The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1910-01-31
WOMEN WHO DIED ON GALLONS IN CONNECTICUT New London County Hanged Girl of Less Than 12
 Years
Windham County Had Holi- day When Elizabeth Shaw Was Executed In Colonial Times = Fairfield and Stratford Put a Number of Women to Death.
(Hartford Courant.)

If Sophie Kritchman, now on trial in Waterbury for first degree murder, should be executed she would not be the first woman in Connecticut to suf- fer the extreme penalty of the law, as- suming that the extreme penalty is plain hanging, there having been a time when the extreme penalty in VOlved worse things.
 During the witchcraft delusion in New England eccentric old women stood little chance of dying in their beds, so that the first execution of a woman in this colony, or one of the first, was that of Aisle Young, "One of Windsor,'' as Winthrop termed her, who was executed in 1647, having been found guilty of being a witch. Others executed for like crime were Mary Johnson of Wethersfield, 1648, who 'dyd in a frame extremely to the sat- isfaction of them that were spectators of it," Joan Darlington of Wethers-' field, 1651; Goody Bassett, Stratford 1851; Goodwife Knapp, Fairfield, 1853; and Rebecca Greensmith and Mary Sanford of Hartford, who were exc cuted in 1862. Considering that there must have been but few old women in Connecticut at that time, the percen- tage of morality was high; it might have been higher, however, IS a good many others were 'fSuspicioned" to use a phrase of that time
 By all odds the most pitiful case of the colonial period came from Windham county, Elizabeth Shaw be- ing the victim. She lived with her father, some two miles southwest of Windhanl, a harmless girl, whose mind was not very strong. Becoming a mother she left her infant in the cleft of a rock until it died of exposure. Her father suspected her and, so, the legend goes, gave information against CS1-o the first degree and her trial began on Sept. IT, 1745, with Roger Wolcott as chief judge. No details of the trial have been saved, but it is known that she pleaded not guilty but was found guilty by the jury and the date of her execution was fixed as Dec. IS, 1745. Legend has it that her father repentance and he secured a reprieVe from Governor Law but storms and accidents prevented him from reaching Windham iIl time.
 When the date of the execution came a gallOWS was created on hill near Windham green and the country folk made a holiday of Elizabeth Shaw's hanging. Seventy years or more later old men and women told the. tale of the hanging which they witnessed as children and of seeing Elizabeth Shaw riding to her death seated on her coffin and crying out, 70 Jesus, have mercy on my souP' There is no doubt as to Elizabeth Shaw's fate, as the court records for 1746 bear this entry: Allowed MT. Sheriff Hun tington for cost and expense of doing execution on Elizabeth Shaw, 829. .5s.' The story is one of the worst in the judicial history of Connecticut.
 In view of the fate meted out to Elizabeth Shaw the outcome of a trial 1x4 CT is wholly ineXplicable, especially as the criminal in this case was appar- ently a slave. The crime occurred in Pomfret in 1795, as readers of The Courant will doubtless remember. The criminal was Ann, a 13 year old color ed girl, who belonged to Samuel Clark. Moved and melted thereto by the devil,' as the old indictment read, she killed the five year old daughter of her master, cutting the child's throat. Then, with an access of deviltry who'll ly beyond her years, she gave the alarm, saying that a vagrant had killed the child. She was tried and yet she was not sentenced to death. The first thing that happened to her was ~39 lashes on her bare back and the branding of the letter ''M'' upon her hand. After these preliminaries she was sentenced to life imprisonment in the jail of Windham county.
 The crime for which unfortunate Elizabeth Shaw was executed was not an uncommon one in colonial times, judging from the various manuscript records in the volumes of Crimes and Misdemeanors in the state libary. In 1754. nine years after the execution of Elizabeth Shaw, the general assembly was deeply concerned with Jane Thompson of Union, who was charg- cd with the same offense. She fled into his majestys colony of Massachu- setts, where an officer arrested her, brought her back into Connecticut, where she was brought before a jus tice of the peace and bound over for trial in the superior court. The pa pers on file do not concern themselves with her fate, but are the memorials of the officer who captured her in Mas sachusetts and who petitioned the gen. eral assembly for additional costs be- cause of the expense which he had incurred.
 Within a few years of this time Katherine Garrett, better known as