Sheila Duane

Bridget's Hanging Sheila Duane

On August 30, 1867, on a New Jersey gallows, convicted murderer Bridget Durgan was hanged before a crowd of over five hundred men, women, and children who behaved as though they were attending a carnival. She remained suspended until the cheering crowd was satisfied that justice had been done.

But had it? In Bridget's Hanging, Sheila Duane looks carefully at the evidence and concludes that justice was not done: Bridget was tried, condemned, and executed for a murder she didn't commit.

Instead, she was guilty of being poor, illiterate, Irish Catholic, an immigrant, and not beautiful, all of which were loathed in nineteenth-century America. Tried by a media not unlike today's and condemned by mob mentality, Bridget and her sensationalized story eclipsed the murder victim herself-Mary Coriell, for whom Bridget worked as a domestic-and a more likely suspect.

While journalists at the time painted a picture of Bridget as monstrous, Duane looks with fresh eyes at a character who was intellectually childlike, who practiced a foreign religion, believed in unfamiliar superstitions, and who spoke with a brogue that was difficult for Americans to understand. Both a well-documented study and an absorbing whodunit, Bridget's Hanging dissects the case against Bridget Durgan and finds it wholly unconvincing. In doing so, Duane manages to find a little justice for Bridget at last.