Jasper Banner, Volume 2, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 April 1855 — The Horrid Murder of the two Aged Females in South Gardner, Maine. [ARTICLE]

The Horrid Murder of the two Aged Females in South Gardner, Maine.

One of the most horrid and strange murders ever committed in this country, was the sanguinary atrocity perpetrated upon the two aged sisters of the late Abner Kneeland, the once : famous infidel of Massachusetts. — j A brief aeeoutateefttahtad tad tolb-l graph, but the following particulars I will be read with interest. An ex- ■ change says: 4 ‘From appearances, the murder, must have occurred on Tuesday night, as one of the bodies was partially frozen. The first discovery was made at eight o'clock on Wednesday evening, by a young man who went there to obtain milk. No one sanswering his knock, he went to the barn, where he found that the cow had not been milked. He also found that a window had been broken in the bouse. He proceeded to arouse the neighbors, and the house was entered and the bodies found as before stated.— A club was found with blood upon it. The deceased were seventy-five and eighty-five years of age, and so poor that they received some aid from the town. The select men have offered | a reward of SSOO for the arrest and ; conviction . of-the asassin. The names of the deceased are Miss, j Miriam Kneeland and Mrs. Sarah K.; Phinney, the latter being a widow, j A correspondent of the Milford nal says: . q “We come to the house - a poor, old, dilapidated affair—in Which hail; lived two old females. The lower I sash of the window was stove in ori out; and there upon the floor, in her i night-clothes, lay one of these old j women with her head all crushed or stabbed. (There was such a crowd 1 had to look in at the window, and, therefore, could not tell certain.) On the bed was the other, and near her a bloody Chair, with which the deed was done. Oh! it was awful! It was probably done for plunder, as there trunks were burst open. The man arresleiTTs a Ffenclmian7 one of the most ugly-looking objects imaginable^—some like Dickens’ ‘Fagin.’— His clothes had spots of blood on them, and he was seen near the house, which is situated one-and-a~ half miles from the