CHAPTER15

Margaret Walber: Husband Killer

1894

She decided it would do him good to be locked in a cupboard

n the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the British courts had to start to rethink their attitudes to the defence of provocation when it came to a spouse killing his or her partner. As there was a very important difference in the outcome of manslaughter as opposed to wilful murder (a trip to the scaffold for murder), then some legal brains thought it was about time that judges and juries were better informed about the various causes of marital aggression and violence.

In a celebrated Lincolnshire case of 1891, this issue had been further clouded by the part that heavy drinking played in such violence. In short, was drunkenness a viable plea as a kind of ‘temporary insanity’?

In the story of how Margaret Walber came to take the life of her husband, John, these facts are relevant. But it is a very unusual case. Wives killing husbands are highly unusual events in the legal chronicles. Not only did Margaret kill her man: she revelled in tormenting him as well.

The Walbers lived as grocers; they had been married five years when these events happened, and Margaret was fifty-three. John was just two years older, and Margaret’s son, John, by a previous marriage, also lived with them. Two lodgers added to the domestic extended family. Both husband and wife liked to take a drink; in fact they liked to drink most of the time. Young John said at the trial that John Walber was ‘a quiet man.. although often drunk, he never struck back when she set about him …’ Margaret clearly took some delight in giving her husband a clout and she wanted him under the thumb.

The last straw came one day when John went to visit a woman he had lived with seventeen years before this. This was Ann Connelly. They had only been together for a few months and it was a long time ago, but that was still a big problem for Margaret. She came after him, shouted to Annie if he was there in the house, and when told he was, she heard Annie say ‘Yes … you can take him. I don’t want him.’ Margaret set about attacking John with ferocity, striking and kicking him, then led him home again.

That was only the beginning of her brutal regime. The couple slept in the top room of the building, and there she decided that it would do him good to be locked in a cupboard. Poor John was locked up for lengthy periods, and neighbours knew what was going on. There was no report to the police, though, and when a friend came visiting Margaret and the subject came up, she said that he was locked up to ‘prevent him going to a bad house.’ The visitor was told that Margaret would ‘take fly-paper to him.’ This was a reference to the ‘Black Widows’ whose poisoning had become a dark legend in the Liverpool streets by this time.

Margaret was seen carrying a chain and padlock upstairs, and the visitor, Mary Vouse, said that she heard movements upstairs, and some shouting. She heard John calling out, ‘Murder! I won’t go there any more missus.’

The response from Margaret was, ‘I’m coming, Duke of York.’ The reference is something of a mystery. But there is no mystery in the outcome: Margaret told her visitor, ‘He won’t leave this house until he’s carried downstairs in his coffin.’ When she talked about having flypaper in the cellar for him, her son John protested. He was beginning to see the enormity of his mother’s actions. ‘Don’t give that to the poor old man’, he said.

After spending many months locked upstairs, in November, John’s sister came to visit. She said that John was lying on the bed looking bewildered. It is a bizarre scene to imagine: Margaret explaining her crazy behaviour by saying that if he wasn’t shut up in the cupboard he would go to brothels, and the man’s sister being genuinely worried about him, saying she would fetch ‘a doctor or a priest.’ But what may seem superficially like some strange black comedy then became seriously brutal, as Margaret Walber turned nasty and hard in front of the man’s sister, saying that he was only shamming and that the sister would fetch nobody: ‘It’s all a mockery.’

Things escalated one day when – her hatred of Annie Connelly knowing no bounds – Margaret was drinking, and offered to pay a woman a sovereign to smash Connelly’s windows. What is important in understanding this woman is that she had been in prison in the past, and it is that period that is so important in understanding her hatred of Connelly as well as of her husband. In her drinking during November, she shouted about that she had ‘done time for him’. Then the day came when she went home to find that her son had left.

Her friend later reported that Margaret came downstairs, saying that her son had gone and had taken his money and his violin. Mary Vouse was there again the next morning, and she saw Margaret come down to the shop, saying: ‘My son killed John. John’s dead. No. I don’t think he’s dead, there’s blood on his face.’ But when the two women went upstairs they saw what Mary reported as a ‘scene of a bloody struggle’, and the body of John Walber propped against a box. The bloodstains told a story of the man being chased or dragged across the room, fighting for his life.

When Mary brought the police, Margaret Walber made her confession: ‘I hit him on the head with a chain. My son John had nothing to do with it.’ She was tried on 14 March. Her son testified against her. At the moment of the killing, she had been in a drunken frenzy, grabbing the chain to attack the man. The medical words used to explain the death were ‘haemorrhage and shock’ but the fact is that there were wounds all over the body; there were cuts on his cheek, forearm, and across his nose (the latter injury being very deep). A telling detail is that some of his beard had been cut off. All this suggests a violent attack, with evidence of the cruel streak which had been so evident in the woman for a long time.

There was now a very bad, antagonistic feeling in the air towards the people still left at the grocer’s shop, notably Mary. She and her man had to be protected from attack for a while after the trial. But for Margaret it was all over: she was hanged on 2 April 1894 at Liverpool prison. As for the defence of temporary insanity while drunk, it never stood a chance. There had been years of cruelty before this, and plenty of evidence that Walber was a sadist, taking delight in inflicting pain on a weak man in her power.