The Peekskill Murder, Part One: A Curious Sort of Home Life

...[Betts'] marriage to Cornelia [sic] Carman and the curious sort of a home life that he led, broken in later years by criminations and scandals, are part of the gossip of the neighborhood.

[Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Nov. 4, 1891]

Henry Lambert Betts was born in 1852 into a wealthy family, thanks to his mother's inheritance of the Suydam farmlands (her mother was a Suydam, which makes us distantly related - Daniel Losee Hicks and Henry Betts were 5th cousins through the Suydams). The Betts family lived in a large house on part of the original Suydam land, at the corner of Fulton Street and Nostrand Avenue.

Henry's father, Charles C. Betts, was the president of the Brooklyn City Railroad, the city Controller, and an Alderman of the 19th Ward. In short, he was a very prominent citizen indeed. In fact, it was probably through the elder Betts' friendship or acquaintanceship with David Barnett that the latter became the Brooklyn counsel for his troubled son in 1891. David Barnett stated that he had known Henry "for 17 or 18 years" by 1891 (i.e., since about 1873).

Henry, also known as Harry, was the black sheep of the Betts family. People who knew him said that "he had always been erratic in his habits," that he was moody and eccentric. He once started to build a racetrack on his land, but never finished it. He leased land to a group of gypsies, and ignored the neighbours' protestations.

From October 1872 to March 1873 Henry was at Sandford Hall, "a sanitarium for the insane" in Flushing, Queens. According to the superintendent there, Betts was unpleasant to the other patients and phyisically violent as well. Other instances of his "mania" and other treatments - including a stay at McLean's outside of Boston - were mentioned during the trial.

When Henry was about 21 years old, he eloped with Miss Cordelia E. Carman (called Carrie or Delia), the 16 year old daughter of oil merchant Benjamin T. Carman, himself a wealthy man. They were married September 29, 1873 and proceeded, during the next nine years to have nine children, of whom five survived: Charles, Willie, Viola, Edith, and Mabel.

About the year 1876 Betts disappeared for several days, turning up in East New York peddling apples from a horse and wagon that he bought from a real peddler. He participated in a religious revival and had become "fanatical."

As is often the case with newspaper accounts, some events are detailed very precisely (such as the kinds of furnishings that Delia sent to the hotel in Peekskill - which we'll get to later) and some - such as Henry's eccentricities - are just sketched in.

After their last child was born, Harry and Delia separated. Mabel, the youngest, was born in 1883, so they were living apart by about 1884-5. They were probably living in Oswego at this time, because Henry had bought a mineral spring there as a business venture. Oswego, on Lake Ontario, was known for its springs, such as the Great Bear Spring in this 1896 ad.

Also in Oswego, running a hotel called the Doolittle House, was a flashy gentleman named Charles Frederick Blish. It was said that he and Delia Betts met about 1886. Blish was born in 1845 in Watertown, Jefferson County, New York. He had lived in Brooklyn until about 1885, when he went up to Oswego. In Brooklyn Blish had been steward of another hotel, the Pierrepont House.

Delia Betts' father, Benjamin T. Carman, told the Brooklyn Daily Eagle that his daughter and Mr. Blish were merely friends, and that her marriage to Harry Betts had been a difficult and painful experience. The latter sounds, from the evidence, to be quite true. And the former - also from the evidence - sounds much less likely.

Perhaps Blish and Delia started as friends, but by 1889 they were openly travelling together in Europe. In the next installment of the case, we'll look at the very interesting and detailed statement given to the Eagle by Delia's father. We'll also look at something that he did not have access to (and we do): the passport applications made by Blish and Delia.

In Delia's passport application, there is evidence to support a mysterious offhand statement made in one of the many articles about this case: to wit, that Benjamin T. Carman was not, in fact, Delia's father.


[A full list of sources will be given at the end of the Peekskill series.]


Image of Oswego, New York from the Library of Congress American Memory Collection.