* July 2 – Bathsheba Spooner, American murderer ( b. c. 1746 )

* Bathsheba Spooner, criminal

Bathsheba Ruggles Spooner ( February 15, 1746 – July 2, 1778 ) was the first woman to be executed in the United States by Americans rather than the British.

The daughter of a prominent Colonial American lawyer, justice and military officer, Bathsheba Ruggles had an arranged marriage to a wealthy farmer, Joshua Spooner, prior to her father's banishment from Massachusetts in 1774, due to his British Loyalist stance.

Bathsheba Spooner and the three men were tried and convicted of the crime and sentenced to death.

Bathsheba Ruggles Spooner was the daughter of Brigadier General Timothy Ruggles, a lawyer who had served as chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas in Worcester, Massachusetts, from 1762 to 1764, and founder and most eminent citizen of the town of Hardwick, Massachusetts.

Under public censure for his refusal to sign the Stamp Act protest as Massachusetts representative to the 1765 Stamp Act Congress, Ruggles might have arranged the marriage on January 15, 1766, for his daughter to Joshua Spooner, but no documentation has yet turned up to explain why Bathsheba Ruggles married a man she very soon came to hate.

The son of a wealthy Boston merchant, Spooner was a well-to-do Brookfield farmer, later described as an abusive man for whom his wife, Bathsheba developed " an utter aversion.

" The Spooners had their first child, Elizabeth, on April 8, 1767 Three more followed between 1770 and 1775 ; Joshua ( February 21, 1770-September 18, 1801 ), who died in London, England and daughter Bathsheba Spooner ( January 17, 1775 – 1858 ).

When Ezra Ross first met Bathsheba Spooner in the Spring of 1777, he was a sixteen-year-old soldier in the Continental Army, who had already served in the American Revolution under George Washington for a year.

Ross was walking north from Washington's winter camp in Morristown, New Jersey, on his way home to Linebrook, Massachusetts, when he fell ill and was nursed to health by Bathsheba Spooner before heading on to his home.

Ross stayed on at the Spooner house through Christmas and into the new year, travelling with Joshua Spooner on business trips, as well as carrying on an illicit affair with Bathsheba Spooner.

Ross brought along a bottle of nitric acid, given to him by Bathsheba, which he planned to use to poison Spooner.

While Ross and Joshua Spooner were in Princeton, Bathsheba Spooner had invited two runaway British prisoners of war, Private Williams Brooks and Sergeant James Buchanan, to stay at the Spooner home.

Bathsheba Spooner distributed paper money from her husband's lock box and articles of his clothing to the three men, who then took one of the Spooner horses to Worcester, 14 miles distant

The trio implicated Bathsheba Spooner and three of her household servants, Sarah Stratton, her son Jesse Parker, and Alexander Cummings.

Brooks was charged with the assault on Joshua Spooner, Buchanan and Ross were charged with aiding and abetting in the murder, and Bathsheba Spooner was charged with inciting, abetting, and procuring the manner and form of the murder.

There was little Lincoln could do to defend Brooks or Buchanan because they ( with Ezra Ross ) had dictated and signed a lengthy written confession to the crime, but Lincoln did mount a credible defence in support of Ezra Ross and Bathsheba Spooner.

Chronicles, which draws a veil over David's faults, omits all reference to the way in which Bathsheba became David's wife, and gives only the names of her children: Shimea, Shobab, Nathan, and Solomon.

The cases ranged from famous assassinations ( of Abraham Lincoln, Leon Trotsky, and Julius Caesar ) and the lives ( and often deaths ) of the likes of Cesare Borgia and Blackbeard to more obscure cases, such as Bathsheba Spooner, who killed her husband Joshua Spooner in 1778 and became the first woman tried and executed in America.

But he became sympathetic to a woman prisoner named Bathsheba ( Scipio / Xerxes ' wife ), and this sympathy awakened feelings of remorse and guilt.

Bathsheba becomes pregnant.

David commits adultery with Bathsheba and plots the death of her husband ; for this God punishes him, saying that the sword shall never depart from his house.

Bathsheba was the mother of three young children, and in her own words felt " an utter aversion " for her husband, who was known to be an abusive drunk.

As the daughter of the state's most prominent and despised Loyalist, Bathsheba bore the brunt of the political, cultural, and gender prejudices of her day.

From the Round Top Mountain area of Burrillville comes a very well known New England legend of a witch named Bathsheba Sherman who, according to the legend, sacrificed her infant child as an offering to Satan, then hung herself in her barn.

The story says that prior to her hanging Bathsheba, a known practicing witch, placed a curse on anyone that would take her land / farm.

The household was centred on the Ferrar family: Nicholas's mother, his brother John Ferrar ( with his wife Bathsheba and their children ), and his sister Susanna ( and her husband John Collett and their children ).

He falls in love with a newcomer eight years his junior, Bathsheba Everdene, a proud beauty who arrives to live with her aunt, Mrs. Hurst.

She uncovers her face and reveals herself to be none other than Bathsheba.

Boldwood is a prosperous farmer of about forty whose ardour Bathsheba unwittingly awakens when – her curiosity piqued because he has never bestowed on her the customary admiring glance – she playfully sends him a valentine sealed with red wax on which she has embossed the words " Marry me ".

Bathsheba soon discovers that her new husband is an improvident gambler with little interest in farming.

Some months afterward, Troy and Bathsheba encounter Fanny on the road, destitute, as she painfully makes her way toward the Casterbridge workhouse.

Gabriel, who has long known of Troy's relationship with Fanny, tries to conceal the child's existence – but Bathsheba, suspecting the truth and wild with jealousy, arranges for the coffin to be left in her house overnight.

Seeing the reason for her failure to meet him, he gently kisses the corpse and tells the anguished Bathsheba, " This woman is more to me, dead as she is, than ever you were, or are, or can be.

He goes to Boldwood's house, where a party is underway, and orders Bathsheba to come with him ; when she shrinks back in surprise, he seizes her arm, and she screams.

Bathsheba, profoundly chastened by guilt and grief, buries her husband in the same grave as Fanny and their child, and adds a suitable inscription.

In David's old age, Bathsheba secured the succession to the throne of her son Solomon, instead of David's eldest surviving son Adonijah.

David, shooting at the bird, strikes the screen, splitting it ; thus Bathsheba is revealed in her beauty to David ( Sanhedrin 107a ).

According to the biblical Second Book of Samuel, King David was tempted upon seeing Bathsheba bathe in her courtyard from the roof of his palace.

In these paintings Artemisia again demonstrates her ability to renew herself with the novelties of the period and handle different subjects, instead of the usual Judith, Susanna, Bathsheba, and Penitent Magdalenes, for which she was already known.

Bathsheba and her creations at the 2006 Maker Fair in San Mateo, California | San Mateo