CHAPTER 6

The Killer Butcher

1862

The prisoner then fell upon her with fury …

n 1862 Isabella Tonge was a lady of the streets in Victorian Liverpool, and she had been living with Thomas Edwards for eleven years, when trouble started in earnest between them. Edwards, thirty-two, was a butcher, but Isabella had said to others that he was living from her earnings on ‘the game.’ As they lived in a house that was strictly Isabella’s (the rent in her name) then she had a point. But whatever the truth of his attitudes and life with her, knowing she was a prostitute, the case here is that he had a jealous streak in him.

Liverpool was a rough place at that time: the Statistical Society noted that there was one thief to every 1,500 men, and that there was one committal for every fifty-five people in 1860. In 1866 there were fifty-six highway robberies in the city. When the population was growing rapidly, and work was hard to find, crime became a way of life for many, and prostitution was rife. In that situation, so were the problems that went along with that activity. When a woman brought a client back to her room, it was always risky, but in this case, it was dangerous for poor Isabella.

In November of this year she brought home a man called Sullivan, and he was not a new face, a passing client among many: she had known him earlier in her life. Around this time, not only did she bring Sullivan home, but Isabella went away with him, to a destination unknown to Edwards. He was consumed with violent jealousy. In that state, he became rabidly drunk, knocking back beer and rum in large quantities. When Sullivan and Isabella finally returned, Edwards was ready to fight. He backed down when Sullivan faced him and said that it was none of his business where the two had been. Edwards then sat by the fire and brooded, his rage growing with every second.

Isabella whispered to Sullivan that her man had a knife, and she took Sullivan upstairs, saying that Edwards should go up and stay with him (so the enraged young man could be restrained) while she and a girlfriend went to a lower floor. This happened, as Sullivan was persuasive and firm, but the jealous man had only one thought in him, and he ran down to where Isabella lay, then asked her for money. He said that he would not have her selling her body for him any more. As a contemporary report has it, he then ‘fell upon her with fury, and with his knife, stabbed her in nineteen places; two of the wounds penetrated the lungs, from which injuries she shortly afterwards died.’

It didn’t take long to take hold of Edwards, and he was soon under arrest. But he blamed the killing on all the drink he had taken. Remorse there certainly was not, though, as he said: ‘I have had my revenge, and if she and Sullivan was to die, I’d be glad of it … I’ll be content to die myself.’

It took the jury a long time to come to a decision, and when they did return a guilty verdict, they added that they would like a recommendation to mercy. The foreman did not explain this, but a reporter at the time considered the thinking behind this to be that the arrival of Sullivan had been a provocation. The judge took the recommendation and said that it would go into the usual system but that Edwards should not ‘place any reliance on its taking effect.’ The butcher Edwards had used his skills in handling a knife much too well, and on the woman he was supposed to care for. He was hanged in Liverpool on 3 January 1862. There is no record of his final days; one suspects that, as with many cases like this with another partner possibly involved, it would have been a situation of extreme passion, interspersed with ranting and remorse. We have plenty of similar cases on record with these features: only the chaplain and the hangman would know the facts, and our memoirs from these men are few.