THE ABUSED WIFE DEFENSE

On a Saturday evening long ago, a worn-out woman of nearly 40 pushed away from the dinner table inside a claustrophobic cabin she shared with her husband and five children in the Oregon wilderness.
Without a word, Charity Lamb stepped outside and walked to the woodpile, where she retrieved an ax.
The gaunt mother trudged back into the cabin and positioned herself behind the chair of her husband, Nathaniel.
She raised the blade toward the soot-stained ceiling and brought it down, cleaving Nathaniel's skull with a sickening thwack while their children sat as witnesses.
Then she hit him again for good measure.
Lamb and her oldest child, daughter Mary Ann, 17, fled the cabin, leaving four sons, including an infant, with their dying father.
The oldest boy, Abraham, later said his father "fell over and scrambled about a little." The man lingered, but his injuries eventually proved fatal.
Authorities tracked down the wife at a neighbor's place and inquired as to why she had whacked her husband with an ax.
"I did not mean to kill the critter," Charity Lamb told them. "I only intended to stun him."
The homicide, committed on May 13, 1854, made Lamb infamous as the first murderess in the Oregon Territory. The case was noteworthy for another reason: She was one of the first American murder defendants to use the abused-wife defense.
The Lambs had been married in North Carolina in 1837. Mary Ann was born 10 months later,and the sons arrived at irregular intervals thereafter.
In the spring of 1852, the family packed its belongings and joined a wagon train on the five-month journey along the Oregon Trail from Missouri to the northwest wilderness.
They arrived in the Willamette Valley that fall and were issued a government patent to 318 acres in Clackamas County near Salem.
The pioneer lifestyle was hard on Charity Lamb, and she grew sickly and haggard, especially after she gave birth to her fifth child in 1853.
Nathaniel Lamb was not sympathetic. He scolded his wife, driving her to labor harder. When words weren't enough, he used violence against her.
Charity threatened to run away, but Nathaniel vowed to put her in his rifle sights if she ever did. Once, while she was fleeing a tiff, he fired a warning shot that whizzed just past her head.
The relationship faltered further with the arrival in the summer of 1853 of a handsome young stranger named Collins.
Both Charity and daughter Mary Ann apparently were love-smitten by Collins, a hired hand on a neighboring farm.
Nathaniel Lamb found a love letter to Collins in his wife's hand. She claimed she wrote it on behalf of Mary Ann, but local tittle-tattle held that mother and daughter were conspiring to run away with Collins to California. http://www.nydailynews.com