The Woman in the Rocks

Hey Coastal,

Last week, I left you on a frozen rock in the Atlantic.

Two women dead in a little house on Smuttynose Island. A third, Maren Hontvet, alive only because she spent the whole night hiding face down in the rocks with her dog, listening to the killer hunt for her. At dawn, she gave one name: Louis Wagner.

And one detail that didn't fit. When the attack started, her sister Karen didn't scream “Louis.” She screamed “John.”

If you missed Part One, go read it first. I'll wait.

Ready? Happy Halloween. Let's finish this.

Around seven o'clock that morning, back in Portsmouth, Louis Wagner walked into his boarding house.

He was soaking wet. He looked like he'd been up all night. And there was blood on his clothes.

It was fish guts, he said. Just fish.

The night before, Louis couldn't pay his rent. That morning, he suddenly had money. He cut his hair, shaved, bought himself a set of new clothes, and got on a train to Boston.

By the time he stepped off that train, the news had beaten him there. Two women butchered on an island off the coast. A survivor. And a name.

His.

The owner of the Boston boarding house where he was hiding read the papers, looked at his new tenant, and called the police.

When they brought Louis Wagner back to Portsmouth, the town was waiting for him.

A crowd gathered outside the jail. Then it got bigger. Then it got angry. This was a fishing town, and those were fishing families. And now the man they believed had taken an axe to two of them was sitting behind a door.

The mob tried to break in and hang him themselves.

They didn't get him. But the message was clear. Portsmouth had already decided.

The case against him piled up fast.

A bloody shirt turned up stuffed down the privy at his boarding house. His landlady recognized it. She'd washed it for him.

His boots matched the bloody footprints on the island.

A rowboat had been stolen from the Portsmouth waterfront that night and was found abandoned the next morning. People said they'd seen him rowing hours after the murders.

The men remembered how he'd asked, three separate times, whether the women would be alone.

He couldn't say where he'd been that night. Not the boat he claimed he'd been working on, not the saloon he said he'd been drinking in. Nothing.

And then there was the button. When police searched him, they found a small button in his pocket. Maren knew it. She said she had given it to her sister Karen.

Here's the answer to last week's cliffhanger, and it's sadder than it is sinister.

John Hontvet was in Portsmouth all night, stuck there by the weather with the rest of the men, right where everyone could see him.

Think about where Karen was. Asleep in the kitchen, in the middle of the night, in a house where everyone had been waiting for the men to come home. The door opens. A big shape comes in out of the dark.

She thought it was John. She thought the men were finally home.

The last name she ever said belonged to the man she thought had come to keep her safe.

The trial was held that June in Alfred, Maine. Everyone wanted a look at the monster of Smuttynose.

What they saw confused them.

Celia Thaxter, the poet who lived on the next island, knew these families. She described Wagner as tall, powerful, and dark, with a peculiarly quiet manner. But a reporter in the courtroom saw a young man with fair hair and blue eyes, and a face so mild it was hard to imagine it behind an axe.

He sat through the whole trial calm. Almost peaceful. He said he never set foot on the island.

The jury didn't believe him. Guilty. He was sentenced to hang.

Then Louis Wagner broke out of jail.

A convicted axe murderer, loose again.

He was caught and dragged back. But he still wasn't done talking.

From his cell, Wagner started telling a different story.

He hadn't killed anyone, he said. The killer was Maren.

Think about it, he said. Who was the only person left alive in that house? Who was the only witness? Who told everyone what happened, and who did it, before anyone else set foot on the island? And her husband, he claimed, had paid witnesses to make sure Louis Wagner swung for it.

It sounds desperate. Maybe it was. But it planted something that has never quite gone away.

People started asking questions.

Could one man really row roughly ten miles out to Smuttynose in the dead of a March night, kill two women, search the whole island, sit down and eat a meal, and then row all the way back before sunrise?

Why was there blood on Maren's own nightgown? A professor in Maine couldn't stop asking that one.

And how well did anyone really know what went on inside that house, three women alone together on a rock, with the men gone for days at a time?

Nobody could prove anything. Nobody could quite forget it either.

On June 25, 1875, at the state prison in Thomaston, Maine, Louis Wagner walked up the steps to the gallows holding his Bible.

He never confessed. Not in the courtroom, not in his cell, not with the rope in front of him. To the very end, he swore he was innocent.

Then they hanged him.

Hanging Louis Wagner didn't end the whispers about Maren.

More than a century later, in 1997, the novelist Anita Shreve wrote a bestseller called The Weight of Water, built around a single terrible idea: a confession, written by Maren herself, admitting that she was the one with the axe. It was fiction. Shreve invented the letter. But it became a movie, and for a lot of people, it's the only version of Smuttynose they know.

Historians who've spent years on this case say the right man hanged. Maren named Wagner the moment she was found, half frozen, before she could have known what evidence anyone would turn up. A button in his pocket. A bloody shirt in a privy. His boots in the blood.

But here's the thing about Smuttynose. Everyone who could have told us for sure is gone. Two of them died that night. One swung from a rope still swearing he never did it. And the only one who walked away was the woman who spent the night in the rocks.

An axe said to be the very one used that night is still kept in Portsmouth, at the Portsmouth Athenaeum.

And Smuttynose still sits out there in the Atlantic, bare and quiet, waiting for the next boat.

You've heard all of it now. The row in the dark. The scream. The button. The rocks. The rope.

So I want to know what you think.

I'll share the results next week, along with a brand-new case from the coast.

Happy Halloween, from all of us at Hey Coastal.

Lock the doors tonight. And if you hear someone come in late, make sure you know who it is before you call out their name.

Until Next Tide,

Hey Coastal

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