Posted here (PDF document and Word document transcription, above) is the following article:
“More Light on Dreiser’s Chester Gillette/Clyde Griffiths Family”
by James E. Barcus
English Language Notes, 38:1 (2000): 68-73
Chester Gillette was the prototype of Clyde Griffiths, the main character in Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
June 2020
‘Gillette Says the Boat Upset’ – Syrcause Herald 7-14-1906
‘Mystery in Girl’s Death’ – NY Times 7-14-1906
‘Girl Murder Victim’ – Washington Post 7-14-1906
‘Gillette Accused of Miss Brown’s Murder’ – NY Times 7-15-1906
‘Lake Murder Arrest’ – NY Tribune 7-15-1906
‘Gillette a Prisoner’ – Washington Post 7-15-1906
‘Accused of Killing Girl’ – Chicago Tribune 7-15-1906
‘Flaws in Gillette’s Story’ – NY Times 7-16-1906
‘Lured to Her Death’ – Washington Post 7-16-1906
‘Accused of Murder of Grace Brown’ – Hartford Courant 7-16-1906
‘Is It a Murder’ (Gillete’s arrest) – Malone (NY) Farmer – 7-18-1906
Grace Brown murdered (gives DOB) – (Lowville) Journal & Republican 7-19-1906
‘Sister Sobs with Gillette’ – Washington Post 7-27-1906
Followers of this site may be interested in reading some of the earliest accounts of the Gillette murder case that were published in newspapers in July 1906. The case provided the factual underpinning for Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy.
The newspaper accounts — posted here (above) as downloadable PDF files — are as follows:
GILLETTE SAYS THE BOAT UPSET
Syracuse Herald
July 14, 1906
MYSTERY IN GIRL’S DEATH.
New York Times
July 14, 1906
GIRL MURDER VICTIM
Washington Post.
July 14, 1906
GILLETTE ACCUSED OF MISS BROWN’S MURDER
New York Times
July 15, 1906
LAKE MURDER ARREST
New York Tribune
July 15, 1906
GILLETTE A PRISONER
Washington Post.
July 15, 1906
ACCUSED OF KILLING GIRL
Chicago Tribune
July 15, 1906
FLAWS IN GILLETTE’S STORY.
New York Times.
July 16, 1906
LURED TO HER DEATH
Washington Post
July 16, 1906
ACCUSED OF THE MURDER OF GRACE BROWN
Hartford Courant
July 16, 1906
IS IT A MURDER?
Malone (NY) Farmer
July 18, 1906
TRAGEDY AT BIG MOOSE
Journal and Republican (Lowville, NY)
July 19, 1906
SISTER SOBS WITH GILLETTE
Washington Post.
July 27, 1906
— posted by Roger W. Smith
June 2020
Ruth Reynolds, ‘Justice and the Two American Tragedies’ – Daily News (NY) 7-7-1935
Ruth Reynolds, ‘Echo of An American Tragedy’ – Daily News (NY) 9-18-1966
Posted here (downloadable Word documents above) is a groundbreaking article on the Gillette case:
Justice and the Two American Tragedies
Attempt to Forget Life Task of Many Who Were Involved
by Ruth Reynolds
Daily News (New York)
Sunday, July 7, 1935
pp. 42-47
And also a follow up article by the same author:
Echo of ‘An American Tragedy’
by Ruth Reynolds
Daily News (New York)
Sunday, September 18, 1966
pp. 134-135
The first article, which appeared in the New York Daily News Sunday magazine in 1935, has never been reprinted and is, for all practical purposes, unavailable. I found a copy on microfilm in the New York Public Library, and transcribed the entire article. It is a very well written and researched account of the Gillette case. There are some minor inaccuracies, but the article contains information available nowhere else. This is particularly true of Chester Gillette’s family and what became of them. Reynolds interviewed surviving family members for the story.
Ruth Reynolds (1904-1971 was a staff writer for the New York Daily News. She won acclaim for her series of “justice” stories on noted criminal cases.
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Ms. Reynolds’s 1935 article also covered the Robert Edward murder case, which Dreiser covered. On the Edwards case, see:
Theodore Dreiser, “I Find the Real American Tragedy.” Mystery Magazine 11 (April-May 1935): 22-24, 83-86. Reprinted: Resources for American Literary Study 2 (Spring 1972): 40-55.
Salzman, Jack. Introduction to “‘I Find the Real American Tragedy’ by Theodore Dreiser.” Resources for American Literature Study 2 (Spring 1972): 3-4.
Famous novel might have inspired local murder
by William C. Kashatus
The Citizens’ Voice
Wilkes-Barre (PA)
August 2, 2009
pg. C1
https://www.citizensvoice.com/arts-living/famous-novel-might-have-inspired-local-murder-1.155509
— posted by Roger W. Smith
May 2020
This brief post concerns the following recent posts on the web:
Behind the True Crime Story That Inspired “A Place in the Sun”; Over a century before the true-crime boom, People v. Gillette attracted the nation’s attention
By Tobias Carroll
InsideHook
February 25, 2020
Behind the True Crime Story That Inspired “A Place in the Sun”
People v. Gillette: How an Obscure Execution in the Finger Lakes Inspired Generations of Storytellers; The Long Cultural Afterlife of a Horrifying Crime
By S.L. McInnis
via Grand Central Publishing
February 24, 2020
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It is frankly annoying to see constant misstatements of fact about — or wrong inferences being made from — the Gillette case, which provided the factual basis for Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. The case has been recounted and examined thoroughly in Craig Brandon’s Murder in the Adirondacks: An American Tragedy Revisited. A few errors and missed facts about the case have been discovered and corrected by Brandon himself over the years; and on this blog, as well as elsewhere.
Confusion seems to arise from true crime enthusiasts and movie buffs, as well as readers of the novel, having conflated facts derived from An American Tragedy and the 1951 film A Place in the Sun.
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Tobias Carroll states:
[T]he defendant, Chester Gillette … was put on trial for the murder of a co-worker with whom he’d been having an affair. After he began another affair with a woman of higher social standing, Gillette got some news: his co-worker was pregnant. Gillette got nervous, and he and his co-worker took a fateful trip by boat from which only Gillette returned. He was found guilty and executed, but [S. L.] McInnis notes that evidence that surfaced decades later supports Gillette’s innocence.
S.L. McInnis states:
Chester Gillette, a poor relation … got a job at his wealthy uncle’s shirt factory in Cortland, New York in 1905. He was only twenty-two at the time and on his way up in the world, a handsome young man in pursuit of the American Dream.
Gillette met another young employee at the factory, a pretty brunette named Grace Brown. …. Gillette and Brown began a sexual affair and by the spring of 1906, she was pregnant with his child.
Meanwhile, Gillette, who was a local playboy, had started hobnobbing with the upper classes in town and had apparently become involved with someone more appealing: a wealthy young socialite who would become known as “Miss X.” When Brown told Gillette she was pregnant, and begged him to make her an honest woman, he allegedly began plotting her murder. …
Throughout the trial, [Gillette] maintained his innocence, explaining that his statement changed because he was terrified of being blamed for Brown’s death after her body was found. There was no hard evidence against Gillette at all, in fact. Everything was circumstantial.
Years after the verdict, another witness came forward saying he observed a search volunteer poking Brown’s corpse with a stick. It was enough to inflict the wounds Gillette had been accused of. According to Professor Susan N. Herman of Brooklyn Law School, who’s written extensively about the case, even the District Attorney at the time said if the evidence had been presented in court, Gillette would’ve been acquitted.
Was an innocent young man put to death simply because he appeared guilty? Is merely “wishing” someone dead a crime? If that’s the case, even if we hate to admit it, wouldn’t we all be guilty of that at some point in our lives?
Could we actually go through with murdering another human being to get what we want in life? Probably not, although none of us know what we’re truly capable of until put to the test. Did Gillette? Most retellings of the story let us decide what to believe. And that mystery–did he or didn’t he?–lets us hope for his innocence, and perhaps root for him just a little bit.
Ironically, Gillette confessed to the crime while he was on death row. But that fact isn’t included in either the book or the film. Even at the time, officials didn’t take Gillette seriously because he’d “found religion” and his state of mind was in question.
What endures about People v. Gillette is a relatable suspect, that evocative love triangle – and a murder with no hard evidence.
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What’s wrong with these assertions? Just about everything.
Dreiser was seemingly true to the “spirit” of Chester Gillette/Clyde Griffiths’s motivation for murdering Grace Brown/Roberta Alden. After becoming involved with Grace Brown, Gillette became popular with the girls in the town of Cortland, New York, where the Gillette Skirt Company was located. It was not a ‘shirt” factory, as McInnis states.
Perhaps Gillette felt he had better marriage prospects. Grace Brown was undoubtedly viewed as an encumbrance by him. It was rumored that Gillette had courted Harriet Benedict (the “Miss X” of Dreiser’s novel; there was no mention of a “Miss X” at the trial or by the press at the time), an attractive girl from one of the “best’ families in town, but there is no factual basis for this whatsoever. Miss Benedict herself denied it. The oft repeated assertion that Gillette was courting another rich girl (another girl besides Grace Brown) is flat out untrue.
The search volunteer said by McInnis to have poked Grace Brown’s corpse (he never did any such thing) with “a stick” (a pike pole) was Roy Higby, who was a thirteen-year-old boy at the time when a steamer was sent out to search for Grace Brown’s body in Big Moose Lake. Years later, he recounted details of the search in an article published in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise. Higby does state that a pike pole was used to pull Grace Brown’s body out of the lake. Higby wrote (Adirondack Daily Enterprise, March 28 [29?], 1958): “I can remember exactly my first sight of the body. Her forehead was badly cut from the hairline of her left forehead across the right eyebrow and looked as though it had been struck by a fairly sharp-or medium blunt instrument, heavily enough to lay the scalp wide open.”
And a Mrs. Marjory Carey testified at the trial to hearing a “piercing cry” on the lake at the approximate time of Grace Brown’s death.
Gillette did not confess to the crime “while he was on death row.” He was said to have made an admission of guilt just prior to his execution, but no one knows for sure.
The bottom line is that Chester Gillette was guilty of premeditated murder. One does not need legal expertise to see that. His actions leading up Grace Brown’s drowning and immediately afterward, his statements when arrested, etc. all show this conclusively.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
February 2020
Grace Brown and Chester Gillette – The Atlanta Constitution, Sunday Magazine, April 21, 1935, pg. 6
— posted by Roger W. Smith
September 2019
‘Gillette Sees His Parents’ – NY Times 3-1-1908
Posted here (above) as a downloadable PDF file is a New York Times article about a visit Chester Gillette’s parents made to the prison in Auburn, NY where he would be executed a month later. Gillette had just lost an appeal of his conviction.
“Gillette sees his parents,” New York Times, March 1, 1908
Craig Brandon is the author of Murder in the Adirondacks, the definitive book about the Chester Gillette murder case. This case, which resulted in Gillette’s execution in Auburn State Prison in New York in 1908, provided the basis for Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy.
Chester Ellsworth Gillette (1883-1908) was arrested on July 14, 1906 at the Arrowhead Hotel in Inlet, New York, an Adirondack outpost, for the murder of Grace Mae Brown (1886-1906).
Brandon gives lectures about the case, about which he is recognized as the foremost authority. In one such lecture, I recall that Brandon spoke of an uncle from Chicago who, learning of Gillette’s arrest from the newspapers, tried to contact either his nephew or the authorities. (I can’t recall which was the case.) Brandon expressed befuddlement over this and implied that the so called uncle was not in fact Chester Gillette’s uncle.
There indeed was such an uncle and his name was Josiah Rice. He was an uncle of Chester Gillette on Chester’s mother’s side.
Attached (see below) is the death certificate of one Josiah Rice. The details are as follows:
Josiah Rice
residence: 5400 N. Ashland Avenue, Chicago
died in Edgewater Hospital [Chicago] on April 8, 1939
widower; husband of Matilda Rice
his date of birth: February 5, 1855
his age: 84 years 1 month 23 days
his place of birth: Oxford, Massachusetts
father’s name: Leonard Rice (born Oxford, Massachusetts)
mother’s maiden name: Matilda Coyne (born Rock Island, Illinois)
Now, some facts about Chester Gillette’s mother:
Her maiden name was Louisa Maria Rice;
She was born in Millbury, Worcester County, Massachusetts on May 12, 1859;
Her parents were Leonard Rice and Dulcena (or Dulcimer) S. (Gale) Rice;
Leonard Rice and Dulcena Gale were married in Millbury on April 25, 1855.
So, it is apparent that Josiah Rice was the son of Leonard Rice by a first wife of Leonard — namely, Matilda (Coyne) Rice — and it would seem to be a certainty that Matilda died giving birth to Josiah.
Therefore, it is conclusive that Chester Gillette’s mother, Louisa (Rice) Gillette was the half-sister of Josiah Rice of Chicago. So, it would be quite natural and proper for Josiah Rice to call himself Chester Gillette’s uncle and to inquire after Chester upon learning of his arrest from newspapers.
— Roger W. Smith
July 2016
Craig Brandon’s Murder in the Adirondacks is considered the definitive book about the Chester Gillette murder case, upon which Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy was based. It is indeed an authoritative source, but there are some gaps and factual errors.
For instance: Franklin Gillette and Louisa (Rice) Gillette were the parents of Chester Gillette (1883-1908), who was convicted of and executed for the murder of Grace Brown. Chester Gillette was the prototype of the character Clyde Griffiths in Dreiser’s An American Tragedy.
Brandon states, in Murder in the Adirondacks: ‘An American Tragedy’ Revisited (Utica, NY: North Country Books, Inc., 1986), pg. 15, re Gillette’s parents:
Sometime after 1880, Frank Gillette met his future bride, Louisa Maria Rice, a native of Millbury, Massachusetts. … The circumstances of the couple’s meeting, courtship and marriage have not been recorded, but the ceremony probably took place sometime in the summer of 1882. Soon after the marriage they moved to Wickes [Montana], a mining town just south of Clancy. …
This paragraph has been deleted from a revised and expanded version of the book: Murder in the Adirondacks: An American Tragedy Revisited; Fully Revised and Expanded Edition (Utica, NY: North Country Books, Inc., 2016). Brandon merely states (pg. 15) that Chester Gillette was born on August 8, 1883 “less than a year” after his father, Frank Gillette had married Louise Rice.
There is a record of the marriage of Chester Gillette’s parents. It indicates that Franklin Gillette and Louisa Rice were married on October 21, 1883 in Jefferson County, Montana Territory, shortly after their first child, Chester Gillette, was born.
The witnesses to the marriage were Franklin Gillette’s brothers Rembrandt Gillette (1848-1893) and Ellsworth Gillette (1861-1896).
Frank and Louisa’s first child, Chester Ellsworth Gillette, was born on August 9, 1883 in Wickes, Jefferson County, Montana.
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transcription of marriage certificate (see copy below):
marriage record
Franklin Gillette and Louise
October 21, 1883
County of Jefferson; Territory of Montana
recorded Nov. 19, 1883
Territory of Montana / County of Jefferson
This is to certify that I a minister of the Gospel did join in lawful wedlock Franklin Gillette and Louise Rice on the 21st day of October 1883 in the presence of Carrie Gillette and Rembrandt Gillette witnesses / W W Van Onsdele (?) / Recorded Nov the 19th 1883 at 7 o’clock am / Joseph (?) D. Taylor; County Recorder.
— Roger W. Smith
July 2016
Descendants of Charles H. Babcock
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This post contains four reports — posted above in downloadable PDF format — showing the genealogy of the families of Chester Ellsworth Gillette (1883-1908) and Grace Mae Brown (1886-1906).
Gillette was executed in Auburn, NY in 1908 for the murder of Grace Brown.
Chester Gillette was the prototype of the character Clyde Griffiths in Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy. Grace Brown was the prototype for the character Roberta Alden in the novel.
The reports posted here were generated using genealogy software. They include:
Descendants of John Gillette
John Gillette (1729-1760) was an ancestor of Chester Gillette.
Descendants of Leonard Rice
Leonard Rice was an ancestor of Chester Gillette. Rice was the maiden name of Chester Gillette’s mother, Louisa Maria (Rice) Gillette (1859-1939).
Descendants of Daniel Brown
Daniel Brown (1696-1771) was an ancestor of Grace Brown (Chester Gillette’s murder victim), the daughter of Frank B. Brown (1856-1918) and Minerva (Babock) Brown (ca. 1858-1939).
Descendants of Charles H. Babcock
Charles H. Babcock (ca. 1832-1881) was the maternal grandfather of Grace Brown. Babcock was the maiden name of Grace Brown’s mother Minerva (Babcock) Brown.
— Roger W. Smith
June 2017; updated August 2020
