Soon after midnight on Dec. 2, 1900, Margaret Hossack, an Iowa farmer’s wife, awakened her children, telling them that she feared someone had entered the house. “And something is the matter with Pa,” she added. “Come down quick.”
Margaret lighted a small oil lamp and led the children into her bedroom, where they found Pa – John Hassock – with his head split open by two blows from an ax. He died later that day.
The gruesome murder enthralled Iowans as much as the Fall River, Mass., ax murders of a wealthy couple had captivated the nation and catapulted Lizzie Borden to notoriety a few years earlier. Newspapers all over Iowa sent reporters to cover the crime and subsequent trial.
Although there were sightings of strangers and a mysterious rider near the farm the night of John Hassock’s death, authorities quickly settled on a single suspect, the hapless Margaret. She had complained for years that she feared her volatile husband would kill her or their children. She had asked neighbors to intervene when John lost his temper, and one man even claimed Margaret had suggested he kill John. On occasion, Margaret had run away and sought refuge with a married daughter.
An ax, the apparent murder weapon, was found near the house, although it was unknown whether the blood staining it belonged to John or the Thanksgiving turkey. The coroner wondered how a killer could slay John, who slept next to the wall, without waking his wife, asleep on the outside of the bed. There also was the question of why Margaret, hearing a suspicious noise, would get out of bed and awaken her children instead of turning to her husband, sleeping next to her.
Margaret was arrested at her husband’s funeral, and her trial became a sensation. She was tried in court for murdering her husband and in public opinion for violating the standards of ideal womanhood.
Those Victorian standards of domestic bliss were still very much in effect in farmland Iowa at the turn of the 20th century. The ideal woman inspired her husband by her cheerful nature and self-sacrifice, kept a neat and happy home, never complained. Little matter that the typical Iowa farm wife, surrounded by a brood of children, worked long hours cooking, cleaning, gardening, raising animals, and making clothes and bedding. Many, like Margaret, were married to stingy, mean-tempered brutes and lived in fear of her lives.
The term “wife abuse” didn’t exist. And of course, there was no such thing as battered-wife syndrome. Margaret’s appearance – she was a large, plain woman – worked against her. And instead of bringing her sympathy, Margaret’s complaints to the neighbors, which she denied in court, were seen as a motive for the murder. An ideal woman would have kept her family’s discord private.
The trial dragged on as Margaret, surrounded by her children, sat stone-faced. She was prosecuted by an ambitious young attorney, defended by one of the area’s most respected legal minds and judged, of course, by a jury made up entirely of men.
That fact did not escape the notice of one of the reporters covering the trial. Susan Glaspell was a young journalist, recently freed from the women’s pages, writing about the murder for the Des Moines Daily News. Her first story appeared two days after the attack on John Hossack, and she continued to cover the murder until the jury returned its verdict.
A feminist who moved to New York, where she fell in with a bohemian literary crowd, Glaspell later won a Pulitzer Prize, and she is one reason the Hossack killing became part of Iowa legend. Glaspell fictionalized the murder in a play, “Trifles,” and later used it as the basis of “A Jury of Her Peers,” one of America’s great short stories.
When wife-husband team Patricia L. Bryan and Thomas Wolf set out to research the Hossack murder and trial for “Midnight Assassin,” they hoped they would be able to solve the crime. The principals are all dead, of course, but this has freed their descendants (some of whom moved to Colorado) to tell what they know. The authors don’t exactly wrap up the mystery, but they uncover enough facts to let readers draw their own conclusions.
Sandra Dallas is a Denver novelist. Her latest work, “New Mercies,” is in bookstores.
Midnight Assassin
By Patricia L. Bryan and Thomas Wolf
Algonquin, 288 pages, $23.95
