Old Newspapers Give Insights to 100-Year-Old Weston Murder

Copies and scans of old newspapers online reveal a dramatic insight into an unusual murder case in Weston more than 100 years ago. The news was so dramatic it made newspapers in Connecticut and the New York Times, as well as local papers.

According to the Meriden Daily Journal of Meriden, Conn., Miss Mabel Page, 41, was found at her father's house, in "a lonely part of Weston," stabbed to death, on March 31, 1904.

The Daily Journal initially attributed the murder to a "maniac," but in the next day's edition of the Daily Journal, Dr. Horace B. Frost, a physician who first saw Page's body, told the paper, "The murder of Miss Page was, I believe, the work of neither a woman nor a crazy man. The wounds show plainly that they were planned and directed with the greatest skill."

Both the Daily Journal and the Boston Evening Transcriptreported that Page had left a note for her father saying that her brother Harold had been injured and that she was going to see him at Massachusetts General Hospital. Doors and windows at the house were generally kept locked, a maid told police, and nothing was missing from the house, leading police to believe perhaps Page knew her assailant.

The April 3 edition of the New York Times describes a breakthrough in the evidence: witnesses who claim to have seen a man in the vincinity of the Page house prior to and after when the murder was thought to take place. The man, witnesses said, boarded a trolley in Auburndale towards Boston, with a visible wound to his right hand.

On Jan. 24, 1905, Charles L. Tucker of Auburndale was found guilty of the murder in Cambridge. The verdict was quite emotional for many in the courtroom; the New York Times reported Tucker collapsed upon learning of his fate and many of his friends openly wept in court.

Some physical evidence tied Tucker to the Page house but the Times article notes that "the evidence against Tucker was entirely circumstantial."