Worcestershire Murders E-Book

Nicola Sly

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

Seitenzahl: 306

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Worcestershire Murders brings together numerous murderous tales, some which were little known outside the county, and others which made national headlines. Contained within the pages of this book are the stories behind some of the most heinous crimes ever committed in Worcestershire. They include the murders of the entire Gummery family at Berrow in 1780; Catherine Gulliver, killed by John Butler at Ombersley in 1864; and Maria Holmes, slain by her husband at Bromsgrove in 1872. Cases from the twentieth century include two unsolved murders - the body of an unidentified woman found in a tree in Hagley Wood in 1943, and the brutal killing of Florrie Porter at Lickey End in 1944. Nicola Sly's carefully researched and enthralling text will appeal to anyone interested in the shady side of Worcestershire's history.

Leseprobe

Worcestershire

MURDERS

NICOLA SLY

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

Bristol Murders

Cornish Murders (with John Van der Kiste)

Dorset Murders

Hampshire Murders

Shropshire Murders

Somerset Murders (with John Van der Kiste)

Wiltshire Murders

First published 2009

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2012

All rights reserved

© Nicola Sly, 2009 2012

The right of Nicola Sly, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, 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 8409 9

MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 8408 2

Original typesetting by The History Press

Ebook compilation by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

CONTENTS

Author’s Note & Acknowledgements

1. ‘The girl looks just the same as she did when she was asleep’

Berrow, 1780

2. ‘What is to be done with him now?’

Oddingley, 1806 and 1830

3. ‘Why didst thou leave me?’

Lye Waste, 1829

4. ‘Don’t cry, my child, and I will get you some flowers’

Old Swinford, 1830

5. ‘I planned the murder for days and even dreamed about it’

Areley Kings, 1836

6. ‘What was I to do, kicked and abused as I was?’

Rous Lench, 1842

7. ‘Have you seen my little whore?’

Drakes Broughton, 1848

8. ‘How could you be such a cruel mother?’

Near Stourbridge, 1852

9. ‘I have heard them say revenge is sweet’

Dudley, 1855

10. ‘Her ain’t dead, is her?’

Oldbury, 1862

11. ‘Somebody ought to mind him’

Holt Fleet, 1864

12. ‘Each must take care of himself’

Bromsgrove, 1872

13. ‘If ever I was to meet with him I should be a match for him’

Alvechurch, 1885

14. ‘Let the bastard have it!’

Lenchwick, 1889

15. ‘Life is worth little to me’

Long Eye, 1893

16. ‘Tell Will his mother’s nearly dead’

Foxlydiate, 1902

17. ‘Murder will out some day’

Kidderminster, 1903

18. ‘He went at me with great revenge’

Worcester, 1905

19. ‘I consider he is a perfectly sane man’

Worcester, 1925

20. ‘Look how she has served me out’

Lye, 1925

21. ‘Come on, let’s die together’

Northfield, 1942

22. ‘Who put Bella in the wych elm?’

Hagley Wood, 1943

23. ‘Are you all right?’

Bromsgrove, 1944

24. ‘I want to say it was a sudden urge’

Kidderminster, 1958

25. ‘You’ll get the same dose as your mate when you come out’

Worcester, 1961

Bibliography & References

AUTHOR’S NOTE & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Having been married for almost twenty years to a man who was born and raised in Kidderminster, I was only too pleased to be asked to compile Worcestershire Murders. However, while researching this collection of true cases, it quickly became evident that the county boundaries of Worcestershire have, over the years, been somewhat fluid. I came across one man who, without moving house, had actually lived in three different counties, and there were also places like Dudley, which historically was an isolated ‘island’ of Worcestershire, geographically located in the county of Staffordshire. Hence, I made the decision to include those cases for which the location was given as Worcestershire at the time of the murder.

As with any other county, historically there are those in Worcestershire to whom human life means very little. These include people who killed purely for financial gain, such as William Lightband who murdered elderly shopkeeper Joseph Hawkins at Areley Kings in 1836, and the band of wealthy landowners who arranged the murder of the rector of Oddingley in 1806 to avoid paying what they considered to be unfair tithes, then murdered the killer they hired to ensure that their villainy would never be revealed.

Others killed through jealousy, such as William Yarnold who murdered his estranged wife in Worcester in 1925. Some turned to murder simply to rid themselves of a person who had become a perceived nuisance, as in the case of Charles Wall who callously threw his fiancée’s five-year-old daughter down a mineshaft at Old Swinford in 1830.

Some murders remain unsolved to this day, such as those of Florrie Porter at Lickey End, near Bromsgrove, in 1944 and Patrick Mulligan, murdered in Worcester in 1961. Yet perhaps the biggest mystery of all surrounds ‘Hagley Bella’, whose body was found wedged in a hollow tree in 1943 – not only has her killer never been identified, but also, in this case, neither has the victim.

As always, there are numerous people to be acknowledged and thanked. John J. Eddleston and Steve Fielding have both previously published reference books, which contain a mine of information on British murders and executions. Anne Bradford has written a fascinating book on murder in and around Worcester, and Donald McCormick penned an intriguing book on the case of ‘Hagley Bella’. These books are recorded in more detail in the bibliography, as are the local and national newspapers from which the details of the featured cases were drawn. I am especially grateful to the Express and Star, Wolverhampton, for permission to use pictures pertaining to the Hagley Bella case, to the Worcester News for allowing me to use their picture of Florrie Porter and also to the BBC at Birmingham for supplying me with a DVD of their Inside Out programme, which covered her murder. My thanks must also go to the staff of the Worcestershire Archives for their help with my research, and particularly with their assistance in helping me to unravel the numerous county boundary changes over the years. The retired policeman from Stourbridge, who shared his observations on some of the more recent cases featured, wished to remain anonymous, but nevertheless his contributions were very much appreciated.

A map of Worcestershire.

On a more personal level, John Van der Kiste was, as always, generous with his help and advice. My grateful thanks also go to my brother-in-law and sister-in-law, John and Sue, who opened their home to us during our visits to Worcestershire. My husband Richard’s local knowledge of the area proved invaluable and, as usual, he acted as chauffeur on my research and photography trips. As always, Richard generously proofread every word of this book and invariably improved the content with his observations. My father, John Higginson, remains my inspiration.

Finally, my thanks must go to Matilda Richards, my editor at The History Press, for her continued help and encouragement.

1

‘THE GIRL LOOKS JUST THE SAME AS SHE DID WHEN SHE WAS ASLEEP’

Berrow, 1780

In the early hours of the morning of 7 May 1780, Mr Player, a cottager from Berrow, was awakened from his sleep by a terrible howling noise coming from the direction of his neighbour’s home. Player shook his wife awake and together they listened intently for a few moments, hearing the howls repeated, closely followed by a loud thumping sound, as if something heavy had fallen onto a wooden floor.

Courageously, Mr Player got up and went to investigate the dreadful noises. The front door to his neighbour’s cottage was tightly closed, but Player could hear sounds coming from within. He shouted several times for his neighbour, Edward Gummary, but received no reply so he eventually walked round to the back of the cottage. The back door was also closed, but Player could hear someone moving about in the kitchen. Assuming that it was Edward’s wife, Elizabeth, Player called out to her, but again received no response.

Concerned, he ran back to his own cottage and roused his wife, telling her that there appeared to be something dreadfully wrong at the Gummary’s home. Mrs Player accompanied her husband back to their neighbour’s cottage, where now the front door stood wide open. To their horror, the Players could see blood dripping through the kitchen ceiling from the bedroom above. Mr Player immediately rushed upstairs, where a scene of terrible carnage awaited him.

Two dead bodies lay on the floor of the bedroom, close to the bed. The sight so upset Mr Player that he found himself unable to check on the other occupants of the house. Instead, he and his wife rushed to summon assistance from neighbours.

When somebody finally had the stomach to investigate the Gummary’s cottage more closely, they found that one of the bodies on the bedroom floor was that of Edward Gummary. He had a large wound between his collarbone and his neck, which had penetrated his chest and almost severed his arm from his body. He had numerous other injuries, including cuts to his head and face, a deep wound below his ribcage through which parts of his bowel protruded, a leg wound with a broken fibula, and several deep cuts to his hands, which suggested that he had fought desperately with his attackers. Close by lay his wife, with wounds to her face and head that were deep enough to expose her brain. Her nose had been completely chopped from her face.

Actually in the bed was the body of the Gummary’s nine-year-old daughter, Ann. A deep wound to the side of her neck had severed both her jugular artery and her spine. Finally, in a neighbouring bedroom, a visitor to the house lay dead. Elizabeth Gummary’s brother, Thomas Sheen, had serious wounds to his head and chest.

All of the bodies were dressed in their nightclothes and, it seemed, had been savagely attacked by someone frenziedly wielding a weapon, such as an axe, while they lay sleeping peacefully in their beds.

The alarm was raised immediately and neighbours quickly launched a hunt for any strangers in the area. In a field about a quarter of a mile from the Gummary’s house, six gypsies were rounded up and handed over to the authorities, although there was no real evidence to connect any one of them with the slaughter of the entire Gummary family. A young child who was with the travelling families tearfully told the villagers, ‘It was not my daddy that killed them, but two men who are gone to Tewkesbury.’

One of the gypsies had a small amount of blood on his clothing and a bloody stick was found in his possession. Taken back to the scene of the crime, he was alleged to have said, ‘The girl looks just the same as she did when she was asleep.’ However, it was apparent that, given the extent of the massacre within the house, any man who had been involved would have had more than a small amount of blood on his person and eventually the gypsy families were released without charge.

An inquest was opened before coroner Harry Long and a verdict of ‘wilful murder by person or persons unknown’ was recorded on all four victims. The bodies were buried on 11 May 1780 in Berrow churchyard, their final resting place later marked with a memorial plaque on the outside wall of the church.

There were no clues to the identity of the assailant or assailants and indeed, it was impossible to even suggest a motive for the brutal murders of the entire family. None of the victims was known to have any enemies, or to have recently quarrelled with anybody. The cottage showed no signs of having been ransacked and considerable sums of money were found untouched. A total of 29s 8d in coins was found in the cottage, in addition to 3s 6d farthing in the pockets of Thomas Sheen, and it was generally agreed that this was about the correct amount that should have been in the possession of the deceased family, meaning that theft was not a motive for their slaughter.

With no conceivable motive, no clues and absolutely no evidence, it seemed as if whoever had killed the Gummary family had literally got away with murder. Two men, William Jones and William Addis, who had been caught destroying the nearby Malvern Link fence, were strongly suspected of being the murderers at the time but, since there was no concrete evidence against them, they could only be charged with destroying the fence, for which both were imprisoned.

In fact, it was to be almost thirty years before a possible clue to the identity of the killer or killers emerged. In January 1809, an eighty-year-old man was admitted to the Worcester Royal Infirmary with a broken leg. Delirious with pain, James Traynton began to talk. Another patient heard his ramblings and immediately recognised what he believed to be details of the murder of the Gummary family, so many years earlier.

When questioned directly, Traynton seemed to have some knowledge of the murders, although he would only admit to helping to destroy the fence, holding a ladder against the window and supplying the murderers with drink. He assured nurses that all the murderers were still alive and of a similar age to himself, telling them that the murders had been committed using ‘bills’. (A ‘bill’ is a shortened name for a billhook, a sharp, long-bladed hatchet used for hedge trimming.) In between talking about the murders, Traynton raved about being pursued by demons, judged by his fellow patients as being the signs of a guilty conscience.

The memorial stone for the Gummary family in Berrow churchyard. (© N. Sly, 2008)

Traynton died four days after his admission to hospital, unfortunately without naming any of the alleged murderers of the Gummary family. It was established after his death that he had once worked as a labourer on the Malvern Link enclosure and had, in the past, been thought of as a ‘bad character’.

Whether or not Traynton’s demented ramblings betrayed his involvement in the slaying of an entire family will now never be known and officially the case remains unsolved.

Note: In some accounts the family name is given as Gummery. I have used the spelling shown on the memorial stone although, of course, there is no guarantee that the mason was correct in his interpretation.

2

‘WHAT IS TO BE DONE WITH HIM NOW?’

Oddingley, 1806 and 1830

On 24 June 1806, Thomas Giles and John Lench were walking along a lane near Oddingley when they heard the report of a gun, followed by a shout of ‘Murder!’ The two men rushed to investigate and soon came across a man skulking in the hedgerow, a bag in his hand.

‘Villain, what have you been doing?’ the men asked him.

‘Me? Nothing,’ replied the man, dropping his bag and running off.

A few yards further along the lane, the two men became aware of something burning on the ground. When they got closer, they realised that it was in fact a man who had obviously been shot and whose clothes were now on fire.

Lench began to pull the man’s burning clothes from his body and, once he was sure that all the flames had been extinguished, he set off in pursuit of the man who had just fled. Meanwhile, Giles ran to the nearest house to summon help. That house turned out to be the vicarage and a servant there sent for the rector of the next parish, Reginald Pynder, who was at that time also acting as a County Magistrate. Pynder immediately saddled his horse and galloped to where the badly injured man lay, and, on his arrival, he was surprised to find that the victim of the shooting was Revd George Parker, the rector of the parish of Oddingley. Sadly, Parker died within minutes of Pynder’s arrival.

It was apparent from Parker’s injuries that his assailant had first shot him, the ball penetrating his right side. Seeing that his victim was still alive, the gunman had then clubbed him over the head with the butt of his gun, which had broken, leaving Revd Parker with two large cuts over his left eye. Finally, he had set his victim on fire, at which point he had been interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Giles and Lench.

The bag that the attacker had dropped was found to contain the pieces of a broken gun. Soon, John Lench returned from his pursuit of the murderer to say that he had almost caught up with him when the man had put his hand in his pocket as if to withdraw a pistol and threatened to shoot Lench if he came any nearer. Wisely, Lench backed off, leaving his quarry to escape across the fields.

Giles and Lench described the attacker as being about 5ft 5in tall, with dark brown hair, balding at the front. A black beard framed his face and he was wearing a long, blue coat with metal buttons. This sounded to the police very much like a description of Richard Hemming from Oddingley, who, although he worked legitimately as a carpenter, was known locally as a shady character, whom the police suspected of being responsible for several robberies in the area.

By the time the police got to Hemming’s home, he was nowhere to be found. Enquiries revealed that he had been seen heading towards Worcester on the afternoon of Parker’s murder and he was later seen at a public house. There was one more alleged sighting of him a week later, when a girl told police that she believed that she had seen him running into a wood. However, the police never managed to catch Richard Hemming who, it seemed, had disappeared without a trace, leaving his wife and three young children behind. Even if he was a man of suspicious character, Elizabeth Hemming swore that Richard was a loving husband and father and insisted that he would never have left without telling her.

An inquest was opened into Parker’s murder on the following day, at which the foreman of the coroner’s jury was a man named Captain Evans. There were later to be allegations of malpractice at the inquest, with some evidence not being presented and the proceedings being rushed in order to conclude them within the day. However, the jury eventually returned a verdict of ‘murder against some person or persons at present unknown’.

There were so many complaints about the inquest that the county magistrates felt obliged to hold an investigation. As foreman of the jury, Captain Evans, was interviewed and told the magistrates that he was so keen to see Parker’s murderer apprehended that he was personally starting a fund to provide a reward for anyone with information about the killer. This so impressed the magistrates that they immediately offered a donation of £50 towards the fund.

Since the only viable suspect in the murder of Revd Parker seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth, the police found themselves at a standstill with their investigations and the case went cold. It was not until 1830 that it was revived, after the discovery of a body at Netherwood Farm in the village.

At that time, a barn at the farm was in a bad state of repair and the tenants asked their landlord, Mr Galton, if they might demolish it. Galton agreed and the Waterson family engaged the services of a local labourer, Charles Burton, to carry out the demolition. Burton began work on 21 January 1830 and, while digging round the barn’s foundations, he discovered an old boot buried in the ground, a skeletal foot still in it. His next shovel-full of earth contained a second boot and foot; Burton stopped digging and notified the police.

The earth around the barn’s foundations was loose and, when the police dug down to a depth of 18in, they uncovered the complete skeleton of a man, lying on his left side. The man’s skull was cracked and his upper and lower jaws were broken. As well as the man’s remains, the police also excavated the remnants of a woollen waistcoat and some cord trousers. Various personal effects were buried with the man, including a few coins, a whetstone, a clasp knife and a carpenter’s slide rule.

As the wife of the only man known to be missing in the area, Elizabeth Hemming was called to view these items and identified the boots and the rule as being the property of her husband, Richard. She recalled a crack in the rule where it had once been dropped and recognised the boots by their turned up toes and by nails in the heels. (Coincidentally, labourer Charles Burton was Elizabeth’s brother.)

At the time that Hemming had disappeared, Thomas Clewes had owned Netherwood Farm and he was promptly arrested on suspicion of his murder. Coroner Mr Smith opened an inquest at the Talbot Inn into Hemming’s death and, on the third day of the proceedings, Clewes’ gaoler passed a message to the coroner saying that Clewes wished to make a statement.

Revd Parker had been a kindly man, who was always willing to help any of his parishioners who might be in need. That said, he was not a popular man, as he was also extremely parsimonious and was a stickler for collecting the biggest possible tithes from the wealthier villagers.

Parker’s position as rector was unsalaried and thus he survived solely on the annual tithes that he collected. These were normally a tenth of any produce or stock held by landowners each year and were payable either in goods or in cash. The payment of the tithes had long been disputed by the landowners of Oddingley and, when Revd Parker took over as rector of the parish, he apparently became a little greedy and insisted that the landowners paid their dues in kind.

The average tithes paid by each landowner was £30 a year, but as a result of the war in France, the price of goods rocketed, meaning that, by paying in kind, the landowners were paying much more than the amount they might reasonably have expected to pay. As a group, they approached the Revd Parker asking if they might pay in cash instead, even offering to increase their cash payments to £70 a year, but Parker refused. He added insult to injury by trying to insist that, since the landowners were paying him with goods, it was their responsibility to buy him a barn at a cost of £150, in which to keep the animals and store the grain with which they were paying him. The last straw for the farmers was when Revd Parker then complained bitterly about the cost of the dinners that the men regularly held at a nearby pub, the God Speed the Plough Inn.

Clewes told the inquest that he and five other men had got together and made a decision that something must be done about the situation. The leader of the breakaway group was Captain Evans – the man who had served as foreman of the jury at the inquest into Parker’s death – and he was joined in his scheming by Clewes, John Barnett, Joseph Taylor and brothers William and George Banks.

As prominent citizens, it was obviously impossible for the conspirators to be directly implicated in Parker’s death themselves, hence Richard Hemming was hired for the sum of £50 to kill the rector and provided with a gun by Captain Evans. However, once the deed was done and Evans and his cohorts realised that Hemming had been seen, they found themselves in a quandary. If Hemming were arrested for the murder, then he would surely try to save his own skin by telling the authorities who it was in the village that had wanted Parker dead.

Hemming was told to hide himself in Thomas Clewes’ barn while a plan was hatched for his escape. At eleven o’clock on the night after the murder, Evans, Taylor and George Banks called at Clewes’ home and the four men went out to the barn, where Richard Hemming had concealed himself under some loose straw. Evans called out to Hemming, telling him that he had brought some food for him. As Hemming wriggled out from under the straw, Joseph Taylor, the village blacksmith, stepped forward and hit him two or three times over the head with his blood stick. (A blood stick was a piece of hard wood, loaded at one end with lead and resembling a small mallet in appearance, used when bleeding horses, to strike a blade into a vein.)

Clewes professed himself to have been appalled at this, saying that it had been his belief that Hemming was to be given money and helped to escape. Had he known what was actually going to happen, said Clewes, he would never have gone to the barn. However, there was no time for recriminations as the men now had a dead body on their hands and a pressing need to dispose of it. ‘What is to be done with him now?’ asked Taylor.

Captain Evans supervised the digging of a hole near the outside wall of the barn then he and Taylor unceremoniously dragged Hemming’s body outside and buried it in the hole. The entire process took less than thirty minutes.

Clewes’ statement continued, describing the day after Hemming’s death on which Clewes had gone to Pershore Fair. While at the fair, George Banks and John Barnett had approached him and both men had given him a package of money totalling around £27, saying that it was his share of the money that had been intended for Richard Hemming, to help him escape. ‘Be sure you never split,’ Barnett warned Clewes.

For the next few years, the landowners did everything in their power to keep Clewes sweet. He was advanced a large loan without any security and was also given a black mare by Captain Evans – having bid for it at a farm sale, the mare was knocked down to Clewes and Evans later picked up the £22 bill.

As a result of Clewes’ statement at the inquest, the police immediately sought the remaining landowners, prepared to arrest them for their part in the murders of George Parker and Richard Hemming.

Twenty-four years had passed since the murders and Captain Evans and Joseph Taylor – the two alleged murderers of Richard Hemming – had both since died. Captain Evans had lived to the age of ninety-five, dying in May 1829. For the last few years of his life, he had drunk a bottle of brandy a day and had been tormented by terrible hallucinations, which appeared to those who witnessed them as if a ghost were haunting him.

The police charged the surviving members of the group – Thomas Clewes, John Barnett and George Banks – with being accessories after the facts of the murders of both Richard Hemming and George Parker. Thomas Clewes alone was additionally charged with the murder of Richard Hemming, with having aided and abetted Taylor in striking him and with harbouring the murderer of George Parker. The three defendants stood trial together at the Spring Assizes in Worcester before Mr Justice Littledale.

The first half of the trial consisted mainly of arguments put by the counsels for the defence on the legalities of the charges against their clients. All three men had retained separate counsels and all three counsels disputed the legality of trying men as accessories after the fact in a murder case when the actual murderer had not been tried. They maintained that, unless someone had been tried and convicted of committing a murder, in the eyes of the law, no murder had actually been proven. Eventually, Barnett and Banks were temporarily discharged and the trial proceeded with Clewes as the only defendant, charged with the wilful murder of Richard Hemming. Clewes pleaded ‘Not Guilty’.

The court then heard from a number of witnesses including Charles Burton, Elizabeth Hemming (who had since remarried and was now Elizabeth Newbury) and surgeon, Matthew Pierpoint, who had examined the remains of Richard Hemming. Then those people who had been involved in the aftermath of the murder of George Parker were called, including John Lench, who had found the body (Thomas Giles having since died), Daniel Cole, who had performed the post-mortem examination, and the police who had been involved in the search for Hemming after Parker’s murder. A handful of villagers who believed that they could connect Parker’s murder with Hemming testified, including John Perkins who had seen Hemming waiting for Parker to pass by on the day of the murder and had also seen him drinking with Thomas Clewes, six weeks prior to Parker’s death.

Despite the objections of Clewes’ defence counsel, his statement to the coroner was read out in court, in which he confessed to witnessing the murder of Hemming. The confession had been made to magistrate Revd Clifton and he too was called to court to be interrogated. Clifton admitted that he had initially told Clewes that he would make every effort to prevent any personal ill consequences falling on him as a result of giving his statement. After taking the statement, Clifton had immediately become worried about making this promise and had even written to the Secretary of State for advice. When he received a reply from the Under Secretary, he told the court that he had gone back to Clewes and told him that he was unable to guarantee his original promise.

Clifton told Clewes that he had told no one what he had said and that, if Clewes wanted, the matter could be forgotten. However, Clewes had insisted that his statement was put before the coroner regardless.

It finally fell to the judge to sum up the long, complicated case for the jury, which he did at great length. He warned them that they must reach their verdict only on the evidence that they had heard in court that day. He told them that they had heard evidence on Parker’s murder only because it seemed to be the precursor of Hemming’s murder, which was the case under consideration. Telling the jury that Clewes’ confession was the only real evidence against him, he passed an opinion that the confession implicated Clewes as an accessory after the fact but that, as far as he could see, the killing of Hemming seemed to have been done without Clewes’ participation. There was no evidence that he had concealed Hemming after Parker’s murder and the only evidence that Captain Evans and Taylor were responsible for killing Hemming was Clewes’ confession.

To be an accessory to murder in the eyes of the law, Clewes did not have to have struck the final blow but need only have encouraged the act or participated in the killing in any way. Mr Justice Littledale believed that the confession suggested that he had done neither.

The jury retired briefly before returning with a verdict of ‘Guilty as an accessory after the fact’. However, when the judge reminded them that the charge against Clewes was actually one of murder, they immediately acquitted him. On his acquittal, the counsel for the prosecution told the court that they did not intend to proceed with their case against John Barnett and George Banks.

All three defendants were discharged from the court and on their return to Oddingley a big party was thrown in their honour. Thomas Clewes later took over as the landlord of the Fir Tree Inn at nearby Dunhampstead, where he displayed press reports about the murders on the walls. The ‘Murderer’s Bar’ is still in existence today. Meanwhile, the village pub in Tibberton, where the plot to murder Revd Parker was allegedly hatched, was ordered to change its name from God Speed the Plough to Speed the Plough in view of the godless act perpetrated within its walls.

Note: As might be expected in a case that occurred so long ago, there are some discrepancies in the contemporary newspaper accounts. Richard Hemming’s name is alternately spelled Heming or Hemings. The name Banks is also spelled Bankes and Taylor is alternatively named Joseph and James. Pynder’s name is sometimes spelled Pinder.

3

‘WHY DIDST THOU LEAVE ME?’

Lye Waste, 1829

On Saturday 29 August 1829, mine surveyor Thomas Higgs was walking past a pit in the Haye Dingle, near Lye Waste in the parish of Old Swinford, when something white caught his eye. After staring at the white object for a few moments, he realised that he was actually looking at a human body, which lay face up in a couple of inches of water at the bottom of the pit.

The sides of the pit, which was about 18 yards deep, were steep and sheer and it was obvious to Higgs that he would be unable to reach the body without ropes. He rushed to fetch miner William Cartwright, who came to the pit with his brother, James. William was roped and Higgs and James lowered him carefully to the pit bottom, where he found the body of a woman lying on her back. Between them the three men managed to haul the dead woman from the depths of the pit and carried her to the Swan Inn at Lye Waste.

On the following morning surgeon William Freer from Stourbridge was called to perform a post-mortem examination on the body. He found that the woman had a fractured hip but, surprisingly, no bruises anywhere on her body. At the back of her head were two large, rough cuts that were full of grit. Working in a mining area, Freer had seen this particular kind of wound numerous times and was able to state with confidence that the injuries to the back of the woman’s head had been caused by her fall into the pit. However, the woman had another wound on her right eye and the cause of that injury was much more difficult for the surgeon to determine.

He was hampered by the fact that maggots had eaten away at the edges of the wound. The eye itself had been knocked out and the surgeon believed that this injury had not resulted from the woman’s fall. Had it occurred when she fell, Freer would have expected to observe abrasions to the surrounding skin, the presence of grit in the wound and also some damage to the more prominent orbital bone above the eyebrow. Thus, although he was unable to say what had caused the wound, he was fairly certain that it had occurred before she fell. There were no corresponding skull fractures beneath any of the head wounds and Freer formed the conclusion that the woman hadn’t been dead when she fell. The surgeon felt that the woman had most likely been stunned by a blow to the front of her head and then thrown alive into the pit, where she subsequently died.

As yet, the identity of the woman was not known but, in the days prior to the discovery of her body, Michael Toll, an Irish peddler, had been making enquiries in the area about his missing common-law wife, Ann Cook.

According to Toll, he and Ann had been hawking their wares in the villages around Stourbridge on Monday 24 August when Ann had complained of a bad headache. The couple had rested for a while at a coal pit near Cradley then Ann had said she felt better so they had walked together to the turnpike road. There he had given Ann some shawls to sell and the couple had separated, having arranged to meet that evening at the Anchor public house at Stourbridge. He had last seen Ann as she set off to walk along the main Stourbridge road, while he took a different route to the town.

Toll had arrived at the Anchor at about half-past eight on the evening of 24 August and had immediately asked if his wife was there. When he was told that she hadn’t been to the pub that day, he waited for a little while then announced his intention of going to look for her, saying that she might have gone to visit her father.

Pound Bridge, Cradley, 1944. (Author’s collection)

Ann’s father, Joseph, lived at Wolverley, about 5 miles outside Stourbridge. Toll arrived there at about four o’clock on the following morning and was told that Ann hadn’t been there. So later that day he and Ann’s sister, Jane, set off to look for her.