In the closing weeks of 1851, three members of one Cincinnati household died within a few weeks of each other: a mother and two of her small sons. Each had fallen suddenly ill. After the youngest boy died, a doctor at the post-mortem examination said he had taken arsenic, and an analysis later found arsenic in the stomachs of the mother, both boys and a woman from an earlier household. The person charged was the family's new nurse, Nancy Farrer, a young woman who had come from England as a child and who, according to witnesses, could read a little but could not write.
She was indicted for four deaths and tried for one, the death of two-year-old James Wesley Forrest. In March 1852 a Hamilton County jury found her guilty of first-degree murder, and she was sentenced to hang. One of her lawyers, appointed by the court, was a young Cincinnati attorney named Rutherford B. Hayes, who would later become governor of Ohio and president of the United States. He took her case to the Supreme Court of Ohio, which reversed the verdict in December 1853 because the jury had misbehaved while deliberating, and ordered a new trial. That trial never took place. In December 1854 a jury in the Probate Court found her "of unsound mind," and she was sent to an asylum. She is not, in law, a convicted murderer: the only verdict against her was set aside, and the question of her guilt was never put to a jury again.
The case is known chiefly from the Supreme Court of Ohio's 1853 opinion, from Hayes's own diary and letters as published by the Ohio Historical Society, from a detailed article on Hayes's law practice by Watt P. Marchman, director of the Hayes Library, in the journal Ohio History, from an 1876 campaign biography of Hayes, and from a 1987 law review article on the history of Ohio's insanity defense.
Nancy Farrer was born on July 24, 1832, in Lancashire, England, according to Marchman, who prints the name of her birthplace as "Fannington." Her father left England with a younger son when Nancy was about ten, and she and her mother followed about two years later.
Religion shaped the family. Several years before leaving England her mother had joined the Mormon church, and Nancy was said to have joined as well. Her father joined after reaching Cincinnati, and the family was said to have lived about two years at Nauvoo, Illinois, the Mormon settlement on the Mississippi. The Supreme Court opinion records the same outline: an English father who became a Mormon, who lived with his wife and daughter at Nauvoo, and who died of drunkenness in a Cincinnati hospital; and a mother who believed she was a prophetess. Marchman adds that the father drank heavily, twice tried to kill himself, and died in the city's Commercial Hospital in 1847. Nancy, according to testimony summarized in the opinion, thought of herself as "the same as her mother."
She grew up poor and with little schooling. She could read a little but could not write, and when she was asked to sign her indictment she made her mark. Hayes, in a diary entry quoted by Marchman, described her as very homely. Witnesses at her trial, as the Supreme Court later summarized them, described her as quiet and obedient but awkward and in many ways not capable: she rarely spoke unless spoken to, asked few questions, kept away from company and did what she was told. They also described her as unusually kind to children. The father of the boy named in the indictment testified that her conduct was very good and that no mother could have been kinder.
By 1851 Nancy was working in Cincinnati as a nurse. In July of that year, according to Marchman, she went to live with Mary Ann Green, who was recovering from childbirth. Mrs. Green's husband had gone away and left a large sum of money in her keeping. A family friend who visited judged that Nancy was not intelligent enough to nurse a sick woman, and he hired a second nurse, a Mrs. A. B. (she was later charged and acquitted), to help.
Mrs. Green was soon troubled by violent vomiting. Ice water prescribed to settle her stomach seemed instead to make it worse. Her baby died, and then she died too. Marchman places her death in October 1851; the Supreme Court opinion's summary of the evidence places the deaths of Mrs. Green and her baby earlier, in August. A neighbor later told of overhearing the two nurses talking. One said, "It's under the bolster, you can easily take it." Later the second nurse said, "Well, Nancy, you know more about it than the doctors," and Nancy answered, "I expect I do." The second nurse left soon after Mrs. Green's death.
Nothing in the court record states a motive. Marchman notes the money left in Mrs. Green's care; the Supreme Court majority found less evidence of motive in the Green household than in the Forrest case, and no evidence of malice toward anyone.
About three weeks after Mrs. Green's death, by Marchman's account, Nancy went to work for the Forrest family. The Supreme Court opinion puts her arrival at about October 27, 1851. She was a house servant with charge of the children.
The family's mother, Cassandra Forrest, fell violently ill after a supper that Nancy had prepared and served, and she died within five or six hours, on a Monday about a week after Nancy arrived, according to the opinion and Marchman together. A little more than three weeks after Nancy came, the older boy, John Edward, about eight, fell ill in the same way and died in less than an hour.
Then, at another meal, the father and a son named Billy were seized with vomiting. Both recovered. On December 1, 1851, according to Marchman, the remaining members of the family fell ill at dinner, and that night the youngest child, James Wesley, about two, died. The Supreme Court opinion's summary of the evidence says he became ill two days before he died, on a Wednesday. The two accounts differ on the timing.
This time the doctors suspected poison. At the post-mortem examination a physician said that the boy had taken arsenic. The bodies of John Edward Forrest and of Mrs. Green were exhumed, and Dr. Salter analyzed the stomachs of James Wesley, Mrs. Forrest, John Edward and Mrs. Green. Arsenic was found in all four. Nancy, Marchman notes, had not been ill at all.
The case against her was circumstantial. As the Supreme Court later summarized the testimony, druggists said she had bought arsenic from them several times, saying it was for rats. A clerk at Dr. Salter's drugstore testified that she bought arsenic from him about three weeks before the boy's stomach was analyzed. Marchman names three druggists who testified that they sold her arsenic, and two physicians who said they had seen her buy it. A paper label from Dr. Salter's drugstore was found on the stairs leading to her room, and a witness who saw her near the drugstore was told she had gone out for muslin.
Witnesses also repeated things she said. When Mrs. Forrest fell ill, Nancy remarked that she had been taken with vomiting and heaving the same as Mrs. Green. She told one woman that there had been five deaths in places where she had lived, naming Mrs. Green and her baby and the baby of another family she had worked for, which she said died a day or two after she left. She talked about a child's illness before it came and said she was preparing clothes for him. When it was suggested to her that she might have killed the children, she answered, "Maybe I did," in what seemed a joking way. Once, angry with a witness, she said, "You devil, you! I've a notion to kill you," and then put cold water instead of hot into the coffee boiler. Late on the night of the boy's death, a witness said, she sat by the fire wrapping and unwrapping a string around her fingers and biting it, as if thinking about something.
There was also talk of onion syrup. A witness had recommended it for the children, Nancy supplied it, and the boy later blamed it for his sickness; Nancy agreed with him and warned the witness against using it.
On December 4, 1851, the children's father swore an affidavit charging Nancy Farrer with the death of his youngest child. She was arraigned on December 8 in the Cincinnati Mayor's Court, where she was represented by John F. Hoy and Israel Garrard, and the county prosecuting attorney, Andrew J. Pruden, appeared for the state.
On January 10, 1852, a Hamilton County grand jury returned two indictments against her, and on January 15 she was arraigned on two more. Between them, according to Marchman, the indictments charged her with poisoning four people: Mrs. Green and the three Forrests. The second nurse from the Green household, Mrs. A. B., was indicted with her for Mrs. Green's death. Nancy was tried only for the death of James Wesley Forrest.
In January 1852, Rutherford B. Hayes was defending a man named Samuel Cunningham, in what he called in his diary his maiden effort in the criminal court. At the close of that case, Judge Robert B. Warden of the Court of Common Pleas appointed him to help defend Nancy Farrer.
Hayes saw at once what the appointment meant for him. In his diary for January 17, 1852, published by the Ohio Historical Society, he wrote that the court had appointed him to defend, or to assist in defending, "Nancy Farrer, the poisoner of two families," and that "It is the criminal case of the term." He expected it to draw more attention than anything he had yet handled. He set out his line of argument in the same entry: that a person's original constitution, early training and associations shape character, and so lessen responsibility. He planned to study medical jurisprudence on poisons and to read good speeches and poetry to improve his style. "Here is the tide," he wrote, "and I mean to take it at the flood."
J. Q. Howard's 1876 campaign biography of Hayes tells the same story in the warmer terms of its genre. It says Hayes faced public anger and the prejudices of judge and jury, worked hard to build his defense, and found, as he saw it, that she was not responsible because of inherited mental weakness and insanity, pointing to her father's drinking and her mother's belief that she was a prophetess. It also notes that the plea of insanity had been used so often for sane prisoners that it was widely distrusted.
The trial opened on February 18, 1852, in the Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas before Judge A. W. G. Carter. Andrew J. Pruden and P. McGroaty prosecuted. Hoy and Hayes defended.
The prosecution called the children's father, the druggists who said they had sold her arsenic and the physicians who said they had seen her buy it. The defense called Dr. J. R. Buchanan, a medical lecturer whose teaching, Marchman notes, dealt particularly with the brain. He testified that the general tone and temperament of her brain "would favor imbecility" and that she was "rather a subject for compassion than for punishment." Other physicians also gave evidence about her mental capacity; the Supreme Court later described them as intelligent doctors "of opposite faiths" who agreed that her capacity was limited.
The defense, as Judge Carter summarized it to the jury, made two arguments. First, the evidence was circumstantial and pointed at least as strongly toward someone else. Second, even if she had given the poison, she was not responsible because of imbecility or insanity. Judge Carter's charge on insanity, according to the 1987 law review article, rested on whether she could tell right from wrong.
Testimony closed on February 28. The jury retired at about three o'clock on a Saturday afternoon. After two nights and all of Sunday, it came back on Monday morning to ask for further instructions on imbecility. It returned again at about six o'clock on the evening of Tuesday, March 2, 1852, with a verdict: guilty of murder in the first degree.
Before Nancy was sentenced, Judge Carter tried Mrs. A. B., who had been indicted with her for the death of Mary Ann Green. Marchman tells what happened, citing the Cincinnati Gazette of March 1852. Nancy had told Hayes privately that the other woman had taught her how to give the poison, and had agreed to swear to it. On the witness stand she instead cleared Mrs. A. B. of any knowledge of the arsenic. The jury acquitted without leaving the box. When Hayes later asked Nancy why she had lied to him, she said that one woman was enough to hang for murder, and that she had not meant to hang the other.
Marchman notes that this woman's name is spelled several ways in the records: the Gazette's own spelling, a different one in Judge Carter's memoir, and a third in a later history of Cincinnati.
Hayes then spent two days arguing a motion for a new trial before Judge Carter. The grounds, he wrote to his uncle on April 5, 1852, concerned the conduct of juries while they deliberate, which he thought very interesting to the profession. The motion was overruled. Hayes blamed what he called the judge's eagerness to shine in sentencing the girl. In his diary for April 1, 1852, he recorded simply that he had argued his Nancy Farrer case, that she was convicted, and that he had nonetheless gained some laurels on the motion. He and Hoy were to share a fee of $150; Marchman records that Hayes received $75 from the Court of Common Pleas.
Judge Carter sentenced Nancy Farrer to be hanged in the yard of the Hamilton County jail between eleven in the morning and one in the afternoon.
The sentence of a young woman to death drew comment. On April 3, 1852, Hayes's mother, Sophia Birchard Hayes, wrote to him that if the governor pardoned Nancy, it would be only because she was a woman, and that women ought to be punished as severely as men, because women ought to be better than men.
On April 21, 1852, Hayes took the case to the District Court on a writ of error that listed six points of error. He asked that the sentence be suspended until the Supreme Court of Ohio could hear the case at Columbus, and the court granted the request.
Hayes prepared for the Supreme Court argument for more than a year. In his diary for October 14, 1852, he wrote that he would now begin reading for his argument before the court at Columbus, and that he meant it to be the best effort of his life. The published edition of his diary notes that some twenty pages written in the autumn of 1853 hold a detailed summary of the argument he was preparing.
The case was heard at the December 1853 term. Hayes argued for a new trial, and the state's attorney general, George E. Pugh, argued against it. Howard's campaign biography quotes the court reporter who heard it as calling Hayes's argument a truly admirable effort.
The Supreme Court of Ohio decided the case on December 15, 1853. The report is Farrer v. State, 2 Ohio St. 54. Three justices, John A. Corwin, Allen G. Thurman and Rufus P. Ranney, voted to reverse the judgment and order a new trial. Chief Justice Thomas W. Bartley dissented. Each wrote separately.
The one ground on which all three in the majority agreed was the conduct of the jury. Affidavits filed with the motion for a new trial, as the opinions describe them, showed that during the long deliberation some jurors had talked through the open windows of their room with people on the sidewalk below. No talk about the merits of the case was shown, but people outside had asked whether the jury had agreed, whether it was likely to agree and how it stood, and some of those questions were answered from the jury room. One juror asked the prosecuting attorney to have a change of clothes sent to another juror. Two jurors were given liquor, one of them possibly on a doctor's prescription. And one juror obtained a newspaper that printed part of the judge's charge. A deputy sheriff took the paper away when he saw it, but by then a juror had read the insanity section aloud, and the jury had used that printed version in its discussions for several hours before reaching its verdict. The newspaper's account of the charge was conceded to be accurate.
Justice Corwin held that this alone required a new trial. A verdict could not stand, he wrote, where a jury had so far mistaken its duty as to get its own report of the court's instructions. He looked to the jury rules of Ohio's new code of procedure, which required jurors to be kept together under an officer who was not to speak with them except to ask whether they had agreed, as a fair statement of the proper practice, though not as the law governing her trial. Justice Thurman agreed that the misconduct required a new trial, adding that misconduct is not always willful. Justice Ranney rested his vote on the misconduct alone.
Corwin and Thurman went further. Both thought the evidence about Mrs. Green's death should not have been admitted at a trial for the death of James Wesley Forrest. Corwin said it did not prove that she knew what arsenic would do, and only stirred prejudice. Thurman said the state could have proved her knowledge without putting other poisonings before the jury, and that such evidence hung with a deadly weight on the defense.
Corwin also wrote at length about her mind. He found no evidence of malice or motive toward the people who died. He saw signs of concealment and some cunning, but thought her conduct singular for a guilty person. He relied on the physicians, on her family history and on her behavior, and concluded that it was improbable she had ever been sane; he described her as weak-minded and imbecile. He declined to rule on phrenology, the popular theory that read character from the shape of the head: whether it was a science or a delusion, he wrote, the court would not undertake to say. On the trial judge's instruction, he found the right-and-wrong test imperfect because it left out self-control and free agency, but not so wrong as to have harmed her.
Thurman took a narrower view of insanity. He wrote that there was no authority for holding that "mere moral insanity," as it was sometimes called, excused a person from responsibility. He agreed that insanity must be "clearly proved," but read that to mean a clear preponderance of the evidence, not proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Chief Justice Bartley would have let the verdict stand. He found no misconduct serious enough to justify a new trial, stressing that no one had been shown to discuss the merits with the jurors and that the newspaper's version of the charge was correct. He held the evidence about Mrs. Green admissible, because it was tied to Nancy's own statements, showed knowledge and intent, and bore on her sanity. He held that insanity must be shown by clear and satisfactory evidence, and that it took a clear case to reverse a refusal to grant a new trial.
The judgment of the Court of Common Pleas was reversed and the case sent back for a new trial.
Legal historians have read Farrer v. State as part of the long development of Ohio's insanity defense. John K. McHenry, writing in the University of Dayton Law Review in 1987, placed it in a line running from Clark v. State, an 1843 Ohio case whose jury charge asked whether a defendant was a free agent, able both to know right from wrong and to choose the right. McHenry notes that only the jury-misconduct ruling had majority support in Farrer; Corwin's discussion of insanity was his own. Corwin cited the Clark test with approval but left the trial judge's right-and-wrong instruction undisturbed, calling that kind of definition one "such as we frequently find in the books." McHenry adds that the Supreme Court of Ohio cited Farrer with approval in State v. Staten in 1969.
The new trial never happened. In December 1854 the question of her sanity was put instead to a jury in the Hamilton County Probate Court, before Judge John B. Warren. Hayes argued the case. The jury of twelve, three of them from the city, deliberated overnight, and at half past ten the next morning it found Nancy Farrer "of unsound mind."
A judge of the Court of Common Pleas, James Parker, then ordered the sheriff to hand her over to the officer named by the Probate Court. Howard's campaign biography says simply that she was never tried again and was sent to a lunatic asylum.
Hayes counted the outcome as a victory. On January 22, 1855, he wrote to his friend Guy M. Bryan that a few weeks earlier he had "succeeded in finally getting an acquittal of my first life case," a case that had been "a pet case so long" and to which he owed much. The letter does not name her, but Marchman identifies the case as hers. In law, the lunacy verdict was not an acquittal of the murder charge; it was a finding that she was of unsound mind, after which the state did not bring her to trial again. Hayes's word is his own.
Marchman writes that the case brought Hayes recognition as a capable lawyer. By September 1852 he was defending three prisoners under sentence of death, and he had moved suddenly into public view.
Nancy Farrer was taken to the asylum at Lick Run and was later moved to Longview, according to Marchman. In July 1852, while her appeal was pending, her mother had sent Hayes a box holding two neckties and some Mormon writings in prose and verse.
The last account of Nancy Farrer comes from Judge Carter, who had tried her. In his memoir, The Old Court House (1880), as Marchman summarizes it, Carter wrote that years later he met her near the Lick Run asylum and stopped to talk. She greeted him, said she was glad to see him, and asked whether he had not hanged her after all. She told him she was now one of the keepers, taking patients out for air, and she called the patients in the woods nearby her pets. Carter said he would have hated to be the means of hanging a woman. Then, he wrote, one day she went out and did not come back, and no one knew where she went.
No later record of her has been reported. Her date and place of death are unknown.
Guilt. The only verdict against Nancy Farrer, for the death of James Wesley Forrest, was reversed by the Supreme Court of Ohio, and she was never retried. The deaths of Mary Ann Green, Cassandra Forrest and John Edward Forrest were charged in indictments but never tried. Arsenic was found in all four bodies, and witnesses testified that she bought arsenic, but no court ever finally decided who gave it. Corwin's opinion treated her as at least a participant in the Green poisoning; Thurman's held that the Green evidence should not have been heard at all.
The second nurse. Nancy at first told Hayes that the other nurse had taught her to poison Mrs. Green, then cleared her on oath. That woman was acquitted. What part, if any, she played was never established.
The number of deaths. The indictments named four. Nancy herself, by one witness's account, spoke of five deaths where she had lived, counting two infants; another witness said Nancy first spoke of six. Howard's 1876 biography says she poisoned all the members of two families, which is not what the record shows: in the Forrest household, the father and a son survived. McHenry's 1987 article says evidence showed five people in her care died of arsenic and describes the victim in the indictment as eight years old; the court record names the two-year-old James Wesley as the child in the indictment and describes arsenic found in four bodies.
Dates. Marchman places Mrs. Green's death in October 1851; the Supreme Court's summary of the evidence places it in August. Marchman dates James Wesley's death to the night of December 1, after a family dinner; the opinion says he fell ill two days before he died, on a Wednesday. Howard's biography gives the Supreme Court decision as the December term of 1858, an error: the report and Marchman both give December 1853.
Her mind. Physicians at trial described limited capacity; the jury rejected the defense; the Supreme Court majority split on how far her mental state mattered; and a Probate Court jury later found her of unsound mind. The language of the time, "imbecility," "moral insanity," and phrenological readings of her head, does not map onto modern diagnoses, and none has been proposed for her in the published accounts.
July 24, 1832: Nancy Farrer is born in Lancashire, England.
When she is about ten: her father emigrates with her younger brother; she and her mother follow about two years later. The family is said to live about two years at Nauvoo, Illinois.
1847: her father dies in Cincinnati's Commercial Hospital.
July 1851: she goes to nurse Mary Ann Green, who is recovering from childbirth; a second nurse is hired to help.
August or October 1851: Mrs. Green's baby dies, then Mrs. Green.
About October 27, 1851: Nancy joins the Forrest household as a servant in charge of the children.
About a week after her arrival: Cassandra Forrest falls ill after a supper and dies within hours.
A little more than three weeks after her arrival: John Edward Forrest, about eight, dies after a similar illness.
Late 1851: the father and a son, Billy, fall ill after a supper and recover.
December 1, 1851 (Marchman): James Wesley Forrest, about two, dies; a post-mortem points to arsenic.
December 4, 1851: the children's father swears an affidavit charging Nancy with the child's death.
December 8, 1851: she is arraigned in the Cincinnati Mayor's Court.
January 10 and 15, 1852: four indictments returned and arraigned, covering four deaths.
January 1852: Judge Robert B. Warden appoints Rutherford B. Hayes to help defend her; Hayes calls it "the criminal case of the term" in his diary on January 17.
February 18, 1852: trial opens before Judge A. W. G. Carter.
March 2, 1852: the jury finds her guilty of first-degree murder.
March 1852: the second nurse is tried for Mrs. Green's death and acquitted after Nancy clears her on the stand.
Spring 1852: motion for a new trial overruled; she is sentenced to be hanged.
April 3, 1852: Hayes's mother writes to him about the case.
April 21, 1852: Hayes files a writ of error in the District Court; the sentence is suspended pending the Supreme Court.
July 1852: her mother sends Hayes a gift.
December 1853 term: Hayes argues the case in Columbus; Attorney General George E. Pugh opposes.
December 15, 1853: Supreme Court of Ohio reverses the judgment and orders a new trial, Chief Justice Bartley dissenting.
December 1854: a Probate Court jury finds her "of unsound mind"; she is committed to the asylum at Lick Run.
January 22, 1855: Hayes writes that he has won "an acquittal of my first life case."
Later: she is moved to Longview; by Judge Carter's account she later walks away and is never traced.
1880: Judge Carter publishes his recollection of her in The Old Court House.