New Jersey & Kentucky: Industry and Ambition
October 1900, Paterson, New Jersey. A seventeen-year-old silk mill worker named Jennie Bosschieter walks toa drugstore on a Thursday evening. She never comes home. Four men from the city's wealthiest families drugher with chloral hydrate, assault her, and leave her body by the Wagaraw Bridge. The murder trial exposes a citywhere the families that owned the mills believed they owned the law, too.Eight hundred miles south, Perry County, Kentucky, 1887. Two merchants in a town called Hazard turn a disputeover coal mineral rights into a seven-year shooting war. The French-Eversole Feud kills more than twentymen, burns down the county courthouse, and brings the state militia into Appalachian Kentucky. The outsidecompanies that started the conflict get exactly what they wanted.The VictimsJennie Bosschieter was seventeen years old, Dutch-American, the middle child of an immigrant family living at155 East Fifth Street in Paterson's Riverside section. She had been working at the Paterson Ribbon Company onVreeland Avenue since she was thirteen — twelve-hour shifts on a doubling machine, barely a dollar a day. Shewas walking to Kent's Drugstore on Main Street to buy baby powder for her infant niece when she encounteredthe men who would kill her.Joseph Eversole was a merchant, lawyer, and father of seven in Hazard, Kentucky. He traveled Perry County'shollows warning subsistence farmers that outside agents were buying their coal mineral rights for fifty cents anacre — a fraction of their value. Nick Combs, Eversole's brother-in-law, was twenty years old when he was killedalongside Eversole in an ambush on a mountain road in April 1888. Judge Josiah Combs, sixty-two, grandson ofHazard's founder, was shot at his own doorstep six years later.The Crimes**Case A — Paterson, New Jersey (1900):** Walter C. McAlister, Andrew J. Campbell, William A. Death, andGeorge J. Kerr lured Jennie Bosschieter to Saal's Saloon at River and Bridge Streets. McAlister placed chloralhydrate in her drinks — two doses, the second lethal. The four men took her in a hired carriage toward the Bergenside of Paterson. Jennie was sexually assaulted and died from the chloral hydrate overdose. Her body was foundnear the Wagaraw Bridge at 5:30 the next morning by Marinus Gary, walking to work at Alyea Brothers feed mill.The cause of death: chloral hydrate poisoning. A visible skull fracture was determined to be postmortem, frombeing dropped.**Case B — Perry County, Kentucky (1887-1894):** The French-Eversole Feud began as a commercial rivalrybetween Joseph Eversole and Fulton French over coal mineral rights and control of the county courthouse. Thefirst killing came September 15, 1887, when Eversole shot French supporter Bill Gambriel in the street. On April15, 1888, hired assassins ambushed and killed both Eversole and Nick Combs on the road to Hyden. The violenceescalated through the Battle of Hazard in November 1889 — a two-day gun battle through the town streets, withthe Eversole faction barricaded in the courthouse and the French faction occupying the jail fifteen feet away.As many as twenty of the town's roughly 135 residents died. The courthouse was burned on July 4, 1890. JudgeJosiah Combs was assassinated at his doorstep on September 23, 1894.The AftermathMcAlister, Campbell, and Death were convicted of second-degree murder. McAlister and Campbell each receivedthirty years. George Kerr, tried separately for rape, received fifteen years. Judge Dixon stated openly he wishedthe death penalty had been available. Kerr served eleven years before release. A New York labor newspaper, TheCall, ran the headline: "Wealthy Murderer Released." Campbell served fifteen of his thirty years. Author KimberlyTilley recovered Jennie's story in her 2019 book *The Poisoned Glass: A Famous, Forgotten Murder*, restoringa case that had been forgotten for over a century. The Bosschieter murder is recognized as one of the earliestdocumented uses of chloral hydrate as a date rape drug.In...