Grace Brown

Grace Mae Brown (March 20, 1886 – July 11, 1906) was an American skirt factory worker whose murder caused a nationwide sensation, and whose life inspired the fictional character Roberta Alden in the Theodore Dreiser novel, An American Tragedy, as well as the Jennifer Donnelly novel, A Northern Light. Shelley Winters was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the role inspired by Grace Brown (with the name changed to 'Alice Tripp') in the film A Place in the Sun. The facts of the real murder are laid out in the two non-fiction books: Adirondack Tragedy: The Gillette Murder Case of 1906, written by Joseph W. Brownell and Patricia A. Wawrzaszek, and Murder in the Adirondacks: An American Tragedy Revisited, by Craig Brandon.

Brown grew up in South Otselic, New York, the daughter of a successful Chenango County farmer. She was reportedly given the nickname "Billy" because of her love of the contemporary hit song Won't You Come Home Bill Bailey; Brown often signed her love letters "The Kid," after the Western outlaw Billy the Kid. She attended grammar school in the village, and became close friends with the teacher, Maud Kenyon Crumb, and her husband. In 1904, she moved to nearby Cortland to live with a married sister, and went to work at the Gillette Skirt Company.

Chester Gillette, the company owner's nephew, moved to Cortland in 1905 and began a romantic and eventually sexual relationship with Brown. In the spring of 1906, Brown realized she was pregnant and she returned to her parents in South Otselic. Gillette agreed to take her away to the Adirondacks, apparently promising marriage—but because Brown packed her entire wardrobe for the trip while Gillette packed just a small suitcase, some 21st-century historians conjecture that Gillette had merely promised to take Brown to a home for unwed mothers in upstate New York. Gillette and Brown went by train and coach to Big Moose in Herkimer County, New York.

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