His attitude was "complete despair - the perfect extinguishment of hope," said Palmer. He said Rowell had finally faced up to the affair on the day of the shooting. "I also told him that his wife was very deceitful." "I told Rowell on several occasions that he had right and justice on his side," Palmer said. The star witness was William Palmer, the marital interloper. Neither husband nor wife testified, to the great disappointment of scandal-peepers. Nonetheless, he faced trial for murder during a bitterly cold stretch in January 1884, with a huge throng of gawkers gathered on the Batavia courthouse square, despite temperatures below zero. An upstate paper said the shooting was "excused and even defended by the most moral of Batavians." Letters of support for Rowell streamed in from across the country as the Batavia Sensation made its way into the American press. He listened briefly to love grunts before interrupting the frolic with his firearm. Rowell hid as his wife and her lover devoured dinner then ascended the stairs toward bed. He wanted to parade Lynch naked through the streets of Batavia and mail the libertine's clothing to the Utica newspapers.īut by the time Lynch arrived by train from Utica the next afternoon, Newton Rowell had secreted himself in his own home when his wife went out to yet again stash her kids with a friend. Palmer planned to help Rowell storm the house and catch the lovers in the act. Agreeable to you, I should be glad to see you some evening this week." The same day, Jennie sent a letter to Lynch in Utica: "I am alone. While there, he showed a bartender a photo of Jennie and said, "I'm after the son of a bitch who's been after this." He packed a bag and trudged toward the train station on Oct. Palmer took that as a taunt, and he cooked up a plan to prove to Rowell once and for all that Jennie was a Jezebel.Īt Palmer's direction, Rowell told his wife that he was leaving on a long trip. She also noted that he tended to be "very slow in finding out things about me." Yet after she calmed down, Jennie confided in Palmer about her husband's lack of affection. The next day, his wife stormed into the factory and castigated the busybody partner. The note revealed that the lovers had been enjoying sneak-aways to Rochester. So Palmer took his nosiness another step, reading a letter from Lynch to Jennie that had been mistakenly delivered to the box factory. He told Rowell that he suspected an affair, but his partner's reaction was "cold and distant," Palmer said. Palmer often noticed Jennie Rowell at the train station when her husband was away. Rowell went into the box manufacturing business there with William Palmer, and his work took him out of town frequently. In 1880, Rowell put some space between Jennie and her Johnson by moving the family 165 miles west to Batavia.
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