“Justice, though slow, is sure to overtake the wicked. “Perhaps at this late hour the murderer may be detected,” the newspaper hoped.
There had been rumors at the time, however, that “an unprincipled and vicious man by the name of Mallory,” who later served time in the Vermont state prison, was responsible. A young woman with the surname Kendall had disappeared in the Northfield area about two decades earlier her body had never been found and it had been thought she had drowned in the river. “On the back part of the skull there is a hole about the size of an ordinary sized bullet,” the Democrat told its readers, “and, judging from appearance, the probability is that she came to her death by being shot.” The paper eagerly offered the possible identities of the victim and her killer. The republished report on the discovery of bones behind a cellar wall in Northfield, Massachusetts. Physicians summoned to the scene concluded they were the bones of a woman who had been between the ages of sixteen and twenty when she died. Under the heading “Mysterious,” the paper noted that the bones were “in a good degree of preservation” and must have been deposited behind the wall within the previous twenty-five years – after the home was built and before Stebbins moved in, a short time before he began to expand the cellar. The Greenfield Democrat, published in a neighboring town, was the first to break the news in mid-July. This story originally appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
The body, he clearly believed, had been entombed behind the wall by someone who was either unskilled in building stone walls or had been in a hurry to hide the remains. “The condition of the wall appeared as if part of the wall had been removed,” he informed the Vermont Phoenix, “and the human body crowded in, and the wall, unworkman-like, replaced.” He emphasized the term “unworkman-like” in his letter to the newspaper in nearby Brattleboro, published after press reports of the discovery circulated in the summer of 1842.
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