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PORTLAND, Maine — Joseph Sager’s murder trial, and later execution, are notable for two reasons: politics and science.
First, the 1834 legal proceedings in Augusta were a star-studded, political affair. The historic cast of characters reads like a who’s-who list of Maine’s most powerful men during its first years as a state in the Union.
Sager’s defense attorney was a sitting U.S. senator. The opposing prosecutor later became a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. A presiding judge had already been Maine’s fifth governor.
The second reason to spend time re-telling this story today is science, both pseudo and real.
Sager’s trial marks the first time a murderer was found guilty and condemned to death in Maine using what was then newfangled, and now familiar, scientific forensic evidence.
Also, in a fantastical postscript, the dead man’s friends attempted to resuscitate him with jolts of electricity, possibly inspired by Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” first published about a decade earlier.
Sager, 36, was in the clothing business. He married his wife, Phoebe, 48, some 14 years earlier, in Gardiner.
It was not a happy marriage.
The couple argued a great deal. Sager was often away on business, and his wife was frequently ill.
Several witnesses at trial recalled Sager speaking of his wife’s imminent death in the year before she died — though all thought, at the time, he was referrring to her recurring illnesses, not her upcoming murder.
“He said he should ‘rejoice to hear of her death’ and didn’t think she would live only till fall,” said John F. Child, remembering words spoken to him by Sager the previous summer.
A transcript of the trial is in the collection of the Harvard Law School.
While on a Kennebec River steamboat, returning upriver from Bath in late August, crew member Shubael Burns remembered Sager saying, “I shall be a widower this fall.”
Sager then asked Burns to keep a piece of paper safe for him. Sager said he could not risk taking it home, in case his wife should find it.
Written on the slip, which Burns showed the court, were the descriptions of two women on the boat with them, as if Sager were making a shopping list of potential future wives.
Sager’s prediction of Phoebe Sager’s death came true a few months later.
On Sunday morning, Oct. 5, 1834, Sager made his wife a special breakfast concoction of eggs, wine, sugar and — unbeknownst to her — arsenic.
Shortly after drinking it, Phoebe Sager became violently ill. Her physician, Dr. David Neal, was called but could do nothing.
She died hours later, writhing in pain, vomiting blood and fully aware of her own impending death.
But before she expired, Phoebe Sager told Neal that her husband and his egg-and-wine mixture were to blame.
Neal next checked the vessel where the wine was stored. There, he observed a white sludge at the bottom. He saw the same sediment in a cream pitcher used to whiten the breakfast tea.
The quick-thinking doctor, in an act now familiar to modern viewers of crime scene investigation shows on television, preserved the contents of the cream pitcher.
He also bottled up a sample of Phoebe Sager’s vomit for later analysis.
Neal then contacted the authorities. and Sager was arrested.
When doctors removed Phoebe Sager’s stomach during an autopsy, they found it irritated and corroded. One later testified the condition was consistent with some kind of poisoning.
In another move now familiar to contemporary true-crime aficionados, the preserved cream, vomit — plus a sample of the stomach’s contents — were all shipped to an expert at a medical school in Brunswick.
There, a Dr. Parker Cleaveland performed chemical tests which confirmed the presence of arsenic in at least the stomach contents and cream.
Sager’s defense team, led by one of Maine’s sitting U.S. Senators, Peleg Sprague, produced other doctors who disputed the prosecution’s forensic evidence. Sprague also said the arsenic could have been added to the samples after Phoebe Sager’s death.
Sprague, who resigned his senate seat later that year and eventually became a federal judge, also produced witnesses who said the deceased woman was a known alcoholic, implying her addiction, as well as other health problems, led to her death.
“She took gin, brandy and whiskey on an empty stomach before breakfast every morning, thus taking three poisons, herself,” he said in his closing statement.
The state’s prosecution was led by Nathan Clifford, who later served Maine in the U.S. House of Representatives, as the nation’s attorney general, ambassador to Mexico and, ultimately, as a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
In his closing remarks, Clifford leaned into the scientific evidence and testimony of witnesses, saying they all added up to murder.
“The deceased stood between him and the gratification of his lusts,” Clifford said, “and he was determined to be rid of her.”
One of the two Maine Supreme Court justices presiding over the case was Albion Parris, a former Maine governor and future federal district judge. Parris instructed the jury to disregard the dying accusations of Phoebe Sager, reported by her doctor, saying they were second-hand and only her opinion, anyway.
The jury sided with the state, convicting Sager of premeditated murder on Oct. 27, 1834, just 22 days after his wife’s death.
Another Maine Supreme Court justice overseeing the trial, Nathan Weston, sentenced Sager to death, saying, “Let the span of life that is yet left to you be devoted to preparation for another world, upon the verge of which you stand.”
Weston’s grandson, Melville Fuller, then only a baby, would later become the eighth Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Sager was hanged in Augusta, at the corner of State and Winthrop streets, on Friday, Jan. 2, 1835. He was the second person executed by state authorities in Maine and the 19th person put to death here by any government, overall.
Despite a driving sleet storm, an estimated 12,000 people, including Gov. Robert Dunlap, attended the event.
But the spectacle didn’t end with Sager’s death.
After hanging from a noose for 20 or 30 minutes, the dead man’s body was cut down onto a horse cart and whisked away to Hallowell, “where attempts were made to restore it to life by means of galvanism and other experiments, all of which were fruitless,” wrote James North in a history of Augusta, published in 1870.
Galvanism is named for the Italian scientist Luigi Galvani who devised theories about reanimating corpses via electricity. In 1803, Galvani’s nephew, Giovanni Aldini, put his uncle’s theories to the test inside London’s Newgate Prison.
There, Aldini applied electrical stimulation to the body of a recently hanged killer.
“The jaw of the deceased criminal began to quiver, and the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye actually opened,” reads a later British account of the incident. “In the subsequent part of the process, the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion.”
The gruesome experiment, and others like it, were on Mary Shelley’s mind when she wrote her novel “Frankenstein” a few decades later, not long before Sager’s death. She said as much in the introduction to an 1831 reprinting of the book.
Causing muscle contractions with electricity is now considered science fact. However, zapping a corpse back to life is still science fiction. Like Albini, Sager’s friends may have gotten his body to twitch, but they could not restore his life.
He remains dead to this day.
This story is part of an ongoing series examining Maine’s historic use of the death penalty.
