On the morning of March 23, 1860, a convicted murderer mounted a scaffold in downtown St. Paul, said a few last prayers as the noose was fastened, and stepped onto the drop.
When the sheriff released the platform, the sad, spectacular story of Ann Bilansky passed into Minnesota history. Her body was allowed to hang for about 20 minutes, long enough for 1,500 to 2,000 people who blocked Wabasha Street with their carriages and hay wagons to get a glimpse of the swaying woman at the end of the rope.
“I die a sacrifice to the law,” the newspaper, the St. Paul Pioneer & Democrat, quoted Bilansky as saying seconds before she stepped into eternity.
In an age of O.J. and court-TV crime entertainments, her words still have an eerie reverberation.
Bilansky was convicted of killing her husband, Stanislaus Bilansky, by mixing arsenic in his food and drink in their rat-infested cabin. She did it, prosecutors said, so she could take up with a fair-haired, blue-eyed carpenter named John Walker.
Her lawyers said Stanislaus, habitually drunk and in poor health, could have died of any of a number of ailments. They said John Walker was not her lover, but her nephew, who summoned her to St. Paul so she could care for him during an illness.
Between her arrest in March 1859 and the hanging a year later, Bilansky’s case sorely tried the limits of 19th-century forensic science; became one of the new state Supreme Court’s first appeals; triggered an eight-day “woman-hunt” when Bilansky escaped from a basement window of the city jail and headed west with John Walker; became a cause celebre for St. Paul society figures, who flocked to her jail cell; triggered a showdown between the pro-Ann Legislature and Gov. Alexander Ramsey; became the first execution under statehood, and the only time Minnesota ever executed a woman; and, finally, was one of our state’s first sensational newspaper stories.
“Bad enough to be a harlot, and bold enough to be a murderer,” the Pioneer & Democrat said in a story about Bilansky’s last day. It was headlined “EXECUTION! – Her Dying Words.”
I am not an innocent bystander in the story. For several years now, I have been involved in (and have been paid for) a project with the Great American History Theatre. The result is “A Piece of the Rope,” a play that brings all the actors in that dark March drama back to life.
Mary Ann Evards Wright arrived in St. Paul in the spring of 1858. She was in her late 30s or early 40s and said she was originally from North Carolina, where her parents still lived and where her first husband died in a railroad accident. She said she had never borne children and came here to care for her nephew, John Walker, during an illness.
A police handbill issued during her escape described Ann as “tall in stature … sharp-visaged, teeth a little projected … very talkative, uses good language … grey eyes, light hair, Roman nose.” Walker had “light curly hair, blue eyes, light complexion” and had been here for several years before Ann arrived.
Perhaps through Walker, Ann soon met Stanislaus Bilansky, a “Polander” in his early 50s who had come to St. Paul in 1842 and had run a bar and grocery in his lowertown cabin. Stanislaus went through several wives before he married Ann and was described as a short, heavy-set man with brown hair and a less-than-winning personality – “melancholy, abusive, unlovable,” and also frequently ill, convinced he would die in March.
It was only a few months after their wedding that Stan took to bed with a violent abdominal illness. He died at 3:30 a.m. Friday, March 11, after drinking a tumbler of liquor brought by his son. The next day, at an inquest in the cabin, his was ruled a death from natural causes, and the body was freed for burial Saturday evening.
A neighbor and friend of the Bilanskys, Lucinda Kilpatrick, then made the report that turned the old pioneer’s death into a murder case: She went to the police chief and said she and Ann had purchased arsenic a few weeks before the death. She said Ann Bilansky called her aside during the first inquest and asked that Lucinda not tell the coroner about that trip. With that new information, Stan Bilansky’s body was exhumed and a second inquest a few days later ruled that he died by arsenic poisoning “administered by Mrs. Bilansky.”
Kilpatrick became a key witness against Bilansky in her trial in late May and early June. (One of the jurors was Justus Ramsey, whose brother, Alexander Ramsey, would be elected governor later that year and would have Bilansky’s life in his hands.) Kilpatrick and Rosa Scharf, the Bilanskys’ maid, brought out suspicious remarks and behavior by Ann, painting her as a woman who wanted Stanislaus out of the way so she could flee with John Walker, who (prosecutors alleged) was her lover, not her nephew. Local scientists offered an array of tests to suggest there was arsenic in Stanislaus’ stomach.
Ann Bilansky did not testify. John Walker did, said Ann was his aunt, and denied there were any improper relations. Others said Stanislaus was depressed and worried about debts, suggesting a motive for suicide. Kilpatrick, the neighbor whose testimony sent Ann to jail, was asked about her own relationship with John Walker, and about letters, a breast pin and a ring that she allegedly gave to Walker. She refused to give an answer – an answer that could have cast a new light on her accusation – and the trial judge did not force her to.
The jury deliberated for five hours on June 3, 1859, before finding Bilansky guilty of first-degree murder. On July 21, the state’s new Supreme Court upheld the conviction. Two days after this last legal appeal was exhausted, Bilansky was visited in jail by Walker, and later that evening, she escaped through an open window and disappeared into the countryside.
“In a very short time, every policeman in the city was made aware of the escape,” the Pioneer & Democrat reported. “Watchmen were placed on all the thoroughfares leading out of town, and every vehicle inspected. A general search was also made throughout the city, but without success.”
For most of the next eight days, John Walker and Ann Bilansky hid out near Lake Como and made preparations to escape. (They holed up for a time at the farm of a fellow jail inmate, George Lumsden, who had befriended her. Four years later, Lumsden would be pardoned on the condition that he enlist in the Union army. He did, and was promptly killed at the Battle of Nashville.) Bilansky, wearing men’s clothes, and Walker were finally captured on their way to St. Anthony, walking west.
A month later, Walker appeared in court on a charge of aiding in her escape. According to the Pioneer & Democrat, there was insufficient evidence to convict him, and he was released. He disappeared forever from the city and the story. Bilansky was sentenced to death by hanging on Dec. 2. She “sobbed audibly while the judge was addressing her, and on receiving her sentence, she burst into tears,” the Pioneer & Democrat reported.
Between the sentencing and the execution, legislators and other prominent citizens paid their respects in Bilansky’s cell. Cynics viewed her comments on her trial as wholly untrustworthy; they used the phrase, `You have been to see Mrs. Bilansky,’ when someone was suspected of stretching the truth.
On Jan. 5, 1860, Rosa Scharf, the maid whose testimony helped seal Bilansky’s fate, was found dead in her bed. The night before, she had visited Lucinda Kilpatrick and was worried about what was happening to Bilansky. A coroner’s jury ruled that Rosa took an overdose of laudanum, suggesting suicide; the physician said she died of apoplexy.
Pressure began to build on the new governor, Alexander Ramsey, to commute Ann Bilansky’s sentence. Ramsey signed the death warrant in late January, setting March 23, 1860, as the date of the execution. The Legislature passed a bill commuting the sentence to life. Ramsey vetoed the measure.
In his message, he colorfully expanded on the evidence of the trial, suggesting, as no one at the trial did, that someone had actually seen Bilansky administer poison.
“She sat by the bedside of her husband, not to foster, but to slay,” Ramsey wrote. “She watched without emotion the tortures she had caused, and, by and by, administered no healing medicine, no cooling draught, but ever, under a guise of love and tender care, renewed the cup of death.”
In the days before her death, petitioners urging that Ramsey commute her sentence included the prosecutor, Isaac Heard, who said he had “grave and serious doubts” about whether Bilansky had a fair trial, and Supreme Court Justice Charles E. Flandreau, who participated in the opinion denying her a new trial. Flandreau wrote that while he supported the death penalty, “it rather shocks my private sense of humanity to commence by inflicting the extreme penalty on a woman.”
In an excellent article on the case in Minnesota History magazine, author Matthew Cecil noted that Gov. Ramsey must have heard arguments for Bilansky’s guilt from his brother, Justus, who had been on the jury and who was in business with the governor. Cecil also notes that commuting the sentence would be “likely to anger a public skittish about criminal justice.”
On the day of the execution, the town was clogged with gawkers, including an unusually large number of women, many carrying children. As soon as the body was cut down, the newspaper reported, “We noticed an individual making strenuous efforts to secure a portion of the rope, and succeeded, and there were many present who endeavored to get a piece of it as mementos, or as a remedy for disease.”