But what about the motive behind my wife’s great-great-grandfather’s murder? The first newspaper accounts, by the way, identified him as John Millie; in fact, his death certificate gives his first name as Joseph. (That’s the kind of mistake that drives genealogists bats.) The death certificate, inscribed in a graceful goose-quill hand, lists his cause of death as "Wilful [sic] Murder."

The awful crime, which must have occurred just about dark on that December day, was not discovered until after one the next morning. After an odd break of several hours, the murderer had set fire to the bank; it was firemen, breaking in, who discovered Joseph Millie’s body, plus another man, still alive.

The second man, Archibald Bolam, was the bank’s actuary and Millie’s immediate boss. He was carried across the street to a surgeon’s office and laid out on a table there, seemingly insensate. But only seemingly so. The surgeons noted, and later testified, that his pupils reacted to light, and that physical twitches in his limbs, which a layman might have read as a seizure, suggested to them he was only faking unconsciousness. They also noted that the right sleeve of his jacket had been recently and vigorously scrubbed.

Further, the light wound on his neck was not angled across and down like a cutthroat’s work. No, this very shallow wound suggested a right-handed man reaching across to cut himself on his neck’s left side. And various other cuts in his jacket and vest had got nowhere near his skin. Why, the plaid shawl that had lain over Bolam when he was found didn’t have a cut or a trace of blood on it.

The circumstantial evidence mounted quickly, and the constabulary’s judgment was soon firm: for reasons unknown, Bolam had murdered his colleague viciously, then spent panicked hours concocting a cover-up. In that time he had walked across the Tyne River Bridge and two miles to his home to scrub blood from his coat and hands. All the way there and back, he feverishly shaped his plan.

The crime must look like an attack from the outside _ by someone out to kill, not Millie, but him. And so his bogus story of threats shoved under the bank’s door. But if the assault was directed at him, he must bear signs of violence, too. He must spill his own blood for effect, and to cover any of Millie’s blood that was on him. And so the superficial wound to his own neck.

And there must be further diversion. Something must suggest revenge on the Savings Bank itself, for that would add angry customers or former employees to the list of suspects. And so his setting fire to the two-room bank _ kindling the blaze in the second, smaller office, at the farthest point from where he would arrange himself to look like a man stunned and injured _ a man lucky to be alive, given poor Millie’s horrible state.

Well, because of the observations of the doctors and police, plus a dozen inconsistencies in Bolam’s story, the whole fabrication fell apart. He was accused, tried, found guilty. Still, the evidence was circumstantial, and so he was not hanged, but condemned to life of exile "beyond the sea." That meant Australia; and in Australia he lived out his life, still claiming, as he died decades later, his innocence of the murder.

But what was Bolam’s motive? What was to be gained by killing an inoffensive widower, Anne’s great-great-grandfather?

By great good luck, the Newcastle Archives holds an 1839 book published on the murder, the trial, and the possible causes of the crime. Of course we read it avidly; and the kind librarians, bending their ordinary rules, let Anne Xerox the small volume.

The book develops a picture of what today would later be called a sociopath. It portrays Bolam as a man who cloaked a total lack of fellow feeling with a fawning warmth_until someone crossed him. Then he turned bloody-minded and vengeful. A case in point: when a man that he’d hired and befriended dared challenge his management style and the accuracy of his accounting, Bolam painstakingly engineered his firing.

Joseph Millie was hired into the fired man’s place, and initially Bolam treated him almost as a brother. All went well between them until that December evening, when they were working together on the year-end report. Perhaps Millie found a mistake in Bolam’s accounting _ something big enough to make Bolam explode with rage and beat his accuser to death with the fireplace poker.

But another potential motive is raised in this 1839 book, one it expresses with tortured indirection. Bolam, says the author, had been fired from two earlier jobs as a schoolmaster because of "untoward actions toward boys under his charge." And the man whose firing Bolam had engineered had declared he had forcefully rebuked Bolam when he spoke, even indirectly, about what Oscar Wilde would later call, "the love that dare not speak its name."

Perhaps, says the book’s author, Bolam had raised the same subject with Joseph Millie, and had been rebuffed again. Perhaps Millie even threatened to denounce him publicly. Thus it may have been Millie’s silence that Bolam gained as he struck, again and again, with that poker.

A hundred and seventy years later, the mystery remains; and it ever will.

Anne’s great-grandmother, that brave little girl of 12, grew up to marry a Londoner. And later in life, like Archibald Bolam, she crossed an ocean. But not to Australia. She crossed the Atlantic to a pioneer life in northern Ontario.

On this side of the ocean, Elizabeth always told people her maiden name was, not Millie, but Millais. Perhaps that was her way to assure that no one, even by chance, would link her with that monstrous event back in Newcastle Upon Tyne. Her way to distance herself from a past no child should have experienced.

Read about Jim Atwell’s book, "From Fly Creek _ Celebrating Life in Leatherstocking Country" JimAtwell.com.