Murder suicide

Unrequited love and a murder-suicide

David Thayer shared “a sketchy family story” about a murder-suicide that occurred on July 22, 1941 on “Wagon Road,” an old cart path which is now Warner Road off of Topsfield Road, and not far from where we live.

“I was raking down on Mill Road, some years ago, when a car pulled into the driveway and a man got out. He introduced himself to me as Joe Kamon. His brother, Nick was the caretaker at Holiday Hill, which until we moved here in the 70s, was a summer home. Joe told me that he had been my grandmother’s chauffeur, and drove her new 1937 Ford Phaeton. He also went along with my father on the maiden flight of my father’s new airplane.

My grandparent’s previous chauffeur, Walter Brown, had asked Joe if he would take over his job as chauffeur for my grandmother. Walter was the town water commissioner, and was also the winter caretaker of Holiday Hill and the summer homes of the Tuckermans on Waldingfield Road, where there used to be llamas and bison.

Walter Brown was spurned by his ex-grilfriend Phyllis Chisholm, a 1933 Ipswich High School graduate who lived with her mother at 16 Brown Street in Ipswich. He arranged a meeting with her, drove into the blueberry thicket in what is now the Warner Rd. neighborhood, shot Miss Chisholm, and gassed himself in Annie Tuckerman’s beach wagon. Some kids were bluberrying, and found the couple in the car on the old cart road.”

Beverly Times, 1941
Phyllis Chisholm was murdered by Walter Brown in 1941 on what is now Warner Road in Ipswich. Squeezed into the lower left corner is a photo of WWII metal recycling at Market Square.
Article from the Beverly News
Suicide hose
After shooting her, Walter Brown finished off Miss Chisholm and himself with carbon monoxide.
Walter G. Brown, annual report of the Ipswich Water Department
The 1941 Ipswich Town Report included a tribute to the late Water and Light Commissioner Walter G. Brown without mentioning that he had murdered his girlfriend Phyllis Chisholm and committed suicide.

2 thoughts on “Unrequited love and a murder-suicide”

  1. Phyllis Chisholm was my aunt. My mother and grandmother waited for her to come home as her murderer begged my aunt to just talk to him. He had the audacity to leave a note for his sister stating he would pay for my aunts funeral expenses as he watched her slowly die as he shot her

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