‘It was laid down by the law, that if a man found his wife in bed with an adulterer and he put him to death on the instant, the crime was only manslaughter, but if he did this deliberately, and after he had time to think and reflect, the crime would amount to murder’. Such was the legal conundrum put before the jurors in the case of Henry Wynn who, in December 1835, was accused of killing Eliza Jones.
On 7 December, Eliza, an Irishwoman, walked into the beer shop and lodging house owned by Mr Griffith in Highworth. She was accompanied by a blind man and another couple. The group had been sitting in the kitchen of the lodging house for about two hours when another man, Henry Wynn, entered the premises. Walking straight up to the blind man, he said, ‘Joe, I don’t thank thee for sending me to walk and taking my woman away with thee.’
His words were met with an immediate denial from blind Joe, who assured Wynn that he had not taken Eliza away – in fact he had hardly spoken half-a-dozen words to her. At the same time, Eliza Jones got to her feet and tried to placate her boyfriend, promising him that she was ‘not away with anyone’ and asking him not to ‘fall into a passion’. Her pleas earned her a resounding slap on the face, at which she screamed out in pain and anger. Wynn then pulled a clasp knife from his pocket and told Eliza that he ‘had a damned good mind to stab her.’
‘Pray don’t stab me,’ Eliza begged. At this point Sophia Dix, a servant at the beer shop, decided to intervene, telling Wynn to put the knife away. Wynn reassured Dix that he was only intending to scrape some dried mud from his coat and proceeded to do so. Then suddenly, before anyone had time to react, he swung at Eliza, the knife in his hand. The knife went into her left side, at which Eliza cried out, ‘Oh, my God! I am a ruined woman!’ before collapsing into the arms of the woman with whom she had been drinking for the past couple of hours. Henry Wynn calmly folded up his knife and put it into the pocket of his waistcoat.
Sophia Dix screamed for help and another customer of the beer shop, John Dine, jumped up and bravely approached Wynn, holding out his hand for the knife. Wynn meekly passed it to him without comment and Dine tossed it to Sophia Dix for safekeeping.
The High Street, Highworth, 1906. (Author’s collection)
A surgeon and the police were sent for and Eliza Jones was carried upstairs, where she was made comfortable in one of the lodging house beds. Sophia Dix undressed her, noticing as she did that the knife had penetrated Eliza’s stays.
Surgeon William Gane arrived to attend to the wounded woman and found that she had a stab wound on her left-hand side, between her ninth and tenth ribs. At first glance, the wound, which was about an inch long, didn’t look too serious to the surgeon, who cleaned and dressed it and promised to call again the following morning. Meanwhile, Henry Wynn was marched off to the poor house, where he was locked up for the night.
Sophia Dix stayed with Eliza Jones until about half-past eleven that night, when her mistress sent her to get some rest. Eliza spent an uncomfortable night, throughout which she constantly insisted that she was going to die.
By the following morning, when Sophia saw Eliza again, it was obvious that her condition had worsened. Mr Gane called again between eight and nine o’clock but there was nothing further that he could do to help Eliza, and she died soon after the surgeon’s visit. When Gane later examined her body, he found that Wynn’s knife had entered Eliza’s side and penetrated to a depth of two and a quarter inches, nicking her colon and causing the contents of her intestines to escape, thus bringing about her rapid death from peritonitis.
Thomas Scaley, the assistant overseer for the parish of Highworth, visited Henry Wynn in custody at the poor house shortly after nine o’clock on the morning of 8 December, asking Wynn if he had heard that Eliza Jones had died. Wynn acknowledged that he had, adding that he had been very sorry to hear it. Scaley had then showed Wynn the knife that Sophia Dix had given to him earlier that morning, asking Wynn if he recognised it. ‘That was the knife I done the deed with’, said Wynn, miming his stabbing action for Scaley. He then explained to Scaley that Eliza Jones had left him and gone away with the blind man, making him so jealous that he had been forced to stab her. Wynn assured Scaley that he was truly sorry for what he had done and that he knew that he must now suffer for it.
The High Street, Highworth, 1915. (Author’s collection)
Henry Wynn was tried for the murder of Eliza Jones before Mr Justice Littledale. The proceedings were opened and concluded on the same day, 11 March 1836. Given that Wynn had already confessed to the murder, Mr Smith, for the prosecution, merely outlined the facts of the case, calling Sophia Dix, William Gane and Thomas Scaley as witnesses.
Wynn was not defended, although he was allowed to speak in his own defence. He claimed to recall very little about the night of 7 December after taking the knife out of his pocket. He did not remember stabbing Eliza Jones or know how she had died as, at the time of the murder, his reason was quite gone.
After Wynn had spoken, Sophia Dix was recalled to the witness box to add to her testimony with specific regard to Wynn’s mental state when he had stabbed his girlfriend. She stated that she didn’t believe that Wynn was ‘in a passion’ and that she didn’t think that he was ‘tipsy’.
It was then left to Mr Justice Littledale to sum up the case for the jury. Saying that he was sure that the jury would give the case their most serious and deliberate consideration, the judge then informed them that the question was whether the killing of Eliza Jones amounted to the full crime of murder or whether there was anything about the case that could reduce it to manslaughter. Having outlined the law on adultery for them, he pointed out that this only applied if the respective parties were man and wife and there was no evidence that Wynn and Jones had ever been legally married. Thus there were just two points for them to consider – if the accused had occasioned the death of Eliza Jones and, if so, whether he was guilty of murder or of manslaughter.
The jury chose the former option, finding Henry Wynn ‘Guilty of wilful murder’ and leaving the judge to mete out the prescribed sentence. Wynn was to be executed and his body buried within the confines of the prison. He was hanged just three days later, on 14 March 1836 at Salisbury.