[1][2][3] Charles Lockwood was a farmhand who worked for Randall, a prosperous farmer newly established in the quiet country village of Morris, Connecticut.
On the morning of Thursday, July 22, Lockwood asked Mattie to accompany him to the upper fields of the farm, where he said Mr. Randall wanted her to drive the hay rake.
As they walked across an isolated stretch of the farm, Lockwood allegedly murdered her with a shotgun blast to the chest and fled into the woods, leaving his hat and gun behind.
Finally, on Sunday, July 25, two boys discovered Lockwood's body hanging from a rope eight feet above the ground from the limb of a towering chestnut tree on the edge of the forest not far from the Randall farm, where the search had already passed.
[5] The medical examiner reported that death had occurred twelve hours earlier, at around midnight, though other accounts claimed that the body was still warm when found.
"[6] Lockwood's body exhibited several non-lethal injuries, including a "burn as large as a teacup" and scorched clothing, evidently caused by a gunshot, on his chest.
[10] Writing in 1904, sociologist James Elbert Cutler rejected the suicide theory: "To a disinterested party, however, the evidence appears very strong in favor of the former view [that Lockwood was lynched].
In the writer’s opinion, formed from reading various newspaper accounts of the occurrence, the Chicago Tribune rightly included Charles Lockwood in the list of persons lynched in the year 1886.
"[1] The True Northerner, a Michigan newspaper, went so far as to claim that "Lockwood was tortured by being shot in the back, and then a negro plunged a knife through his neck; he was then strung up to a tree.
"[11] More than forty years later, in 1928, the Hartford Courant published a long essay arguing that Lockwood had hanged himself and that Connecticut should be included "on [the] honor roll of lynch-less states.