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How Timothy Dexter Turned Ridiculous Ventures Into Riches

Khalid Elhassan November 22, 2024 13 min

Dexter - Timothy Dexter — Timothy Dexter. New England Legends

4. A Horrible Husband

Despite the seemingly dumb investments, Dexter’s business career prospered. Not so his marriage. His wife, Elizabeth Dexter, came from a prominent New Hampshire family that included a governor, and they looked down on him. If his frequent womanizing was not enough to wreck his marriage – on one occasion a cuckolded lawyer beat the daylights out of Dexter on the street – his pretending that his wife was dead would have done it. Late in life, Dexter began to refer to Elizabeth as a ghost, and refused to acknowledge that she was alive.

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.