At half past seven on the morning of May 4, 1919, a man walking through a quiet park in Barre, Vermont, spotted something pale among the flower beds. It was not a fallen sheet or an abandoned coat. It was the body of a woman lying face down, wearing only her stockings, shoes, and leather gloves. Harold Jackson, a twenty-one-year-old from the nearby town of Orange, had been staying at the Bazel Hotel and had gone out for his usual morning stroll.
He stood still, did not cry out, did not approach. He simply understood that Barre, a granite-mining town of about seventeen thousand people, would never be the same. The woman was Lucina Corse Brodwell, twenty-nine years old, a wife and mother of three. She had been born on July 26, 1889, in Johnson, Vermont, and raised by her parents, George and Ruth Corse.
In 1910 she married Harry Brodwell, a carpenter by trade. Five years later they moved to Barre, drawn by the steady work the granite industry offered to skilled craftsmen. By all appearances, their home was much like thousands of others in the town. Witnesses later described Lucina as slender, five feet three inches tall, weighing about 110 pounds, with dark features and prominent cheekbones.
In the language of the time, her husband told investigators she had been “liberated,” a word that carried its own unspoken judgment. In early 1919, according to her friend Grace Grimes, Lucina had been a prolific letter writer, confiding in her correspondence more than she did with her husband. One of those letters, written to a friend in Boston on the very day she died, would later become one of the sharpest tools in the investigation. The scene in the park told a grim story.
Lucina’s hands had been tied behind her back with a piece of her own underclothing. A portion of her clothing, along with a man’s white handkerchief, was knotted around her neck. Her hat lay eight feet from her body. Her Waltham watch, engraved with the initials LPC for her maiden name, Lucina Phillips Corse, was found thirteen feet farther away and was still running.
Her empty purse was discovered five feet beyond that. Other items of clothing, including her corset, were scattered nearby, some torn, with buttons strewn on the ground. The marks on her neck left no doubt that she had been strangled. Investigators quickly concluded she had not been killed in the park at all but at the Bazel Hotel, and that her body had been moved to the garden afterward.
Suspicion first fell on her husband, Harry Brodwell, as it often did. He was questioned at length about his whereabouts that night, but he offered an alibi that satisfied the investigators. During his interview, however, he quietly mentioned his suspicion that his wife had been seeing other men elsewhere. That single observation turned the investigation toward a boarding house on the other side of the city and toward a man who called himself George Long.
The boarding house was run by a woman named Isabelle Parker. To a select circle, it was known for what were discreetly called “faithlessness parties,” gatherings arranged for men and women who were, as Mrs. Parker herself would later describe to investigators, a little too “liberated. ” The pattern was always the same.
Mrs. Parker would identify a married man inclined to stray, tell him that a certain woman wished to meet him, invite him to her home at a set hour, and instruct him to use the back door. Rooms were rented, money changed hands quietly, and the arrangement was repeated over and over. Lucina had attended such gatherings at Mrs.
Parker’s house on multiple occasions. On the night of May 3, she dined with George Long at the boarding house before the two went to the Bazel Hotel. The Vermont authorities were not satisfied with the pace of the local investigation, so they brought in James R. Wood Jr.
of the Wood Detective Agency in Boston, then considered the most famous investigator in New England. Wood arrived in Barre on May 7, the same day Lucina’s body was taken to Johnson for burial. He met with Frank C. Archibald, the state’s attorney for Vermont, and reviewed the evidence gathered so far.
The post-mortem examination confirmed the cause of death as strangulation. It also established that Lucina had eaten a meal, later determined to be meatloaf and bread, about an hour before she died, a detail that would prove crucial in reconstructing her final hours. Wood’s investigation proceeded methodically. Grace Grimes, located in the Boston area, confirmed that she and Lucina had corresponded regularly and that the last letter, written on the day of the murder, mentioned a boarder named George.
Isabelle Parker admitted under questioning that Lucina had been at her home that night and had met George Long there. A search of the Parker premises uncovered what became known as the famous “red book,” a ledger of the names of her clients, said to include a number of prominent Barre residents. Two pieces of physical evidence proved decisive. The first was a wheel track found beside the curb near the scene, later identified as belonging to a car rented by George Long.
The second was the handkerchief tied around Lucina’s neck. Investigators traced it through a laundry mark to a man named Eddie Barron, who testified that he had given the handkerchief to Long some time earlier. One week after the body was found, Wood questioned Long again. Confronted with Mrs.
Parker’s admission, Long finally acknowledged knowing Lucina, though he continued to deny any role in her death. Wood considered it one of the strongest circumstantial cases he had faced in his entire career. On May 15, George Long and Isabelle Parker were arrested and taken to the Washington County jail in Montpelier. Arraignment followed the next day.
Attorney Jay Ward Carver was assigned to defend the accused, while Earl Davis represented the prosecution. During the weeks before the grand jury hearing, it was discovered that George Long’s real name was George Rath and that he had been hiding a considerable criminal record behind his assumed identity. On June 11, the grand jury formally indicted both Long and Parker. Long’s trial began on October 7, 1919, with jury selection.
By October 10, opening arguments were presented before a courtroom filled beyond capacity. The people of Barre seemed unable to stay away. On October 20, a second statement Long had made to investigators was read into evidence. In it, he admitted paying Lucina for sexual relations and compensating Isabelle Parker for the use of a room.
Four days later, a witness named Daisy Laws testified that she had spoken to Long on the morning the body was found, and that he had told her there would soon be one less woman in Barre. The prosecution returned to that statement again and again. The trial lasted a full month, with about a hundred witnesses testifying. In closing arguments, the defense maintained that Long had no motive for murder, insisting the two had been intimate partners with no reason for violence.
The prosecution offered no sympathy, describing Long in terms that stripped him of any human consideration. The case ultimately rested on the weight of circumstantial evidence carefully assembled by the Wood Detective Agency: the wheel track, the handkerchief, the letter, the timing of the last meal. On October 31, the judge instructed the jury. By three o’clock that afternoon, the jury returned a verdict of guilty.
George Long was convicted of second-degree murder. On November 5, he was sentenced to life in prison and transferred to Windsor State Prison. He appealed, but in 1922 the Vermont Supreme Court upheld the conviction, stating in its written opinion that the records showed a brutal murder, indicating unquestionably a corrupt heart and unjustifiable cruelty. The appeal was denied and the sentence stood.
With Long’s trial concluded, the court turned to Isabelle Parker. Though she had once been at the center of suspicion, she was ultimately charged only with maintaining a disorderly house. She pleaded guilty and received a sentence of two to four years. Citing declining health, she was allowed to remain free while seeking clemency from the governor.
Her petition was denied on April 23, 1920, and she began serving her sentence three days later. Isabelle Parker died on September 5, 1922, after serving two and a half years of her term. Throughout the summer and fall of 1919, the Barre Daily Times published nearly daily reports on the case, the investigations, the arrests, and the long month of testimony. For a city of seventeen thousand people, the murder of Lucina Brodwell was not merely a crime.
It was a shared obsession that touched, in one way or another, nearly every household in town. Lucina was buried in Johnson, Vermont, on May 7, 1919, in the Lye View Cemetery in the town where she was born and raised. Her death certificate, preserved in the clerk’s office, remains among the few official records of a life that left little written trace. The case did not fade quietly into the historical record.
In 1990, writer Richard Potamin published an account of the murder in Central Vermont magazine. In 2006, Vermont historian Patricia Belding published a full history of the case, drawing extensively on the original newspaper coverage and surviving trial photographs. In 2020, Harvard historian Jill Lepore returned to the case for her podcast about the nature of evidence and truth, working from the original file long believed lost, preserved in the Vermont State Archives. Lepore concluded that regardless of the facts of the killing itself, George Long had been convicted, in her reading, as much for moral reasons as for the physical evidence assembled against him.
Wood’s papers, including his handwritten report on the investigation, are preserved today in the Historical and Special Collections at Harvard Law School Library, a modest volume of printed pages kept far from the granite hills where the detective’s frustrations, persistence, and eventual triumph remain legible more than a century later. The park off North Main Street is still part of the city today. Few who pass by now know its connection to the case, or remember that on a cold spring morning in 1919, a young mother of three was found there, and with her, a long season of scandal began for the town. Her name was spoken everywhere for a time.
Now it survives mostly in yellowed newspaper pages, in a closed archive box, and in the quiet record of a headstone in Johnson.