Massachusetts & Tennessee: Two Axe Murders, 1893 & 1897

This episode contains detailed descriptions of violent death, including axe murders and decapitation. If you need to skip this content, advance to the chapter markers below. Support resources are listed at the end of these notes.

This Episode

Season 40 of Foul Play marks America's 250th anniversary with a series of Twin Portraits, two true crimes from two different states, set in the same decade, examined side by side. This week: two axe murders from the 1890s, one in Massachusetts, one in Tennessee, both forgotten by history.

On May 30, 1893, twenty-two-year-old Bertha Manchester was killed in her father's farmhouse outside Fall River, Massachusetts, six days before the Lizzie Borden trial opened fifteen miles away in New Bedford. In March 1897, five members of a German immigrant family were slaughtered on a Tennessee ridge, their house burned to the ground, their case never solved. Two women named lived into their nineties and never saw justice. Shane and Wendy tell both stories.

The Victims (Case A, Massachusetts )

Bertha Mabel Manchester was born May 7, 1871, in Fall River, Massachusetts. She was twenty-two years old. Her mother had died when she was young, and she helped run the family dairy farm on New Boston Road, the quiet, rural edge of a city better known for cotton mills and crowded streets. She was home alone on the morning of May 30, 1893, when her father Stephen and her twelve-year-old brother Freddie left with the milk wagon.

She fought back. The medical examiner found twenty-three wounds to the back of her skull, defensive cuts on her hands and arms, and clothing torn in the struggle. Five teeth had been knocked out. The same doctor who performed those wounds had examined two other bodies less than a year before, Andrew and Abby Borden, murdered with a hatchet eight miles away the previous August. Dr. William A. Dolan was the medical examiner for Bristol County. He had seen this kind of violence before.

The Victims (Case B, Tennessee)

Jacob Ade was a German immigrant who had farmed 410 acres on Paradise Ridge, in the northwestern corner of Davidson County, Tennessee, for twenty years. His wife Pauline was fifty. Their daughter Lizzie was eighteen. Their son Henry was thirteen. On the night of March 23, 1897, a ten-year-old neighbor named Rosa Moirer was sleeping over at the Ade farm.

By 9:30 that night, a neighbor named Squire Simpson saw a glow on the horizon. He went to investigate with a potato fork lashed to a long pole, probing through