Murder and a Real Life Dr. Frankenstein in 19th Century New Jersey

It’s a bright morning with a deep blue sky that goes upward forever.  Already, warm rays of sun cascade down and splash across the town green, hinting at the heat of late summer that is sure to come in only a few short hours.

This would be the perfect day for an outdoor wedding.  And crowds, some dressed in their finest clothes exactly like those of a wedding party, are beginning to gather in abundance on the open fields of the town square.

On the narrow lanes that lead into the center of town, carriages and carts of all descriptions are jostling with one another in long snaking lines of traffic.  Horses are neighing impatiently and the din of iron-shod wooden wheels clattering over cobblestones can be heard above all the shouts and sounds of this mass of excited humanity.

Entire families, men women and children; the well-to-do and ne’er do wells alike are all moving in the same direction.  All of them are eager to get the best view possible of the upcoming spectacle that’s set to take place at high noon today.

What”s about to happen here, on the town green in Morristown, New Jersey, is the culmination of a story that newspapers from New York City to Philadelphia have been reporting on in lurid detail all Spring and Summer.

As the crowd masses in the center of town everyone cranes his or her neck to be able to see over the head of the person who is in front of them.  Each person is straining in order to catch a glimpse of a strange wooden platform that has been erected directly across the street from the town green and right in front of the municipal courthouse.  A row of armed militiamen, with muskets stiffly raised at attention, and a somber faced black robed minister with the Good Book clutched in his hand, stand just off to the side of the platform.

The wooden platform that’s been erected in front of the courthouse is a gallows.  However, it is a gallows unlike any that the estimated 10,000 people gathered on the town green have ever seen before.  It is a gallows that is designed not to hang a man, at least not to hang him in the traditional sense of the word by dropping him down from a height until a noose tightens around his neck, but rather, this wooden contraption of ropes and pulleys has a counterweight attached to it at one end and is designed to repeatedly jerk a man up into the air, over and over again, until his neck snaps in half.  It was designed by local doctors and engineers from Princeton University, and by the standards of the time, it is thought to be a more humane form of execution.

The date is September 6, 1833 and there is definitely a celebratory air among the crowd of thousands that has gathered on the town green in Morristown, New Jersey on this beautiful late summer’s day.  The crowd is not there to attend a wedding--it is there to witness a man be executed, and maybe even more.

That man is Antoine Le Blanc.  He is a thirty-something year old immigrant from southern France and he speaks hardly a word of English.

Le Blanc considers himself to be a respectable gentleman.  At least, his family back in France, seems to have been from a solidly middle class background.  But as it turned out, neither he himself, nor his family as a whole, had quite enough money to allow Le Blanc to marry his sweetheart Marie.

Back in France, Marie’s father had made it all very simple:  either Le Blanc needed to amass more money, and do so very quickly, or he wouldn’t be marrying his daughter anytime soon.

So, in April of 1833 Le Blanc arrived in Manhattan looking to make his fortune in America and take all of the money that he earned back home to France so that he could marry Marie--the woman that he loved.

That, at least, is Le Blanc’s own explanation for why he came to America.  The authorities who arrest Le Blanc later on will claim that he is nothing more than a wandering tramp and vagabond, maybe even a political radical and agitator, who has spent all of his adult life hiding from the law all across Europe and the high seas before finally washing up on the shore of the United States.

The real truth as to why Le Blanc came to America probably lies somewhere in the middle of these two diametrically opposed explanations, but one thing is known for certain.  It is known that Le Blanc spent three days looking for employment in New York City before agreeing to work on the family farm of a Mr. Samuel Sayre from Morristown, New Jersey.

Samuel Sayre lived in a large white house that had originally been built in 1749.  He was a respected citizen of Morristown, a wealthy judge who had lots of local connections, and the owner of a small farm.  He lived with his twenty year old daughter, his wife Sarah, and a house servant who may have been a slave of African descent named Phoebe.

In that same month of April 1833, Sayre hired Le Blanc as a laborer and tasked him with the primary responsibilities of wood chopping and cleaning the hog pens.  In return for performance of these menial duties, Le Blanc was given room and board in the basement of the Sayre family home, but paid no monetary wages or salary.

At the time that he was hired, it seems likely that Le Blanc, who had little to no understanding of the English language, may have misunderstood what he was actually being hired for.  It is possible that Le Blanc believed he was being hired to manage a large family estate and that he would be paid a considerable salary by the Sayre family in return for his managerial skills.

But when he arrived at the Sayre family farm Le Blanc quickly discovered that he had been hired on as simple lowly laborer.  When the truth dawns on him, and Le Blanc discovers that he will be paid no wages by the Sayre family, he feels cheated and is enraged.  In his eventual confession to the police Le Blanc readily admitted that it was at this very moment of realization that he began to plot his revenge against Samuel Sayre and his family.

Other servants and workmen on the Sayre family farm reported that Le Blanc had a surly demeanor and an antisocial attitude from the very moment that he arrived.  Le Blanc seemed to hold steadfastly to the belief that he was superior to everyone else, and others questioned his lack of personal hygeine, and complained both of his nasty behavior and of the foul smelling cheap tobacco that he incessantly smoked.

Was Le Blanc a sort of slovenly sociopathic scoundrel who had the evilest of intentions right from the very beginning?  Or was he, through simple misunderstanding and a jingoistic attitude on the part of Samuel Sayre, tricked into a form of indentured servitude by a wealthy patron and justifiably outraged as a consequence?  As with so much regarding this case, the true answers to those questions are known only to history.

But the real truth is that Le Blanc did definitely plot some sort of revenge for some perceived wrong.

After spending two weeks laboring on the family farm, Le Blanc began the night of May 11, 1833 by loading up on hard cider at a local Morristown tavern.

That night he returned to the farm, probably in a thoroughly intoxicated state, at around 10:30.

When he returned he ran up the large white Sayre family house and pounded loudly on the door.  Le Blanc then faked being distressed by using signs to communicate that he had supposedly discovered that one of the horses had fallen gravely ill and was close to death outside in the stable.

Samuel Sayre came out of the house and followed Le Blanc out to the stable.  When his back was turned, Le Blanc grabbed a nearby shovel that was leaning up against the wall, and repeatedly whacked Samuel Sayre in the back of the skull with it, killing him

With Samuel Sayre’s lifeless body lying sprawled out in the stable, Le Blanc returned back to the house and repeated the same ruse with Samuel Sayre’s wife Sarah.  He drew her out to the stable and killed her with dozens of kicks to the back of the head after he had smashed her across the face with the same shovel that he had used to murder her husband.

Le Blanc’s jacket was splattered with the blood of Mr. and Mrs. Sayre.  He quickly grabbed the bodies of Samuel and Sarah Sayre and buried them beneath a pile of horse manure in the stable.  Then with his foul work in the stable complete, Le Blanc took the blood soaked shovel and crept into the Sayre family home.

He walked up the creaking wooden steps to the second floor and discovered the servant girl, Phoebe, sound asleep in bed.  He bludgeoned her in the head with the shovel, killing her, before she even had time to open her eyes.

Now that his three victims had been murdered Le Blanc changed out of his bloody clothes and into one of Samuel Sayre’s suits.  Then he went from room to room, ransacking the house, and stuffing valuables into empty pillowcases to make up for all of the wages that he hadn’t been paid.

Then in the middle of the night, carrying his sacks of loot, Le Blanc ran back outside to the stable where Sarah and Samuel Sayre’s bodies lay decomposing beneath a pile of dung.  For a time he sat there, and considered waiting for the return of the Sayre’s daughter Elizabeth who had spent the night staying at a family friend’s house, but then he decided that he needed all the time he could get in order to get to New York and catch a boat back to France.

As Antoine Le Blanc galloped away into the night on a stolen horse, some valuables engraved with the initials of Samuel Sayre fell out of one of the pillowcases he had strapped to the saddle and landed on the dirt road leading away from the farm.

In the morning, Louis Halsey, a personal friend of the Sayre’s who had come by to pay the family a visit, discovered some of these personal effects lying on the road.  Halsey feared that the Sayre family had been robbed in the night and he quickly rounded up a group of townspeople to search the property.

The group discovered the murdered bodies of Sarah, Samuel and Phoebe.  Le Blanc’s absence from the farm was reported, and Morristown Sheriff George Ludlow set off in pursuit of the missing laborer.

Ludlow caught up to Le Blanc later that day at a place called The Mosquito Tavern somewhere in the Meadowlands near Hackensack.  Le Blanc was drinking cider at the tavern when Ludlow arrived.  On the bar in front of him Le Blanc had placed a bag of the Sayre family’s stolen possessions.  When Le Blanc noticed Ludlow approaching the tavern he attempted to flee through the backdoor, but after a brief chase he was apprehended and brought back to Morristown to stand trial.

While in jail awaiting trial Le Blanc confessed that he had stopped at the tavern in Hackensack merely to rest before heading on either to Manhattan or Newark from where he planned to sail back to France.

Le Blanc’s confession was given to a Mr. A. (probably Arthur) Robinson through a French interpreter.  In the confession Le Blanc stated simply that he had, “done it for Marie.”

His trial began on August 13, 1833 in courtroom number 1 of the Morris County Courthouse.  With his damning confession having already been submitted as evidence, the jury took only twenty minutes to deliberate before finding Le Blanc guilty on all three counts of capital murder.  

Judge Gabriel Ford, a friend and business associate of Samuel Sayre’s sentenced Le Blanc to be hanged until dead and for his body, and all parts contained therein, to be offered up to the esteemed Doctor Isaac Caulfield for scientific dissection and experimentation.

In the early Victorian Era in both Europe and America, it was not uncommon for the bodies of condemned criminals to be given over to science for experimentation.  Through the use of dissection, medical professionals were learning more and more on a daily basis about the inner workings of the human body, and those tasked with enforcing the law like Judge Gabriel Ford, found it in their best interest to turn the bodies of condemned criminals over to scientists because doing so prevented the spread of one of the time period’s most abhorrent crimes: body snatching.

Body snatching involved doctors and medical students roving graveyards late at night and digging up fresh corpses to use in the classroom because, at the time, many people had moral objections to dissection in general and this was the only way that colleges and universities could acquire the necessary specimens for their research, until that is, cases like Le Blanc’s came along.

Promptly at noon on September 6, 1833 Le Blanc’s body was jerked up into the air, witnesses reported that it looked like a child’s ragdoll being flung about, again and again.  A crack and snap were heard, the crowd of 10,000 fell silent, and Le Blanc lay strung up dead for all to see.

But the story doesn’t end there.  Almost immediately after being pronounced dead on the scene, Le Blanc’s body was cut down and carried off of the wooden platform.  The body was brought across the street to the office of Dr. Caulfield where he, and an assistant, Dr. Joseph Henry from Princeton University, hooked Le Blanc’s lifeless corpse up to a primitive battery and tried to revive him using electrical current, like a real life Frankenstein’s monster.

Of course, Antoine Le Blanc did not come back to life, but the trial, arrest and subsequent celebration for 10,000 spectators had cost Morristown a lot of money.  In an effort to defray expenses, Le Blanc’s skin was flayed and made into wallets and purses, which were sold as souveniers to people who had attended to the event.

Many of these macabre artefacts, these keepsakes made from Le Blanc’s own flesh, still survive today, and many are said to still be owned by local Morristown residents.

In 1893 workers building an addition to the county clerk’s office found Le Blanc’s bones in a small wooden box buried deep within the bowels of the building.  Le Blanc received no marked grave though the final resting place of the Sayre family can still be seen at a local Presbyterian church.

On October 31, 1995 workers for Dawson’s Auctioneers and Appraisers of Morris Plains, New Jersey found a plaster death mask of Antoine Le Blanc’s face while liquidating the assets of a Mr. Carl Scherzer of Morristown who had died in 1979 and had a served as a local unofficial town historian.  The group also found a purse made of human skin in Mr. Scherzer’s possession.  

These grisly artefacts still exist and are still on display today.

A restaurant named Jimmy’s Haunt was built on the site of the Sayre family home in Morristown and though that restaurant has since been replaced by a bank, many say that ghosts created by the ghastly murders committed by Antoine Le Blanc in 1833 continue roam the premises.

It is likely that physical reminders of what Antoine Le Blanc did on that spring day back in 1833 will continue to be found, hidden away in dusty old boxes and dank basements all across northern New Jersey, for years and years to come...