In Hot Blood E-Book

Nicola Sly

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 509

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This chilling compendium of historic crimes features 28 cases that shocked the nation during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among the cases featured here are the shooting of Bessie Cross, after she fell pregnant while her husband was away serving his country in 1917, and the 1869 murders of Maria Death and her alleged lover by Maria's partner, Frederick Hinson. It also recalls the tragic stories of Elvira Barney and Ruth Ellis, who shot and killed their lovers in 1932 and 1955 respectively, with very different consequences. Along with the most notorious cases, this book also features many that did not make national headlines, examining not only the methods and motives but also the real stories of the perpetrators and their victims. This book is a must for true-crime fans everywhere.

Leseprobe

Copyright

First published in 2013

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, gl5 2qg

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© Nicola Sly,2013

The right of Nicola Sly to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9221 6

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Cover

Titlepage

Introduction & Acknowledgements

1. ‘I am afraid I have shot my wife’

Cheam, Surrey, 1828

2. ‘You shall find a complete devil in me’

Middlesex, 1847

3. ‘I did it and I did it right’

Old Meldrum, Aberdeenshire, 1857

4. ‘I’ve stopped her whoring’

Rochester, Kent, 1858

5. ‘What is to become of me?’

Ipswich, Suffolk, 1858

6. ‘Look what you made me do’

St Budock, Cornwall, 1859

7. ‘He was always a good boy’

London, 1861

8. ‘Send for a policeman, I have murdered that bitch’

Manchester, 1863

9. ‘And yet I loved her as never a woman was loved before’

Batley, West Yorkshire, 1865

10. ‘I would rather die than live with you’

Birmingham, Warwickshire, 1866

11. ‘This is the fruit of going with another man’s wife’

Wood Green, London, 1869

12. ‘He was my bosom friend’

Southsea, Hampshire, 1872

13. ‘I went to that house with nothing but love in my heart’

Glasgow, 1876

14. ‘Oh, horror of horrors!’

Dolgellau, North Wales, 1877

15. ‘Grandfather’s clock, stop clock, never to go again’

Clerkenwell, London, 1879

16. ‘I’ll pay the little devil out’

Douglas, Isle of Man, 1892

17. ‘To kill is one thing; to commit murder is another’

Woodhouse Mill, near Sheffield, South Yorkshire, 1893

18. ‘I am no more a fool than what you are’

Blackburn, Lancashire, 1893

19. ‘We were very jolly all night afterwards’

Wormwood Scrubs, London, 1893

20. ‘The devil overcame me’

Bolton, Lancashire, 1893

21. ‘I bet he’s strangling her’

Burnley, Lancashire, 1915

22. ‘If I have done wrong, I have got to put up with it’

Bristol, 1917

23. ‘Your wife is not going on as she ought to’/p>

Camden Town, London, 1918

24. ‘I passed from despair to hope and hope to despair’

Central London, 1923

25. ‘I love him so’

Knightsbridge, London, 1932

26. ‘I could forgive extravagance or anything else but infidelity – never’

Lancaster, 1935

27. ‘She was everything in the world to me’

Letchworth, Hertfordshire, 1937

28. ‘You may wonder if she was as black as was said’

Luton, Bedfordshire, 1943

29. ‘You’ll stand it because you love me’

London, 1955

Plates

Bibliography

About the Author

Also by the Author

Introduction & Acknowledgements

The term ‘crime of passion’ usually refers to a violent crime, especially murder, which is committed because of sudden strong impulse, rather than as a premeditated crime. Sometimes described as a ‘red mist descending’, it frequently results from an overwhelming rush of emotion, such as jealousy or anger, or after extreme provocation and is often said to occur ‘in hot blood’, the perpetrator acting immediately upon the rise of passion, without the time for contemplation or for allowing the blood to cool.

The following is a collection of true historical accounts of murder committed in so-called hot blood, drawn entirely from the contemporary newspapers listed in the bibliography at the end. Although, much as today, not everything was reported accurately and there were frequent discrepancies between publications, with differing dates and variations in names and spelling, a common theme emerges – in the blink of an eye, lives are needlessly terminated and men and women are left to rue the consequences of a momentary loss of self-control.

I would like to thank Matilda Richards, my commissioning editor at The History Press, for her help and encouragement in bringing this book to fruition and, as always, my husband Richard remains a constant source of support and constructive criticism.

Every effort has been made to clear copyright; however, my apologies to anyone I may have inadvertently missed. I can assure you it was not deliberate but an oversight on my part.

Nicola Sly, 2013

1

‘I am afraid I have shot my wife’

Cheam, Surrey, 1828

William Wittman was a poor physical specimen of a man. He was short in stature and having once broken his back in an accident, he was also a hunchback, who was ‘not perfect in his limbs’. A former holder of a very lowly position in the Excise Office, he lived in Walworth with his wife Sarah and their son, William junior. The couple lived very unhappily together – Sarah, who was said to be ‘from the most degraded walk of society’, was younger than her husband, very strong and robust and possessed a fearsome temper.

The death of William’s father enabled him to give up work and live on the income from properties bequeathed to him in his father’s will. He moved Sarah and five-year-old William to a cottage in Cheam but sadly the couple’s relationship worsened when both husband and wife began to drink heavily. Sarah frequently used violence on her rather weedy husband and towards the end of 1828 William was driven to apply to a magistrate for a warrant against her for assault. He described several instances of his wife’s violent conduct, showing the chief constable cuts and bruises to illustrate his allegations and saying that he ‘constantly went in absolute danger of his life.’ He claimed to be in mortal fear of his wife, saying that if he wasn’t protected in some way or another he felt sure she would end up killing him. Unfortunately, the magistrates could do little to help Wittman and he was advised to go to magistrates at Epsom, that being the nearest town to his home.

Whether or not William ever consulted the Epsom magistrates is not known but he continued to complain of Sarah’s violence towards him and, on one occasion, tried to persuade a friend to go home with him, since he was too afraid of his wife’s uncontrollable temper to go alone. Sadly, the friend had other commitments and soon afterwards the situation between the warring Wittmans came to a head, with tragic consequences.

When the couple first moved to Cheam, they employed a young servant girl. The Wittmans made some improvements to their new home, employing a plumber and painter named Prosser, who quickly moved into the cottage as a lodger and began a dalliance with the servant. It is easy to imagine that the virile Prosser might have proved more sexually attractive to Sarah Wittman than her crippled, deformed husband and before long she dismissed the maid and took the girl’s place in Prosser’s bed. When Wittman protested, Sarah exploded in a rage and whenever he tried to remonstrate with her about the impropriety of her conduct, she physically attacked him, hitting him with a poker, smashing a chair over his head and destroying everything around her in an uncontrolled fury. Eventually, Wittman seems to have come to view Prosser as an ally rather than an enemy and, on occasions when Sarah’s temper reached its crescendo, her husband would take refuge in Prosser’s bedroom, sharing his bed until Sarah’s wrath abated.

In December 1828, Sarah destroyed all of the couple’s silver spoons in a temper and smashed three family pictures to smithereens. Nevertheless, when her husband became aware that she had slept in Prosser’s bed on the night of 11 December, he felt obliged to ask her about it. Sarah immediately snatched up a poker from the fireplace and hit her husband twice on the head, stunning him. One of Wittman’s hobbies was shooting small birds in his garden and he usually kept a loaded gun handy for taking outside. Now, he realised that Sarah was going for the gun, which stood in the corner of the back parlour. He grabbed her and the couple grappled for possession of the weapon for a few moments before the gun went off, shooting Sarah in the face.

As soon as Wittman realised that his wife was shot he ran to the back door, finding it locked and the key not in its normal place. Knowing that the front door was always kept locked and anxious to get help as quickly as possible, Wittman scrambled out of a window and ran to the home of his nearest neighbour, Mathew Stedman, telling him that there had been a terrible accident and begging him for assistance. ‘I am afraid I have shot my wife,’ he told Stedman, blood streaming down his face from the cuts on his head. ‘Look at my head. See how I was struck. I fired the gun afterwards in the heat of passion,’ Wittman continued excitedly.

Stedman and two friends who were at his house that evening went back to the Wittmans’ cottage with him, climbing in through the open window. There was a lamp burning on the table, which Wittman picked up, using it to light their way into the kitchen, where Sarah lay partially dressed on her back on the floor near to the fireplace. William Perkins knelt down beside her and felt for a pulse. ‘It does not beat, she is quite dead,’ he declared.

Surgeon Samuel Farrant arrived at about 8.30 p.m., too late to do anything to help Sarah who, according to the surgeon, had died instantly from a close range gunshot wound, the powder and small shot completely obliterating her facial features, before lodging in her brain. ‘This is a shocking thing – how did it happen?’ he asked Wittman.

‘Sir, I’ve had great provocation – very great provocation. She struck me twice on the head with a poker,’ Wittman explained. The surgeon noticed that Wittman had two bleeding wounds on his scalp and that there was a heavy poker on the floor, beneath the dead body. The surgeon asked Wittman whether he had purposely loaded the gun to shoot his wife but Wittman told him that it was already loaded when he picked it up, adding that he had absolutely no recollection of having cocked or fired the gun.

An inquest was held at the Wittmans’ home the following morning at which the first witness called was Mr Prosser. He stated that he had dined with the Wittmans the previous day and recalled that Sarah Wittman was ‘in liquor’, so much so that she went upstairs to lie down after the meal. Prosser and William drank a glass of gin together before Prosser left the house to spend the evening at a nearby pub, returning at 9.15 p.m. to find the house full of people and his landlady dead. Prosser confirmed that Wittman often shot small birds in his garden and habitually kept at least one loaded gun in the house. The coroner seems to have questioned Prosser closely about the Wittmans and their relationship but very little was reported about the alleged improper intimacy between Prosser and Sarah, details of which were probably judged to be too racy for publication. Prosser testified that both William and Sarah were ‘addicted in the extreme degree to the use of spirituous liquors’ and were in the habit of quarrelling when drunk. At such times, Sarah was invariably so violent that her husband was often forced to shelter from her fury in Prosser’s room.

The inquest jury returned a verdict of wilful murder against William Wittman, who was immediately taken to Surrey’s Horsemonger Lane Gaol. While awaiting his trial, he spent much of his time in the prison Infirmary, where he reportedly ‘laboured under excessive agitation of mind, attended with a great depression of spirits.’ However, when he was brought before Mr Justice Burrough at the Kingston Assizes on 29 December 1828, the Grand Jury rejected the charge of murder against him, finding instead a bill for manslaughter. Thus Wittman was tried for wilful murder on the coroner’s warrant.

The crux of the case was that, although Wittman had at one time claimed that the gun went off while he and his wife were struggling for possession of it, he had also readily stated to all and sundry in the immediate aftermath of the shooting that he had shot his wife after she provoked him by hitting him on the head with a poker. The implications of Wittman’s assertions was that the shooting had been a deliberate action, albeit one that occurred after considerable provocation from his victim.

The bent poker found under his wife’s body corroborated Wittman’s story that she had hit him on the head and he was indisputably bleeding when he arrived at his neighbours’ home. Several people testified to Sarah Wittman’s terrible temper, including her sister, who told the court that she frequently visited the couple and had witnessed many quarrels between them. She recalled one particular argument that erupted while she was sitting in the kitchen at the cottage in Cheam and stated that she immediately went to try and calm the situation down. When she entered the parlour, she saw Sarah sitting in a chair holding a gun, which she promptly fired at William, the shot lodging in the door. Sarah immediately stood up and ordered her sister, ‘Fetch me the other gun and I will shoot him with that.’ Fortunately, William got to that weapon first and rushed outside with it, discharging it harmlessly in the garden.

It was pointed out to the jury that William Wittman had ample opportunity to escape after the shooting but made no attempt to do so, instead immediately raising the alarm to try and get help for his wife. Surgeon Mr Farrant testified to examining both the victim and her alleged murderer at the scene of the crime, describing Sarah as ‘a good, strong woman’ and drawing a contrast between her and her ‘much deformed’ husband.

‘She was more than a match for him, I suppose?’ the surgeon was asked.

‘Oh dear, yes,’ he replied.

In summing up the case, Mr Justice Burrough observed that often the first impression of an event was far worse than the actual circumstances and this appeared to be the case here. With regard to the coroner’s verdict of wilful murder, the judge told the jury that the evidence that had been presented in court was insufficient to prove a case of murder, although he personally believed that the jury could convict the prisoner of manslaughter if they so desired. Burrough seemed surprised that Wittman’s counsel had not taken the stance that the fatal shot was fired in self-defence, which would be no offence at all. However, Burrough instructed the jury that they could hardly come to that conclusion now, since the prisoner had not set up such a defence but had consistently stated that he committed the murder in the heat of passion. In conclusion, the judge advised the jury that the allegation that Wittman was struck with a poker before the shooting was supported by the evidence and that such blows would constitute sufficient provocation for the reduction of Wittman’s offence from murder to manslaughter.

Without feeling any need to retire and deliberate the case, the jury made an almost instant decision that Wittman was not guilty of wilful murder but was guilty of manslaughter. In passing sentence, Burrough told Wittman that, while he had undoubtedly received great provocation, it did not justify him using a gun to avenge himself. However, the provocation that Wittman received at the hands of his wife would induce the court to pass a much lighter sentence and, having given due consideration to all the circumstances of the case, Burrough sentenced William Wittman to three calendar months’ imprisonment in the House of Correction.

Note: Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the date of this case, there are some discrepancies between the newspaper reports. The surgeon is variously referred to as Samuel Farrant, Tarrant, Sharratt or Sarratt and it is not clear whether Stedman was Wittman’s neighbour or was one of the two men visiting his neighbour. His name is recorded both as Mathew and Michael.

2

‘You shall find a complete devil in me’

Middlesex, 1847

Twenty-nine-year-old file cutter and grinder Robert Henry Blake was legally married to a woman named Esther, who he had left in Birmingham after meeting thirty-eight-year-old Harriet Parker. Blake persuaded Harriet to desert her husband and move to London with him, where they lived as man and wife. Harriet’s husband was a retired soldier, who was considerably older than his wife and died roughly eighteen months after she left him.

Although Blake was no longer living with Esther, two of the couple’s children lived with him and Harriet in Cupid’s Court, St Luke’s in Middlesex. On 31 December 1847, Blake arrived home from work and told Harriet to hurry up with his tea and to boil some water so that he could wash and shave, as he had made plans to go to the theatre. Harriet wanted to go too but Blake told her that he had already made arrangements to go with a friend, Stephen Hewlett.

Having eaten his tea, Blake put seven-year-old Amina and her five-year-old brother Robert Henry junior to bed, before setting off for the theatre. Harriet was furious at being excluded from his plans and also highly suspicious that he might be meeting another woman and so decided to follow him. She trotted along behind him and, when he protested, she told him that she intended to stay with him all night, so he had better get used to her being there. ‘You shall find a complete devil in me,’ she told Blake ominously.

Blake actually intended to spend the night with a prostitute, Jane Jones, who lived in Goswell Street. Anxious to escape Harriet’s clutches, when he met Hewlett at The Duke of Bedford public house in Golden Lane, he asked his friend if he would take Harriet to the theatre. When Hewlett refused, Blake suggested that they went for a walk and the two men set off towards Goswell Street, with Harriet trailing behind them. Hewlett sneaked a quick backwards glance over his shoulder at her and told Blake that she appeared to be carrying something heavy tied up in a handkerchief. Blake, who was an inveterate womaniser, bemoaned the fact that Harriet was exceedingly jealous. ‘If I was to kiss that post she would be jealous of it,’ he joked. The two men eventually returned to The Duke of Bedford, where Blake managed to give Harriet the slip and went straight to Jane’s house, where he stayed until the next morning.

Meanwhile, Harriet was enraged to find that Blake had evaded her and immediately rushed out of the pub to look for him. She returned five minutes later having been unable to find him, appearing very animated and threatening that Blake would rue the day he left her. ‘I will do something that he shall repent and will die in Newgate,’ she told Hewlett, adding, ‘I have something very black in mind and I’ll stop it before long. You will hear of me before you see me.’

Harriet seems to have continued searching for her errant partner for some time, as a witness saw her early on New Year’s Day 1848, at which time she was walking the streets with Amina, asking people if they had seen Blake. Then nothing was heard of her until 4 a.m., when she knocked frantically on her neighbour’s door.

When Jane Moore opened her bedroom window and leaned out, she found Harriet on her doorstep looking anxious and agitated.

‘Oh, Mrs Moore, I have done it,’ Harriet told her and when her neighbour asked what she had done, Harriet launched into a rambling explanation.

‘I went out with Blake last night intending to go to the play, when he met a little strumpet and took hold of her arm and immediately left me.’

Mrs Moore failed to grasp the significance of what Harriet was saying and asked what all that had to do with her and why Harriet had woken her in the early hours of the morning to tell her about it. ‘Has Mr Blake not come home?’ she asked Harriet, somewhat perplexed.

‘No, he has not and a pretty spectacle there is for him when he does come home. I shall go and deliver myself up to a policeman,’ Harriet continued and when Mrs Moore asked her why she felt the need to do that, Harriet told her, ‘I have murdered the two children.’

While Jane’s husband John Moore went in search of a policeman, Harriet herself walked around until she met PC George Fowler. ‘I give myself up,’ she told Fowler and insisted that he arrest her, although she wouldn’t initially tell the constable what she had done and only admitted to killing the children on the way to the police station, when she told Fowler, ‘I have murdered the children to revenge their father. They were innocent – through my vindictiveness I have done the deed.’ Fowler cautioned Harriet to say nothing but she told him, ‘I worshipped the ground he [Blake] walked on and he knew it. I was not like a person who was drunk. I was quite sober. I knew what I was about.’

Back at Cupid’s Court, Mr Moore had returned with two policemen, who climbed into Blake’s house through the parlour window. They found the two children lying together on a bed, wearing just shifts and stockings. Both Amina and Robert junior were still warm and the only marks of violence on their bodies were scratches and bruises on their throats and faces. Surgeon Francis Wright was called to the scene and estimated that both children had died at around 3 a.m. on 1 January. Wright believed that the marks on the children were caused by someone grasping their throats very tightly with their fingers, although he believed that the cause of death was probably suffocation and that someone had pressed their hand hard over their faces and held it in place until the children stopped breathing. Post-mortem examinations conducted on both children by Wright and another surgeon, James Courtenay, indicated that Wright’s conclusions were correct. It was obvious that the children had struggled desperately for their lives and, indeed, Jeremiah Donoghue later came forward to say that he had heard Amina shouting ‘Murder!’ between 1 and 2 a.m. and got out of bed to listen at his window but had heard nothing further out of the ordinary.

Coroner Mr Baker opened an inquest at The William the Fourth public house on Golden Lane. The inquest was adjourned several times, before concluding with a verdict of wilful murder against Harriet Parker. Magistrates at Clerkenwell Police Court were in full agreement and she was committed for trial at the next assizes.

Harriet appeared at the Middlesex Assizes, held in the Central Criminal Court on 31 January 1848, where she seemed completely unruffled as she pleaded not guilty to the two charges of wilful murder against her. (It had been her intention to plead guilty and forego her trial but she was persuaded against doing so by Under-Sherriff Mr France.) Described as ‘a woman of below the middle stature, of dark swarthy complexion and a most repugnant cast of countenance’, Harriet was nevertheless smartly dressed in a plum-coloured dress with bright steel buttons, coupled with a dark shawl and a dark cap. ‘She seems to have attired herself to as much advantage as she could’, commented a contemporary newspaper. The trial took place before two judges, Mr Baron Alderson and Mr Justice Williams, with Mr Bodkin and Mr Clerk handling the prosecution and Mr Clarkson acting in Harriet’s defence.

The first witness for the prosecution was the father of the victims, Robert Blake senior, who described the way in which Harriet persisted in following him on the night of 31 December, even though he asked her several times to go home. Blake stated that he had not intended to meet prostitute Jane Jones but claimed to have met her ‘spontaneously’. Although he admitted to spending several days before the murder drinking and bragged in court that his relationship with Harriet had never stopped him from seducing other women, he categorically denied taunting Harriet or trying to make her jealous on the night of the murders.

Blake’s evidence differed from a statement made by Harriet after her arrest, in which she claimed that he had told her to hurry up with his meal as he had made plans to take another woman to the theatre. ‘You must get her to make your tea then as I won’t,’ Harriet told him, insisting that she only followed Blake to get a look at her rival. (Harriet also disputed Donoghue’s claim that Amina had cried ‘Murder!’ in her statement, saying, ‘The poor little thing wouldn’t have had the chance.’)

Once the prosecution had called John and Jane Moore, Jane Jones, surgeon Frederick Wright and the police officers and a female searcher who had dealt with Harriet in the aftermath of the murders, they rested their case and it was left to Mr Clarkson to attempt to defend her. Clarkson began by admitting that he could hardly deny that his client had committed the dreadful crimes alleged against her. However, Clarkson told the court that, at the time of the murders, she was not a ‘responsible agent’. He reminded the jury that Blake had behaved in such a base and unmanly way that it was more than probable that his cruel conduct towards her had driven the prisoner into a state of frenzy and that the dreadful deed was committed in the heat of passion, while her mind was in that condition.

Mr Baron Alderson recapitulated the evidence for the jury, saying that it was for them to decide on Harriet’s state of mind at the time of the offence, adding that, as far as he could see, there was little doubt that she committed the acts with which she was charged. It took the jury just ten minutes to deliberate, returning with a guilty verdict but accompanying it with a strong recommendation for mercy on the grounds of the unparalleled provocation the prisoner had received.

‘The children gave her no provocation at all,’ protested Alderson, before both judges put on their black caps and he proceeded to pass sentence on Harriet Parker.

He promised to forward the jury’s recommendation to the proper quarters but advised Harriet not to hold out any hope that it would be heeded. ‘From a feeling of revenge towards another person, you have taken the lives of two unoffending children,’ Alderson told Harriet, reminding her that she had committed the act while her victims were ‘in a sweet, innocent sleep.’ Blake had unquestionably behaved very ill towards her, concluded the judge before questioning what ground was that for her to wreak her revenge upon his children, who had given her no offence?

After Alderson pronounced the death sentence, Harriet shouted out, ‘God forgive you, Blake. You have bought me to this,’ before being led from the court.

The judge was as good as his word and did indeed forward the jury’s recommendation to Home Secretary Sir George Grey. In a letter dated 12 February 1848, Grey announced that he could see no grounds for recommending the prisoner to the mercy of the Crown and that he must therefore leave the law to take its course.

Harriet Parker spent the days leading up to her execution dictating letters. She wrote to Blake, advising him to return to the ‘wife of his bosom’ and never again trifle with a woman as he had with her. Harriet also asked Blake to pay off some minor debts, but he didn’t reply to her letter and the debts were eventually settled for her by a benevolent prison visitor. Blake did write one letter to Harriet, which was delivered to the prison by one of his workmates, Mr Shotton. Blake asked if Shotton might be granted an interview with Harriet but this was not permitted, although Harriet was allowed to see her neighbour Jane Moore, who remarked on how well she looked. ‘I have received more kindness in Newgate than ever since I left my mother’s home,’ Harriet explained, telling Mrs Moore that she was quite resigned to her fate and sincerely regretted her crimes, fully acknowledging the justice of her sentence.

On 19 February 1848, Harriet wrote a final letter to Blake, in which she told him: ‘My untimely fate will, I hope, be a warning to you and I shall be the last, I trust, you will be the cause of bringing to so bitter an end’ [sic]. Harriet sent Blake a Bible, with a hymn written inside it and also a pair of cuffs she had knitted for him while she was imprisoned. ‘Pray leave off drinking so much, staying out so late at night and getting into such bad company. These things first withdrew the affections of your wife and were the cause of all our misery,’ she ended the letter.

A skilled knitter, Harriet had also fashioned ornamental cuffs for the prison chaplain and governor, which they accepted with pleasure. Harriet expressed a wish to sit up throughout the night before her execution but sleep overtook her at around 2 a.m. On the morning of 23 February 1848, she drank a cup of coffee and attended the prison chapel, where she received the sacrament and sang a hymn, ‘Be gone, unbelief; my Saviour is near, and for my relief will surely appear; by prayer let me wrestle, and he will perform; with Christ in the vessel, I smile at the storm.’

A massive crowd had assembled to watch the execution and they yelled, hissed, whistled and hooted as Harriet was led to the scaffold. Faced with such a heaving mass of humanity, her courage deserted her momentarily at the foot of the steps leading to the drop and, but for the timely assistance of executioner William Calcraft, she might have fallen. As Calcraft placed the white hood over her head and the noose around her neck, she was heard reciting the Lord’s Prayer and repeating the words, ‘Lord have mercy upon me,’ as the drop fell. ‘The sufferings the wretched creature underwent, if muscular contortions and violent motion of the hands and arms be any criterion, were truly dreadful,’ reported one contemporary newspaper, adding that this arose not from any want of skill on Calcraft’s part but simply because Harriet was such a diminutive woman.

After hanging for the customary period of one hour, Harriet’s body was cut down. Unusually, permission was not granted for a death mask to be made of her features, before her body was buried within the confines of the prison.

When Harriet was arrested, her shift was stiff with old, dried blood arising from a beating Blake had administered just days before the murders and, even in court, Blake boasted of drinking and idling for at least a week before the murders, during which time he had spent nearly £3 on drink and women. ‘She has not prevented me from seducing three young women who were in service,’ Blake bragged, bemoaning the fact that Harriet had got one of his conquests sacked from her job by telling her employers that she was associating with a married man. In her penultimate letter to Blake, Harriet wrote: ‘Awful as my fate is, I would rather die than live again the wretched life I have done for the last twelve months’ it was widely believed at the time that had Harriet Parker murdered Robert Blake rather than his innocent children, she would probably have been convicted of the lesser crime of manslaughter on the grounds of provocation and her life would have been spared.

Note: Amina Blake is alternatively named Armenia, Emma and Amelia in various newspaper accounts of the tragedy. Some sources give the trial date as 4 February 1848 and there too many discrepancies among the different newspapers in the names of several other witnesses to list individually – for example PC Fowler is alternately named as George and Robert Fowler, Towler and Towle. I have taken the most frequently used variation in each case.

3

‘I did it and I did it right’

Old Meldrum, Aberdeenshire, 1857

Although he earned his living as a travelling hawker, John Booth had a home in Old Meldrum in Aberdeenshire, where he lived with his wife Mary and two children, aged nine and six years old. Mary’s parents, James and Jean Barclay, kept a small crockery shop in the village, roughly 250 yards from their daughter and son-in-law’s home.

According to contemporary newspapers, the whole family were looked upon by their neighbours as ‘a queer set’. Described as ‘something approaching what is known as the genus tinker’, Jean Barclay read tealeaves and practiced palmistry, something which displeased her son-in-law immensely, especially since Jean tried to persuade Mary to follow in her footsteps. She also played cards on Sundays, which Booth saw as a bad example to his children. In the past, he had been charged with threatening his mother-in-law but when he was brought before magistrates, they too took a dim view of Jean’s activities and it was she who was reprimanded and cautioned rather than her son-in-law. However, although he was discharged on this occasion, John Booth was no angel – he had several previous convictions, including one in 1849, when he served forty days in prison for breach of the peace, malicious mischief and assault.

Booth spent a lot of time away from home and there were persistent rumours in the village that his wife was unfaithful while he was away travelling the local gossip was that whenever Booth left his home, more than one man took advantage of his absence to call on Mary for sexual favours. Although Booth didn’t entirely believe the rumours, he was a short-tempered man, who was fond of a drink when he had money in his pockets and the constant whispers and innuendo upset him, so there would almost always be quarrels on his arrival home from one of his trips. Jean invariably took her daughter’s side against him, which irritated Booth still further.

On 8 July 1857, Booth was away at a fair, which took place about eight miles from his house. When he returned home, Booth was later to say that he had ‘ocular proof’ that the rumours about his wife’s infidelity were true. A furious row ensued and although Mary Booth protested her innocence, Booth threatened to ‘do for her’. The following day, Booth got tipsy and went into the village druggist’s shop, where he asked for six pennyworth of laudanum. When asked why he wanted it, he told the druggist that his wife had a bowel complaint but, seeing that Booth was drunk, the druggist sold him a phial of harmless medicine. Booth went straight home and waved it triumphantly in Mary’s face. ‘Ye’ve long had the victory – ye’se has it to the end,’ he told her, before dramatically draining the contents and throwing the empty phial in her face. The draft had no ill effects, although the fact that Booth was prepared to take an overdose of poison because of Mary’s behaviour seemed to bring the couple to their senses and for the next few days they lived together in relative harmony.

The domestic peace lasted until 21 July, when Booth and several of his friends were drinking in the village. There was a fair the following day and one of Booth’s drinking companions taunted him, saying that once Booth was out of the way, he would go and visit his wife, where he was assured of the warmest of welcomes. A physical fight broke out between Booth and Thomas Moneur and, once Booth had knocked Moneur down, he went home to deal with his errant wife.

He arrived home at about 10 p.m., having been drinking whisky, beer and porter for much of the afternoon and evening. Mary Booth was in bed and he went into their bedroom and quietly asked her if she was asleep. When she said that she wasn’t, he asked her to get up and help him untie his shoelaces and when she didn’t immediately do as he asked, he angrily ordered her to get out of bed. As soon as she complied, Booth swung at her with a knife, cutting her arm.

For a few moments, Mary and her husband grappled for possession of his knife and Mary was stabbed again on the thigh, before she happened to notice that the door was open. Quickly, she seized her chance to escape and ran out of the house, heading as fast as she could towards her parents’ shop.

She pounded desperately on the door and when James Barclay opened it, she rushed into the house, telling her father that her husband was after her with a knife. She was dressed only in her nightclothes and James could clearly see the cut on his daughter’s arm, which fortunately was only superficial. As Mary tried to hide, Booth burst through the door waving his knife and demanding to know where she was.

As Mary cowered behind her mother, Booth suddenly rushed at his mother-in-law and slashed her arm. James Barclay picked up a spade and when Booth lashed out at Jean with the knife a second time, James hit him over the head. The blow did little more than stun Booth momentarily but it allowed Jean to dodge past him and run out of the house and across the street, where she rapped on her opposite neighbour’s window shouting, ‘Murder!’ She then made the fateful decision to return to her own house, where she was met by Booth still wielding his knife.

Jean was stabbed several more times. ‘He’s murdered me,’ she said in apparent astonishment to the neighbours who were beginning to gather at the house. Meanwhile Booth calmly dropped his knife and went outside, where he sat quietly awaiting the arrival of the police. Tragically, Booth’s nine-year-old son, James, who was staying overnight with his grandparents, had watched the entire tragedy unfold.

Neighbours ran for a surgeon and the village constable, James Tarves, both of whom arrived within minutes. As surgeon John Ingram examined Jean Barclay and pronounced her dead, Tarves concentrated on Booth, who offered no resistance to being arrested. ‘I did it and I did it right,’ Booth repeatedly told the constable, adding that they would find the knife he used ‘to do the job’ on the floor, somewhere near the body. Tarves noted at the time of the arrest that Booth ‘appeared to have had a dram’ but judged him to be sober and to know perfectly well what he had done.

There being no lock-up in the village, Booth was detained overnight at a pub and the following morning, he was taken to East Prison in Aberdeen. He made no attempt to deny murdering Jean Barclay and claimed that he had done so gladly because of the bad example that she set her daughter. Booth’s only regret was that he had failed to mete out the same punishment to his wife. He was charged with one count of wilful murder and one count of stabbing his wife, with intent to kill or maim but declined to give any statement other than what he had already said on the matter. Meanwhile, a post-mortem examination on his victim showed that she had been stabbed seven or eight times with a sharp instrument and had wounds on her head, neck, arms and chest. The fatal wound was located between the fifth and six ribs and had penetrated Jean Barclay’s heart, causing her to bleed to death within minutes. According to Ingram and surgeon Francis Ogston, who examined the body, all of the wounds resulted from blows with a knife, given with great force.

When Booth was brought to trial at the Autumn Circuit Court at Aberdeen, he pleaded guilty to culpable homicide, an offence defined as causing loss of life through wrongful conduct or ‘wicked recklessness’, but without intention to kill. (The offence would equate manslaughter under English law.) However, the prosecution was eager to secure a conviction for the capital offence of murder. In his closing speech, the counsel for the prosecution told the jury that he had no intention of wasting words. The fact that Booth had killed the victim was indisputable. The jury had heard the evidence and it was up to them to decide whether they could see anything in the circumstances that might lead them to reduce the charge from murder to culpable homicide.

Booth’s court-appointed defence counsel, James Moncrieff, made no attempt to argue the facts of the case but reminded the jury that there was no motive shown for the murder on Booth’s part and that the legal distinction between murder and homicide was nothing more than the presence or absence of evil intent. The fatal stabbing occurred in the middle of a confused struggle and the defence maintained that the fact that Jean Barclay sustained a number of non-fatal wounds actually showed that Booth had no intention of inflicting a mortal wound. The defence seemed intent on urging the jury towards a verdict of guilty of culpable homicide on the grounds that such a verdict would allow ample time for the prisoner to reflect on his actions and repent, hopefully leaving this world a better person than the speedy termination of his life by judicial hanging would allow.

In summing up, the Lord Justice Clerk John Hope, then the most senior judge in Scotland, began by explaining the legal difference between murder and culpable homicide to the jury. He agreed that there was no proven enmity on the part of the prisoner towards the deceased but argued that, contrary to the defence counsel’s closing speech, enmity was not a necessity for the offence to be classed as murder. Hope argued that it had been proven that there was an intention to do harm to the victim, since Booth never turned his knife against James Barclay when he stepped into the fray in his wife’s defence but instead continued to attack the deceased and dropped his weapon immediately after she was mortally wounded. Hope then further contradicted Moncrieff, picking up on his depiction of a ‘confused struggle’. The only struggle was actually with James Barclay, who was attempting to defend his wife and daughter, said Hope, and during that struggle, Booth made no attempt to use his knife.

After the initial attack on Mary Booth, that knife was used only against Jean Barclay. A person without evil intent might deprive another of his life by one single stroke of the knife but in this case the knife had been used no less than eight times and, in Hope’s opinion, unless the jury could find any alleviating circumstances, this was a clear case of murder. It took the jury just forty minutes of deliberation to decide that they agreed with the judge and pronounce John Booth guilty of murder.

As Hope was preparing to pass the death sentence, Booth interrupted him, asking to be allowed to speak. When permission was granted, he claimed that several of the witnesses in court had not spoken the truth. ‘I will speak the truth, as I shall answer to God,’ he promised before commencing a lengthy speech. ‘For seven years, I have suffered from my wife and her mother, who I am now accused of murdering,’ he stated, continuing to list some of his grievances against Jean Barclay’s drinking and immoral conduct. ‘I actually, positively and truly, before you and before God, see’d another man – a married man – having to do with her carnally with my own eyes,’ he insisted, saying that when he challenged Jean about her scandalous behaviour, she called him a liar to his face.

Booth continued by saying that he had never made any attempt to stop his wife from seeing her mother – on the contrary, he firmly believed that they should enjoy each other’s company and that a mother should set a good example for her daughter to follow. However, Booth’s son spent a lot of time with his grandparents and, according to Booth, was encouraged to be cheeky and foul-mouthed towards him. Booth had heard rumours that, while he was incarcerated in 1849, Jean Barclay was sleeping with other men in his house. Booth then claimed that, shortly before the stabbing, a man named William Saunders had told him that he had seen Mary ‘having connection’ with another man and asked Booth what he intended to do about it. ‘Can you do nothing? Can you stand that?’ Saunders asked Booth, who described himself as ‘thunderstruck’ by the revelations about his wife. ‘I stood and did not reply a word to him,’ Booth said but, deciding that he had to investigate the rumours, then claimed that he and another man had ‘see’d with their own eyes’ a man ‘in the very act of carnal dealings’ with his wife. Booth was so distraught that he bought poison intending to kill himself but, having swallowed it, was so drunk that he almost immediately vomited it up again, before it could take effect. His second suicide attempt failed because he was sold an innocuous liquid by the village druggist.

Having finished his speech Booth sat down again and the Lord Justice Clerk resumed sentencing. ‘From the tone of mind in which you are speaking and the manner in which you have addressed me just now it would be useless for me to address anything further to you,’ he told Booth before donning the black cap. Booth was told that he was to be taken back to East Prison in Aberdeen and detained there, fed only bread and water, until 21 October, when he would be hanged by the neck until dead and then buried within the confines of the prison.

The sentence of death was appealed on the grounds that Booth had acted under such extreme provocation that he was scarcely responsible for his actions and many of the local and national papers carried editorials on his behalf. ‘Here is not a person whose character and antecedents are calculated to excite sympathy in his favour,’ opened one such piece, ‘So whatever feeling of regret or dissatisfaction the verdict has occasioned is entirely due to the circumstances which had driven him to the terrible crime for which he is condemned to suffer.’

It was argued that for many years, Booth was ‘subjected to every shame and degradation which it is possible for a man to suffer by the infidelities of his wife, the connivance of her mother and the taunts and jeers of his acquaintances’. Yet, although this situation was subsequently confirmed by many people, the newspapers bemoaned the fact that none of the details of Booth’s unhappy existence had been used to further his defence.

Traditionally, the killing of an adulteress by an injured husband was regarded almost as justifiable homicide and this was true even in the days when stealing anything to the value of twelve pence was a capital crime. Booth was guilty of a different crime but nevertheless, it was a crime of the same class. He was obviously in pursuit of his wife when the offence was committed and, at the time, was apparently burning with all the rage excited by her conduct and from his quarrel with the man Moneur, a notorious character, who subjected him to all manner of insults. The lapse of time which the law makes an element in distinguishing between murder and manslaughter relates entirely to the assault on the wife, whereas the fatal attack on her mother was clearly a momentary and unprecedented impulse, born from a belief in her connivance in his wife’s infidelities but aggravated by ‘The chance medley of a struggle’.

Many of the contemporary newspapers printed allegations that, at the time she was stabbed, Jean Barclay was actually battering her killer with a rolling pin. ‘We hear of a spade and a rolling pin without getting any clear conception of how and when they were used,’ wrote one newspaper, whose editor seemed to be of the opinion that Booth was in a state of blind fury at the time of the killing and that, in confronting him, Jean Barclay unwittingly became the focus of his frenzied rage. Some newspapers questioned why Booth’s counsel had not seen fit to plead temporary insanity as a defence.

‘The only things that are clear are that the long, maddening provocations of years had at last passed all endurance and that, with the distorted notion of justice and his drink-distracted brain the author of his disgrace and suffering, he [Booth] killed the first one of them that came to hand.’ The newspapers made much of the fact that Booth was defended ‘on the poor’s-roll’ – in other words, because he was unable to raise the necessary money to pay for his defence, it was provided for him free of charge. ‘Had this poor creature or his friends been master of fifty pounds, he would have escaped the gallows,’ concluded many of the newspapers of the time.

In the run-up to his execution, Booth remained cool and composed, never once denying his crime or trying to excuse it, although he expressed deep contrition for what he had done. An appeal for clemency was made on his behalf but Home Secretary Sir George Grey saw no reason to interfere with the due course of the law so, on 21 October 1857, Booth kept his scheduled appointment with executioner William Calcraft. He made a brief, calmly spoken statement to the assembled crowd of spectators, urging them to flee from any wrath that may happen to them and turn to Christ. ‘Now I will bid you all farewell and may God, in His infinite mercy, forgive you as I expect at this moment he will forgive me my transgressions.’ With that, the executioner drew the white hood over Booth’s face and he was heard praying quietly as the drop fell, killing him instantly.

Booth wrote several letters before his death, including a written statement, which he asked to be published, once he had been hanged. Headed ‘East Prison, Aberdeen, 20 October 1857’, it read:

The statement which I made in Court at my trial has given me and gives me still the utmost uneasiness and pain, for what will a man not say or do for his life. And I implore in the near prospect of death and eternity that that sad speech will be forgotten and never remembered against my dear wife and children. And further, it is my anxious desire that the black deed of which I am guilty and for which I am to suffer, will never operate against the interests of my dear wife and children. I do from my heart implore my dear wife to forgive whatever I have said and done that has wronged her and I earnestly pray that God may be gracious unto her and the children and bless them.

Note: Although nearly all of the newspapers name the victim as Jean Barclay, some reports name her as Joan or Jane.

4

‘I’ve stopped her whoring’

Rochester, Kent, 1858

At around 6 a.m. on Sunday, 18 April 1858, Sarah Anne King was rudely awakened by a scuffling noise, followed by a loud thump. Sarah and her husband, William Joseph King, rented the bottom floor of a cottage at the rear of The Telegraph public house in Rochester, Kent. The top floor was occupied by forty-nine-year-old Albert Huskey Turner (also known as George Turner) and his wife Mary Ann, who was twenty years younger than her husband.

After more noises, Sarah nudged her husband awake and told him to get up and go and see what was happening. ‘It’s none of our business. It’s man’s and wife’s affair,’ William told her sleepily, somehow ignoring a bloodcurdling scream and another heavy thud from upstairs. Moments later, he leaped out of bed and began pulling on his trousers, finally galvanised into wakefulness by blood dripping through the ceiling and falling onto his bed.

William and Sarah rushed out of their rooms to find Alfred Turner standing just outside the door at the foot of the stairs, his hands covered in blood.

‘Don’t knock your wife about so; you will kill her,’ Sarah warned him.

‘I have killed her,’ Turner replied conversationally. ‘Mrs Turner is no more. Go and see her. She shan’t be Moulder Taylor’s whore anymore.’ [sic]

While Sarah King rushed upstairs to see if she could help Mary Ann, Turner announced his intention of going to the police station to hand himself in and asked William to accompany him there. ‘I’ll go comfortable with you; not with anybody else,’ he told King.

‘Moulder’ was William Taylor, a young, unmarried man whose nickname came from his job, which was making moulds for casting bricks. As King walked with him to the police station, Turner explained that he had seen Taylor behind a well with his wife and suspected that the couple were having an affair. He had woken at 4 a.m. that morning and, finding that his wife was not in bed with him, he went to search for her. Knowing that she had been drinking with Taylor the night before, Turner told King that he went to The Telegraph, where he actually heard his wife and Taylor committing adultery in the pub’s parlour. The door to the room was locked and Turner was unable to get in, so he went outside to check the window shutters and the back door of the pub, which were also locked. Unable to get indoors, Turner went back to his rooms to wait for his wife to return.

By five o’clock, she had still not come back, so Turner went to The Telegraph and checked all the doors and windows again. When he returned to his rooms, having been unable to gain entry to the pub, he found his wife sitting at the top of the stairs waiting for him. He accused her of adultery and Turner told King that she begged for mercy and promised to mend her ways but Turner claimed that his feelings were so hurt that he picked up the poker and hit her three times on the head with it. Mary Ann slumped over the table semi-conscious, and her husband eased her onto the floor and cut her throat with a razor. ‘I would rather see her lying dead than that she should be a prostitute,’ Turner revealed, seemingly very satisfied with his night’s work.

When they arrived at the police station, King handed Turner over to PC John Story. ‘I have come to give myself up, for murdering my wife,’ Turner told the constable. Seeing Turner’s blood-caked hands and clothes, Story promptly despatched PC Featherstone to The Telegraph to investigate his admission, before searching Turner and removing a tobacco box and a knife from his pockets. ‘I didn’t do it with that, I cut her throat with a razor, which I left lying by her body,’ Turner explained helpfully. Story asked Turner why he had killed his wife and he rationalised, ‘I’ve stopped her whoring.’

Meanwhile, PC Featherstone had arrived at Turner’s rooms and found that surgeon Mr Bell had already pronounced Mary Ann dead. She lay on the floor in a huge pool of blood, fully clothed apart from her boots, a broken poker and a bloody, white-handled razor close by. Surgeon Thomas Pearce Bevan conducted a post-mortem examination later that day, finding that Mary Ann had a four-and-a-half-inch-long wound across the front of her throat, which had divided her carotid artery and jugular veins. In addition, she had two deep cuts on the back of her hand and heavy bruising to her upper arms and shoulders, suggesting that she had fought desperately for her life. Mary Ann also had a very swollen contusion on her left cheek and a fractured skull, which Bevan believed were caused by heavy blows from a blunt instrument, such as the poker. However, the cause of her death was haemorrhage from the savage slashing of her throat.

On 19 April, coroner James Lewis opened an inquest at the Guildhall in Rochester. Sarah and William King were first to testify, followed by Thomas Chalkin, the landlord of The Telegraph, who stated that Albert and Mary Ann Turner were drinking in his establishment on 17 April with Taylor and a man named Jesse Potter. After hearing from PCs Story and Featherstone, the inquest jury asked if it would be possible for Taylor to testify, so the coroner adjourned the inquest until the following day. When it resumed, both Jesse Potter and William Taylor appeared as witnesses.

Potter corroborated Thomas Chalkin’s evidence. He told the inquest that, although he did not personally know the Turners, he was drinking with Taylor in The Telegraph on the night of Saturday 17 April. The Turners were also in the taproom at the time and appeared to be on friendly terms with each other and also with Taylor. At around 10.45 p.m. Albert Turner left, leaving his wife sitting next to Taylor at the bar, chatting and drinking with him. Within fifteen minutes, Turner came back into the room, asking if anyone had seen her and, having been told that she was not there, he walked off, muttering something unintelligible under his breath.

William Taylor was next to give evidence and gave exactly the same account as Potter before him. ‘I swear I never saw Mrs Turner after eleven o’clock,’ he concluded. With the landlord’s permission, both Potter and Taylor spent the night sleeping in the pub, the former in the taproom and the latter in the parlour. Both men claimed to have slept soundly all night and only woke when the landlord’s little boy opened the pub doors and Turner marched up to Taylor and told him, ‘Taylor, you’ve had the last of her. Now go and watch her draw her last breath.’

The inquest jury deliberated for under ten minutes before returning a verdict of wilful murder against Albert Turner. Almost as soon as the inquest concluded, Turner was brought before magistrates on the same charge. Representatives from the local newspaper described him as having ‘a mild and pleasing countenance’, although they added that he looked careworn and unhappy and that he trembled and sobbed bitterly throughout his hearing. One of the first tasks for the mayor, Jesse Thomas, was to establish whether or not the victim was Turner’s legal wife. Turner explained that he had been married before and had two daughters by his first wife. After she died, nineteen-year-old Emma and fourteen-year-old Harriet went to live with their aunt in Berkshire and Turner eventually remarried Mary Ann.

The evidence before the magistrates was practically identical to that heard at the inquest and the mayor echoed the coroner in committing Turner for trial at the next assizes. ‘I have nothing to say. I know I have done it,’ Turner responded, before asking the mayor if he might see his wife one last time. Told that this was not possible, he fell to his knees, sobbing and clasping his hands together, begging, ‘Pray do let me, pray do. I pray hard to see her.’ He was hauled to his feet and taken to Maidstone Gaol to await his appearance at the assizes.