by Peter Moore
All that Clewes said was copied down by the duty clerk, James Hooper.11 And once finished, Smith asked Clewes to read through the document, which he did, making only a few clarifications. He then signed across the foot of every page, before he was escorted from the room by a turnkey.
The story had at last been rounded off. The conspiracy to kill Parker had been followed by Heming’s murder the next day. Clewes, if he were to be believed, was not a lone wolf but a man entangled in a community-wide conspiracy headed by Captain Evans and executed by James Taylor. Before Smith left to resume the inquest at the Talbot, he performed one last task, signing a warrant for the arrest of the man who seemingly had bankrolled the enterprise: Mr John Barnett.
CHAPTER 16
Marvel-Hunters and Wonder-Lovers
February, March 1830
ON THURSDAY 4 February Berrow’s Worcester Journal published a full-length transcript of Clewes’ dramatic confession. Just three days had passed since the farmer had first divulged details of Heming’s murder to Reverend Clifton in private, but now his involvement in the night-time execution was known by all. The newspaper sold quickly. In London The Times noted, ‘The avidity with which the paper is bought1 is a proof of the intense interest excited in the neighbourhood.’
The confession was beyond compelling. At almost 1,500 words, it captivated readers with its its lucidity, colour and Clewes’ remarkable recollection of dialogue. Clewes had not merely explained how Heming’s skeleton had appeared in his barn, but had also – were he to be believed – vividly evoked the crime scene. The Devil lurked in his little observations. There was the dull glow of the Captain’s lantern in the barn, Banks standing silently by in his smock frock, James Taylor’s bloodstick, the limp body being dragged across the floor and then the Captain’s impassioned threat: ‘I’ll give you anything. Damn your body! Don’t you never split!’
It was a lurid tale of calculated murder, rendered more powerful by Clewes’ telling. Nothing appeared invented. Clewes’ recollections were not muddled or ambiguous but detailed, linear and coherent. Yet again Captain Evans plays the part of the village Rottweiler: first ordering Heming to the barn and then later coercing Clewes to join them. He sends George Banks on errands, pours Taylor brandies and afterwards binds them all to silence with threats and oaths. In the background is John Barnett, supplying money and lending the scheme his tacit support. There is a hint of authentic panic too, as Clewes sees the dreadful situation develop before his eyes. Throughout, Clewes remains desperate to detach himself from blame, peppering his narrative with pleading interjections. ‘It was no spade of mine,’ he says. ‘I never stepped off the floor into the bay. I thought I should have died where I was.’
The truth of Clewes’ confession was soon being judged by a wide audience. Over the next three days the Berrow’s report was syndicated to publications across the country. The paper, now in the thick of a sensational news story, mused
In the early part of this inquiry,2 the evidence was of a nature to attach violent suspicion to certain individuals; but the impression upon the public mind was, that unless facts of a more decisive character were disclosed, it was scarcely probable that anyone could be convicted of the murder of Heming. Since that time, however, circumstances have occurred which lead us to the expectation that … the arm of justice may overtake one or more who were implicated in the murder of Heming. That wretched being appears to have been made away with within a few hours after the death of Mr Parker – thus speedily becoming the victim of those who had tempted him to take away the life of a fellow-creature! This case, when considered in all its circumstances, is one of the most extraordinary that has become the subject of judicial inquiry. Not only is the public attention in the neighbourhood riveted to it, but in distant parts of the kingdom the inquiry has caused a deep interest.
Such levels of interest spurred editors in London and Birmingham to dispatch reporters of their own in pursuit of fresh material, and the final two days at the Talbot were attended by a growing number of journalists. In the public house the mood had changed. Previously the emphasis had been on locating witnesses in the hope that – joined together – their testimonies would provide a likely explanation for Heming’s murder. But Clewes’ confession had changed everything. He had admitted to being present at the scene, and if enough evidence could be gathered to demonstrate he had played a more active role than he claimed, he might be convicted as the principal offender. And if Clewes could be prosecuted, then Banks’ and Barnett’s prospects seemed equally gloomy. All three might hang together.
At the Talbot new evidence continued to surface. Gilbert Jones, the surveyor who had spent almost a month in Oddingley in May 1806, remembered how he had worked in an atmosphere of resentment and anger. George Harris from Droitwich claimed that he too had been approached by Captain Evans, about half a year before Parker’s murder, with an offer of £50 to shoot the clergyman. He remembered Evans saying there ‘would be no more harm in shooting him [Parker] than a crow that fled in the air’. Shortly after, Clement Churchill, the farmhand who had stayed quiet for so long, told the coroner that he had been at Church Farm on Midsummer Day and that there had been ‘laughing and joking’. And Elizabeth Fowler, the Captain’s old dairymaid, testified about the shotgun she had found hidden beneath the staddles on Easter Monday 1806.
The evidence against John Barnett also began to mount. One labourer told the coroner how Barnett had assaulted Parker at Pound Farm years before his murder. Thomas Reed then remembered the drinking session at the Raven two weeks before Midsummer Day. ‘They all seemed in liquor,’3 he said, ‘and talked a great deal about how they plagued the parson. John Barnett said he would give £50 for a dead parson. They all, except me, then stood up at once, took their hats off, and drank damnation to the parson.’
There were indications that John Barnett knew about Heming’s murder too. One of his farmhands explained that Barnett had been annoyed by Henry Waterson’s decision to have the old barn pulled down. Barnett had complained that it was foolish to begin such a job in the middle of winter, leaving all the animals outside to freeze. On the day Burton demolished the roof, Barnett had seemed unduly riled. He told the labourer that he was tempted to fetch his gun and shoot at him.
John Barnett’s plight was made worse still when his younger brother was called to testify. William Barnett, now in his mid-fifties and a successful farm master in his own right, quickly managed to aggravate the coroner with a string of blank denials. He said that John had not mentioned Parker’s murder when he had returned from Bromsgrove Fair on Midsummer Day. He did not know whether or not his brother had visited Church Farm that evening. He could not recall who had said Heming might be involved. Furthermore he could not remember being at the vestry meeting in 1806, nor could he recollect his brother or George Banks ever speaking angrily about Parker. ‘I never in my life heard my brother say what became of Heming,’ William Barnett told the coroner. ‘I do not believe he knew any more of what had become of him than you.’
As constable in 1806 and the current master of Church Farm, Barnett was a pivotal figure, and before long his forgetfulness began to jar. After a stern lecture from Smith it transpired that he had been warned by the family solicitor not to commit himself to any firm statement. Smith, intolerant of any new attempt to interfere with the proceedings, dismissed him. Barnett left the Talbot embarrassed and discredited.
One of the final witnesses was Matthew Pierpoint, returning with fresh evidence. The surgeon had ‘heard that the murder was supposed to have been committed with a blood stick’. Pierpoint told the jury that he had a little knowledge of blood sticks and since Tuesday he had examined one. Some ‘had a round knob at one end’, he informed them, and others ‘had a covering of lead around the knob’.
Pierpoint told Smith that if Heming had been in the position described by Clewes (rising from the floor, his head about three feet high) the leaden knob of a blood stick would have been quite sufficient to produce the frac
tures to the skull. One strike would not have been enough to cause death, but two or three heavy blows would have. ‘At that moment,’ the Morning Chronicle reporter recorded, ‘[Pierpoint] could think of no instrument more calculated to produce the fractures he had seen than a blood stick, being round and not over-heavy.’ It would have been perfect, he explained, for fracturing the bones of the skull without breaking the skin so as to ‘cause an effusion of blood’. ‘A heavier sharp-angled instrument would most likely have broken the skin as well. In the situation in which Heming was said to have been, he [Pierpoint] thought one blow would have been sufficient to have stunned him, so as to have deprived him of the power of speaking.’
At four o’clock on Friday 5 February Smith signalled an end to the long and exhausting process of interviewing witnesses. After a break of two hours the jury accompanied William Smith to Worcester County Gaol, where he was required to read through the depositions before the prisoners. Thomas Clewes and George Banks were led, handcuffed, into the magistrates’ room. John Barnett, who had been in the gaol since his arrest on Tuesday, forwarded a message to Smith stating that he did not wish to attend.
It was the first time Clewes and Banks had come into contact that week. They glowered at each other from across the room, and an exchange of words was only averted by the intervention of the chief gaoler.
It took four hours for William Smith to read out the depositions. At times Banks seemed agitated ‘and made several remarks’, and when Smith read Clewes’ confession he shouted out that ‘he would suffer himself to be torn limb from limb if he was ever in that barn’. Clewes, who remained reserved and detached, simply commented that ‘it was true’. As the reading ended, Banks turned and locked his eyes on Clewes. He warned him ‘to be careful how he took the life of a fellow creature’. ‘I was never in the barn when Heming was murdered,’ Banks shouted, ‘and nor did I know anything of him being murdered or butchered!’
‘Do you remember coming down to me that morning?’ Clewes replied. But as Banks started to speak he was silenced by Smith, who told him to ‘reserve his protestations of innocence for his lawyer and the jury at the assize’. The two men were escorted back to their cells, and the jury left for the Talbot, where they were invited to consider their verdict. After a few minutes of deliberation, they returned to the courtroom.
The Jurors summoned to enquire for our Sovereign Lord the King, when, how, and by what means, Richard Heming, late of the Parish of Oddingley, in the county of Worcester, Carpenter and Wheelwright, came to his death, do find a verdict of Wilful Murder against Thomas Clewes and George Banks, and that such Murder was committed on the night of the Twenty-Fifth of June, One Thousand Eight Hundred and Six. And do further find, that John Barnett, of the Parish of Oddingley, in the said County, Farmer, was AN ACCESSORY TO SUCH MURDER BEFORE THE FACT.
It was a climactic and significant procedural moment. When an inquest jury accused a named person of either murder or manslaughter, the coroner had the power to have the suspect detained – an act usually performed by magistrates – and all the witnesses bound over to appear at the next assize sessions. The verdicts were now equivalent to official indictments and the case would move to the assize court where the accused would be tried by one of the King’s judges. Assize courts were part of a tradition that could be traced back to the twelfth century, when judges were sent out into the provinces to deal with breaches of the peace and other matters which touched royal interest. In 1830 the King’s judges still travelled the ancient assize route, each of which comprised several counties. Worcestershire lay on the Oxford circuit, and the next sessions in the county were planned for early March. Until then the case would rest.
There was still, though, much to digest from the last fortnight. Smith had gone far beyond the limits of an ordinary coroner’s inquest. He had sat for five days and a total of around 60 hours. He had encouraged witnesses who had remained silent for upwards of two decades to speak out for the first time, and he had concluded with three suspects under arrest and with substantial evidence against each of them. The newspapers were quick to acknowledge these successes, and Smith was hailed again and again in reports. ‘Throughout the enquiry5 he has evinced an anxious desire to conduct it in such a manner as should promote the great end of justice, and to his zeal and intelligence the public is much indebted for the thorough investigation which this horrible and extraordinary affair has undergone,’ a typical piece recorded.
The days passed and the weather improved. ‘The frost has at length broken up, after having continued with more or less severity for upwards of forty days,’ Berrow’s Worcester Journal reported on 11 February. The paper expressed its hope that the canal would be navigable within days, and that the Severn, which had been covered by vast plates of ice and had flooded in the thaw, would settle back into its normal character.
Frontispiece of The Oddingley Murders, one of a number of commercial pamphlets to appear in the wake of William Smith’s inquest and Clewes’ confession
Clewes, Banks and Barnett had been incarcerated for a week. Now the verdict had been given, and they had been formally charged, their status changed. They were compelled to don regulation prison dress – yellow velveteen frocks and matching caps – and to undergo the full rigour of the gaol’s regime. This meant rising at a quarter to six, labouring until nine o’clock, and then from ten until one and two to six. The three men were kept apart on different wards.
Although the inquest had ended, the clamour for information persisted. Journalists sought out talkative locals, listened to taproom tales and inferred as much as they could from the suspects’ personal appearances. They penned potted histories of Clewes, Banks, Barnett, Heming, Captain Evans, Reverend Parker and James Taylor, revealing little vignettes as they unearthed them. Their reports were then swapped and syndicated across the country. Captain Evans was the acerbic military man, George Banks a respectable local, John Barnett a wealthy farmer (one newspaper speculated he was worth £20,000), Richard Heming and James Taylor both cast as opportunistic villains, and Thomas Clewes a pitiful character, a prisoner of his past.
They also raked over details of George Parker’s life and stories from the tithe dispute. Some claimed that Parker was the son of the Duke of Norfolk. The Morning Chronicle, which had historically opposed the tithing system, published a mischievous article about the Oddingley dispute: ‘In what is anything but unusual [Parker] quarrelled with his parishioners respecting tithes,’ they wrote. ‘Being a Cumberland man,6 and therefore, probably, like all mountaineers, obstinate and determined, he resolutely fought the good fight till 1806, caring equally little for the love or the enmity of the parishioners, and disregarding all warnings to take care of himself, when one afternoon he was shot at from behind a hedge and afterwards despatched.’
It was unsurprising that the Morning Chronicle adopted the case for campaigning purposes, but for other papers the Oddingley affair was most notable for its similarities to a more recent sensation. One newspaper, the Leicester Chronicle, was typical of many when it published its account of the inquest under the sub-heading ‘Parallel to the Polstead Murder’. Polstead was a small village in the south of Suffolk which had been thrust into national focus just two years earlier when the remains of Maria Marten, daughter of the village mole catcher, were discovered in a barn. Twenty-five-year-old Marten had disappeared 11 months previously, and had last been seen on her way to meet her companion William Corder at his barn, where her body was later found.
The story had fascinated the country. Corder, who had a bad reputation, had left Polstead soon after Maria’s disappearance. He had told her family they had married and settled on the Isle of Wight. The lie had held for a year, but in April 1828 Maria Marten’s mother began to have strange dreams suggesting that her daughter had been murdered and buried in Corder’s red barn.7 On 19 April 1828 she persuaded her husband to search the building. ‘[I] put a mole spike down into the floor … and brought up something black, which I smelt and I t
hought it smelt like decayed flesh,’ Mr Marten told a court several weeks later. It was the decaying remains of his daughter’s body.
The public interest that followed Marten’s discovery had been immense. Corder was traced to London and amid a circus of press coverage was brought back to Suffolk, where he was convicted of murder. Much of the country was caught up in the frenzy. A preacher travelled from London to Suffolk to deliver a sermon to around 2,000 people outside the barn, which now was referred to as the Red Barn; Staffordshire pottery figures were produced, and everyone clamoured for a memento. The Red Barn was pulled down and sold as ‘tooth picks, tobacco-stoppers, and snuff boxes’, and after 7,000 people gathered at Bury St Edmunds to watch Corder’s execution the hangman sold sections of the rope at a guinea an inch.
The similarities between the murders were obvious. Both victims had been lured to quiet barns in rural England to be killed by men they knew and trusted. Thereafter their graves were concealed and fictions invented and peddled to those who would miss them. It also seemed odd that both Heming and Marten had been discovered by family members. Was this chance, or providence? But while Maria Marten had been buried for just under a year, Heming had been missing for nearly 24. This fact troubled journalists as much as it excited them. How could those responsible live for so long with such a wicked truth? How could Clewes have continued to live at Netherwood with the skeleton of a murdered man buried just outside his farmhouse? How could Captain Evans have continued to reside in the parish after organising not one but two murders?
It was not unusual for newspapers to speculate on criminal cases. Although the law stated that any publisher could be committed for contempt for distributing articles that prejudiced a trial, in reality few titles took heed of this. The Worcester Herald4 did little to cloak its opinions. It reported all Clewes’ statements with gentle cautionary asides, taking every opportunity to remind its readers what type of man he was. Conversely their descriptions of Banks were supportive. The paper judged Banks ‘a fine man of most respectable appearance and of rather pleasing manner’. His reputation was, it confirmed, ‘much esteemed’ in the locality, and it rubbished the suggestion that he was the Captain’s son. One broadsheet, published on Valentine’s Day, went further, brazenly declaring, ‘We trust [Banks] will be able to clear himself from the serious charge brought against him.’ This pamphlet, which ran to more than 30 pages and consisted of newspaper accounts of the depositions, ended with a strangely contradictory paragraph.
