Old murder, new intrigue: Determined novelist re-imagines the life of NNY native ‘Diamond Bessie’

“Even though I’d grown up in the Dallas area, I had never heard of Jefferson,” she said.

What Ms. Hadlock saw there would eventually lead her down rabbit holes, up and over miles of roads to libraries, hours and hours of studying websites, along with trips, including jaunts to Ireland and Canton.

Now, a few days after her first novel “The Lives of Diamond Bessie” has been published by Spark Press, Ms. Hadlock can breathe easier. In a phone interview from her home near Fort Worth, Texas, she was asked if all the work, and three decade gap from inspiration to publication, was worth it.

“Looking back, I realize I needed to go through everything to get to this point,” Ms. Hadlock said. “There were so many times it was so frustrating, I thought, ‘Why can’t I get this? Why is this so hard?’ I had all of these hopes and I’d always wanted to write a novel. I went through periods I was so disappointed in myself. But it was all worth it.”

Inspired by a true story and partially based on the life of a wayward north country girl, “The Lives of Diamond Bessie” is a haunting tale of betrayal and redemption, set in the 1870s against the backdrop of brothels from Watertown to New Orleans, a convent, Texas court rooms and jails and the burgeoning women’s rights movement.

Drama, heritage in Jefferson

The life of “Diamond Bessie” has been part of popular culture in Jefferson, Texas, for decades, mainly thanks to the staged drama, “The Diamond Bessie Murder Trial,” part of the Jefferson Historical Pilgrimage, hosted by the Jessie Allen Wise Garden Club since 1940. Since 1955, the story of “Annie,” who became “Diamond Bessie,” has been produced for stage in Jefferson, except for 2020 when the Pilgrimage was canceled due to the pandemic.

The 75th annual Jefferson Historic Pilgrimage is April 28, 29 and May 1, with the 68th “Murder Trial” scheduled for five performances at the Jefferson Playhouse.

Jefferson is also where the body of Northern New York native “Diamond Bessie” now rests, in a grave site at Oakwood Cemetery that has become a tourist attraction.

In February of 1877, the Watertown Daily Times reported: “A Watertown Girl Murdered — Supposed to be Annie Stone, formerly of Watertown. Murdered at Jefferson, Texas. A remarkable affair. Sad ending of the life of a wayward girl.”

Ms. Hadlock’s research indicates that Annie, who in her trade used the name “Bessie,” did not have the last name Stone, nor was she a native of Watertown. Other reports of her time indicate she was a native of Burrville and Syracuse.

“Ever since her murder, rumors started that it was a woman named Annie Stone, who was, apparently, a prostitute in Watertown,” Ms. Hadlock said. “But through a lot of research, not just mine, it was established without a doubt that she was not Annie Stone. She was definitely from Canton, not Watertown.”

Annie’s last name was Moore, and she worked at LB Storr Clothing Store in Canton, Ms. Hadlock said.

North country newspaper reports from 1877 confirm that name and the murderous situation of the time in Texas. The Times of 1877 apparently incorrectly reported Annie’s last name.

The Watertown Reunion on March 8, 1877 reported, in a dispatch from the New York Herald:

“Bessie Moore, who was murdered last month in Jefferson, Texas by Abe Rothschild, a Cincinnati Jew, was a native of Canton, St. Lawrence County, in which town, 10 years ago, she was in service. She was a remarkably handsome and intelligent girl, and it is alleged, was seduced by a lawyer, then and now a resident of Canton. From Canton, she went to Watertown, where she lived for some years, ultimately becoming an inmate of a house of ill-fame. From Watertown, she removed to Syracuse, where she became the mistress of a well-known man of wealth, with whom she lived until she came west to live a shameful life, and ultimately fall in a victim of the man on whom she latest wasted her love.”

In Texas, her jewelry, especially the diamonds she apparently wore, stood out when she visited with Mr. Rothschild, a traveling salesman and son of a Cincinnati jeweler. A marriage license had been issued to them recently in Danville, Ill., where, Ms. Hadlock said, they stopped on their way from Chicago to Texas.

Intrigued by discovery

Ms. Hadlock worked as a broadcast journalist and then in nonprofit public relations before turning her focus to fiction. She was working as a TV news reporter in Charleston, S.C., when the trip to the museum in Jefferson was suggested.

“I remember walking down an aisle and at the end, there was this full-page newspaper article in a display case,” Ms. Hadlock recalled. “I went up to read it and was just fascinated and immediately intrigued.”

It was a Dallas newspaper from the 1930s, outlining the “Diamond Bessie” murder, including pictures and drawings. The murder had happened 60 years ago in a town three hours away.

“I wondered why this paper would be so interested in a story so many years later,” Ms. Hadlock said. “I kept reading the article, and thought, ‘Wow. How did he get away with it?’ I was just stunned.”

From then on, “Diamond Bessie” had her hooks in Ms. Hadlock. She made a vow, and in January of 1995, she got a job anchoring the news at a San Antonio TV station.

“I immediately started my research,” she said. “I spent two years in almost every bit of my spare time. In the mornings and on the weekends I would go to the library. This is when you had to do intralibrary loans.”

The loans were mainly for microfilm.

“Back then, I had to look through every page trying to find articles about her,” Ms. Hadlock said. “It took me two years and I ended up with two, 4-inch binders full of newspaper articles.”

It was a time before easy access to past editions of newspapers now available on the internet.

“Newspapers.com is a godsend,” Ms. Hadlock said.

Newspapers.com, a subscription plan, is the largest online newspaper archive consisting of more than 23,300 newspapers from around the United States and beyond. In a related, and free service, NYS Historic Newspapers uses the same software as the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America Project. It was created and administered by the Northern New York Library Network in partnership with the Empire State Library Network.

With research on the case complete, Ms. Hadlock sat down to write an outline of her planned novel.

“Even though I had done all that research and did an outline, I quickly discovered that while I spent so much time trying to find the facts about the case, I still needed to do a lot of research on what life was like in the 19th century,” Ms. Hadlock said. “I had a good idea from history classes, but on every single page of my book, there was something that needed to be researched or confirmed. I wanted it to be as accurate as possible.”

She also became frustrated in that she lacked a point of view for her story. She set the novel aside for more than a decade and thought of switching her plan to non-fiction.

“Life got in the way,” Ms. Hadlock said. “I was struggling with writing and I set it aside and was really focused on my career.”

In addition to writing, her other passion is advocating for people with special needs. She met her son, Marius, while reporting on Romania’s orphanages post-communism and saw firsthand the effects of the lack of nurturing and nutrition on the young orphans.

the right point of view

“Diamond Bessie” remained in the back of her mind and Ms. Hadlock returned to the story in 2014. She did more research and with the help of Texas-based freelance editor Bridget Boland, found a point of view. The novel is written from Bessie’s point of view in first person, but with a twist.

“I wrote the first chapter in two days,” Ms. Hadlock said. “It was a very rough draft, but it finally came out. Then, once I had the right point of view, I got the first draft out in like seven months.”

But after more feedback from agents and others, she had to tweak Bessie’s point of view a bit more, and also the novel’s setting. Ms. Hadlock had originally planed to write about Bessie from when her murder happened. But she began to explore how Bessie came to find her fate in Texas, including her beginnings in Canton and her family’s background in Ireland.

In 2016, while attending the Writers Digest Writers Conference in New York City, Ms. Hadlock took a side trip to Canton. From NYC, she took a train to Albany and drove to Canton. There she met with village historian Linda A. Casserly.

“I did a lot of research on the places where Bessie visited or lived to make the places come alive for the reader,” Ms. Hadlock said. “I certainly wanted to put the reader in that place at that time.”

She said it’s unknown which brothel Diamond Bessie worked at in Watertown. “But there was a madam named Elizabeth Harding there at the time,” Ms. Hadlock said.

From genealogy sites, Ms. Hadlock found a baptismal record for Ms. Moore and discovered that Annie Moore, a.k.a. Diamond Bessie, was born in Togher, County Cork, Ireland, and baptized on July 3, 1850.

In the summer of 2018, Ms. Hadlock traveled to Ireland, and with the help of an Irish genealogist Paul MacCotter, found Diamond Bessie’s homestead in County Cork. Mr. MacCotter also prepared an extensive genealogical report on Ms. Moore’s parents, Matthew Moore and Mary McCarthy, and their children. The family, the report says, emigrated to the U.S. circa 1852.

The author also traveled to Chicago, where she said Bessie worked at a “parlor house”; Cincinnati, where Abe was from and where Bessie also worked at a parlor house; Hot Springs, Ark., where Bessie and Abe first met; New Orleans, where Bessie wintered and to Edmonds, Wash., where Ms. Hadlock visited the daughter of a man who, as a young boy, claimed to have had seen Bessie on the streets of Jefferson. She visited the historical societies and museums in each city.

In her Cincinnati visit, she said she found an atlas of the city from 1883. She spent hours at the city’s library making 11”x14” copies of each section, and then piecing them together when she returned home.

Women’s rights angle

As for as she knows, Ms. Hadlock said that “The Lives of Diamond Bessie” is the first novel based on the life and murder of Annie Moore.

“The first half is very much fictionalized because there’s not a lot known about her life,” Ms. Hadlock said. “What was life like for women like her who became prostitutes? Of course, it’s mainly economic. Women then had few rights and opportunities.”

At one point in the novel, Bessie is living and working in Chicago. In that city, the character attends a speech by Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906). According to The National Susan B. Anthony Museum & House, in 1875 in Chicago, and other cities, the social reformer and women’s rights activist attacked the “social evil of prostitution, calling for equality in marriage, in the workplace and at the ballot box to eliminate the need for women to go on the streets.”

“Back then, it was taboo to talk about prostitution,” Ms. Hadlock said. “Even the newspapers referred to it as ‘the great social evil.’ I read the memoirs of three 19the-century prostitutes, which were an absolute gold mine.”

The author didn’t originally intend to focus so much on women’s rights in her novel.

“It was very organic,” she said. “I went down that rabbit hole doing a lot of research and thought this was fascinating and relevant. It was crying out to be included in the novel. When people read the book, I hope they think about how far women have come since then.”

A ‘bizarre’ trial

Ms. Hadlock includes true happenings in the novel in relation to Abe Rothchild’s murder trial in Jefferson, Texas. In the story, when he is arrested and extradited to Texas to stand trial, he receives a reception fit for a hero’s return.

“That happened,” Ms. Hadlock said. “There’s a newspaper article about that. They treated him like a visiting dignitary, not a man on trial for murder. The mayor was there and they paraded him around town to the jail. Things that seem so bizarre to us today were commonplace back then.”

Abe Rothschild was defended in part at his second trial by U.S. Congressman David B. Culberson.

“He literally had a dream defense team,” Ms. Hadlock said. “He came from a wealthy family.”

The author also recounts visits that were paid to the suspect while he was in jail awaiting trial, including one visitor who brought with him an unusual device.

“In my research, I found a short article, I don’t know how, about how somebody with a new invention — a phonograph,” Ms. Hadlock said. “This man took it to the jail and actually recorded Abe’s voice. I decided to use that. I took a lot of the facts and then fictionalized it.”

There was also an apparent sinister visit, also reflected in the novel, in chapter 40. On Oct. 25, 1877, the Commercial Advertiser, based in Potsdam Junction, reported on a “special dispatch” dated from Jefferson credited to the St. Louis Globe, dated Oct. 18, 1877:

“Last night, 50 well-armed and disguised men rode silently into Jefferson and quietly proceeded to the jail, which they succeeded without much trouble in engineering. Within its walls were Jim Johnson, the negro, who is accused of having murdered Frank Jennings, the mail rider, and Abe Rothschild, the wealthy young Jew of Cincinnati, who brutally murdered his mistress, Miss Moore, alias Diamond Bessie, and is moving heaven and Earth by the aid of his father’s money, to escape the just penalty of his crime.”

After Mr. Johnson was “secured” by the mob, the Globe reported that Mr. Rothschild was told that in his case, the “law would take its course.”

“But if it was shown by evidence at the trial there was any likelihood of the ends of justice being thwarted, they intended to take him out and hang him like a dog,” the Globe reported.

The mob then left, but taking Mr. Johnson with them.

“He was undoubtedly lynched, but his body has not yet been found, nor has any clue as to the identity of the raiders been obtained,” according to the Globe report.

Ms. Hadlock has a theory as to why the life and times of Diamond Bessie still call out to us more than a century after her death.

“Whenever there’s such an obvious injustice, people are always bothered by that,” she said. “This was covered in newspapers around the country. People can be fascinated by people who choose to live kind of outside the norms of society. You got this murder, somebody who is acquitted, and she was a prostitute. All of those elements make for an interesting story.”

Another story by Ms. Hadlock is in the works.

“I found out about my second novel while researching the first one.”

The details

WHAT: “The Lives of Diamond Bessie,” a novel by Jody Hadlock.

PUBLISHER: SparkPress, a BookSparks imprint.

COST: $16.95

AVAILABLE: At the Little Book Store in Clayton and Watertown, and at online sites. ■ A CRITIC’S VIEW: “Drawing on a true story, Hadlock uses authentic period detail and well-drawn characters to pull readers into Annie/Bessie’s precarious journey toward redemption, which comes to an unexpected ending.” —Publishers Weekly ■ OF NOTE: The Fayetteville Free Library in Onondaga County has scheduled a “Meet the Author” Zoom event with Ms. Hadlock for 6:30 p.m., Monday, Aug. 15. Registration is open by going to the library’s website at fflib.org and its “Events” link. The author is open to invitations for similar online events. “I’m hoping other libraries up there would like to do something,” Ms. Hadlock said. “And if any book clubs, I’d be happy to join by Zoom.” Ms. Hadlock may be contacted by writing to her at jody@diamondbessie.com