Dr. Horace Pope, a Detroit physician, never knew what hit him.
The first axe blow sliced off the top of his scalp and sprinkled the dark, green patterned wallpaper in his den with crimson dots. The second blow bit into the skull so deep that the killer had to brace his leg against the back of Pope’s chair to yank out the blade. Dr. Pope slumped forward and fell face-first onto the hardwood floor. He body trembled with convulsions as the killer lifted the hatchet above his head and slammed it into the bloody mass a third time.
It was a brutal headline crime that led to one of the most sensational murder trials in Wayne County’s bloodstained history.
*****
Left: Nellie Pope, c. 1895. Unknown photographer.
Right: Nellie Pope, c. 1928. Unknown photographer.
Detroit resident Nellie W. Pope, at six foot four and two-hundred and fifty pounds, had a certain Amazonian beauty that William Brusseau found irresistible. The barber, a humble man, quickly fell under her spell. Persuaded by periodic sexual favors, Brusseau became putty in the Nellie’s powerful hands. She tested his loyalty by entrusting him with a few personal papers and then sending a friend to tempt him into selling the blackmail fodder. He passed the test by refusing to sell.
Time and again, he proved that he would do anything for his Amazonian queen, including murder. Spurned by semi-fictitious stories of her husband’s heavy-handedness, Brusseau agreed to do away with Dr. Horace Pope so Nellie could obtain Horace’s $15,000 life insurance.
Thirty-five-year-old Nellie was born in Canada in 1860. She married dentist Dr. Horace Pope. The couple had a daughter, Margaret, in 1886. A second daughter, Nellie, died in childbirth, in 1893. Two years later, the couple’s relationship was on the rocks.
Dr. Pope’s fatal moment came on February 2, 1895.
Hatchet in hand, Brusseau tiptoed behind Dr. Pope as he sat in a chair and swung the blade with such force that the blow knocked off the top of the unsuspecting man’s cranium. Brusseau continued to hack away at the doctor’s skull until the head was nothing more than a bag of skin containing shattered shards of skull.
Nellie stood, motionless, and watched—a fact that convinced police she had to have conspired with Brusseau.
Once collared, Brusseau tried to slip his neck out of the noose by claiming self-defense, that Dr. Pope brought on his own death when he physically accosted his wife’s lover—a spurious claim contradicted by the forensic evidence that proved the axe blows came from behind while the victim sat in a chair.
Brusseau pled guilty, throwing himself on the mercy of the court. He admitted murdering Dr. Pope to obtain the insurance money because, he said, Nellie had hypnotized him. He received 25 years in the slammer; Nellie, life at hard labor.
Upon hearing the sentence, the characteristically histrionic Pope slipped into character as the unhinged convict and went into hysterics. Back in her jail cell, officers gave her several shots of whiskey spiked with laudanum.
As customary, a train took Nellie Pope to the State prison at Jackson for processing, after which she would return to serve her sentence inside the Detroit House of Correction—Michigan’s only facility for women serving long sentences. When she arrived in Jackson, she was nearly comatose from the large amount of opium and alcohol she had consumed.
A search of Nellie Pope’s corset revealed two boxes containing 100 capsules of opium that someone had smuggled to her in Detroit, possibly to help her escape her life sentence.
A few years later, Pope tried to escape her life sentence by feigning insanity. She told Captain Joe Nicholson that a ghost was harassing her.
Nicholson described the situation. “She commenced to tell that it was the doctor that she saw; said that he came every night and stood and looked at her until she nearly died of fright.”
“’Oh, well, Nellie,’ said I, ‘If that’s the case, I can’t do anything for you. Anybody that bars and bolts will keep I can relieve you of but when it comes to ghosts, I’m all at sea. I have no pull with them. Besides, if the doctor chooses to come and visit you, and I could help him along any, I should feel it my duty to do so. No, Nellie, I can’t bar out the doctor’s ghost.’”
The ghost, Nicholson explained to the press, eventually stopped harassing his most famous inmate. “She worked the ghost game for some little time, but finally gave it up. If the doctor’s spirit still glares at her in the dead watches of the night, I am not annoyed with any more recitals of it.”
Nellie Pope spent the next twenty years behind the palatial façade of the old Detroit House of Correction, where she worked carding buttons in the prison factory shops. Throughout her incarceration, Nellie maintained her innocence and constantly lobbied for her freedom.
She confounded prison authorities with constant misbehavior, from small-scale scraps to larger brawls with fellow inmates. With her sizable physical stature and a quick-temper, she was an imposing, and frightening, figure in the women’s wing.
At first, the warden put her to work in the prison shops alongside the rest of the female inmates. But she constantly accused other prisoners of conspiring against her; the resultant battles led to work stoppages, so the warden isolated her as much as possible.
She even disrupted a religious ceremony in the chapel when she leapt from the balcony onto the male inmates worshiping on the ground level.
And of course, there was the ghost she complained about to Nicholson.
While ghosts haunted Nellie in Detroit, “Billy” Brusseau toiled at hard labor in Jackson. Before he died in 1916, Brusseau reportedly made a deathbed confession during which he shouldered the entire responsibility for the axe murder. His attempts to absolve Nellie Pope did not fall onto deaf ears.
On January 1, 1917, (on his last official day in office) Michigan Governor Woodbridge Ferris gave Nellie Pope a late Christmas present in the form of a parole. Destitute, she relied on the Salvation Army for survival, living there for the next dozen years.
Prison authorities, and fellow convicts, breathed a big sigh of relief as Nellie, accompanied by noted prison reformers Mr. and Mrs. Robert Ogg (who also took convicted serial poisoner Mary McKnight under their wing), wobbled out of the old Detroit House of Correction.
“I want a chance to be good,” she told a curious reporter. “I want the public to give me a chance. I want fair treatment. I am innocent of the crime for which I have spent a long time in prison. And it has been a long time—a long, long time.”
She did not reunite with Margaret, who was five when court bailiffs took her, sobbing, from her mother’s arms after Judge Chapman read the sentence. Following the trial, Margaret was adopted, changed her name, and essentially ceased to be Nellie’s daughter. She reportedly resented her mother for robbing her of a family and never visited Nellie in the House of Correction. At the time of her birth mother’s release, she was twenty-seven, married, and a mother.
Governor Fred W. Green issued Nellie Pope a full pardon in 1928—an official exoneration that wiped away her thirty-three-year-old conviction. She was free and no longer a murderess, at least on paper.
She vowed to let Margaret alone. “She is married, happy, and has children of her own. Our lives must stay far apart.”
Nellie W. Pope, at one time the most infamous murderess in Detroit history, died in May 1929 at the age of sixty-nine and was interred in Woodlawn Cemetery. Thirty years earlier, the press described her as a sinister, ugly ogre. The Detroit Free Press was much gentler in their postmortem description: “Wrapped in the silent majesty of death, the face of the once-beautiful Nellie Pope showed a broad brow, high-bridged aquiline nose, and firm chin, still features of strength.”
Was she guilty? The questioned lingered for a while in the wake of Nellie Pope’s death. Brusseau swung the axe, but the evidence indicates that Nellie stood by and watched. Up until his death Brusseau always maintained that Nellie conspired with him, at one point even accusing her of hypnotizing her. His testimony in large part convicted her. Brusseau’s deathbed confession may have been motivated by a guilty conscience, but he may also been trying to do a peri-mortem mitzvah for his former flame.
At the time of the crime, it was considered a given that the motive for the murder was Dr. Pope’s rather large life insurance policy. Typically, the next of kin would receive the insurance pay-out. The person who benefitted most would have been…Nellie Pope.
On the other hand, Nellie Pope never wavered in her claim of innocence. Until her last breath, Nellie Pope said she had nothing whatever to do with her husband’s murder.
All that remains to determine her guilt or innocence, after the tides of time has washed away the hard evidence, is the word of two convicted slayers.
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