Aboard the vessel making its way down the Shannon, an officer boarded with a loaded musket, so far gone in drink that he brandished it recklessly above the passengers’ heads. Richard Fitzgerald, then an undergraduate at Trinity College, relates that he secured the weapon after the man slumped into sleep, finding it primed and loaded. The young woman seated a short distance away watched her companion with a distress that the young scholar could not yet fathom. She confided to him that she had just left her uncle’s house after a ceremony which, she believed, had made her a wife. Nearly half a century later, Fitzgerald wrote that he never forgot that meeting. The gentleman was John Scanlan; the young woman, styled in the records alternately as Ellen Conery or Ellen Hanley, was already ensnared in a web wherein the promise of holy matrimony served only to sever her from her kin.
Fitzgerald presents himself as an eyewitness to those pivotal weeks: an undergraduate on holiday in the summer of 1819, he claimed to have journeyed alongside Scanlan and Ellen, spoken with her, and later witnessed the recovery of the body. His volume, printed at Dublin in 1868, mingles these personal recollections with statements gathered from the family and depositions he asserted lay before him. Yet it is by no means a contemporary judicial transcript, and a fierce moral indignation frequently colors his prose. Beside him, Camden Pelham published in 1891 a more summary account, furnishing divergent figures and a flawed chronology. The Dictionary of Irish Biography identifies the victim as Ellie Hanley, celebrated in memory as the Colleen Bawn, and places the legal proceedings in 1820. One must therefore trace the course of events without blending these disparate voices into a single testimony.
Ellen had been reared by her maternal uncle, John Connery, a ropemaker. The biographical notice in the DIB records that she was not yet sixteen years of age when she quitted his hearth on June 29, 1819, in Scanlan’s company. Fitzgerald relates that the young officer, who frequented the cottage under the pretext of shooting game, won the family’s confidence before prevailing upon the girl to elope. The authorities disagree as to the sums carried away: Pelham and the DIB cite one hundred pounds in banknotes and twelve guineas; Fitzgerald records the uncle’s lament that she had taken sixty pounds, the hard-won savings of a lifetime. This discrepancy matters less as an exact audit than as a gauge of the rupture: an adolescent had fled the roof that sheltered her to follow a gentleman to whom she believed herself lawfully bound.
The ceremony itself remains an object of dispute across the narratives. Pelham maintains that Scanlan initially deemed the rite legally void, only to discover subsequently that it was binding under Irish law. Fitzgerald later wrote that Sullivan had disguised himself in priestly vestments to solemnize the union; the DIB refers to a mock ceremony alleged to have been performed. No formal judicial decree regarding the validity of this alliance is preserved in the record. For Ellen, however, the belief was absolute: on board, she explained to Fitzgerald that she was Scanlan’s lawful wife, the rite having been solemnized the evening prior. Fitzgerald records that Scanlan openly bragged on deck of having caroused the entire night.
The journey brought the three travelers toward Glin, along the Shannon, carrying them between several shores and homesteads. In this geography of water crossings, Sullivan was no mere bystander: a former soldier who had served under Scanlan, he had become his servant and boatman. Pelham asserts that Scanlan conceived the murder and tasked Sullivan with its execution, seeking to rid himself of a bride who had become an encumbrance to an advantageous alliance. This explanation stems from the compiler; it is not a direct deposition from Scanlan’s lips. Fitzgerald, for his part, attributes to Sullivan’s confession the account of an aborted first attempt. The servant allegedly shrank from the deed when Ellen’s countenance unsteadied his resolve; Pelham attributes this hesitation to a smile. Both authors regard this reprieve as the final interval before violence, though their pages do not depict the identical scene.
The second excursion was no ordinary passage. Fitzgerald records that Scanlan feigned sickness and sent Ellen out upon the water with Sullivan, promising to join them presently. Prior to their casting off, he reportedly urged his servant to complete the bloody work and placed a weapon in his hand; such is the narrative derived from the reported confession, not a scene established by an independent witness. In the middle of the river, Sullivan struck Ellen with the butt-end of the gun. Having slain her, he endeavored to sink the corpse beneath the current. The heavy ballast and chain previously prepared had been lost during an earlier fishing excursion. Fitzgerald attributes to Sullivan the expedient of a rope lashed to a heavy stone found in the boat. The young woman was cast into the depths; Scanlan waited upon the bank and, according to the same account, understood by Ellen’s absence that the design had been accomplished.
The disappearance did not pass unnoticed. Scanlan initially gave out that he had placed Ellen aboard a vessel whose captain would afford her protection; another version, preserved by Fitzgerald, placed her at his sister’s residence. Ellen Walsh, who had waited upon the young woman, recognized certain garments and a mantle known to be hers. The rope found about the corpse was identified by a man who had lent it, recognized by its particular splice. The DIB dates the discovery of the body at Money Point, in County Clare, to September 6; it records that Walsh identified the remains by two double teeth in the upper jaw. Fitzgerald likewise notes this anatomical feature, as well as the garments recovered from Sullivan’s kin. These matters were brought forward as circumstantial proofs, not as scenes observed concurrently by the two chroniclers.
Scanlan was discovered on November 14, 1819, concealed in his father’s house, according to the DIB. The accounts diverge sharply regarding his trial. Pelham asserts he was tried “in August,” without specifying the year—an indication wholly irreconcilable with the mittimus printed by Fitzgerald, which dates Scanlan’s committal to November 14, 1819, and with the DIB, which states the trial opened at the Limerick assizes on March 11, 1820. The page of Fitzgerald’s volume recording the sentence appoints the execution for Thursday, March 16. We may therefore accept this outcome and the clearly printed date of execution, while noting that Pelham’s chronology of the trial is either corrupted or incomplete.
At the bar, Scanlan pleaded not guilty. The DIB records that Daniel O’Connell, retained for the defense, argued that the ceremony had been a nullity and that Scanlan consequently possessed no motive to murder the girl. He sought further to shift the entire culpability onto Sullivan. Pelham does not detail these pleadings, and Fitzgerald summarizes the testimony rather than transcribing the depositions in full. The jury returned a verdict of guilty; Scanlan was hanged on March 16, 1820. Fitzgerald reproduces a phrase attributed to the condemned man disclaiming any part in the taking of her life, while the DIB account notes that he protested his innocence to the very last. It is not the chronicler’s office to convert this denial into proof of innocence, nor to treat a capital conviction as an open window into the convict’s soul.
Sullivan initially eluded capture. The DIB relates that he was apprehended two months after Scanlan’s execution, in Kerry, under the assumed name of Clifford; Fitzgerald reproduces a warrant of committal dated June 17, 1820, issued upon a Kerry precept. Pelham, who writes that the servant evaded justice for twelve months and died a full year after his master, cannot be reconciled with these records. Sullivan’s trial took place at Limerick on July 25, according to the DIB. Fitzgerald’s volume contains a sentence headed “Tuesday,” ordering the execution for Thursday, July 27; the Thursday date accords with the DIB, though the heading “Tuesday” alone does not suffice to establish the precise day of the arraignment.
Fitzgerald records that prior to his end, Sullivan acknowledged having slain Ellen, naming Scanlan as the instigator. He adds that the servant had addressed a petition to the bench, acquiescing in his doom and requesting that his final hours remain undisturbed by idle spectators. This confession does not diminish Sullivan’s physical culpability; it shifts the inquiry rather toward the dominion he claimed his master exercised over him, and the guilt of the gentleman waiting upon the shore. The 1868 narrative maintains that he renewed these declarations upon the scaffold, while Scanlan had persisted in his denial. The DIB likewise summarizes this confession and dates Sullivan’s execution to July 27, 1820.
Thus, two executions separated by four months closed the judicial pursuit, but not the obscurities of the case. One retrospective source dates Ellen’s death to July 4, within the formula of the verdict preserved by Fitzgerald; the DIB assigns July 14, while Pelham notes merely the month of July. We cannot decide between these dates upon the authority of the surviving texts alone. Similarly, the ceremony the girl believed to be holy wedlock was subsequently branded a deceit, though no formal decree upon its validity is reproduced here. The tragedy remains far less neat than the moral tale Fitzgerald sought to oppose to fiction: a young girl fled her home upon a promise, two men were tried separately, and the posthumous utterances of the one could never restore to the dead her own voice.