14

‘Oh, horror of horrors!’

Dolgellau, North Wales, 1877

On the morning of 16 July 1877, with the river Arran near Dolgellau in spate after recent heavy rains, a little girl saw a human arm floating downstream. When the child’s gruesome discovery was brought to the attention of the police, Chief Constable Captain Clough organised a search and more body parts were removed from a half-mile stretch of the swollen river. When the head was located, the eyes had been removed and the hair shorn, presumably to hinder identification. In all, twelve segments of human remains were retrieved from the water and taken to the local workhouse mortuary, along with several women’s garments. There the pieces were fitted together like a jigsaw and, once assembled, it was evident that the body was that of a woman, who initially appeared to have been shot in the head, before being dismembered and dumped either in the river or on its banks. However, when surgeons Edward Jones and Humphrey Lloyd Williams conducted a post-mortem examination on 17 July, they formed the opinion that the woman’s catastrophic injuries were actually the result of a single heavy blow from a blunt instrument on the left-hand side of her head, rather than a gunshot. Seven of the bones in the woman’s skull were shattered and thus the doctors believed that only a very violent blow could have caused such trauma. The doctors also confirmed that the woman was pregnant at the time of her death.

The police were aware that a woman had been reported missing in the area and called in her father and sister to view the remains. Margaret Hughes confirmed that the body was that of her sister, Sarah, who was last seen alive on 4 June 1877. An inquest was opened at the Dolgellau County Hall by Merionethshire coroner Mr Griffiths Jones Williams and adjourned until 1 August, to allow the police time to make enquiries into thirty-six-year-old Sarah’s suspicious death.

Sarah lived in a small village called Brithdir, about three miles outside Dolgellau and was employed at a farm called Coedmwsoglog, farmed by Lewis Jones. On 2 June, Sarah left her job and returned home and on 4 June, she visited her sister, leaving Margaret’s house sometime after 8 p.m. Sarah was seen roughly an hour later by a woman named Ann Williams, who met her about half a mile outside Dolgellau, at a place called Ship Mill. Mrs Williams told the police that Sarah was walking away from Dolgellau, heading along the turnpike road. To get to her home from there, Sarah’s most direct route was a path through woods, which eventually joined the old turnpike road leading to Brithdir.

It occurred to the police that whoever had cut up Sarah’s body was unlikely to have travelled too far to dump the pieces in the river. They followed Sarah’s probable journey home, carefully searching every nearby property on the way and at 5 a.m. on 18 July, they reached Parc, a smallholding farmed by twenty-five-year-old Cadwalader Jones, the son of Sarah’s employer, Lewis. Thinking it too early to disturb the occupants of the farmhouse, they waited outside for almost an hour until the farmer came out through the front door, when he was approached by Superintendent Hughes. ‘Don’t be agitated,’ Hughes told Jones. ‘We are going to search every house in the neighbourhood until we find out something about the murder.’

‘It is quite right that the person who committed it should be found out,’ Jones agreed, stepping back to allow the officers into his house. Jones stood in the kitchen apparently deep in thought, while Inspector Owen Jones and another officer went upstairs and two more policemen began searching downstairs. After a few minutes, the farmer suddenly seemed to make a decision. ‘I must go upstairs and speak to Owen Jones,’ he said and, on finding the inspector searching a bedroom, Jones told him, ‘I do not wish you to trouble yourself any further; it is my desire to tell you that I did it.’

The startled policeman immediately cautioned Jones, asking him if he fully realised the gravity of what he was saying.

‘Yes. I did it and I alone. That is the truth; that is the truth,’ replied Jones. The policemen took him downstairs and informed Superintendent Hughes of the statement he had just made.

‘I wish to conceal nothing,’ the farmer told Hughes, who arrested him, before continuing with the search of his property. As the party moved outside and began poking around in a cowshed, Jones helpfully told one of the officers, ‘What you want is in that corner,’ indicating a pile of stones. When the policemen moved some of the stones, they found a wet, mouldy sack, which stank of putrefying flesh. The sack was found to contain human organs, along with the sleeve of a woman’s jacket, identical to one found two days earlier by the river.

Having searched the outbuildings, Superintendent Hughes announced his intention of going down to the river. Led by Cadwalader Jones, who was handcuffed to a constable, the search party set off towards the Arran. ‘We will go in here,’ Cadwalader said suddenly, leading the police off the path and into a garden, taking them to a corner where there was a pile of newly-cut hazel branches. As the police officers rummaged around among the branches, a dog that had followed them from the farm suddenly pounced on something, which, when retrieved from the dog’s mouth, proved to be part of a woman’s hand, including the fingernails.

‘Here everything was done,’ Cadwalader told them, before asking if he might have his Bible with him while he was in custody. Given permission, he was taken back to his house to fetch it, asking Superintendent Hughes on the way if he thought the Lord would forgive him for what he had done to Sarah Hughes.

With Cadwalader Jones in custody, the police completed their search of his garden, first removing the hazel branches and finding the handle of a billhook lying on the ground. The earth beneath the branches was bloody, greasy and malodorous and had the appearance of a freshly-dug grave, with a natural spring at one end. When the police dug down into it, at a depth of two feet and six inches they unearthed an umbrella, a penny, a quantity of human hair and a few buttons from the dead woman’s black cloth jacket. A billhook with a missing handle was found on a bench outside Parc Farmhouse, along with an axe.

Cadwalader Jones was brought before magistrates and committed for trial at the next assizes for wilful murder. When the inquest was resumed, the police had traced witnesses who had seen him apparently fishing in the Arran on the morning of 16 July, when the first remains were discovered. Unusually, he was repeatedly dipping the end of his fishing rod into the water and the police theorised that he may have been trying to dislodge body parts that had become stuck on rocks or on the river banks.

At the end of the inquest, the coroner summed up the evidence for the jury and told them that they needed to agree on the answers to three questions. Firstly, were they sure that the body they viewed on 17 July was that of Sarah Hughes? Secondly, did any person or persons wilfully murder her? Thirdly, if the answer to the first two questions was yes, were the jury satisfied that Cadwalader Jones was the person who committed that wilful murder? It took the jury around thirty minutes’ deliberation to answer yes to all three questions, returning a verdict of wilful murder against Jones.

The trial of Cadwalader Jones took place at Chester Assizes on 31 October 1877, before Mr Justice Manisty, with Ignatius Williams and Mr Marshall acting for the prosecution, while Mr Swetenham acted as defence counsel. Jones was described as ‘a physically fine specimen of the stout and lusty peasantry of North Wales’. ‘He looks altogether like a farm servant,’ reported one contemporary newspaper, adding that there was ‘such mildness in his countenance’ that it was almost impossible to wonder that he might be guilty of such a horrible crime as that of which he is accused.

The trial was controversial from the outset, since it was held in an English court and Cadwalader Jones and several of the witnesses spoke and understood only Welsh. Thus solicitor David Pugh was appointed as an interpreter and, as the case unfolded, it quickly became evident that the prosecution and defence counsels had completely different theories about how and why Sarah Hughes died.

The case was opened for the prosecution by Ignatius Williams, who began by describing what was known of the victim’s movements after leaving Coedmwsoglog on 2 June. After she was last seen on 4 June, it was shown that she would have walked close to Parc Farm on her way home and, at the time, Cadwalader Jones was out and about, since he visited a woman named Gwen Lewis that evening and purchased a milk churn. Mrs Lewis stated that Jones arrived at her house at around 8 p.m. and stayed for about an hour before leaving to walk home, which would have taken him about twenty minutes. Since Ann Williams claimed to have seen Sarah Hughes walking home at around 9 p.m., it seemed very likely that she and Jones might have met.

Since Sarah had worked for Cadwalader Jones’s father, the couple knew each other and the prosecution saw Sarah’s pregnancy as a motive for murder. She already had two illegitimate children and it was said that she claimed that at least one of them had been fathered by a married man, who had been forced to leave the district in disgrace as a result of her attempts to affiliate the child to him. Cadwalader Jones was newly married and his wife had recently given birth to the couple’s first child, a daughter. The prosecution believed that Sarah Hughes might have tried to exhort money from Jones, threatening to expose him as the father of her latest baby. Although the prosecution accepted that it was unlikely that he had fathered the child, they suggested that Sarah might have seen him as an easy target.

During his incarceration in the run-up to his trial, Cadwalader Jones specifically asked to see Inspector Owen Jones, who he had known by sight for several years. The inspector told the court that he had been to visit the prisoner in his cell, taking with him a document relating to Parc Farm, which needed a signature. According to the inspector, in the few minutes that he spent with him, Jones asked about his wife and child and his father and then began to sob. When Owen Jones left, Cadwalader asked him to visit again and the police officer told the court that he met with the prisoner on one further occasion. That meeting took place in the exercise yard at the prison and the prison governor was present the entire time.

However, Cadwalader Jones had told his defence counsel that he had made a statement to Inspector Jones, in which he explained exactly how Sarah’s death happened. According to Cadwalader, as he was returning from buying his churn on the night of 4 June, he met Sarah by a well on the Dolgellau road and she began following him, taunting him and threatening to make him pay for her latest baby. Cadwalader said that he repeatedly begged her to go away and leave him alone but she persisted in following him until he finally lost his temper and threw a stone at her to try and get rid of her. To his absolute horror, the stone hit her on the head, killing her almost instantly. Cadwalader claimed to have buried Sarah’s body in a grave he dug in his garden but, as the weeks passed, he was so overcome by remorse and guilt that, in an effort to rid himself of the corpse once and for all, he dug up the body, dissected it and threw the pieces into the river, where unfortunately for him, it was found very quickly.

Under cross-examination by the counsel for the defence, Inspector Jones categorically denied ever having spoken to Cadwalader alone about the death of Sarah Hughes. The inspector agreed that Jones had begged him several times to go and see him in his cell but was adamant that nothing whatsoever had been said on the subject of the prisoner throwing a stone in a passion.

The prosecution rested, confident that they had proved their case of wilful murder and Mr Swetenham stepped up to speak in Jones’s defence. It was alleged by the prosecution that there had been a confession in the case, Swetenham began, before continuing to say that he hoped to be able to demonstrate that the meaning of Jones’s words had been misconstrued.

There was not the slightest evidence that Jones had any motive for committing the crime of which he stood accused. There was nothing to show that there was any bad blood between Jones and Sarah Hughes and it was highly unlikely that there had ever been any improper intimacies between them, since they had practically no opportunity to be alone together, particularly after Jones married and moved to Parc Farm with his wife.

Swetenham professed himself ‘disappointed’ that Inspector Jones had no recollection of statements made to him in the prison cell but, from the medical evidence, it was quite reasonable to believe that Sarah Hughes had indeed died from being struck on the head by a stone as the defendant claimed. The doctors believed that Sarah Hughes had not been dismembered until hours before she was found, or in other words, several weeks after her death. However, the cutting up of her body had little bearing on the case – what mattered was how she died in the first place. Cadwalader Jones was a newly married man, said Swetenham, entering into a period of personal happiness, which he had eagerly anticipated for many years. Sarah Hughes was the mother of two illegitimate children, one of whom she had already tried to blame on a married man, who had been forced to leave his home, wife and family as a result of her spurious and malicious allegations against him.

Although the defence counsel conceded that Cadwalader Jones had killed Sarah Hughes, he strongly disagreed that his client had murdered her, asking the jury to consider the facts. There was no question that Sarah was walking home on the night of 4 June and no doubt that she died at Parc Farm. However, Parc was at least 400 yards out of her way and Swetenham asked the jury why she might have gone there. It didn’t matter if she met Cadwalader Jones on her way home and followed him, as he claimed she did, or whether she came to the farm to meet him, Swetenham said, reminding the jury that Sarah Hughes was killed by a blow to the head. If the crime was at all premeditated, why didn’t Jones use a weapon? If he planned in advance to kill Sarah, why did he not arm himself with something more effective as a killing instrument than a stone? Why did Cadwalader Jones decide after six weeks to exhume his victim’s body and dispose of it in the river, asked Swetenham, pointing out that if Jones wanted to conceal the killing, the very worst thing he could do was to place the body in a river that flowed along the boundary of his property and into the very heart of Dolgellau.

Sarah Hughes was pregnant and Cadwalader Jones was a respectable, devout and somewhat timid man, ‘whose future happiness she could blast and destroy almost with her very breath’. It was therefore the contention of the defence that Sarah tried to do to Cadwalader Jones precisely what she had done before with another married man – she tried to saddle him with responsibility for her pregnancy, with the aim of getting money from him. Perhaps she threatened to tell his wife that they had been intimate. Maybe she threatened to ruin his reputation, as she had already done to the other man. Whatever Sarah Hughes said to Cadwalader Jones, she provoked him and roused his anger until he killed her in a moment of passion and frenzy. He didn’t murder her, since there was no malice aforethought and no use of a deadly weapon and, although he had confessed to killing Sarah Hughes, he had not confessed to her murder. At worst, this was a case of manslaughter and, at best, a tragic but accidental death.

Was Jones’s conduct in the aftermath of the killing that of someone who had committed a foul and bloody murder, asked Swetenham? Before he was taken away, he asked permission to go into the house and collect his Bible, which the defence counsel described as ‘The safest guide and the greatest comforter to a distressed and burdened soul.’ Imagine going to bed every night with your wife and young child in the knowledge that a woman who has died a victim of your wrath lies in a shallow grave just a few yards away. ‘Oh, horror of horrors!’ exclaimed Swetenham dramatically, asking the jury if they could accept that, in the wake of the killing, Jones’s mind was filled with the deepest remorse and regret.

‘Do you think the water floods did not speak the name of Sarah Hughes to the prisoner?’ Swetenham asked the jury theatrically, drawing on William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest for inspiration. ‘Do you think that the winds, when he was in bed with his wife and child, did not sing it to him? Do you think that the thunder – that deep-toned organ pipe – did not equally call out to him; aye, and make him feel such horrors in his soul as to make it impossible he could sleep, whilst his victim was lying mouldering in the grave? What then could he do but get rid of that heavy nightmare floating through his dreams.’

Swetenham concluded his speech by reminding the jury that Jones’s defence was a reasonable one. He claimed to have been sorely provoked by the victim, so much so that his anger was roused to such a fever pitch of passion that he momentarily lost control. Surely, this was a reasonable explanation and, more importantly, could the jury find anything at all that had been proved by the prosecution that was inconsistent with it. ‘I trust you will find a verdict not of murder but of manslaughter,’ finished Swetenham.

Before Mr Justice Manisty’s summary, the defence called a procession of character witnesses, all of whom had known Cadwalader Jones for many years. As one, they testified that he was a kind-hearted man, of irreproachable character and a gentle disposition. Witness after witness described Jones almost as a saint, using such words as kind, quiet, friendly, innocent, meek, peaceable, humane, respectful, conscientious, devout and well-disposed.

It was then left to Manisty to address the jury. He began by commending the defence counsel, saying that it was now his duty to explain to them the relevant points of law, before leaving the jury to decide between verdicts of murder and manslaughter. It was beyond all doubt that the prisoner killed Sarah Hughes and that her death was unlawful. If he had understood the defence correctly, their contention was that Sarah accosted Cadwalader Jones and threatened to affiliate her unborn child upon him. Jones, who was recently married, dreaded the consequences of such an action and flew into a rage. If Jones was indeed the father of Sarah’s baby then he had no right to inflict the injury on her but, if her allegations were false, he would have known them to be false and legally, if he picked up a stone or other weapon and used it against her, that provocation was sufficient to justify a reduction of his crime from murder to manslaughter. Thus, if the jury believed that Sarah Hughes did provoke Jones, they must determine whether that provocation came as a result of a truth or a falsehood.

If her allegations against Jones were false, the act of picking up a stone and either hitting her with it or throwing at her, causing her instant death, was in proportion to the provocation. What actually happened on the night of 4 June would never be revealed in this world and therefore the jury would have to find their way in the dark when it came to reaching a verdict.

The judge advised the jury to disregard the burial and subsequent exhumation and disposal of the body and concentrate on the events of 4 June. He reminded them that the prisoner had confessed to causing Sarah’s death and that the debate was whether he had confessed to murdering her or to killing her. Manisty told the jury that the confession had been made in the prisoner’s own language and, although he personally did not know of any, there may be some subtle difference in meaning or significance between the words for murder and kill in the Welsh tongue.

The jury should look at the evidence as to Jones’s character, in conjunction with the other evidence and give the defendant the benefit of any doubts they might entertain, which was especially important in cases such as this, where the defendant had been universally described in such glowing terms.

Although Manisty seemed to be giving the jury every opportunity to spare Jones’s life by finding him guilty of the lesser offence, they took just twenty minutes before returning to court with their verdict of guilty of wilful murder. Jones sat through the entire trial appearing completely cowed and overcome, obviously comprehending very little of the proceedings and when the verdict and subsequent sentence of death were translated into Welsh so that he could understand his fate, he buried his face helplessly in his hands and was eventually removed from court in a state of semi-consciousness.

As Jones awaited his appointment with the executioner at the Merionethshire County Gaol, several people wrote to the newspapers complaining about the way that the trial was conducted and challenging the verdict. Many thought it unfair that Jones was tried at an English assize, far removed from his home and from the people who knew him. The assizes for Merionethshire had been held the week before the discovery of the body and by holding the trial at an English assize, rather than waiting for the next Welsh one, it was suggested that proceedings were rushed and that consequently Swetenham had insufficient time to prepare his defence. It was also argued that since the defendant and most of the witnesses were Welsh speakers, the trial should have been conducted in Wales, by those who spoke the native tongue.

People were horrified and outraged that the jury had taken only twenty minutes to arrive at their verdict and it was widely believed that they had placed too much evidence on the terrible act of mutilation perpetrated after the killing and too little on the provocation supposedly given by the victim beforehand. Finally, it was thought unfair that Cadwalader Jones was not allowed to speak in his own defence, particularly since it was his own confession that put him on trial in the first place.

Meanwhile, arrangements for the execution were making little progress. Since there was no permanent scaffold at Dolgellau Gaol, Under-Sherriff Mr Griffith asked several local carpenters to erect one but all refused. In fact, not one local builder or tradesman was prepared to have anything to do with the execution, and Griffith was eventually forced to contact the carpenter who had constructed the gallows at Chester Castle.

Once the scaffold had been built, it was sent by train to Dolgellau, where the town’s carters refused as one to transport it to the gaol. It was eventually taken to Penmaenpool Station, from where it was moved to the under-sherriff’s home and one of his labourers was persuaded to take it to the gaol.

Although a petition bearing around 10,000 signatures was raised to appeal for clemency, when Home Secretary Mr Cross declined to interfere with the course of the law, Cadwalader Jones was hanged by William Marwood on 23 November 1877. As Marwood left the area, he was rushed by a baying mob and the stationmaster was forced to lock him in a third-class carriage for his own protection, through the windows of which he raised his hat and bowed to the people on the platform.

After Cadwalader Jones’s death, the authorities released a letter he had written on the day before his execution, in which he acknowledged the justice of his punishment and professed his great sorrow for the trouble he had brought upon himself and all others. It was said that in conversation with his father and with an independent minister, Reverend W. Griffiths, Jones admitted that the crime was premeditated, saying that Sarah Hughes had continually asked him for money and that, afraid that his wife would find out about his ‘intimacy’ with her, he planned to kill her. However, in view of the controversy surrounding the trial, the truth of Jones’s confession was also challenged and it was intimated that, being an intensely religious man, he had been persuaded by his spiritual advisors to cleanse his soul before going to meet his Maker. By and large, it was thought highly unlikely that a man intending to commit murder would go to do so without taking a weapon with him.

Note: Dolgellau is also described as Dolgelley and Dolgelly in contemporary newspaper accounts and there are a variety of ways of spelling Cadwalader, including Cadwaller and Cadwallader.