Horrific Murder on a Bunker Hill Road Farm

Saturday, August 6, 1881: Joseph Fisher, a Prussian immigrant and market gardener, was returning from the Northern Liberty Market about 4pm. He had sold his morning’s run of produce and was coming home for another load. He turned the horse-drawn wagon into the lane that branched off from Bunker Hill Road. He opened the gate and was surprised not to see his young niece and nephew, Lizzie aged 6, and Joe aged 3. They lived with Fisher and his wife, and would usually run down the drive to greet him when he came home, then ride back to the house in the wagon. But not today. There was a ramshackle one-story stone house at the entrance where an elderly African American woman lived with her daughter, but he didn’t see either of them. As he approached the house, he saw the two children lying close together under some trees near a wood pile. He assumed they were napping, so tended to the horses before he went over to them. What he saw caused him to cry out in horror.

A word before we proceed. Just as it would be today, these killings had the media salivating. Murder was not uncommon downtown, but it was rare out in the county, especially involving children. How the newspapers covered the story says a lot about the journalism of the time, even in well-respected publications. Much of it is lurid, speculative, and often misleading. And in this case, racism in its ugliest form is clearly present as well. Some of the language is offensive to 21st century ears, but it serves to show the evolution of contemporary tabloid journalism and the extent of racial stereotypes in the late 19th century.

The Washington Post seems to have had the first reporter on the scene. He arrived just a few hours after the crime was discovered. Here is how he described Joseph Fisher finding the two children:

Blood stains upon their clothing and the death pallor of their faces told him that a foul deed had been done. Springing forward, he saw at a glance that the little ones were dead, the girl’s skull having been crushed, blood and brains oozing from a frightful wound, and a punctured hole in little Joe’s forehead bore evidence of a most dastardly murder.

Three farmhands were working in the cornfield south of the house and came running when they heard Fisher’s screams. Shocked, they helped Fisher bring the children’s bodies into the house, then searched the area for any sign of the perpetrator. An axe was lying next to the woodpile, and they thought it might be the murder weapon, but no blood stains or other evidence was found on it. The two African American women who lived in the stone house, Christina Taylor and her daughter Rose, also came by and offered their condolences. The Post described Christina as a “wrinkled negress,” and Rose as “A thick-lipped, unprepossessing woman.” The field hands told Fisher that they had seen Christina Taylor walking quickly away from the main house about 3:30pm, with a dog yapping at her heels. Fisher quickly rode back into town, informed the police, and picked up his wife as well as his sister-in-law Lena Fisher, the widowed mother of the two children, who was working near Center Market.

To get you oriented, here is a map from the era, showing the Fisher and Taylor homes, as well as Fort Bunker Hill and the Brooks mansion.

When police arrived, they questioned Fisher, the farmhands, and the two Taylor women. The children had been left alone that day, as they were most days. Fisher assumed the nearby farmhands and the dogs would be enough protection. Nothing in the house had been stolen or disturbed, so robbery was apparently not the motive. After police learned that Christina Taylor had visited the house that afternoon, she and her daughter were arrested, and the questioning began. The Coroner’s inquest started on Tuesday, August 9. On the 10th, The Evening Star described Christina Taylor this way:

Christina Taylor, the old woman, is a wrinkled old hag, of a repulsive and brutal appearance, her retreating forehead and protruding teeth giving a particularly sinister expression to her face. The daughter, Rose, is dark-colored and an ordinary-looking negress. The grandson, Thomas Goff, a boy 13 years of age, is a stupid-looking black boy. The old woman and her daughter have lived in the stone house as tenants of Mr. Fisher two or three months, the old woman working out her rent by doing chores.

The police kept interviewing Christina Taylor. She told them she had borrowed a washboard from Mrs. Fisher, which she often did, and went up to the house on Saturday to return it. She did not see the children, she said, but was about to go in the back door when she heard a voice saying “What are you doing here?” She didn’t see anyone, but was frightened, so left the washboard in the kitchen, then hurried out the front door, where the dogs started yapping at her. That gibed with what the farmhands had said about seeing her leaving the house. She was interviewed for hours by Lieutenant Johnson and Justice O.S.B. Wall, and by the end had gotten quiet. Johnson said she asked, “If I tell you the truth, all about it, will you let me go?” He responded. “I will do what is right.” She said nothing further.

The evidence was all circumstantial, but the newspapers and the police were sure they had found their perpetrator. Their theory was that Taylor had gone to the house with the washboard, a Yankee brand, in her hands. She saw the children, who annoyed her somehow, and hit first one, then the other with the washboard. She put the washboard in the house and hurried away. The washboard had been closely examined, and even though it had no blood stains, small yellowish hairs were found on the two feet, causing many to speculate they matched the color of the children’s hair. The picture of a washboard at right is similar to the one described by the police. It was later shown that the hairs on it were not human, but likely came from one of the farm dogs. But for many days, newspapers touted the hairs as definitive evidence of Christina Taylor’s guilt. Meanwhile, Washington’s African American community was concerned about the two Taylor women in the hands of the police. Isaiah Washington, an African American lawyer, was hired by the Colored People’s Protective Union to represent them. But Christina Taylor’s statements in the coming days would make his job next to impossible.

On the evening of August 11, after five days of intensive questioning from police, local officials, clergymen, and newspaper reporters, Christina Taylor offered a confession. According to the Washington Post and other newspapers, she told police Captain A.K. Vernon and Archibald White of Rock Creek Church this:

I suppose I must say I did it…I was going along the path; it was not God Almighty, but it was the devil that put it into my head to kill them. I could not help killing them, I did not do it with the ax, nor the washboard, but with a piece of wood as big as my arm, and about eighteen inches long. the children were running about the yard of the house. I struck the one with the long hair first; but I don’t know how many times I hit her…What I killed them for I don’t know. The devil got into me so that I could not help doing it. I picked the stick up in the road. I never told any one about it but you and Mr. Archie White. I believe it has worried me some. I have told the truth to you white people. It is the truth from my heart. I threw the stick away down by the woodpile.

That was all the newspapers needed and they were soon calling for a death sentence. The Evening Star printed this editorial on August 12:

The Evening Critic even sent an artist to the jail to make a sketch of the elderly woman. This unflattering and blatantly racist portrait appeared in the next day’s issue:

In December, Christina (the papers were now beginning to spell her name Christiana) Taylor was arraigned and charged with the murder of the two children. Her trial would start in April, 1882, under Judge Andrew Wylie, with Robert J. Murray and William H. Brown for the defense. The trial took two days. Mr. and Mrs. Fisher, the farmhands, the police, and Archibald White testified for the prosecution. Rose Taylor testified in her mother’s defense, and proclaimed to the court that Christina Taylor did not kill the children. The jury deliberated for 55 minutes before coming back with a guilty verdict. Her lawyers made a motion for a new trial, which Judge Wylie heard in May. Mr. Brown said he would not push the motion further, but wished to convince the court that Christina Taylor was demented and not responsible. He asked for more time to gather affidavits. The Evening Critic reported on the judge’s response:

Judge Wylie said that this seemed to be a miserable, degraded, unintelligent old creature, and at the trial he thought her hardly responsible for her acts, but he left that to the jury and they seemed to think that a case of insanity was not made out. He had no objection to a postponing of the sentence, and if it was imposed, he should feel it his duty to join in an application to the pardoning power for a commutation of it. She was a helpless creature and unable to support herself and all that could be done would be to put her beyond doing harm.

The judge granted the delay until June 1, when the affidavits were presented and he granted Christina Taylor a new trial. That new trial never began. In 1884, she was still incarcerated. The National Republican reported on the high number of cases that were languishing at the jail.

“They seem to be going to let Christiana Taylor die on our hands,” remarked Capt. Russ as the round of inspection was about concluded. “Not that she is ailing at all, but she must, in course of time, die of old age, and there does not seem any prospect of her being hanged. She was committed here over three years ago for the cruel murder of two white children named Fisher, in the county, tried, and convicted, but she seems to have been forgotten.”

Finally, in December of 1884, Judge Wylie set aside the conviction and ordered Christina Taylor to be held in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, formerly known as the Government Hospital for the Insane. She likely died there, but I have been unable to find any documentation of her death or burial. Other than the murder for which she was jailed, we know very little about Christina Taylor’s life. She told her cellmates she had been enslaved in King George County, Virginia, by a man named Chew, came to the eastern part of the District after the war, and had only been at Fisher’s place about four months. When a reporter from the Evening Star told her she might hang, she responded:

If they hang me, they will hang me for nothing, for I don’t see what I struck the children for, if I did strike them. What is the use of telling the truth, for you won’t believe me? I didn’t kill them.

The funeral of the two children was held on August 8, 1881 at St. Mary’s Catholic church on Fifth Street, with a huge crowd, both Black and White, in attendance. The two small coffins were then taken to Prospect Hill Cemetery (referred to as the German burying ground) and laid to rest in a single grave. Some of the children’s schoolmates acted as pall bearers.

The farm property was eventually sold to the Carmelite Fathers, who built their Whitefriars Hall there, at what is now 1600 Webster St. NE. They kept the original farmhouse and used it for offices and storage. Surprisingly, though it was built before the Civil War, it survived until 2016, when it was razed. Google’s satellite view of the area was obviously taken before that time, as the farmhouse is still visible.

Although Brookland wouldn’t be subdivided until 1887, there were enough people living in the area that the story of the horrid murder reverberated for generations and was well-known in the growing neighborhood. They were still talking about it fifty years later.

It’s also easy to see how today’s tabloids, as well as online platforms like X, formerly Twitter, feed on the kind of reportage exhibited in the Christina Taylor story. She was tried and convicted in the press, well before the case was presented to Judge Wylie. We don’t know whether Christina Taylor actually committed the crime or not. We do know that intimidating police procedures, poor journalism, and ever-present racism ensured a guilty verdict.

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SOURCES:

I drew this story almost entirely from newspaper coverage of the time. The local papers, the Washington Post, the Evening Star, the National Republican, and the Evening Critic, covered it most thoroughly, but out-of-town newspapers also sent reporters, including the Daily Gazette from Wilmington, Delaware, and the Cincinnati Gazette, from Ohio.