History: Hot Heads Leads to Murder on Main Street

On a Thursday evening on September 15, 1910, John McCracken, 21, originally from Richmond Hill, was shot by David O’Leary, 21, Setauket, after a scuffle near Athena Hall (now Theatre Three) on Main Street.

The two men apparently were fighting over a married woman from Port Jefferson named Mrs. Ella Jayes whom both were courting and who had agreed to meet both young men on different days, when O’Leary took out a pistol and shot McCracken in the stomach.

O’Leary rode away on his bicycle, while McCraken, who had come to the village to work in a machine shop, was taken away by his brother who also came to Port Jefferson for work. Unknown to McCracken or a surgeon who examined him immediately after the incident in the village, the bullet was lodged in his spine. He died from his injury two days later in a Jamaica, Queens hospital where McCraken’s brother had taken him to see his father.

Curiously, when McCracken collapsed in Queens after coming off the train, his father called for whiskey to revive him. When that didn’t work the young man was taken to a hospital, where he died not long after. An autopsy found the bullet still in his spine.

O’Leary attempted to get rid of the pistol but he was arrested, the gun located and he faced a Grand Jury. At his trial O’Leary was found to be a terrible witness for his own defense and “made some damaging admissions.” The young man was found guilty of second-degree manslaughter and sentenced to “not less than four years or more than eight years and two months in Sing Sing prison,” according to a report in the Port Jefferson Echo.

His mother, distraught, threw herself on her son when the verdict was announced in court and she had to be taken away by the sherrif.

As for the married woman, the Port Jefferson Echo summed up its opinion in an editorial following the trial by saying that “the evidence in the O’Leary murder case pretty thoroughly established one thing, at least–that a wronged husband picked a very tart lemon in the garden of love.”