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Throughout the pages of time, most of the stories that have been saved or discovered about lighthouse keepers are of a positive nature, but sadly some are not. Such is the case of Henry C. Fanning, who, from August 7, 1889 to October of that year, served as the 1st assistant lighthouse keeper at the Statue of Liberty Lighthouse in New York.
Born in October of 1859 in Utica, New York, Henry Fanning, at the age of 19 in 1879 married a woman named Ellen Riley. Before long, they were the parents of two children.
Sometime in 1889, Henry Fanning became infatuated with a lady named Emily Taylor, who was also married with two children. Soon Emily Taylor fell under Fanning’s advances, and an affair ensued between the two lovers. Their torrid love affair soon became public knowledge, and Emily Taylor’s husband, who became distraught over his wife’s unfaithfulness, committed suicide on June 15, 1889.
This terrible tragedy did not stop the actions of the shameless couple and they continued the affair. On August 7, 1889, exactly 100 years to the day when Congress declared that all lighthouses came under the jurisdiction of the federal government, Henry Fanning was able to secure the position of 1st assistant lighthouse keeper at the Statue of Liberty, a job that paid $800 per year and came with free housing. It is highly likely that Emily Taylor came out to the island to visit him on numerous occasions, and Fanning probably thought that she and her two children could eventually live with him there. But the Lighthouse Service put a kibosh to his plans. He was apparently told, in no uncertain terms, that a woman who was not his wife would not be allowed to live with him in government housing. Apparently, this did not sit well with Fanning, and in October of 1889, he quit the Lighthouse Service and went back to the city where he moved in with Emily Taylor, abandoning his wife and two children.
However, their new life together was far from perfect. Reportedly, Henry Fanning was an extremely controlling and sometimes abusive person. His actions caused Emily to eventually leave him. She moved into an apartment on Third Avenue in New York where she took in laundry to support herself and her two children. However, according to newspaper accounts, in spite of his cruelty and ongoing threats, Emily continued to have connubial visits with him.
During this time, Henry Fanning must have used his persuasive ways to also have occasional hook ups with his wife, as the couple had two more children. For a short time, Fanning and his wife even got back together and lived at his mother’s house. But that did not last long. So that Fanning could have unquestionable time to have hook-ups with Emily Taylor, he took a room with a roommate at the Hotel Harlem.
One night when Emily Taylor returned home from one of her trysts with Fanning, she had a gash on her neck. She told her good friend and neighbor Fanny McCarthy that an argument took place about her wanting to end the relationship, and Fanning had become highly agitated and he took out a pocket knife, held it to her throat and said, “Well Emma, you better say your prayers. Your time has come.” She pleaded with him to let her go and he said, “I’ll let you go this time, but I’ll have your blood yet!”
Why she would ever agree to see Fanning again is anyone’s guess, especially after her last altercation with him. But she did.
As Emily Taylor left her apartment on that fateful Saturday night of April 18, 1891 to meet Henry Fanning, she told her neighbor Mrs. McCarthy, “Goodbye Fanny. God bless you. You may never see me again!” No one witnessed what happened later that night but an African American man, strolling in the area where Emily had told her neighbor she would be meeting Fanning, found her bleeding from a gash in her throat. Being dark and late at night, with no one around to help, the man got her inside a nearby drug store where she bled to death by the time help arrived.
Fanning returned to his room at the Hotel Harlem where he boasted to his roommate what he had done. The roommate fled and called the police, who promptly showed up and took Fanning into custody.
Among the items found by the police in Fanning’s room was a shirt with blood on it that Fanning had been attempting to wash out and a blood stained razor blade.
In an attempt to learn more about the life of Henry Fanning, a reporter for The New York World newspaper visited his parents. His mother placed some of the blame on Fanning’s wife. She told the reporter, “All the trouble is due to Henry’s unfortunate marriage. He married Miss Riley when he was nineteen years old. He is thirty-two now. She had a violent temper and drank sometimes. They had four children. Two are dead, one is in the hospital and I have his ten-year-old boy living with me. Henry and his wife lived here with me for a while, but two years ago she moved back to live with her father.” Referring to his mental state, his mother said, “Whenever he has stayed away long I’ve been fearful that he had committed suicide. He was so unhappy. I never heard of this woman, Emily Taylor.”
The reporter also learned that, although Fanning was an unemployed engineer, he was also in the New York National Guard and worked out of the Ninth Regiment Armory and he called the roll for his company on weekly drills. He was well-liked and respected among his comrades. Reportedly, immediately after the murder, Fanning shaved off his long-time mustache, perhaps in a planned effort to hide his identity while in a planned flight from the law.
In spite of the overwhelming prosecution evidence against him, Fanning pleaded not guilty at his trial. Part of his planned defense was going to be that he was with his wife at the time of his lover’s murder, something that shocked the public. The Evening World newspaper on June 10, 1891 wrote, “Would the sweet-faced little mother of his two pretty babes, spurned and dishonored by this lack principled husband and father corroborate his story on the witness stand?”
The newspaper went on to report, “The possibility of witnessing the spectacle of such wifely devotion brought the brownstone court house enough people to thrice fill the chamber.” Everyone was shocked at how they believed that Fanning could manipulate his wife into testifying for him, in spite of the overwhelming evidence against him. The newspaper wrote, “To cap the climax, this little creature, that licks the hand of the man who has cursed her life and dishonored her and their children,” did in fact testify that Fanning was with her at the time of the murder.
That evening’s second edition of the newspaper reported the following about the closing arguments of the trial by Fanning’s lawyer. “Fanning listened to the plea of his lawyer that his life might be spared with cool, dispassionate indifference. His white-haired father sat behind him watching the effect of the lawyer’s remarks on the jury and the little wife by herself in the corner of the courtroom made the scene remindful of the chamber of heavy sickness where the shadow of death seems to be almost enveloping the patient.”
The trial itself was short, and Judge Martine sentenced Henry C. Fanning to death by the electric chair with the electrocution to take place at New York’s Sing Sing Prison.
But, Henry Fanning’s fate again took a bizarre turn when, at the risk of his own life, he helped guards at Sing Sing Prison quell a prison riot. As a reward for his actions that saved the lives of some of the guards, on May 13, 1892, New York’s Governor Roswell P. Flower commuted Fanning’s sentence from death to 20-years-to-life.
After being released from prison, sometime after 1910, Fanning had no trouble finding another woman to live with. But perhaps he had learned nothing from his 20 some years in prison for murdering his former lover. Perhaps his jealousy and temperament again got out of control, but this time things took a different turn.
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper in its May 18, 1916 edition reported that Henry C. Fanning, “today ended his life by shooting himself in the temple in his home at 43 Bergen Street. In a letter to his daughter Grace, he stated that he had ended his life because he could not bear to be separated from Lydia Jacobson, the woman with whom he boarded at the Bergen Street address and who was planning to break up their home.”
This is a sad ending for someone who, even briefly, served in the United States Lighthouse Service. Perhaps if he had remained a lighthouse keeper, this story might have had a more positive ending.
This story appeared in the
Jan/Feb 2019 edition of Lighthouse Digest Magazine. The print edition contains more stories than our internet edition, and each story generally contains more photographs - often many more - in the print edition. For subscription information about the print edition, click here.
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