Edgar Allan Poe and the Murderer

As we suggested in our screenplay, "Poe Laughing," the truth about Edgar Allan Poe is stranger than his fiction. From Rufus W. Griswold and his allies the Transcendentalists to the present day, a long line of smear artists, fantasists, lazy scholars and bad historians have created and perpetuated so many myths about Poe that the real man has been distorted beyond recognition. "Poe Laughing" is our counter to a century and a half of lies and misrepresentation.

However, there are some Poe legends that fall into the "too good to check" category. One of my favorites involves a notorious 19th century murderer.

In October of 1845, the corpse of a prostitute named Maria (or Mary Ann) Bickford was found in her Boston boardinghouse lodgings, her throat gruesomely slashed. Her former lover, a wealthy, married man named Albert J. Tirrell, immediately became the prime suspect. Although he made attempts to flee the country, he was soon arrested and brought back for trial. The circumstantial evidence against him seemed overwhelming, and his own personal character had long been an object of public scandal (one observer noted that he and Bickford had, between them, accounted for “a rather high percentage of moral turpitude.”)

However, Tirrell had two very important factors in his favor: A high-powered defense attorney, former U. S. Senator Rufus Choate, and a public who had decided the slain “fallen woman” was a mere Jezebel who brought doom upon herself. Choate and the rest of Tirrell’s defense team, as all good attorneys do when faced with a seemingly hopeless client, did their best to put the jury into a state of utter discombobulation. First, they argued Bickford had committed suicide, the “natural death of persons of her character.” Then, they tried insinuating someone else in the boardinghouse was the true culprit. Finally, perhaps unable to convince even themselves of those possibilities, they brought on a parade of witnesses ready to testify that Tirrell had long suffered from somnambulism. So, if their client killed the unfortunate woman, don't blame him. He was walking in his sleep!

This bad dream of a defense was good enough for the judge. His instructions to the jury stressed the victim’s dubious character, and suggested that Tirrell’s alleged sleepwalking could be seen as a form of exculpatory insanity. Tirrell was duly acquitted of murder, although he was forced to spend three years in state prison for “adultery and lascivious cohabitation.” Choate, who subsequently became understandably popular with America’s criminal classes, went on to become the Attorney General of Massachusetts, but the Tirrell trial proved to be his real legacy. After his death, he was remembered as the lawyer who “made it safe to murder."

What does all this have to do with Poe, you ask?

A contemporary pamphlet, "The Life and Death of Mrs. Maria Bickford," tells of an incident which took place only a few months before the murder:

But we cannot dismiss the subject matter of this history until we inform the world of one of Tirrell’s exploits in a business way. No sooner had he tumbled into the possession of his patrimony, than he took up quarters in the city of New York, with the intention of founding a publishing house on a magnificent scale. After beating about the trade for two or three weeks, without knowing where or how to begin a business of which he was utterly ignorant, and which his rattle-headedness rendered him incapable of comprehending under any circumstances, he made up his mind to commence the publication of a periodical, of some kind or other. Our information runs, that, with this object before his eyes, he called on Mr. Edgar A. Poe, of that city, and tendered him the exclusive editorship and control of the concern, without ceremony or condition. Poe, after a cautious and analytical survey of the gentleman, propounded divers queries which Tirrell had not the capacity to answer. He seemed to be possessed of a belief that if he brought some doubled sheets of printed paper before the people, and the ladies in particular, an illumination as wonderful as the aurora borealis would be the consequence.  

"The people," said he, "want knowledge; they thirst for it as the heart [sic] panteth for the water brooks." "Yes, sir, precisely," said the other, "but engagements compel me to decline your generous offers; I have already promised to do much more than I can possibly accomplish. I think, however, there is a compositor of my acquaintance whose talents are so nearly like your own that he would prove the very person you are seeking. I will give you his name—it is Silas Estabrook. Explain your plans to that individual, sir, and there will be no lack of projects, I assure you."

Unfortunately, Poe was right in his estimation of Estabrook’s compatibility with Tirrell. The two subsequently collaborated on “The Unexpected Letter: A Truthful Journal of News and Miscellany,” which proved an immediate disaster. The enormous, wildly ambitious initial costs of the venture, coupled with Tirrell’s chronic "rattle-headedness," sank the publication before it even began. (Estabrook, who saw himself as the dupe of his unconventional business partner, found consolation by publishing a tell-all booklet about Tirrell's crimes that included the anecdote above.) Tirrell and Poe apparently never met again while achieving, in their very different ways, memorable places in history.

Researcher Harry Koopman wrote, “[Tirrell’s] offer may be regarded as a tribute to Poe’s prominence in the literary world.” The encounter can also be regarded as even more eloquent tribute to Poe’s underrated prominence as an escape artist.