The jury retired for an hour and a quarter, and on their return delivered a verdict of Guilty of Manslaughter.
The Lord Chief Baron informed them that the Court could not receive such a verdict; they were bound by the solemn obligation which they had taken, to decide according to the facts. If they believed the evidence, their verdict must be Guilty; if they discredited the witnesses, they would acquit the prisoner. It was not for them to assume the King’s prerogative and mitigate the punishment.
The jury were desired to reconsider and amend their verdict, which they accordingly did forthwith, without leaving the box. The verdict was Guilty.
The Recorder then pronounced the awful sentence of death upon the prisoner, who seemed to be very much affected by his unfortunate situation. Silence being called, the Recorder addressed him nearly as follows:
‘Francis Smith, you have been tried by a most attentive and intelligent jury, to whom the law on this unhappy case has been fully and ably stated. It was incumbent on you to have given evidence in mitigation of your heinous offence, if any such proof could possibly have been adduced. That ǹot having been done, the jury have very properly, and according to law, found you guilty of the wilful murder of Thomas Milward. The law of God and man is that whosoever sheddeth man’s blood shall atone for his offence by his own.’ The prisoner was then sentenced, in the usual manner, to be executed on Monday next.
He was so much agitated that he was unable to walk from the dock without the assistance of two of the keepers. Mr Dignum, of Drury Lane Theatre, who had sat near him throughout the proceedings, was extremely affected; he wept, clasped his hands together, and suffered the greatest agitation. Several of the prisoner’s relatives were also present, and apparently in great distress.
The Sessions House was still crowded in every part at nine o’clock, and the Yard was filled with an anxious multitude, all making inquiry, and interested in the fate of the prisoner. He was, as usual, taken back to Newgate; but at seven in the evening a respite arrived for him, till His Majesty’s pleasure should be known.
Friday, 20 January 1804 The sentence of death passed upon Francis Smith has been commuted to imprisonment for one year.
Tuesday, 20 January 1807 At the Kensington petty sessions yesterday, a bald-pated, grey-headed old man, named James Graham, the individual who caused such excitement in the neighbourhood of Hammersmith some years since by enacting the part of a Ghost, and during the pursuit of whom a man was unfortunately shot, was charged, with another man, named Joseph Mitchell, before Mr Codd, the sitting magistrate, with having been drunk and disorderly on Saturday night at Hammersmith.
Police Constable Dowling stated that, between twelve and one o’clock on Saturday night, while he was conveying a disorderly prostitute to the station-house, the prisoners interfered and created such a disturbance that he and other officers were obliged to take them into custody. They were first requested to go home quietly, but they declared they would go where they — pleased, and cursed and swore very much. They had both evidently been partaking of drink. Inspector Mullins and Policeman Ayres, T167, corroborated the evidence of Dowling.
His Ghostship, in his defence, addressed the bench in a whining voice, as follows:
‘Sirs, on Saturday evening I went to the pawnbroker’s to fetch home my best coat, for I always go two or three times on the Lord’s day to a place of worship, and I like to go respectable. You have heard that I am charged with swearing. Now, as I am a worshipper of the true God, the great Jehovah, is it probable I would do so? I am a quiet spirit; and I associate, to quote the language of David, with “the excellent of the earth, in whom is my delight”.
‘I am not a frequenter of low public-houses, Sirs, but went into the Hammersmith coffee-house, and had half-a-pint of warm ale. While there, my companion came in and asked me to have a glass of ale; I said, “Thank ye, but yours is fourpenny, and mine sixpenny.” We, however, had three pints of ale together, and when we came out the streets were in a very quiet state. Sirs, there is usually more than a hundred persons in the streets of Hammersmith at that time on a Saturday night, but then they were very quiet, more so than I have seen for years. I suppose it was owing to the working people having so little work, and consequently little money to spend.
‘Well, Sirs, as we were going home, we met a tender female between two policemen, who were conducting her to the station-house. I said to my companion, “What a dreadful pity that a delicate woman should be locked up on such a cold night.” The policeman said that if I interfered he would lock me up too. I immediately exclaimed, “Lock me up! Impossible! I never violated the laws of my country. I never injured man nor mortal.” I then went to the station-house.
‘Now, Sirs, could it be possible that I could be drunk? I’m a man who never will take spirits, and therefore was not drunk; I was just going home to my poor old woman, and to a warm bed, but they put me instead into what they call a cell, with boards for bed, and a block of wood for my pillow, by which I yesterday was prevented from enjoying what has been a blessing to me, the worship of my great Creator, the great God. I am not an ignorant man, Sirs, I can give you a description of the great God in language of –’
Mr Codd: ‘Stop! I cannot take my ideas of God from the description of a man who frequents public-houses until twelve o’clock on Saturday nights.’
His Ghostship was fined five shillings, and Mitchell one shilling, or fourteen days in the House of Correction.
In 1825, Hammersmith was again the haunt of ‘a Ghost whose mischievous antics spread dismay among young and old by nightly prancing about the vicinity, annoying every individual that chanced to fall within his perambulations’ – till, at one o’clock one morning, Nicholas Worsley, returning home from Kensington, and having got as far as Widow Salter’s turnpike-gate in Walham Green, encountered ‘a man on horse-back, clothed in a white sheet, and with a hairy cap tied under his chin, who was making a most hideous groaning noise; rather than retreating, Worsley went forward and seized the bridle-rein of the Ghost’s horse, took the white sheet off and threw it into a gentleman’s garden, forced the Ghost to dismount, and held on to him until a watchman, Isaac Hawkins, came up’. The offender turned out to be John Benjamin, ‘a quite respectable looking young farmer and hay-salesman of Alperton, in the parish of Harrow [seven or eight north-western miles by road from Walham Green]’. Next morning, up before a magistrate, he had no more to say in his defence than that he had been ‘put in a joking mood’ by a few too many drinks at a White Hart public-house other than the one associated with the shooting of Thomas Milward. ‘The magistrate considered his behaviour a joke of too serious a nature to be lightly passed over, and ordered his Ghostship to find bail, himself of £50, and two sureties of £25 each, for his appearance at the Middlesex Sessions.’ A few days later, a jury there found him guilty of unlawfully disguising himself with an intent to frighten His Majesty’s subjects, and he was fined £10, with a warning that ‘further sillinesses’ would be punished more severely.
One hundred and thirty years later, in 1955, someone in Hammersmith remembered (or, as likely, invented) a supernatural tradition – that, every fifty years, on the August night when the moon was full, the ghost of a man who had cut his throat near St Paul’s Church in 1803 appeared in the churchyard: ‘therefore’, going by the lunar data in Old Moore’s Almanack, he could be expected on Wednesday, 3 August. Never minding the apparent quirkiness of the arithmetic – for if the ghost’s stroll was an every-half-century anniversary one, he should have taken it in 1953 – journalists made up pieces about what might be going to happen. Interviews were published:
A resident of Hammersmith for over 70 years, who declined to give his name, said that he saw the ghost 50 years ago, ‘wearing a white winding sheet, its eyes flaming’. Generations of his family, right back to his great-grandmother, have seen it. His great-grandmother was one of the first to see it when it began to appear between December 1803 and January 1804. She had been walking through the c
hurchyard when ‘a tall white figure rose from the tombs’ and chased her until she fainted. When she recovered, the ghost had disappeared. Two days later she died.
Another elderly native of Hammersmith said that he had already had four ‘ghostly experiences’:
His first was in an empty house at Batoum Gardens [Hammersmith], where a murder is said to have been committed. He was going up the stairs in the dark when something brushed by him. ‘It couldn’t have been anything else but a ghost,’ he says. During the battle of Mons in the First World War, he saw the famous ‘Mons Angel’ just before he was wounded. Before his demob, he was billeted in Lord Onslow’s mansion in Ireland. One night he was on the ground floor when the housekeeper’s dog came running down the stairs ‘with the hair on its back stiff’. He then heard screams from the housekeeper and shouts of ‘I’ve seen a ghost’. Then she fell down the stairs. He also claims to have seen the famous [sic] Hurlingham polo-ground ghost.
What with all the advance publicity, the churchyard was crowded on the Wednesday night. A detachment of policemen tried to keep order, and, sometimes failing, removed ‘disorderly elements’ (teddy boys, most of them) to a Black Maria parked outside the gate. According to one of the attending reporters, seventeen spectators (among them, the man who had had four ‘ghostly experiences’) were convinced that they had seen the anniversarial ghost – in the form of a flickering glow on the west wall of the church. No one bothered to count the people who, having seen the self-same glow, assumed it to be the remnant of a street-light, shining through breeze-blown foliage.
Reverting to the murder of Thomas Milward: though ‘Smith’ is a common name, it is a trifle odd that two Smiths were involved in the Hammersmith case – Francis, the murderer, and the Smith who, because Milward’s wife was with him, was partly responsible for Milward’s being out late at night looking for her. The latter Smith receives only a brief, unforenamed mention in a couple of the first press reports. (The name is italicised in the one I have used: I have no idea why.)
Other things seem odd:
When Francis Smith left the White Hart the first time, he was supposed to be going to a ‘private party to which he had been invited’. It was then about half-past ten – an extraordinarily late time to be turning up at a party on a week-night.
‘By some means or other his purpose was changed, and he returned to the White Hart, where a conversation about the Ghost took place….’ What were the means that changed his purpose? Did he, returning, join in a conversation about the Ghost – or did he start it?
Odder than all the rest of the oddities is the fact (at last we have one) that when Francis Smith fired his gun, he was so close to Milward – or, presumably as he thought, a ghost – that the victim’s face ‘was all blackened with the powder’. Yes, it was a dark night – but, in the absence of evidence that Smith’s vision was defective (and remembering that he had been out for at least a few minutes, long enough for his eyes to have grown accustomed to the darkness – so accustomed that he could see that Milward’s waistcoat and trousers were white), it is hard to understand how he mistook a man for a ghost. Perhaps fear – and a certain tipsiness (for the report that he was ‘perfectly sober’ takes some swallowing) – caused a finger-jerk reaction.
Put together, the above oddities and unanswered questions come nowhere near making a basis for a suspicion that the murder of Milward was premeditated.
However, a writer of fiction could easily transform the case into a tale:
The two Smiths are actually one and the same – a young Excise Officer who is carrying on an illicit affair with Milward’s wife. She, having been told by Milward that he has been hired for a through-the-night job on commercial premises, arranges a tryst with Francis Smith at his lodgings at 10.30pm. As soon as Milward leaves, she dolls herself up – but he returns, asks her to explain her undomestic attire, and thus starts a row. Either he, already suspicious of her infidelity, has lied to her that he will be away all night – or she, in the course of the row, keen to cap a rude remark of his, screams that he is being cuckolded by a man named Smith. Then she flounces out. Milward goes in search of her. At 10.30, Francis leaves the White Hart for the ‘private party’ at his lodgings next-door, finds Mrs Milward in a state, and believes her exaggeration that Milward is searching for them both, meaning to commit double-murder. He, recalling that Milward has been mistaken for the ghost, has what seems to him to be a bright idea. Without thinking once, let alone twice, he hurries back to the pub, starts a conversation about the ghost, feigns a rush of blood to the head, collects his gun, and persuades Girdler the watchman to go one way – increasingly distant from where Milward is probably prowling – while he goes in that other direction. He finishes up at the house where Milward’s parents and sister live; seeing Milward through the window, he waits, almost opposite the house, hiding in a gap between the high hedges. Milward comes out. Francis blocks his path, at the same time dashing off the words: ‘Damn you, who are you? Stand, else I’ll shoot you!’ Not giving the perplexed Milward (his eyes certainly unaccustomed to the dark) time to answer, Francis kills him.
His cover-story seems perfect. Seems: he has not taken account of the legal definition of murder. Even so (and especially so at the time of this tale, in the early 1800s, when more than 210 offences less serious than murder can be punished by execution), a sentence of twelve months’ imprisonment is a most inadequate penalty.
There can, if the fiction-writer wants a happy ending, be one: The Widow Milward, sticking to the promise she made stealthily before the trial, is waiting discreetly for Francis when he, having been a well-behaved convict, is let out early from prison, and they live contentedly in sin (always a long way from Hammersmith) ever after.
Amityville Revisited
JEFFREY BLOOMFIELD
OURS IS A WORLD of symbols, fast-flashing to awaken slumbering memories or ideas, much as Pavlov’s bells awoke the salivary glands of his dogs. Addresses are such symbols. Is not the image of power or government awoken by the terms ‘1600 Pennsylvania Avenue’, ‘10 Downing Street’, ‘the Kremlin’? What historical images are conjured up by the words ‘Nineveh’, ‘the Great Wall’, ‘the Pyramids’? Words can also revive less pleasant memories: talk to a survivor of Nazi atrocities, and just see what a word like ‘Dachau’ can do. Lesser nightmares are there as well: the address ‘10 Rillington Place’ will always evoke that tall, bald, seedy man in his horrible kitchen. The subject of this essay is also tied to an address: 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, New York. But though mass-murder occurred there, its infamy was made afterwards … possibly with some paranormal help.
One Man’s Family
To the east of Manhattan, the heart of New York City, is a long (120-odd mile) island, known, quite expectedly, as ‘Long Island’. It is made up of four state-counties: Kings, Queens, Nassau, and Suffolk. The western two are among the five boroughs that make up the city of Greater New York (to add to this split-personality in geography, Kings County is actually the ‘city’ of Brooklyn, which, if independent, would be the fourth largest city in the United States). Nassau County comes after Kings and Queens, but the largest of the four counties is Suffolk, which stretches into the Atlantic like the tail-end of a fish. Close to the foot of the Nassau-Suffolk border is the small town of Amityville. Its portion of Suffolk County faces down to South Oyster Bay, which would lead directly into the Atlantic Ocean, were it not for a strip of land comprising Jones Beach and Gilgo State Park.
In 1974, Amityville had a population of about 10,000. Like most communities on Long Island, the majority of the working inhabitants had jobs in New York City; most of the residents were in the upper middle class. A typical resident was Mr Ronald DeFeo, who in 1974 was forty-three years old. He had lived in Amityville since 1965, when he had purchased the house at 112 Ocean Avenue. It was a three-storey colonial-style house, and he had added what he considered improvements to it, including a swimming pool. It also had a two-car garage; also a boat-house and pier, s
o that the family could take their boat out into the bay. The newspapers of 1974 estimated the value of the house as between $75,000 and $100,000. My knowledge of real-estate values is not the best, but I imagine that, with inflation, the house has to be worth over $450,000 on today’s market. Given his investment, Ronald DeFeo had a good feeling about his property, and even put up a sign on his lawn saying ‘High Hopes’.
In November 1974, the household comprised seven people. Besides the father, there were Louise, his wife (forty-two), Ronnie Jr (twenty-three), Dawn (eighteen), Allison (thirteen), Mark (twelve), and John Matthew (seven). Reporters for the New York papers questioned neighbours about the family, and (with one glaring exception) learned nothing that was not nice or praiseworthy about them. It was a close family, which ‘prayed together, travelled together, and threw snowballs together’, according to an article by George Vecsey in the New York Times of Friday, 15 November. It was also considered a charitable family, having befriended an elderly woman named Catherine O’Reilly, whose husband had recently died. It was a conspicuously religious family: Ronald DeFeo had erected a creche on his front lawn that depicted St Joseph holding the Christ child, with three women kneeling to their saviour.
Ronald DeFeo worked as service manager at the Brigante-Karl Buick automobile dealership on Coney Island Avenue, Brooklyn. This firm was owned by DeFeo’s father-in-law, Michael Brigante, and John Ventieri. The New York Post (14 November 1974) quoted the used-car sales manager, James Manitta, as saying that DeFeo was ‘a happy-go-lucky guy who was well-liked by everybody. He didn’t have an enemy in the world.’ Again, the image of a nice person comes out, to be recalled later.
The exception to the ‘lovely-family’ stories was Ronnie Jr. Harry Stathos, writing in the New York Daily News (15 November), described him as a spoiled brat. It is hard to dispute the image. His parents showered him with gifts, like new cars, a $5000 boat, his own pool-room, and a stereo system. They were not totally tolerant, however: when he had a party once, his mother and he had a screaming match because he was playing the stereo too loud; it seems that the rest of the family wanted to sleep.
The Supernatural Murders Page 9
