Nevada & Georgia: Women on the Gallows, 1873-1890

Historical Significance

In Georgia, a Webster County posse pursued Susan and Enoch one hundred twenty-five miles to Coffee County, Alabama. The grand jury indicted both on May 27, 1872, twenty-three days after the murder. Enoch's trial lasted a single day; the jury deliberated for three minutes. Both were sentenced to death on May 30. Twenty-six days from murder to death sentence. The Georgia Supreme Court denied Susan's appeal in *Eberhart v. State* 47 Ga. 598 (1873), with Justice H.K. McCay dismissing calls for mercy. Governor James M. Smith refused clemency four days before Susan was to die.

Sheriff L.R. Barnard traced the Potts family over five hundred miles to Rock Springs, Wyoming, arresting the couple on February 16, 1889. Josiah Potts claimed Fawcett had killed himself after sexually abusing their daughter Edith, then approximately five years old. The abuse allegation was never investigated. The jury deliberated four hours, unanimous guilty verdict. Two hundred sixty-seven residents of Carlin petitioned the state board of pardons to commute both sentences to life imprisonment. The board refused. Sheriff Barnard himself opposed the execution.

The Investigations and Trials

Case B, Georgia (1872): On May 4, 1872, after ten o'clock at night, Enoch Spann strangled his wife Sarah with a plow line, breaking her neck. According to his confession, Susan Eberhart held a handkerchief over Sarah's mouth at his command. Susan maintained she had been asleep and was compelled to participate under direct threat from a man who had already attempted murder twice, including a staged buggy accident where Susan had pulled Sarah from a swollen creek to save her life.

Case A, Nevada (1888): Miles Fawcett entered the Potts household on New Year's Day to collect a debt and use knowledge of Elizabeth's bigamous marriage in Fresno, California. He was never seen alive again. His remains, charred, dismembered, buried in pieces throughout the cellar floor, were discovered on January 16, 1889, by the new tenant George Brewer. The only identifying object: a fragment of burned trouser pocket containing Fawcett's pocketknife.

The Crimes

Sarah Spann was approximately fifty years old. She had lost a leg and lived as an invalid in a one-room log cabin inWebster County, Georgia, dependent on her husband Enoch for everything. A Confederate veteran whose own fellow soldiers had described him as "very ignorant and very imbecile, Enoch Spann was the man she was married to and the man who k