Twenty-eight-year-old Norman Shilton, a postman, was slowly dying from cancer. He had been seriously ill for more than two years and, by August 1953, it was obvious that he had only a very short time left to live. Only then did Bessie, his devoted wife, ask her mother-in-law, Frances Shilton, to sleep at the house in Queens Road, Salisbury.
On 16 August, Frances left the house at twenty-past eleven in the morning for a brief visit to her own home in Clarendon Road, arranging to return at three o’clock when she promised to take her granddaughter out ‘if daddy was still all right’. Bessie assured her that she would telephone her immediately should anything happen to Norman and Frances had no reason to doubt her – after all, Bessie had always been the perfect wife to her son, keeping the house spotless and caring for him devotedly throughout his long illness, refusing to allow him to be taken into hospital.
When she returned at three o’clock, Frances was concerned to find the front door of the house locked against her. She knocked and shouted for several minutes, but there was no answer, so she went through a neighbour’s home to get to the back door. That too was locked and, looking through the window into the dining room, where a downstairs bed had been made up for Norman, Frances saw that the bed was empty.
Mrs Shilton turned to the neighbours, Mr and Mrs Pearce, for help and Richard Pearce managed to ease up the sash window in the dining room and climb through it. As he scrambled over Norman’s bed, he found his body lying on the floor at the side of it.
A strong smell of gas pervaded the house and Mr Pearce hurried to the kitchen to try and find the source. There, lying on an eiderdown on the kitchen floor, he found Bessie Shilton and her daughter, Linda Bessie, who was two years and eleven months old. On the kitchen table stood two bottles, one containing Norman Shilton’s sleeping tablets, the other junior aspirins. Both mother and daughter appeared dead.
Salisbury High Street and Poultry Cross, 1950s. (Author’s collection)
A doctor was immediately called and Linda was taken out into the garden. Dr Clive Sheen attempted artificial respiration and also injected the child, but it was too late. Meanwhile, Bessie Smith, who was alive but deeply unconscious, was rushed to the Salisbury Infirmary. It took two days before she had recovered sufficiently to be told that her daughter was dead.
A post-mortem examination on little Linda confirmed that she had died as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning. She had had a cold and traces of junior aspirin were found in her body, although that had not contributed to her death. That Bessie had intended to kill Linda and herself was blatantly obvious, since she had left two suicide notes, one addressed to ‘My own dear Mum and Dad’ and the other to Norman’s parents.
The letter to her own parents read:
My own dearest Mum and Dad,
Well my dears, I am writing this letter to you with a broken heart for Norman has passed on and now I have nothing left to live for. Don’t think I don’t love you dearly though. Believe me my dears, I do, oh I do. But my love for Norman was even stronger as ours has been such a perfect partnership and because our love and contentment for each other was so perfect it seems it was too good for us to share for more than four years. For now the light of my life has been taken from me so Linda and I are going to join her beloved Daddy in the world beyond.
Detective Sergeant Thomas Shales charged Bessie Shilton with her daughter’s murder while she was still in hospital and, on her discharge she was immediately taken before a special sitting of magistrates at the Guildhall in Salisbury. She was to make four appearances in magistrate’s court in all and, between hearings, was remanded in Holloway Prison.
Much was made at the court hearings of the closeness between Bessie and Norman Shilton. According to Norman’s mother, even before his illness, her son and his wife had been a devoted couple who shunned visitors, being perfectly content with each other’s company and that of their daughter. Not only that, but Bessie was also an exceptionally good mother to Linda and absolutely worshipped her daughter. Frances Shilton told the magistrate’s court that the idea of her daughter-in-law killing her granddaughter would be the very last thing she expected.
The district nurse and doctor who had attended Norman throughout his illness were called to give evidence. Dr Sheen, who had tried so hard to resuscitate Linda, had been the Shilton’s regular GP. Dr Sheen spoke of the remarkable courage that Bessie had shown throughout her husband’s illness. He had visited Norman on the morning of his death, at which time Bessie seemed calm and composed and resigned to the fact that her beloved husband was all too rapidly nearing the end of his life. He too had had no inkling that Bessie might attempt suicide and take her daughter’s life as well.
Mrs Olive Norris, the district nurse, had also visited the Shilton’s home at about twenty past ten on the morning of Norman’s death, a Sunday. Over the course of Norman’s illness and her daily calls at the house to attend him, she had come to know the family well. She too testified that Bessie had been her normal self that day and, although she had not seen Linda on that visit, she had been told that the child was upstairs with a slight cold. Mrs Norris told the court of the courage with which both Norman and Bessie had faced his terminal illness. It had been suggested many times that Norman should go into hospital, but neither he nor Bessie would even entertain the idea. Yet while the couple insisted that they just wanted to be together for however long they had left, the mammoth task of nursing her husband day and night, coupled with looking after her home and a young child had put an enormous strain on Bessie, particularly since Norman was in great pain for the months prior to his death.
One of the final witnesses called before the magistrates was WPC Phyllis Thomas, who had been assigned to guard Bessie Shilton at Salisbury Infirmary. She testified that Bessie had told her that Linda ‘cried in my arms because her daddy was dead. I could not bear it. I didn’t mean to kill her. She was perfect. Everyone said she was too perfect to live – and I loved her so much. She was such a comfort to me in all the trouble I had.’
Twenty-five-year-old Bessie Shilton sat in court, crying quietly as the evidence against her unfolded. An attractive, dark-haired young woman, dressed in a grey coat over a flower-patterned summer dress, she remained calm, if visibly upset. When the chief magistrate informed her that she was to be committed to stand trial at the next Wiltshire Assizes for the murder of her daughter, she smiled faintly at him and whispered, ‘Yes, sir. Thank you.’
The trial at Devizes was presided over by Mr Justice Parker and Bessie Shilton pleaded ‘Not Guilty’ to the murder of her daughter, Linda Bessie. John Stephenson defended Mrs Shilton and Mr H.J. Phillimore QC prosecuted.
Most of the witnesses from the magistrate’s court testified at the assizes and, from the beginning, it seemed very much as though the emphasis of the proceedings were on Bessie Shilton’s mental state at the time of the murder.
Frances Shilton again championed her daughter-in-law, telling the court that there was no better housewife in the world than Bessie. According to Mrs Shilton, Bessie kept her house and her daughter beautifully clean and had never once been heard to complain about her circumstances. Unwilling to be apart from Norman for even a minute, she had slept on two chairs in his bedroom night after night. Watching her adored husband in constant pain and slowly dying had been a terrible strain on her.
Dr Sheen and Nurse Norris echoed Mrs Shilton in describing the effects of Norman’s illness on Bessie Shilton, both saying that, towards the end, the signs of her extreme strain were clearly visible.
The defence called the only new witness, Dr Thomas Christie, the principal medical officer at Holloway Prison. Christie had been caring for Bessie Shilton since her arrival at Holloway on 20 August and described her as both severely depressed and clearly suffering from a disease of the mind. Had he been Mrs Shilton’s private physician, he added, he would have unhesitatingly arranged for her immediate admission to a mental hospital for observation.
Christie stated that she had become almost obsessive in caring for her husband, wanting to be at his side for twenty-four hours a day just in case he needed her. He also pointed out that Bessie was afraid that Norman’s illness may be hereditary and so might be visited on her little girl. This left Bessie under such a tremendous pressure that, when she killed Linda, she had a severe defect of reason that would have left her totally incapable of knowing that what she was doing was wrong. On the contrary, what she was doing in trying to join Norman with her daughter would have seemed absolutely the right thing to do.
Uppermost in Bessie Shilton’s mind was the loss of her soul mate and the fact that Linda had been so distraught at the death of her daddy. It was only too easy to see that, for Bessie, the only option was that the closely-knit family should stay together and that her only motive for killing her daughter and attempting to kill herself was that she and her daughter should be as a family with Norman again, wherever he might be.
Dr Christie finished by telling the court that Bessie had made a steady improvement since her admission to prison. What he described as ‘the severe phase’ had now passed, although he could not rule out the possibility of a recurrence. At present, he could not regard her as certifiably insane, although he believed that she most probably was at the time of the murder.
It was left to the counsels for the prosecution and defence to make their closing arguments and even Phillimore for the prosecution seemed largely sympathetic towards Bessie. Calling the circumstances of the case tragic and pitiful in the extreme, he nevertheless reminded the jury that it was their duty to give a verdict in accordance with the law.
After a three-and-a-half-hour trial, the jury of nine men and three women needed only five minutes to decide on their verdict, finding Bessie Ruth Irene Shilton ‘Guilty but insane’. Mr Justice Parker ordered that she be detained as a patient at Broadmoor Hospital until Her Majesty’s pleasure be made known.
Broadmoor Asylum, 1906. (Author’s collection)
Bessie had shown little emotion throughout the trial and while she undoubtedly deeply regretted killing her only daughter, it is probably fair to say that her deepest regret was having survived her attempted suicide.