Person:Jeremiah Meacham (9)

NEHGR 30:435: "Memoranda from the Rev Wm Cooper's Interleaved Almanacs" March 23, 1715: "A melancholy Relation of a barbarous murder committed at Rhoad Island, by one Jeremiah Meacham, a man of ab't 40 years of age, born at Salem Village, but had liv'd in y't colony ab't 20 years: who one evening kill'd his wife with whom he had liv'd well, and had children; and also his wife's sister; both without any known reason or provocation, but by a diabolical impulse. He first cut them with his hatchet, and then his wife's throat with a penknife. A man coming to them he also dangerously wounded; and then set fire to his house, and cut his own throat; but the fire being extinguished, and his wound not mortal, he was apprehended & committed."

1. ↑ Salem, Essex, Massachusetts, United States. Vital Records to the End of the year 1849. (Salem, Massachusetts: Essex Institute, 1916-1925)
   2:69.

   Meachum, Jeremiah, s. Jeremiah and Mary (Trask), [born] 21: 10 m [Dec]: 1673. CT.R.

2. ↑ "Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination" (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000) by Karen Halttunen, briefly discusses Meachum's trial in the contexts of religious and social conceptions of evil.