The verdict: not guilty — a death and a jury in 1683

Written August 2026 · Sources last checked 2 August 2026 · Corrections: hello@lewestown.com

What the record says

The facts as recorded are brief. Susan Johnson died in Sussex County in 1683. Her husband, John Johnson Sr., was held under suspicion of having murdered her. A trial followed, in which members of the jury reported that they found not “one sign of Murder” on the body. The verdict was not guilty.

The phrase is the interesting part. The jury is not reporting a judgement about John Johnson’s character or his movements; it is reporting a physical examination of his wife’s body, conducted by jurymen. That is how this worked in 1683.

How a seventeenth-century jury decided

There was no forensic pathology, no autopsy in any modern sense, and in a county as small and new as Sussex in 1683 there may well have been no physician available to consult. The jury looked at the body for visible marks of violence, found none, and concluded accordingly.

By the standards of the time this was a reasonable procedure, and it was the procedure. It is also, by any modern standard, a method that would fail to detect most ways of killing a person — poisoning, suffocation, drowning, neglect, or internal injury without external mark.

That is not an accusation against John Johnson. It is a statement about the limits of the evidence. An acquittal on those grounds establishes that the jury saw no marks; it does not establish what happened to Susan Johnson.

The woman at the centre of it

Mrs. Brittingham’s original page observes that the not-guilty verdict has swathed John Johnson in innocence as the case has been reviewed over the intervening years, which is a sharp remark about how records work. The surviving document is a court record, and court records are organised around the accused. John Johnson is the person the paperwork exists to describe.

What the record does not carry is Susan Johnson. We know her name, her county, the year she died and that her death was suspicious enough to bring a charge. Her age, her circumstances, whether she had children, and what anyone thought had happened to her are not in the surviving account. That absence is not incidental — it is the standard shape of the seventeenth-century record for women, and it is worth naming rather than reading past.

The case is worth keeping in this archive for exactly that reason. It is not a mystery to be solved at three centuries’ distance. It is a demonstration of what a small colonial county could and could not find out, and of whose story the paperwork was built to hold.

From the original page at this address

“When Susan Johnson died in Sussex County in 1683, her husband, John Johnson, Sr., was held under suspicion of her murder. In the trial that followed, members of the jury reported that they found not ‘one sign of Murder’ on the body.”

Hazel D. Brittingham, “The Verdict: Not Guilty”, Lewestown Publishers, 1997. © Copyright 1997 Hazel D. Brittingham. Short extract quoted for commentary; the full original is at the Internet Archive.