1739: Penelope Kenny and Sarah Simpson

On this date in 1739, Penelope Kenny and Sarah Simpson were publicly hanged in colonial New Hampshire for “feloniously concealing the death of a[n] … infant bastard child.”

The first people — male or female — executed in New Hampshire history had separately disposed in August 1739 of their respective newborns. Unluckily for them, some never-discovered third woman did the same thing around the same time much less adroitly … and her dead infant was found in a well.

The ensuing investigation uncovered (in one case by the forcible ministrations of a midwife team) the recent pregnancies of this day’s victims, and though Simpson claimed her child was miscarried, she still fell under a law making a capital crime of covering up the death of a baby.

Today, Executed Today interviews New Hampshire historian Christopher Benedetto, whose research situates Kenny and Simpson in the context of their times:

Killing their infants is in essence related to abortion. Both are the killing of an unwanted child.

The part where the body was thrown down a well, for the life of me, this is beyond insane. The drinking of dead body soup every time they draw water from the well. Their own kid on top of it.

This is no different that the early water storage systems called cisterns where a wind mill pumped water to a basement open air storage tank that would be contaminated with dead snakes, birds, lizards, insects etc.

Or the popular open air hand dug wells with a small roof and hand crank for the bucket also filled with dead critters.

It is really sad. I am sure some women did kill their newborns. I am sure some women were raped. Many servants were probably so lonely any sort of attention from any old cad was received eagerly by them.

It is sad to think they had no one in their lives to attend a birth and sneak the infant away for them and place it in a basket where someone would quickly come across it.

Many probably delivered babies that were killed by the umbilical cord being wrapped around their necks. If someone had been there to help them, even if they didn’t particularly know what they were doing when it came to childbirth, they might have been able to figure out how to unwrap the cord.

I wonder how often another person, a fellow servant, did try to help and the woman discovered to have recently given birth protected this person by not naming him or her as a witness to the baby being born dead or taken away. I suppose if the baby were successfully found in a basket, there would be reports of such a thing to point to and the woman facing execution could find out from her helper where she placed the baby, but then she would have to explain how she knew this and who else knew it.

But maybe a fair amount of babies were found in baskets and certain women in the area, who suddenly seemed slimmer, were suspected of being behind it and people just decided to let it go because the woman did the best thing she could do.

In the case of these two women, it’s because some woman had to throw her baby in a well instead of burying it, for it could have been stillborn for all anyone knows, that anyone paid attention to these two women when they appeared to have slimmed down seemingly overnight.

It’s even sadder that people today point to cases like this to support abortion when at the same time we have 15-year olds who are thrown multiple baby showers, which is proof that shaming on this level does not take place.

Murder is murder.

And some of these females are serial killers — there are even monsters that get pregnant (and then abort) as part of a satanic fetish — just like the medical lynch mobs that they hire to do their killing are serial killers.

I’m glad when any of these persons repents.

But tolerating their murders is only gonna bring a terrible condemnation on this nation. Arguably that condemnation is already going on as we are seeing what looks like Romans 1:18-32 going on in many lives in our society (rabid support for faggotry in society is shown as a result of being turned over to a depraved mind, not the cause of it).

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