Paul and Susannah Koezula. (Author’s collection)
There were nineteen executions in 1894, sixteen of which were in England, two in Wales and one in Ireland. All, apart from the single Belfast execution, were conducted by James Billington. Two of the cases stood out as being of particular interest: those of Margaret Walber and James Canham Read.
The first quarter of the year was relatively unremarkable with just three executions which were neatly spaced at six week intervals.
The first, on 2 January, took place at Warwick and the condemned man was William Haines, alias Harris, a Birmingham labourer with a history of violence. In the late 1880s he was sentenced to several months’ hard labour for beating a prostitute, but the punishment did little to deter him, and in September 1893 his abusive behaviour led to the end of his relationship with seventeen-year-old Florence Clifford. She had been lodging with Haines but returned home to live with her mother. On 20 September Florence and her mother arrived at Haines’ home in Aston to pick up the rest of Florence’s belongings. Haines attacked Florence with an axe and chased Mrs Clifford, who escaped unharmed.
After the death penalty had been passed Haines was quoted as saying, ‘I wish I could have got her mother as well. I would have chopped her into mincemeat and made sausages of her, then I should have been satisfied.’
Six weeks later and Billington was called upon to execute George Thomas at Carmarthen. While poor Florence Clifford had died at only seventeen, the object of Thomas’ affections and aggression was even younger. Fifteen-year-old Mary Jane Jones had initially been flattered by the attention of the twenty-year-old army reservist, but within a few weeks his growing obsession with their relationship drove her away.
On 19 November 1893 Mary went to a service at her local church, and afterwards left alone. Between the church and her home was a deserted stretch of road and it was here that Thomas hid. Before anyone had even noticed that Mary was missing, Thomas surrendered to the police and showed them where they could find her body. Her throat had been cut using a razor which he had borrowed from a friend a day earlier.
The third execution, which took place on 27 March at Nottingham Gaol, was the result of a bizarre murder. Walter Smith was hanged for killing twenty-five-year-old nurse, Catherine Cross.
Smith worked as a machinist at a lace factory and became friends with Catherine after she had arrived in Nottingham to visit her mother. Catherine was already engaged and there was nothing to suggest that she had any interest in Smith aside from friendship, however she did agree to go to the factory where he worked so that he could show her a new piece of lace-making equipment.
Smith claimed that he had invented the machine but was also trying hard to impress her and after a few minutes pulled out a gun. He waved it in her direction and shouted, ‘Your money or your life!’ The gun went off and Catherine fell to the floor. In a panic Smith fired twice more, fatally injuring the young woman, and ran from the scene. Miraculously, Catherine was still alive when she was discovered and managed to tell the police what had occurred. Smith’s trial lasted for three days; his defence that the gun had gone off accidentally was accepted for the first shot but unsurprisingly rejected for the following two.
Billington performed the execution without an assistant and death was instantaneous.
Five days later Billington arrived at Walton Gaol with his assistant Thompson. Women accounted for less than 4 per cent of the condemned prisoners that the Billingtons executed and Margaret Walber was James Billington’s first.
She was fifty-three years old and had been found guilty of the murder of her husband. His death was not a crime of passion, but a cold-blooded attack that had come at the end of five months’ abuse – abuse which he had suffered at her hands and not the other way around.
Margaret Walber, formerly Murray, had married John, her second husband, in 1888 when she was forty-eight and he was fifty. They ran a general provisions shop in Gildart Street, Liverpool and lived in accommodation over the shop. They were both heavy drinkers and their relationship was never a happy one, but events took an unexpected turn in May 1893 when John Walber made the fatal error of being caught in the company of another woman.
She was a prostitute named Connelly, with whom John had had a relationship about ten years before his marriage. Margaret Walber burst into Connelly’s house in Oakes Street, Liverpool, initially just shouting at her husband, but then punching and kicking him. Margaret Walber told Connelly she could keep him, but John was quick to hurry after his wife.
Margaret’s anger did not subside, and she confiscated his clothes and locked him in an attic room, where he remained for the following five months. Remarkably no one questioned his whereabouts, and although the neighbours heard quarrelling they did not query the situation. Even when his sister visited she seemed satisfied that he had been locked in for his own good.
His ordeal came to an end somewhere between 15 November and 16 November 1893, when Margaret took the chain securing the bedroom door and beat him to death with it. Although her son, John Murray, was initially charged with assisting her he was acquitted and Margaret was held wholly responsible for her husband’s murder. She was executed on 2 April 1894 at Walton Gaol in the presence of officials only.
As far as records show, this was Thompson’s first of only two appearances at executions. Very little is known about him except that he accompanied James Billington to both. These two executions were at different prisons and it was likely, therefore, that he was brought along by Billington rather than appointed separately. It is conceivable that Thompson was in fact the eldest of James’ sons, Thomas, who would have been twenty-two at the time.
Billington continued alone to his next appointments, the execution of Philip Garner on 3 April, Frederick William Fenton on 4 April and John Langford on 22 May.
Each of these had been ‘domestic’ crimes. On 2 December 1893 Garner, forty-nine, had beaten his wife Agnes to death with a hammer, while on 12 December thirty-two-year-old Fenton had shot his fiancée, twenty-four-year-old Florence Nightingale Elborough, with a revolver. Fenton also made a failed suicide attempt, as did forty-year-old confectioner, John Langford, after fatally stabbing his girlfriend, Elizabeth Stephens, on 3 April. Elizabeth Stephens (also known as Stephen or Stevens) was an alcoholic and had been drinking heavily for two days when she was attacked. The court considered this to be ‘provocation’ and with the addition of her dying statement, ‘the cause of all this was my own fault’, a failed appeal was made for mercy on behalf of Langford.
In none of these cases did the men ever offer an explanation for their crimes, although in each instance the perpetrator was stated to be suffering from alcohol addiction.
In terms of newsworthiness, the majority of the cases of 1894 were little more than a depressing catalogue of acts of domestic mayhem played out against the backdrop of poverty, alcohol and poor education. Even though the Walber case had captured several column inches, its interest lay more within the reversal of the sexual roles of male aggressor and female victim than any gripping narrative to the case.
The trend continued through July with two executions, one at Winchester on the 18th and the second at Manchester on the 31st. The first was that of Samuel Elkins who worked at the tram yard in Bournemouth. He lost his temper after being reprimanded by the manager, William Mitchell, and returned to the site with a gun, shooting and killing Mitchell.
The second was that of William Crossley who on 11 June also lost his temper, but in this case it was when his landlady, Mary Ann Allen, instructed him to look for new lodgings. He attacked her with an axe, mortally wounding her and injuring her adult daughter and one of the other lodgers in the process. Crossley was found guilty at Manchester Assizes on 12 July and executed at Manchester on the 31st.
Billington’s mysterious assistant Thompson made his second and final appearance for the 14 August execution of Paul Koezula. Koezula went to the gallows proclaiming his innocence, but his was almost certainly the hand which committed the murder of Sophia Frederica Matilda Rasch. Less just was the fact that the other people involved in planning and committing the crime were not judged to be equally guilty.
Mrs Rasch lived with her husband Karl and four children at 167 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, in the same building as the family restaurant. The children, three boys and a girl, included eight-year-old Clara and a baby of just a few months. The family employed a German couple, Paul, aged twenty-five, and his wife Susannah Koezula, aged twenty-four, who had worked for them since September 1893. The Koezulas were not completely happy with their situation and in the weeks before Mrs Rasch’s murder had frequently talked of moving on.
During their time in Shaftesbury Avenue they had become acquainted with another German, a waiter named George Schmerfeld. Thirty-one-year-old Schmerfeld had known the Rasch family for about seven years and often ate in their restaurant, he appeared to be on good terms with Karl and it was quite usual for the two of them to take short walks together. But from George’s point of view the relationship was not as cordial as it appeared; he had run up a debt and owed Karl between £3 and £4 and had left a box with Karl as security against this. The debt had been outstanding since the previous year.
When George became friendly with the Koezulas he discovered that there were amounts of cash and jewellery in the house with a total value approaching £100 and soon the three of them hatched a plan to steal the money. It relied on two elements, firstly gaining access to the wardrobe where the valuables were kept and secondly keeping the members of the Rasch family out of the way. The key to the wardrobe was always kept with Mrs Rasch, who was in the habit of taking an early evening nap.
On the evening of 25 May 1894, George Schmerfeld suggested that he and Karl Rasch take a walk, but this time to Hyde Park, a far greater distance than their usual stroll around the block. With Karl away Susannah occupied the children, distracting Clara by encouraging her to practice on the piano.
As she played, Clara heard a cry and noises which she thought came from the upstairs rooms. Susannah assured her that they came from a neighbouring house and told the child to keep playing. Then Clara said she wanted to see her mother, but Susannah told her not to go and said her mother had instructed that she should not be disturbed. And when Clara tired of playing Susannah took over, banging the keys as she repeatedly played the only tune she knew, Daisy, Daisy.
On his return home Mr Rasch went upstairs. He immediately realised that the house had been robbed and, on moving the pile of pillows lying on his bedroom floor, discovered the body of his wife. Her ankles were bound and she had been smothered after having put up a considerable fight for life.
The arrest of Schmerfeld and the Koezulas was swift. Paul Koezula claimed that the real culprit was a friend of Schmerfeld’s named Kempf, and that Kempf had a hand injury sustained when Mrs Rasch had bitten him. Kempf disappeared after the murder and just the other three were charged.
No one had seen Paul Koezula at 167 Shaftesbury Avenue on the evening of the murder and much of the evidence produced in court was circumstantial: the Koezulas had £9 and a watch belonging to Mrs Rasch in their possession, Schmerfeld had ‘stolen’ his box back from Mr Rasch, and all three had been open about plans to leave the area. However, most of the stolen items were not recovered and the string which had tied Mrs Rasch’s ankles had come from the Rasch’s own cellar,
When the verdict was returned Susannah was cleared of any involvement with the murder, but it was recommended that she should be charged with larceny. Both Schmerfeld and Paul Koezula were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death, but Schmerfeld was reprieved just before his execution.
It may have been at Paul Koezula’s hand that Sophia Rasch died, and because of George Schmerfeld that her husband could not help her, but it is hard to imagine anyone more cold-hearted than Susannah Koezula, who happily occupied four small children, knowing that their mother was dying.
The year 1894 continued in the domestic vein with the conviction and execution of a Wakefield man found guilty of murdering his son. Twenty-eight-year-old Alfred Dews poisoned his son with ammonia. The murder was the culmination of a jealous obsession during which Dews had convinced himself that his wife had been unfaithful. Throughout her pregnancy he had been adamant that the baby wasn’t his and, even after the birth, continued to accuse his wife of having relationships with other men.
On 12 May 1894 the child was in the care of a neighbour, but she went out for a short time leaving Dews alone with him at their home in Alverthorpe near Wakefield. On her return she found that the baby was ill. He continued to deteriorate and died on 23 May. Although the autopsy revealed no traces of poison it also showed that an irritant poison had been the cause of death. Dews claimed he was innocent throughout the trial and his subsequent incarceration. One of the strongest arguments for his guilt was the jealousy that he had displayed towards his family.
He was executed on 21 August 1894 at Leeds. Here James Billington acted without an assistant, as he continued to do at his next two executions.
The first of these took place on 27 November when Oldham man James Wilshaw Whitehead was hanged for the murder of his wife. Once again alcohol and jealousy fuelled the crime; realising that his wife was out drinking with her sister and two other men, he bought a razor which he hid in his pocket as he went in search of her.
It was 20 August and the locals were enjoying the Oldham Wakes, the time each year when the local factories shut down and the workers had a short holiday period. Although it was just after midnight, the streets were still busy and there were plenty who witnessed the moment when Whitehead caught sight of his wife and drew out his shiny new razor. He did not attempt to speak to her and Mrs Whitehead made no sound as her head was yanked back and her throat was cut. She slumped to the ground and he ran away, attempting suicide twice before being apprehended in his own house. He was executed at Manchester, after which Billington travelled to Carmarthen, where a forty-one-year-old sailor named Thomas Richards was waiting.
Richards’ ship The Electra had arrived back in Borth on the morning of 19 September 1894 just as his brother-in-law sailed out for Bilbao. Whether Richards knew that his sister-in-law, Mary Davies, would be home alone that night is unclear, but what is certain is that Richards knew that she and her husband had savings of almost £300. To give some idea of the current value of these savings I have used a set of calculations devised by MeasuringWorth. Acording to these calculations, £300 from 1894 is worth the following in 2008:
£22,415.36 |
using the retail price index |
£30,045.37 |
using the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) deflator |
£134,860.78 |
using average earnings |
£174,805.62 |
using per capita GDP |
£277,482.26 |
using the GDP |
Copyright © 2007 Lawrence H. Officer and Samuel H. Williamson.1 |
Obviously there is a huge difference in the results but, even taking the lowest figure, the amount stolen still equates to a very large sum of money.
Mary Davies lived at 1 London Place, Borth, and Richards arrived at her house late in the evening of Thursday 20 September. At 2 a.m. the following morning loud screams were heard coming from the house. Neighbours were not surprised when they saw nothing of Mrs Davies on Friday but assumed that she had gone away with her work as a seamstress. They noticed that the blinds at the windows were drawn very untidily, an unusual occurrence as Mrs Davies was a very fastidious woman, but even so it was not until Saturday evening that anyone investigated.
Mary Davies’ body was found lying across her bed; a pillow covered her face and there was bruising around her neck, which appeared to indicate strangulation.
Richards left an easy-to-follow trail: withdrawing £62 from a bank in Aberystwyth, making multiple attempts to sell Mary’s wedding ring, and posting his wife a cigar box containing £40 in gold and a £5 note. On 24 September he travelled to Neath and was quickly arrested. The Chief Constable of Cardiganshire accompanied him back to Aberystwyth and during the train journey he made a statement, which read:
I went on to my sister-in-law’s house and got in through the window which I opened with a gimlet. After I got in I lit some matches and found some keys on the top of the chest of drawers. I opened the drawers and took from there one of them two notes. I then went upstairs and to the bedroom where my sister-in-law slept, who by that time had got out of bed and had lit a candle. She was then screaming, and in order to prevent her I pushed her onto the bed and placed a pillow over her face. I never thought of killing her and I only wanted to stop her screaming, and did not know she was dead until you told me at Neath.
His trial took place at the South Wales circuit assizes at Carmarthen before Mr Justice Lawrence. He directed the jury to find Richards guilty of murder even if they believed his statement. This was on the grounds that Richards had gained unlawful access to her house with the sole purpose of committing a crime. The jury did not reach their verdict quickly, but eventually returned one of ‘guilty’.
Richards was executed in Carmarthen Gaol on 29 November. The local paper explained that the High Sheriff of Cardiganshire, Major Price Lewes, had banned reporters from the execution, but then proceeded to give a lengthy description of the event:
At four minutes to eight Billington arrived at Richards’ cell and pinioned his arms. The procession, including Richards, the executioner, prison officials, police surgeon, and the chaplain reading the service for the burial of the dead, left the condemned cell. Instead of the usual short route to the scaffold, they made their way along the corridor, through a doorway, down a flight of steps and across the yard, in total 55 yards.
Once Richards was on the platform, Billington was quick to strap his legs and cover his face. Richards was part way through saying, ‘Lord have mercy on me’ when Billington pulled the lever. Death was instantaneous, the result of a drop of 7ft. From the time of Richards’ arrest until his execution his weight had increased from 136lb to 148lb.
There were five more appointments for Billington in 1894, all in December. The first of these was a sensational case, full of illicit romance, deception, mystery and, of course, murder. As the story unravelled on the pages of every national paper, the readers were as enthralled as they could have been with any of the other macabre attractions of the day. It began with the discovery of a young woman’s body …
It was the afternoon of Monday 25 June 1894. A man named Frederick Rush was walking along Victoria Avenue, the main road running from the station area to Southend into Prittlewell. The part of the road he was on was comparatively rural and overlooked a field. The first thing he noticed was a woman’s glove. Then he noticed bloodstains. There was a brook running through the field and, when he made a closer inspection, he saw her body lying in the water. She was lying on her back and was obviously dead: there was a pool of blood around her head. The cause of death was very clearly a gunshot wound to the forehead, fired from such close range that it had singed her hair.
The police were summoned and their initial task was to identify the woman.
Meanwhile in Westby Road, Southend, Mrs Louisa Ayriss had spent the morning worrying about her younger sister, twenty-three-year-old Florence. Although Florence was only her junior by one year, Louisa knew that Florrie was a vulnerable young woman who had spent the previous evening with a far more worldly man, Mr James Canham Read.
By afternoon, Louisa had taken the decision to telegraph Canham Read at the Royal Albert Docks, where he was employed as a pay clerk. She asked whether Florrie was with him. He replied in a letter, dated 25 June:
Dear Mrs Ayriss,
What is the meaning of your extraordinary wire? Please wire fully. I have not seen this young person for 18 months when you were at St John’s Hill.
Yours faithfully, J.C. Read.
But by the time his letter was delivered the police had already been to visit Louisa to inform her that they had found her sister’s body.
James Canham Read was still just ahead of the law though. As soon as he’d posted the letter to Louisa Ayriss he must have realised the futility of trying to pretend he hadn’t seen Florrie: for one thing she was ‘advanced in pregnancy’ and had been very upset when she realised that he wasn’t the single man he had originally claimed to be. His letter hadn’t been far from an admission of guilt, if he had admitted to meeting her but denied all knowledge of her death his story would have seemed far more plausible. At 3.30 p.m. that same afternoon he went into hiding; there was more than just Florrie’s death on his conscience so, with £159 12s 6d stolen from his employer, Canham Read slipped away from his office.
He remained undiscovered until July, during which time the investigation gathered pace, building a sordid picture of both the wanted man and the murdered woman. Canham Read was in his late thirties. In court he was described as good looking, but was in fact rather average, he was 5ft 4in tall, medium build, dark brown hair, and also described as ‘a sober, educated and intelligent man, believed to be of exemplary character.’
In fact, he was a person who had been leading a double, if not triple, life. And the secrets he’d been keeping on one existence had started spilling into the next. Officially he was a married man living at 57 Jamaica Street, Stepney, with his wife and eight children, but although he was resident there during the week he also had a second home, Rose Cottage, Upper Mitcham where he had been living since 1893. And to go with the second home he had his second family: a young woman from Cambridge named Beatrice Diva Kempton and their baby. To satisfy her parents, he had falsified a marriage certificate and they lived and rented the cottage under the names Mr and Mrs Edgar Benson.
Canham Read was passionate about Beatrice and had showered her with love letters including one in which he wrote, ‘This love of ours is savagely strong and will drag us down to our destructions. I have lost complete control over myself.’ She believed that she was the love of his life, and he the love of hers. By this time, she knew and had accepted that he was already married but she knew nothing of his other women.
Canham Read first met Beatrice Kempton in October 1892. From their very first meeting he used the name of Benson, and even introduced his brother Harry Read and a friend named Harry Edwards. This use of pseudonyms was already part of Canham Read’s life; it was one of the devices he had been using to conceal his other extramarital relationships with Florrie Dennis and her sister Louisa.
Louisa had met him in September 1889 while separated from her husband. Later in that year she had moved into lodgings in St John’s Hill. In the autumn of 1890 Florrie came to stay with her and was introduced to Canham Read. Soon after this, Canham Read began to pursue Florrie and for almost two years was having an affair with both sisters.
Canham Read’s relationship with Louisa lasted until March 1892 and during that time she was pregnant twice, giving birth to the second child in May 1892. Louisa and Canham Read corresponded by sending letters back and forth using a variety of pseudonyms and false mail boxes at local shops. His letters to Louisa were often addressed to Mrs Neville while his letters to Florrie were addressed to Miss Latimer.
Louisa eventually returned to her husband and in 1893 they lived at a house in Hanwell. From 30 September 1893 until the last week of October Florrie came to stay with them. Read claimed to be in Hanwell on business that October, but in fact Florrie was his only reason for being there and by the time she left Hanwell she was pregnant.
He continued to see Florrie at various times, using the excuse that he had to go to Canterbury on business. Beatrice later recalled a comment that he made, that this ‘business’ would get him out of his critical condition. If it did not, then God only knew what he would do, and he was dead broke.
Florence Dennis was the daughter of a harness maker from Shakespeare Road, just off of Dulwich Road in southwest London. But for several weeks prior to her death she had been away from home, staying with her sister, Louisa. Publicly the story had been that her mother had brought her down to Southend to recover from illness, but after her death it became clear that this story had been used to cover for the embarrassment of having an unmarried and eight-month-pregnant daughter at the family home.
Florrie had spent several long periods staying with relatives, and had hoped that James Canham Read would visit her while she was with another sister in Sheerness, but he wrote:
My dear little girl,
I am very sorry I shall not be able to be with you as promised, for business will keep me very late tonight. I had expected that I should see you before you went away, but it appears now that I shall not. I sincerely hope you will have a jolly time, and you will come back from Sheerness all right and quite well. If you go out bathing, mind you do not go into deep water, as you will be drowned.
With fondest love, J.C.R.
Florrie was well aware that Canham Read was married and that her own sister’s relationship with him had floundered. It is not known whether she really harboured any realistic hope that he would eventually marry her or even support their child.
Until May 1894, when Canham Read discovered that Florrie was pregnant, he wrote to her making no attempt to disguise his handwriting, but after May he tried to make his handwriting look uneducated. He claimed that Florrie had been involved with a soldier from Hounslow, and that this soldier was the baby’s father and letter writer.
With one month until the birth of her child Florrie was not prepared to let him just disappear and arranged for him to visit her at Southend on Saturday 23 June 1894. By the end of that weekend Florrie was dead.
Canham Read was discovered on 7 July living at Rose Cottage. He was arrested by Detective Inspector Baker who took him to Southend where he was held. Baker also recovered just over £35 in cash and the forged marriage certificate.
Canham Read was moved to Springfield Prison in Chelmsford and his trial began on 12 November at Chelmsford Assizes. The judge was Mr Baron Pollock. Much of the evidence put forward was aimed at establishing the nature of Canham Read’s relationships with the various women involved in the case. The prosecution also called a handwriting expert who gave the opinion that the majority of the letters and telegrams received by the women were in the same handwriting. The gun which shot Florrie had not been found and the prosecution produced evidence that proved Canham Read had a revolver in his possession earlier in the year. This was not produced and therefore could not be discounted as the murder weapon.
From the time of his arrest until the day of his execution Canham Read claimed he was innocent. But there was plenty of evidence against him, including five witnesses able to confirm that they had seen Canham Read in Southend on Sunday 24 or Monday 25 June. Probably the most reliable of these was PC Daniells. He testified that at 1.15 a.m. on Monday 25 June, whilst on duty outside a shop in Benfleet, he saw Canham Read walking towards him. He asked him where he was going and Canham Read asked for directions to London.
Louise Ayriss also testified that she had seen Florrie and Canham Read together during the evening of 24 June but she later changed several parts of her statement and admitted lying in court, claiming that she had done so only because she had been sure that the two of them had been together. As a witness Louisa was totally discredited, and shown to have lied about details of both her and Florrie’s affair with Canham Read.
Mr Cock and Mr Warburton for the defence tried to use this in their favour. They pointed out that the only witness who had seen Canham Read and Florrie together at any time between their first and last meetings was Louisa Ayriss, who had ‘perjured herself in the attempt to place the prisoner upon the scaffold’. Therefore, they argued, it was more logical to conclude that Florrie had never been involved with Canham Read, except as a decoy to cover up for her sister’s ongoing affair with him.
They also disputed the statements made by the witnesses who had identified Canham Read, particularly PC Daniells. They argued that had Canham Read just committed murder he would hardly be strolling around Benfleet admitting that he’d just come from Southend.
They brought forward a variety of character witnesses including his eldest daughter, Emma, and William Kendall, a close friend of both James Canham Read and his brother Harry. Kendall, who had known Read since childhood and thought that he displayed the character of a kind-hearted man, stated, ‘He was good tempered and not quarrelsome, and he was liked by all with whom he came into contact.’
The defence pointed out that no murder weapon had been found and that there had been no bloodstains on any of Canham Read’s clothes and no indication that he had ever shown any violent tendencies.
The jury were asked to consider the possibility that Canham Read had been unable to give details of his whereabouts because he had been having yet another affair and was trying to protect the woman’s identity.
Perhaps the greatest insight into Canham Read’s personality was revealed in a love letter he had written to Beatrice Diva Kempton in February 1894:
We may, I think, flatter ourselves that we have qualified ourselves for the stage, for have we not acted a drama of real life, and acted so well that our whole audiences have been deceived by our realism.
It seems that Canham Read was the one most deceived by his own multiple lives. He had made copious notes throughout the trial. It took the jury forty minutes to reach their verdict of ‘guilty’, but even after its delivery he still attempted to convince the court of his innocence and read out the following statement:
I wish to repeat that I am perfectly innocent of this charge, that it is now two years since I have even seen Florence Dennis, that I have never written to her, that I have only received one letter from her, and that I have received from her one telegram – both of these at the instance of Mrs Ayriss. But until the 22nd October this year did I know where the murder was committed when I saw the plan of the place shown me by my solicitor. I have never fired a revolver in my life. The revolver spoken of in evidence has not been in my possession since the end of February last …
… Lastly, I have to say that at the time the murder was committed according to the evidence I was as nearly as possible fifty miles from the spot.
Members of Canham Read’s family petitioned the Home Secretary, primarily complaining about the unreliability of Mrs Ayriss and the weakness in the evidence of identification. The reply was that the Home Secretary saw no reason to intervene and the execution remained scheduled for the morning of Tuesday 4 December 1894.
One of Canham Read’s last acts was to write to his brother Harry about the unfairness of his execution, ‘Is not this monstrous? Is it not murder?’ he ranted.
By the morning of his execution he was more resigned to his fate, asking for a little brandy before being pinioned. Billington hurried Canham Read on to the scaffold. Canham Read’s final request was to ask to have his buttons done up on his coat. Billington did this for him before completing the execution.
He had allowed a drop of 7ft 8in and death was instantaneous.
By mid-December the most popular exhibit at Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors showed James Canham Read sitting in the dock at Southend police court.
The final mystery of the case involves the murder weapon. When arrested at Rose Cottage Canham Read’s first words were reported to be, ‘Mrs Ayriss knows more about this than I do. Mrs Ayriss can tell you where the revolver is.’ The gun was never found, but Rose Cottage, now known as 13 Commonside East, Mitcham, has a long history of being haunted. The legend was that a murder had been committed there and the body hidden down a well. Almost 100 years after James Canham Read’s execution builders working on the cottage discovered an old well under the floor and, without investigating, filled it in. Canham Read could have thrown the gun down the well, or disposed of it elsewhere. But maybe Mrs Ayriss really did know far more than anyone ever knew.
For Billington, 1894 ended with a flurry of four executions in the space of three days. None of the men had love lives as convoluted as Canham Read’s but each resulted in the murder of a woman and the hanging of a man.
At Leicester on 10 December Billington carried out the execution of forty-two-year-old ex-Royal Marines Colour Sergeant John William Newell, also known as William Newell. He lived in Loughborough with his wife Isabella, three daughters and one son. For at least eighteen months he had suspected his wife of having an affair. She had become distant, but in truth was just very unhappy at his mood swings and heavy drinking. When his behaviour had been particularly bad she had taken proceedings against him and he’d been bound over to keep the peace. For a time they had been reconciled but on 20 August 1894 she told him that she planned to leave.
He festered over this and in the morning came into their bedroom wielding a pick. Isabella fainted. Their eight-year-old son and ten-year-old daughter ran from the house but by the time help arrived Isabella had suffered about five heavy blows to the head and died soon afterwards. On his arrest he said, ‘I’ll go to the gallows with a good heart if she is dead.’
A plea of insanity was entered but no witnesses were called in Newell’s defence. After hanging Newell, Billington left Leicester for Newcastle, where he was engaged to carry out the execution of Samuel Emery the following morning.
Emery was a twenty-year-old soldier who had fallen in love with eighteen-year-old Tynemouth girl Mary Ann Marshall. When Emery’s regiment moved to Strensall, near York, he asked Mary’s father for her hand in marriage, but although Mr Marshall approved of the young man he told them to wait until both were a little older.
Heartbroken, Emery moved away but returned just a short time later and attacked her. The explanation given was that he had been consumed by jealousy when incorrectly informed that she had moved her attentions on to someone else.
After the execution Billington travelled on to Winchester, where he met up with William Warbrick who had been engaged to assist him there. Emery’s execution was still on Billington’s mind and Warbrick later recalled:
‘He was the gamest man I ever hanged,’ was Billington’s comment to me when he arrived at Winchester after executing Emery. According to what Jim told me Emery seemed almost too long for death. He held up his chin for the noose to be passed over as he stood on the drop.
The execution at Winchester took place on the morning of 12 December. It was a double execution of prisoners Cyrus Knight and William Rogers. Forty-five-year-old Knight, from Binstead near Alton, had murdered his wife Frances after a domestic row had escalated; he left the room but returned with a shotgun and fired both barrels. Rogers slit the throat of his ex-girlfriend Sarah Jupe after she publicly taunted him. Warbrick described the execution in his 1916 memoirs:
So Knight and Rogers were both left for us to execute. I went to the Winchester county gaol on the Tuesday, December 12 1894, the double execution being fixed for the following morning.
Jim Billington was at Newcastle and we got word that he would not get to Winchester till late in the evening. However he arrived in good time for us to inspect the condemned men through the spy-holes in their cell doors and to fix the length of their drops.
There was a big difference between the two men. Knight stood 5 feet 11¼ inches high and weighed 176lbs while Rogers was only 5 feet 4 inches and weighed 154lbs. so we decided to give Knight a drop of 6 feet 2 inches and Rogers 7 feet.
There was also a noticeable difference in the demeanour of the two condemned men. A petition had been presented to the Home Secretary on Knight’s behalf, but when his decision not to interfere with the death sentence was delivered to Knight the man seemed to quite crumple up. He was very worn and haggard on his execution morning and his burly form seemed quite weighed down.
Rogers, on the other hand, was quite phlegmatic. He only had one visitor, his landlady, to whom he bequeathed all his effects.
William Warbrick and Billington actually arrived in Winchester on 11 December, a small discrepancy but worth noting because William Warbrick’s memoirs were, at times, grossly inaccurate. Having said that, there is nothing to indicate that his description of this double execution was incorrect in any other way.
The newspapers reported that Billington was assisted by Wilkinson, William Warbrick’s original surname.
Endnote
1 Lawrence H. Officer, co-founder and Director of Research of MeasuringWorth, is Professor of Economics at University of Illinois at Chicago, he wrote the paper ‘Five Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a UK Pound Amount, 1830–2006’ MeasuringWorth.Com, 2007.