Do we live in a true crime-obsessed society? The prevalence of podcasts, documentaries and works of nonfiction that fall into this category suggests that this is indeed the case. And it isn’t difficult to see why. Some true crime works offer the timeless pleasure of a thrilling narrative. Others focus on fascinating subcultures or larger-than-life personalities. Still others use the genre of true crime to explore institutions — some doing unsung work, some entangled with corruption, and some in desperate need of reform.
Cover courtesy of Kent State University Press
Leslie Lambert Rounds’s “I Have Struck Mrs. Cochran with a Stake: Sleepwalking, Insanity, and the Trial of Abraham Prescott” belongs to a different subgenre within the world of true crime. It’s a work that explores a case from relatively early in the nation’s history and uses it as a point of comparison – sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly – to explore how the law has handled similar cases in the years since then.
The violent incidents at the heart of Rounds’s book took place in Pembroke, New Hampshire. In the winter of 1832, Abraham Prescott – a teenager working for Sally and Chauncey Cochran – attacked the couple as they slept. When confronted about it, Prescott offered a novel defense: He was sleepwalking. The couple accepted his explanation, and he remained in their employ – though not until the case was covered by a number of intrigued newspapers. The Cochrans’ decision to keep Prescott employed turned out to have tragic consequences.
In warmer weather, Prescott and Sally went for a walk together to pick strawberries. On that walk, something happened – evidence suggests that Prescott propositioned Sally Cochrane, and she rebuffed his advances. Prescott then killed Sally and utilized the sleepwalking defense when it became clear what he had done. This time, however, he would face trial for murder. Rounds, executive director of the Dyer Library and Saco Museum, does a fine job of evoking the chaos of the crime scene itself. “And then (Chauncey) Cochran came across his wife’s calash, the broken comb from her hair, and the spilled basket of crimson strawberries, lying abandoned on the matted grass,” she writes. “If he’d entertained some belief that this was all a strange lie, his hopes were crushed.”
While Prescott’s case is fascinating in its own right, there aren’t necessarily enough twists and turns in it to carry the weight of an entire book. Rounds opts to use the murder trial and the questions of Prescott’s state of mind to explore broader questions about the ethics of capital punishment when it comes to insanity and mental illness. Prescott’s sleepwalking alibi seems to have been borrowed from a recent and somewhat notorious case, but Rounds suggests that he may have been insane or developmentally disabled; alternately, while his own defense was likely a falsehood, Prescott may well have been deemed not competent to stand trial had he been tried in a present-day courtroom.
“I Have Struck Mrs. Cochran with a Stake” offers a few unsettling facts about the state of the United States justice system in the 1830s. Rounds writes that a successful insanity plea, in the 18th century, generally resulted in the defendants being sent to live with their families rather than in an institution of some sort; this “was beginning to change at the time of Prescott’s trial.” As for Prescott’s incarceration, Rounds offers a relatively shocking portrait of jail conditions: “It would have been typical of the time that Prescott, who had freely admitted to bludgeoning Cochran to death, was kept for two and a half years in a common cell with other prisoners, nearly all of them jailed for minor civil offenses.”
Rounds’s book covers a lot of territory. It’s a portrait of a horrific crime and its aftermath, including details on Cochran’s life after Prescott’s trial. It’s an account of a rural region caught unprepared when dealing with a violent killing. It’s an exploration of changing mores within a justice system, and how this particular case helps to demonstrate those shifts in real time.
Was Abraham Prescott a calculating sociopath or a young man grappling with mental illness? It’s one of many questions that Rounds ponders in this absorbing book. But she also does a fine job of evoking the lives of Sally and Chauncey Cochran, creating for the reader a powerful sense of what was lost when Sally was killed. In this book, the crime is only part of the equation; the history and the issues at hand keep things engaging throughout.
New York City resident Tobias Carroll is the author of three books: “Political Sign,” “Reel” and “Transitory.” He has reviewed books for the New York Times, Bookforum, the Star Tribune and elsewhere.
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