History Talks Speaker Series: Greg Williams on Sandwich’s Bathsheba Spooner – Seducer of Souls

The “Seducer of Souls”, Bathsheba Ruggles Spooner, was born in the center of Sandwich, in what was then (1746) a tavern operated by her notorious-Tory father, Brig. General Timothy Ruggles. The extended family moved to central Massachusetts when Bathsheba was a child, and she married the well-off Joshua Spooner. The family lived on the Post Road in what is now Brookfield.

Bathsheba, aged about 32, began an affair with a teenaged Colonial militia soldier from Ipswich who was passing by, and eventually, with him and two British Army regulars (dispersed upon the Massachusetts countryside after the Battle of Ticonderoga) conspired to murder her husband, Joshua. Which they did: beating him and dumping him into the household well. All four were apprehended and convicted of murder and (in Bathsheba’s instance) aiding and abetting. They were publicly hanged in Worcester in July 1778–after the United States had declared its independence from Great Britain, and thus they were the first executed defendants in U.S. history. Notoriously, Bathsheba did not even benefit from a stay based on her claimed pregnancy because two examinations did not agree she was indeed pregnant. She was, five months. She was not, as sometimes claimed, also the last woman hanged in the country. A few followed her, though fairly soon thereafter.