The Cemetery Keeper's Wife

     The murder of Tillie Smith, a kitchen worker at the former Centenary Collegiate Institute, in 1886, is the subject of speculation to this day. 

    Like the Changewater murders 40 years before, Tillie's murder was "solved," but not without suspicion.

    Although it occurred in more recent times, the Tillie Smith murder had less evidence than the murders of John Parke and his family in their home near the Musconetcong River in the 1840's. There wasn't a fortune to be inherited. There weren't myriad relatives. The victim was related to prominent figures, the Smith's of Waterloo, but not prominent herself. There wasn't even a Methodist pastor with a firey delivery.

     Local historian Denis Sullivan wrote a book about the trial of James Titus who was convicted of murdering the teenage Tillie.
But Sullivan concentrated on the trial and Titus. MaryAnn Abromitis McFadden was curious about Tillie herself. And a little angry about why she wasn't the central figure in her own story.

     When the Abromitis family moved to Hackettstown from Brooklyn, MaryAnn went exploring and found Tillie's monument in the cemetery.
Later, as a real estate agent, she found herself in Titus' house.
Other coincidences plus her familiarity with Centenary where she both studied and taught led her to decide to write Tillie's book.

   The author of three novels, McFadden had to decide how she wanted to approach the story. A historical novel? Straight nonfiction?
She settled on a hybrid, a well-researched novelization centered around the wife of the cemetery keeper at Hackettstown Union Cemetery where Tillie is buried.

    Her main character, Rachel, also stumbles across coincidences with Tillie's life, including one very big one. She becomes obsessed with Tillie's life and death, to the dismay of her husband and his family. She can't keep away from digging into the story of what led Tillie to her death on the Centenary campus.

     Which is sort of what McFadden found happening to her. She found more and more reason to doubt Titus' guilt and more interesting facts about Tillie.

    The book took about five years to research, not unexpectedly for this coldest of cold cases.

    McFadden introduced the book, appropriately, in the Victorian parlors of the Seay Building at Centenary, the structure that replaced the original Collegiate Institute that burned on Halloween Night 1899. (Yes, legend has it Tillie's ghost set the fire.) She packed the parlors as she did the Clinton Book Shop a couple of weeks later. 

    The crowds had to do with the popularity of McFadden's earlier books and also with the hold Tillie has on the populace around Hackettstown, especially around the college.

     She may be known as a real estate agent in her brother's firm, but McFadden started her career as a reporter and proved with The Cemetery Keeper's Wife she still knows how to find and tell a good story. 

     The book is compelling. Don't start reading it if you need a early night because you won't want to put it down. I read it with a booklight clipped to the pages during the recent power outages. 
McFadden is a fine writer and a terrific researcher, but most of us knew that from her novels. But this book is on another level. I can imagine how much research went into the effort and I'm not sure I'd take it on.

MaryAnn Abromitis McFadden at the Clinton Book Shop

  As I always say with Mike Daigle's books, I am a friend of the author, but I also know a terrific read when I read it. And The Cemetery Keeper's Wife is more than that. It is the necessary piece in the Tillie Smith puzzle. It is the book that, finally, gives Tillie a voice.

  Only one thing makes me a little sad about the book. A very important figure (besides Tillie) was missing from the exuberant book launch, MaryAnn's mother, Angie Abromitis, who died last year. But Angie was supervising the book and its launch. No doubt about that. 
 
 

A Voice for Tillie

MaryAnn Abromitis McFadden calls herself a former journalist. Sharon Decker, English and Humanities Department Chair at Centenary University takes issue with that because of McFadden's extensive research into her latest book, The Cemetery Keeper's Wife.  I take issue with that because the book does exactly what journalism is supposed to do, it gives voice to the voiceless. MaryAnn proves she's still a reporter.

Since 1886 when Tillie Smith was murdered at the school, then called the Centenary Collegiate Institute, many of the stories have been about the case but not the victim.

To be sure, there are serious questions about the guilt of John Titus and Denis Sullivan's book about the trial was important to the story overall, but McFadden had another goal: to let people know who Tillie was.

Too often, the victim is lost in the sensationalism of a trial. That is exacerbated by the possibility of injustice. Titus wasn't helped by possibly incompetent counsel and yellow journalism that was only too prevalent at the time, but, guilty or not, he was only part of the story.

McFadden chose to tell the story as a novel. She created a modern-day character, Rachel, who auctions houses and discovers Tillie in much the same way McFadden did. Coming to Hackettstown from Brooklyn as a child, McFadden found Tillie's gravestone in the Union Cemetery and was intrigued by this young woman. Years later, while selling real estate, she ended up listing the house where Titus lived. These coincidences sparked an interest in the story and in Tillie herself.

The Cemetery Keeper's Wife was introduced on Tuesday, April 24, in the parlors of the Seay Building at Centenary to a packed house of family and friends as well as fans of McFadden's earlier books.

I can't review the book yet, but I can recommend anything by MaryAnn McFadden, former and present journalist.