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History’s Juiciest and Intriguing Scandals

Khalid Elhassan January 11, 2021 32 min

Cheryl Crane - Johnny Stompanato — Lana Turner's daughter Cheryl being escorted from jail to juvenile court. Getty Images

26. A Messy Murder a Hurried Flight

murder of maria bickford — The murder of Maria Bickford. National Police Gazette

Albert Tirrell was the last person known to have seen Maria Bickford alive, according to multiple witnesses, who saw him enter Bickford’s room that evening after her last customer had left. 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. Police immediately began a search for Tirrell, but he had fled, having last been 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, 1845, and extradited to Massachusetts. The rich kid murder scandal quickly became a local and national sensation that had everything. 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. Albert Tirrell’s parents hired Rufus Choate, a former US Senator and respected Boston lawyer is known for his creative defense strategies.

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.