Mark Twain - MURDERER!!!

Tuesday, December 29, 2015

Mark Twain – MURDERER!

Mark Twain may be the most famous American ever to be accused of murder (albeit briefly), all over an umbrella.
On May 18, 1875, in Hartford, Connecticut, Mark Twain and a record crowd of 10,000 fans watched their undefeated Hartford Dark Blues (12-0) lose to the undefeated Boston Red Stockings (16-0) by a convincing score of 10-5.

Mark Twain lost an umbrella at the game; stolen, he said, by a small boy. He wanted it back - badly; he offered $5 for return of the umbrella and $200 for the boy - dead, not alive:

TWO HUNDRED AND FIVE DOLLARS REWARD

At the great baseball match on Tuesday, while I was engaged in hurrahing, a small boy walked off with an English-made brown silk UMBRELLA belonging to me and forgot to bring it back. I will pay $5 for the return of that umbrella in good condition to my home on Farmington Avenue. I do not want the boy (in an active state) but will pay two hundred dollars for his remains. SAMUEL L. CLEMENS[i]
As a well-known humorist, few readers would have taken his call for blood seriously – that is, until a corpse turned up in his home:
Mark Twain’s joking advertisement for the body of the boy who stole his umbrella at a baseball match recoiled rather heavily upon him. Some medical student left a “case” – the corpse of a boy – at his house, and Mark was thought to have been his murderer until the janitor of the medical college claimed the “subject.”[ii]
If the story had received more notoriety, he might have said something like, “Reports of my guilt are greatly exaggerated.”

I did not write this blog from Tuesday, December 29, 2015. I researched and cannot find who posted it. The content is from a NY Times article on March 14, 2010. The retelling of a story from 145 years ago, relating to Mark Twain hard to pass-up

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/sports/baseball/14twain.html?_r=1