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On Sept. 5, 1873, there was a funeral in Huntington for Charles Kelsey's legs.
While the Second Presbyterian Church on Main Street was filled to overflowing, Kelsey's casketed legs - actually, the lower half of his body, from the second vertebra down - were left outside on the church lawn. Two ministers disagreed on whether the remains inside the coffin were really those of Kelsey. They were.
For the sleepy little village of about 2,500 people, "The Kelsey Outrage," as it came to be known, produced one of the most sensational murder cases Long Island had ever seen. It had all the ingredients: sex, mutilation, spurned love, tar-and-feathering, a missing body that later turned up floating in Oyster Bay Harbor - half of it, at least - murder charges against two leading Huntington citizens, and two lemons found on the beach.
Ten months before the funeral, Charles G. Kelsey was alive. But Nov. 4, 1872, was the last day of his life. All because of his infatuation with a plump and saucy young orphan, Julia Smith, who lived with her grandmother, Charlotte Oakley, in a large mansion on Main Street.
A well-educated, prosperous farmer in his 30s, an occasional teacher and a pedestrian poet, Kelsey had a terrible crush on Smith, who was just out of her teens. The long-haired, goateed Kelsey had met Smith as a teenager at their church, the Second Presbyterian, where he often taught Sunday school. The thought of the young lady taking up with an older man, a poet, no less, mightily displeased Oakley and other church members. It was said that Smith would put a lantern in the window to signal Kelsey when the coast was clear.
Smith turned fickle, however, switching her attentions to 25-year-old Royal Sammis, a member of a locally...