Bathsheba Spooner was the daughter of Timothy Ruggles, a general in the French and Indian War, president of the Stamp Act Congress, Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, and a leading loyalist in Massachusetts during the Revolutionary War; the epitome of upper class.

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Like her father, Bathsheba was smart, strong-willed, and a staunch British loyalist. Forced to marry a man she did not love, Bathsheba withstood her husband’s abuse for years until a young Continental soldier entered her life. But when this well-heeled mother of three small children discovered she was pregnant with the soldier’s child, her thoughts quickly turned to murder.

Based on a true story, the events that follow Bathsheba’s life, her decisions, and her ultimate demise will show that Bathsheba Spooner was, in fact, Unlike Any Other.

 

When the prisoners, three men and a woman, arrived at the place of execution under the harsh summer sun of a July day, they stared at the gallows, knowing their mortal end would happen within minutes. Mounting the stairs, they stood on the scaffold.

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The ropes were hauled up, thrown over the thick oak beam, and secured. As the sheriff adjusted the nooses around the prisoners’ necks, towering black clouds built dark and fast in the western sky. Booming thunder rolled through the sky and broke the silence of the solemn proceeding. One of the men, a young Continental soldier, stood with his head bowed and said a prayer, neither mumbled nor choked with emotion, but aloud with deep sincerity and conviction. He looked up and saw his parents near the scaffold. His mother gripped her husband’s arm, wide-eyed and overwhelmed with grief. They would soon claim the body of their youngest of six sons.

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The two other men, British prisoners of war, did not look at the crowd. They were far from their homeland on the other side of an ocean; no one here would care about their death. The sheriff put his hand on the lever to drop the platform, then hesitated, staring at the blackening sky, a terrific thunderstorm about to unleash Nature’s fury. 

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People shrieked and cowered as lightning splintered the sky. The thunder exploded again and again, louder and louder as the moment came for the platform to drop and the prisoners to die. The storm burst upon them with such a terrible and violent ferocity it was as if God Himself was furious with the appalling act of vengeance that was about to take place.