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‘I am afraid I have shot my wife’

Cheam, Surrey, 1828

William Wittman was a poor physical specimen of a man. He was short in stature and having once broken his back in an accident, he was also a hunchback, who was ‘not perfect in his limbs’. A former holder of a very lowly position in the Excise Office, he lived in Walworth with his wife Sarah and their son, William junior. The couple lived very unhappily together – Sarah, who was said to be ‘from the most degraded walk of society’, was younger than her husband, very strong and robust and possessed a fearsome temper.

The death of William’s father enabled him to give up work and live on the income from properties bequeathed to him in his father’s will. He moved Sarah and five-year-old William to a cottage in Cheam but sadly the couple’s relationship worsened when both husband and wife began to drink heavily. Sarah frequently used violence on her rather weedy husband and towards the end of 1828 William was driven to apply to a magistrate for a warrant against her for assault. He described several instances of his wife’s violent conduct, showing the chief constable cuts and bruises to illustrate his allegations and saying that he ‘constantly went in absolute danger of his life.’ He claimed to be in mortal fear of his wife, saying that if he wasn’t protected in some way or another he felt sure she would end up killing him. Unfortunately, the magistrates could do little to help Wittman and he was advised to go to magistrates at Epsom, that being the nearest town to his home.

Whether or not William ever consulted the Epsom magistrates is not known but he continued to complain of Sarah’s violence towards him and, on one occasion, tried to persuade a friend to go home with him, since he was too afraid of his wife’s uncontrollable temper to go alone. Sadly, the friend had other commitments and soon afterwards the situation between the warring Wittmans came to a head, with tragic consequences.

When the couple first moved to Cheam, they employed a young servant girl. The Wittmans made some improvements to their new home, employing a plumber and painter named Prosser, who quickly moved into the cottage as a lodger and began a dalliance with the servant. It is easy to imagine that the virile Prosser might have proved more sexually attractive to Sarah Wittman than her crippled, deformed husband and before long she dismissed the maid and took the girl’s place in Prosser’s bed. When Wittman protested, Sarah exploded in a rage and whenever he tried to remonstrate with her about the impropriety of her conduct, she physically attacked him, hitting him with a poker, smashing a chair over his head and destroying everything around her in an uncontrolled fury. Eventually, Wittman seems to have come to view Prosser as an ally rather than an enemy and, on occasions when Sarah’s temper reached its crescendo, her husband would take refuge in Prosser’s bedroom, sharing his bed until Sarah’s wrath abated.

In December 1828, Sarah destroyed all of the couple’s silver spoons in a temper and smashed three family pictures to smithereens. Nevertheless, when her husband became aware that she had slept in Prosser’s bed on the night of 11 December, he felt obliged to ask her about it. Sarah immediately snatched up a poker from the fireplace and hit her husband twice on the head, stunning him. One of Wittman’s hobbies was shooting small birds in his garden and he usually kept a loaded gun handy for taking outside. Now, he realised that Sarah was going for the gun, which stood in the corner of the back parlour. He grabbed her and the couple grappled for possession of the weapon for a few moments before the gun went off, shooting Sarah in the face.

As soon as Wittman realised that his wife was shot he ran to the back door, finding it locked and the key not in its normal place. Knowing that the front door was always kept locked and anxious to get help as quickly as possible, Wittman scrambled out of a window and ran to the home of his nearest neighbour, Mathew Stedman, telling him that there had been a terrible accident and begging him for assistance. ‘I am afraid I have shot my wife,’ he told Stedman, blood streaming down his face from the cuts on his head. ‘Look at my head. See how I was struck. I fired the gun afterwards in the heat of passion,’ Wittman continued excitedly.

Stedman and two friends who were at his house that evening went back to the Wittmans’ cottage with him, climbing in through the open window. There was a lamp burning on the table, which Wittman picked up, using it to light their way into the kitchen, where Sarah lay partially dressed on her back on the floor near to the fireplace. William Perkins knelt down beside her and felt for a pulse. ‘It does not beat, she is quite dead,’ he declared.

Surgeon Samuel Farrant arrived at about 8.30 p.m., too late to do anything to help Sarah who, according to the surgeon, had died instantly from a close range gunshot wound, the powder and small shot completely obliterating her facial features, before lodging in her brain. ‘This is a shocking thing – how did it happen?’ he asked Wittman.

‘Sir, I’ve had great provocation – very great provocation. She struck me twice on the head with a poker,’ Wittman explained. The surgeon noticed that Wittman had two bleeding wounds on his scalp and that there was a heavy poker on the floor, beneath the dead body. The surgeon asked Wittman whether he had purposely loaded the gun to shoot his wife but Wittman told him that it was already loaded when he picked it up, adding that he had absolutely no recollection of having cocked or fired the gun.

An inquest was held at the Wittmans’ home the following morning at which the first witness called was Mr Prosser. He stated that he had dined with the Wittmans the previous day and recalled that Sarah Wittman was ‘in liquor’, so much so that she went upstairs to lie down after the meal. Prosser and William drank a glass of gin together before Prosser left the house to spend the evening at a nearby pub, returning at 9.15 p.m. to find the house full of people and his landlady dead. Prosser confirmed that Wittman often shot small birds in his garden and habitually kept at least one loaded gun in the house. The coroner seems to have questioned Prosser closely about the Wittmans and their relationship but very little was reported about the alleged improper intimacy between Prosser and Sarah, details of which were probably judged to be too racy for publication. Prosser testified that both William and Sarah were ‘addicted in the extreme degree to the use of spirituous liquors’ and were in the habit of quarrelling when drunk. At such times, Sarah was invariably so violent that her husband was often forced to shelter from her fury in Prosser’s room.

The inquest jury returned a verdict of wilful murder against William Wittman, who was immediately taken to Surrey’s Horsemonger Lane Gaol. While awaiting his trial, he spent much of his time in the prison Infirmary, where he reportedly ‘laboured under excessive agitation of mind, attended with a great depression of spirits.’ However, when he was brought before Mr Justice Burrough at the Kingston Assizes on 29 December 1828, the Grand Jury rejected the charge of murder against him, finding instead a bill for manslaughter. Thus Wittman was tried for wilful murder on the coroner’s warrant.

The crux of the case was that, although Wittman had at one time claimed that the gun went off while he and his wife were struggling for possession of it, he had also readily stated to all and sundry in the immediate aftermath of the shooting that he had shot his wife after she provoked him by hitting him on the head with a poker. The implications of Wittman’s assertions was that the shooting had been a deliberate action, albeit one that occurred after considerable provocation from his victim.

The bent poker found under his wife’s body corroborated Wittman’s story that she had hit him on the head and he was indisputably bleeding when he arrived at his neighbours’ home. Several people testified to Sarah Wittman’s terrible temper, including her sister, who told the court that she frequently visited the couple and had witnessed many quarrels between them. She recalled one particular argument that erupted while she was sitting in the kitchen at the cottage in Cheam and stated that she immediately went to try and calm the situation down. When she entered the parlour, she saw Sarah sitting in a chair holding a gun, which she promptly fired at William, the shot lodging in the door. Sarah immediately stood up and ordered her sister, ‘Fetch me the other gun and I will shoot him with that.’ Fortunately, William got to that weapon first and rushed outside with it, discharging it harmlessly in the garden.

It was pointed out to the jury that William Wittman had ample opportunity to escape after the shooting but made no attempt to do so, instead immediately raising the alarm to try and get help for his wife. Surgeon Mr Farrant testified to examining both the victim and her alleged murderer at the scene of the crime, describing Sarah as ‘a good, strong woman’ and drawing a contrast between her and her ‘much deformed’ husband.

‘She was more than a match for him, I suppose?’ the surgeon was asked.

‘Oh dear, yes,’ he replied.

In summing up the case, Mr Justice Burrough observed that often the first impression of an event was far worse than the actual circumstances and this appeared to be the case here. With regard to the coroner’s verdict of wilful murder, the judge told the jury that the evidence that had been presented in court was insufficient to prove a case of murder, although he personally believed that the jury could convict the prisoner of manslaughter if they so desired. Burrough seemed surprised that Wittman’s counsel had not taken the stance that the fatal shot was fired in self-defence, which would be no offence at all. However, Burrough instructed the jury that they could hardly come to that conclusion now, since the prisoner had not set up such a defence but had consistently stated that he committed the murder in the heat of passion. In conclusion, the judge advised the jury that the allegation that Wittman was struck with a poker before the shooting was supported by the evidence and that such blows would constitute sufficient provocation for the reduction of Wittman’s offence from murder to manslaughter.

Without feeling any need to retire and deliberate the case, the jury made an almost instant decision that Wittman was not guilty of wilful murder but was guilty of manslaughter. In passing sentence, Burrough told Wittman that, while he had undoubtedly received great provocation, it did not justify him using a gun to avenge himself. However, the provocation that Wittman received at the hands of his wife would induce the court to pass a much lighter sentence and, having given due consideration to all the circumstances of the case, Burrough sentenced William Wittman to three calendar months’ imprisonment in the House of Correction.

Note: Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the date of this case, there are some discrepancies between the newspaper reports. The surgeon is variously referred to as Samuel Farrant, Tarrant, Sharratt or Sarratt and it is not clear whether Stedman was Wittman’s neighbour or was one of the two men visiting his neighbour. His name is recorded both as Mathew and Michael.