William Hugh Cousins, aged forty-four, was a married man with four children, but for ten years he had been living apart from his wife and family. His wife, Mary Ann Cousins, lived with the children at a cottage in Durrington, while William lived as man and wife with Miss Edith Jessie Cable at Laburnum Cottages in Alderbury. Miss Cable had three children, the youngest of whom was born in 1921 and was fathered by William Cousins.
Cousins desperately wanted his wife to grant him a divorce so that he could marry Miss Cable, but Mary Ann was a staunch Roman Catholic and divorce was against her religious beliefs. Besides which, even though he had left her ten years ago, Mary Ann still seemed to hold out hopes of a reconciliation with her husband.
Mr and Mrs Cousins spoke on the telephone on 5 June 1939 and whatever the conversation between them, it prompted William to write a registered letter to his wife. The letter was headed ‘Please do not stand in my way of happiness and justice’ and continued:
Dear Mother,
With reference to our conversation this morning re to come and live together again, I cannot see no matter how I have tried of my ever living happy with you and after what I have done does not wish to come back again to you even when your ten lodgers has gone. But you could make me happy if you tried and forgave me for my wrong doings. But please take this as final. I cannot ever go back again. There is only left for me one way out if you don’t take divorce proceedings against me. I must do something, even if it costs me all I have got and that is not much. From your broken-hearted husband. Please don’t ask me to come back at any future date. I cannot.
Yours W.H. Cousins. [sic]
In May of that year, Edith Cable had become ill and on 22 May she was admitted to Salisbury hospital where she underwent an operation on her stomach. She was discharged to a convalescent home in Bournemouth, where she was due to stay until 13 July. At first Edith Cable and William Cousins continued to exchange affectionate letters but on 8 July, Edith suddenly seemed to change. She wrote to Cousins advising him that she wanted to end their relationship and to be alone, asking him to arrange for her clothes to be packed up so that she could collect them when she left the convalescent home.
Cousins had driven to Bournemouth to see Edith Cable on 8 July and the two had gone out together in the car. On 9 July, Cousins again appeared at the Convalescent Home and Miss Cable was seen to go out to his car to meet him. It was the last time that she was to be seen alive.
At about half past nine on the evening of 9 July, William’s daughter, Kathleen Cousins, arrived home and found her father in conversation with her mother in the kitchen. Kathleen went upstairs and shortly afterwards Mary Ann joined her in her bedroom, speaking briefly to Kathleen before returning downstairs. Whatever Mary Ann said to Kathleen obviously worried the girl since she immediately decided to go downstairs herself. She had just got to the top of the stairs when she heard a gunshot, followed by a shout from her mother of ‘Kath. Kath. He has shot me!’ then a second shot. William Cousins immediately called out to Kathleen telling her not to come into the kitchen, but to send one of the lodgers in instead.
As a way of earning more money, having to bring up her children alone, Mary Ann Cousins had let some rooms to boarders. Now, in addition to her family, there were four male lodgers in the house, all of whom had been asleep in their bedrooms at the time of the shooting.
John O’Brien – one of three cousins all named O’Brien who were lodging with Mrs Cousins and her children – was awakened by a woman screaming at just after half past nine. Moments later, Kathleen Cousins burst into his bedroom, in a state of panic. The three O’Brien’s ran to alert Samuel Fiddler, the fourth lodger. As Fiddler got up, he heard a man’s voice shout cheerfully from downstairs, ‘Come on down, you Irish boys.’
Fiddler followed the O’Brien’s down to the kitchen. As John and Timothy O’Brien opened the kitchen door, they were greeted by William Cousins, who calmly told them, ‘Take this gun, go to the police station and fetch a policeman. I have shot my wife.’
John O’Brien took the gun and passed it to Samuel Fiddler, who was still coming downstairs at the time. Fiddler went back up to his room and left the gun safely there then made his way to the kitchen. As he entered the kitchen, William Cousins approached him and shook his hand telling him, ‘This is the third I have done.’ He then asked Fiddler if he would stay on and look after the children. Fiddler saw Mrs Cousins’ body lying on the floor, covered by a tablecloth, and set off for the police station at Durrington. He arrived there soon after the O’Brien’s and, within minutes, Constable Zebedee was driving to the house, with PC Pierce following in another car.
As soon as Zebedee arrived, he saw Mrs Cousins’ body and removed the tablecloth to see if he could render any first aid, but the woman was clearly dead. Hearing a voice from upstairs, Zebedee shouted to ask if it was Mr Cousins. ‘Yes. I am just coming down,’ replied Cousins.
Durrington in the 1920s. (Author’s collection)
Cousins came into the kitchen and shook hands with PC Zebedee. ‘I am going to make things as easy for you as I can,’ he told the constable. There is only one way out of this. I have lived a man and I will die a man. My wife lies dead on the mat there. I shot her just now.’ Zebedee tried to caution him, but Cousins was determined to have his say. ‘I know I shall hang for this,’ he continued, ‘but I don’t mind that. Out in the yard in a car is another dead woman, the woman I love. I strangled her at Ringwood at ten to eight tonight. After I had strangled her and driven about 100 yards, I thought I saw her move, so I shot her.’ Just then Mrs Cousins appeared to make a slight movement, an involuntary twitch of the muscles. Immediately William snatched a whisky bottle from the table and threw it at his wife’s head. ‘She is not dead yet,’ he explained to the startled policeman. ‘Give me the gun again. I’ll see she shan’t live to have the laugh over me.’
Cousins then handed a .410 gun cartridge to PC Zebedee telling him that, although he had given the gun to the lodgers, since they were all Irish like his wife, he had been too frightened to give them the cartridge in case they shot him.
When PC Pierce arrived at the cottage, Cousins greeted him cordially, almost as if he were an invited guest. He knew Pierce and insisted on shaking his hand, telling him, ‘I have just killed my wife. Or at least, I hope I have.’ Pierce cautioned Cousins not to say any more, but Cousins insisted, saying, ‘I want to help you all I can.’
He then led the officers to his car parked in the yard outside and unlocked the front passenger side door. Edith Cable was sitting in the passenger seat, her body covered by a coat, on the lap of which had been scattered a bunch of sweet peas. Cousins pulled back the coat and gently kissed Edith Cable before locking the car door again and passing the key to the police.
Cousins was taken to Amesbury police station and a thorough search was made of his car. A spent cartridge was found in the back, along with three empty quart bottles of beer and a glass that had obviously been used. The police also found numerous letters in the car, some of which were correspondence between Cousins and Edith Cable and one that was addressed to the chief of police, Salisbury. The letter was dated Wednesday 21 June 1939 and related that Cousins wanted to finish this ‘horrific life’ as he had been deprived of the woman he wished to marry. He had always said that only death would part himself and Miss Cable and it was true. Cousins wrote that he had no intention of committing suicide, but intended to die on Winchester Scaffold with a good heart for the woman he loved.
Charged on the following morning with the murders of Edith Cable and Mary Ann Cousins, William Cousins professed himself to be ‘exceptionally glad’ and ‘as happy as a sand lark’ and only wished he could have ‘got the other three’, although he did not specify who those three might be.
An inquest into the deaths of the two women was opened at the Amesbury Public Assistance Union before County Coroner Mr H. Dale. It was a particularly poignant occasion as William Cousins junior, William and Mary Ann’s son, had been married only that morning. Obviously, neither his father nor his mother had attended his wedding, which should have been a happy family occasion.
The bodies of the two dead women had been taken by ambulance to the mortuary at Amesbury and, according to Dr Neighbour, both had still been warm on arrival. He had conducted a post-mortem examination on both women, finding them to have suffered gunshot wounds that could not have been self-inflicted. Edith Cable had also been partially asphyxiated before being shot. The deaths of both women were attributed to gunshot wounds and resultant shock.
After hearing evidence of formal identification and the medical evidence, the coroner adjourned the inquest pending the outcome of criminal proceedings. Meanwhile, Cousins made three appearances before magistrates at Salisbury before being committed for trial at the next Wiltshire Assizes.
His trial opened before Mr Justice Croom-Johnson at Devizes, with Mr Scott Henderson prosecuting and Mr J. Skelhorn and Mr M. Hughes appearing for the defence. Cousins, who was tried only for the murder of his wife, pleaded ‘Not Guilty’.
As expected, much of the trial focused on Cousins’ mental state at the time of the murder, with the defence offering a plea of insanity. It was the prosecution’s contention that a man was assumed to be sane unless he is proved otherwise and the counsel for the prosecution pointedly asked several witnesses about Cousins’ conduct at the time of the murder. His daughter, Kathleen, described him as ‘exceptionally calm’ and ‘barely agitated’. PC Zebedee testified that, as far as he was concerned, Cousins’ conduct did not seem strange, although he conceded that the defendant throwing a whisky bottle at his dead wife’s head had seemed somewhat unusual at the time.
The defence called several witnesses to testify on the subject of Cousins’ mental state. The first of these was Mr A.B. Lemon, a solicitor who had acted professionally for Cousins for about ten years. Lemon had seen his client a few days before the murders and stated that, at that time, he had been very strange in his manner. Normally a quiet, gentle man, Lemon believed that Cousins was distraught and more than capable of becoming violent. He had been so concerned by his client’s uncharacteristic behaviour that he had requested that a clerk remain in the office while he was dealing with Cousins. He had hurried through his business with the defendant then ushered Cousins out of the office as soon as he politely could. On that occasion, the purpose of the meeting between the solicitor and his client had been to discuss a possible divorce and Lemon had advised Cousins that the chances of him getting a divorce from his wife were pretty slim.
Wiltshire Assizes jury form, dating from 1936. (Author’s collection)
The defence next called Dr Arthur Guirdham, the head of a private mental hospital and a specialist in diseases of the mind. He had examined Cousins on 29 September and stated that Cousins had continued to insist that he was ‘very happy’. In conversation, Cousins tended to wander wildly off topic, harping on about trivial details of the First World War rather than sticking to the point. The doctor told the court that Cousins had suffered from severe headaches after a motorcycle accident five years earlier and also complained of cold, numb feelings starting around his heart and spreading around his body. He had been oversensitive and unreasonably afraid of a standard eye test using a torch. Although he had eventually been convinced that it was a harmless routine procedure, he had continued to show irrational fear, trembling and becoming agitated when the test was repeated. Guirdham’s diagnosis was that Cousins was mentally abnormal and suffered from schizophrenia. The main manifestations were that he did not react to particular sets of emotional cues in the way a normal person would do. The doctor gave the example that something that may make a normal person depressed might possibly have the opposite effect on Cousins.
The disease would affect Cousins’ ability to differentiate between right and wrong and, in the case of the murder of his wife, Cousins was even now totally convinced that he had done right rather than wrong. The doctor told the court that Cousins believed that his wife had been unfaithful to him and that two of her four children had been fathered by another man. ‘That might not be a delusion at all,’ interjected the judge, who wanted clarification as to whether or not Cousins knew right from wrong when he shot his wife. The doctor drew the court’s attention to the letter that Cousins had written to the chief of police, in which he had stated that he was prepared to die on the gallows. Cousins clearly knew that what he was doing was against the law of the land, but his disease had affected his values, making the act seem not wrong in his mind.
Dr Guirdham was prepared to say that he believed that Cousins was completely insane at the time that he killed both his wife and Edith Cable. His opinion was backed up by Dr R.F. Barbour of Bristol, who had examined Cousins on four occasions and had consequently diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia.
The prosecution had also called a medical witness, Dr Hugh Grierson, the senior medical officer at Wandsworth Prison. He had agreed that Cousins was suffering from a mental illness, but believed that it was in its very early stage. Describing Cousins as of ‘a paranoid type but not a paranoiac’, Grierson had been adamant that, at the time Cousins had killed his wife, he had known right from wrong.
The defence having rested, it was left to Mr Justice Croom-Johnson to sum up the case. He instructed the jury that they could return one of three verdicts – not guilty, guilty or guilty but insane. There was, he pointed out, no dispute about the facts of the case, but there was a dispute about the state of Cousins’ mind and the onus of proof of mental impairment rested with the defence. There had been nothing in Cousins’ mental history prior to the murders to suggest insanity – in fact all that was known about him was that he was apparently a hard-working and respectable man with a kindly disposition.
The judge emphasised the importance of the various items of correspondence written and received by Cousins between 22 May and 8 July. The jury would probably agree that Cousins was an abnormal person, but did what they had heard in court indicate that he was insane? Reminding them that they should only be considering the case that was before them – that of the murder of Mary Ann Cousins – the judge pointed out that all three of the medical witnesses called had identified some degree of mental illness in the defendant. However, there was disagreement between the prosecution and the defence as to the extent of that illness. Were the jury satisfied by the medical witnesses called by the defence, who believed that, at the time of the murder of his wife, Cousins was labouring under a defect of reason that prevented him from knowing the nature and quality of what he was doing?
The jury retired for an hour and a half before returning a verdict of ‘Guilty’. Immediately, the clerk of the court asked Cousins if he had anything to say that sentence should not be passed on him. Cousins began to speak, but his voice was so quiet that the judge didn’t even realise that he was speaking. He put on his black cap and sentenced Cousins to be executed. Cousins, who showed no sign of emotion at his sentence, was removed from the court, at which the judge discharged the jury and ordered that the case of the murder of Edith Jessie Cable should be marked ‘not proceeded with’.
At this point, it was brought to the judge’s attention that Cousins had tried to speak but had not been recognised. The judge immediately ordered that Cousins be brought back to court and given the opportunity to speak. Cousins, however, merely wanted to assure the judge that he was confident that he had received a fair trial and that he sincerely regretted causing trouble to the families concerned, particularly his own family. He hoped that they would soon forgive and forget him. ‘Edie,’ said Cousins, ‘was one of the pleasantest women and best women a man could wish to live with and for that reason I am still willing and prepared to die for her only.’
Willing or not, Cousins was not to get his wish. The man who intended to die on ‘Winchester Scaffold’ was later reprieved, certified insane and ordered to be detained at Broadmoor Asylum.