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CRIME & PUNISHMENT

PRISONS CURRENTLY IN USE

Princetown prison, constructed between 1806 and 1809 and opened in the latter year, was built to hold prisoners from the Napoleonic Wars and the Anglo-American War of 1812. In 1851 it was reopened as a civilian prison but closed briefly in 1917 to be converted into a Home Office Work Centre for conscientious objectors released from prison. In 1920 it became a prison for some of the country’s most serious offenders. It suffered some damage in January 1932 during a riot by inmates, one of whom was shot and injured before order was restored. In 2007 it housed 646 prisoners. Famous former inmates included Michael Davitt, founder of the Irish National Land League and Nationalist MP, and Éamon de Valera, third President of Ireland.

Channings Wood prison, Denbury, near Newton Abbot, built partly by contract and partly prison labour, was opened in 1974. An adult male Category C institution, in 2008 it housed 731 prisoners.

Exeter prison, opened in about 1850, holds male adults and young offenders on remand to local courts from Cornwall, Devon and West Somerset. In 2005 it housed 533 prisoners.

FORMER PRISONS

The above prison replaced an older building. Exeter was also home to the Devon County Prison for Debtors, which closed in 1855 when the last inmates were moved to the county prison. The building later became a barracks for the First Devon Militia, and after further changes of use was largely demolished in 1909. The remaining wing was converted into houses, while part of the site was used as a church and later as a carpet and furniture showroom. Exeter Guildhall also had cells for housing prisoners, being last used thus in 1887.

Plymouth’s first prison, next to the Guildhall in Whimple Street, closed in the early nineteenth century. Millbay Prison was built to house French and American prisoners of war until they could be taken to Princetown.

Devonport prison, Pennycomequick, was completed and opened in 1849. After the passing of the Prison Act in 1877 which required all gaols to be passed to state control, it was closed the following year. All inmates were transferred to Plymouth Borough Prison, Greenbank, also opened in 1849. It was closed in 1930 and the remaining inmates were transferred to Exeter. The building was converted into headquarters for City of Plymouth Police.

EXECUTIONS AT EXETER

The earliest executions recorded at Exeter were those of Alured de Porta, Elias Poyfed, Richard Stonyng, Thomas Amener, and Roger Twate, on 29 December 1285, for their role in the murder of Walter Lechlade, Precentor of Exeter Cathedral, in November 1283. Porta has the dubious distinction of being the only Mayor of Exeter to be hanged for murder.

The last man to be hanged at Exeter for an offence other than murder was William Bissett, on 20 August 1830. Aged sixty-five, ‘an unhappy and miserably degraded old man’, he was convicted at Exeter Assizes for having had ‘a certain venereal and carnal intercourse’ with a dog on 11 June that year, accused by Margaret McGennis who claimed to have witnessed the offence at Newton Abbot.

The last convicted murderer to be hanged in public at Exeter was Mary Ann Ashford, on 28 March 1866, found guilty of poisoning her husband. Since public hangings were abolished by Parliament in 1868, the following were convicted of murder in Devon and hanged at Exeter Prison:

William Taylor, 11 October 1869

John MacDonald, 10 August 1874

William Hussell, 19 November 1877

Annie Tooke, 11 August 1879

William Williams, 28 March 1893

Edmund Elliott, 31 March 1909

George Cunliffe, 25 February 1913

James Honeyands, 12 March 1914

Frederick Brooks, 12 December 1916

Cyril Saunders, 30 November 1920

Ernest Moss, 7 December 1937

Ernest Moss was the last convicted Devon murderer to go to the scaffold, for battering his girlfriend Kitty Bennett to death with a shotgun at Woolacombe on 9 August 1937.

Gordon Trenoweth, who killed shopkeeper Alfred Bateman in Falmouth on Christmas Eve 1942, was the last man to be hanged at Exeter, on 6 April 1943. After his execution, the gallows were dismantled and taken to Jersey where they were used in one further execution about ten years later.

The last woman to be hanged for murder at Exeter was Charlotte Bryant of Dorse, convicted of poisoning her husband in 1935. She went to the gallows on 15 July 1936.

Thomas Eames, who stabbed his wife Muriel to death at their home in Plymouth on 27 February 1952, after she had told him she was leaving him for another man, was the last man in Devon to be put to death for murder. He was executed at Winchester on 15 July.

Brian Churchill, who stabbed Jean Agnes Burnett to death, a teenager whom he had been stalking for several months, on a bus journey in Exeter on 22 July 1952, was found guilty of murder on 30 October, and thus became the last person in Devon to be sentenced to death. This was commuted to life imprisonment three weeks later.

THE CULLOMPTON KILLER

In 1693 or 1694 Thomas Austin, a Cullompton farmer who had lived beyond his means for some time, turned to fraud and eventually highway robbery in an effort to try to discharge his debts. After robbing and killing one wealthy gentleman on the road, he had an argument with his wife, and went to visit his uncle and aunt, but only the latter was in the house. He attacked and killed her and her children, stole all the money he could find in the house, returned home and cut the throats of his wife and children. His uncle came after him, and had him brought to justice. He was arrested and found guilty of murdering his wife, aunt and seven children, and hanged.

THE LAST DUEL IN DEVON

The last challenge of pistols at dawn in the county was in 1833, when Dr Peter Hennis, an Irishman who had gained a reputation for his hard work during the cholera epidemic of 1832, was accused by Judge Sir John Jeffcott of spreading scurrilous gossip about him and his family. The practice of duelling was no longer strictly legal, but something of a grey area. They fought at Haldon Racecourse on 11 May, ironically ten days after Jeffcott had been knighted. Hennis was shot and wounded, died in agony about a week later, and was buried at St Sidwell’s Church, where his grave can still be clearly seen. Jeffcott was advised to flee to Sierra Leone before he was arrested for murder. He returned home a year later and was charged but acquitted due to lack of evidence. He took up an appointment in Australia, and in 1837 he drowned while being transferred to a prison ship as part of his duties. His body was never found.

THE MUTINEER

Richard Parker, born at Exeter in 1767, was the ringleader of the mutiny at the Nore, off Sheerness, Kent, on board HMS Sandwich in 1797, for which he was court-martialled and hanged.

BABY FARMERS

Baby farmers were a particularly gruesome aspect of Victorian England, whereby women would advertise to take infants off the hands of young women, usually unplanned and illegitimate children who were inconvenient to have around. The ‘farmers’ would demand a generous fee for the little ones’ upkeep, and then kill them. Two major cases occurred in Devon during this era, both leading to death sentences, although only one of the convicted parties went to the gallows.

In December 1864 Charlotte Winsor of Torquay offered to take little Thomas Harris, aged two months, off his mother, for a fee of 3s per week. Two months later Thomas’s dead body was found tied up in a parcel lying beside the road. Mrs Winsor was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death, but this was commuted to life imprisonment. As she admitted to having committed similar offences in the past, she was very fortunate to escape the rope. One of her victims had been the child of her own sister, who promised to pay her £4 if she would dispose of it. The sister only paid £2, and Mrs Winsor had never spoken to her since.

On 17 May 1879 parts of the mutilated body of Reginald Hede, the illegitimate baby son of Mary Hoskins of Camborne, were found by labourers in the River Exe. When police came to question Annie Tooke, a widow of Exeter, who had ‘adopted’ him, and asked her to produce the baby, she initially said that somebody else had taken him away about a fortnight earlier. The mother was arrested and charged with murder, but her innocence was established and she was acquitted. The police suspected that Mrs Tooke was lying, and while in custody she confessed to having suffocated the baby with a pillow, and then cut him up with a wood chopper. Although she later withdrew this confession, she was found guilty of murder and hanged on 11 August.

THE MAN THEY COULDN’T HANG

John Henry George Lee (1864–1945), known to posterity as ‘Babbacombe’ Lee, or ‘the man they couldn’t hang’, was unique in British crime history as the only man who survived three attempts to hang him for murder. He was charged with the killing of Emma Keyse, an elderly widow who had employed him as a live-in handyman, at her home, The Glen at Babbacombe, near Torquay, on 15 November 1884. He already had a police record for theft, and he was known to have a grudge against Mrs Keyse as she reduced his wages because he was lazy and unreliable. Although the evidence against him was largely circumstantial, he was found guilty at his trial in February 1885.

When he went to the gallows at Exeter Prison on 23 February James Berry, the executioner, made three attempts to hang him, but the trapdoor failed to open. As it was deemed inhuman to prolong his agony further, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He was released in December 1907 and, eager to exploit his experience, he sold his story to a newspaper and received a large fee which precluded any necessity for him to seek work ever again. John Lee being a common name, there is some doubt about what eventually became of him, but it is generally believed that he emigrated to New York, settled there with his common law wife, and died there in 1945, aged eighty.

THE UNSOLVED MULTIPLE MURDER

One of Devon’s most unpleasant murder cases, which involved the killing of three members of the same family, has never been solved. Around or soon after midnight on 12 June 1936, Emily Maye (seventy) and her unmarried daughters Joan (twenty-eight) and Gwyneth (twenty-five), who still lived with their parents at Croft Farm, West Charleton, were battered to death at their cottage. The gruesome discovery was made by Charles Lockhart, their live-in gardener, when he returned home late from a dance in the village. Emily and Joan were already dead, Gwyneth was still just alive but unconscious, and although rushed to hospital, she died a few hours later. Thomas Maye (seventy-one), husband and father of the victims, was found semi-conscious with severe injuries.

After he had recovered, he was charged with triple murder and sent for trial in November, pleading not guilty. The defence maintained that such injuries could not have been self-inflicted, and that the attack had been carried out by person or persons unknown. Maye was found not guilty and acquitted, although a few villagers suspected that he was a man of uncertain temper who might have been provoked into doing the deed. When he died in 1957, he was buried at West Charleton Church beside his wife and daughters.

TREASON

Plymouth-born Duncan Alexander Croall Scott-Ford (1921–42), of the Merchant Navy, was hanged for treason at Wandsworth Gaol after being convicted of supplying information to the Germans on the movement of shipping. Details of his trial were kept secret until after his execution. Newspapers reported that he had betrayed his country for £18 and paid the ultimate penalty, as a warning to other Merchant Navy sailors who might have been similarly approached. He was the youngest person ever to be executed in Britain under the Treachery Act.

Guy Burgess (1911–63), born in Devonport, was an intelligence officer and double agent, part of the ‘Cambridge Five’ spy ring that betrayed Western secrets to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. He defected to Moscow in 1951 and died an alcoholic twelve years later.

CYBERCRIME

Christopher Pile (1969–), an unemployed computer programmer from St Budeaux, Plymouth, known as ‘the Black Baron’, was jailed in 1995 for eighteen months in what was described as the first case of its kind in Britain under the Computer Misuse Act of 1990. He was found guilty at Exeter Crown Court of eleven offences, including creating two computer viruses and another piece of software which made viruses harder to detect. The damage caused, it was estimated, could run into several millions of pounds, and one company alone allegedly lost £500,000 because of his activities.