Date: August 20, 2024 Time: 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM Location: Brewster Ladies Library, 1822 Main St., Brewster, MA 02631 or via Zoom.

Bathsheba Spooner: A Revolutionary Murder Conspiracy

Guest speaker: Andrew Spooner

 What possessed a woman from the elite society of eighteenth-century New England to conspire with an American soldier and two British run-away soldiers to murder her husband at the midpoint of the American Revolution? The story of Bathsheba Spooner (1746-1778) is the most sensational “true crime” tragedy of the American 1700s. She was the first woman in American history to be executed following the Declaration of Independence. She was just 32 years old and her penalty for “inciting, abetting and procuring the manner and form of murder” was death by hanging. Along with her three conspirators, this was carried out in Worcester’s Washington Square before a crowd of 5,000 spectators on July 2, 1778.