Alfred J. Lindsay -- 1 of 12 Men Executed
for Cattaraugus Murders

The above image is based on a satellite view of the Great Meadow Correctional Facility.

About five and a half years prior to their murder March 5, 1935, the romance of Bernice Kenyon and Harold Farnsworth began in Cattaraugus County's Salamanca court house.

Bernice, 50, was there as secretary to the judge sentencing Harold, 46, on a carrying concealed weapon conviction. His rap sheet, dating back to 1914, reflected a pattern of getting into trouble with the law.

Yet she saw something in him -- perhaps in how he stood before the bench, in what he told her judge, in the manner of his speaking -- that prompted her to look beyond the record of his past. Instead, what she saw, what perhaps no one else had ever taken the time to see in him, prompted her to look to the possibilities of his future.

Did they exchange brief glances in the courtroom? Did they exchange some passing polite phrases during breaks in the proceedings? That isn't known. What is known is they began a correspondence that continued throughout his next several years in Great Meadow Prison as he served the sentence her judge had imposed.

The above sketch of Isaac V. Baker, Jr. appears in this website's presentation of Michael Harling's Origins of the New York State Bureau of Identification. The Bakers played key roles in the development of the New York State prison system and its fingerprint bureau. Isaac V. Baker Sr., a New York railroad magnate and politician, had two sons, Isaac V. Baker, Jr. and Charles K. Baker. Isaac, Jr. served in the Legislature until 1881, as an Assemblyman and then State Senator, also oversaw the family's railroad interests. He then served as Superintendent of the NYS Department. of Prisons from 1882 through 1887. His brother, Charles K., who had also served as an Assemblyman, was given the position of Prison Department chief clerk, a post he held about 30 years. In middle of the 20th Century's first decade, the Baker family sold the state the land outside of Comstock upon which the Great Meadow Prison was eventually built.

Frequent letters had to take the place of frequent visits because that prison is situated in Comstock, Washington County, nearly 400 miles away from Salamanca, Cattaraugus County.

Back in the 1930s, the Southern Tier Expressway and other super highways and thruways did not exist. While New York had an extensive network of passenger railroads, a person seeking to travel from the western-most parts of the state to the eastern-most parts had to complete a time-consuming series of connections and stop-overs. In-state air travel, an industry still in its infancy, was not any more direct (if available at all in certain areas) and was a great deal more expensive.

So correspondence was Bernice and Harold's main means of maintaining contact. The prison mail censors must have smiled to themselves as the letters between the two progressed in tone from cautious interest to friendly rapport to fond regard to warm affection.

In his historical profile of Great Meadow Correctional Facility for the New York State Department of Correctional Services magazine DOCS Today May 2000 issue, NYCHS founding member Austin Clarke wrote:

In 1905, New York State purchased a 1,000-acre homestead from the family of railroad magnate Isaac V. Baker. The tract, east of Lake George in the village of Comstock, included tillable lands, pasture and woodlands. By all accounts, the family got the better deal. The state overpaid for the land, much of which could never be cultivated; within a few years of the prison's opening, it was forced to lease 250 nearby acres of arable land to feed the inmates.

For nearly two miles, the grounds fronted the Barge Canal, with the main line of the Delaware & Hudson Railway but a quarter-mile away. . . .

The state [had] intended to build an insane asylum on the site . . . Instead, in 1909, the Legislature appropriated $350,000 for a prison. The new institution would expand the capacity of the evolving system of adult penal institutions, then consisting of three prisons (Auburn, Sing Sing, and Clinton), two men's reformatories (Elmira and Eastern), two women's reformatories (Albion and Bedford) and the asylums for insane criminals at Matteawan and Dannemora.

Of the four prisons, Great Meadow would be the only one to which prisoners were not sent directly by the courts. "Young and promising background first offenders" would be transferred there at the discretion of the superintendent of state prisons (the equivalent of today's commissioner), usually as a reward for good behavior. The "honor prison" would also differ from the established prisons in being set up as an educational institution, with a "School of Agriculture" and industrial training as well as academic instruction for illiterates (chiefly the foreign-born).

The name, too, was a break with tradition. Until then, New York was content with place-names. We don't know whether "Great Meadow" was a name used by the Bakers or if it was christened by a state official, but it was certainly inspired by the nearly level 300-acre field on which the prison would be built. . . .

The magnificent 1865 Baker mansion was used until the early 1970s as the warden's residence (it is now used for offices).

On February 11, 1911, 23 inmates from Sing Sing arrived at the partially completed prison and were housed in the north wing of the cellblock.

For those who regularly read issues of the Sunday newspaper insert Parade magazine or the International Herald Tribune and for those who can remember having read the Herald Tribune (which closed in 1966), the name "Walter Nelson Thayer III" has possible relevancy, even if not recognized. Thayer III was a major figure in their corporate history, having headed both the NY and the International "Trib" and having had a significant role in the acquisition of Parade by Trib owner John Hay Whitney. Thayer III was born in Dannemora where his father, Dr. Walter N. Thayer Jr. headed a state reformatory before becoming state Correction Commissioner and where III's grandfather Walter N. Thayer Sr. had headed Clinton Prison.

Great Meadow did not officially open however, until June 8, 1911, when Walter N. Thayer became the first warden. (Thayer, formerly warden at Clinton, was the father of Dr. Walter N. Thayer, Jr., who was New York's commissioner of correction from 1931 to 1936.)

Thayer resigned a month into the job and was replaced by William J. Homer, who stayed until his death in 1919.

Homer, 50, was stricken at 11 p.m. Oct. 4th, 1919 with a "paralytic stroke" after making an address to Jewish inmates assembled to observe the feast of Yon Kippur. He died the following morning at 3 o'clock. Homer, a former Erie Railroad traveling passenger agent, had been appointed Great Meadow warden by Governor John Alden Dix in July 1911.

After Homer, Col. William J. Hunt was named to the warden post.

By the time, Harold Farnsworth arrived at Great Meadow to begin serving his weapon possession conviction sentence, the character of the prison had changed significantly from its original "honor system" plan. It was supposed to have been -- and for less than a decade and a half it was -- a prison without a wall around it. But due to (a) overcrowding elsewhere in the statewide system and (b) Great Meadow's underutilization because of the "first offenders only" rule on admissions, that restriction was eroded as second timers were introduced into the inmate population in 1916 during its Homer era and, not long afterward, third timers as well.

Even with some recidivists added to the prisoner mix, hundreds of cells remained unoccupied because of administrators' fears that filling them would result in a steady stream of escapes unless an outer wall was built.

Above, based on a Google map image, illustrates Great Meadow's proximity on Route 22 at Comstock to the Great Barge Canal locks westward (left) from the prison (red dot) and to the NY-Vt. state line eastward (right) from the prison.

Thus in 1924 under Warden Hunt the inmates were put to work constructing a wall running 3,000 feet. It took four years to build. With its completion, the facility became a full-scale maximum security prison.

If Harold had been permitted to stand atop the wall and look eastward with binoculars, he might have see some western parts of his native Green Mountain state, Vermont, such as Lake St. Catherine, only a relatively few miles away. Would he have harbored a hope to escape to it, except for the hope of another kind of escape that Bernice's letters held out to him -- the opportunity to break away from his criminal past, a chance to "go straight" and to make for them a life together?

When Farnsworth arrived at Great Meadow, Hunt was still warden but not for long. Highly regarded, he had been offered the warden post at Auburn Prison but turned it down in order to stay at Great Meadow. But that was not to be. In 1931, Hunt was tapped to head Attica, the system's fifth maximum security prison.

The above image of mobster Charles "Vannie" Higgins, boyhood buddy of Great Meadow Warden Joseph H. Wilson, is based on a portion of a photo of the bootlegger turning up his coat collar as he leaves NYC's Elizabeth St. Police Station in November 1931. Part of the NY World-Telegram & Sun photo collection of the Library of Congress, the full b&w photo can be accessed on the Pop Art Machine website by clicking the sepia version above.

Joseph H. Wilson, formerly state budget director, was named to succeed him as Great Meadow Prison warden. Farnsworth, who served much of his sentence during Wilson's tenure, was an inmate there when one of the warden's pals from childhood days in Brooklyn flew in -- literally -- for a visit.

Known as Brooklyn's Last Irish Boss, Charles "Vannie" Higgins was one of only a handful of mobsters who knew how to fly a plane and had a valid pilot's license to prove it. Knowing that his boyhood buddy would be flying up for dinner with him June 17, 1932, Warden Wilson had inmates clear a nearby meadow so Vannie could land his plane.

The next night, Vannie was back in Brooklyn for his 7-year-old daughter's tap dance recital. About 11 o'clock as he left the Prospect Park hall with his daughter, Higgins was gunned down gangland-style, having protectively run from her toward his assailants so as to draw away from her their gunfire.

The bootlegger's violent death, coming little more than 24 hours after his Great Meadow visit, put into the public spotlight the Wilson-Higgins dinner and the use of inmate labor to clear a "landing field." Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, running for President, made the appropriate public comments criticizing the warden's actions. But Wilson indicated there would be no apologies coming from him for his having welcomed "a social visit" by his old friend from their old neighborhood, a buddy whom he could never again see in this life.

Perhaps Farnsworth was among the inmates who cleaned the meadow to make a field for the warden's boyhood buddy to land his plane. But if not, Harold would surely have learned about it from the prison grapevine. For Farnsworth, another kind of buddy story started at Great Meadow. His cell mate was a New Rochelle burglar about 20 years his junior: Alfred J. Lindsay.

The younger convict must have been generally aware of, if not personally privy to the romance by correspondence between Harold and Bernice. That kind of thing would have been hard to conceal within the narrow confines of a prison cell, especially given the life-transforming effect that the long-distance relationship with her was having on Farnsworth. Her letters had led Harold to dare think, even to plan on making an honest living so that she and he could be together after his release. Harold may well have wanted someone with whom to talk about those plans, if only to make sure they didn't sound foolish at his age when spoken aloud. Lindsay was a handy listener.

"On a little traveled dirt road in the Cattaraugus hills" is how the location of Harold and Bernice Farnsworth's farmhouse was described by the New York Times in its story on their murder. Situated in the southwestern part of the county, the farming region has a significant number of Amish who began settling there circa 1949. The image below is based on an "Amish Country" web page image on the "Official Tourism Site of Cattaraugus County." Click to access.

Both were released the same day in August 1934.

Harold headed for Cattaraugus to demonstrate to Bernice that he really meant what he wrote her about making a new start in life and to ask her to share that life with him.

Lindsay headed in another direction.

Bernice accepted Harold's proposal and they were wed soon after he had arrived back in the county.

The Farnsworths took up farming in the Cold Spring near Randolph.

Their farm house was, according to the New York Times description, "on a little traveled dirt road in the Cattaraugus hills."

The farming community where they settled is situated in the southwestern part of the county and takes its name from nearby Cold Spring Creek that feeds into the Allegany River.

Today that region of Western New York has a significant Amish presence, but not so back when the Farnsworths were newlyweds. The Amish didn't begin settling there in noticeable numbers until the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Though Farnsworth and Lindsay had gone their separate ways after being released from prison together, they kept in touch. When Alfred informed Harold about having a hard time finding legitimate work, the older man offered to take him on as a farm hand.

Not that the job would pay much, if anything. The whole country was in the midst of the Great Depression. But at least the Farnsworths could share with him the food on their table, the roof over their heads and the logs burning in their fireplace. Bernice went along with Harold in opening their home to her husband's jobless former cell mate. After all, Alfred had made known his jobless situation around Christmastime 1934; so taking into their home someone in need seemed keeping with the spirit of the season.

The above image of Cattaraugus Towns is derived from an image on the Towns page of Ancestry.com's RootsWeb Cattaraugus section. The towns depicted in that image are linked to pages providing their respective town histories. Click the above image to access that image with its town history links.

The problem appears to have been that Alfred didn't enter into the arrangement with the same spirit. Perhaps, the newlyweds -- so happy that they were together at last, so hopeful as they started out on a new life together -- simply assumed Alfred, who had been aware of their prison correspondence romance, would welcome being part of this dream-come-true for them.

But Alfred's much more negative attitude about life in general belied the "True Love" tattoo etched across the fingers of his left hand. The Farnsworths' evident happiness in their own true love could well have had a reverse effect on Lindsay, prompting a resentment in him having little to do with his work around their farm.

The degree of violence inflicted upon the couple by Alfred strongly suggests that more than a monetary motive was involved in the double murder. Harold had been shot three times in the head. Bernice had been hacked to death with a double-edged axe. Given that the Farnsworths were about the same likely age as Lindsay's parents, one wonders whether Alfred's relationship with his own mother and father figured into the fury of the attack.

The slayings at the Farnsworth farm happened Tuesday March 5th but three days elapsed before the crime became known. On Friday, March 8th, Harold was found at the bottom of a flight of stairs and Bernice's body was discovered in the cellar. Missing from the farm were the couple's few valuables, their car and Alfred.

Cattaraugus Sheriff Lester W. Carlson and his deputies learned from interviewing neighbors and others that the Farnsworths had taken on Lindsay as a farmhand about two months earlier but had severed his employment Monday, March 4, the day before the homicides.

Carlson disclosed to newspapers that Harold, originally from Montpelier, Vt., and Alfred, originally from New Rochelle, Westchester, had been inmate buddies at Great Meadow. The sheriff also outlined the story of Harold and Bernice -- their meeting in the Salamanca court, their years of correspondence during Farnsworth's imprisonment, and their marrying after his release the previous August.

The images immediately above and below are based on photos of 154th NY Volunteers monuments (Gettysburg above, Chancellorsville below) found on the timeline page of the excellent Fenton History Center site telling the stories of the Western NY Civil War soldiers. Click either image to access the site. Also worth checking out is The Hardtack Regiment, the informative site of 154th historian Mark H. Dunkelman whose interest in the 154th began during childhood when he learned his great-grandfather served with it. He soon discovered that the 154th’s legacy was neglected, a situation he decided to change. During decades of research, he contacted more than 1,000 descendants of members of the regiment and gained access to more than 1,600 wartime letters, a score of diaries and accounts, 200 portraits, and other material he used to write several books and numerous articles on the 154th. Links to a complete roster of the 154th NY appear on The Hardtack Regiment site. Since 1986, descendants of the 154th New York have held annual reunions in Cattaraugus, New York, where the regiment was raised. To mark the 10th reunion they raised funds, erected and dedicated the regimental monument at Chancellorsville, Virginia, the 154th's bloodiest battlefield. .

On Monday, March 11th, three days after the homicides were discovered, Lindsay was arrested in New York City, tripped up by the tattoo on his left hand.

NYPD Detectives Walter Clancy and John Northeis of the West 13th St. Police Station spotted him in a restaurant at 6th Ave. and 49th St., Manhattan. His furtive behavior aroused their suspicions. Despite the March weather outside, his wearing gloves inside the warm eatery didn't seem appropriate. But when he took the glove off his left hand, they saw the letters on the back of the fingers. They spelled out the phrase "True Love." That fit a "wanted" sheet description of the suspect in the Western New York double-murder case.

Taken to the West 68th St. Stationhouse, Lindsay was questioned by Deputy Inspector Michael McDermott. Detectives said the fugitive admitted the killings but claimed self-defense, alleging he was attacked when he insisted on being paid back wages of $10 a month for the time he had worked on the farm.

Alfred had driven the Farnsworth car to his sister's home in New Rochelle for a change of clothes and then drove to Manhattan where he abandoned the vehicle at Columbus Avenue and 96th St. Police recovered it there after his arrest.

Accompanied by other law enforcement officers, Cattaraugus District Attorney A. Edward Krieger, armed with an arrest warrant charging first degree murder, departed Jamestown, N.Y., that evening to bring the suspect back to the county to face trial.

Exactly one month after the homicides, Lindsay heard judgment rendered: the penalty of death on the conviction of first degree murder. While legal processes were quicker in the 1930s, the single month between the March 5th crime and the April 5th trial court judgment still appears remarkably swift. Perhaps that reflected a determination by the law authorities in Cattaraugus to brook no delay in seeing speedy justice done in this particularly heinous case.

Key to the accelerated rate at which proceedings progressed was D.A. Krieger's decision to try Lindsay only for the savage slaying of 57-year-old Bernice Kenyon Farnsworth. Not that the district attorney credited the claim by Alfred that his killing Harold was an act of self defense. Rather, the prosecutor obviously reasoned that the self-defense claim, already straining credulity when advanced to justify shooting Farnsworth in the head three times, totally lacked the least bit of plausibility to explain away the vicious hacking to death of Mrs. Farnsworth.

In addition to being widely known in the county's legal circles because of her former work as a judge's secretary, her family name -- Kenyon -- had roots in Cattaraugus history tracing back to before the Civil War.

Winfield Scott Kenyon, who was born at New Albion Dec. 12, 1843, served in Company B of Western New York's 154th NY Volunteers Regiment. He died at Salamanca March 13, 1919.

Recruited from Chautauqua and Cattaraugus counties, the Hardtrack Regiment (as it became known) was organized at Jamestown, N. Y., mustering in there Sept. 24, 1862. The regiment's bloodiest battle took place at Chancellorsville but it also earned battlefield flag honors at Gettysburg, Lookout Valley, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Atlanta, Savannah, and in the Campaign of the Carolinas.

Cattaraugus County's Civil War veterans, like their former comrades in-arms around the country, had celebrity status within their home communities, being honored guests at annual patriotic events.

For many decades, one of the most poingnant moments during July 4th parades would be the line of march of those venerable old warriors, (fewer each year) stepping slowly but stubbornly forward along the route, some with the aid of canes. Winfield Scott Kenyon saw more than 50 July 4ths come and go before he passed away.

The images immediately above and below are based on Mary E. Bryant's photos of Randolph Rural Cemetery. The full color photos can be found on the Painted Hills Genealogy Society site's opening page for the list of burials at the cemetery. The society is devoted to genealogy in the 6-county Painted Hills region of Western NY (4 counties) and northwest Pennsylvania (2 counties). Click either image to access.

His remains are buried in the Central Road section of Randolph Rural Cemetery where are the remains of Olive G. Kenyon who like Winfield was born in 1841 but who predeceased him by nine years.

The remains of three other Kenyons are also nearby in the Central Road section of Randolph Rural Cemetery:

• Dora G. Kenyon (born 1874, died 1940);
• Morna G. Kenyon (born 1873, died 1962); and
• Bernice Kenyon Farnsworth (born 1879, died 1935). Alongside her are her husband Harold's remains.

The Kenyon family roots in Cattaraugus and the regard for Bernice Kenyon in the county's legal community may have been among the several factors D.A. Krieger took into consideration in deciding on the unusual course of trying Lindsay for her murder, instead of both murders.

Lindsay was represented at the trial and on appeal by G. Sydney Shane, of Salamanca, and Cornelius J. McCarthy, of Olean. In the late 1930s and early 1930s, Shane would chair the Democratic Party in the county and in 1943 be a candidate for State Supreme Court Justice.

On July 11th, the state's highest appellate bench, the Court of Appeals -- headed by Chief Judge Frederick E. Crane -- affirmed Lindsay's conviction and sentence without issuing a written opinion (per curiam). Judges Crane, Irving Lehman, John F. O'Brien, Irving G. Hubbs, John T. Loughran, and Edward Ridley Finch all concurred. Judge Leonard Callendar Crouch did not sit in the case.

Gov. Herbert H. Lehman declined to commute Lindsay's death sentence to life imprisonment.

Herbert H. Lehman, son of a founder of the Lehman Brothers investment banking firm, was governor when the issue of commuting Alfred J. Lindsay's death sentence to life imprisonment came to the state's chief executive desk as a matter of course. Lehman declined to grant it, Twice elected with Franklin D. Roosevelt as lieutenant governor, Lehman became governor when FDR became President. Lehman was thrice elected to two-year terms as governor (1932, 1934, 1936) and once to a four-year term (1938). Director of the UN relief agency from 1942 through 1946, he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1949, serving there until retirement in 1956. Lehman died on the eve of his receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963.

Frederick E. Crane was chief judge of the state's highest tribunal, the Court of Appeals, when it affirmed without a written opinion the Cattaraugus trial court judgment of conviction and death sentence of Alfred J. Lindsay. Crane was born March 2, 1869 in Brooklyn. He graduated from Columbia University Law School in 1889; was admitted to the bar in 1890, and was in private practice until 1896 when he was appointed an Assistant District Attorney of Kings County. Elected Kings County Judge in 1901, he became a State Supreme Court Justice in 1906; joined the Court of Appeals in 1917 and became its Chief Judge in 1934. Elected Delegate-at-Large to Constitutional Convention of 1938, he retired from the bench in 1939. Crane died Nov. 21, 1947 in Garden City. Click image to access the Historical Society of the Courts of the State of NY web page containing the portrait on which the above version is based. A link to a fuller bio appears there too.

On the evening of August 29th -- slightly less than six months after the homicides and about a year after he and Harold had been released together from Great Meadow Prison -- Sing Sing guards brought Lindsay his final dinner. Earlier he had been that for the traditional "last meal" he could order virtually any food he fancied. In passing up that opportunity for a feast, Alfred laconically replied:

"What's the use?"

Instead, he ate regular prison fare of that day: a hamburger, boiled potatoes, lima beans, and rice pudding.

He walked "the last mile" stolidly, without physical aid, behind the priest, and through "the little green door" to the execution chamber. He glanced briefly at the witnesses assembled and then sat down in the electric chair without a word. No final formal statement.

As the guards adjusted the electrical attachments and restraints, he maintained a silence that, in a sense, seemed to sum up his attitude of the moment and perhaps his abiding general mind frame throughout his short life: "What's the use?"