Reason First: Chester Gillette and the Murder in the Adirondacks

On Big Moose Lake, in 1906, the water rocked the boat in a steady motion. Two young people who had become smitten with each other but had their own demons enjoyed each other’s company. Chester Gillette looked at the comely Grace Brown and smiled. It appears as if the two had fallen in the most profound and sincere kind of love. He carried with him a tennis racket. He withdrew the tennis racket and whacked her in the face in the head with it like an axeman chopping at a tree. Grace lost consciousness and fell overboard. Under the assumed name Carl Graham, Gillette journeyed back to the shore with supreme confidence.

In time, men would go out on their boat and discover Brown’s body. Still going by Graham, police soon arrested Gillette for murder.

This all stemmed from the fact that Gillette and Brown had been going steady. Without her knowledge, Gillette busied himself with other women. The collection of other women positioned Gillette as a liar but he had not committed the crime...yet. He impregnated Brown and she expected to live a happy life with a husband and child. Gillette had other plans.

His trial took place in Herkimer County Courthouse in New York. The jury convicted him of the crime and the judge sent him to the electric chair. In correspondence to his family, Gillette said that the courts had “convicted” him and that he would “write.”

Some may argue that Brown had asked for her own death. She sent Gillette a letter stating that maybe in her death, then Gillette could be happy. This signaled in his mind to dispatch Brown. The woman, in all of her beauty, could not escape the doldrums of a wayward boyfriend who possessed designs to end her life.

Gillette’s case points a light on the fact that the pretense of love can be just as deadly as hate. His inability to recognize the facts of reality and truth of the matter led him to not only the destruction of Grace Brown but his own psyche. One cannot go on feeling that one is fit for existence with the knowledge that a person has committed a monstrous act. The consciousness eats away at itself. Through all of the horror the mind cannot process the wickedness this is too much to bear.

The appeals process did not go in Gillette’s favor and so he received electricity through his body until he was dead. There’s an argument that this served as a way out of the torment that he should have experienced for killing Brown.

His relative apathy about murdering his lover should have landed him in prison with no possibility for parole. He should have been placed in a cell and given just enough victuals and clothing and a cot to suffice continuing his miserable life.

The Gillette case became so famous that it inspired novelist Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy (1925). The film of the same name saw release in 1931. Twenty years later, Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor starred in another adaptation of the novel, A Place in the Sun.

The interesting tidbits of lovers mixed with murder has intrigued man since the origins of history. The Gillette case has provided writers like Dreiser and filmmakers to convey this particular story because of the sweet sadness that it evokes.

Did Gillette in his own mind feel that he was doing Brown a favor? Did all morals and virtues spill from him like water from a sieve with nothing left but vice? Did he want to grant his lover her wish negating the criminal implications of carrying out such an ugly action? The fact remains that he clobbered Brown without remorse, without regard. And no one or nothing but the Adirondacks knows what really happened that day.