1786: Elizabeth Wilson, her reprieve too late

ExecutedToday.com ^ | January 3 2011 | Headsman

[CheshireTheCat]

On this date in 1786, Elizabeth Wilson was hanged in Chester, Pennsylvania for the murder of her infant twins.

“One of the melodramas of the early American republic,” our Elizabeth (sometimes called “Harriot Wilson” in the accounts) was a farmer’s daughter of Chester County who got knocked up by a passing sailor. When this gentleman declined to make an honest woman of her after she had borne the bastards, the kids disappeared — later to be discovered dead in the woods by a hunter.

The fallen woman denied having killed them directly, but “acknowledged having placed the children by the road-side, in order that any person passing that way, and who had humanity enough, might take them up.”

She would eventually, after condemnation, accuse her lover of having slain the children.

Elizabeth’s brother William Wilson vigorously undertook on this basis to secure her a pardon at the hands of the Commonwealth’s executive authority, the Supreme Executive Council — then under the leadership of no less august a character than Benjamin Franklin...

[o-n-money]

In 200 years from now, Pennsylvania will recognize that Donald Trump won that state in 2020.

[lepton]

So, leaving them unattended by the side of the road is cause for the conviction, even if they did not die by her own hand.

This falls into the category of ‘close enough’.