‘Pratt fired again and shouted,
“Now damn your heart, I will do for you!”’
Berden is a small village on a back road between Newport and Bishops Stortford. It was there that Henry Trigg, the Parish Constable of Berden, was murdered.
Trigg, then thirty-six, was not a full-time policeman – parishes appointed a local man of good character to patrol the streets. In his every day life, Trigg worked as a cobbler. His shop was next to Berden Hall, in The Street, and he slept on the ground floor while his elderly parents stayed upstairs.
On the night of Friday, 25 March 1814, Thomas Turner and William Pratt visited Berden from Bishops Stortford. Turner had been to Berden before; he had bought a dog from a local called Chapman.
On his visit he noticed that Trigg had a large stock of leather in his shop and he told Pratt about his discovery. Together, the two men decided to rob the shop.
Pratt was described as ‘a well looking man, with fair hair and good complexion, about 5 feet 10 inches in height’, while his friend, Turner, was ‘considerably shorter, a squat figure with a rather disagreeable obliquity of vision in his left eye’.
Just before midnight on that fateful Friday, Trigg heard a noise and went upstairs to warn his parents, saying he thought there might be thieves in the shop. Trigg and his father crept quietly down the stairs and, seeing two men, the younger Trigg set about Turner with his staff, encouraged by his father.
Pratt then attacked Trigg senior and a shot was fired, although it missed its target. The sudden appearance of the gun made the Triggs pull back and Turner got up, bloodied and beaten. Pratt fired again and shouted, ‘Now damn your heart, I will do for you’. The bullet went straight into the younger Trigg’s heart, killing him instantly.
Captured, both men attempted to blame the other. The duo appeared before Mr Justice Chambre at the Chelmsford Assizes and the jury quickly found them guilty. They were hanged along with two other murderers. Their corpses were used for medical research.