On the morning of March 22, 1915, residents of the small town of West Shelby, New York, awoke to a horrific scene. A woman clad only in a bloodied nightgown lay shot to death in the snow on the doorstep of an immigrant farmhand, Charles Stielow. Across the street, in the farmhouse where Stielow had recently begun work and where the dead woman had kept house, 70-year-old farmer Charles Phelps was found shot and unconscious. He died a few hours later.
After finding that Stielow lied when he told investigators he did not own a gun, the police arrested him on Aug. 21, 1915. During Stielow’s trial, a self-proclaimed criminologist, Albert Hamilton, testified that the nine bumps he said he found inside the barrel of Stielow’s .22 caliber revolver matched the nine scratch marks he had identified on the same caliber bullets at the crime scene. Although Hamilton never showed his evidence to the jury, declaring the findings were so technical they could only be discerned by an expert, Stielow was found guilty of murder in the first degree. He was sentenced to death in the electric chair and sent to Sing Sing prison to await execution.
Several people familiar with the case, including the deputy warden at Sing Sing, became convinced that Stielow was innocent and that his confession contained words that the farmhand, who was mentally challenged, could not have understood let alone uttered. Just one week before Stielow was scheduled to be electrocuted on December 11, 1916, the Governor of New York called for a reinvestigation. A firearms expert from the New York City police department compared the bullets from the murder scene with those test-fired from Stielow’s gun. Even by eye, the markings on the two sets of bullets did not look similar but to make c ..
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