“A week later, John Miller, who was helping with the farm, found the door locked, and could get no answer to his knocking. He brought some neighbors and they forced an entrance. [Finding prepared food cooling in the otherwise empty kitchen,] …they stamped hastily up the narrow stair. In a little whitewashed bedroom above lay Hannah Shingle, her feet on the floor, her body and crushed head stretched out on the bed. There were marks of fingernails on her throat. The furniture was in disorder, the white walls splashed with blood, and there was a crimson pool on the floor, flowing out from under the bed. On a pillow, the murderer had left a bloody print of his bare foot, showing even the toenails. The robber had climbed a ladder to an upper window, probably in the early evening, and the old lady had left her cooking below to show him her prowess with the axe. It seemed obvious that the murderer was familiar with the ground, was someone in the Valley.”

(The culprit was never found. This is part of a somewhat longer history of the Valley which includes a naturalist, spouse-swapping religious sect, but that’s for another day.)