths in her husband's family in the autumn of 1864 and among her neighbors. None of these deaths was the subject of a trial or a verdict, and she denied them. Lofquist writes that the sensational press exaggerated her crimes, that many allegations were not properly investigated, and that the total number of victims is uncertain. He also reports a claim in the press that she was a skilled shoplifter; it was never tested in court.
The record therefore supports two deaths only: one by verdict, one by admission.
Her husband outlived her. Lofquist reports that he died in Parker, Pennsylvania, on February 24, 1892.
1815: Birth year given in a reference work.
1859: Martha Grinder and her husband move from Louisville to Pittsburgh.
February 28, 1864: Death of Jane R. Buchanan in Pittsburgh (admitted by Grinder before her execution, never tried).
August 1, 1865: Death of Mary Caroline Carothers in Allegheny City.
August 26, 1865: Grinder arrested.
October 28, 1865: Verdict of guilty of first-degree murder.
November 25, 1865: Sentenced to death.
January 19, 1866: Executed at Pittsburgh.
February 24, 1892: Death of her husband at Parker, Pennsylvania.