The Accidental Crime Writer
By Elizabeth DeWolfe

I hadn’t intended to write about crime. A graduate school class on Women and the Law was as close as I got to nineteenth-century disorder. And while the subject of my first book, an anti-Shaker activist, had her day in court, nobody committed a crime, or at least, no violent ones. Women’s history, cozy-style.

And then I found Mary Bean.

I was hunting around for a new project, and at my antiquarian bookseller husband’s store, I stumbled on The Narrative of the Life of George Hamilton, a rotter of a criminal who plied his trade in Saco. Counterfeiting! Thievery! MURDER!

Rulison Cover

The 1850 novella read like overwrought fiction, one of many mid-nineteenth-century works that popularized murder, lust, kidnapping, and other crimes, and offered the reading public trashy, ephemeral reads. The opening scene hooks the reader: evil George Hamilton dumps mill girl Mary Bean’s body in a brook and pins the crime on his brother, and “Hamilton,” that cad, “felt relieved of a burden.”

“Mary Bean” Ad

I used to live in Saco, and as I read, I recognized street names and landmarks, and while the characters were larger than life, the setting rang a bit too familiar. Was this story true? My project radar pinging, I went to the Dyer Library and from the vault, pulled out the 1840s and 1850s Saco newspaper, the Maine Democrat. It didn’t take long: “Dead Body Found!”

I had my next project. The story unfolded in newspapers and court records, payroll registers, and medical texts. Mary Bean – Berengera Caswell (1826-1849) – worked in the textile mills. In New Hampshire, she met a Biddeford boy, William Long, and in the summer of 1849, they engaged in “criminal relations.” Six months later, Berengera died in Saco from septicemia following a legal abortion at the hands of a botanic physician. The doctor panicked and attempted to dispose of her body. He tied it to a board and placed her in a stream that emptied into the Saco River. But the board got hung up in a culvert and buried by snow; Berengera was discovered four months later, ironically, where the Saco police station sits today.

Newspaper Headline about the trial

I had become a crime writer, writing of cases not very cozy. And the reason is simple: in writing women’s history, crime is where you find the women. As Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich famously quipped, “Well-behaved women rarely make history.” But the ill-behaved leave trails. And it’s those trails I followed.

The discovery of Caswell’s body set off a media frenzy with newspapers across New England reporting the news. One newspaper was blasé, headlining a short piece on the death of “yet another mill girl.” But in Saco-Biddeford, there were fears to calm and money to be made; editors published daily “extras,” single newsprint sheets carrying the latest intel and authors-for-hire churned out at least eight short stories featuring Saco-Biddeford factory girls who ignored parental warnings and met unsavory ends—cautionary tales designed to instruct young women on how to be safe, with an overlay of forbidden topics: lust, seduction, and the specter of unwed pregnancy.

Image from “The Murder of Mary Bean”

As a historian, my goal is to recover forgotten lives – to document the twists and turns that led to my subjects’ ultimate fate. So, I work backward to make the dead come alive, pulling out details from available documents, chasing down each name, parsing the fact from the fiction, making timelines, exploring medical procedures that could cure you, or kill you.

History relies on written documents, and in women’s history, we see the noisy women, the women who transgress boundaries, the women who sought more than their prescribed role allowed. The women who make great protagonists in writing, factual or fictional.

History is storytelling – and it’s all about choices of whose story we tell and whose story gets left out. As writers, we have options for our tales: historical fiction, contemporary fiction that borrows from history, or my genre, narrative nonfiction – deeply researched but written like a novel. The writing paths are many: the past is fair game for inspiration. How will you use history in your work?

If you’d like to explore how historical archives can provide story ideas, obscure murder weapons, or colorful characters, join Professor DeWolfe and Maine Historical Society staff for Crimes in the Archives, a pre-Crime Wave tour and mini-workshop at the Maine Historical Society in Portland on Friday, May 29, at 1 p.m. Uncover history’s mysteries and incorporate the past in your writing. REGISTER HERE:  https://www.mainewriters.org/events/maine-crime-wave-in-the-archives

Historian and Crime Writer Elizabeth DeWolfe

Elizabeth DeWolfe is the award-winning author of The Murder of Mary Bean, recipient of a 2008 IPPY Award in true crime, as well as awards from ForeWord magazine, the New England Historical Association, and the Northeast Popular Culture Association. Her recent book, Alias Agnes: The Notorious Tale of a Gilded Age Spy, is a finalist for the 2026 Maine Literary Award in Nonfiction. Recently retired from a thirty-year career teaching history and archival research methods at the University of New England, she is hard at work on her next book. Mum’s the word, but when this criminal died, thousands came to the funeral. Read more about her work at http://www.elizabethdewolfe.com and follow her on Facebook.

Maine Literary Award Nominee, 2026

Kent State (murder of Mary Bean) https://www.kentstateuniversitypress.com/2010/the-murder-of-mary-bean-and-other-stories/

UPKY (Alias Agnes) https://www.kentuckypress.com/9781985902244/alias-agnes/

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