John C. Colt
After numerous business ventures, he became an authority concerning double-entry bookkeeping and published a textbook concerning the subject, which had 45 editions and remained in continuous publication until 13 years after his death.
Colt killed Adams with a hatchet the year previous to his arrest in what he claimed was self-defense, but he had afterwards concealed the crime by disposing of the body.
The trial became a sensation in the New York news because of his family name, the manner of disposal of the corpse, and Colt's somewhat arrogant demeanor in the courtroom.
[2] Conspiracy theories circulated about the suicide, with some holding that Colt had in fact escaped from prison and staged a body to look like his own.
He and his siblings were then cared for by their father's sister, Lucretia Colt Price, until Christopher remarried two years later to Olivia Sargeant.
The Colt brothers' one surviving sister, Sarah Ann, acted as a surrogate mother of sorts until she was sent off to a relative's house to work as a menial.
[citation needed] At age 14, Colt started work as an assistant bookkeeper for the Union Manufacturing Company in Marlborough, Connecticut.
The next year, his sister Sarah Ann killed herself by swallowing arsenic; one newspaper account stated it was due to a fight with her stepmother and another said she "took a morbid view of her doom to labor" until her "fortitude and her mind gave way".
Constitution; illness prevented him from serving on the ship, and he worked as a clerk in Norfolk, Virginia, for a man referred to as Colonel Anderson.
[6] Colt spent three months as a marine and was disillusioned with the military lifestyle; clerking in a humid port was not the adventurous life he had envisioned.
Colt then traveled to the Great Lakes region to recuperate and bought a farm in Michigan on Gooden's Lake; however, tubercular symptoms began again and he soon left for Cincinnati, Ohio, where he became a teacher of one of the first correspondence courses in America; he also became part of a group known for Bohemianism, and considered John Howard Payne and Hiram Powers among his friends.
[7] He attempted many business ventures throughout the United States: land speculator in Texas, soap manufacturer in New York, grocery wholesaler in Georgia, fur trader, dry-goods merchant in Florida, and an organizer of Mardi Gras masquerade celebrations in New Orleans.
The decomposing body had already started emitting a strong odor, which ship hands had assumed was a poison put out to kill rats.
The stevedore opened the crate, revealing a half-clothed male corpse wrapped in a shop awning, bound with rope and packed with salt.
The press depicted Colt as a former professional riverboat gambler who had public affairs with women and a common-law wife and who committed perjury to enlist in and quit the Marines.
[32] The October 30 issue of the weekly Tribune quoted James Colt, then practicing law in St Louis as saying "insanity is hereditary in our family".
[32] James Gordon Bennett wrote lengthy editorials in the New York Herald about Colt's "confidence, assurance, and impudence" and that his "limitless potential has been undermined by a want of moral and religious culture".
[35] Several witnesses were called in to testify against this idea including an early ballistician named Zabrisky and Samuel Colt himself, who demonstrated to the court, by shooting his revolver in the courtroom and catching the fired balls in his hand, that such a shot could not penetrate to the depth of the wound found on Adams' skull.
[34][35] Despite Selden's objections, Whiting had the coroner, David L. Rogers, bring Adams' skull and the hatchet into the courtroom to show the jury the direction and number of strikes made.
[34][36][37] The cylindrical wound which Whiting and Gilman thought was made by a ball fired from a revolver was actually caused by one of the nails used by Colt to seal the crate.
[35] Gilman conceded that the wound was caused by a nail and admitted that no foreign object such as a ball from a revolver was found in the victim's head.
Kent remarked on Colt's "careless air" demonstrated throughout the trial in the courtroom and said his behavior was "not typical of an innocent man".
[44] The prisoner has forgotten his victim, heaped insult upon his humble and bereaved family, defied the court, denounced the jury, and presented himself before the executive as an injured, not a penitent man.
– William H. Seward[44]On September 28, 1842, after exhausting his final appeal, Colt was sentenced to death by hanging and remanded to New York City's infamous prison, the Tombs.
While imprisoned, Colt lived luxuriously in his prison cell, receiving daily visits from friends and family, smoking Cuban cigars, sleeping in an actual bed instead of a mound of straw and wearing silk dressing gowns inside and a seal skin overcoat for his daily walks in the prison yard.
His cell contained the latest novels, a gilded bird cage with a canary and fresh flowers brought to him every day by Henshaw.
[47] Colt's friends lodged the doctor in the Shakespeare Hotel on the morning of the scheduled hanging and planned to take the body there from the Tombs for resuscitation.
[52] Harold Schechter, a researcher and author of two books about John Colt dismisses this as "an outlandish tale" and a "product of folklore, not fact".
[53] An article in The New York Times written during 1880 said that Caroline Henshaw was watched by private detectives for years after Colt's death and that no sign was ever seen of him alive.
[55] In a 1953 biography about Samuel Colt, based largely on family letters, Edwards wrote that John's marriage to Caroline was a way to legitimize her son Sammy.
