After serving in the Army for eighteen years, Benjamin Purnell left the services and obtained a job as a porter in the Devizes Union Workhouse. It was there that he met and married his wife, Emily, although theirs was definitely not a match made in heaven. Emily was said to be ‘of a very aggravating disposition’, while Benjamin possessed a hair-trigger temper; the two fought like cat and dog. Within months of their marriage they had decided to live apart. Emily moved in with her brother, Edward Hampton, acting as housekeeper at his cottage in Avon Terrace, and Benjamin left the area. The couple’s one child stayed with Emily.
In May 1889, nine years after their marriage, Benjamin unexpectedly arrived back in Devizes. He found himself a steady job as a stone breaker for the Rural Sanitary Authority and he and Emily decided to give their relationship a second chance. Accordingly, Benjamin moved into Edward Hampton’s cottage. It was not a move that Hampton welcomed, as he was not at all fond of his brother-in-law. However, he did not feel that it was his place to keep a husband and wife apart and so grudgingly agreed to sharing his home. The cottage in Avon Terrace was only small and the Purnell’s were forced to share a bedroom with one of their nephews, Caleb.
Benjamin and Emily quickly fell back into their old ways of arguing about anything and everything and Benjamin was often heard to threaten to ‘do for’ his wife. In the early morning hours of 9 November 1889, he finally made good his threats.
On the previous day, Emily had treated herself to a new flannel petticoat. This simple act infuriated Benjamin, who accused her of wasting money. A furious row ensued and, when the couple eventually retired to bed, they were not on speaking terms.
Market Square, Devizes, in the 1950s. (Author’s collection)
At just before 6 a.m. on 9 November, Edward Hampton left the house as usual to go to his work as a snuff curer. He noticed a light burning in his sister and brother-in-law’s bedroom, but neither heard nor saw any other signs to indicate that the couple were not sleeping peacefully. Shortly afterwards, Caleb Hampton was awakened by his uncle Benjamin getting out of bed. Benjamin picked up the new petticoat, which was hanging on the bedpost and walked out of the room with it, grumbling unintelligibly to himself as he did.
Shortly afterwards, Emily also got up and began to get dressed. She was most put out when she couldn’t find her petticoat and, dressed only in her chemise, picked up the lamp from the room and followed her husband downstairs.
Caleb and his two brothers, who shared a bedroom with their father, clearly heard the previous night’s argument start afresh. ‘Give me my petticoat!’ demanded Emily, to which her husband replied angrily, ‘Go along, or I will break your skull.’
Things went ominously quiet downstairs for four or five minutes then all three boys heard a series of heavy thumping sounds, followed by silence. The three boys crept downstairs to see what was happening. Their uncle was standing in the front room in his shirtsleeves, taking a waistcoat and coat out of a drawer to finish getting dressed. One of the boys asked Benjamin where his aunt was, but got no reply.
Since Emily was nowhere to be seen, the boy opened the back door and looked outside. He immediately spotted a strange shape in a corner at the far end of the yard, about 7yds from the door and, as he got closer, he realised that it was his aunt Emily who was lying on her back unconscious, the lamp still tucked under her arm.
Sending his younger brother to find a policeman, the boy roused Mr Hillier, the next-door neighbour, who immediately sent for a doctor. When Dr Cowrie arrived just minutes later he quickly organised a stretcher and had Emily conveyed to the cottage hospital at Devizes, where she was admitted to the woman’s ward. Only then did anyone take a close look at her injuries, which were so severe that it was quite evident that Emily Purnell stood absolutely no chance of surviving. She died at five o’clock on the following morning, without ever having regained consciousness and a later post-mortem examination noted the presence of six serious wounds to her head, five of which had actually fractured her skull. Any one of the five fractures would have been sufficient to cause her death. A heavy hatchet, bearing traces of blood and human hair, was found in the yard a few feet from where her body had been lying, along with the remnants of her new petticoat, which had been torn to shreds.
The police were at Avon Terrace within minutes of the attack on Emily Purnell. PC Selman had been close by, patrolling his beat near to the railway station, but in spite of the speed of his arrival, when he got there Benjamin Purnell had disappeared. It was later established that, having finished getting dressed, he had walked into Devizes and gone to the borough police station, with the intention of giving himself up. Finding nobody there, he began to walk to the county police station, near to where he was arrested by Superintendent Baldwin later that morning. When first questioned by the police, Purnell told them, ‘I know I beat my wife’ and, when informed the next morning that Emily was dead, his only reaction was to say, ‘Oh, is she?’
An inquest was held into the death of Emily Purnell, presided over by coroner Mr F.T. Sylvester. It was surmised that Emily had either been told by Benjamin or had merely suspected that her new petticoat was in the yard and had gone outside to look for it by the light of the petroleum lamp that she had carried downstairs from the bedroom. It was evident that Emily had not been attacked inside the house since the severity of her injuries meant that she would almost certainly have dropped to the ground as soon as she was first struck. Had she run out of the house to escape her husband’s violence, it was unlikely that she would have taken the lamp with her, and, in all probability, she would have screamed or cried out. Since no screams had been heard, the inquest determined that the most likely scenario was that forty-four-year-old Emily was attacked as she bent to gather up the scraps of her ruined petticoat. The coroner’s jury returned a verdict of wilful murder against Benjamin Purnell, who was committed for trial at the next Wiltshire Assizes.
Shortly before his trial opened at Devizes, Purnell sent in an application to the judge, Baron Pollock, to be assigned a defence counsel since he was unable to afford to hire one. His request was granted and Mr Hussey Walsh was appointed to defend him, while Mr F.R.Y. Radcliffe and Mr Lopes prosecuted.
When the charge of wilful murder was read out to him at the opening of the proceedings, a haggard looking Purnell promptly pleaded ‘Guilty’. The court clerk approached him and asked him directly if he was pleading guilty or not guilty. ‘Yes, I am guilty of the charge,’ responded Purnell. It was only after a brief consultation with his counsel that Purnell changed his plea to the more customary ‘Not Guilty’ and the trial began.
Mr Radcliffe told the court of the Purnell’s unhappy marriage and of the constant bickering between him and his wife, before relating the events of the morning of 9 November. After hearing from several material witnesses, it was then left to Mr Hussey Walsh to present the case for the defence.
The defence counsel mysteriously told the court that there were circumstances in the case that had not been disclosed by the evidence and which he himself was unable to divulge. He did drop a very subtle hint to the jury, saying that it might give them cause for reflection. He had questioned Mr Hampton’s children and had asked each of them the question, ‘What was the dispute as to the child about?’ All of the children had agreed that the argument between Benjamin and Emily Purnell that had preceded her murder was about ‘the child’, although none of the children seemed to know why the couple should be quarrelling. Mr Hussey Walsh told the jury that there were many suppositions open to them, but he would leave them to wonder why there was so much mystery surrounding the cause of the argument.
The case for the prosecution was straightforward, according to prosecuting counsel, Mr Radcliffe. The number of blows struck and the choice of weapon proved conclusively that Benjamin Purnell had intended to murder his wife – after all, anybody who picked up a large hatchet and struck someone on the head with it six times must surely realise that they were likely to kill that person. Counsel for the defence disagreed. Mr Hussey Walsh put it to the jury that there had been dire provocation by the victim and that her husband had snatched the first weapon to hand and struck her in hot blood, without any intention of killing her.
The jury chose to believe the prosecution’s version of events, finding fifty-one-year-old Benjamin Purnell guilty of the wilful murder of his wife, Emily. Purnell listened to Baron Pollock’s sentence of death with a dazed, somewhat despairing look on his face before being taken from the court back to prison at Devizes, where hangman James Berry carried out the sentence on 9 December 1889. Afterwards, Purnell’s body was buried within the prison walls.
The defence counsel’s enigmatic hints about an argument concerning a child remain a tantalising mystery. However, in reporting the murder, the local newspapers of the time clearly state that Benjamin and Emily Purnell had one child, who lived with Emily at her brother’s home. Yet curiously, in describing the sleeping arrangements at Avon Terrace, the same newspapers also state that the cottage had two bedrooms, one occupied by Emily’s brother, Mr Hampton and two of his sons, the other by Emily, Benjamin and Caleb, the youngest son of Mr Hampton. No mention is made of the whereabouts of the Purnell’s child, who, assuming that he or she was born in wedlock, would have been eight or nine years old at the time of Emily’s murder – the same age as Caleb Hampton. A search of the records pertaining to the Hampton family seem to indicate that, by the time Caleb was one month old, his father, Edward, is recorded as being widowed.
Were the contemporary newspapers simply mistaken in reporting that the Purnell’s had a child together and that this child lived with Emily at Avon Terrace? If not, where was he or she when the murder occurred? Was this ‘the child’ referred to by the counsel for the defence during the trial? And, if so, why was he or she the subject of the argument that precipitated Emily’s murder? Why was Mr Hussey Walsh unable to reveal any further details, particularly if these details might possibly have saved his client’s life? Was Emily Purnell really killed simply because she had frittered her money away on a new petticoat or was there another motive? So long after the murder, it seems that these questions are destined to remain unanswered.
[Note: Some recently written accounts of the murder, particularly those on the internet, give the couple’s name as Purcell and the location of the murder as Bradford-upon-Avon. In writing this account, I have taken information from contemporary newspapers, which use the name Purnell and give the location of the murder as Devizes. (Hampton’s residence is confirmed as Avon Court, Devizes in census records of the time.)]