The bodies of a woman and her child were found inside a burned house on Christmas Day, 1843. An autopsy showed that they’d died before the fire even started. Alex Hortis's book is The Witch of New York. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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On Christmas 1843 and Christmas night on Staten Island, there were a group of men that were walking towards the town's only tavern. One of them noticed smoke coming out of the kitchen chimney of Captain George Hausman. Didn't think much of it. There had been snow and it may have been wet logs. But soon a young kid comes down the road and yells, fire, fire, fire.
Alex Hortus is a historian and lawyer.
They run back. They arrive at this chaotic scene at the house. The back kitchen is on fire. There's flames spitting out of the windows, smoke billowing out. They break down the door. They find a way in. And inside, it's just a very intense fire. There was resin melting from the top. You know, it was permeated with smoke. Everything seemed to be on fire.
Neighbors formed a line and started passing buckets of water from the nearest well. They were able to put the fire out. Three men volunteered to go into the house to check that the fire was fully out.
Neighbors told them that the owner of the house, Captain Houseman, was out at sea on his oyster schooner, and that his wife, Emmeline Houseman, and their one-year-old daughter, Anne Eliza, were visiting relatives. When the volunteers entered the house, one of the men checked the kitchen.
So as he's sifting through the ashes, he hits something hard. He initially thinks it's a sheep or a dog. It ends up being Emmeline Hausman's torched and bludgeoned body.
Next to her was the burned body of her daughter, Annalisa. The press reported that both bodies were wrapped in a blanket, but the blanket was barely burned. They also reported that Emmeline's hands were tied with a silk black handkerchief in a sailor's knot. Captain George Houseman returned from sea the next day.
He docks his schooner, and then he's walking over to the ferry boat, and he literally runs into his sister, Polly. And it falls upon Polly to tell him, the horrible news. They ride back in silence. He doesn't know what to say or think. He goes to the house, and all that's left is this burnt-out, scorched kitchen and the horrible remains of what was left of his family, Emmeline and Annalisa.
The autopsy of the body found that Emmeline had a stab wound on her arm so deep that it fractured the bone. 18-month-old Annalise's skull was completely fractured. They determined that the mother and daughter were murdered before the fire. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. In the 1840s, Staten Island was mostly farmland. The farmers grew corn, wheat, and potatoes from Manhattan and New Jersey.
The first ferry service between Manhattan and Staten Island started only a few decades earlier. Only about 10,000 people lived on the island.
Everyone knew everybody. But what was also distinct about Staten Island was just across the bay was the largest city, North America. And if you go over the hills, you could see some of the lights and all the ships going in and out from all over the world. So it was a very stark contrast between a very rural, small town that was connected to the great metropolis of the West.
Captain George Houseman's family was one of the wealthiest and most important on the island. His father, Abraham, got rich from managing a granite quarry and farming oysters.
He had a very prosperous oyster business. There was an oyster craze in New York. And so much of Staten Island's economy was feeding New York oysters.
Abraham had eight children. George Hausman was his second son. And Alex Horta says George was closest to his younger sister, Polly. Polly got married when she was 15 to a 24-year-old man named Andrew Bedine.
It was considered sort of a match made in heaven because it was a marriage between two great clans on Staten Island, and clans meant everything on Staten Island. And these were families that predated the formation of the United States, and in the case of the Hausmans, predated even the English arriving.
Polly and Andrew moved to a little house on the ocean, and within a year of getting married, had their first son. Soon after, they had a daughter. But after three years, their marriage fell apart.
He ends up being a drunk, ends up being abusive towards her, and ends up spending all the family money. So she separates from him, and in the 1840s, this is, if not unheard of, it's certainly scandalous.
Polly could only divorce Andrew if she could prove adultery, which would have been an expensive process, attracting even more attention from people in town. So instead, Polly decided to move in with her father, Abraham. Her brother George lived next door with his wife and daughter.
He has a schooner business, but he's away at sea for long stretches of time.
Polly and her daughter, Elizabeth, would walk across the yard and keep Emmeline company while her husband, George, was away. Polly also spent a lot of her time in Manhattan. Her son, Albert, had an apprenticeship at an apothecary shop in Lower Manhattan. But Polly wasn't just visiting her son. She was having an affair with his boss. His name was George Waite.
George Waite is a 30-something sort of merchant prince. He owns his own apothecary just off Broadway. Broadway is the commercial emporium of the Western world at this point. And she would go in, come for a long weekend, and travel back, usually on Monday or Tuesday, back to Staten Island.
Rumors began spreading about Polly. Soon, she found out she was pregnant. They decided to keep it a secret.
They had no idea that the whole entire country would in a few weeks know about their adulterous relationship.
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Right now, right from your phone. That is a huge change, and it's happened so fast that most of us haven't spent much time thinking about what it means and if it's a good thing. But Michael Lewis, that's the guy who wrote Moneyball and The Big Short and Liar's Poker, has been thinking a lot about it. And he tells me that he's pretty worried.
I mean, there was never a delivery mechanism for cigarettes as efficient as the phone is for delivering the gambling apps. It's like the world has created less and less friction for the behavior when what it needs is more and more.
You can hear my chat with Michael Lewis right now on channels, wherever you get your podcasts.
What was the penny press? The penny press were the first newspapers to appeal to a mass popular audience. This was revolutionary at the time, because before that, there were these really kind of dull merchant publications. They would carry stock prices, they would carry official news, maybe some news from Washington, but they did not have a wide audience.
So at the same time, the penny press papers were a penny, so they were affordable for the working person. The founders of it had this fantastic idea that you don't have to wait and sit back for subscriptions. You can sell it on the streets. So they start hawking the news. These are the first newsboys. And so they're selling to anybody who comes along and initially gets a working class audience.
But then it becomes so popular and so addictive. to get this different kind of newspaper that it goes all the way up to the upper classes of New York City. The mayor, everyone was reading the penny press. So what made the penny press very different, it would cover murder and suicides. It would cover scandals. It was about sex. It was really, in many ways, the forerunners to our current tabloids.
The first penny press was printed in New York in 1833, and other cities followed. In 1835, a newspaper man named James Gordon Bennett founded one of New York's largest penny presses, the New York Herald. He claimed, what Shakespeare did for drama, such shall I do for the daily newspaper press.
The penny press headlines were catchy and vague, like highly important if true, or from Florida, more murders, and another one gone. The stories were not always accurate. In the mid-1830s, one penny paper reported a series of articles that an astronomer had found evidence of unicorns, two-legged beavers, and creatures that were part human and part bat on the moon.
Everyone from longshoremen, rope makers, to ladies in smoking parlors, to the mayor, to anyone who could read was starting to pick up the penny press. And they love these stories.
On December 27, 1843, two days after the bodies of Captain George Houseman's wife and daughter were discovered, the Herald's headline read, Destructive Conflagration at Port Richmond, Two Lives Lost. A rival paper's headline read, Horrible Affair, Mysterious Murder and Arson at Staten Island. The police had barely started their investigation and hadn't made any announcements.
But James Gordon Bennett published that a gang had killed Emmeline and her daughter.
Gangs were very much a concern in New York City. And they would kind of roam through the streets committing crimes, occasionally committing murders. He really didn't have much of anything to go on when he said that.
The New York Daily Tribune reported that Emmeline had also been gagged, which wasn't true. But among Emmeline's family, there was a suspect, and it was Polly Bedine. Emmeline's father knew that Polly Bedine was the last person who Emmeline was seen alive with. And he began telling people that Polly murdered his daughter.
The other thing that aroused his suspicion was George Hausman had carried around $1,000 in silver coins at the time, which was a considerable amount of money, in big bags. And he had suspected that Polly had somehow tried to rob the money from Emmeline.
At this point, the investigators didn't have any other real leads.
Polly Medine subsequently becomes the primary suspect. The reasons for this are a mix of rumor and some troubling facts. First of all, she's led a scandalous life. Her character is, quote, considered low. And so she was always held to be suspicious. When authorities look at Polly, they find out about the relationship with George Waite.
The police took George Waden for questioning.
He eventually quickly confesses to say that he had a relationship with Polly Bodine. They find a very suspicious note on him when they search him, written from Polly, which, quote, says, "'Hide the things.'" This really alarms the authorities. They search the apothecary of George Waite, and they find this coral necklace that belonged to the infant, Annalisa, one of the victims.
They arrested George Waite and started looking for Polly.
Polly is in her father's house. Her brother-in-law comes in out of the rain and says, essentially, Polly, you know, everybody thinks that you're the murderer. She immediately gets up. She goes to the back room. She gets her shawl, and she takes off into the rain as she's eight months pregnant. She walks the length of Staten Island all night long.
In the early morning hours, she's seen taking the Staten Island ferry, the Staten Islander, over to Manhattan.
Finally, Polly went inside a restaurant where the owner saw her, pregnant and soaking wet, and offered her food and a bed. Polly said as she was falling asleep, she overheard other guests talking about a murder on Staten Island and that the authorities were looking for a woman suspect. She left and continued walking.
And then she walks all the way up to Harlem, which at the time were country estates. So she, over the course of two days, she essentially walks a marathon in the cold and rain as she's eight months pregnant.
Polly found a church where she could finally sleep. When she woke up, she continued roaming Manhattan. Then, someone she knew recognized her and told Polly that the police were looking for her.
And he talks her into giving herself up. She hasn't been charged yet, but they treat her like a fugitive.
They took her to Manhattan's prison, the Tombs, and transferred her to the Staten Island Jail. That day, the editor of the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett, published a story about Polly.
He went into George Waite's apothecary, and he detailed evidence that Polly had essentially been sleeping with George Waite.
The Herald reported that they found a nightcap, nightgown, and hair similar to Polly's color in George's bedroom. Soon, all of the papers started publishing their own accounts of what happened. One reported that Polly had poisoned Emmeline with a dose of acid. Another used Polly's separation from her husband and her bad character as signs that she probably committed the murder.
Another reported that Polly had confessed. She hadn't. A few days after her arrest, Polly went into labor alone in her jail cell and delivered a stillborn baby. When word got out, a penny paper reported that Polly had smothered her own child. James Gordon Bennett of the Herald printed that Polly had nearly a half dozen abortions during her relationship with George Waite.
George Wade is an apothecary, of course, off of Broadway, so he sold abortifacients at the time, these herbal remedies, which are very dangerous and noxious. So he is rumored to have procured, you know, maybe half a dozen abortions. There's really no proof of that. There's no way that the press could have proved that, but they ran with the story anyway.
During the investigation, the editors of the Penny Papers petitioned the commissioner and the district attorney to let the press observe the witness examinations. Previously, press weren't allowed to sit in on those proceedings. But James Gordon Bennett argued that the press was the living jury of the nation. The district attorney and the commissioner allowed it.
From his jail cell, George Waite knew the penny press was writing about him. He was being charged as an accessory after the murders. He decided to publish a letter in the papers claiming his own innocence. He wrote he had no idea how Captain Houseman's daughter, Annalise's beads, had ended up in his shop. And George did not come to Polly's defense.
Polly's trial was scheduled for June 1844, five months after she was arrested. One reporter predicted that it would be a mess. Quote, they manage these matters wretchedly in New York. That reporter was Edgar Allan Poe.
At this point, he's a newsman, so he's writing essays for the Columbia Spy. But he was also very interested in crime, and he becomes fascinated with the idea of being essentially an amateur detective, and becomes fascinated in this idea that I can solve crimes using logic reported in the newspapers, and I can use deductive logic to solve crimes.
He even invented a word for this way of thinking, radiocination. The idea of using logic, more than just facts, to solve a crime. In post-detective stories, the main characters used radiocination to solve crimes police couldn't.
So he's already writing detective stories. He writes the first detective story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, in which this Detective Dupin, who becomes his alter ego and becomes the first sort of Sherlock Holmes character, solves an unsolvable crime. And then he comes across the Pauly Boudin case. He's following it very carefully. And then he goes on and he criticizes the police.
And he decides that Pauly Boudin is clearly guilty, but he believes that the authorities will undoubtedly mess it up.
To him, the police seemed, quote, blown about in all directions by every varying puff of the most unconsidered newspaper opinion. The trial of Polly Bodine began on June 24, 1844, on Staten Island.
As soon as the Herald and the Sun started reporting on the trial, it caused a huge furor. So people from Manhattan, people from Long Island, people from New Jersey, they all flocked to Little Staten Island and its courthouse. The case against Polly Bodine at that trial is largely circumstantial, but it's fairly extensive.
The prosecution argued that Polly murdered Emmeline and Annalisa the night before Christmas Eve, stole their belongings, and then returned on Christmas to set fire to their house. They called a relative of Polly's who testified that she heard a scream coming from Emmeline's home the night the prosecution said she committed the murder.
A neighbor said she saw Polly go to Emmeline's house that same night, but never saw Emmeline alive after that. She also said that the morning of Christmas Eve, she saw Polly leaving Emmeline's home with a shawl over her head. The prosecution also called two Staten Island ferry workers, who said they saw Polly taking the ferry to Manhattan the morning after the murders were discovered.
They said they noticed her because she ordered a slice of cake and a gin so early in the morning. Then, Polly's son Albert took the stand. He was 16. He'd been subpoenaed. He said he didn't know where his mother was for part of the day on Christmas. Polly told him she was going to a neighbor's home. But that neighbor testified she never saw Polly.
One of the key pieces of evidence that had come out was some pawnbrokers had answered a reward in the newspapers and had said that somebody had come on Christmas Day, this is several hours before the murders were discovered, and had pawned Emmeline's valuables. So it raises the obvious question, How in the world were those goods pawned half a day before the bodies were discovered?
How to have somebody who had access to the house?
Before the trial, authorities brought the pawnbrokers to the Staten Island jail, where Polly was being held.
But what they did was they had her dress up in her outfit that they had caught her with. And they brought the pawnbrokers to this lone cell. She was the only person there. There was no lineup. Like you'd have today, you'd have to have a lineup. Otherwise, it'd be considered unduly suggestive. And he said, you know, basically said, this is who we think it is. Is that her?
And they all said it was her.
In her defense, Pauly's attorneys told the jury that it was George Waite, the apothecary, who had committed the murders.
And her family, Pauly Benign's family, the housemen, say George Waite's the killer, Pauly's innocent. George Waite essentially killed her for money.
The defense also argued that Pauly wouldn't kill Emmeline and her niece because they were so close.
was the defense's strongest point in many ways. She had actually delivered Annalisa, the young girl, an 18-month-old girl. Why in the world would Polly Bodine murder her 18-month-old niece over Christmas? Why would she murder her sister-in-law? The prosecution suggested that Polly was, in fact, in financial distress. The problem with this is that Polly came from a wealthy family.
So what is the verdict?
There was an eccentric juror who actually was a fairly prosperous farmer on Staten Island. And he holds out and he says, I'm not going to convict her under any circumstances. There were some reports that he had been opposed to the death penalty. And so they have an all-night deliberation. And remember, these jurors, you know, these are not comfortable beds here. They're in a very small jury room.
They don't have much to eat. They have bread and water. They used to actually withhold bread and water from jurors until they reached a decision. But he's the lone holdout. Everyone else votes to convict. He literally jumps out the window and runs away.
We'll be right back.
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After the jury failed to reach a unanimous decision because one juror ran away, they had to start over. A second trial was scheduled. The court couldn't find 12 jurors on Staten Island who hadn't already read everything about the case and the penny papers. So they moved the second trial to Manhattan.
And it becomes this enormous social event. It far attracted women spectators far more than men. They'd be dressed up in the latest stylish outfits. They'd be eating lunches. They'd bring their children. They'd treat it like a show, essentially. On the first day of trial, there was a near riot, and the police had to beat down spectators because it had caused such strong feelings about it.
It's really the first case... in which the entire country is following details of the case. And you have very able reporters that are transcribing it and doing very detailed day-to-day trial testimony.
The head of a museum down the street from where Polly's trial was held, a man named P.T. Barnum, noticed all the excitement. P.T. Barnum, short for Phineas Taylor, had started his career with a traveling musical, Barnum's Grand Scientific and Musical Theater. He bought a museum in Lower Manhattan.
It featured exhibits like the Siamese twins Chang and Ang, an alleged orangutan's torso with a fishtail that he called Fiji Mermaid, and bearded ladies.
So he creates this disgusting wax figure of Polly essentially as this old witch, killing Emmeline. And Annalisa. In the American Museum, he advertises during her trials, there are undoubtedly were many, many thousands of people who saw both this horrible wax figure and then went over and sat in the trial, which was only about two blocks away.
The museum called the wax figure a faithful representation of the celebrated Polly Budine.
Curiously, P.T. Barnum was not, you know, probably trying to endanger. He wasn't a bloodthirsty person. He opposed the death penalty. But he also knew he believed in selling tickets. That was his modus operandi. And so he really becomes one of the first people to make true crime entertainment.
It cost 25 cents to see the wax figure. The real Polly was down the street in court.
The trial goes on extremely long, about five weeks. And the defense pulls out all the stops in this case. The defense floats the idea for the first time that it was a gang in New York. The Bowery Boys, the Dead Rabbits, the Roach Guard. These were menacing street thugs.
The Dead Rabbits and the Roach Guard were Irish gangs in New York City. Their rivals were the Bowery Boys, an anti-Irish gang in Manhattan's Bowery neighborhood. They were known for committing crimes like looting and starting riots throughout the city. The longest riot, a fight between the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys, lasted two days. Eight people died.
New Yorkers were scared of the gangs, and the defense knew that. Then the defense brought forward Polly's sister, Caroline. She testified that she had seen Emmeline alive the day after the prosecution claimed Polly had murdered her.
This is a big problem for the prosecution. It disrupts their timeline.
Polly's niece also testified that she saw Emmeline on Sunday morning. She said she knew it was her by the way her arms were swinging when she walked.
These two witnesses are an enormous problem for the prosecution, and Pauly then starts to have less opportunity, less of a window to occur the murders.
Pauly's lawyer also had an answer to why Pauly lied to her son about her whereabouts the night of the murder.
He said that Pauly was going to a place to deal with her pregnancy, where there's euphemisms for an abortion, Or, alternatively, there were these houses where women gave up their children. He calls no witnesses to substantiate this. But it's a brilliant way because he knew how to play to the press. He knew that people cared about abortion. He knew people would pay attention to this.
It was plausible, you know, on his face at least, for why then she would have lied to her son. It gives her, quote, an alibi. But, of course, there actually is no alibi witness. But he knows he has to play to the press. He's very good at manipulating the press.
Polly's lawyer asked Polly to dress in black from head to toe to show that she was in mourning for her sister-in-law and niece. Outside City Hall, New Yorkers debated the case. Gamblers in Brooklyn took bets on the verdict.
There are some jurors that want a manslaughter conviction because the cause of death, the prosecution never could really prove the exact cause of death. They might have been bludgeoned. It might have been something else, poisoning.
The jury settled on a murder conviction with a recommendation that she not be executed. She was sentenced to life in prison. But in response to the verdict, the Washington Union wrote... Pauli's defense attorney appealed the case to the New York Supreme Court. He argued that the jury in the second trial had been influenced by the penny press. He said, The court granted the appeal.
the court interviewed 4,000 potential jurors, but couldn't find 12 people who said they were unbiased. Polly's lawyers asked to move the trial out of the city to a small town of 9,000 people upstate called Newburgh. But reporters in New York City kept writing about the case and calling for Polly's death.
And at the Brooklyn Eagle, a young reporter in his 20s named Walt Whitman had been following along. A decade before Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman had been covering executions and joined the anti-gallows movement.
He had long opposed the death penalty and was radically opposed to the death penalty. And in part is because he had sort of a radical Christian sympathy.
In his reporting on Pauly's case, he called it a vindictive penalty and described Pauly as a miserable creature being dragged from prison to prison.
He went on to write, So he projects his own kind of ideological views onto the case, just as Edgar Allan Poe projected his views about how the police should conduct investigations onto the case, and just as how many people on the abortion issue project their views onto the case, what this all had to do with her guilt or innocence, you know, very tenuous.
In the last trial, the prosecution suffers from a number of problems. First of all, it's the third trial, and these witnesses are tired of being abused. Their names are run in the newspapers. They're, you know, savaged on their cross-examination.
One of the ferry workers and a pawnbroker dropped out of the trial.
What also happened was Newberg got turned off by all this vitriol towards Polly. There was this scandalous pamphlet that had made up, you know, these stories about her being a harlot, basically. And the people of Newberg were just so turned off by the red meat press at the time that they start swinging sympathetically towards Polly as if she were a victim. And so they acquit.
At the Brooklyn Eagle, Walt Whitman wrote that this case proved that the death penalty should be abolished. The National Police Gazette blamed the death penalty abolition movement for her acquittal.
And so Polly is let go eventually the following year, but in a sense she's not free because the people on Staten Island all believe that she's guilty. She lives in this small cottage. She never leaves Staten Island, and she's sort of this recluse. There are rumors about her, and she lives out her very long life as a recluse on Staten Island, still shunned.
Some people on the island claim that she eventually confessed to the murder. Visitors would travel to the site of the murders to see the kitchen where the victims were found. Her wax figure at Barnum's American Museum stayed up until the museum's closure in 1865.
In the book, Heads, Faces, and How to Study Them, phrenologists analyzed the physical qualities of criminals and concluded that Polly was one. They wrote that her face lacked the loving mouth, the lips looked punched, critical, fault-finding, unloving and unlovable, and that her nose was long, sharp, inquisitive, and inclined to interfere and disagree.
Five years after her acquittals, Polly, who'd been written about extensively for years, wrote something herself. It was published in the New York Herald, the paper that had called her a wretched woman and the living embodiment of despair. The paper published an inaccurate story that she was peddling fruit in Philadelphia hotels.
She wrote to the editor, James Gordon Bennett, and said she was a daily reader of his entertaining paper, but she said she wasn't selling fruit and asked for a correction. Quote, You, as a gentleman, will oblige me The New York Herald retracted the story. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer.
Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sachiko, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Gabrielle Berbet. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. This episode was mixed by Emma Munger. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter.
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We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.