Weird Island

31. BARNABY CASTLE: Part 2 | A Murder Mystery

Episode Summary

Don't just listen, see inside Barnaby Castle yourself at this years HALLOWEEN PARTY! Tickets at: http://www.kaitlyn-alyece-events.com/barnaby-castle Last week we explored the story of Barnaby Castle and the first person convicted of committing murder via the mail. This week, we’ll dive deeper into that murder mystery and ask, what if the man who was convicted didn’t do it? Plus, hear from one of the tenants living in Barnaby Castle about what it’s like to live in such a unique historical building.

Episode Notes

Don't just listen, see inside Barnaby Castle yourself at this years HALLOWEEN PARTY! Tickets at: http://www.kaitlyn-alyece-events.com/barnaby-castle

Last week we explored the story of Barnaby Castle and the first person convicted of committing murder via the mail. This week, we’ll dive deeper into that murder mystery and ask, what if the man who was convicted didn’t do it?

Plus, hear from one of the tenants living in Barnaby Castle about what it’s like to live in such a unique historical building.

Episode Source Material:

Episode Transcription

Hi, I’m Sara, and you’re listening to Weird Island. Each week I’ll be telling you about the strangest stories I can dig up from my tiny, little state of Rhode Island. And this week’s story - it’s actually a part 2, so if you haven’t listened to last week’s episode, then you need to go back and check that one out first, because I’m not going to waste any time with a recap - we’re going to get right back into the story of Barnaby Castle and the sensational murder of Josephine Barnaby.
Okay, you’re back! Let’s dive in, because if you’re anything like me, you’re probably dying to know more about this strange murder mystery.
So, the story that I already told, that’s what most people know of this story. Josephine Barnaby was murdered by someone who sent her a bottle of arsenic-laced whiskey in the mail, and her Doctor, T. Thatcher Graves was convicted of the murder. And today this is remembered as the first murder by mail. But as I started reading about the trial and newspaper articles from the time, I realized that this was a much more convoluted case than I had expected. The newspapers were constantly reporting incorrect information, people on both sides were lying and play-acting during the trial, and both the conviction of Dr. Graves and his suicide in jail were called into question. And one of the people who famously questioned the outcome of the case was Barnaby Conrad, the great-grandson of Josephine Barnaby.
Barnaby Conrad’s grandmother and grandfather were John Howard Conrad and Mabel Barnaby Conrad. And likely those two names sound familiar, because Mabel was Josephine’s daughter and John Howard Conrad, her husband, became very very involved in this murder trial. Barnaby Conrad describes Mabel as his “proper grandmother” who had a “gentle and rarefied accent which always sounded slightly British.” His grandfather, John Conrad, on the other hand, he described as “a blunt, wealthy, ruthless man with tremendous drive and many of the less attractive attributes of a bulldog.” Bear in mind that he never actually met his grandfather, who died when he was just six years old. But his impression seems to track with the general consensus. Historian Murray Lundberg, who wrote a book on John Conrad’s involvement in gold and silver mining in Montana had a more sympathetic view of Conrad, and yet he still described him as a mean spirited “high-rolling scoundrel” with a “cathedral-sized ego,” who liked publicity ladled out in big scoops.
So, John Howard Conrad wasn’t the nicest guy. But, Barnaby Conrad might not have had much of a reason to dwell on that. Except that 91 years after the murder, in 1982, he was going through his mother’s belongings after her death, and he found, in the bottom of a large Louis Vuitton suitcase dozens of letters. And mixed in with those letters was a thick brown paper folded into a packet and sealed with red wax, on which someone had written: March 1894: NOT TO BE OPENED BY ANYONE UNTIL 1994. And this was signed by grandmother, Mabel Barnaby Conrad.
Well, curiosity got the better of him and he opened the packet. Inside, there was a note in his grandmother’s handwriting that said: “These two letters were obtained from a guard at the prison by my then husband, John Howard Conrad. They must never be allowed to be seen or published.”
Let me tell you what those letters said. So, letter number 1 read: “To whom it may concern: Upon my solemn Masonic Oath, I, T. Thatcher Graves, did not have anything to do in any way, shape, manner nor deed, with the death of Mrs. Barnaby. I write this knowing what the future will soon have in store for me.”
And the second letter read, “To the coroner: Please do not hold any autopsy upon my remains. The cause of death may be rendered as follows: “Died from persecution, worn out, exhausted.”
Weird, definitely. But then there was something else.
Alongside the letters was a typed manuscript of an interview held in 1908, with the title: “The True Secret of the Barnaby Murder… One that totally alters the verdict of the famous case.”
In the manuscript, a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News named Wilson P. Rush interviews one of Doctor Graves’ lawyers, 17 years after the murder. And along the top of the manuscript, the reporter had handwritten a note that said: “In consideration, for certain sums of money from the Conrad Bank of Montana, I do hereby agree and swear never to try to publish the information contained in this interview with Judge Macon. (signed) Wilson P. Rush.
So, the Conrad family had paid the reporter not to run the interview that Barnaby Conrad held in his hands. And I’ll tell you what the interview said, in a minute. But before we get there, you have to know that this was not the first time Conrad bribed the press in order to control the narrative of the case. I mentioned that this was an incredibly confusing and corrupt trial. There was so much corruption that in my research notes, I just had a segment titled: Everyone Conrad Bribed. He had a lot of money, and he used it effectively.
So I’m going to, kind of, run through a list. Conrad testified that he paid for all the expenses of the witnesses of the state, which the defense argued likely totaled to around $75K dollars - or the equivalent of about $2.3 Million dollars today. And this was supposedly because of his love for his mother-in-law, who he wept over repeatedly during the trial. Even though he and his wife hadn’t spoken to her in years and he reportedly hated her and called her the she-dragon.
He also testified that he, quote, “had some connection,” with the newspapers, and he admitted to having paid for reporters Henry Trickey (of the Boston Globe) and Charles E. Lincoln (of the Boston Herald) to testify in court. Their testimony and their reporting attacked the character of Doctor Graves, so much so that his lawyers stated that the “terrible attacks of the local press upon the accused,” had “influenced the opinions of scores of persons and made them unfit for jury service.”
And as I hinted at in the last episode, Henry Trickey was exposed as a liar a year or so later when he made up false stories during the Lizzie Borden case. He actually fled to Canada under a false name and died soon after that.
I won’t go over every example, but there were tons of false stories reported in the papers that were later proven to be completely made up. But the most important story run in the paper, was that of a confession.
Just after the murder, and after Mrs. Barnaby’s body had been returned to Providence, followed by the doctor and her daughter and John Howard Conrad, Conrad invited Graves to Barnaby Castle under the guise of trying to figure out what happened. Conrad introduced Graves to a man who he said was his brother, but this man was actually a Pinkerton detective named Orinton Hanscom. Graves talked with the men over the course of a few days, and he later testified that Conrad had told him he wanted to become a US senator and governor of Montana, and had offered him $25K to sign a paper stating that he had sent a bottle of pure whiskey to Mrs. Barnaby, saying, “If I could prove that somebody sent a bottle of pure whiskey, I would fix it on the Worrells.” The suggestion being that the Worrells might have added the poison after the whiskey was sent.
The Defense claimed Conrad said, “I have given $20 each to 10 reporters and I have bought up the Boston Herald, and I can make public feeling for you or against you, and if you don’t sign this paper, I will have you taken to Denver; I am a Western man and will stock a jury on you, and I will convict you unless you sign this paper.”
But Graves testified that he never signed the paper and never confessed. And even detective Hanscom confirmed that Conrad had asked him to make this statement in writing, which he never did.
But just days after these meetings, the newspapers ran stories that Graves had confessed to Conrad. And, as the New York Times stated, “The alleged confession has dwarfed everything else.” Conrad then faked a telegram from Denver asking Graves to come West to testify in the trial against the Worrells, and when he arrived in Denver, he stepped off the train and was immediately arrested.
After the trial was over, and the jury deemed Graves guilty, the bribery actually didn’t stop. At this point, public opinion towards Conrad wasn’t overwhelmingly positive. The day after the verdict, a bailiff told newspaper that Graves confessed as he left the court. But it would later come out that Conrad had bribed the Bailiff with $350. Maybe in an effort to further sway public opinion against the doctor.
Okay, so you get the picture. Conrad was pretty corrupt. But let’s get back to that wax-seeled, 91 year old interview transcript Barnaby Conrad dug up. In it, defense lawyer Thomas Macon tells the reporter, “Tom (Graves) didn’t do it,” and he asks, “Who had the three ingredients that are necessary for any crime--motive, ability and opportunity?” When the reporter asked, “Who?”, Macon responded, “It was John Howard Conrad… He hated her guts for virtually cutting his family out of the will and for embarrassing him and his political campaigns with her antics… There was only one person that he hated more--and that was her friend Doctor Graves.” So, is it possible John Howard Conrad actually had Josephine Barnaby, the she-dragon, poisoned and then got Doctor Graves convicted for the murder?
All of the bribery and lying certainly looks bad for Conrad. But, while Macon believed Conrad did it, Dr. Graves’ other lawyer, Henry Furman, actually disagreed.
Handwriting analysis played a big part in the trial, and there were multiple handwriting experts who testified. The experts brought in by the prosecution claimed that the writing accompanying the bottle of poison matched letters written by Dr. Graves. However, that expert also said that the writing with the bottle was obviously written in such a way as to attempt to disguise the sender’s handwriting. When asked why he believed that, the handwriting expert said, “Because it is unlike the writing in the letters.”
But the handwriting expert hired by the defense argued the letters and the inscription were written by different people. And he testified that the writing with the bottle was “unquestionably” written by a woman.
I don’t know about that. My knee jerk reaction is to assert that men and women do not have distinguishable handwriting. But I did a very quick search, and there may be some studies suggesting that the majority of the time (something like 60%+ of the time) people could correctly indicate a writer’s gender. So, I don’t know.
But, let’s say, perhaps a woman wrote the inscription. There were a couple of women who were initially suspects. There was Mrs. Worrell, Sallie Hanley (Josephine’s dismissed personal maid); and there was Doctor Graves’ wife, Kitty.
Kitty Graves’ story was a little interesting, because she met Dr. Graves at age 18, when her parents brought her to him to be treated after a bit of a breakdown. She was found totally nude wandering in a meadow at night, babbling lines from Hamlet. Doctor Graves treated her, and she was said to be doing much better when the two got married a year later. But Kitty Graves was seen throughout the trial as being incredibly fragile, and because of that neither the prosecution nor the defense really interrogated her strongly. In fact, no one asked where she was the day the bottle was mailed.
Reportedly, Furman said he “should have put Kitty on the grill, but that Dr. Graves wouldn’t allow it. But when Furman was asked where Kitty Graves was on the day the package was mailed from Boston, he “smiled significantly and replied, “Boston.” In his memoirs, Furman writes that Graves mentioned a time he came back from a two-day business trip to NY not long before the murder to find that his labratory had been tampered with. Canisters were not in the right place. And it seemed the canister of arsenic had been moved. “My personal belief,” he wrote, “is that after the scene Tom described he then confronted the murderer and learned the truth, and then had to practice to deceive at great effort.”
A friend of Graves held the same belief, and would later write in a letter, “It was a courageous act he did, not a cowardly one, done solely to insure his wife and mother’s well fare.” After the doctor’s reported suicide, Kitty actually inherited the $25K Mrs. Barnaby had left Graves in her will, and after spending some time in a mental hospital, she moved from Providence and wasn’t heard from again.
So, was it John Howard Conrad? Or Kitty Graves? Or was it Doctor Graves after all?
Maybe no one will ever really know. In reviewing the prosecution’s case, defense attorney Macon said he had never seen such willful and malicious misrepresentations and distortion of facts. And that’s really the overarching takeaway of this whole case. There were so many lies, so many misreported stories, it’s really tough to figure out what might have actually happened, especially all of these years later. And I don’t actually have the answer, as you might have guessed.
But I’ll leave you with this last, fun theory. So, Doctor Graves reportedly committed suicide in prison, but the details of that suicide were a little shady as well.
The day before his death, he was reported to be especially cheerful. He ate lunch with his wife and seemed optimistic, and one of the guards said the couple “acted like young lovers.” Yet, the next day he was dead. And no autopsy was ever done. Some believed that it was a suicide, andto some extent this might make sense. Because it was the only way Dr. Graves could guarantee his wife got the money from the will. Others suggested John Howard Conrad was responsible. But one newspaper really took the story to the next level. The Headline read: “Dr. Graves Not Dead. It is said that his suicide was all a fake. A pine log fills his grave and the Doctor has gone abroad.”
This theory claims Graves was hustled out of prison in a guard’s uniform--and was rumored to be in Brazil with his wife and Mrs. Barnaby’s money!
I mean, I can’t actually imagine that one’s true, but wouldn’t that be the perfect twist to wrap up this incredibly odd and confusing story?
This trial was all taking place during a time when stories about detectives were new and romanticized. The first Sherlock Holmes story was published in 1886, just five years before the murder. So, it’s no surprise that this real story played into the public imagination around detectives and crime and maybe got twisted a bit in the media. But it makes for a pretty fascinating backstory to a beautiful building that people obviously feel something about.
And with all of this intrigue, the murder, so many potential suspects, you really have to ask yourself. Could the house be haunted? Well, I actually found someone who was able to help answer that question:
“Hi, I’m Daria Phoebe Brashear.”
Daria is currently living in Barnaby Castle.
“There have definitely been some unexplained phenomena, but nothing that stands out in a way that is obvious. The place is clearly haunted, and I don’t worry about it because apparently I'm on the right side of things, and other than to the extent that the roof leaks occasionally, even once in a while directly over my bed. I’m clearly not being messed with. So I’m not that worried about it. There’s nothing I need to do to free anybody from anything.”
Daria and I just happened to meet this past week, and not because of the podcast. It was just serendipity. And Daria was kind enough to come on and share a little bit of what it’s like inside the castle.
“The main spaces have that victorian look to them, the bedrooms less so, the kitchen and the bathroom are more thoroughly modern. It’s in many ways like any other third story walkup except it has this tower hidden away in the corner.”
I had this assumption that anyone living in that space must have sought it out for the story or to participate in the restoration of the historical building, but was surprised to learn that wasn’t the case for Daria:
“When I moved into Barnaby Castle in mid 2018, I had been to Providence twice before. Once to see a show at the Columbus Theater and once to visit my friends who had moved in a few months earlier. And at that point I was living in Somerville MA and had recently lost my partner in tragic circumstances and was basically looking for a situation where I could live somewhere that wasn’t alone.”
In 2000, Barnaby Castle had fallen into disrepair and was listed on the Most Endangered Properties List. There was a wire fence and scaffolding around the building, which had suffered serious water damage. But then the property was purchased.
“The person who’s doing the restoration is the owner, Richard, and it’s very much a labor of love for him. You know, it’s very clearly he bought this place off the endangered Providence property list and he’s been slowly, sometimes one step up and two steps back, restoring the place ever since then. It is very much a construction zone around us. The first month or so I lived there, I didn’t have a bed because the plaster roof was being repaired. And somehow it still felt more like home than the place I had left in Somerville where my partner had died, because.. There were people.”
This place became a home to Daria, and I think that in that neighborhood, Barnaby Castle stands out and means something to people. After releasing last week’s episode, a lot of people excitedly reached out to share their thoughts and feelings on this house that has taken on almost a personality of its own. And one thing I heard loud and clear - Barnaby Castle is the bubble house!
“Katelyn is our downstairs neighbor. Sometime after we moved in, I noticed that she had a handheld bubble gun. You know like a plunger style bubble gun and she would stick it out the window and just blow bubbles occasionally. And I said, that’s neat, but it’s way too high labor. I can’t imagine doing something like that. So I bought myself a DJ grade bubble cannon, and aimed it out the window. And it worked reasonably. But I pointed this out to her, and she liked the idea and bought herself a DJ grade bubble cannon for her window and then a second and then a third. And the problem is, it turns out DJ Grade bubble cannons aren’t made for that sort of use cycle, they’re not intended to be left on for hours and hours and hours somewhat exposed to the weather, so she kept wearing them out. An eventually she got the giant bubble cannon that is more serious, more hardcore. And she runs it more often. And I must say the spot she runs it out of gets much better neighborhood bubble coverage than any of the windows in our apartment.”
I love that Daria and Katelyn and the other tenants are keeping the personality and whimsy of this place alive. It’s obvious that little, charming detail doesn’t go unnoticed in the neighborhood.
Thanks for listening to me talk about Barnaby Castle for two whole episodes! If you’re loving this story and interested in checking the castle out, obviously it’s a place where people live, so that’s not something you can do very often. But you’re in luck;
“The Halloween party is coming up very soon that is the fundraiser for the restoration of the building, and they’re requiring a negative COVID test and vaccination record to get in, so it should be reasonably safe to have a party in the building. And that’s coming up. So you can tell folks, if they want to see inside the house, that’s their chance, because it’ll come up into all of the apartments including ours.”
So don’t miss this chance to see inside the building, maybe win a costume contest, you can imagine all of the houses’ mysteries unfolding around you all while supporting the restoration of the building.
Thank you so much for listening. As always, all research and writing is done by me, Sara Corben - with special help this week from Daria Phoebe Brashear. Daria, thank you so much for coming on and being so kind to a complete stranger asking a million questions about the place that you live! If you liked this episode, I’d love it if you could share it with your family and friends. Or you can email me or send me a recorded voice memo at weird rhode island @ gmail.com. And on that, it’s halloween month, so if you have any spooky stories from Rhode Island, please send them my way! I want to hear them! Hope to hear from you and see you next week as we dig up more stories about all things weird and wonderful in the little state of Rhode Island. Until next time!