3 October 2024
ST. PAUL — Stanislaus Bilanksy was sick. Again.
He was bedridden, complaining of stomach pains and a fever. It was March 11, 1859, in St. Paul, and the shopkeeper in his early 50s had barely recovered from falling ill just one month before. This should have been a happy time for Bilansky, after all — he had just married for the third time, to Mary Ann Evards Wright in September 1958.
But this time — this time was different.
Bilansky would soon be dead, and after a dramatic trial, his new wife would be found guilty of his murder and hanged. Her name would go in the annals of the state’s history: She would be Minnesota’s first official execution and the only woman in state history to suffer the death penalty.
She might also have been innocent.
“As to the murder charge, reasonable doubt appears to exist,” writes historian Matthew Cecil in “Justice in Heaven,” his definitive account of the matter published in Minnesota History magazine. “Witnesses with questionable motives and shaky scientific evidence made up the majority of the prosecution case. The defense offered evidence undercutting prosecution witnesses and pointed out Bilansky’s melancholy nature, raising the possibility that he took his own life.”
The Bilansky affair grabbed the public’s attention and many column inches of newsprint were dedicated to it, in Minnesota and nationwide, for months. It was presented as something of a soap opera and a morality play all in one.
Wrote the St. Paul Weekly Pioneer and Democrat after the trial’s verdict months later: This case was “the repetition of a tragedy, which has been enacted the world over, wherever a woman, bad enough to be a harlot and bold enough to be a murderer, has wished to get rid of a husband she disliked, for a paramour whom she preferred.”
An odd couple
The now Mrs. Bilansky, or Ann, as she preferred to be called, had moved to St. Paul recently. She and her new husband may have seemed an odd match. She was energetic and smart, a young widow who had moved to Minnesota on the invitation of her nephew, John Walker. Bilansky, however, was short and stout, and was known to be a nasty drunk, have foul moods, and known to be something of hypochondriac, always complaining of illness.
After Ann married Bilansky — one of St. Paul’s earliest residents — and moved into his home and began to take care of his three children, Walker moved into a cabin behind the Bilansky home near Stillwater Road.
Then, barely two months after getting married, in December, Bilansky fell ill after going on a hunting trip. He recovered before falling ill again in February, then recovered. Then he fell sick again — this time, for the last time. He took a turn for the worst, vomiting frequently, before a doctor — Dr. Alfred Berthier — visited him on March 5.
Bilansky was taking a patent medicine known as Graffenberg pills for his illness and the doctor added his own treatment — a bit of absinthe mixed into water and consumed with meals. At the time the doctor didn’t seem overly worried. But then in the early morning of March 11, Bilansky called his eldest son to his side, asked for liquor, drank it, and then died.
Ann Bilansky and her nephew, Walker, planned to bury him the following day. But on March 12 the Ramsey County coroner marched into the house and declared an inquest into his death. The inquest included a search of the house, an examination of the body, and testimony from several people.
Those included Walker, Rosa Scharf (who had been hired to help the house) and a neighbor, Lucinda Kilpatrick. None testified of anything amiss, and the coroner’s jury determined Stanislaus Bilansky had died of natural causes.
Yet the following day both Bilansky and Walker were taken to jail. The charge: murder.
A key detail
Kilpatrick, the neighbor, knew more than she had told the coroner’s jury, and later that same day, she told local police a key detail that triggered the arrest. She recalled in February, she and Ann Bilansky were on a shopping trip, and Bilansky had purchased arsenic, claiming it was needed for rats in the cellar.
A second coroner’s inquest gathered even more evidence. Scharf testified again. A chemical analyses provided only inclusive evidence of arsenic. This time, the jury ruled that the death was caused by arsenic poisoning. The trial was set to start on May 23.
Bilansky pleaded not guilty. The 12-man jury included Justus C. Ramsey, the brother of the then-Gov. Alexander Ramsey.
Shocking claims
The prosecutor, Isaac Heard, laid out the government’s case: means, motive and opportunity. He claimed Bilansky had purchased the deadly arsenic, and then made the shocking assertion that Bilansky and Walker “lived on improper terms” together and that he was not actually her nephew. She obviously had easy opportunity to poison her husband, and had even mentioned she had thought about it. Open and shut case.
Kilpatrick was the prosecution’s key witness. She recalled the arsenic shopping trip in even more damning detail, and told how Bilansky had tried to cover up the purchase. She also testified that Stanislaus Bilansky “didn’t like” the relationship between his wife and Walker, and described Ann Bilansky’s lack of remorse after her husband’s death.
John Ball Brisbin, the lawyer for Ann Bilansky, made a shocking claim of his own. He presented evidence that it was Kilpatrick who was in a relationship with Walker. Kilpatrick had no answer to the evidence.
Rose Scharf, the hired housekeeper, was next on the stand. She spoke of Walker and Bilansky’s relationship, said “their looks and actions attracted her attention” and talked about shared looks that “did not look natural.” She told how she had seen Ann Bilansky undressed in front of Walker — although it seemed this was more of an accident of Walker being in an room adjacent to one where she was wearing her bedclothes.
The arsenic evidence was introduced and discussed, but that too was far from conclusive. The supposedly expert witnesses admitted the test results were far from definitive, and they themselves weren’t experts in testing for a substance like arsenic. Also, the Graffenburg pills the alleged victim had purchased could, taken in quantity, have killed him.
Brisbin fell ill later in the trial, robbing Bilansky her best defender, but the attorney’s associate continued her defense. Called by the defense was one of Stanislaus Bilansky’s ex-wives, who testified to his general unpleasantness and a fixation with death. His son, 10-year-old Benjamin also testified, describing the house as rat-infested and saying he had never seen anything improper between Walker and his step-mother.
The defense review of the scientific evidence further illustrated the concerns about the lack of solid proof of arsenic.
The case was sent to the jury. After five hours, they returned with a verdict: guilty of murder in the first degree.
An attempted escape
An appeal to the Minnesota Supreme Court failed and on July 25, 1859, the case was sent back to the district court. Bilansky was to be sentenced.
Later that same day, Walker met with Ann Bilansky in jail, then she chatted with the jailer. When the jailer left to get his keys, Ann Bilansky made a break for it — pushing through the bars of a window and hiding in some tall grass. She was later able to contact Walker, who met up her. They didn’t make it far. Sheriff’s deputies nabbed them and Walker was initially jailed for helping Bilansky escape, but was never charged with a crime.
Ann Bilansky was sentenced to death. At the sentencing, she said, “If I die in this case, I die an innocent woman. I don’t think I have had a fair and just trial.”
While Bilansky awaited execution, Rosa Scharf, the housekeeper, was found dead. She had completed suicide, a vial of laudanum was found in her room.
The hanging was set for March 23, 1860.
The hanging
The battle over the execution of Ann Bilansky was a fierce one. Many were horrified at the idea of a woman being executed, including state Supreme Court Justice C.E. Flandrau. Others believed in her innocence. Her supporters lobbied state legislators and Gov. Ramsey. His was an even more tricky position because his brother had been on the jury and several of Bilansky’s defense team were his political enemies.
On March 5, the state legislature send Ramsey a commutation of Bilansky’s death sentence, one he vetoed on March 8, calling it “contrary to sound public policy.”
Bilanksy penned her own appeal to Ramsey.
“For the past half year {I} have waited patiently to have an opportunity to satisfy the public mind of the innocence of the crime on which I have been imperfectly and unfairly tried,” she wrote.
On March 22, the day before Bilansky’s scheduled execution, came a surprising last-ditch plea from Heard, the prosecutor in the case. He said that even he had doubts Bilansky had gotten a fair trial due to illness among her defense team, possible other evidence not included in the trial, and the jury being potentially influenced by the sensation newspaper coverage of the case.
The governor remained unmoved.
On March 23, Bilansky was led to the gallows in Court House Square, with an estimated crowd of between 1,500-2,000 people present to watch — many of them women.
According to newspaper reports, when given the chance for a final statement, Bilansky continued to protest her innocence.
“I die a sacrifice to the law,” she said. “I hope you all may be judged better than I have been, and by a more righteous judge. I die prepared to meet my God.”
Despite the questionable trial, newspapers of the day were convinced justice had been served, despite the powerful questions raised about her trial.
“All who examined the evidence in the case critically, united in the opinion that Mrs. Bilansky was guilty of the murder of her husband,” wrote the Pioneer and Democrat, falsely. “If so, by human and divine law, she merited her fate.”
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