JUSTICE STORY: The bloody trunk and the American dream gone wrong

April 27, 1908, was final move-in day for the Farmers — James, 45, Mary, 29, and their baby, little Peter, about a year old.

Workers were still hauling the family’s belongings into their new house in Brownville, a village near Watertown in northern New York, when police stopped them with a search warrant.

One item quickly caught the eye of the investigators — a large, locked trunk tied with clothesline.

The sheriff demanded to see what was inside.

“The sickening odor of decaying flesh pervaded the room,” the Watertown Daily Times reported. The trunk contained a woman’s bloody corpse, her skull crushed with a blunt instrument.

It was all that was left of Sara Brennan, 53, the Farmers’ neighbor, landlady, and friend. She owned one house that Mary and James had rented for $2 a week and the second house, close by, that the Farmers were now going to call home.

Moving into the place that Sarah Brennan and her husband, Patrick, 55, had occupied for 25 years was a dream come true for Mary, a “stolid little drudge,” as the Daily News called her.

She came to America around 1901 as a poor Irish immigrant and found a job as a servant. She yearned for the American dream, which meant a house of her own. But her marriage to Jim Farmer, a laborer with a strong thirst for ale, failed to be a ticket out of poverty.

From her run-down rental, Mary would peer at the Brennans’ modest but tidy home. It filled her with envy.

So she decided to steal Sarah’s identity and then her house. All it would take was a forged signature and a corpse.

Around Halloween 1907, a slender young woman visited a Watertown attorney and introduced herself as Sarah Brennan. She said she had sold her house to Mary and James Farmer for $1,200 and had signed documents to confirm the sale.

The attorney drew up a new deed with the Farmers listed as owners.

The couple filed the false document with the county clerk, then waited in their shack for six months to make their move.

On the morning of April 23, 1908, Sarah told her husband she was going into town for a dentist’s appointment. He went off to work.

When he arrived home, Sarah was missing. Then Jim Farmer came over to the house with some strange news.

He told the worried husband that Sarah had sold them the property in October and had been paying them rent. But she fell behind so they were going to take possession of the property.

Patrick knew nothing about any of it. The next day, he tried to trace his wife’s steps in Watertown. The dentist said she never showed up for her appointment. He reported her missing to the police. They suggested she had just run off.

Four days after Sarah vanished, Patrick told his story to the district attorney, who directed the local sheriff to look into it. The sheriff found the first clue that something was wrong at the attorney’s office.

The woman calling herself Sarah Brennan appeared to be in her late 20s, the attorney said. Sarah was in her 50s.

Police got a warrant to search both houses. They quickly found the trunk containing Sarah’s decomposing corpse.

The Farmers were arrested and charged with first-degree murder.

Mary started blabbing right away, saying that Sarah had come to her house for a visit. “While she had her back turned, I got the axe, and I raised it and brought it down on her head as hard as I could,” she said. “It was the only way to get such a nice house. I had wanted it for years.”

Investigators digging into her past discovered another scam aimed at stealing a building, wrote Mark Grossman in his book “The Trunk Dripped Blood.” Authorities suggested that the woman had a “mania for real estate deals and that it was her hobby to obtain property through trickery.” She had not yet succeeded with any of her plans.

Mary Farmer’s trial started in June. Her attorneys tried to prove she was insane, but it took just three hours for the jury to find her guilty of first-degree murder, which meant death in the electric chair.

James Farmer’s trial started in October, and he was also found guilty and sentenced to death.

Appeals to save Mary’s life failed, and she went to the chair at Auburn on March 29, 1909. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph have mercy on my soul,” were her last words.

She was the second woman electrocuted in New York State. The first, Martha Place, was executed 10 years almost to the day earlier.

In her final hours, Mary offered a statement: “I wish to say as strongly as I can that my husband, James D. Farmer, is entirely innocent of the death of Sarah Brennan, that he knowingly had no part in any plans that led to it, and that he knew nothing whatsoever about it.”

James stayed on death row for more than a year. In 1910, he was acquitted, based largely on his wife’s statement. He lived quietly from then on, working in the local mill until his death at 69 in 1934.

Mary Farmer’s name faded from headlines, popping up every so often on lists of also-frieds whenever bad girls like Ruth Snyder faced the ultimate penalty. Recently, she turned up online when the New York auction house Doyle held an “Oddities auction” in 2019. Nestled in with the two-headed calf taxidermy and banners for the “Torture-Proof Man” was a marble slab from beneath Auburn’s electric chair, commemorating Farmer’s death. It sold, according to Doyle’s website, for $2500.

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