7

‘He was always a good boy’

London, 1861

Husband and wife Thomas and Mary Reeves lived in Drury Court, off The Strand in London. Both heavy drinkers, they were described by their neighbours as ‘dissipated people’, fighting like cat and dog whenever they were intoxicated. The couple had several children, including eighteen-year-old Richard, who was actually Mary’s stepson and ten-year-old Mary Ann, known to everyone as ‘Polly’.

The entire family worked as basket makers but since Thomas and Mary were far fonder of drinking than they were of making and selling baskets, it was Richard who actually did most of the work and so supported the entire family. He was a handsome young man, who was intelligent, sober and hardworking and he bore much of the responsibility for looking after his younger siblings, since his parents were often too drunk to do so. By contrast, Polly was described even by her own mother as ‘a very aggravating child’, who seemed to take great delight in teasing and tormenting her older brother.

On the morning of 15 November 1861, things were pretty normal in the Reeves household. Richard was busy making baskets, while Thomas was laid up bed with a mild attack of delirium tremens and Mary was still sleeping off the excesses of the previous night, so it was Polly who made breakfast. Richard stopped work for his meal at around 9 a.m., at which time Mary got up. She went out shortly afterwards, leaving Richard and his sister sitting at the kitchen table eating. Minutes later, two other occupants of the house, Ellen James and Mary Ann Griffiths, heard him going to the coal cellar, the door to which had been long since nailed closed, so that the only access was through a trap door. Richard was subsequently heard calling to his sister, ‘Polly, bring me the key of the back shop.’

‘Where is it, Dick?’ his sister asked.

‘On the back room table,’ Richard replied and, on finding it, Polly took it to him.

At about 10 a.m. Richard visited his sweetheart in Temple Bar and without preamble calmly announced to eighteen-year-old Jemima Kedge, ‘I have murdered my sister.’

‘I cannot think you have done such a thing,’ the horrified girl replied but Richard was insistent, telling Jemima and her friend Lizzie Rogers, ‘I strangled her.’ When he left the two young women, they were unsure about whether Richard was playing some kind of macabre joke on them, so said nothing to anyone about his bizarre claims.

Meanwhile, Mary Reeves had come home and grew more and more anxious because she couldn’t find Polly. She asked Ellen James and Mary Ann Griffiths if they had sent her on an errand but they could only tell Polly’s worried mother that they hadn’t seen the child since breakfast time. When Richard returned home just before 2 p.m., Mary asked him if he knew where she was but Richard said he didn’t. Soon afterwards, he asked, ‘Mother, have you found her?’

‘No, my boy. Where should I look?’ asked Mary, at which Richard volunteered to go out and see if he could find his half-sister. He approached his friends, hotel porter John Lyne and carpenter’s labourer William Carney and told them that Polly was lost, asking if they would mind helping him search for her. However, the three youths had not walked very far before Richard suddenly stopped.

‘It’s no use looking for my sister,’ he told Lyne and Carney. ‘Go home and tell my father that if he wants Mary Ann I have strangled her in the coal cellar.’ With that, Richard walked off, leaving his two shocked companions unsure of what to do.

Eventually, they headed back towards the Reeves’ house and on their way they met Thomas, who although apparently still tipsy, was going to get a shave. Having told him what Richard said, Lyne volunteered to go and check the cellar and, while Thomas waited by the coal hatch door with William Carney, Mrs Griffiths and another tenant Mrs James, Lyne went down the coal chute into the cellar.

By the light of the candle he carried, he could see the little girl lying on her side, her face partly covered with pieces of coal. Kneeling down, Lyne immediately realised that she was dead so he lifted her still warm body, passing her up through the hatch into the waiting arms of Ellen James and Mary Ann Griffiths.

While Lyne and Carney ran to King’s College Hospital to try and find a doctor, Mrs James gently laid Polly on a sofa. The child’s face was swollen and black and a closer examination revealed that a piece of twine had been wrapped two or three times around her neck and pulled so tight that it had sunk almost an inch into the flesh. Hearing the commotion, John Griffiths came downstairs from the first floor and, with great difficulty, managed to work his finger under the cord, which was tied with two running knots under Polly’s right ear. Since nobody could find a knife, Mrs James picked at the knots until they came undone.

Charles Henry Allfree, a house surgeon at the hospital, arrived at the house within minutes but there was nothing that he could do to revive Polly. When he conducted a post-mortem examination the next day, he found that the cause of the child’s death was suffocation by strangulation and he was able to report that there were no marks of violence on her body and no sign of any sexual assault. In Allfree’s opinion, Polly’s body had not been suspended but the twine round her neck had been fashioned into a slip knot and pulled tight around her neck. There were no marks on Polly’s fingers, which, according to the doctor, proved that she could not have strangled herself.

The police were called and a search was instigated for Richard Reeves. After leaving his friends, he went back to his girlfriend’s house and told Jemima Kedge that he was unable to stay but wanted her to know that he had sent two ‘chaps’ to tell his mother where his sister was. He later went back to Jemima’s house for a third time, asking for some tea, before wandering off again. He was next seen at 4.45 p.m.by PC Charles Germanus Venes, who saw him leaning against a lamp post and quickly placed his hand on Richard’s shoulder, saying, ‘I want you.’

‘I know what for,’ Richard replied. ‘I will go with you. I did it.’

‘You are charged with the murder of your sister,’ Venes informed him. ‘Be cautious what you say, for whatever you say I shall use in evidence.’

‘I did it,’ Richard repeated. ‘She aggravated me to it,’ he explained and then said nothing more.

He was brought before magistrates at Bow Street Police Court the next morning, charged with wilful murder but appeared cool, calm and collected, gazing around the court looking disinterested and unconcerned.

The first witness was Mary Reeves, who appeared in court with a patch over her right eye, as if to conceal the effects of a blow. ‘My little girl Mary would have been eleven next January,’ she told the court before stating when she had last seen her daughter.

John Lyne, William Carney, Ellen James, surgeon Mr Allfree, Jemima Kedge and PC Venes followed Mary Reeves into the witness box and Richard was offered the chance to question each of them but sullenly refused. The magistrates lost no time in committing him for trial at the next assizes and he was removed from court and taken back to the police station. While in a police cell, awaiting transportation to Newgate Prison, he was allowed to see his father in the presence of a police constable and only now his veneer of bravado slipped and he gave way to uncontrolled sobbing. The only reason he could give for his diabolical act was that Polly aggravated him to do it.

When coroner Mr C. St Clair Bedford opened an inquest on the death on 19 November, some of the evidence shed further light on the relationship between Richard Reeves and his young victim. Richard was the son of Thomas and his first wife, although Mary Reeves had married Thomas in 1852 and had cared for Richard since he was seven years old. Polly was Thomas and Mary’s biological daughter and, in Richard’s eyes, was treated with great favouritism. While Richard was regularly cursed, cuffed and pushed by both his father and his stepmother, nobody ever laid a finger on Polly, who was allowed to boss her brother about and ridicule, tease and cheek him at will. Occasionally, Polly even refused to let Richard have any food, locking up the cupboard where it was kept and refusing to hand over the key. A couple of times, Richard grew so unhappy that he actually ran away from home, supporting himself by pawning his clothes, but he was so concerned for the welfare of his siblings in the charge of their drunken parents that he invariably returned home. ‘He was always a good boy,’ sobbed his stepmother and her sentiments were echoed by almost all of the witnesses, who described Richard as kind, tolerant, good-tempered, industrious, intelligent, mild and inoffensive.

Those witnesses who had appeared before the magistrates repeated their testimonies at the inquest and, after a short deliberation, the coroner’s jury returned a verdict of wilful murder against Richard Reeves, adding that they further considered that the youth had been ‘hardly treated’ at home.

The assizes opened on 25 November and Richard Reeves appeared before Mr Baron Bramwell charged with wilful murder. For the prosecution, Mr Clarke admitted that he personally found the case ‘of a most painful character’. The facts of the matter are beyond dispute, said Clarke, as the jury would recognise. Having listened to the evidence, Clarke was confident that they would entertain no doubt that the defendant had destroyed his sister by strangling her with twine and had even admitted doing so. If this should be proved, continued Clarke, the jury would be compelled to find Reeves guilty but Clarke insisted that nothing would give him greater satisfaction than if his learned friend for the defence could give any explanation for the prisoner’s conduct that would justify the jury coming to a contrary conclusion.

The various witnesses repeated their evidence and were cross-examined by counsel for the defence, Mr Sleigh. It emerged that Richard’s uncle and grandfather had both been lunatics and Thomas Reeves had himself suffered from two severe bouts of delirium tremens and, on both occasions, was hospitalised in the ‘lunatics’ ward’.

When it came to addressing the jury in defence of Reeves, Sleigh told them that, as far as he could see, it would be an insult to the jury’s common sense if the defence tried to dispute any of the facts put forward by the prosecution. Sleigh conceded that the prosecution had given the strictest proof, beyond any reasonable doubt, that Reeves had killed his sister. Yet, this was a most extraordinary, almost incredible case, continued Sleigh. Here was the prisoner, who was universally well thought of and had always conducted himself as a kind and well-disposed lad. There was not the slightest evidence of any malice, ill-feeling or desire for revenge on his part and yet he was supposed to have inveigled his young sister into a cellar and deliberately strangled her, after which he openly admitted what he had done to several witnesses. Of all the extraordinary deeds of death that had ever been narrated in a court of justice, this was one of the most extraordinary he had ever heard, said Sleigh.

Since Reeves had shown no signs or symptoms of madness, his defence counsel told the jury that he had too much respect for them to ask them to acquit Reeves on grounds of insanity, although he begged to remind them that the youth had a family history of lunacy and it was well known that ‘the taint of madness’ was very frequently hereditary. Instead, Sleigh asked the jury to consider whether his client’s mind might have become suddenly and temporarily deranged and whether a cheeky remark or some other action by the victim might have provoked her brother into a momentary loss of control.

Mr Baron Bramwell reiterated the fact that there was not ‘a tittle of evidence’ to support acquitting Reeves on the grounds of insanity, adding that the law required that, in order to justify such a verdict, it was necessary to prove that, at the time of the offence, the accused was not only unaware of the nature and quality of the act he or she was committing but was also incapable of comprehending that he or she was doing wrong. The jury asked the judge if there was any evidence as to the prisoner’s state of mind since his arrest but Bramwell seemed to find this question irrelevant, asking the jury to bear in mind what he had just told them about insanity.

It took just ten minutes of deliberation for the jury to return a guilty verdict, although they recommended mercy on account of the prisoner’s youth and the bad example set him by his parents. Promising to forward their recommendations to the proper quarter, Bramwell addressed Reeves, asking if he had anything to say why sentence should not be passed upon him to die according to law.

‘No, I have nothing to say,’ replied Reeves, calmly and then stood without any show of emotion as the judge donned the black cap and intoned the death sentence.

Reeves was sent to Newgate Prison to await his execution but was respited in January 1862. Unusually, he was given no indication of what his punishment might be and, having shown some relief when first hearing that his life was to be spared, he soon returned to the state of indifference he had exhibited since his arrest.

As Reeves was kept occupied in prison with menial tasks such as picking oakum, the press went to town. Newspaper articles reiterated the point that there was not even the slightest evidence of insanity – on the contrary, Reeves was the last person anyone would ever have thought capable of so awful a crime. It was supposed that his diabolical act was committed in ‘an ungovernable fit of cool, concentrated passion’ stated a report in The Observer. Surely, asked the editorial, that cannot be taken as an excuse or admitted as an extenuation of such a crime since, if it could, no younger brother or sister could ever be safe, if their elder relatives might murder them with impunity.

Passion could never be sufficient excuse for commission of murder, maintained the reporter. Whereas every right-minded person in the country must deplore so young a lad waiting for the hangman’s last offices, while the laws remain as they are, he surely should not be permitted to escape his doom.

‘The law lays it down as clear as the noon-day sun that he who commits murder shall die,’ continued the article. ‘We have seen too many instances where a mother, driven to despair by the desertion of her seducer, destroys her illegitimate offspring and perishes on the scaffold. The provocation in the two cases is wildly different – the broken-hearted and disgraced mother, driven to frenzy by her shame and perhaps with want and starvation staring her and the child at her breast in the face, may have been almost driven to commit the offence for which she suffered. Here, we simply have a young lad who could not restrain his hatred because his little sister, some years his junior, was preferred by their feckless parents.’

The newspaper report ended by suggesting that, if the death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, it should only be done on sound and safe legal principles. If he is allowed to escape the ultimate penalty on the plea of passion, the article concluded, it will hardly be possible for execution to ever be carried out again without injustice, since barely a single murder is committed except under the influence of strong excitement.

Richard Reeves was eventually told that he was to be transported for life and set sail for Western Australia on 19 September 1863 on the convict ship Lord Dalhousie. He never offered any explanation for the murder of his sister.

Note: Almost all of the newspaper reports of the tragedy name the family as Reeves, although official records show that Reeve was probably correct. There are numerous variations in the spelling of the names of most of the witnesses. John Lyne is described in the contemporary newspapers as Line, Lines, Lynes, and Lymes, William Carney’s name is also spelled Corney, Dr Allfree is named Allfrey, PC Venes is referred to as Venus and Veness and Jemima Kedge – or Kadge – is alternatively named Maria and Jemitna. In all cases, I have utilised the most commonly used variation.