Murder in the Adirondacks

Description

Murder in the Adirondacks: An American Tragedy Revisited

By: Craig Brandon

Murder in the Adirondacks is the true story of the Chester Gillette-Grace Brown murder case, which was the basis for Theodore Dreiser’s classic novel An American Tragedy and the movie “A Place in the Sun” with Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor.

Although the trial in Herkimer, New York was front page news throughout the nation in 1906, and millions of words have been written about Dreiser’s novel, this book is the first complete account of the fascinating facts behind the fiction Gillette, a former prep school student and railroad brakeman, was the nephew of the owner of a skirt factory in Cortland, New York, where he met Grace Brown, the daughter of a Chenango County farmer.

Soon after Grace discovered she was pregnant with Gillette’s child in 1906, they left on a trip to the Adirondacks. Grace thought it was to be a wedding trip, but Gillette was planning murder, not matrimony.

At Big Moose Lake in Herkimer County, Gillette rented a boat and took Grace to a deserted section of the lake called Punkey Bay. She ended up at the bottom of the lake and Gillette escaped to Inlet, where he was arrested three days later. At Gillette’s trial he claimed Grace jumped out of the boat and committed suicide. However, the jury didn’t believe him and he was sentenced to die in the electric chair in Auburn. Gillette’s mother waged a campaign that led all the way to the governor’s mansion in Albany and a last minute attempt to save her son’s life.

By the 1980s, the fiction had overpowered the facts and many people accepted Dreiser’s novel as the true story. This book sets the record straight. Meticulously re-searched, it relies on the original courtroom testimony and the 1906-1908 newspaper articles. It contains letters, documents and photographs that have never been made public. Facts about Gillette’s early life and his family are revealed here for the first time.

After ninety years, readers can finally find out what really happened at Big Moose Lake in 1906. The true story of Upstate New York’s most famous murder case can finally be told.

Craig Brandon spent twenty years in Upstate New York as a writer and editor for daily newspapers and now lives in Keene, New Hampshire, where he teaches writing at Keene State College. His writing has won awards sponsored by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, New York State United Teachers, the Associated Press and many others. He has also appeared on television programs such as “Unsolved Mysteries” and on PBS and the History Channel.