Cambridgeshire Murders

by Alison Bruce

  An inquest was held on the following day but concluded that James had died ‘through eating a hearty supper’. Despite the misgivings of some of her relatives the police did not consider Horsford could be in any way responsible as he had been so far away in Stow Longa at the time of her death.

  Interestingly she had been pregnant at the time of her death.

  One of her relatives, known only as Mr James, worked for Horsford as a farm-hand. He commented to some of his co-workers that he suspected that his boss had been involved in Fanny’s death.

  Soon afterwards Horsford offered to buy him a drink. They visited a local pub and Horsford handed him a beer. Within minutes James was feeling ill. He hurried home but died very soon afterwards.

  His death was not treated as suspicious, but after Horsford’s conviction it was decided that this and other unexplained deaths should be investigated. The Illustrated Police News printed the stories of the deaths of both Fanny James and her relative as well as the following:

  The third case of alleged poisoning is that of a servant girl at Peterborough who was know to be intimate with Walter Horsford, who was in the habit of visiting Peterborough market. It is alleged that this girl received a packet stated to be addressed in Horsford’s handwriting, and died the same night with symptoms of poisoning. It is doubtful whether the document written by Horsford and purporting to contain a confession of the crime for which he was executed last week, will ever be made public, though it is understood that Horsford’s friends will shortly be supplied with a copy of it.

  Despite these rumours nothing else was ever proved.

  The Horsford case became the subject of at least one street ballad. One entitled The Execution of Walter Horsford credits him with coming from St Neots. Perhaps it would have been more fitting for him to have been known as the Spaldwick Poisoner. Equally inaccurately the ballad seems to think that Horsford deserved some sympathy. As he acted neither in the heat of the moment nor after any great provocation and was certainly one of Cambridgeshire’s most cold-blooded killers, any sympathy would be misplaced.

  Notes

  1 Strychnine occurs naturally in a variety of seeds and plants, especially the dog button plant, indigenous to India, Hawaii and other tropical countries. The fruits resemble mandarin and the seeds are large, and a velvety looking grey. Strychnine is colourless with a bitter taste and affects the central nervous system with symptoms that are very similar to those of tetanus. Medically it was developed as a stimulant and sometimes as an ingredient in preparations for the treatment of nausea. It was used most commonly as a rat poison.

  2 Dover Powders or Dover’s Powder: a powdered drug containing ipecacuanha and opium, formerly used to relieve pain and induce perspiration. After Thomas Dover (1660–1742), British physician.

  3 Now St Neots’ Museum.

  4 Palliasse: mattress consisting of a thin pad filled with straw or sawdust.

  5 A drachm is a unit of apothecary weight equal to 1/8 of an ounce or to 60 grains.

  6 Neuralgia is acute spasmodic pain along the course of one or more nerves.

  9

  AN IRONIC TWIST OF THE KNIFE

  James Henry Hancock was executed for a murder committed on the evening of 4 March 1910. Hancock was a 54-year-old labourer, who had lived with a woman named Eliza Marshall for fourteen years. She was also known as Eliza Chapman and was a married woman living apart from her husband, at 22 Water Street, Chesterton.

  Mrs Marshall, four years older than Hancock, earned her living by taking on casual work at fairs, travelling with a caravan in the summer, and in wintertime hawking coke in the Cambridgeshire villages.

  Hancock was known by the nickname of ‘Sonny’. He had originally come from Sheffield and moved to Cambridge in the mid-1890s when the drainage work on the Fens was being carried out.

  During the time that Hancock and Marshall lived together they had frequent rows and it is said that Hancock twice left and returned to Sheffield. But each time he came back to Cambridge, again to live with Marshall. Towards the end of their relationship however, Marshall tried to separate from Hancock, saying that she could not live with him any longer. She even went as far as to make a complaint to the police about him.

  On 4 March Marshall and Hancock had arranged to go to Cottenham with a load of coke. At about 6 a.m. Hancock took their horse and cart and went to the gas works to pick up the load. Marshall met him there at just after 7 p.m. Hancock had loaded the cart by then and so they set off.

  Shortly into the journey a quarrel broke out between them, the exact cause of which was unclear, but it was resolved with Hancock declaring that he would not go to Cottenham. Apparently Hancock wanted to sell the coke in Cambridge while Marshall wanted to adhere to the original plan and take it to Cottenham. When Hancock declined to go any further Marshall said that she would get her brother, Alfred Doggett, to go with her.

  Doggett, aged about 60, lived in Red Barn Cottages in Old Chesterton. He came to meet them with a view to his taking over the cart. This possibility enraged Hancock and the two men began to argue. Hancock threatened Doggett with violence and took the horse home, to unharness it and put it in its stable.

  When Marshall arrived home Hancock baldly stated that he wanted his clothes and that she would not have any more worry with him. She took this to mean that he was leaving again. Therefore she and her brother re-harnessed the horse and returned to the original plan of going to Cottenham. When they returned Doggett saw to the horse while Marshall went indoors. Hancock was still there and had made tea. He asked her to join him but she refused, being still annoyed with him. This renewed Hancock’s bad temper and he slammed the door in her face.

  She went across to the stable to help her brother with the horse, and after a few minutes Hancock joined them. A brief discussion ensued culminating in Hancock asking Doggett, ‘Have you got over your temper?’ which was met by stony silence.

  What happened in the next few moments is not clear; Marshall’s story differed from Hancock’s. However, with or without provocation from her brother, it is clear that Hancock struck Doggett and, as she saw her brother fall to the ground, Marshall realised that Hancock held a knife in his hand.

  She pulled the knife away from Hancock, suffering a minor injury to her hand, and then ran from the stable. Doggett staggered after her with blood gushing from a wound to his neck. He managed to cross the road but then fell and died almost immediately. On examination the wound was measured at almost 5in long and was deep enough to have sliced the jugular vein and damaged bone.

  Hancock made no attempt to escape and when Edwin Phillips, who worked for the university, stopped to ask him what he was doing Hancock said, ‘I’m sorry for what I’ve done but meant killing her.’ He later repeated this claim to another witness when he said, ‘I killed him, but I killed the wrong one.’ Then, on his arrest by a policeman, Constable Lander, he shouted, ‘Here you are, Mr Lander. I have done it, but it ought to have been old ‘Liza and all’. On the way to the police station he added: ‘I hope he’s dead. I hit him hard enough anyway. I plead guilty, but I wish it had been the other old **** as well. I did try but the knife was not strong enough. I don’t care. I shall get three weeks before I get my neck stretched, and then I shall have some beer.’

  The following evening Hancock made a further statement to Constable Evans, which included: ‘She wanted me to go to Cottenham with her, but I did not want to go. He went with her, and when they got back old ‘Liza started swearing, and he started shouting. I soon stopped him and I should have soon stopped her if she had not soon got out of the way. I stopped him. I stuck the knife into him. They have always been against me. About fourteen years ago he kicked me in the jaw. She won’t be able to fly to him in the future.’

  At his trial on 28 May Hancock claimed to have had a legitimate reason for possessing the knife and claimed that he did not know how Doggett had been injured. He also swore that he had no recollection of the fight. Despite efforts by his counsel, Graf
ton Pryor, and his solicitor, G.A. Wootten, the judge, Justice Phillimore, found him guilty and passed the death sentence.

  James Hancock was executed at 8 a.m. on 14 June 1910 despite about 500 signatures being obtained in an effort to obtain a reprieve. Henry Pierrepoint was the executioner and was assisted by his brother Thomas. Death was said to be instantaneous. In an ironic twist it was later discovered that Doggett had been one of the workmen who had helped to build the scaffold that was used for the execution of his murderer.

  Subsequent to the report of James Hancock’s execution the following interesting article appeared in the 17 June edition of the Cambridge Independent Press:

  A CENTURY’S RECORD

  Previous Executions in Cambridge.

  It is 12 years since the extreme penalty of the law was last paid within the walls of the County Gaol, so that Tuesday’s execution is the first that has taken place here in the 20th Century. The last culprit was Walter Horsford, the notorious St Neot’s poisoner, who was hanged on the morning of Tuesday June 28th 1898 for the murder of his cousin, Mrs Holmes. Prior to that date there was a long period during which the hangman was not called upon to perform his dread office within the county, for it was as far back as December 14th 1876, that the previous execution took place – that of Robert Browning, for the murder of a woman named Emma Rolfe, on Midsummer Common.

  The last public execution in the county was on March 11th 1864, when John Green was hanged for the murder of a girl at Whittlesey. Shortly after this the law was passed putting a stop to executions in public, and the tendency since then has been more and more towards complete privacy, so much so that it seems somewhat difficult now to realise that not 50 years ago an execution was the occasion for the assembly of huge crowds of people who used to regard it very much in the light of a public holiday. There are not a few still living who can remember these grim exhibitions, when people flocked into the town from many miles around to see the unhappy wretch expiate his crime on the gallows. One gentleman remembers that when a boy at school at Huntingdon the father of one of his schoolfellows came to the school to fetch his son away for the day in order to take him to Cambridge to see an execution.

  These unedifying exhibitions have, happily, been abolished, and now the executions are carried out in such strict privacy that even the representatives of the Press, those indispensable watch-dogs of the public are not always allowed to be present.

  A GRIM RECORD

  The records of the last century show some 26 persons have suffered the death penalty in Cambridgeshire during that period. Of these, however only four were executed during the latter half of the century, and only two since public executions were abolished. In the early days of the 19th Century people were hanged for much less serious offences than that of murder. Thus the century’s grim record commenced with the hanging of William Grimshaw in March 1801 for housebreaking and in April of the following year William Wright and Robin Bullock were put to death for arson. Then came an interval of 10 years, but in 1812 there were two executions, the first being that of William Nightingale, alias Bird, on March 28th, his offence being forgery, and the second, on August 8th, that of Daniel Dawson, for poisoning a horse at Newmarket.

  Four years later came the Littleport riots for taking part in which John Dennis, Isaac Harley, Thomas Smith, William Beamise and George Crow were hanged together at Ely on Friday June 28th. The offence charged against them was that of ‘felony in the sad and dreadful outrages that had taken place at Littleport, Ely, and its neighbourhood during the last week in May’. John Dennis, it seems, was a publican at Littleport, and the ringleader of the gang. He was convicted on three separate indictments of having extorted money from Ely gentlemen. Harley, Smith and Crow were labourers and Beamise was a shoemaker. All appear to have gone in for robbery, and it was stated on one occasion Smith robbed a man named Josiah Dewey, of Littleport, of 100 guineas. All five were executed near the toll-gate on the Cambridge road, and it is recorded that they were preceded to the fatal spot ‘by the most respectable inhabitants of Ely, carrying white wands on horseback’. An account of the execution says that ‘No words can describe the awful effect of the execution, the prisoners, with the exception of Beamise, being young man in the full vigour of life. As they moved along, St Mary’s bell tolled, and the unfortunate man prayed fervently aloud and uttered the most pious ejaculations.’ After many expressions of penitence and exhortations to the crowd to profit by their examples, ‘the caps being drawn over their faces, they were launched into eternity’.

  A DESPERATE CHARACTER

  The next offender to suffer death was a well known character named John Scare, who was executed in 1817 for burglary at Whittlesford. He was only 21 years of age but he appears to have been a very desperate character and to have taken to villainy at an early age, his record, from the time of his apprenticeship to Mr. Pont, a gingerbread maker of Cambridge, until he met his end, being one of petty villainy and incorrigible scoundrelism. At one time he worked at the oil mills at Whittlesford, and at that place he robbed the house of an aged fellow-workman named Edward Stone.

  Scare’s heartless character was exemplified by his treatment of his wife ‘with whom he lived but a few days.’ He took to systematic robbery and carried a loaded pistol about with him, and such was the terror which his reckless and ferocious spirit had inspired that none dared apprehend him. But his recklessness proved his undoing, for on Sunday, as he sat boldly drinking ale at a public house at Fowlmere. The parish constable, one Rickard by name, crept up behind him and seized him, while another man snatched away his pistol.

  In his confession he gave an interesting account of the burglary at Whittlesford. He stated that he and two others went to the house and broke open the window, and as his companions were smaller men, he proposed that they should go in first. They however declined on the grounds that they were ‘afraid of the ghost which haunted the house.’ Scare thereupon thrust his head and shoulders in at the window, exclaiming ‘Now Mr Devil, either you or I’. The burglars seemed to have gone pretty openly to work, for it is stated that they put a lighted candle through the window in the belief that if there was a ghost inside it would blow the candle out. Finding that the candle still burned, they entered the house, rifled it, and went off with their booty into a field, where they put down their hats and ‘threw the guineas into them as long as they lasted.’ One of the thieves, named Frost, appears to have been stricken with remorse or fear, and sent his share of the spoil back to the owner, on hearing of which Scare came back from London, whither he had fled, and broke into the house again to get it. Both Frost and the third man named Teversham, were reprieved, but Scare’s desperate behaviour secured him for the full rigour of the law.

  INTERESTING RELICS

  An interesting relic of the case, a piece of panelling from the old gaol, on which was carved the words, ‘C Teversham crost this bridge the last time March 14th, 1819, after 2 years’ was in the possession of Mr John Whitaker, curio dealer, of Sidney Street, as was also a record of the crime of murdering his wife, for which Thomas Weems was hanged at Cambridge on August 6th 1819. This appears to be the first murder of the century so far as Cambridgeshire was concerned. A somewhat gruesome relic of this murder is, or was, preserved in Trinity College Library in the shape of a square piece of Weems’ skin, dressed and carefully labelled and preserved. Alongside it was kept a similar piece of skin taken from the body of Corder, the notorious Red Barn murderer, whose crime near Bury St. Edmunds gave rise to so much excitement at the time, and on which a play was written which still has a vogue in travelling theatres. This fearsome relic is tanned and of considerable thickness. It is said that at Bury St Edmunds there is a book containing an account of Corder’s life, covered with leather made from his skin.

  DEATH FOR HIGHWAY ROBBERY

  The gallow’s next victim was one John Lane who on April 3rd 1824, was hanged for rape. Another five years elapsed before William Osborn was hanged for highway robbery. Osborn was a
native of Boxworth, and the robbery was committed at Elsworth. The victim of the robbery was David Darwood, of Warboys, a higgler whom Osborn saw with some money at a public house in Knapwell. Osborn went out first, waylaid him on the road to Conington, called on him to deliver, and murderously assaulted him with a ‘dibbing iron’, afterwards robbing him of twelve sovereigns and a £5 note on the Baldock Bank. But Darwood recovered to identify his assailant, and the ‘dibbing iron’ covered with blood and hair, helped to seal Osborn’s fate, which he met in April 1829.

  The next execution took place on April 3rd, 1830, when three labourers, named Wm. Reader, Wm. Turner and David Howard, were hanged for having ‘wilfully and maliciously destroyed several stacks of corn and other property belonging to Mr. Chalk, at Linton, and Mr. Sharp, of Badlingham’. The Cambridge Free Library contains an interesting account of this and other crimes.

  The attempted murder of a gamekeeper three years later brought Wm. Westnot and Chas Carter to the scaffold on March 30th, 1833, and in December of the same year John Stallan was hanged for arson. For 17 years after this the gallows was not required, and then, on April 13th, 1850 Elias Lucas and Mary Reeder were executed for poisoning the former’s wife at Castle Camps. The case excited tremendous interest in the county and a great crowd witnessed the execution at Cambridge. On August l0th, 1861, the gallows was again requisitioned for the punishment of Augustus Hilton for cutting his wife’s throat with a razor at Parson Drove. Then, three years later, came the last public execution in Cambridgeshire, that of John Green, on March 11th, 1864. The next execution was that of Robert Browning, on December l4th, 1876, when, although the execution was carried out in private, a great number of people came into the town in the hope of seeing something of it.