Chester Gillette | Biography

In 1906, the murder case of Chester Gillette and Grace Brown gripped the nation. Sensational newspaper coverage billed Brown's death as the epitome of a woman wronged. Had Gillette drowned his pregnant lover in order to avoid having to marry her? A jury thought so, and he went to the electric chair. But the essential mystery and drama at the heart of the story remained unsolved. Its appeal to twentieth century popular culture persisted for decades, inspiring a major American novel, a popular Hollywood film, ballads, books, television programs, and endless speculation.

Although they met in a factory, the young Gillette and Brown came from sharply different circumstances. Gillette was the son of formerly successful parents who gave up a hotel and other businesses in order to be Salvation Army missionaries. A prep school dropout bouncing between jobs, the twenty-two year old ended up working in his wealthy uncle's skirt factory in Cortland, New York, in 1905. There he met Brown, a bright, fun-loving farm girl. They dated a bit, but, according to the strict social mores of the time, kept their sexual relationship secret.

Then pregnancy intervened. Gillette showed no interest in settling down. At least as far as Brown was concerned, he had apparently promised to marry her. She wrote him increasingly desperate letters, begging him to start their life together. Ultimately on what she hoped would be their wedding trip, they went to the Adirondacks on July 9, 1906. Two days later, on July 11, while boating together on Big Moose Lake in Herkimer County, she fell into the water. Gillette did not jump in to rescue her. Instead, he fled, traveling under an assumed name before being arrested three days later.

At trial, District Attorney George Ward built a devastating case. Even decades afterwards, Ward's work was studied as a textbook example of how to win a prosecution using only circumstantial evidence. Traveling widely in his preparation, he had mustered over one hundred witnesses and collected one hundred pieces of evidence with which to bury jurors in mountains of meticulous detail. And he did not neglect the emotions. In a tremulous voice, the prosecutor read the dead woman's love letters to the jury--at one point even brandishing a jar containing her fetus. Gillette's defense was far less compelling: he maintained that Brown committed suicide to escape the shame of her pregnancy.

Gillette was executed on March 30, 1908, but his story lived on. The yellow journalism of the era burned the saga into the public mind, and the popular culture jumped in. In 1925, Theodore Dreiser published his widely acclaimed novel, An American Tragedy, based on the story. Hollywood adapted the novel in the A Place in the Sun (1951), which won six Academy Awards. Speculation about the truth of Brown's death continued into the late twentieth century. Craig Brandon's nonfiction account Murder in the Adirondacks (1986) questioned Gillette's guilt, and television documentaries on PBS and the History Channel retold the story in the late 1990s.