After five years of prison, the day of Bill’s release arrived. The prison chaplain offered him a Bible, but Bill couldn’t read. Then the clerk told him to sign a voucher to receive two dollars. Bill looked at the voucher and said, “I have been in prison five years unjustly, and ain’t going to settle so.” The prison officers and the chaplain laughed.
John Depuy took him from the cold, foreboding halls of Auburn State Prison. Bill hardly recognized his brother-in-law. As they traveled home, Bill said he had accidently broken a dinner knife while eating and the guards had threatened to give him five more years in prison. He was afraid and asked John if they could do that to him. Over and over he said he needed to find the people who had caused him to be imprisoned and to make them pay him for the injustice he had suffered.
For months he lived with John. The people who had known him, both black and white, were stunned by the changes in him. He rarely talked, and when he did he often made little sense. People had described him as “a lad of good understanding and of kind and gentle disposition.” Now he seemed stupid, angry, and prone to break out in loud laughter for no reason.
One day, Bill walked the five miles to Mrs. Godfrey’s house and told her that he was innocent of stealing her horse and that he wanted her to pay him a settlement. She felt sorry for him and gave him some cakes. He left quietly.
Bill then went to a lawyer and asked for a warrant for the man whose testimony had put him in prison, saying that he wanted to get damages. The lawyer’s clerk told him to go to the justice of the peace’s office. A few days later he went to see a lawyer named Lyman Paine, who was a justice of the peace. Bill said he wanted “a warrant for the man who put me to State Prison.” Paine told him that the only warrant he could make out would be for perjury, and that he would need detailed facts to issue such a warrant. But Bill could not understand and just kept repeating himself. Finally, Bill threw a quarter on the table and said, “Sir, I demand a warrant.” He soon left the office but returned in the afternoon and gave Paine the names of Mr. Doty and Mrs. Godfrey. Paine would not issue a warrant and sent him away again. Refused a warrant, but unwilling to give up, Bill went to another justice two days later. Again he was denied a warrant and was informed that there was no legal remedy for his problem.
During the same period of time, Bill went to the John Van Nest farm, on Owasco Lake, four miles from Auburn. The Van Nests were a very wealthy and well-respected family. They had no previous relationship with Bill and had never seen him before. He asked for a job, was politely refused, and left the farm.
After being refused a warrant and visiting the Van Nest farm, Bill became more and more agitated. He bought two knives and, while showing them to John Depuy, started to threaten him. After John calmed him down, Bill said that he had found the folks that had put him in prison—“they were Mr. Van Nest”—and that he was going to kill them.
On the night of March 12, 1846, twenty-two-year-old William Freeman left the settlement at New Guinea with his knives, drank a pint of liquor, and walked to the Van Nest farm. He walked back and forth outside the yard, until after a long wait he saw Mrs. Van Nest open the back door and step outside. He ran toward her and began stabbing her. Her husband, John Van Nest, heard her screams and opened the door. Bill jumped on him and quickly killed him. He then ran upstairs and into a room where George, their two-year-old son, was sleeping, stabbing the boy so hard the knife pierced the bed. One of the men in the house, Cornelius Van Arsdale, confronted Bill and was also stabbed, but he managed to hit Bill with a candlestick and knock him down the stairs. As Bill left the house he ran into Mrs. Wyckoff, the mother-in-law, who attacked him with a carving knife and severed the tendons in his wrist. In the struggle, he stabbed her in the stomach. She too would die, two days later. Bill ran to the stable, took an old horse, and fled.
After some miles the horse gave out and fell. Bill killed the horse and stole another from a nearby barn. By the next day he was forty miles away in another village. When he tried to sell the horse, people became suspicious and called the authorities. A Mr. Alonzo Taylor found Bill in Gregg’s Tavern and arrested him. He accused Bill of the murder. When Bill denied, Taylor said, “You black rascal, you do know about it,” and raised his cane to hit him. He was stopped from striking Bill, but he then allowed two men to take Bill into another room “to get something out of him.” The two men beat Bill. He was then taken back to the Van Nest farm, where he was identified by Van Arsdale. He was continually interrogated and gave many different responses, from denials to statements that he wanted to get paid for being in prison, to sentences that just made no sense. One sentence, however, did make sense. Bill said: “You know there is no law for me.”
As word of the murders spread, people from all over the countryside gathered at the Van Nest farm. When Bill was brought there to be identified the crowd screamed for his death. They called out that he should be put on a rack, or burned at the stake. Some people had brought ropes and called for a lynching. However, the officers “by a diversion artfully contrived” escaped from the mob and managed to get Bill safely into the county jail. The mood in Auburn and Cayuga County was ugly. People were outraged when anyone even raised the idea that Bill might have been insane. The funeral services acted as a platform for Reverend A. B. Win-field, who used the sad occasion to stir up hatred against the “assassin” and to lobby for the death penally. Winfield’s speech is one that could be given today by proponents of capital punishment, as it criticized lawyers, judges, and the appeals process.
Winfield warned against “adroit counsel” who would use confusion and sympathy to pervert the law. He raised the specter of judges infected with sympathy who would thereby charge the jury in favor of the criminal. And he warned that the appeals process might put off the trial so long that witnesses would die. He railed against “false sympathy,” which would lead the murderer to be acquitted. He concluded by appealing to the assembly “to maintain the laws of their country inviolate” and put the murderer to death.
Given the atmosphere of the day, and the fact that the jurors would be drawn from the same county in which Winfield spoke, the reverend’s tirade served to inflame people even more against Bill and a possible insanity defense. His sermon was published and thousands of copies were given away free throughout the state of New York. The public was characterized by one of Bill’s attorneys as having “a demon thirst for blood, and unchristian thirst for revenge.” The Albany Argus observed: “It was with the utmost difficulty that the people of Auburn could be prevented from executing summary justice upon the fiend in human shape.”3
Bill, meanwhile, sat in his stone cell, chained at all times, as people from the community came and peered through the bars of the cell and doctors, law officers, and even the district attorney were allowed to question him.
As William Freeman lay chained in his cell, William Seward, the former governor of New York and one of America’s most prestigious lawyers, was talking with friends and associates from Auburn. A few of them pleaded with him to take up Bill’s defense. What kind of man was William Henry Seward, and why would he defend such an unpopular case? Seward was born in the farm country of New York State in 1801. His parents were of English, Welsh, and Irish extraction, leaving Seward with an affinity for Irish independence from Great Britain. His father, a Jeffersonian Republican, was a doctor, merchant, land speculator, and county judge. His mother was a compassionate woman, well respected in the community. Over the years his father amassed a fortune, and Henry (as he was then called) and his four siblings grew up in comfortable surroundings. In accordance with his father’s wishes, Henry went to college and then took up the study of law. He studied in school for one year and apprenticed in a law office for another year. At the age of twenty-two Henry passed his bar examination. He went to Auburn and began to practice law in the same firm as Judge Elijah Miller, a fortuitous move both professionally