In the early months of 1780, while the American Revolution still raged and the young nation struggled to define itself, a crime of unprecedented horror unfolded in the quiet hills of western Connecticut. On the night of February 3, a nineteen-year-old former Continental Army soldier named Barnett Davenport committed what historians now recognize as the first documented mass murder in United States history.

In the untamed wilderness of late eighteenth-centuryAmerica, where the rule of law barely reached beyond scattered frontier settlements, two men carved a bloody path through the territories of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Illinois. Micajah "Big" Harpe and Wiley "Little" Harpe are often referred to as cousins. However, their exact familial relationship remains debated by historians, and they have earned thegrim distinction of being considered America's first serial killers. Between 1798 and 1799, these two men terrorized the frontier with acts of violence so brutal and seemingly purposeless that they shocked even the hardened settlersof the American borderlands.

On July 2, 1778, Bathsheba Spooner became the first woman executed in the newly independent United States of America. Her death by hanging in Worcester, Massachusetts, marked a dark chapter in Revolutionary War-era justice and sparked debates about capital punishment, pregnancy, and the rights of the accused that would echo through American legal history for generations to come.