1840 – She Watched Her Slave With Other Women… Then Asked Him to Kill With Her | HO

The Woman Who Felt Nothing

In the spring of 1840, the Ashley River ran slow and black through the Carolina Low Country — its waters thick with mud, secrets, and the silent weight of things people didn’t talk about.

At Monroe Grove, a 600-acre rice plantation outside Beaufort County, its mistress, Abigail Monroe, was thirty-five years old, beautiful, composed, and dead inside. She had been performing womanhood since she was a girl — the obedient wife, the gracious hostess, the pious mother — all mask, no soul.

Her husband, Victor Monroe, called her the “perfect Southern lady.”
He had no idea that behind her still, pale eyes lived something hollow and monstrous.

And when she met Jonah, a newly purchased slave with a gaze that didn’t flinch — a man who saw through her mask because he wore one of his own — the two of them created one of the most disturbing partnerships in Southern history.

Within two years, twenty-three people were dead.

The Predator Arrives

In March of 1840, Victor Monroe bought Jonah at the Charleston auction block for $800 — a “prime field hand, no visible defects.”

The records say nothing of his past. But Jonah had already left bodies behind in Georgia. He was intelligent, charming, and entirely without conscience. He could make people trust him — and then destroy them.

He began as he always did: studying everyone on the plantation, finding weaknesses. Within weeks, he had the other slaves laughing with him, confiding in him. He seduced the lonely women, manipulated the proud men, and charmed even the overseers.

But when he saw Abigail Monroe crossing the yard one humid afternoon, everything changed.

He didn’t lower his eyes like he was supposed to. She didn’t look away like she was expected to.

For two seconds, they simply stared at each other — two predators recognizing themselves in another body.

The Lady and the Slave

Abigail Monroe’s life had been a performance of control. Married at nineteen to settle her father’s debts, she’d given Victor three children and not a single genuine emotion. When her youngest broke her arm falling from a horse, Abigail felt only annoyance.

She had learned to mimic compassion the way a bird mimics speech — perfect form, no understanding.

Jonah was the first person she had ever met who didn’t pretend.

One September night, she called him out behind the tobacco barn. “I’ve been watching you,” she said. “I know what you did to that woman. You broke her, piece by piece, and you felt nothing.”

Jonah didn’t deny it. He smiled.

“And you?” he asked.

“I’ve wanted to,” she said. “All my life.”

They spoke for hours in the dark — about cruelty, control, and the thrill of watching another human break. It was not a confession. It was courtship.

By dawn, they weren’t just accomplices in sin. They were partners in pathology.

The First Victim

Her name was Rebecca, a twenty-two-year-old house slave. Intelligent, proud, and literate — she carried herself with the quiet dignity that Abigail despised.

Abigail ordered Jonah to seduce her. Not for pleasure. For study.

They wanted to watch her unravel.

Jonah did what he always did: whispered sympathy, promised freedom, built hope. Abigail, meanwhile, made Rebecca’s daily life unbearable — insults, punishments, impossible tasks — until Jonah became the only refuge she had.

When Rebecca was finally in love with him, they brought her to the barn.

Abigail told her everything. Every lie. Every manipulation. How they had planned it together.
Then they watched as Rebecca’s world collapsed in front of them.

No beating. No blood. Just pure psychological annihilation.

Rebecca survived — but she would never recover.

A Taste for Death

For Abigail, that night changed everything. For the first time in her life, she felt something.

Not guilt. Not horror.

Pleasure.

Two months later, she wanted more. Not just control. Not just humiliation. Death.

The first kill came on January 18, 1841. Her victim was Martha, a field hand who had refused Jonah’s advances. Abigail and Jonah lured her to the barn. Abigail looped a leather strap around her neck and pulled while Jonah held her still.

It took four minutes.

When it was done, Abigail trembled with something she mistook for life. “Again,” she whispered. “I want to do it again.”

The Years of Blood

Over the next two years, they killed twenty-three people.

Field workers, house servants, even an overseer. Each death served a purpose — silencing witnesses, satisfying impulses, testing boundaries.

Abigail documented every kill in a secret ledger. Her handwriting was neat, elegant, detached — as if recording household expenses. “Four minutes,” she wrote after one murder. “Eyes bulged, hands trembled, body resisted longer than expected. Result: satisfying.”

Jonah preferred strangulation. Abigail liked variety — suffocation, poisoning, staged accidents. Each method became a kind of experiment in sensation.

By 1842, their partnership was less romance than ritual. Killing replaced sex. The act itself was the only intimacy either of them could feel.

The Collapse

But monsters eventually turn on each other.

Abigail wanted escalation — children, maybe even her own. Jonah refused. “You’ll get us caught,” he warned.

“You’re a coward,” she replied.

By May of 1842, they were each plotting to kill the other. On the night of May 23, they met in the barn — both armed, both ready. The struggle was brief. A gunshot rang out. Jonah escaped into the night.

He was hanged three years later in Georgia for killing a white man. He never mentioned Abigail’s name.

Abigail told her husband there had been an intruder. But the knife Jonah dropped gave him away. When the slaves whispered about what they’d seen — the meetings, the disappearances — Victor Monroe began to suspect the truth.

He hired investigators. What they found shattered him: blood traces in the barn, multiple witnesses, and testimony from Rebecca, who described how Abigail and Jonah had toyed with her mind.

Victor had two choices — turn his wife in and ruin his family’s name, or bury the truth.

He chose silence.

The Confession

Three months later, Abigail swallowed a bottle of laudanum and wrote her confession — forty-seven pages of calm, perfect penmanship.

She described every murder in detail: the victims’ faces, the moments before death, the satisfaction afterward. Psychologists who later studied the document called it one of the most chilling firsthand accounts of shared psychopathy ever recorded.

Her final lines read:

“I am not sorry for what I did. I am only sorry that I was discovered.
The only real moments of my life were the moments when I was killing.”

Victor burned the confession — or so he claimed. He told neighbors his wife had died of illness and buried her quickly in the family plot.

But according to later records, no one ever saw her body.

The Woman in New Orleans

In 1847, a brothel keeper in New Orleans — refined, emotionless, around forty — drew police attention after several of her women disappeared. Witnesses described her as “a lady of Charleston breeding.”

When officers came to question her, she was gone.

What Remains

Officially, the Monroe murders ended in 1842. But local folklore says otherwise. Along the Ashley River, fishermen still whisper about a woman’s figure seen standing on the water’s edge at night — pale, composed, and waiting.

Whether she died that night or walked away into another life, one truth endures:

Abigail Monroe and Jonah proved that evil can be elegant, intelligent, and mutual.

It doesn’t always rage. Sometimes it whispers.

And sometimes it looks you straight in the eye — and recognizes itself.