Grace Brown

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Grace Brown

Grace Minerva Brown (March 20, 1886–July 11, 1906) was an American skirt factory worker whose murder became the basis for the fictional character Roberta Alden in the Theodore Dreiser novel, An American Tragedy and also the Jennifer Donnelly novel, A Northern Light. Also, the facts about this murder are laid out in the non-fiction "Adirondack Tragedy: The Gillette Murder Case of 1906," written by Joseph W. Brownell and Patricia A. Wawrzaszek.

Brown grew up in South Otselic, New York, the daughter of a successful Chenango County farmer. She was reportedly given the nickname "Billy" because of her love of the contemporary hit song Won't You Come Home Bill Bailey; Brown often signed her love letters "The Kid," as in the Western outlaw Billy the Kid. She attended grammar school in the village, becoming close friends with the teacher, Maud Kenyon Crumb, and her husband. In 1905 she moved to nearby Cortland to live with a married sister, and she found work at the Gillette Skirt Company. Chester Gillette, the owner's nephew, began a romantic and eventually sexual relationship with Brown that year.^{[citation needed]}

In the spring of 1906 Brown realized she was pregnant and she returned to her parents in South Otselic. Gillette agreed to take her away to the Adirondacks, apparently promising marriage -- but because Brown packed her entire wardrobe for the trip while Gillette packed just a small suitcase, some current historians conjecture that Gillette had merely promised to take Brown to a home for unwed mothers in upstate New York. Gillette and Brown went by train and coach to Big Moose Lake in Herkimer County, New York, where on July 11, 1906, they were seen rowing out on the lake. Gillette is believed to have struck Brown over the head with a tennis racket, and she fell out of the boat and drowned. Gillette returned alone, and gave varying explanations for what had occurred. ^[1] Brown's body was found the next day, and Gillette was arrested in nearby Inlet.

In Gillette's rented room, authorities confiscated Brown's love letters to Gillette as evidence. District attorney George Ward read the letters aloud to the court during the trial in the fall of 1906, and Brown's letters gave the trial national attention. Brown pleaded with Gillette in the letters to accept responsibility for her condition. In her final letter, written July 5 (just six days before her murder), Brown looked forward to her impending Adirondack trip with Gillette, and she bid farewell to her childhood home of South Otselic, wishing she could confess her pregnancy to her mother: "I know I shall never see any of them again. And mamma! Great heavens, how I do love Mamma! I don’t know what I shall do without her (...) Sometimes I think if I could tell mamma, but I can't. She has trouble enough as it is, and I couldn't break her heart like that. If I come back dead, perhaps if she does not know, she won't be angry with me."

Copies of Brown's love letters were published in booklet form and even sold outside the Herkimer, New York courtroom during the trial. Theodore Dreiser paraphrased many of the actual letters in An American Tragedy, quoting the final letter almost verbatim. Curiously, neither movie version (the 1931 film nor the 1951 film adaptation A Place in the Sun) incorporated the letters.

Gillette was executed in 1908 in Auburn Prison by electrocution.