Uncovering Vermont's most notorious murder trial

The Vermont Historical Society will publish a new book in September: Winters' Time: A Secret Pledge, a Severed Head, and the Murder That Brought America's Most Famous Lawyer to Vermont. It's a short, gripping read: a female executive of a local factory named Cecelia Gullivan was brutally murdered in Windsor in the 1920s, and a fellow employee, John Winters, was quickly arrested for the crime.

The case was entirely circumstantial – and involved Gullivan's severed head– but he was convicted for murder. The case was appealed, and this is where it gets interesting: decades before, a Dartmouth student named Paul Darrow was involved in a tragic accident that saw the death of a five-year-old. He told the grieving parents that if there was anything he or his family could do, they would do it. As it turns out, his father was Clarence Darrow, who would become one of the most famous defense lawyers in the country. You've probably heard of him: he was the defense attorney in the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925.

After Winters' conviction, Darrow was speaking at Dartmouth and received a letter: it was the mother, calling in the favor. Darrow agreed to take on the man's appeal to the Vermont Supreme Court.

The book is written by Jeffrey L. Amestoy, the former Vermont Attorney General (1985-1997) and Chief Justice of the Vermont Supreme Court (1997-2004), who has spent years researching a fascinating and dramatic episode of Vermont’s history. (He's also the justice who authored the landmark decision that found same-sex couples have the same rights as married ones here in Vermont, which ultimately led to the state's Civil Unions law.)

The book is now available to preorder from our bookstore, and we'll begin shipping it in September.  

In the meantime, I sat down with Amestoy in my office to chat about his career and what led him to dive into the story of the trial, Winters, and Darrow.  

Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your background?

My name is Jeff Amestoy and I’m a native of Rutland, Vermont. I was brought up here before I left the state when I was 14 and when my parents came back in the early '70s, and after getting a law degree, I returned and worked as an assistant attorney general under then-Attorney General Jim Jeffords. I spent some years as a prosecutor in that office and in 1984, after having serving as the urban industry commissioner under Governor Stelling, I ran for Vermont Attorney General. I was elected in 1985 and was elected reelected six times after that.

In 1997, Governor Howard Dean appointed me to the Supreme Court, and I was Chief Justice of the Vermont Supreme Court for eight years. Probably most noteworthy during our time was addressing the issue of same-sex marriage, which (particularly before the turn of the century) was an extraordinarily divisive issue. We issued an opinion, Baker v Vermont, in which we found that constitutionally, there is a right to all the privileges and responsibilities of marriage in Vermont. That case then went to Vermont eventually becoming the first state in the Union to adopt same-sex marriage by legislation, and we were the first court in the country to recognize the same-sex relationships. So that was an extraordinary part of my own time on the court.

Following that, Harvard University invited me to come down as a fellow at their under two programs, both their institute of politics. We did seminars on same-sex marriage, law and politics, and then I was asked to stay on as a fellow at the Center for Public Leadership, where I worked for primarily on issues of state judicial leadership. While still at Harvard, I wrote a book, Slavish Shore: The Odyssey of Richard Henry Dana Jr. which was published by Harvard University Press in 2015. That was my first endeavor into living in the archives.

You’re publishing a new book with the Vermont Historical Society, Winters’ Time. Can you tell me about the story? 

Winters’ Time is about one of the most notorious murders and sensational trials in the history of Vermont. It was a murder that occurred in November 1926 in Windsor, Vermont, and the victim was a woman named Cecelia Gullivan, who was a prominent executive with the Cone Automated Machine Company. She was the highest-ranking female executive in Vermont, which was very unusual in the profession at that time. The machine tool industry, which was revolutionizing the American industry, was an almost solely-dominated male culture. So her murder was front page news, not only in Vermont, but throughout much of the east and really all over the country.

The governor appointed a special prosecutor, and there was an all-out effort to look for who they thought might be the murderer, and they arrested a man named John Winters. The title of this book comes from his last name, because it is a story not only of him, but really of Vermont in the roaring ‘20s. Calvin Coolidge was president and Coolidge prosperity was running at great speed. Windsor was one of the capitals of the world in terms of its innovation. So this was a murder shocked everyone, and it became a notorious case in its own right.

When did you first hear about this story? 

It first came to my attention as a young lawyer in my very first appearance in court. I was waiting very nervously in the Windsor County courthouse lawyer's room and there was a picture on the wall of a number of folks standing in the courtroom. I asked one of the other lawyers about it, and he said that it was the most famous murder trial in Vermont, and that piqued my interest.

Probably two or three years later, I was researching a case as an Assistant Attorney General, and I found the State versus Winters case that had been appealed to the Vermont Supreme Court. When I read who participated in the case, I was astounded to read that Clarence Darrow represented the defendant.

Most readers might know Darrow for his role as defense attorney for the Scopes Monkey Trial, but he was a much bigger figure than that, right?  

Darrow was the most famous lawyer in the country in the 1920s and his fame was much greater than just from the law. Along with figures such as Charles Lindbergh, Charlie Chaplin, and Babe Ruth, he probably one of the most recognized names of the era. He was an extraordinary trial lawyer, famous for his oppositions to death penalty, and famous for saving defendants from execution.

So the question was: what was he doing in Vermont? That led me to starting to look at this, and first thing that I found was that it was to repay a debt – a pledge that his son Paul had made. His son was a senior at Dartmouth College and was about to graduate in 1904, when he was involved in a tragic accident that killed a five-year-old. There was accident of a horse spooked by automobiles, which wasn’t uncommon at the time. Paul promised the mother that if anybody her family was ever in trouble, his dad, even then a famous lawyer, would come to the help the family.

Almost 25 years later, Clarence Darrow had announced his retirement, which was big news: there was an article in The New York Times about it. One month later he was at Dartmouth to give a lecture opposing capital punishment when a woman gave him a letter, which asked for his help: her nephew, John Winters, was on death row in Windsor Prison.

Winters had been convicted of the Cecelia Gullivan's murder, and she was now calling in this pledge. Clarence knew nothing about her, his son had never told him, but they were close enough that he immediately volunteered to represent Darrow for his appeal to the Vermont Supreme Court.

What do you think this story tells readers in 2025 about what Vermont was like during this era of history? 

Well, I think it's a glimpse into the roaring 20s, even in Vermont, and the issues that were part of the fabric of the country at the time. First of all, there was an extraordinary interest in murders all across the country, fanned by the so-called the Yellow Press. Hearst’s newspapers and other sensational publications were beginning to realize that the appetite for murder coverage was almost insatiable among the American public. You don't think of Vermont as being part of that, but of course, it was: Vermonters were just as interested in notorious murder cases as any place else.

When this happened, Vermonters were fixated on the trial. The case against Winters was entirely circumstantial, and many people thought that he was not the murderer. But when Darrow said in 1927 that he would represent Winters on appeal before the Vermont Supreme Court, it made for an extraordinary story for Vermont, and it reflects the fascination at the time with celebrity.

In a lot of ways, Darrow was really a celebrity, more than a lawyer. He was a great lawyer, but he was just an extraordinary celebrity, and of course, at the time, Vermont was at the confluence of events here. The murder took place 30 miles from Plymouth, where President Coolidge grew up and two years into his presidency, saw the national press covering the story, so I think it reflects part of the culture of the time through a Vermont prism. There was also prohibition, which was as unpopular in Vermont as it was in the rest of the country, and part of this case and trial relates to the use of alcohol.

And then of course, when you look at how cases were tried at the time, women were not allowed on Vermont juries (they wouldn’t be allowed until 1942), the evidence presented in trial, which included severed head of the victim, something that hadn't occurred any place in the history of Vermont, or any where else in the country, as far as I could determine.

So again, I think it's a reflection of the extent to which Vermont as a community, was caught up in the culture of the roaring '20s.

When you decided to start writing this as a book, how did you go about conducting the research to uncover this story?

There had been a little bit of work on it. Paul Gilles had written an article about it. But as with any books centers on Vermont, the best places to start were archives, both from the Vermont Historical Society and at the Vermont State Archives. I spent a fair amount of time there, and the find that made this a story that I could tell was the transcript of the trial. It’s in three volumes and is on file at the Vermont State Archives, and that gave me the ability to really build this story around the trial. Without the transcript, this could not have happened. There was also the publication of Darrow’s letters and a number of letters relate directly to this case, which were absolutely critical to my story.

Vermont newspapers from the trial were also very much part of the story because the coverage was so extensive. There’s also no shortage of books about Darrow and I did a fair amount of reading about the culture of the 1920s, which were all part of the story. I had great help from archivists, both from VHS and the state archives.

Thanks for reading. You can read the other interviews that I've conducted with the other authors that VHS has published:

• Mercedes de Guardiola, author of "Vermont for the Vermonters": The History of Eugenics in the Green Mountain State
• J. Kevin Graffagnino, author of Ira Allen: A Biography
• Garrett M. Graff, author of Life Became Very Blurry: An Oral History of COVID-19 in Vermont