The Cape Cod Murder of 1899: Edwin Ray Snow's Punishment & Redemption

The story of a teenage thief who became a killer—and how prison transformed him—in turn-of-the-century New England.

On a crisp September evening in 1899, a seventeen-year-old petty thief named Edwin Ray Snow shot and killed a bakery deliveryman named Jimmy Whittemore outside Yarmouth, Massachusetts. The gunshots rang out for only a moment, but the effects resounded on Cape Cod for half a century.

The idyllic atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Cape Cod was shattered in a flash. Soon after ...