9. A Nineteenth-Century Romance that Went Terribly Wrong
In his early 20s, Albert Jackson Tirrell, the scion of a well off family from Weymouth, Massachusetts, scandalized society with a romance that struck his peers as being beyond the pale. He left his wife and two children to be with Maria Bickford, a married lady of the night who lived in a Boston brothel. Tirrell did not care: he was passionately in love with Mrs. Bickford. She seemed to return the affection, although that did not stop her from continuing her profession. That did not sit well with Tirrell, and it was a constant bone of contention between the pair throughout their relationship. On the night of October 27th, 1845, loud noises were heard from Mrs. Bickford room.
Soon thereafter, the brothel owner awoke to the smell of smoke to discover that somebody had set three fires in his establishment. After he doused the flames, he entered Mrs. Bickford’s room, to discover that she had been brutally murdered, savagely beaten and with her throat slit from ear to ear with a razor that cut so deeply it almost severed her head. Suspicion immediately fell on Tirrell, the last person known to have seen her alive, according to multiple witnesses, who saw him enter the victim’s room that evening after her last customer had left.
