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Ostracized
At about the same time, in the winter of 1858, “dark and suspicious” rumors regarding “improper intimacy” between Mollie Shreves and James Johnson began to circulate. Mollie’s female friends stopped their visits and she found herself no longer welcome in their homes or even recognized on the street.
But according to the chronicler, she appeared "perfectly infatuated with the fiend who had wrought her ruin, and was so lost to all sense of shame and female delicacy as to usurp the nuptial bed of her aunt; and that, too, in her presence.”
At the trial, Mr. Corbin, a boarder in the Johnson house in 1856 and 1857, testified that he had seen Johnson in bed with Miss Shreve at different times: “Mrs. Johnson was usually in a trundle bed with the children, Mr. Johnson and Miss Shreve lying in the other bed—the big bed.”
Evidence indicates that it was during this winter when a child, “the germinating fruit of a guilty passion .’’ was born to Mollie. Shreve. According to the author of the booklet, Johnson confessed after his trial that the birth occurred in his home and that he buried the baby boy near the house.
“A party of gentlemen” dispatched to search found the remains of an infant in a shallow hole, the body covered with a strip of chestnut bark.
Johnson denied positively ever having improper intimacy with his wife’s niece and said she was pregnant when she came to his w„..,„ _:
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