Henry Stuessy left home on a Sunday in November 1882, walking into the woods south of New Glarus with his hired man and a rifle.

By the next day, the 32-year-old farmer was dead, found in the timber a short distance from his home with two bullet wounds to the head. The killing would become one of Green County’s darkest early murder cases: a hired hand accused of pulling the trigger, a wife accused of plotting the death of her husband and a family of young children scattered because of the crime.