One summer day in 1874, a stranger presented himself to the Brothers of Mary of Dayton with a plea for employment. The man stated that his name was Harry Adams, that he was a vagabond shoemaker who was making his way across the land, and that he was willing to work cheaply since he didn’t need much to get by on. Since there was a need for a cobbler at the St. Mary’s School for Boys, which was operated by the order, he was put to work.
     Several months went by and Harry seemed content with his newfound life at the order on the hill. However, at the foot of the lofty church was a section of the city known as "Slidertown". The northern blocks of Brown Street, from along Hickory to the NCR plant, was composed largely of saloons, cheap rooming houses and red-lighted residences. It was at one such "gentleman’s resort" that Adams met Lou Huffman, who was the madam of the house. It wasn’t long after their first meeting that the couple became infatuated with each other and Lou’s place became Harry’s home.
     In December, 1875 Henry Mulharon left his wife and child in Swantown, Vermont in order to receive medical treatment at the National Soldiers Home in Dayton. While fighting with the 20th Michigan Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War, Mulharon had received a gunshot wound which resulted in the loss of all of the fingers on his right hand. Even though ten years had passed, the hand still gave him trouble. Little did he know how much worse things would get.
     On the morning of February 13, 1876 Henry was given his pension of $50. He decided to spend it in Dayton and caught a streetcar to town.
     Along in the late afternoon Mulharon, in the company of his roommate, Emmon Woodward, arrived at Henry Sweinhart’s saloon on Warren and Brown Streets. It was here that they met Harry Adams. Mulharon confided to Adams that he wanted to renew the acquaintance of one Ella Winters, whom he had met at Huffman’s during one of his other trips into the city. Harry promised to find the woman and told Mulharon and Woodward to meet up with him at Lou’s place in a little while.
     When they got there an hour later, Adams introduced the two men to Jennie Smith, a prostitute of the house. When the liquor supply began to run low, Henry produced a roll of bills and threw one to Harry, ordering him to go to a nearby saloon and buy a quart of whiskey.
     At the sight of the bankroll, Adams began to make plans to separate it from its owner. On his return, he made sure that Mulharon's glass was never empty. Harry also took Lou aside and told her to make sure that Mulharon’s friend remained "occupied". After Henry began showing the effects of his drinking, Harry proposed that they look for Ella Winters in the saloons in the neighborhood. Leaving Woodward behind, Henry and Jennie Smith went out the back door. Harry followed a short time later, pausing just long enough to finish his drink and to conceal a hammer in his back pocket.
     While leaving the first saloon they had visited, Harry spied Mike Cahoe and Andy Redmond on the sidewalk. Allowing Henry and Jennie to get a little ahead of him, Adams casually strolled over as if to say a quick hello to the two men. Instead, he told them of the ex-soldier’s pension money and asked if they would help him get it. Both men declined, claiming it was too daring a scheme for them.
     Several more saloons were visited that evening. At each Mulharon paid the bill. As the night wore on, Henry began to feel the effects of the liquor and began to raise his voice. By the time they had reached Swinehart’s saloon, he had become so obnoxious that other customers in the bar began protesting about the noise. When Mulharon refused to lower his voice, the owner asked him to leave. Placing his arm around Jennie’s waist, Henry left the saloon and walked out onto the sidewalk, with Harry following a minute later.
     When he reached the street, Adams spied two young boys, James Dumas and Andy Delscamp. With drunken recklessness, Harry asked them to help him rob Mulharon. Frightened, they turned and ran from him.
     Meanwhile, after not being able to convince Henry to go back with her, Jennie decided to return to home. Adams, seeing that Mulharon was alone, followed the stumbling man up an alley running off of Brown Street, between Oak and Union Streets.
     A few minutes later, Jennie was confronted by Adams, who had run to overtake her. In one blood-covered hand he held a hammer. Without a word, Jennie knew what had happened.
     "I’ve killed the son of a bitch, but haven’t got his money! Take this hammer to my woman, then you’ll be as deep in the mud as I am," screamed Harry, as he thrusted the bloody tool to her. "Take it or I’ll kill you. And if I can’t, I’ll get someone else to do it. Remember, dead men tell no tales!"
     Frightened, Jennie did what she was told, taking the bloody instrument to Lou Huffman to dispose of.
     Adams quickly returned to the scene of the crime and began rifling through Mulharon's pants pockets. Before he could find the money, however, Harry noticed someone coming out of a nearby saloon. Instead of running away, Adams began yelling that someone had been killed. It didn’t take long before Police Officer Amor M. Keller arrived and found Mulharon in a pool of blood with a fractured skull. When Officer Keller asked for someone in the growing crowd to fetch a doctor, Harry agreed to find Dr. John S. Beck, who lived nearby. After he had left, someone mentioned to Officer Keller that they had seen Adams with Mulharon earlier that evening. When Harry returned with the doctor, he was arrested and brought in for questioning.
     A short investigation also led detectives to Jennie, who was soon sobbing out her story to the police. Based on her testimony, Adams was held on suspicion of murder.
     The case was brought before the jury in Judge Henderson Elliott’s court on December 5, 1876, with the state being represented by John M. Sprigg and Elihu Thompson. During the trial that ensued, Harry strenuously denied the story told by Jennie, instead insisting she had murdered the man. Adams stated that he had had no motive to kill Mulharon, claiming to be skilled enough to have picked the man’s pockets without any trouble.
     At first there was some doubt about Harry’s guilt. Lou Huffman, who had disappeared just before the trial, was finally found in Indianapolis and forcibly brought back to testify. Huffman, whose real name was Lucretia E. Campbell, swore that she had never been given a hammer by Jennie. She also told the court that Jennie Smith’s real name was Jennie Moore, that she had once spent time in a penitentiary, and that she had a quarrelsome, bad disposition. Lou also stated that, due to this ill-temperament, she had been forced to make Jennie move out of the residence a few days before the murder had taken place.
     Unfortunately for Harry, Jennie’s testimony was supported by several witnesses, including the men who had been asked by Adams to help rob the victim.
     Seeing their client’s chance of escaping the death penalty slipping away, Adams’ attorneys, Samuel Craighead and Robert M. Nevin, resorted to save him through a plea of insanity. A witness was brought in that testified Harry had "a crazy streak in him." The jury was told of a day when, working about the garden at St. Mary’s academy, Harry had spied a cat nearby. Grasping it by the tail, the witness had watched as Adams swung the cat in the air, then dashed its brains out against a brick wall, laughing with glee as he tossed away the body of the mutilated animal.
     The jury was unconvinced. On December 9th, after only four hours deliberation, the jury found the defendant guilty of first degree murder. On January 6, 1877 Harry was sentenced to hang for his crime, the punishment to be carried out on April 27, 1877.
     The case was then taken before the Montgomery County Supreme Court on a plea of error. The decision was upheld, however, and a new date of execution was set for the 25th of May. A final plea was made to the Governor of Ohio, Thomas L. Young, for a stay of execution, in order for the attorneys to present a statement to him about the prisoner. This was granted. But in the end, the Governor turned down Harry’s request for a reprieve. The final date of execution was set for June 15, 1877, at 1 o’clock in the morning.
     The gallows, which had been erected for the execution of James Murphy in August 1876, had not been taken down, since Adams had already committed his crime and was in the custody of the courts. For nearly a year prisoners in the jail had had to live under the shadow of the gallows.
     Adams showed little remorse as he was sentenced. From that time forward, even to Father Nicholas Nickels from St. Mary’s, he always protested his innocence; claiming that, though he had provided the hammer, it had been Jennie who had committed the crime.
     Some time before the execution, a neatly attired woman registered at the Phillips House, then sought to visit Harry. Word soon got out that it was his sister from Boston. Up until that time, Harry had closely guarded his real name, and that of his family. But the day before the execution, Harry decided to "come clean" and tell the public his life story.
     It seems that Harry’s real name was Francis Daniel Spealman and he had been born in Petersburg, Pennsylvania on April 1, 1849. His parents, Dan and Marcy Spealman, had never gotten along with him, or with each other. His father had a tendency towards crime, and his mother, being religious, finally broke off the marriage. Harry, nine-years-old at the time, was upset enough to run away from home, the first of several times he would do so over the next decade. He moved on to Philadelphia, shined shoes and sold papers to get by, then returned home a few months later. He remained with his mother until she remarried, which caused him to become upset enough to leave home yet again.
     Harry returned to Philadelphia and met up with his father. It was then that Harry learned how to pick pockets, becoming good enough that he could make a living from it. It wasn’t long, however, before Harry’s father was arrested for counterfeiting money, so he had no choice but to go back and live with his mother.
     But Harry couldn’t stay still, so on May 26, 1864, just after his fifteenth birthday, he entered the Civil War, joining up with the 9th Pennsylvania Cavalry. After mustering out with his company a year later, Harry decided it was time to move up in the world of crime.
     When he returned to Philadelphia, Harry hooked up with an old friend of his father’s, a French Canadian by the name of Henry White. Frenchy, as Henry liked to be called, taught Harry how to scam people with a trick called the Three Card Monte. Frenchy was so impressed with Harry’s slight-of-hand that he also taught the boy how to work the combination locks on safes.
     Although somewhat successful at both endeavors, the two men got caught while in Nashville and were thrown in the state penitentiary there. Always a quick study, it was here that Harry learned the trade of shoemaking.
     After leaving jail, Harry and Frenchy decided to play it safe for awhile, sticking to going into a town where a circus was performing and setting up a place to run the Monte trick. But in 1873, having followed a circus into Dayton, Frenchy heard that Eli Recherts’ house, which was located just outside of the city, was begging to be robbed. The two men snuck into the cellar and found over $2,400 in gold and money. They then took two horses and left town.
     A year later, having had several brushes with the law in Ohio and Illinois, Harry decided to come back to Dayton and settle down. It was then that he became Harry Adams, taking his last name from the county where he had been born. But Harry’s past was never that far behind, and three years after having come to Dayton, he now found himself waiting to be executed.
     Late on the evening of the execution Samuel P. Batdorf, engineer at the jail, reported everything in readiness. A new rope of cotton fiber, five-eighths of an inch thick had been provided.
     A local newspaper reporter later wrote that he watched in amazement as the streets began to rapidly fill with people, while heads protruded from every window in nearby buildings.
     There is something almost inscrutable in the fascination which attracts crowds of men, women and even children to the scene of an execution, when they knew that it is impossible to see anything of the awful tragedy. They fairly besieged the jail in almost frantic efforts to obtain an opportunity to catch a glimpse of the inside through a half opened door way, and stared at the strong stone walls with an almost agonizing intensity. Some men even ascended to the roof of buildings in the neighborhood with opera glasses, seeking positions from which they hoped to catch a glimpse of the horrifying scene through the upper windows of the prison.
     The fatal day, June 15, 1877 had finally arrived. Although the public was not allowed inside, newspapermen were admitted and they came as far away as Chicago and New York to watch the execution take place. By 12:15 more than 30 people were jammed into the corridors to watch Adams hang.
     Before the execution Harry called for Sheriff Albert Beebe, Turnkey Henry O'Neal, Father Nickels and a few others, stating he wanted to personally say farewell to them. A half-hour later Adams and O'Neal started the march to the scaffold.
     While he stood on the trap door of the scaffold, with the Sheriff and O'Neal on one side and Father Nickels on the other, Harry looked into the eyes of those assembled in front of the gallows. Sheriff Beebe asked him if he had anything to say.
     As Harry began to speak, it was immediately apparent to the witnesses that he was drunk. His last speech was described as a wild and mostly incoherent rambling.
     When later questioned on how such a thing could happen, especially after the time with the farce that had occurred during John W. Dobbins’ execution in 1864. Sheriff Beebe explained that Adams had been allowed some wine at dinner time. He also stated that Harry’s nerves were "so utterly broken and he seemed so entirely prostrate" in the last moments, that the Sheriff was afraid it would be necessary to have the wretched man carried to the gallows. Under the advice of Father Nickels, Harry was given a dram of whiskey to steady him. 

 
     Sheriff Beebe stepped on the spring to release the trap door. For a second there was silence, then came the creaking of bolts and the crash of doors as they swung back. Over the noise was heard a sharp snap as Adams’ neck broke.
     Nineteen minutes later the body was taken down, examined, then turned over to Reverend Nickels for burial at St. Henry’s Cemetery. When St. Henry’s Cemetery was sold in the mid 1890’s, Adams’ body was moved to Calvary Cemetery.

Return to "Spilt Blood" Home Page