Never Look Back. Robert Ross
even half of it was true—she shuddered and hugged herself tightly.
She picked up the stack of printouts.
The Hatch murders were among the most notorious in Massachusetts history; at the time the Hatch murders were all anyone on Cape Cod—and Boston—could talk about. The Hatches were not only wealthy but politically connected. Horace Hatch, the father of Lettie Hatch, had served several terms in the U.S. Senate, and was said to have presidential aspirations. After his murder, a memorial service was held in Washington attended by President Coolidge and his wife. President Coolidge himself spoke in glowing terms of all the “great work” Senator Hatch had done, not only for his Massachusetts constituency, but for the country as a whole:
“Senator Hatch will surely be remembered by history as one of the great Massachusetts patriots, on a level with President Adams, John Hancock, and Paul Revere,” he’d said during his speech.
Modern historians don’t quite agree with President Coolidge’s assessment. Senator Hatch’s voting record was not only spotty but often contradictory. He opposed women’s suffrage, for example, despite the fact that he married a suffragette. He was also against American involvement in World War I, opposed almost any legislation that originated in the Wilson White House, and was credited at the time as one of the legislators who led the fight to defeat American ratification of the Treaty of Versailles. He was a vocal opponent of American involvement in the League of Nations—and most historians agree that this doomed the League of Nations to failure and ineptitude, which resulted in the Second World War and the rise of Hitler.
His much younger second wife, Sarah Jane McConnell, had been a suffragette and quite a famous one, at that. She had written several articles on the subject of women’s suffrage, had been arrested several times in protest marches, and had participated in the notorious hunger strikes. There is no record of how the suffragette met the senator, nor of any romance between the two. Their marriage, from all accounts, was sudden and unexpected—particularly from the point of view of Washington hostess Eliza Washburn, whom most Washington insiders thought to have the inside track on becoming the second Mrs. Hatch. A letter from the widowed Mrs. Washburn to her sister has survived; in it, Mrs. Washburn is quite frank about her anger at being so unceremoniously jilted for a much younger, far less socially connected woman. She went so far as to call the second Mrs. Hatch a “scheming viper.” After the murders, Mrs. Washburn wrote her sister again to say that the senator “certainly received his just deserts.”
Except for her suffrage work, nothing much is known of the second Mrs. Hatch. She seems to have appeared in Washington from nowhere, taken up residence at a women’s boardinghouse, and started working on the suffrage movement. Her surviving writings show her to be a lucid thinker, capable of making and defending arguments, with no small skill at the use of language. Once she married Senator Hatch, however, her writings stopped. She certainly never published again.
Little is known, either, about the first Mrs. Hatch, born Ellen Chamberlain into a prominent Boston family who traced their history back to the May-flower. This first Mrs. Hatch never resided in Washington, choosing to remain in Boston or in Provincetown, where the senator had a summer house. She didn’t campaign for her husband, and most gossip from the time holds that the marriage had been over for quite some time. Publicly, the senator always claimed that his wife was an invalid—although Provincetown gossip claimed otherwise. Ellen Hatch died rather suddenly from unknown causes several years before his remarriage; there was only one child from his first marriage—the soon-to-be notorious Lettie. Even after her mother’s death, Lettie remained in Provincetown with her governess rather than going to live with her father.
Witnesses from the time testified at Lettie’s trial that she had hated her stepmother—which her governess, Anna Windham, claimed was just “malicious gossip.” Miss Windham claimed that the Hatch family had gotten along beautifully—that Lettie and her stepmother, while not having a “mother-daughter” relationship (which, she claimed, would have been absurd given the closeness in their ages), were very close. Lettie herself never gave any testimony other than to protest her innocence; and it is very likely that without the alibi Miss Windham gave her she would have been convicted and hanged. Public sentiment was definitely against young Lettie—she was crucified in the newspapers, people crossed the street rather than come face-to-face with her; the Hatch house was frequently vandalized. At one point, an angry mob showed up on the doorstep, shouting epithets and throwing bottles and rocks, and the local constabulary was forced to disperse them.
Was Miss Windham telling the truth? Most newspapers and citizens of Provincetown at the time didn’t believe so. Miss Windham’s story held that at the time someone was inside butchering Horace and Sarah Jane Hatch, she and Lettie were walking along the sand dunes on the other side of the Cape. Miss Windham claimed that Lettie had never been out of her sight that entire day, and so someone else must have committed the murders.
No witnesses ever came forward to corroborate their story, however, and indeed, contradictory testimony was presented at the trial—testimony claiming Lettie had not been with Miss Windham for at least an hour around the time the crimes were committed. Yet that testimony—from a gardener who was known to drink heavily and to have a grudge against both Miss Windham and Lettie—was shaken up by Lettie’s attorney at the trial; ultimately the jury chose to believe Miss Windham rather than the gardener. The gardener, a young man of Portuguese descent named Pedro Fournier, claimed that he’d seen Lettie go into the house by herself shortly after Sarah Jane had returned from the grocer’s. Lettie’s attorney brought to light the fact that young Pedro had attempted to court Lettie and been spurned.
The butcher knife used to commit the crimes was never recovered, although a particularly large one was missing from the Hatch kitchen. Investigators believed the missing knife was the one used in the commission of the crime. The best the prosecution could do was show a knife “similar” to the one used in the commission of the murders.
It also hurt the prosecution’s case that the clothes Lettie was wearing at the time the bodies were found showed no trace of blood, and there was no way—given the bloodbath the Hatch house was turned into—that she could have committed the murders without becoming completely drenched in blood. And several people testified that the clothes she was wearing at the time of the bodies’ discovery were the same clothes she had on that morning. The prosecution insisted she had changed clothes to commit the crime, then destroyed the blood-spattered clothes and bathed, dressing again in the clothes witnesses had seen her in that morning—but it was only a theory they couldn’t prove, since they were unable to recover the clothes they theorized she’d changed into.
So, was Lettie Hatch indeed “Lettie Hatchet”—a notorious murderer—or merely a victim of circumstance? The secret died with Lettie in 1962, forty years after the crimes were committed. Many thought the fact she continued to live in the house where her parents were murdered was evidence of her guilt. “How,” people asked, “could anyone live in that house?” was their line of reasoning. Others, however, saw it as proof of Lettie’s innocence. Miss Windham, who died in 1947, lived with Lettie until her own death.
After the verdict of not guilty was returned, both women refused to ever discuss the case again. No killer was ever brought to justice for the crimes that were the talk of Cape Cod that winter of 1922. Whatever the two women knew, they took it to their graves with them.
As a side note, another, less well-known murder had occurred only a few weeks before the Hatch murders—that of a young artist named Orville Axelrod. His body was found hacked to death a few blocks from the Hatch house. Axelrod was known to be quite a ladies’ man, and no one was ever arrested for that crime, either. Many theorists have conjectured that the two crimes were somehow related—but no link could ever be conclusively drawn between the crimes. It is doubtful if Axelrod, who was part of the artists’ colony at the time and certainly not on the social plane of the Hatches, even was acquainted with the senator or his family.
Karen had read all of this, over and over. There was more she had printed out, too, more speculation, theories, and even photographs of all the principals in the case. The photograph of Lettie Hatch was from 1943. No longer a teenager, she looked serious and severe. She looked as though she never laughed, never smiled. She stared