Unsolved mysteries · People & lives

The Kentucky murder Poe started writing and never finished

Solomon P. Sharp was a rising Kentucky politician whose career ended when he was stabbed to death in his own home in 1825, a killing still remembered as the Kentucky Tragedy. Born in Virginia and raised in a log cabin in Logan County, he trained as a lawyer, moved to Bowling Green, and entered politics young, winning a seat in the state legislature at 22 and a seat in the U.S. House by 25. His time in Congress was undone by his support for a law that paid legislators a flat salary instead of a per-day rate, a vote so unpopular it cost him re-election, though he rebuilt his career back in the Kentucky House and eventually as the state's attorney general under two governors. Along the way he shifted political allegiances through the Relief versus Anti-Relief fight over debtor protections, a dispute so bitter it led Kentucky's legislature to abolish its own high court and replace it with a more sympathetic one, with Sharp as the administration's chief legal officer lending it credibility.

Shadowing all of this was a scandal from 1820, when a planter's daughter named Anna Cooke accused him of fathering her stillborn child and rumors spread that the baby had been mixed-race. Sharp denied it, and because Cooke's reputation as unconventional worked against her, the accusation did little lasting damage to him at the time. It resurfaced during his 1825 campaign for the state House, with opponents claiming he had disparaged Cooke by name, though whether he ever actually said so remains disputed. He won that election anyway, but by then Cooke had married a much younger man, Jereboam Beauchamp, who had taken up her cause. On the morning the new legislative session was to open, Beauchamp came to Sharp's door and stabbed him fatally with a poisoned dagger.

The murder set off a manhunt, rewards from the city and private donors, and suspicion that Sharp's death was really a political assassination tied to the Anti-Relief faction, a theory his own brother later championed in an unpublished manuscript naming a specific rival as co-conspirator. Beauchamp was quickly arrested, tried, and sentenced to hang, but delayed his execution long enough to write a jailhouse confession insisting he had acted purely to avenge his wife's honor. Before the hanging he and Anna attempted suicide together; she died from the attempt, and he was executed days later. The case became a lasting source of fascination for writers, inspiring works by Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Penn Warren among others, and historians still argue over how much of what was said about Sharp and Cooke was true and how much was political invention.

Jereboam Beauchamp married Anna Cooke in 1824, four years after the rumors about Sharp first circulated, then killed Sharp the following year to avenge her honor.

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