Barbaric Murders - Child victims, lady-killers and bodies in boxes (Infamous Murderers) Read online

  On the fourth day, ill, exhausted and starving, poor Anne Naylor’s speech faltered and she died, still strung up on the door. The whole weight of her body was held up by the ropes that tied her to the door. She could not fall, even when dead. She just hung there, as if crucified. The apprentices called out to the younger woman, ‘Miss Sally, Miss Sally! Nanny does not move!’

  Sally Morgan came up to see. ‘If she does not move, I will make her!’ Then she took off one of her shoes and hit the dead girl over the head with the heel. Sally Morgan could see no sign of life, called her mother and had the girl cut down. Sarah Metyard and her daughter then ordered the apprentices to go downstairs while they moved the girl’s body into the garret.

  They told the girls that Nanny had had a fit but had now recovered; they had locked her in the garret in case she should run away again. To make it seem as if all was relatively well, the younger woman took a plate of meat up at midday, saying it was for Nanny’s dinner.

  On the fourth day after the murder, the two women locked the body in a box, left the garret door open and the street door ajar. Then they set up a little charade, sending one of the apprentices up to call Nanny down to dinner, and to tell her that if she promised to behave well in future she would not be locked up any more. The girl came back downstairs with the news that Nanny was not there. After a show of searching the house, the two women came to the conclusion that Anne Naylor had run away once more.

  The two women had not reckoned on Anne Naylor’s sister, though. The little girl mentioned to a lodger in the Metyard household that was sure her sister was dead. Some of her clothes were still in the garret and she would not have run away without them. The little girl’s confidence was not respected, and the two women were furious that they might be given away. They murdered her and hid her body, like her sister’s.

  Anne Naylor’s body was kept in the box for two months. For all of that time the garret was kept locked, because the smell of the decaying body would give them away. In fact the smell became so penetrating and over-powering that the women decided to get rid of the body altogether. On Christmas Eve, they cut Anne Naylor’s body up. The head and trunk were tied up in one piece of cloth, and the arms and legs in another. One hand was kept to one side. It had one finger missing, which might make it recognizable as the hand of Anne Naylor; the two women burnt it straight away.

  The plan was to burn the entire body, bit by bit, but Sarah Metyard and her daughter were afraid the smell would arouse suspicion. Instead, they did something far riskier, which was to take the body parts to Chick Lane and tried to throw them over the wall into the public sewer, an open drain. They found that too difficult, and so just left them in the mud by the drain.

  It was only a matter of hours before the watchman found the parts of Anne Naylor’s body and reported his discovery to the constable. They were examined by the coroner, Mr Umfreville, but he assumed they were parts of a corpse illegally exhumed from a churchyard by resurrection men and took no further action. He did not suspect a murder.

  Four years passed, and Sarah Metyard and her daughter must have begun to believe that they had got away with the two murders. There was a new difficulty now. There were now continual quarrels and fights between the mother and the daughter. The mother thought she could remain in control by continuing to beat her daughter, but the daughter, now older and more assertive, naturally had other ideas. She tried threatening suicide to stop her mother’s ill-treatment; she then threatened to inform on her mother as a murderer, which is what she did. She must later have regretted it.

  At last it came out, and both the mother and the daughter were imprisoned. At their trial, both were sentenced to be executed the following Monday and their bodies dissected.

  Mrs Metyard was in a fit when she was put in the cart to take her to her execution, and just lay on the floor of the cart. When the cart reached the scaffold, she was still unconscious, and was – very unusually – hanged in that state. The daughter, meanwhile, wept incessantly until she was dead. After being left to hang for an hour, the bodies were taken to Surgeons’ Hall, where they were put on view to a curious public before being dissected.

  William Andrew Horne

  ‘justice delayed’

  William Andrew Horne’s father was a scholar, an educated man who tried in vain to educate his son. William was interested only in pleasure and his indulgent father decided to allow the youth his head. William acquired horse and hounds and ended up becoming a classic dissolute country squire.

  He seduced several girls, two of whom were his mother’s servants. Another was the daughter of a local farmer; she died, it was said, as a result of this unhappy liaison. William Horne had two illegitimate daughters, one of whom lived to the age of fifteen; the other was still living in 1759 and might have been respectably married if only Horne had given her financial support, but he refused to give her anything. He was miserly.

  But these were not the only vices. William Horne also had sex with his own sister, who gave birth to his son in February 1724. Horne told his brother Charles three days later, at ten o’clock at night, that they must take a ride. He then put the new-born baby in a bag and mounted his horse. William and Charles Horne rode together to Annesley in Nottinghamshire, taking it in turns to carry the bag. When they got near Annesley, William dismounted and asked Charles if the baby was still alive. Charles said it was. William took it and told his brother to wait until he came back. When he returned, Charles asked him what he had done with the baby. William said he had put it behind a haystack and covered it with hay.

  The following morning, after a very cold night, the child was found dead.

  Not long after this incident the two brothers quarrelled, and Charles told their father what had happened. The father probably understood all too well that both brothers would hang for what William had done, and swore Charles to secrecy. Charles kept his word until the old man’s death; he lived to the age of one hundred and two, dying in 1747.

  William Horne had not treated his brother Charles well. Now his severity would be rewarded. After their father’s death, Charles had some business to attend to with Mr Cooke, a solicitor in Derby, and decided to tell him of the infanticide many years before, asking his advice. The lawyer told him to go to a Justice of the Peace and make a full statement about the whole affair. Charles Horne then went as advised to a magistrate and told him about it, but the magistrate hesitated to take action on the matter, saying there was a danger that half the family might be hanged for it; since it had happened so long ago, surely it would be better to let it rest.

  So, in spite of Charles Horne having told three other people, his father, a lawyer and a magistrate, about the infanticide it remained a close secret.

  In 1754 Charles Horne became seriously ill and called in a Mr White of Ripley. Charles assumed he was about to die and so he unburdened himself to Mr White and asked his advice. Mr White did not want to give Charles Horne advice on the matter; he did not want to know about it; he did not want to get involved at all. Charles recovered within a few days. Mr White was surprised to see him looking so well and Charles said he had begun to recover as soon as he had told him about the death of the baby.

  Some time after this, William Horne, the bumpkin squire, quarrelled with a man named Roe at an inn regarding the killing of game. In the heat of the argument, Roe called Horne an ’incestuous old dog’. Horne unwisely prosecuted Roe for libel in the Ecclesiastical Court at Lichfield and made a dangerous enemy. Roe lost his case and was forced to pay all the legal costs. Roe swore revenge and heard a second-hand version of the not-so-close secret about the dead child which he thought he could use against William Horne. He heard that Charles Horne had mentioned something along the lines of his brother having starved an illegitimate child to death.

  Roe went off to a magistrate in Derbyshire and obtained a warrant. Charles was due to appear before the magistrate the following day. William heard about this and was worried that Charles was going to do h
im damage. William sent for Charles and told him he would (now) be his friend if he would deny the story about the child. Charles refused to do this unless William gave him five pounds, a startlingly small sum in the circumstances, in which case he would go straight to Liverpool and leave the country. It was, in fact, a very generous offer on Charles’s part, but William was too miserly to agree to part with five pounds to save his own life.

  Charles was examined by magistrates in Derbyshire, but they did not want to pursue the case. Then Roe applied to a Justice of the Peace in Nottinghamshire; this man issued a warrant for William Horne to be taken into custody. A constable went from Annesley with Mr Roe to William Horne’s house. They found that Horne was not there. They searched the house, but there was no sign of him. They made a second search. This time they noticed something they had not noticed before – a large linen chest. They asked Mrs Horne what was in it. She said it was full of table and bed linen. Roe wanted to see inside and was all for breaking it open, but Mrs Horne unlocked it for him, presumably not wanting to see her furniture damaged. As soon as it was opened, William Horne popped up out of it like a Jack-in-the-Box.

  He said, ‘It is a sad thing to hang me, for my brother Charles is as bad as myself, and he cannot hang me without hanging himself.’

  William Horne was taken into custody. Two Justices of the Peace committed him for trial at the next assizes. He had not been in prison very long when he applied for a writ of Habeas Corpus. On the strength of this application he was taken to London, where his counsel argued that he should be allowed bail, but the judges disagreed and he was sent to Nottingham Gaol.

  On 10 August 1759 he was tried before Lord Chief Baron Parker. His trial lasted nine hours, at the end of which he was found guilty and sentenced to death. He was hanged just after his 75th birthday, for a murder he had committed twenty-five years before.

  Captain John Sutherland

  ‘and the murder of a cabin boy’

  During the Napoleonic Wars, a British transport ship, The Friends, was anchored in the Tagus estuary about a mile downstream from Lisbon, within sight of the beautiful white Belem Tower. It was 5 November, 1808. During the day both the captain and the mate were ashore along with the other two crew members. The only people left on board were the captain’s servants, a 13-year-old cabin boy called William Richardson, and a negro called Jack Thompson. It was Jack Thompson who was to be the principal witness at the trial, though even he was unable to explain what happened.

  At about eight o’clock in the evening, the captain came back on board, went to his cabin and called the cabin boy down. A few minutes later, the cabin boy went back up on deck and told Jack Thompson the captain wanted to speak to him. The captain wanted to know from Jack how they were to manage the watch that night, given that the mate and the other two seamen were staying ashore. Jack Thompson volunteered to keep watch until twelve o’clock. The captain agreed to this and asked Jack to be sure to call him at twelve, implying that he would take over the next watch himself. Meanwhile, Jack was to let him know if any ship came alongside.

  The captain then asked Jack Thompson to send William Richardson down to him, which he did. It is not known what went wrong in the next few minutes. There seems to have been no build up to the violence that erupted at all, but only about five minutes after the cabin boy entered the captain’s cabin, Jack Thompson heard the boy shouting his name, as if calling for help. Unfortunately, Jack did not go down straight away, as he assumed the captain was ‘only beating the boy’, which was not unusual. If he had gone down immediately, he might have saved the boy’s life. But the boy went on calling out, so Jack at last went down to see what was happening.

  Jack Thompson saw William Richardson lying wounded on the floor and Captain Sutherland standing over him waving a dagger. The cabin boy was obviously relieved that Jack Thompson had come in, and said straight away, ‘Jack Thompson, look here. Captain Sutherland has stabbed me.’ The boy lifted his shirt and showed him a terrible wound in his abdomen, near the groin, and his intestines were falling out. Jack Thompson turned to leave the cabin with the idea of fetching medical help for the boy, and Captain Sutherland said, ‘Jack, I know I have done wrong.’ Rushing out, Jack called back, ‘I know very well you have.’

  Up on deck, Jack called out to the next ship, another transport called the Elizabeth, to try to get assistance. There was apparently no surgeon on the Elizabeth. Jack then went ashore with Captain Sutherland to find a surgeon. They met a couple of soldiers and told them what had happened, and then returned to the ship. When they got there they found that two surgeons had already tended the cabin boy, dressed his wound and put him to bed.

  The next morning, William Richardson, Captain Sutherland and Jack Thompson were all transferred to another ship, the Audacious. The Friends’ mate had meanwhile gone back on board and heard the story about the attack on the cabin boy. He had asked Captain Sutherland what he had been doing with the dagger. Sutherland said that he would never hurt anyone else with it, and threw the weapon into the sea.

  When all three were on the Audacious, the murderer, his witness and his still-living victim, Jack Thompson heard Captain Sutherland apologizing to the boy. He was very sorry for what he had done, and said so more than once.

  William Richardson died of his wound nine days later.

  It was not until 22 June, 1809, seven months later, that Captain Sutherland was brought to trial. Sutherland was tried at the Admiralty Sessions before Sir William Scott and Sir Nash Grose, indicted for the wilful murder of William Richardson. Although the incident had taken place in Portuguese waters, it had taken place on a British ship and was therefore still under the jurisdiction of the Admiralty. Several witnesses were called, but the main one was Jack Thompson.

  It took the jury very little time to agree a guilty verdict, and Sir William Scott passed sentence of death. Sutherland was to be hanged at Execution Dock in London and his body afterwards handed over to the surgeons for dissection. Sutherland was overcome after the sentence was passed. He had a wife and five children to consider, as well as his own awful fate. He was close to fainting and had to be helped away by attendants.

  It is still not clear what happened in the captain’s cabin that could have led to an armed attack on a defenceless boy. It appears to have been an act of sadistic and unprovoked violence without any justification at all.

  Esther Hibner

  (mother & daughter) and Ann Robinson

  The victim in this case was Frances Colpitt, a ten-year-old pauper. This poor little girl was apprenticed to Esther Hibner, who lived at Platt Terrace, Pancras Road in London. The apprenticeship, which started in April 1828, was to learn the making of tambour-work (embroidery).

  It was in the October of 1828, after Frances had been working for the Hibners for six months, that the ill-treatment started. It was not just Frances who suffered, but the other children in the Hibners’ care as well.

  They were kept short of food, compelled to get up and start working at three in the morning, kept working until eleven at night, and sometimes later. They were given no beds, but made to sleep on the floor with only an old rug to cover them at night. They were allowed no exercise. The breakfast they were given consisted of a slice of bread and a cup of milk; after that they were given no more food all day. Sometimes Esther Hibner declared that Frances and the other children had not earned their breakfast. Then they were given a few potatoes at midday, and afterwards nothing more until the next day. They were given meat to eat only once a fortnight. On Sundays they were locked in the kitchen all day.

  This cruel regime took a terrible toll of the children, and three of them died as a result of it.

  Frances Colpitt was reduced to a very low state. She had sores on her feet and abscesses on her lungs, and it was the bursting of an abscess on the lung that led to her death. Esther Hibner’s daughter, also called Esther, had taken Frances from her work, knocked her to the ground, picked her up and knocked her down again. When Esther H
ibner senior was told that Frances was lying ‘ill’ in the work room, instead of showing any concern for her welfare and making sure she was allowed to recover, she said, ‘Let her lie there’.

  After that, Frances could scarcely crawl about the house. Esther junior told her to clean the stairs. Frances tried to do this, but collapsed in a state of exhaustion. For disobeying her order, Esther beat her with a cane and then made her carry on cleaning the stairs. It emerged at the trial that both Esther Hibner junior and Esther Hibner senior had caned Frances, and that Ann Robinson had caned her too.

  A doctor attended Frances Colpitt both before and after she died. He found large sores on Frances’ feet. Her toes were ‘mortifying’ and falling off. After her death, Frances Colpitt’s body was examined closely and found to be in a dreadful state as a result of sustained maltreatment by the Hibners and Ann Robinson.

  At the trial of the three people who had abused Frances Colpitt, the apprentices themselves gave evidence of the cruel regime they had been subjected to. Mrs Hibner said she would leave her defence in the hands of her daughter. The daughter said the apprentices had lied about the way they were treated. Ann Robinson took the same line of defence – that the apprentices were lying. She also claimed she had less responsibility for what happened to the apprentices, as she was employed by the Hibners and went home every night at eight.

  The jury acquitted Ann Robinson and Esther Hibner junior, but found Esther Hibner senior guilty. She was sentenced to death and ordered to be executed the following Monday. Meanwhile the other two prisoners were to be tried for assault on Frances Colpitt.