Henry Stiles was a 58-year-old carpenter living in Windsor, Connecticut, when he was fatally shot on October 3, 1651. He had boarded for two years in the home of Thomas and Lydia Gilbert. The fatal wound occurred during a militia training exercise when a gun held by Thomas Allyn discharged and struck Stiles.

Allyn was initially charged with homicide by misadventure; in December 1651 the court found him guilty of murder, citing sinful neglect and careless carriage, ordered him to pay a twenty-pound fine and forbade him to carry a gun for a year. Three years later the case took a very different turn: in 1654 Lydia Gilbert was accused of causing Stiles’s death by witchcraft, indicted for entertaining Satan and, with his assistance, killing Stiles. A jury found her guilty; historical records do not definitively state her fate.

Does anyone have further information about Lydia Gilbert’s trial or records from Windsor in the 1650s that could clarify what happened next?