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Overview
This absorbing collection delves into the villainous deeds that have taken place in Suffolk during the last 200 years. Cases of murder, robbery, child neglect and abuse, and arson are all examined as the shadier side of the county's history is exposed. From the respectable young man who almost severed his mother's head from her body; the brutal murder of a father and daughter that took almost twenty years to solve; and the man who peppered his wife with over fifty gunshot pellets, this book sheds new light on Suffolk's criminal history. Illustrated with a wide range of photographs and archive ephemera, Murder & Crime Suffolk is sure to fascinate both residents and visitors alike as these shocking events of the past are revealed for a new generation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780752482071 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 01/31/2012 |
| Series: | Murder & Crime |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 128 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Murder and Crime: Suffolk
By Sheila Hardy
The History Press
Copyright © 2012 Sheila HardyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-8207-1
CHAPTER 1
Case One
Be Sure Your Sins Will Find You Out
The Execution of Edmund Thrower, 1812
Suspect: Edmund Thrower
Charge: Murder
Verdict: Guilty
Sentence: Execution
It may come as a surprise to discover that even 200 years ago, the perpetrators of unsolved crimes, or 'cold cases' as we now know them, could be brought to justice almost twenty years after the event. Without the aid of forensic science and all the sophisticated means available to the modern police service, it was often the chance remark, a casual conversation about something else entirely, or the revelation of information of a confidante, that finally brought a criminal to the gallows.
It was on the evening of Wednesday, 16 October 1793 that Thomas Carter and his daughter Elizabeth, who kept the village shop in Cratfield, were last seen alive. John Wright of Stradbroke saw them at around six o'clock walking in the garden as he passed their cottage on his way home. Some three hours later, their near neighbour Sarah Dunnet, being worried that her clock was a bit slow, decided she would go along the road to get a time check from the Carters. She didn't go right up to the door because, seeing that their lights were extinguished and all was quiet within the house, she assumed they had retired for the night. It was a crisp, bright, moonlit night and near to nine o'clock when John Harman and his wife, returning by cart from a day in Norwich, crossed Chevenhall Green, close to the road where the Carters lived, and heard what could have been a woman scream. John remarked to his wife that he was sure it was a female shriek he had heard, to which Mrs Harman replied that no doubt it was a domestic quarrel involving a man throwing his wife out of doors. And if that was the case, the least they had to do with it the better. However, when a bit further on the cart reached the intersection of four ways, one of which led to the Carters' home, John was convinced that he saw a man just a bit shorter than his own height of 5 feet 6 inches who, if not actually running away, was certainly walking very quickly.
The following morning, it was Mrs Dunnet who made the horrific discovery of Elizabeth's body; it had been flung half on and half off the gooseberry bushes which skirted the garden. She was joined almost immediately by John Wright whose usual path to work took him past the Carters' home, and together they stared at the grisly sight – hardly able to comprehend Elizabeth's shattered head and the scattered remnants of the contents of her skull. Almost in a trance, John entered the house, concerned for the old man and there he was confronted with Thomas, still seated in his armchair but with his head stove in.
At the coroner's inquest Mrs Dunnet, John Harman and John Wright reported what they had seen and heard, and further information was given by others that a male stranger had been spotted, lurking in different parts of the village throughout Wednesday afternoon and evening. Together they built up a picture of his appearance. He had worn a light-coloured, long coat over a black or dark waistcoat and breeches, and his stockings were described as speckled. His brown hair was plaited and tied up with a black ribbon, topped with a large, round flat hat. Another witness swore that he had seen a person answering this description running very fast in the road leading from the Carters' house towards Cratfield Bell Green at about nine o'clock that evening. It must have been Wright who testified that he too had seen a stranger talking to the Carters at their gate at six o'clock. But he identified his stranger as a woman, dressed in a coloured jacket, a blue petticoat – that is an overskirt – and a black bonnet. Recording that the Carters had been murdered by person or persons unknown, the inquest was adjourned until Monday 11 November, in the hope of gathering further information. A request for other witnesses, who had not come forward so far, to speak to the churchwardens, the Overseers of the Poor Law or the village constables, seems to have been fruitless and the local press did not even bother to report on the adjourned inquest, if indeed it was actually held.
Understandably the case provoked great alarm in the vicinity at the time for there seemed to be no motive for two such vicious attacks. Nothing within the house had been disturbed; there was no sign of attempted robbery. One or two had come under suspicion but no charges were made and eventually the case became buried in obscurity. That is until eight or nine years had passed, when John Head found himself in Norwich gaol in the summer of 1801. Awaiting execution for the theft of two heifers was John Saunders, who told Head that he had in the past been suspected of the Carters' murder, which he had always hotly denied, but he said he did know how the murders had been committed and who was responsible. Following Saunders' execution, Head had asked the Governor of the gaol for permission to speak to a magistrate as he had valuable information to impart. Archdeacon Oldershaw duly came to the gaol with a constable to take Head's deposition about a murder which had taken place several years earlier. He not only named the murderer as one Edmund Thrower, but also gave a number of details leading up to the crime and how it was carried out. Quite why the Archdeacon did nothing about this deposition at the time is not clear. Certainly when the written deposition was required some twelve years later as material evidence, it could not be found.
Yet the information must have remained at the back of the Archdeacon's mind, and it was he who may have been responsible for finally bringing the culprit to justice. In December 1811, the country had been rocked by the horror of what became known as the Ratcliffe Highway murders. Briefly, on the 7 December, a young shopkeeper called Marr, his wife, small baby and shop boy were all discovered brutally murdered. Robbery certainly had not been the motive and there seemed to be no other. Twelve days later, in the same road John Williamson, a 59-year-old publican, his wife and a servant were found dead in very similar circumstances. Just after this second murder, the Archdeacon, discussing the events in London with Mr Fox, an attorney, remarked that they bore some similarity to the murders in Cratfield in 1793. During the conversation he mentioned his being asked to visit Head in Norwich gaol and described how he had accused a man named Thrower. Mr Fox seized on the name, saying it was a strange coincidence but he had a legacy for a woman of that name. He had been unable to pay it to her because he needed her husband's permission to do so and, so far, they hadn't been able to find him. Oldershaw, on his return to Norfolk, eventually tracked down Thrower, who was living and working as a blacksmith in the village of Carbrook.
Thrower was arrested and brought before the magistrates in Harleston at the beginning of January 1812. Honour may be said to exist among thieves but when the life of one is at stake and one can escape by implicating the other, no such code exists. Thrower, swearing his own innocence, immediately named Head as the culprit, aided and abetted by another criminal known as Gypsy William Smith. These two were then arrested as well and accused along with Thrower of the murder of Elizabeth and Thomas Carter. None of them had led blameless lives; each had been in and out of prison and two of them at least had served a seven-year term of transportation.
John Head, who realised that the sentence for this particular charge was death, saw the opportunity to save his own skin by turning King's evidence against his fellow criminal and erstwhile friend. So on 20 March 1812, he was brought under guard from Ipswich gaol to the Suffolk Assizes held at Bury St Edmunds. It was there that his evidence as an 'approver' – as it was known – sealed the fate of Edmund Thrower.
And what an intricate story he had to tell. He had, he said, known Thrower for thirty years. Thrower was later to say that they had known each other since childhood. But according to Head, their first encounter had been purely a business transaction when Head had bought a donkey from Thrower. Either a good, upright citizen or one who knew all the tricks of the trade, depending on your point of view of him, Head told the court that to safeguard himself against any charge of having received stolen property, he had asked Thrower for his name before he handed over the sum of 5s 6d for the animal. Head made his living at the time as a 'ling cutter' – that is he cut and collected dried heather, which he sold to villagers for fuel. At that time he was living in Swaffham in Norfolk where he had remained on and off until about three years previous to the trial – aforementioned 'off-periods' being spent in various penal establishments including the seven years he had served in the prison hulks.
It stretches the imagination somewhat to think that on the strength of this one meeting that eight years later, Thrower should just happen to turn up one day at Head's house. He told the court it was a wet day; presumably this was to explain why he was not out working, but he was using his time wisely by mending his shoes. Thrower apparently noticed that he was using a broken hammer and promised that the next time he visited he would bring him a new one, which as a blacksmith he could easily do. It was a good thing that Head was not relying on the gift, for it was nearly a year before Thrower came again. This time he was accompanied by his wife and child and he asked Head to take them in as lodgers. Presumably Head could not accommodate all of them, but said he could find space for the child and then directed the parents to the home of the woman next door but one.
It was not made clear at what point Head got round to asking Thrower what had happened to the hammer he had been promised. From the story that he heard, we have to assume that the two men were alone at the time and perhaps the beer was flowing. Thrower related how, on his release in March 1792 from his seven-year sentence, which he served in the Fortunée hulk in Portsmouth, he returned home to discover that his wife had gone off with another man. In order to persuade her to come back to him, he got himself a steady job in Stradbroke. For the next eighteen months or so he worked for a Mr Potter, acting as a drover fetching calves for butchers. His efforts to win back his wife were useless and eventually his anger exploded when he found out that his wife's refusal to return was the result of the advice she had been given by a couple living in Cratfield who had befriended her. He remembered the man and woman concerned as he had bought things from them in the past.
So, according to Head, Thrower said he had 'done them a kindness in return'. He told how he had gone to their home and found the woman in the garden putting up the shutter at the window, and in his anger he had banged her around the head with the hammer and then he had thrown her body over a gooseberry bush. Still incensed, he had then gone looking for the old man and had found him in the house, sitting in his armchair; he killed him too. Almost apologetically, Thrower explained he could not give Head the promised hammer because that was the one he had used and as it had been so covered in bloodstains that he couldn't rub of, he had thrown it into the river. The smock-frock he had been wearing was also splattered with blood and he had had to bury that.
Head, when asked during the trial why he had not done the sensible thing and reported this story to his local magistrate, replied that he did not for one moment think anyone would believe him any more than he believed Thrower. He had dismissed it all as Thrower's fertile imagination, a piece of bragging to make him look big. He himself had forgotten all about it until he found himself listening to Saunders in Norwich gaol recounting how he had been suspected of the murder of the Carters some seven or eight years earlier. Then, he had done his civic duty and reported what he knew to Archdeacon Oldershaw.
As we learned earlier, the Archdeacon may well have felt that Head's original assessment of Thrower's 'confession' was correct, since he did nothing with the information for a number of years, until he was reminded of it by the Ratcliffe Highway murders. This time he moved speedily. Thrower was finally traced to Carbrook in Norfolk, where he was working as a blacksmith. He was arrested and taken to the Suffolk town of Harleston, where he appeared before the magistrates on 3 January 1812. On his arrest, he appeared agitated and was quick to implicate others. In his confession he named both John Head and Gypsy Will Smith as the true perpetrators, and so on 22 January they were both charged with the double murder at Cratfield, and taken to Ipswich gaol to await trial at the Lent Suffolk Assizes.
Thrower's story painted himself as an innocent caught up in the crimes of others. In his account, he was on his way back to Stradbroke following a visit to his father-in-law at Yaxley when, crossing Shotford Heath at Weybread, he was overtaken by Head and Gypsy Will, who offered him a donkey and £10 to go with them to Cratfield – a distance of several miles. He was reluctant, but the money was a great temptation so he agreed. According to Thrower's testimony, the three men set off for Cratfield.
Quite what part Thrower was supposed to play in the tragedy he did not specify. He said they reached the cottage sometime between eight and nine o'clock, and when they got there Head told him to wait at the gate. He said that he saw a young girl come out to put up the shutter and watched as Head 'knocked out the brains' of her while Smith went into the house and killed the man. Afterwards, Head said they should have a celebratory drink at the White Horse in Laxfield. Thrower hadn't wanted to do this but the other two insisted. Fortunately for Thrower, as they were two or three fields away from Cratfield village, they met a man called Hog and while Smith and Head stopped to chat to him, Thrower was able to make his escape back to his lodgings.
This very brief and matter-of-fact account is very different to the one Thrower was reputed to have told Head years before. And while allowing that Thrower was attempting to put the whole blame onto Head and Smith, it just does not ring true. From the descriptions given by those who found the bodies, we know that there must have been copious blood splatter, yet apparently the two alleged murderers were proposing to enter a public house for a drink and were also quite nonchalant in stopping to talk to the man they called Hog.
Questioned as to his movements after the supposed event, Thrower said he had hurried back to his lodgings in Mary Cattermole's house in Stradbroke. The term lodging is somewhat misleading. Thrower did not occupy a comfortable bedroom in Mrs Cattermole's, but rather the wood store adjoining the house where he bedded down amongst straw. Unfortunately for him, when questioned in court, Mrs Cattermole could not verify that he had returned home that night. She remembered the occasion as one of her children was having fits. She told the court that not only did he not come back that night; he was missing for a whole week. Neither could she support Thrower's question to her in court that surely she remembered his sister coming to take him home with her. Bearing in mind that witnesses, as well as the accused, were trying to recall the events of nineteen years earlier, it is surprising just how much they did remember.
Sifting through all this must have been difficult for the judge and jury. Certainly the judge thought that Head's evidence was questionable. He had been in trouble on a number of occasions and had actually only returned from a sentence of transportation three or four years earlier. But, in his defence, it was said that since his return he had 'lived in a manner decently for a man of his kind'. He had sworn that he had never in his life been anywhere near Cratfield, most of his time being spent in and around Swaffham. He also denied knowing Gypsy Will. On the other hand, Thrower had been in the area of Cratfield for a year and a half around the time of the murder. It also went against him that he had tried to escape from police custody when he was first arrested, and that later in court he had suggested that while being conveyed to gaol the police constable had made a deal with him that if he named the others he would be treated leniently – an allegation the constable firmly denied. The judge also drew attention to the fact that the original witnesses following the murder had seen only one man, or possibly two, at the scene, certainly not three! While drawing attention to that point, why was no further reference made to the woman stranger seen talking to Elizabeth Carter in the garden at around six o'clock? Was her identity ever established? Was her being there irrelevant or could it be that she was Thrower's wife, visiting her old friends the Carters? Could it be that Thrower had followed her and made one final attempt to get her back – his failure sparking off these two brutal murders? The judge pointed out that murder was usually committed for either revenge or robbery, and, as the latter was not the motive, it must have been for revenge.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Murder and Crime: Suffolk by Sheila Hardy. Copyright © 2012 Sheila Hardy. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Dedication,
Acknowledgements,
Introduction,
Case One Be Sure Your Sins Will Find You Out,
The Execution of Edmund Thrower, 1812,
Case Two A Most Barbarous Murder,
The Shocking Neglect of 6-Year-Old Mary Ann Smith,
Case Three A Very Strange Stabbing,
The Case of Elizabeth Squirrell,
Case Four A Scandalous Wretch,
The 'gross assault' of 13-Year-Old Henrietta Ship,
Case Five Arson at Laxfield,
The Trial of Robert Goddard, 1856,
Case Six At the End of his Tether,
The Case of William Bear,
Case Seven The Lost Sheep,
Sheep Stealing at Elmswell,
Case Eight Flint-Hearted,
A Case of Excessive Drinking in George Street, Brandon,
Case Nine Murder at Rose Cottage,
The Case of a Criminal Lunatic,
Case Ten A Nineteenth-Century Jobsworth,
The Acquittal of John and Sarah Starling,
Case Eleven The Brown Paper Parcel,
The Reprieve of Ada Brown,
Sources,
Also by the Author,
Copyright,