Part IV: Bergin’s shooting of McBride defied explanation

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a five-part series on a murder committed by Will Bergin and his ensuing botched hanging. Part I (the shooting). Part II (Bergin’s disastrous Civil War years). Part III (eyewitness to the aftermath of Custer’s Last Stand. Part IV Bergin’s shooting of McBride defied explanation. Part V the botched hanging.

MOUNT VERNON — W.B. Weaver, Mount Vernon’s patrolman was getting dressed for the day at about 7:30 a.m. on the morning of June 15, 1877. His quiet morning was abruptly interrupted by the sharp crack of a gunshot.

Patrolman Weaver lived just two blocks from South Main Street, and knew that there was no good reason why a gun should be going off in the middle of downtown. He hurried putting on his uniform. Moments later, a second shot rang out. As he was getting his boots on, his front door was yanked open and his brother Augustus looked in.

“Come on,” Augustus shouted. “Will Bergin just shot Tom McBride at the hotel!”

The men ran back to the Bergin House, where a crowd was gathered around Bergin, sitting outside the office’s outside door. Those gathered had already taken McBride inside and called for a doctor.

Patrolman Weaver immediately grabbed Bergin’s shoulder, but Bergin showed no inclination to escape.

“I am not going to resist,” Bergin said.

He went quietly with Officer Weaver. Since Weaver had rushed on foot to the Bergin House, he walked the prisoner up to the Knox County Jail, at that time on High Street, right behind the courthouse. As they went, Bergin admitted the crime and added that he expected to “look up a rope” for it.

Weaver locked him in a cell, then he and Sheriff Gay headed back down to the hotel to interview witnesses.

Dr. McMillen was the first doctor to arrive at the Bergin House hotel. He was ushered into the parlor, where Thomas McBride had been placed on a couch. He immediately called for the backup up Doctors Russell, Gordon, and Larimore, but the men were unable to do much.

McBride was unconscious, bleeding steadily, and writhing in pain. He hung on for two hours, but around 9:30 a.m., he passed into eternity.

Hotel staffers had already telegraphed McBride’s wife, Fannie, who was in Newark visiting friends. Her husband had originally planned on going to Newark to accompany her home in the afternoon, but instead she found herself rushing back, with their children in tow. She was devastated and described by the Democratic Banner as “nearly crazed” with grief.

Arrangements were hastily made for a funeral in Mount Vernon, to be followed by transportation of McBride’s body to Cadiz, Ohio, where he would be buried in the McBride family plot at Cadiz Union Cemetery.

McBride himself was a Civil War veteran, serving as a private in the 181st Ohio Volunteer Infantry. McBride saw some fighting, including the Battle of Wilson’s Pike, which successfully repelled a Confederate counteroffensive hoping to push General William T. Sherman out of Georgia. But the regiment only lost a total of five men killed during their 10 months of service, and a couple dozen lost to disease, which is far less than many.

McBride fortunately suffered no wounds, and he seemed to suffer no long-term effects from the war. Indeed, McBride was a very popular man, noted for his warmth and friendliness. He and his father had worked together on a number of projects managing properties, including a previous project in Clyde, Ohio.

When William Bergin, Sr., advertised for a manager for his hotel, it seemed like the perfect opportunity, and they had relocated to Mount Vernon. Their years in the community had gone well, and there was considerable outrage over Bergin’s actions.

Not that those actions were even comprehensible to Bergin himself. A Columbus newspaper interviewed him and got answers that weren’t even entirely coherent.

“After you left [the lawyer] Greer’s why did you go round to Gregory’s and get the pistol?” the reporter asked.

“Well, my object and intention was to go down to the bridge and commit suicide,” Bergin matter-of-factly replied.

“Were you drunk at the time?

“I had taken several drinks and was in such a state of mind that I would just as soon be dead as alive,” Bergin said.

“When you walked all the way down the square [sic, the reporter meant ‘down the street’] in front of McBride, what were your intentions?”

“I had no idea of shooting him,” Bergin claimed, “because I did not see him at all.”

“When did you see McBride?”

“When I crossed the street and stepped into the front door of the hotel, I saw Tom sitting on the outside of the side door and I walked up and shot him,” Bergin said.

This omits any explanation of why he was walking into the Bergin House, particularly when he just said his intention was to go down to the bridge over the Kokosing.

“What was your motive in shooting him?” the reporter asked.

“I am utterly unable to say,” Bergin replied. “The sight of him so exasperated me that I did not know what I did.”

“There were two cartridges in the pistol,” the reporter said. “What did you do with the second one?”

“I tried to shoot myself,” Bergin said. “I fired it at myself, but presume I fired wild or some one struck my arm.”

Either Bergin was fully delusional or outright lying. A half dozen eyewitnesses were able to say that after shooting McBride, Bergin pointed his gun down at the pavement and discharged the second shot.

The reporter tried one more question.

“You say your condition was such that you did not know what you did,” he said. “When did you begin to realize what you had done?”

“Along in the afternoon I began to comprehend it,” Bergin said, “But when I did it I was not responsible for it.”

What he was all too clearly setting up at this point was a defense by reason of insanity. This, however, conflicts with several of the statements he was recorded as making in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.

While it is not impossible for a person to have made such statements while out of their right mind, Bergin’s case was complicated by further considerations of his prior behavior. When the trial began in August, witnesses were of mixed opinions about Bergin’s level of intoxication.

While there were certainly times since he returned from out West when he was clearly in a state of severe intoxication, at other times he was witnessed to drink large quantities of alcohol without any noticeable effect.

In retrospect, it is likely that Bergin had reached such an advanced state of alcoholism that he required large quantities of drink just to function normally. Druggist Harry Green testified that the morning of the shooting, he found Bergin waiting for him to open his store, sitting out front with his head in his hands. Bergin begged for whiskey. Green initially refused him, because he had seen Bergin drunk the previous day. Bergin became agitated.

“For God’s sake, give me something!” Bergin said.

Green gave him a dram of potassium bromide (a sedative) and an ounce of whiskey to get him to leave.

This suggests that Bergin was a severe alcoholic, suffering withdrawal symptoms. Actual drunkenness would only come after binges of almost unbelievable quantities of alcohol. The sad truth is that Bergin had turned to alcohol as a way to self-medicate his various traumas.

But as the years went by — and he kept adding more traumas — the old treatment was no longer working.

Bergin was becoming more volatile, more dangerous to himself and others. The irony is that if Bergin had continued just a little longer without committing violence, he would have simply died from alcoholism and been forgotten as all too many traumatized veterans are. Instead, he now sat on trial, half-smiling with a sort of dazed uncertainty each day he was brought into the courtroom.

The Bergin House night clerk, H.P. Courtier, testified that Thursday night, the evening before the shooting, Bergin had showed up looking for a room, and appeared to be in an advanced state of inebriation. Courtier told him politely that he should go home and sleep it off, as they did not wish to be troubled with any customers of the “J.N.” stripe.

Whether or not Bergin was capable of comprehending this insult or not is unknown. It refers to a notorious character named J.N. Free (written about for Richland Source by Timothy McKee here). Free, who lived at times in Mansfield and for longer in McCutcheonville in Wyandot County, became infamous for roaming around the United States after he lost his mind thanks to a stressful business swindle in California, during the Gold Rush.

Free took to roaming the country, announcing wherever he talked that he would give a public address that evening that would “pull back the veil” and reveal the mysteries of the universe.

Free’s long, rambling, incoherent speeches became popular events where attendees would either try to listen without laughing, or just outright heckle the raving man. After years of throwing him off trains for not paying for a ticket, the railroads finally just decided to let him ride free, because it cost less than the timetable disruptions caused by stopping trains to throw him off.

After decades of mad roaming, Free became nicknamed “The Immortal” J.N. Free because it seemed he’d never die.

So, for Courtier to suggest Bergin was of the “J. N.” stripe, he was insinuating that Bergin was a madman. This probably helped Bergin’s insanity defense, as did the testimony of family members.

William Bergin Sr., said that mental instability ran in his family, and that there had been a number of suicides. The father said that he himself had struggled with “fits” as a teenager, and that he had often been troubled and despondent, particularly in recent years.

His aunt from Boston sent a deposition stating that she was aware of seven cases of insanity in recent generations of the Bergin family. The mother of the accused said that her son had been “peaceable, dutiful, affectionate” before the war. After the war, he came home a different person.

“After his return,” Mrs. Bergin said, “I noticed a change; he was unsteady in his habits, irritable, wandered about, magnified trifles, could not be contented at home.”

She said that the few days he had been home before killing McBride, her son had been intoxicated and at times raving.

Bergin himself testified that he had attempted suicide in California in 1873 by taking laudanum, but that the large dose had instead caused him to vomit it up.

Countering these portrayals of Bergin’s unstable behavior were a number of witnesses who testified that they heard Bergin makes threats against McBride during the days preceding the murder. Perhaps the most damning was the testimony of Sarah E. Rose, an acquaintance of Bergin’s who saw him Tuesday morning, three days before the murder.

That morning, Rose was walking in downtown Mount Vernon. As she walked past Dr. Larimore’s office, Will Bergin was walking out. Bergin spotted McBride across the street.

“There goes that damned Tom McBride,” Bergin said. “I would like to shoot him.”

The best Bergin’s counsel could do on cross-examination was to get Rose to say that she didn’t know if Bergin was specifically talking to her, or just talking out loud to himself. It wasn’t an actual conversation. She said that he didn’t appear to be intoxicated.

That counsel, incidentally, was former Civil War general George W. Morgan (covered in a prior History Knox column here), who had just recently retired from national politics to his private law practice.

While Morgan was respected for his rank, he had an uphill battle trying to prove Bergin not guilty by reason of insanity, when there were so many witnesses who had heard him say disparaging or threatening things about Thomas McBride.

In the end, it took the jury only 45 minutes to decide their verdict: Guilty of murder in the first degree. Will Bergin was sentenced to hang.