On November 8, 1821, in a workshop of the Massachusetts State Prison at Charlestown, Samuel Green caught a fellow convict named Billy Williams alone and brought an iron bar down on his head. By the accounts of the case, he kept beating the unconscious man until he had broken his ribs, arms and legs, and he was going for another prisoner when the guards stopped him. Williams died a week later. Green believed Williams had informed on one of his escape attempts, and he had already tried, unsuccessfully, to poison his food.
Green was in the prison for burglary. He had been arrested, drunk, after robbing a store at Danvers, and sentenced to four years; after repeated escape attempts he was made to wear special shackles and clogs, and more time was added. He was twenty-five. He had been born in 1796 at Meredith, in Strafford County, New Hampshire, and in the life published under his name he described himself as the son of poor but respectable parents who tried to educate him and failed.
The trial for Williams's death went before the Supreme Judicial Court. Green's lawyers sought a mistrial on the ground that one of the witnesses against him was not competent to testify, an argument the court rejected in Commonwealth v. Green. He was sentenced to death and hanged on April 25, 1822, at the gallows on Boston Neck. Williams was Black, and the case is recorded as the only confirmed instance of a white man executed in Massachusetts for killing a Black victim. At the gallows, according to a later account, he told the chaplain he had nothing to say to the crowd because he had written out his full confession, and when asked if he was penitent he answered, "If you wish it." The accounts differ over whether he said the crowd would or would not learn his fate.
The confession existed. The Life of Samuel Green, presented as written by himself, drawn up in prison and declared true a few moments before his execution, was published in Boston by David Felt in 1822 and ran through at least nine editions that year, alongside an account of the execution and at least one sermon contrasting him with a better Samuel. It was a commercial product of a thriving trade in gallows literature, and much of what is now told about him comes from it or from twentieth-century retellings built on it.
Those later accounts, by writers including Jay Robert Nash and Troy Taylor, describe a childhood of savage whippings in Meredith and at the home of a family friend in New Hampton; an apprenticeship to a blacksmith; a partnership with another youth, William Ash, and a traveling counterfeiter who taught them to forge notes and pick locks; and a career of burglary, horse theft, counterfeiting and rape from Montpelier to Schenectady and from Saco to Barre. They credit him with clubbing a jewelry peddler to death near Bath, New Hampshire, shooting several members of a posse after a jewel robbery in Montreal, escaping a death sentence there with Ash's help, and killing a wealthy French traveler at Middlebury, Vermont. He is often called America's first public enemy. None of those killings was ever tried, no victim of them is named in the accounts, and the only murder established in court is that of Billy Williams.