On the night of October 14, 1911, young women staying at a boarding house in Boston heard groaning coming from the bathroom. They knocked, asked if their friend was all right, and received no answer but continued moans. When they forced the door open, they found Avis Linnell unconscious. A physician was summoned, but by the time he arrived, there was nothing he could do.
The seventeen-year-old was dead. An autopsy determined that she had died from cyanide poisoning, and it revealed something else: Avis Linnell had been pregnant. The investigation quickly turned toward the man she had been engaged to marry, a Baptist minister named Clarence Virgil Thompson Richardson. Clarence was born on February 15, 1876, in Amherst, Virginia, the third of thirteen children raised on his father’s tobacco farm.
From an early age, he wanted to become a clergyman, but his path to the pulpit was marked by instability. At seventeen, he became engaged to two young women at the same time, and both engagements ended when the women learned he had a third fiancée in Kansas City. More engagements followed over the years, and each one collapsed. In 1896, while staying with relatives in Missouri, he suffered what appeared to be a severe mental breakdown, wandering outside in a delirious state and speaking incoherently.
A doctor declared him insane, and he was admitted to the Missouri Baptist Sanitarium for several weeks. He recovered, enrolled at William Jewell College in Kansas City, and in 1901 was ordained as a Baptist minister. His ministry at the Bud Park Baptist Church ended abruptly in 1904 after several young women separately claimed he had proposed marriage to them. Church trustees requested his resignation.
He studied again, but those who knew him described him as emotionally unstable and prone to nervous collapse. In the autumn of 1906, he entered the Newton Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. The following year, he accepted a temporary invitation to serve at a church in El Paso, Texas, where his mental health deteriorated once more. In July 1907, he fell into a cataleptic state and claimed that unknown men were trying to harm him.
He went to Georgetown, Massachusetts, to recuperate, became engaged again, and the engagement came to nothing. In June 1908, he became the minister at a Baptist church in Hyannis on Cape Cod. There he met Avis Linnell, described as one of the brightest pupils at the local high school. She was sixteen.
Clarence baptized her into the church, and village gossip soon spread that the two were a couple. No formal engagement was announced, but Avis withdrew from her social activities, devoted herself to church work, and openly defended Clarence during disputes over his forceful preaching style. His fiery sermons condemned sin in all its forms and divided the congregation into opposing factions. His behavior soon caused concern.
One night, a doctor was urgently summoned to his boarding house, where several church members were struggling to restrain him. Witnesses described him shifting between partial awareness and complete confusion, speaking irrationally and displaying unusual physical strength. A doctor administered morphine, which eventually calmed him. In the summer of 1909, another physician concluded that Clarence’s state of mind appeared seriously disturbed and showed signs consistent with insanity.
By Christmas 1909, Clarence proposed to Avis, presenting her with a diamond engagement ring. Her family seemed pleased that she would marry a man with such a promising future. In April 1910, Clarence resigned his position and accepted a ministry in Cambridge. According to Avis’s friends, the couple intended to marry and travel to China as missionaries.
Avis moved to Boston, telling her family she planned to study music so she could better assist her future husband in the ministry. In Cambridge, Clarence’s ministry prospered. His plain-spoken sermons made him popular with many congregation members. At a church reception, he was introduced to Violet Edmonds, the daughter of Moses Grant Edmonds, one of the wealthiest residents of Brookline, Massachusetts.
Violet was confident, accustomed to wealth, and moved in distinguished social circles. She was drawn to the young minister, and Clarence devoted considerable attention to her. Before long, Violet confided in others that she and Clarence intended to marry. Whether Avis fully knew about the other woman is not known, but by early summer she had removed her diamond engagement ring.
Only a few of her friends realized that another woman had entered the minister’s life. In August 1911, Avis returned to her family home in Hyannis, and not long afterward, Clarence arrived there for part of his holiday. In the months before this, he and Violet Edmonds had been seen together openly in Boston restaurants. Yet once back in Hyannis, Clarence devoted much of his attention to Avis.
The two were frequently seen together, walking and calling at local homes, and townspeople began to speculate that the pair had resolved their differences and would finally marry after all. In September, Clarence returned to his church duties in Cambridge, and Avis resumed her music studies in Boston. Friends grew concerned, as Avis often appeared anxious and emotionally troubled. On Saturday, October 14, she told a friend at her boarding house that she intended to dine that evening with a gentleman friend.
She did not mention Clarence by name, but her companions understood whom she meant. That evening she returned to her room alone. Later that night, the groaning began. When Avis was found dying, one of her friends telephoned Clarence to inform him.
Instead of showing concern, he asked whether Avis had spoken about him before losing consciousness. When told she had not, he said the friend should not have contacted him and that she needed to speak to Avis’s family and the police. Officers also learned that immediately after being informed of the death, Clarence left his lodgings at the Brookline mansion of Moses Grant Edmonds and traveled into Boston to speak to an attorney. Upon his return, he announced he would remain in seclusion.
On October 19, a chemist in Newton informed police that he had sold cyanide of potassium to the minister. Clarence had told him he wanted the poison to kill a pet dog, and although the chemist warned him not to use it on an animal, the minister insisted. As he was leaving, he asked the chemist not to mention the purchase to anyone. The police surrounded the Edmonds residence but were refused entry.
Early on the morning of October 20, officers were finally admitted and formally charged Clarence Virgil Thompson Richardson with the murder of Avis Linnell. He insisted he was innocent. The Edmonds family announced they would support him and pay for his defense. Violet sent flowers and chocolates to his prison cell and declared her confidence that he would soon be freed and the pair would then marry.
Clarence pleaded not guilty before the grand jury. On November 2, the jury returned an indictment against him on five separate counts connected with Avis’s death. His trial was scheduled to begin on January 15, 1912. On December 20, he was discovered unconscious and bleeding heavily in his cell, having used a crude blade fashioned from a sharpened piece of tin to mutilate himself.
Physicians feared for a time that he might die from blood poisoning. Afterward, he became subdued, mentally exhausted, and increasingly detached from proceedings around him. On January 5, 1912, he abruptly withdrew his plea of not guilty and admitted that he had poisoned Avis Linnell. Four days later, he formally entered his confession before Judge George A.
Sanderson and issued a public statement declaring himself deeply penitent for his crime. He insisted he sought neither mercy nor personal advantage, but wished to spare Avis’s family the ordeal of a public trial. He described himself as tortured by guilt and spoke of hoping, if allowed to live, to spend the rest of his life seeking redemption behind prison walls. It later emerged that his legal counsel had advised him that a guilty plea might allow him to escape the electric chair and receive life imprisonment instead.
But when the judge passed sentence, he told the court that the only punishment permitted under the law was death by electrocution. Clarence collapsed when he heard the sentence and had to be assisted from the courtroom. Only after the death sentence was imposed did his defense team seriously pursue the claim of insanity. Governor Eugene N.
Foss ordered an examination of Clarence’s mental condition and appointed Dr. Lloyd Vernon Briggs of the Massachusetts Mental Health Society to investigate. Through affidavits and interviews, Dr. Briggs built up a detailed picture of a man long troubled by physical and psychological instability.
Clarence’s family had a history of mental illness, including an uncle who died in a Virginia state mental hospital and a cousin confined to an asylum in Missouri. He had suffered a series of head injuries throughout his life, including a childhood fall down the front steps of his home, being thrown from a horse onto a rock, and being knocked unconscious after being hit by another child. The injuries were said to have left him with headaches, weaknesses, and periods of strange behavior. In April 1911, he hit his head while stepping out of an elevator, causing weakness in his legs, confusion, and emotional instability.
Despite recognizing these signs of mental disturbance, none of the doctors consulted believed the murder itself had been committed during one of these episodes. They concluded that Clarence understood the nature of his actions at the time of the killing. On May 16, 1912, Governor Foss rejected the petition for clemency, ending Clarence’s final hope of avoiding execution. Public fascination with the case was enormous.
Crowds gathered outside the prison in the days before the execution. Despite heavy rain, more than two thousand people remained outside the prison walls for hours, waiting for news. Shortly after midnight on May 21, 1912, Clarence Richardson was executed. Many of the crowd stayed through the night, not fully dispersing until morning.
After the execution, public opinion became increasingly divided over whether justice had been properly carried out. Some argued that Clarence had been executed without a proper trial, because his guilty plea prevented a full examination of the evidence and his mental state. Critics believed his obvious psychological instability should have led to a deeper medical investigation rather than a rapid execution, raising wider concerns about how mentally ill offenders were treated by the legal system. In 1921, Dr.
Briggs revisited the case and argued that Clarence had been mentally ill for years, suffering from hysteria, hallucinations, memory lapses, and emotional breakdowns that several physicians had recognized long before the murder. He criticized the authorities for allowing him to continue in public life without proper treatment, and he later used the case to advocate for reforms in the early recognition of mental illness.