Excerpt from zine three: The Pocomoke Tragedy

…The shooting happened in Worcester County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. These days, the area is mostly known for Ocean City, with its beaches and boardwalks, where college kids go to get blackout drunk and seagulls go to live like kings on discarded french fries. But this was before any of that–before Ocean City was much of anything. In the 1870s, Worcester County was entirely rural, dotted with small towns like Pocomoke City. 

There lived 20-year old Lillian Duer and her “intimate friend,” 18-year-old Ella Hearn. Both were well-liked, young, middle-class white women, and they were well known to be extremely close. Ever since the Hearns had moved to town four years prior, the two had been seen together nearly every day, walking arm-in-arm or hand-in-hand. And it was there that on November 5, 1878, in the entryway to the Hearn family home, Lillian raised her pistol, aimed at Ella, and shot.

The bullet lodged in Ella’s upper jaw. The Hearns’ family doctor arrived, but could not remove the bullet because it caused Ella immense pain and the doctor was concerned over sedating a frail young girl with a delicate constitution. (Ella was 18, described as “slightly stout,” and in good health. Well, other than having just been shot). Instead, he cleaned the wound and stitched it up without removing the bullet.

Papers treated it as a tragic accident, making sure to give all the gory details. Articles described the bloody aftermath, underlining what the writers all saw as a fatal mistake: letting women have guns. Newspapers poked fun at how, in what they thought of as the rural South, people loved their guns so much that they even let young girls (Lillian was 20) carry pistols. 

Ella Hearn survived for a surprising 31 days following the shooting. At first, she seemed to be recovering, but after about a week, her condition began to deteriorate. She wavered between being awake and lucid, while other times wild and delirious. She frequently complained of the pain in her jaw–the bullet was never removed–and to help, the doctor had prescribed chloral hydrate, a painkiller and sedative. This helped alleviate the pain, but her condition continued to decline. 

As Ella’s condition deteriorated, her father, Jason Hearn, made a shocking disclosure: Ella had told him that Lillian had shot her intentionally, jealous that she was getting close to another young woman named Ella Foster. What he didn’t mention was that his daughter had handed her family a stack of Lillian’s love letters proposing marriage, which were so scandalous she begged them to burn the messages after reading (which they did, much to the chagrin of both prosecutors and future queer historians). 

After Ella passed on December 6, Jason Hearn asked town officials to convene a ‘coroner’s jury,’ an assembly of doctors who would determine whether Lillian could be held liable for Ella’s death. They convened and held that Ella was killed by “nervous depression” caused by the shooting (more on that later). Lillian was put under $2500 bail and the case went to the Worcester County courthouse in Snow Hill to be heard by the grand jury the following May.

In Baltimore, a newspaper had caught notice of all this and sent a journalist to town, and on December 12, 1878, the Baltimore Evening Bulletin ran the story alongside interviews with Jason Hearn and Lillian. The next day, it was published in four major New York papers. Within a week, it was covered by most major newspapers in the country…