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I was sitting at the top of the stairs watching Bittersweet sniff around the kitchen when Great-Aunt Laura showed up out of nowhere. Surprise!relatives is usually no fun, but she just wanted to watch the UCONN women's basketball game and didn't get the right channel. We don't get it either, actually, so she just sat and talked for a while.
She told me this amazing story that she's been writing as a book, but it actually happened. It was about her mother's cousin Sarah. She was born in Scotland and moved to Meriden, CT with her parents when she was a teenager. Her parents both wanted to go to South Africa, where her brother was stationed with the British army, so they left her with my great-great-grandparents.
Sarah went to nursing school in Connecticut, worked in a nursing home up in Maine, and was eventually hired as a nanny for a very wealthy family in New York. This was the sort of family that had butlers, maids, coachmen, and all that jazz. The daughter of the family was named Pauline and was the only child. Sarah was sitting in the rocking chair in Pauline's room one night while Pauline was asleep (she was four years old) and someone snuck into the room, tied her to the chair, and killed her.
Aunt Laura said she wasn't sure exactly what happened, but the newspapers said Sarah was chloroformed and tied to the chair, and when she started to wake up the person put a rope around her neck and killed her. There were black smudges on the bedsheets, though, (this'll make more sense later) and Aunt Laura thinks she was probably raped, which is something the paper wouldn't have said, because this was in the times when they wouldn't have printed that.
The upstairs maid found Sarah's body the next morning and had the police question all the house staff. The coachman, who had been married nine days earlier, was found in his little house on the property with his throat slit, but alive. There was burnt cork in the house, which the police thought he'd used to blacken his face so if anyone saw him they'd think he was a black man.
But he was still alive, so they took him to the hospital because he kept insisting he hadn't murdered her. He kept saying it was the butler, who was a Japanese man. The butler had gone out sledding with Sarah the day before, because this was January, and the coachman was jealous of the attention Sarah paid him. The coachman eventually confessed and was electrocuted.
My aunt has been looking for Sarah's grave for the last few years, but hasn't been able to find it. The Meriden papers say she's buried in a certain cemetery that I've already forgotten the name of, but when Aunt Laura and my grandma went to look for her they had no record of her. Aunt Laura found out that Sarah might have secretly married a Doctor Morris from Boston, so she's going to go back and look for a Sarah Morris.
So I think that's just the greatest story I've ever heard.
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