A Millbrook murder mystery

MILLBROOK — A 100-year-old murder came to life at the Millbrook Historical Society’s presentation last Thursday,  Jan. 21, when Laura Ferguson Willhite, the 90-year-old second cousin of the strangled victim, made a dramatic appearance to tell the audience about the real Sara Brymer.

Willhite’s emotional recounting turned the evening’s lecture from an entertaining whodunit to a sympathetic portrait of a young life cut short and forgotten.

It was a well-attended evening of surprises as Stan Morse, a past president of the Historical Society, presented the facts of the most famous murder in Millbrook history, committed in a blinding snowstorm on Jan. 13, 1910.  Everyone in the audience was provided with a map of the Compton Estate on South Road and a list of the characters.  Morse began with a description of the estate’s owners.

“Whatever in life Barnes and Charlotte Compton lacked, that lack was not evident,â€� he said.  

They had wealth, prestige and a beautiful 3-year-old daughter named Polly.

On the evening of Jan. 12, 1910, the Comptons left their child and mansion in the care of their faithful servants and took  the train to Manhattan to attend some dazzling, post-holiday parties.  Soon after their departure, a fierce blizzard began, driven by gale-force winds from the west.  

Early on the morning of Jan. 13, the police received a phone call for help from the estate. After hours of traveling through the snow from Poughkeepsie, they found the body of the governess, 26-year-old Sara Brymer, clad only in her nightgown, in the hayloft. Her pillow in the West Wing bedroom of the mansion had bloodstains and black smudges. The police searched Sara Brymer’s possessions.

Who was she? From letters in her trunk, it seemed she had been married, separated and had a child. Lunch was served to the police in the mansion’s dining room by the Japanese butler, whose hands were covered with black smudges.  

The entire estate staff of six was interviewed. The maid had seen a man in the house and a flashing light in the barn. The Tiffany silver was gone and the jewelry box had been rifled.  The police went to the cottage of Frank Schermerhorn, the estate’s superintendent, who tried to cast suspicions on Sataro Ohashi, the Japanese butler.

The mystery was solved immediately when the police discovered that Schermerhorn was lying. When they returned to the cottage to confront him, he slit his own throat. His suicide attempt was unsuccessful, and Schermerhorn ended up in the hospital, where he confessed. He was sentenced to death in June 1910 and electrocuted at Sing Sing in the fall of 1911.

But wait, were these the facts? Not exactly, according to Morse.

“This is not the end. Nowhere near the end,� he said.

His riveting presentation was based on “Harvesters of Murder,â€� the best of the three fictionalized accounts of the Compton estate murder published between 1949 and 1962. The precise facts of the case became lost in time, and Morse, who researched newspaper accounts from the time, pointed out many of the inaccuracies in the books. Sara’s body was never taken to the barn.  The autopsy of the body was not done in Poughkeepsie but rather at the end of Maple Street by Millbrook Village undertaker Cornelius Reardon. Schermerhorn did not confess immediately.

From the audience, Alexandra Marshall, the current owner of the estate, agreed that the description of the mansion as having 22 rooms was quite a large exaggeration. Sara Brymer was never married.

Why did fiction play loose with the facts?  Morse was determined to find out the truth and set the record straight by launching the mystery project in 2004. The original accusation and conviction of Schermerhorn, however, has never been contradicted and is still believed to be accurate to this day.

An important part of this mystery, the identity of Sara Breymer, remained an unsolved puzzle until Morse received a phone call in April 2008 from Nancy Rodgers.  She said some women had been asking about the murder and she had sent them over to Town Hall.  Morse immediately followed that recommendation to ask who these people were. But then, during last week’s presentation, from the front row of the audience, came the clear voice of Laura Willhite, “I am Sara Breymer’s cousin.â€�

Now the audience suddenly knew who this unidentified, white haired woman was who had entered the room during Morse’s presentation and sat down on the reserved seat in the front row.  She had come to Millbrook with her grand-niece, Alyssa Sattler, from Meriden, Conn., to tell Sara Brymer’s story.

Willhite is a Ferguson and Sara Brymer crossed the ocean from Scotland to live with her Aunt Agie Ferguson when her own family decided to journey to Africa. In the United States, Brymer was part of the first nursing class to graduate from Meriden Hospital, and a photo of Brymer and her proud classmates still hangs there. She was not married, and came to Millbrook to work as a governess.

Laura Willhite’s mother, who was Sara’s cousin, was a teenager at the time of Sara’s death, and refused to tell her daughter what had happened to her second cousin. Laura asked her Uncle Will about Sara when he was dying, and all he said was, “It makes me cry.� Urged by her niece, Lisa, Laura Willhite went to the archives of the Meriden Record Journal and discovered that Sara Brymer had been killed. She set off for Millbrook to investigate in April 2008.

Sara Brymer’s body, which was buried in an unmarked grave in the paupers field in Meriden, has now been identified and a grave stone will be placed there:  “Sara Brymer 1883-1910, Finally at peace.â€�  

Laura Duncan, president of the Millbrook Historical Society, reminded the audience that the next Millbrook Historical Society event would be on slavery in the Hudson Valley on March 18.   As usual, the Historical Society presentation will take place at Lyall Church and the public is welcome.