So many questions left unanswered

Forty-year-old Annie (Whipple) Miller was supposed to return to Rhode Island on Aug. 15, 1905. She was staying in Lynn, Massachusetts, at the home of her friend Sarah Prescott, waiting for her husband Clarence Miller, a shoe store bookkeeper whom she had been married to for 17 years, to cancel the divorce proceedings he had begun.

But on that day, her younger sister, Maud (Whipple) Jenks, was contacted with the information that Annie had died earlier that morning. Maud immediately left her home in Warwick and went to Lynn to claim her sister’s remains. But the entire situation was extremely unsettling to her.

The police reported that they had discovered Annie the previous night at the Willard House hotel, sick and screaming upon the bed. They transported her to the station and placed her in a cell, charging her with drunkenness. Eventually she fell unconscious and died in the cell the next morning.

Not only was it impossible for Maud and her family to imagine Annie in a state of intoxication, but it was unthinkable that the police had simply locked her up instead of transporting her to the nearest hospital for medical attention.

Annie’s body was taken to the home of her sister Marion (Whipple) Russell, where the funeral was held at noon two days later. Her nephews carried the casket to its final resting place in Oak Grove Cemetery in Pawtucket.

Maud then returned to Lynn, determined to get answers concerning this shocking tragedy that made no sense. She spoke to 26-year-old Sarah Prescott, who told her that on the night before she died, Annie was there at the house when a strange woman arrived to talk to her. Sarah said that Annie and the woman then left together and that, because Annie had left the light burning in her bedroom, she assumed she would be back soon. She never returned.

Sarah felt there was foul play involved. She suspected that Annie was led to the hotel and drugged, eventually dying of an overdose inside a jail cell. Maud contacted the authorities to ask if an autopsy had been done to determine the cause of death and was told they did not think so. The death certificate listed the cause of death simply as “alcoholism.”

Less than three months after her death, Annie’s newly widowed 48-year-old husband married 32-year-old widow Alice (Knight) Payne, a fellow bookkeeper. Annie’s family had to go on with life, so many of their questions left unanswered.

Kelly Sullivan is a Rhode Island columnist, lecturer and author.