Last Woman Hanged: Roxalana Druse

Cold-blooded murder or abused wife, justified murder?

Seven years before Lizzie Borden went on trial accused of the axe murders of her parents, a small community in Upstate New York reeled in horror of the brutal slaying of William Druse. In January of 1885, authorities arrested Roxalana Druse of the town of Warren and charged her with the axe murder of her husband. The crime shocked the quiet, rural community and the subsequent trial created shock waves all the way to the capitol steps in Albany.

The Roxalana Druse case combined elements of amateur sleuthing, ground-breaking forensics and psychological profiling. Set against the backdrop of emerging suffragette movement, the trial captivated the public's imagination.

Was she an abused woman trapped in a loveless marriage who killed her husband in self-defense? Or was her case doomed from the start by an unsympathetic press and later by an all-male jury?

On February 28, 1887, Roxalana Druse became the last woman hanged in the state of New York. Overshadowed by the Gillette-Brown case that inspired the novel, An American Tragedy, the facts surrounding the social and legal history of the Druse case have been largely forgotten until now.