Vermont Bar Journal, Vol. 40, No. 2 Fall 2015, Vol 41, No. 3 | Page 11

More Inquests

Scholars from Ohio University and others have assembled the Violent Crimes Database, available on the net, listing details
of every reported death, inquest, grand
jury, and capital trial in Vermont beginning in 1760 and ending in 1846.11 The Goodrich case is not listed among them, perhaps because the copy that turned up in
the UVM archives is the only document
to survive, suggesting that the sixteen inquests reviewed here are not a complete
inventory. These are stories of passion, insanity, and tragedy, and illustrate the difficulty of dealing with violent crime in early
Vermont. There was no state prison before
1808, and no facility for the mentally ill until 1891. There were county jails. Matthew
Lyon languished in Vergennes jail for four
months in the late fall and early winter of
1798-1799—an inhospitable place, in his
opinion.
Here is what we know of the inquests
conducted by the juries of inquiry before
1856.
The Supreme Court held an inquest to
determine the cause of death of Lt. Ebenezer Hyde, who died after leaving the Isle
La Motte shore in a canoe with Nathaniel
Wales. The inquest was held in Bennington
in 1791. Despite rumors of more devious
actions on his part, Wales was not held rewww.vtbar.org

sponsible for what the court found to be an
accidental drowning.12
In 1800, Mrs. Samuel H. Holgate burned
down her home, killing her stepdaughter
Orrora and a woman who worked there.
The day before, Mrs. Holgate had an argument with her husband Samuel, after she
hid all his books and papers, and she had
threatened to burn H