Joe Knapp snuck into White’s house one night, stole what he mistakenly thought was the legal version of White’s will, and left a window unbarred. Four nights later, Richard Crowninshield entered the house through that same window and brutally murdered White in his bed. White’s body was found to have received a blow to the head (from a club Joe Knapp had made himself) as well as multiple stab wounds. Both sets of brothers were subsequently arrested and sent to jail, where Richard Crowninshield hanged himself after Joe Knapp gave a detailed confession in exchange for immunity.

Daniel Webster, a famous lawyer and US senator, served as prosecutor at the highly publicized trial, during which he argued that Frank Knapp had been a principal, or chief actor, in the crime. Both Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne were likely inspired by the mesmerizing summation of the case that Webster gave to the jury, which was later published. Webster described White’s murderer as calm, cool, and collected, just as the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” claims to have been while murdering the old man. He also claimed that the murderer was forced to confess when he realized how obvious his guilt was to the world; Poe’s narrator is similarly driven to confess his crime by his belief that the police are aware of his crime—and, more gruesomely, by the heartbeat he thinks he hears beneath the floorboards, tormenting his guilty conscience. In keeping with his signature emphasis on the strange and irrational, Poe also gives his fictional murderer a much stranger motive than that of the Knapps or the Crowninshields: the narrator kills his victim not for money, but because he is inexplicably haunted by the sight of the old man’s “evil eye.”