The Life and Death of Mrs. Maria Bickford: A beautiful female, who was inhumanly murdered, in the moral and religious city of Boston, on the night of the 27th of October, 1845, by Albert J. Tirrell, her paramour, arrested on board the Ship Sultana, off New Orleans, December 6thClergyman of Brunswick, Me.
History
The Life and Death of Mrs. Maria Bickford: A beautiful female, who was inhumanly murdered, in the moral and religious city of Boston, on the night of the 27th of October, 1845, by Albert J. Tirrell, her paramour, arrested on board the Ship Sultana, off New Orleans, December 6th
Clergyman of Brunswick, Me.
Bickford, Mary Ann, 1824-1845; Murder -- Massachusetts -- Boston; Tirrell, Albert John, 1824-1880
The name of the murderer was Albert J. Tirrell, a young man whose
improvidence had, in less than one year, scattered to the winds a
patrimony of more than twenty-seven thousand dollars--the life’s
earnings of an indulgent parent, whose grey hairs had but lately gone
down in sorrow to the grave. His flushed cheeks, his beak-like, pimpled
nose, his gallynipper lips, rendered his demeanor the beau ideal of a
sucker-sharp. His tongue could rattle off more lies and oaths in a
minute than that of any other sucker in Boston, excepting one. These
characteristics, accompanied by the most lavish expenditure of his
wealth, won for him the appellation of “good fellow,” all about the
horse-stables, at least. Whenever he hired a horse and buggy, he
carelessly and suavitously tossed a five dollar gold piece, by way of
perquisite, to the ostler. Then would the literature of horse-flies load
him with slimy phrases. “Liberal-hearted fine gentleman,”--“noble
fellow,”--“there’s nothing mean about him,”--“good fellow,” etc., often
reverberated through the horse-stalls, and the same learned and pithy
remarks were nightly circulating through the upper rooms of a celebrated
gambling-house in Sudbury street, for many years the sucker-sharp head
quarters, and the devil’s den in Boston. But, as the enterprising
Dickinson once remarked to a clan of rebellious compositors, “There is
an end to all things,” so the greatnesses of Tirrell’s life were on that
morning hurried into a grand tableau. He had slashed open Maria
Bickford’s throat with a razor, most valiantly, from ear to ear, and, to
slip the noose of the gallows, ran away!
There is no doubt of his INSANITY.
[Illustration: Tirrell’s Flight.]
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Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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