THE IDAHO SEMI-WEEKLY WORLD — JUNE 28, 1878
[Springfield Republican.]
Gov. Rice is asked to pardon one O’Donnell, of Millbury, from Charleston, and a gentleman who recently visited the State Prison thus tells his story:
“Gentlemen,” said the Warden, “I want to bring before you one of the most remarkable cases in the prison. We call him ‘the man who never smiles,’ and I wish before he comes in to tell you his story. He seems to be a man of more than ordinary ability, one of the better class of substantial, frugal Irish citizens, who owned a small place in one of our manufacturing villages, where he resided with his family of sons and daughters, all permanently employed and in comfortable circumstances. The old man had a fine garden upon which he bestowed his leisure hours, in a part of which was a fine lot of cabbages. It seems that the boys in the neighborhood had a habit of trespassing on the old man’s garden, until he had determined to get rid of them by firing his gun to frighten them away.
One night, hearing some one in his garden, he took down his gun, and getting behind the hedge, fired into the garden, as he claims, without aim or seeing any one to aim at. But the report of the gun alarmed the neighbors, who, rushing into the garden, found the lifeless body of a young girl shot through the heart. The old man, when told what he had done was struck dumb. He was arrested and sentenced to imprisonment for life. He has now been here for ten years,
