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:
“While they stand at home at the door he is dead already,
The only son is dead.
But the mother needs to be better,
She with thin form presently drest in black,
By day her meals untouch’d, then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking,
In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,
O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and
withdraw,
To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“We know how powerful our mother was when we were little, but is our wife that powerful to us now? Must we relive our great deed of escape from Mama with every other woman in our life?”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“It was at a particular moment in the history of my own rages that I saw the Western world conditioned by the images of Marx, Darwin and Freud; and Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western world. The simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.”
—William Golding (b. 1911)