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The Detective Who Discovered HE Was the Murderer: Historic Sleepwalking Cases

Khalid Elhassan February 9, 2025 15 min

Sleepwalking - Robert Ledru commits murder in his sleep — Robert Ledru commits murder in his sleep. Pinterest

8. An Innovative Defense

An 1846 booklet about the Tirrell trial. Pinterest

Albert Tirrell was eventually tracked down to New Orleans, where he was arrested on December 6^th and extradited to Massachusetts. The rich kid murder scandal quickly became a local and national sensation that had it all. There was adultery, the class divide briefly bridged between a scion of a wealthy and respectable family who abandoned his wife and children for a prostitute, capped off with a gruesome murder, nationwide manhunt, arrest, and trial. Tirrell’s parents hired Rufus Choate, a former US Senator and respected Boston lawyer known for his creative defense strategies. At Tirrell’s trial, prosecutors called in numerous witnesses who established strong circumstantial evidence that the rich scion was the murderer. The defendant’s lawyer, emphasized that the evidence was circumstantial and that nobody had seen Tirrell actually murder the victim. He then built his defense on the then-innovative sleepwalking defense.

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.