Town note
Originally each person who wanted to move here was granted one acre of land for every 10 pounds he paid in taxes.
about 0:06:44The story
In June 1965 Dorothy Thompson, known to everyone as Doddy, was thirty years old and living in a small Cape Cod house on Route 179 in Barkhamsted, Connecticut, with her husband Arnfin and their two-year-old daughter Krista. Doddy was the daughter of Asa Burdick, who owned Burdick Apple Orchards, and before her marriage she had been a teller at the Riverside Bank in New Hartford and the organist at St Paul's Lutheran Church. Arnfin, thirty-two, was a bookkeeper and accountant at the Carpenter Brick Company in South Windsor, about thirty miles away. He left the house shortly before eight each morning and stayed out late three or four nights a week, saying he had work to do. In fact he had been seeing Jean Griffin, a bookkeeper at the Rural Gas Service, for about four years.
Doddy kept a rigid routine. She telephoned her mother Annie at 8.20, 10.20 and 3.50 every day, had lunch at 11.50, fed Krista five minutes later, put her down at 1.15 and woke her at three. On 15 June 1965 the 8.20 and 10.20 calls came, but the 3.50 call did not. Annie rang the house and got no answer.
Arnfin left work at about 5.30, stopped at the post office, collected his mail at about 6.10 and drove home. A few minutes later he was hammering on the door of his neighbours, the Stadlers, shouting that Doddy was dead in the backyard and he could not find the baby. Carol Stadler telephoned the state police while her husband ran across the road to search the house.
Doddy was lying on the ground below the unfinished sun deck at the back of the house, about eight feet from the top of the deck. She had been stabbed repeatedly in the back, throat and chest with a two-pronged carving fork; her skull had been crushed with a small sledgehammer, one eyeball knocked out and the other side of her face caved in; her abdomen and hips had been crushed with a nineteen-pound boulder; and an electrical cord taken from the toaster had been used to hang her over the edge of the deck, fixed in place with a nail set. The cord pulled loose under her weight and she fell. Three of the five rooms downstairs were covered in blood, a shirt was half-ironed on the board, and there were drag marks from the kitchen out to the deck. A bloodstained hammer with an eighteen-inch handle was found 110 feet behind the house, and a red earring and a bloodstained shoelace were found in the driveway. The medical examiner, Dr Owen Murphy, and state police captain Thomas O'Brien attended. It was the first murder in Barkhamsted since 1914.
Arnfin told police he had been at work all day with two colleagues. A clerical employee, Patricia Borres, confirmed that he had been there apart from a lunch break of no more than thirty minutes, and Doddy's body was already cold by the time he came home. He also admitted that he had poured himself a couple of good shots while waiting for the police. Some said Doddy had been nervous of her; others argued that a five-foot, 115-pound woman could not have done it, and that Krista would not have sat calmly with her grandmother if she had watched her kill her mother. Krista, asked what had happened, kept repeating, 'She killed her.'
On 16 July 1965 the county coroner, H. Gibson Guyan, issued a coroner's warrant naming her as the person criminally responsible. He found the evidence wholly circumstantial but relied on motive, opportunity and blood of her group type found on her belongings. The warrant was lodged at the hospital and could not be served until she left. Major Samuel Rome, the state police investigator, was convinced of her guilt. He and another officer questioned her for two hours until she got down on her hands and knees and cried that she had not done it. She did, and a murder warrant was obtained but never served.
Meanwhile Arnfin had not collected his mail for about three months. When he finally did, in the late summer, he found an envelope postmarked Winsted and dated 17 June, two days after the murder, addressed in large block letters. It said that the writer had liked his wife, that she had worked with him at the bank, that he had told her no one else could have her, that it took a long time but he had succeeded in what he planned, and that he would soon kill the baby. It described stabbing her with a fork, stomping her face, dragging her through the house with an electrical cord, using a hammer to pound in the stake to hang her, and bashing her head with a large rock. It mentioned a stolen dark blue 1958 Ford hardtop and misspelled several words. Arnfin thought it was a prank. Rome called it the work of a crank and said the crime was the work of a woman.
On New Year's Eve 1965, five children playing in woods on their grandmother's property at the corner of Martin and Westwood Roads in East Hartland found a pink plastic piggy bank, the only thing missing from the Thompson house. The slot had been enlarged with a knife rather than the bank broken open.
He had taken six years to get through Gilbert High School and was described as having a low IQ. He admitted writing the letter, saying he did it to divert suspicion from himself and his car. He said he had gone to the house for homework help from Doddy, but a teacher testified that no work was outstanding after 11 June.
Krista was raised by relatives. Major Rome left the state police in 1970 when Fusenich, his critic, became commissioner, and became a security chief and then a private detective. He said, 'When I'm right, I'm right.'