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Bonkers Crimes and Criminals In History

Khalid Elhassan February 7, 2020 32 min

Thomas Blood - Royal Academy of Arts — Colonel Blood Stealing the Crown Jewels. Royal Academy of Arts

15. Trying Tirrell

Early report of the murder of Maria Bickford. Smithsonian Magazine

Multiple witnesses had seen Albert Tirrell enter Mrs. Bickford’s room on the evening of her murder after her last customer had departed. A bloody razor was found near the body, along with pieces of Tirrell’s clothes and broken-off sections of a distinctive cane known to belong to him. Tirrell fled, and was last spotted bargaining with a livery stable keeper, reportedly saying that he was “in a scrape” and needed to get away.

Tirrell was eventually tracked down to New Orleans, where he was arrested on December 6^th, 1845, and extradited to Massachusetts to face trial. The story quickly became a local and national sensation. It combined the salacious details of sex, the sin of adultery, the class divide briefly bridged between a scion of a wealthy family who abandoned everything to be with a prostitute, capped off with a gruesome murder, nationwide manhunt, arrest, and trial.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.