Herbert Blanchard, the Savoy (Mass.) murderer, is a very bad egg. He began by threatening his schoolmaster, married at seventeen and hammered his girl-wife until she got a divorce, was hunted out of California as a thief, enlisted in the Mexican army and deserted, leaving a wife and child, went to France to complete his criminal education and returned to Savoy to do murder and qualify himself for the gallows.

—The Hartford Courant, August 21, 1877

So went the news stories published in the wake of the July 1877 shooting outside a tiny rural church in the mountainous and remote town of Savoy, Massachusetts. It’s quite a story, and some of it is actually true.

In my forthcoming book, The Many Wives of Herbert Blanchard, I take a deep dive into the life and times of my first cousin, three times removed, unpacking the tall tales from the truth, tracing the journey of his brief and passionate life, and exploring the violence and desperation that accompanied the lives of people whom history forgets.