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SAMPLE 1
Davey's parents, Solomon David (known simply as Dave) and Mary Ann Moore were both Irish immigrants who eked out a meager living on Dave's miner's wages. Married in Ireland and residents of Mine Hill for about ten years, Dave and Mary Ann fought regularly for any number or reasons, among them religion (Dave was protestant, or "Orange" in the parlance of the time; Mary Ann was a Catholic, or "Green"), politics and Mary Ann's chores around the house. These arguments often led to physical confrontations that would leave Mary Ann bruised and bleeding. Dave was a few years Mary Ann's senior, with light hair, small, quick eyes and a wide mouth with thin lips. She was fair-haired and stout but frail, and previous beatings at the hands of her husband had injured her to such an extent that she could walk only with the assistance of a cane. Young Davey spent many nights away from home, engaging in various boyhood adventures with his friends. Though he would later say that he was unafraid of his father, and that these nights spent away from home were unrelated to the violence in the household, one could easily understand why the young man would want to steer clear of his parents during their drinking sprees. As parents, Dave and Mary Ann Moore were inattentive at best and negligent at worst, at least by today's standards. Indeed, much of the time they would have had no idea where Davey was or what he was up to. He rarely attended school and could barely read. In fact, if anyone had asked him how old he was, he couldn't have given a straight answer. He might have been twelve or he might have been fifteen, he truly had no idea. But he was bright and intelligent and in this small town of a few hundred souls he was fairly well known.
One can imagine James and Davey having a brief conversation over the brew. They might have talked baseball. Thirty-two year old James Cox was the oldest of four brothers and two of the Cox boys had been members of the local team. Or they might have talked about recent mining accidents, as fatalities at the mines were so commonplace at the 22 iron mining locations scattered throughout town that barely a fortnight went by without news of further loss of life. Or they might have talked about that dreadful incident over in Dover just three weeks previous, when an Italian immigrant named Luigi Lusignani arrived in town to pick up his wife, Johanna Moosi, who was living with another man. The papers said Johanna was "a fallen woman," a practicing "woman of the Town" and her naive young husband wanted to take her back to New York City, where they had met and wed just a few months prior. But things turned sour and Luigi stabbed Johanna to death in broad daylight on the front porch of a shoe store on the corner of Blackwell and Warren streets. James and Davey could have chatted about all of these things, or they might not have talked about any of them. Davey remained at the Cox Hotel for an indeterminate amount of time. He had left home around 6:30 p.m., at about the same time that his parents were receiving a visitor, Tom Madden, a miner in his twenties (later described as "a lusty, vigorous daredevil fellow, and given to license") who had spent the holiday drinking at Terrence Connelly's, a local unlicensed bar and boarding house also popular with Davey's parents. Before leaving home, Davey told his mother that he was going out with some other boys, and Mary Ann told him that Tom Madden was going to stop by. Davey could tell that his mother was already intoxicated. As he stepped out the front door, Davey saw Madden approaching their home, also obviously intoxicated. Davey told his father that Madden was coming, and a short time later young Davey was on his way to the Cox Hotel.
By noon the following day, Davey would be in police custody, his father would be on the run from the law, and the semi-nude and partially-frozen body of his mother would be found beaten to death near a brook behind his home. Early on Friday morning, November 29th, the day after Thanksgiving, Tom Madden took a little "hair of the dog." Then he took a little more. He had passed out on the Moore's kitchen floor the previous evening and, he would later relate, his mother had come after a time and taken him home to bed. But his long bender continued almost as soon as he opened his eyes the next day. By noon he had already consumed a quart of liquor he had purchased from a Mrs. McGary, then went to Connelly's and bought a half-gallon of beer, which he promptly drank. Then on to the tavern at the Cox Hotel, where he put a couple of drinks away before heading to an uncle's home for about a week. When Tom Madden left the Cox Hotel that afternoon, James Cox would have had no way of knowing that the man to whom he had just served drinks would, within days, have an accusation of battery and rape lodged against him. Neither would Cox have known that Madden's name would soon appear in newspapers across the Northeastern United States in connection with one of the most brutal murders to occur in the history of the state of New Jersey. No, he had no way of knowing any of this. But he was about to find out. |
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When
young Davey Moore stepped into the tavern at the Cox Hotel that cold
Thanksgiving evening, he had no way of knowing that his life was
about to change forever. For Davey, the night was to be spent in a
typically unsupervised fashion, running around with his pals while
his mother and father got drunk at a local boarding house or in their
own two-room home in a miner's shantytown a short distance from the
hotel. Though the iron mines that employed Davey's father were closed
for Thanksgiving, on this most American of holidays the Moore
household was unlikely to have been the scene of much feasting or celebration.
At
the Cox Hotel Davey likely encountered James Cox, the hotel's
proprietor. If there was a state-mandated drinking age at the time,
it was largely unenforced and James would have paid it little heed.
Despite his obviously tender years, if young Davey had plunked down a
few cents for some Jersey Lightning -- the potent, apple-derived
intoxicant so popular at the time -- James probably would have served
some up for the boy.
Davey
spent the rest of the night running around with his pals. After
leaving the hotel, he went to a store in town, perhaps the shop owned
by Joseph Harvey across the street from the Cox Hotel. He spent a
good deal of time at Connelly's, that same unlicensed bar and
boarding house at which his parents and Tom Madden were regulars.
Davey was friendly with the Connellys' son, James, and he often spent
the night at James' house. He also spent part of the night sleeping
in a hay wagon.