BLOOD IN THE SNOW. Notorious New England Murder Cases of the 19th Century (en Inglés) - Robert Geissler

In January 1887, a mother in East Lempster, New Hampshire sat down to write her sick son a letter. She wrote about the snow, the storm, the neighbors, the church - and then, in the middle of it all, she paused and wrote about a murder that had shocked all of New England: Was not the Codman murder one of the most awful thing we ever heard of - I often think how his Mother can stand up under it.

That letter - a piece of antique paper ephemera that has survived one hundred and thirty-nine years - is the seed from which Blood in the Snow grew.

This is the story of George A. Codman, a twenty-two-year-old milkman whose dismembered body was found scattered across miles of frozen road outside Lexington, Massachusetts. It is the story of seventeen-year-old James Nowlin, who killed him for money that wasn't there. And it is the story of the ordinary New England communities that read about the crime in their newspapers, talked about it in their churches, and wrote about it in their letters home.

Drawing on primary sources including 19th-century newspaper accounts, court records, and authentic private correspondence, Blood in the Snow examines the Codman murder alongside other notorious New England criminal cases - from a 1755 slave poisoning that left a body hanging in chains on the road Paul Revere would one day ride, to the domestic poisoning cases that simmered beneath the surface of the Victorian household. Along the way, it explores how the penny press transformed crime into public spectacle, how private letters captured what newspapers could not, and how the mothers left behind by violent crime endured what most of us can barely imagine.

Blood in the Snow is history told from the inside - through the voices of the people who lived it, feared it, and wrote about it by lamplight when the winter storms closed in.