ABSTRACT
The victims in these two stories were both strong, wealthy, and respectable women, who were killed by men of shallow and loathsome characters. The first was a gentle and honest widow, who had been kind enough to lend money to the man who would later become her murderer. Rather than repay her kindness with the money he owed her, he decided to sneak into her house and take her life before burying her in his cornfield. Particularly commendable in this case, as in many others in this collection, were the efforts of the local townspeople to bring her killer to justice. With few clues to go by, they nonetheless undertook a lengthy and careful investigation, which was brought to a successful end by some astute observation and some luck. The second victim was a gentle shopkeeper’s wife, who was raped and killed during one of her daily constitutionals through farmers’ fields. Because their act of rape was already serious enough for both men in this case to hang from the noose, should they be found out, they determined (though not without some soul-searching on the behalf of one perpetrator) to kill the woman so that she could not identify their attackers. We are not told whether the three murderers in these stories were executed for their crimes, but author is confident that each man would suffer “misery proportionably to his crime”.
