It was Rebecca s son Thomas who first realized the victim s identity. His eyes were drawn to the victim s head and aided by the flickering light of a candle he clapt his hands and cryed out Oh Lord it is my mother. James Moills a servant of Cornell... described Rebecca lying on the floore with fire about Her from her Lower parts neare to the Armepits. He recognized her only by her shoes. --from Killed Strangely On a winter s evening in 1673 tragedy descended on the respectable Rhode Island household of Thomas Cornell. His 73-year-old mother Rebecca was found close to her bedroom s large fireplace dead and badly burned. The legal owner of the Cornells hundred acres along Narragansett Bay Rebecca shared her home with Thomas and his family a servant and a lodger. A coroner s panel initially declared her death an Unhappie Accident but before summer arrived a dark web of events--rumors of domestic abuse allusions to witchcraft even the testimony of Rebecca s ghost through her brother--resulted in Thomas s trial for matricide. Such were the ambiguities of the case that others would be tried for the murder as well. Rebecca is a direct ancestor of Cornell University s founder Ezra Cornell. Elaine Forman Crane tells the compelling story of Rebecca s death and its aftermath vividly depicting the world in which she lived. That world included a legal system where jurors were expected to be familiar with the defendant and case before the trial even began. Rebecca s strange death was an event of cataclysmic proportions affecting not only her own community but neighboring towns as well. The documents from Thomas s trial provide a rare glimpse into seventeenth-century life. Crane writes Instead of the harmony and respect that sermon literature laws and a hierarchical/patriarchal society attempted to impose evidence illustrates filial insolence generational conflict disrespect toward the elderly power plays between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law [and] adult dependence on (and resentment of) aging parents who clung to purse strings. Yet even at a distance of more than three hundred years Rebecca Cornell s story is poignantly familiar. Her complaints of domestic abuse Crane says went largely unheeded by friends and neighbors until at last their complacency was shattered by her terrible death.