New Brunswick was barely born when it was shaken by its first recorded murder.
The province had only existed for two months when, in the fall of 1784, a deadly domestic quarrel in Parrtown — now Saint John — made grim history. The murder weapon was not a musket or a knife, but something far more ordinary: a table fork.
On October 4, 1784, two Black Loyalists, Richard Wheeler and John Walker, made their way through the rough settlement to visit their friend John Mosley. What they found instead was a scene of horror. Mosley was dead. Panicked, they ran for a constable and pointed the finger at his wife, Nancy Mosley, also a Black Loyalist.
The couple lived on Allotment #1084, a modest parcel of land on the edge of Parrtown, near what would now be St. James Street below Queen Square. Little survives about their lives, but historian Stephen Davidson believes John and Nancy had likely once been enslaved in America before escaping that world and arriving in Nova Scotia as Loyalists after the American Revolution. Records show they had a child, but by May 1784 the child’s name disappeared from food supply lists, suggesting tragedy had already visited the household before the fatal events of that autumn.
The violence erupted on September 27.
A remarkable document later uncovered in the Provincial Archives preserves Nancy’s own confession. In it, she insisted she had acted in self-defence. According to Nancy, her husband ordered her to bake bread. She refused, telling him he could eat what was already made. The argument quickly exploded. She said John seized an axe and raised it to strike her. Nancy, with a fork already in her hand, threw it up to protect herself. In the struggle, the fork cut into his face.
Friends Grace and John Walker rushed in and broke up the fight. They tried to tend the wound with bacon grease, sugar, and a handkerchief — crude remedies that may have offered comfort, but little real protection against infection. At first, John did not die. He lingered for days, growing worse and weaker, until about a week later, he was gone.
Now there was no quarrel, no injury, no angry exchange. There was a body, and there was a widow accused of murder.
Nancy Mosley was charged, and in February 1785 she stood trial in what became the first murder case in New Brunswick history. Prosecuting her was Ward Chipman, a rising young lawyer who thundered that she had attacked her husband “traitorously, willfully, and with malice” using “a certain iron fork of the value of six pence.” His language was fierce, meant to leave no doubt about her guilt.
Yet the facts told a murkier story. The wound was shallow — only one-eighth of an inch deep. Mosley had not collapsed and died on the spot. He had lingered for days. That raised a troubling possibility: was this truly murder, or a desperate act of self-preservation that ended in tragedy?
Either way, the young province had found its first killing — and it came not in battle, not in some dark alley, but inside a humble home, during an argument over bread.
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What became of her? Guilty or not guilty?