Dorset Murders

by Sly, Nicola;

  Having appeared before magistrates at Weymouth, Frank Burden was committed to stand trial at the next Dorset Assizes for the wilful murder of his wife, Emily.

  His trial opened in June 1902 and Frank pleaded ‘Not Guilty’ to Emily’s murder. His defence counsel, Mr C.A.S Garland, had conducted some investigations into Burden’s mental health and had discovered evidence of insanity in his immediate family history. On Burden’s father’s side of the family, Burden’s uncle and his father’s cousin had both been certified insane, while on his mother’s side, her brother, uncle and aunt were all similarly afflicted. Burden himself had complained of suffering from severe headaches prior to killing his wife, a statement corroborated by his brother Ernest, hence it was Garland’s intention to offer a defence of insanity for his client.

  Burden still continued to insist that Emily had brought about her own demise by being unfaithful to him. Two doctors had examined Burden after his arrest, finding his conversation to be wandering and confused, although both differed in their opinion of his mental state. Dr Peter MacDonald, medical superintendent of the Dorset County Asylum, considered Burden to be insane. To MacDonald, the injuries to Emily Burden were so severe that only a madman could have inflicted them. Frank Burden’s perceived inability to sire children and his groundless convictions that Emily was being unfaithful to him were evidence that he was delusional and, by his own testimony, had felt so ill when he killed his wife that he did not know what he was doing. Dr W.E. Good, medical officer at Dorchester Gaol, felt otherwise and was prepared to testify that Burden had shown no evidence of insanity while he was incarcerated and awaiting trial.

  Accordingly, Garland had mentally prepared himself to go into court and argue against Dr Good’s opinion of his client. He was therefore completely flabbergasted when the counsel for the prosecution, Mr A. Cavell Salter, seemed to want the same outcome as the defence team.

  Having heard from both MacDonald and Good, who continued to disagree on the subject, the court then heard from Dr Lionel Weatherly, the medical licensee of the Bailbrook Asylum near Bath, who had been consulted by the prosecution for a third opinion. Weatherly concurred with Dr MacDonald, stating that in his opinion Burden had inherited a potentially insane mind, which had broken down when he had become stressed by his delusions of his wife’s sexual affairs. Emily’s ‘conduct’ had fast become an obsession and such delusions in a sick mind could easily produce an impulsive violent act such as suicide or murder.

  At that, the judge intervened and instructed the jury to find Frank Burden guilty but insane. The jury complied and Burden was sentenced to be detained at Dorchester Prison during His Majesty’s pleasure.

  No evidence was ever found to support Burden’s assertions that he was infertile. Ironically, just weeks before killing his wife, Frank Burden had been offered a job as a keeper to a titled gentleman. Emily had strongly urged him to accept, but he had refused because he preferred to stay in the Portland area, close to his family. Had Burden accepted the job and moved away then it was possible that Emily’s life would have been spared.

  [Note: In various contemporary accounts of the murder of Emily Burden, some variations of names appear. The Burdens’ lodger, Jack Roberts, is alternatively referred to as John Roberts. Their neighbour is alternately called John and Jonathan Lano. The two men alleged to have had an affair with Emily Burden, Abe Winter and his friend John (Jack) Pearce, were the Burden’s rent collector and a monumental mason. In some accounts Winter is referred to as the rent collector and Pearce as the stonemason – in other accounts their positions have been reversed.]

  10

  ‘I DON’T WANT ANYTHING ELSE TO DO WITH YOU, MR SIMMONS’

  Weymouth, 1902

  There was, Dr Pritzler Wetherall decided, something seriously wrong with his patient. The man had come to his surgery that morning complaining of vomiting and of being unable to sleep. However, as the doctor tried to question him, Edward Simmons refused to sit down, nervously pacing and babbling incessantly about anything and everything, making it almost impossible for the doctor to get a word in edgeways.

  After several unsuccessful attempts at breaking into the man’s monologue, the doctor had had enough. Casting a glance at Simmons’s wife, who sat quietly in a corner of the surgery anxiously watching her husband’s bizarre behaviour, Wetherall suddenly bellowed ‘Sit Down!’ The order was enough to stop Simmons in his tracks for just long enough for the doctor to briefly examine him, diagnose alcoholic gastritis and prescribe some medicine.

  When he next visited the surgery, Simmons was given short shrift by the doctor who had checked up on some of his ramblings from his first visit and found them to be a pack of lies. Simmons was not the ex-medical student he had claimed to be, nor did he have a brother in the Army Medical Corps. Excusing his brevity by saying that he had an urgent appointment, Wetherall dispensed some more medicine and ushered Simmons and his wife politely, but firmly, from his surgery.

  The truth was that Simmons had suffered a severe illness as a child and his parents had been warned that he would most probably be left with some permanent mental disability as a result. Although he was undoubtedly a sickly child, suffering from frequent fainting spells, he did well at school and on leaving was employed by a firm of wholesale druggists. He initially did very well at his new job but, within a short time, he became convinced that the foreman did not like him and was deliberately picking on him.

  He began to take unscheduled time off work and eventually just seemed to disappear into thin air. His parents were frantic with worry, wondering if this was the onset of the mental disability that they had been warned about many years earlier. In a desperate effort to find their son, they placed advertisements in national newspapers, asking for anyone who had seen Edward to contact them.

  They were surprised by the response that the advertisement elicited. Writing in the third person, Edward himself replied. It was obvious that he had absolutely no memory of events that had occurred since he left his job for the very last time.

  When he was safely home again, a family conference was called to decide what to do about Edward and it was at this point that his brother John, usually known as Jack, had a brainwave, announcing that he would give Edward a job. Edward was smart and cultured, said Jack, with a pleasant personality and the ‘gift of the gab’ – he would make an excellent travelling salesman.

  It seemed as though Edward had finally found his niche. Jack was delighted with his brother’s performance, particularly since he firmly believed that the downfall of travelling salesmen was alcohol and Edward was a staunch teetotaller.

  Or at least he was until he met up with a group of commercial travellers in a hotel in Cardiff. On learning that Edward planned to spend the evening balancing his books in his room, the salesmen were appalled and managed to persuade him to take the night off and come for a drink. Edward agreed, having first stipulated that he would take nothing alcoholic. He failed to notice that the group were spiking his drinks and was soon drunk to the point of passing out.

  He woke up the next morning with a terrible hangover and was horrified to realise that, while he had been dead to the world, his brother’s samples had been stolen, as had all the money he had collected on his trip and the contents of his own wallet.

  Edward was far too ashamed to go home. Instead, he wrote to Jack begging his forgiveness and apologising over and over again for letting him down. He ended the letter by saying that he planned to go to Ireland and join the Army.

  He served for eight years with the West Kent Regiment, achieving the rank of sergeant and travelling all over the world. Apart from a brief spell in hospital in India, his health improved dramatically and he was eventually discharged with an exemplary service record.

  Once he had left the Army, Edward became the manager of a late-night club in Edinburgh, before moving to Manchester to manage a similar club for the same owners. In 1895 he married his wife, Frances, and the couple later adopted a child.

&nb
sp; By this time Simmons was beginning to exhibit some rather strange behaviour. He constantly complained of headaches and was certain that the top of his head was about to come off. The loving and indulgent Frances would spend many hours humouring her husband by holding the top of his head in order to prevent such an occurrence.

  The Harbour Weymouth, 1954.

  When Frances herself became ill and was hospitalised for a lengthy period, Edward seemed lost without her. He began to show up for work at the club earlier and earlier, forcing his staff to do the same. Indeed, he was often observed sitting on the steps of the club in his pyjamas in the early hours of the morning. Despite his obvious problems, his employers were still more than happy with the way that he ran the club, but, once again, Simmons began to have delusions that they were deliberately interfering with his job because they didn’t like him. His paranoia grew to the point where he felt obliged to hand in his notice. The club management turned down his first two letters of resignation, but finally accepted his third, leaving him not only jobless but homeless as well.

  When Frances was finally discharged from hospital, the couple moved to Aldershot to stay with friends until, after five weeks, Simmons secured the post of steward/secretary for the Royal Dorset Yacht Club at Weymouth.

  Simmons obviously still possessed his ‘gift for the gab’, since he quickly made friends with several people in his new hometown, including the Graham family, partners in a large firm of wine merchants. The Yacht Club was close to Graham & Sons wine bar and Edward got into the habit of popping in regularly for a drink, usually a ginger ale, but occasionally he would take a glass of whisky. Soon he became completely enamoured by one of the barmaids who worked there, twenty-four-year-old Hettie Stephens from Truro, Cornwall.

  A little flirting from customers is an occupational hazard for barmaids, particularly when they are as attractive as Hettie. However, Hettie was certainly not interested in any male attention, since she already had a steady boyfriend, who was currently working the Klondyke Gold Rush to make enough money for them to marry.

  The Harbour, Weymouth, 1931.

  Eventually Simmons purchased a gold bracelet for Hettie, the latest in a series of small gifts, paying £2 7s 6d for it from a local jeweller. He persuaded the jeweller to write him a receipt for £2 10s 0d and, having given Hettie the bracelet in the bar one evening, then proceeded to make a big show about how much it had cost him.

  Hettie had never shown any interest in Simmons beyond the obligatory politeness from a barmaid to a paying customer. Not wishing to offend him by refusing the bracelet, she accepted it and thanked him, but coolly continued to keep her distance.

  His lack of success with Hettie was not all that was troubling Simmons at that time, as he had become convinced that mail was being stolen from the yacht club. Although the intended recipient of the letters had made no complaint, Simmons involved the police, who, after spending countless hours investigating the alleged theft, came to the conclusion that the crime existed only in the mind of Edward Simmons. Many of the friends he had initially made on his arrival in Weymouth were now beginning to draw away from Simmons, believing him to be opinionated, argumentative, a braggart and a habitual liar.

  The slightest untoward incident threw Simmons into an emotional turmoil. He was driven almost to the point of a nervous breakdown when a man spoke to him at a concert without first being introduced and, on another occasion, the sight of a man wearing a woman’s bracelet was enough to send him into near meltdown. Concerned for her husband’s mental health, Frances took the unusual step of consulting Dr Wetherall alone, tearfully begging the doctor to do something. Wetherall calmed her, promising that he would sort something out.

  Weymouth in the 1930s.

  Edward’s next step was to call on Percy Graham and ask him for a private word on a rather delicate matter. He told Percy that he had watched Hettie Stephens pocketing money from the till in the wine bar and that he had also seen her drunk in charge of the bar several times. Graham realised that these allegations could not possibly be true and demanded that Simmons leave his office immediately, warning him not to repeat the preposterous allegations against Hettie to anyone else.

  Simmons went straight from Graham’s office to the local ironmongers, where he asked to see some really sharp knives, explaining that he needed one for sticking pigs. He eventually purchased one with a 5in blade, then, leaving the ironmongers, hailed a taxi and asked to be driven to the railway station. Arthur Collins drove him to the station, and then returned to the taxi rank on the Esplanade where, by chance, he immediately picked up another fare for the station. As he drove, he spotted Simmons walking back into town and wondered why he had asked for a cab, only to immediately turn round on reaching his destination and return. Later, Collins was to find the brand new knife that Simmons had just purchased under the seat cushions in his taxi.

  Simmons went straight to the shops on his return to Weymouth town centre and purchased a revolver for ‘shooting rats’. Having rejected the first gun he was shown because it was too big, he bought a smaller gun, only to return it to the shop minutes later because it was too small, finally settling on the gun he had first turned down. He then asked for ammunition, but was told that he needed to go to Mr Hayman’s shop, a little further along the street. At that, Simmon’s walked out and went straight to Mr Lanning’s shop, where he again demanded ammunition. Never having stocked ammunition, Lanning also directed him to Hayman’s, but Simmons lingered in Lanning’s shop and eventually purchased another knife almost identical to the one he had just left in the taxi. He never did manage to reach Hayman’s.

  Weymouth locals watched as Simmons’s behaviour became ever more bizarre. On one occasion he was observed walking out of the yacht club and slamming the door behind him, only to do an immediate about turn and go back inside again. He repeated this sequence of actions over and over again, until the watchers tired of looking at him and went off to do something else, leaving him still going in and out, in and out, in and out . . .

  Simmon’s preoccupation with Hettie Stephens’s alleged wrongdoings became an obsession, related in detail to anyone who was prepared to listen to him. Most people ignored him, including his wife, but others went to the Grahams with what they had been told, eventually forcing Percy Graham to approach Frances Simmons on the street and ask her to get her husband to stop blackening the girl’s character.

  Embarrassed, Frances agreed to have word with her husband, but she didn’t get the chance. It came to the notice of Archie Graham that Simmons was spreading rumours about Hettie and he confronted Simmons in the wine bar and told him in no uncertain terms that it must stop. Simmons admitted that he had been wrong and promised that he wouldn’t say another word against Hettie.

  By now, in a very fragile mental state and almost totally unable to sleep, the slightest irritation was sufficient to send Simmons over the top. When a member brought a dog into the yacht club, against the rules, he screamed and ranted like a lunatic. He was more convinced than ever that the top of his head was coming off and poor Frances had to spend hours holding it in place for him.

  Still unable to go to Hayman’s shop to buy ammunition himself, he eventually sent the hall porter from the yacht club to buy some for him, then attempted to load the gun by pushing the bullets into the trigger aperture, throwing a tantrum when they wouldn’t fit and sending the porter back to the shop to exchange the ‘wrongly sized’ bullets. The porter wisely got some instructions on how to load the gun and passed them on to Simmons. Between them, they managed to load the weapon and Simmons fired a test shot in the table tennis room of the club.

  On 27 March 1902, Simmons asked the night porter at the yacht club to deliver a note to Hettie Stephens for him, stressing that he should wait for a reply and not to return without one. The porter duly obliged. The note asked Hettie to meet Simmons so that they could discuss the things he had been saying about her and, presumably anxious to clear her name, Hettie sent back a note agreeing to m
eet him in the bar that evening.

  She was due for a tea break at 6 p.m. but when that time came, her replacement had not yet arrived, so she continued to look after the bar. Simmons walked in and immediately began, what looked to other customers, an argument with Hettie. They could not discern exactly what was being said but, on one occasion, Hettie raised her voice in anger and the words ‘Not after what you said about me’ were heard.

  When her relief, Edith Hill, arrived at 6.15 p.m., the argument seemed to have run its course. Edith heard Hettie tell Simmons, ‘I don’t want anything else to do with you, Mr Simmons’, at which point Hettie went to the small cloakroom at the end of the bar, got her coat and put it on ready to leave.

  As Hettie walked across the bar towards the door, three shots rang out. Edith screamed as Hettie fell instantly to the floor, having taken all three bullets in the face. Then, as Edith and the bar customers looked on in horror, Simmons put the barrel of the revolver into his mouth and pulled the trigger once more. The bullet came straight out through Simmons’s cheek, before embedding itself in the ceiling of the bar.

  The police and a doctor were sent for and the customers in the bar courageously tackled Simmons who meekly passed his gun to one of them, saying, ‘Don’t fret. I’ve done what I intended to do and I’ll wait quietly until the police arrive.’

  Simmons was taken to Weymouth police station, where a doctor was called to attend to his injuries. It was Dr Wetherall and Simmons greeted him like an old friend. He was apparently unable to comprehend that he had done anything wrong, joking when the doctor was forced to shave off part of his moustache to stitch his wounds and asking if the doctor would mind going back to the wine bar for him, as he seemed to have left his false teeth there. (The teeth were later found scattered all around the bar, having been shattered by the bullet.)