4

‘I’ve stopped her whoring’

Rochester, Kent, 1858

At around 6 a.m. on Sunday, 18 April 1858, Sarah Anne King was rudely awakened by a scuffling noise, followed by a loud thump. Sarah and her husband, William Joseph King, rented the bottom floor of a cottage at the rear of The Telegraph public house in Rochester, Kent. The top floor was occupied by forty-nine-year-old Albert Huskey Turner (also known as George Turner) and his wife Mary Ann, who was twenty years younger than her husband.

After more noises, Sarah nudged her husband awake and told him to get up and go and see what was happening. ‘It’s none of our business. It’s man’s and wife’s affair,’ William told her sleepily, somehow ignoring a bloodcurdling scream and another heavy thud from upstairs. Moments later, he leaped out of bed and began pulling on his trousers, finally galvanised into wakefulness by blood dripping through the ceiling and falling onto his bed.

William and Sarah rushed out of their rooms to find Alfred Turner standing just outside the door at the foot of the stairs, his hands covered in blood.

‘Don’t knock your wife about so; you will kill her,’ Sarah warned him.

‘I have killed her,’ Turner replied conversationally. ‘Mrs Turner is no more. Go and see her. She shan’t be Moulder Taylor’s whore anymore.’ [sic]

While Sarah King rushed upstairs to see if she could help Mary Ann, Turner announced his intention of going to the police station to hand himself in and asked William to accompany him there. ‘I’ll go comfortable with you; not with anybody else,’ he told King.

‘Moulder’ was William Taylor, a young, unmarried man whose nickname came from his job, which was making moulds for casting bricks. As King walked with him to the police station, Turner explained that he had seen Taylor behind a well with his wife and suspected that the couple were having an affair. He had woken at 4 a.m. that morning and, finding that his wife was not in bed with him, he went to search for her. Knowing that she had been drinking with Taylor the night before, Turner told King that he went to The Telegraph, where he actually heard his wife and Taylor committing adultery in the pub’s parlour. The door to the room was locked and Turner was unable to get in, so he went outside to check the window shutters and the back door of the pub, which were also locked. Unable to get indoors, Turner went back to his rooms to wait for his wife to return.

By five o’clock, she had still not come back, so Turner went to The Telegraph and checked all the doors and windows again. When he returned to his rooms, having been unable to gain entry to the pub, he found his wife sitting at the top of the stairs waiting for him. He accused her of adultery and Turner told King that she begged for mercy and promised to mend her ways but Turner claimed that his feelings were so hurt that he picked up the poker and hit her three times on the head with it. Mary Ann slumped over the table semi-conscious, and her husband eased her onto the floor and cut her throat with a razor. ‘I would rather see her lying dead than that she should be a prostitute,’ Turner revealed, seemingly very satisfied with his night’s work.

When they arrived at the police station, King handed Turner over to PC John Story. ‘I have come to give myself up, for murdering my wife,’ Turner told the constable. Seeing Turner’s blood-caked hands and clothes, Story promptly despatched PC Featherstone to The Telegraph to investigate his admission, before searching Turner and removing a tobacco box and a knife from his pockets. ‘I didn’t do it with that, I cut her throat with a razor, which I left lying by her body,’ Turner explained helpfully. Story asked Turner why he had killed his wife and he rationalised, ‘I’ve stopped her whoring.’

Meanwhile, PC Featherstone had arrived at Turner’s rooms and found that surgeon Mr Bell had already pronounced Mary Ann dead. She lay on the floor in a huge pool of blood, fully clothed apart from her boots, a broken poker and a bloody, white-handled razor close by. Surgeon Thomas Pearce Bevan conducted a post-mortem examination later that day, finding that Mary Ann had a four-and-a-half-inch-long wound across the front of her throat, which had divided her carotid artery and jugular veins. In addition, she had two deep cuts on the back of her hand and heavy bruising to her upper arms and shoulders, suggesting that she had fought desperately for her life. Mary Ann also had a very swollen contusion on her left cheek and a fractured skull, which Bevan believed were caused by heavy blows from a blunt instrument, such as the poker. However, the cause of her death was haemorrhage from the savage slashing of her throat.

On 19 April, coroner James Lewis opened an inquest at the Guildhall in Rochester. Sarah and William King were first to testify, followed by Thomas Chalkin, the landlord of The Telegraph, who stated that Albert and Mary Ann Turner were drinking in his establishment on 17 April with Taylor and a man named Jesse Potter. After hearing from PCs Story and Featherstone, the inquest jury asked if it would be possible for Taylor to testify, so the coroner adjourned the inquest until the following day. When it resumed, both Jesse Potter and William Taylor appeared as witnesses.

Potter corroborated Thomas Chalkin’s evidence. He told the inquest that, although he did not personally know the Turners, he was drinking with Taylor in The Telegraph on the night of Saturday 17 April. The Turners were also in the taproom at the time and appeared to be on friendly terms with each other and also with Taylor. At around 10.45 p.m. Albert Turner left, leaving his wife sitting next to Taylor at the bar, chatting and drinking with him. Within fifteen minutes, Turner came back into the room, asking if anyone had seen her and, having been told that she was not there, he walked off, muttering something unintelligible under his breath.

William Taylor was next to give evidence and gave exactly the same account as Potter before him. ‘I swear I never saw Mrs Turner after eleven o’clock,’ he concluded. With the landlord’s permission, both Potter and Taylor spent the night sleeping in the pub, the former in the taproom and the latter in the parlour. Both men claimed to have slept soundly all night and only woke when the landlord’s little boy opened the pub doors and Turner marched up to Taylor and told him, ‘Taylor, you’ve had the last of her. Now go and watch her draw her last breath.’

The inquest jury deliberated for under ten minutes before returning a verdict of wilful murder against Albert Turner. Almost as soon as the inquest concluded, Turner was brought before magistrates on the same charge. Representatives from the local newspaper described him as having ‘a mild and pleasing countenance’, although they added that he looked careworn and unhappy and that he trembled and sobbed bitterly throughout his hearing. One of the first tasks for the mayor, Jesse Thomas, was to establish whether or not the victim was Turner’s legal wife. Turner explained that he had been married before and had two daughters by his first wife. After she died, nineteen-year-old Emma and fourteen-year-old Harriet went to live with their aunt in Berkshire and Turner eventually remarried Mary Ann.

The evidence before the magistrates was practically identical to that heard at the inquest and the mayor echoed the coroner in committing Turner for trial at the next assizes. ‘I have nothing to say. I know I have done it,’ Turner responded, before asking the mayor if he might see his wife one last time. Told that this was not possible, he fell to his knees, sobbing and clasping his hands together, begging, ‘Pray do let me, pray do. I pray hard to see her.’ He was hauled to his feet and taken to Maidstone Gaol to await his appearance at the assizes.

The trial was held at Maidstone on 26 July 1858, with Mr Baron Bramwell presiding. From the outset, the prosecution informed the jury that all they would have to decide was whether the prisoner was guilty as charged of wilful murder, or if there were any mitigating circumstances that could reduce the offence to manslaughter.

Sarah King was the first person to give evidence and described the events of the evening and morning of 17/18 April. Mrs King had been drinking in the pub the night before the murder and claimed that Mary Ann Turner left the premises at around midnight, roughly an hour after her husband. Asked about the relationship between the Turners, Mrs King stated that while Mrs Turner often got drunk, Turner always seemed very fond of his wife and acted kindly and affectionately towards her – in fact, on the day before the murder, Turner had even scrubbed the floor for Mary Ann to save her from having to do it.

William King followed his wife into the witness box, drawing a gasp of horror from the spectators when he revealed that he had prevented Turner from trying to rifle Mary Ann’s pockets as she lay dying on the floor, to get a halfpenny to buy beer.

Landlord Thomas Chalkin recalled locking the pub on the night of 17 April, having seen everyone leave with the exception of Jesse Porter and William Taylor, who had been given permission to sleep in the taproom and parlour. Chalkin admitted that Taylor could have easily opened the back door during the night and let anyone he pleased into the pub but stressed that Taylor was alone in the parlour and fast asleep on the Sunday morning, when Turner burst into the premises, declaring that he had killed his wife.

PC John Story and Superintendent John Tuff recalled their dealings with Turner after the murder, agreeing that he had stuck to his original story throughout. Turner gave both police officers the same account of events, stating that he had suspected his wife of committing adultery and had heard her in a room with the man he suspected of being her lover. He insisted that, had he been able to get into the room, he would have also killed Taylor.

Once all of the witnesses had testified, it was left to defence counsel Mr Bridge to speak for his client. Bridge prompted the jury to recall that every single person who had seen Mary Ann Turner’s body had stated that it didn’t look as if she had been to bed that night and those who went into the Turners’ bedroom said that it seemed as though only one side of their bed had been slept in. If Mary Ann had not been in her rightful place in bed with her husband that night where had she been and who had she been with? Bridge did not argue that she had died at her husband’s hands but stressed that Turner was in such a state of intense excitement and hurt at finding his wife in the very act of committing adultery with Taylor that he lost all reason and self-control. The justice of the case would be amply satisfied by finding Turner guilty of manslaughter, the defence concluded.

Baron Bramwell agreed that Turner had not been motivated by revenge or any other wicked feeling when he took his wife’s life but committed the act under an almost overpowering feeling of excitement at the injury, which he no doubt believed had been inflicted upon him by his wife’s infidelity. Yet however sympathetic the jury might feel, the law required them to do their duty according to their oaths. He was bound to remind them that every act of homicide was murder in the eyes of the law unless there were circumstances connected with the act that would reduce it to a lesser crime. Before dismissing the jury, Bramwell expressed an opinion that, even supposing that Turner had heard his wife and Taylor in the act of adultery, the fact that some time had elapsed before he reacted meant that there was no legal justification for the act he had committed.

The jury took almost three hours to find Turner guilty of the lesser offence of manslaughter and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. After his conviction, Turner was said to have undergone ‘a great change of mind’. He spent most of his time reading the Bible and, although he remained adamant that he had proof of his wife’s unfaithfulness, he nevertheless expressed a deep regret at having killed her. In due course, Turner was transported to Western Australia, sailing on board the ship Lincelles on 30 September 1861.

Note: The cotemporary newspapers show considerable variations in the spelling of names. For example, landlord Thomas Chalkin is alternatively named Chalklin, Chelkin and Chelklin.