William Freeman and Ella Watson: New York & Wyoming

William Freeman, a deaf Black man broken by Auburn State Prison, killed four people near Owasco Lake in 1846, and Seward defended him. In 1889 in Wyoming, six men lynched Ella Watson, and newspapers smeared her as Cattle Kate.

Freeman was born free in Auburn, New York, and was sent to Auburn State Prison before he turned 16, on one man's word in a horse theft case. A keeper's blow with a board left him deaf. Released in 1845 with nothing, he killed John Van Nest, a farmer and justice of the peace; his pregnant wife, Sarah; their son George, not yet two; and Sarah's mother, Phebe Wyckoff, in March 1846. Seward argued insanity, the conviction was reversed in 1847, and Freeman died in his cell that August before a new trial.

Ella Watson was 28, with a legal homestead claim in Carbon County, Wyoming Territory, when six men took her and Jim Averell on July 20, 1889, and hanged them from a pine above the Sweetwater River. A coroner's jury named the six, a grand jury indicted no one, and the name Cattle Kate was never one she was known by in life.

Content note: racism, the beating of a Black prisoner, the killing of a pregnant woman and a child, and a lynching.

Foul Play, Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary. Fifty states, fifty crimes. This is Episode 11.

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