Escape
Before the execution could take place, Fairbanks escaped with the help of his brother, a cousin, a friend, and his nephew, Nathaniel Davis. A $1,000 bounty was placed on his head, and a newspaper headline screamed "Stop the Murderer!" The party tried to make their way to Canada, but stopped to eat in Skenesboro, now known as Whitehall, New York, just south of the Canadian border. Fairbanks was recaptured.
Fairbanks was returned to the Boston jail, for authorities no longer trusted the Dedham jail, and on September 10, 1801, Fairbanks was hanged at a massive event. He was twenty years old. Two Army cavalry companies and a volunteer militia unit made sure he did not escape again, and the 10,000 people who showed up at the Town Common to witness the execution were five times the town’s population at the time.
Within two days of his execution, the Report of the Trial of Jason Fairbanks was published. The story was then written up in a pamphlet entitled A Deed of Horror! Trial of Jason Fairbanks for the Murder of His Sweetheart in 1801. It became the basis for a novel called The Life of Jason Fairbanks: A Novel Founded on Fact, which is believed to no longer exist.
Read more about this topic: Jason Fairbanks
Famous quotes containing the word escape:
“With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“The cross of the Legion of Honor has been conferred on me. However, few escape that distinction.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“what can he do to escape that fatal Mama—”
—Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926)