In History: An 1870 New Year's Double Murder

An otherwise sleepy community made famous by Washington Irving was rocked on New Year's Day with the news that two of its citizens were brutally murdered.

Mrs. Isaac Van Wart Buckhout, described as a woman of culture, class and music, was found dead in her home on Sleepy Hollow Road near the banks of the Pocantico River, as was her guest Alfred Rendall, a wholesale liquor dealer in NYC. Seriously wounded was Rendall's son Charles, whose eye was shot out and face disfigured. Alfred was fatally shot in the head; examiners say the wife was killed by being hit in the face with the same rifle. 

Reports have it that the husband was jealous, perhaps insane, and assumed his wife was orchestrating an affair with the Randall son. Buckhout was eventually hanged and laid to rest in Chappaqua. The murdered remain in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, while the son went on to live another 34 years and eventually join them in our local cemetery. 

Read these various historic articles, supplied by local historian Jim Logan of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, on the murder that shocked Sleepy Hollow on the first day of 1870.

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