by Peter Moore
Barneby left Oddingley for Worcester, leaving behind him a sense of mounting frustration. A murder merited much more than the insipid investigation that had just taken place. In establishing the causes of death and movements of those involved, Barneby had performed his duty, but he had done no more. He had shown little inquisitive rigour, had failed to interview several crucial witnesses and had allowed an ambiguous verdict to be passed down by the jury, who fixed the crime on an unknown rather than boldly declaring Heming the chief suspect – a fact already generally held in the village.
A methodical inquest, however, was perhaps more than could have been hoped for. Three members of the coroner’s jury (Marshall, Jones and Hardcourt) had good reason to resent Parker, and that the Captain was involved after arguing publicly with the victim so recently was highly unfortunate if not suspicious. Indeed, John Perkins, Parker’s closest ally among the farmers, was omitted completely, as was Reverend Pyndar, who, as the responsible magistrate, must have expected to be called as a witness. Pyndar, watching the inquest as a spectator, had been caught flat-footed; it had been the constable, William Barnett, who had assumed control of proceedings. Had Pyndar fetched Barneby from Worcester himself, briefed him and furnished him with a list of witnesses, the outcome may have been quite different.
As it was, no mention was made before Barneby or the jury of the feud. Countless villagers had first-hand experience of Captain Evans, Thomas Clewes, John Barnett and George Banks damning Parker, swearing drunken oaths and making chilling predictions of his imminent death, but not one of these was called to testify. The women in particular were excluded. Elizabeth Fowler, Sarah Lloyd and Mary Parker all possessed vital pieces of evidence not brought before the coroner. Fowler had discovered a shotgun which exactly matched the murder weapon and which could easily have been identified; Sarah Lloyd had heard the drunken jeers in the Pigeon House; and Mary Parker could have testified that she and her husband had been disturbed in the night by stones clattering against their window, that Captain Evans had argued with George in the lanes and that for years the parish had been characterised by resentment and anger. Even Susan Surman, the last person to see Parker alive, was somehow overlooked.
These gaping omissions could be attributed to prejudice. Women were generally considered less reliable witnesses than men, and in the countryside such beliefs were stronger. Historian Roy Porter describes the extent of discrimination in English society at this time.
Public life on a grand scale8 was a men-only club (as were almost all clubs themselves). There were no female parliamentarians, explorers, lawyers, magistrates or factory entrepreneurs, and no women voters. For Dr Johnson, the idea of a woman preacher was ‘like a dog walking on his hind legs’ … Public opinion tight-laced women into constrictive roles: wives, mothers, housekeepers subordinate workers, domestic servants, maiden aunts. Few escaped. Such stereotyping created a kind of invisibility: women were to be men’s shadows.
Such shadows loomed long in Oddingley Rectory on 25 June 1806. Perhaps the absence of women from the coroner’s inquest is best explained by pure prejudice; perhaps it was considered indiscreet to have Surman, Lloyd, Fowler and Parker interrogated by men in public, or perhaps these women were marginalised and excluded from the hearing by William Barnett and the Captain, who were desperate to silence their voices. It left much of the story untold. No mention of the quarrel would be made in the newspaper reports over the following days and of all the deficiencies of the coroner’s inquest, the failure to establish any context for the murder was Barneby’s gravest. Thus far the crime was a one-sided story, told from a narrow perspective.
In 1806 murder was an alarming and unusual crime. In 1805, the first year for which there are official records, of the 350 death sentences passed in England and Wales,9 only ten were for murder. Occasionally, following an assize trial, felons would be hanged from the wooden scaffold at Red Hill on the eastern edge of Worcester, but these were rarely murderers. Of the nine people executed in the county since the turn of the century five had been convicted of burglary, two of sheep stealing, one of horse stealing and one of forgery. Parker’s death, therefore, was guaranteed to attract considerable attention, and within days newspapers across the Midlands were carrying stories about the ‘Barbarous and Inhumane Murder’. The news that a clergyman, a minor member of the gentry, had been attacked and killed in his own parish was sensational and disturbing, a story to stand out above even the weekly war reports. The social position of the victim and the familiarity of the setting lent the reports their most chilling edge: if a country parson could be attacked in his own glebe, then who could consider themselves really safe? Details of the murder would ripple across the county: the educated classes reading reports in the newspapers and workers swapping accounts in the inns and market squares, where news of a brutal murder so close to home was the most compelling of all.
There were similarities between Parker’s killing and another case which had so recently horrified the country. On 5 April 1806 a man named Richard Patch had stood before a London jury charged with the murder of Isaac Blight,10 his master, a wealthy ship breaker.fn1 The newspapers had devoted enormous amounts of coverage to the case, describing Patch as a man of uncertain character who had suddenly appeared outside Blight’s home a number of years earlier under the pretext of visiting his sister. Patch, who was destitute and penniless, had soon won Blight’s confidence, secured a job in his shipyard and been promoted to the point that, eighteen months later, he was considered the most trusted and important of Blight’s servants.
But by 1805 Patch had devised a scheme to kill Blight, inherit his business and all its assets. On a crisp autumnal night he had lured Blight into a carefully arranged trap at his dockside home at Rotherhithe on the south bank of the Thames. As Blight lazed in his back parlour, drunk on grog in the evening gloom, Patch entered and fired a shot at him. The ball from Patch’s pistol passed through Blight’s abdomen and his chair and lodged in the wall. Blight, mortally wounded, had lingered through the night, but died in terrible pain the following day.
Patch very nearly eluded justice. Blight’s assassination was ingeniously devised and almost perfectly executed. The murderer had provided himself with an alibi by feigning an upset stomach and making an ostentatious exit seconds before the fatal shot was discharged. Patch was only betrayed when magistrates searched his privy and instead of finding evidence it had been used by someone suffering from diarrhoea discovered the ramrod of a pistol jammed in the vault. A search of Patch’s bedroom subsequently turned up a pair of white ribbed stockings that, although on first inspection seemed perfectly clean, were in fact soiled on their soles ‘as if the wearer had crept about outside in his stockinged feet’.
In a ‘very awful and important inquiry’ these delicate strands of evidence linked Richard Patch inescapably to the crime. He was arrested and brought to court. In his long and eloquent assessment of the case Lord Chief Justice Baron MacDonald declared famously that ‘the prisoner [Patch] had begun his career of guilt in a system of fraud towards his friend [Blight], he had continued it in ingratitude and he had terminated it in blood.’ Patch was found guilty of murder and hanged at the New Prison in Southwark on Tuesday 8 April, the day after Elizabeth Fowler discovered the shotgun at Church Farm. Berrow’s Worcester Journal joined other local newspapers in recording the event, describing in florid prose the ‘awful moment when Patch was about to be launched into late eternity’.
Isaac Blight’s murder shocked and enthralled all London. A long pamphlet detailing the particulars of the case sold in record numbers, and the trial itself was attended by the Dukes of Cumberland and Sussex, along with other members of the aristocracy, who sat in a specially designed box high in the courtroom. Outside, enormous crowds gathered in Horsemonger Lane to steal a glimpse of Patch as he was escorted into court, ‘genteelly dressed in black’.
Blight’s murder was similar to Parker’s in certain ways. Like the clergyman, Blight had been a man of som
e importance and local standing, a fact which made him both a dangerous and seductive target. But most comment was reserved for Patch. He was described at great length in all the newspapers and pamphlets as their authors tried to get at the strange, terrible collision of personality traits that had created this monster. These writers highlighted his ambition, his unbridled courage, his ingenuity and natural ability, almost like an actor, to slip into different roles: the long-lost brother, the faithful business partner, the sickly patient and, ultimately, the horrified witness. People were becoming more interested in the mechanics of the criminal mind. Just what could drive a man to murder?
There were distinct similarities between Patch and Heming. Both had histories of petty crime, both had abandoned their childhood homes and both had gone on to commit murder. To some Patch and Heming would have been examples of a criminal class: a tightly defined breed of professional outlaws, burglars or smugglers, the most courageous of which, Friedrich Engels would later argue, became ‘thieves and murderers’.11 But for others such individuals were not products of society but human aberrations. Was there something special in the anatomical make-up of these men that a trained eye or a careful physician could detect? Could a murderer be betrayed by an innocuous physical quirk or by something strange and distinct in their manner?fn2
Although Patch and Heming shared similar personal histories, their two cases were actually very different. While Patch had been driven to kill Blight for financial gain, at Oddingley there was no such clarity. No money had been stripped from Parker’s body, nor had he been assaulted at a time of day when he was likely to be carrying any. Furthermore there was no known antipathy or even connection between Heming and Parker. Their only encounters had been brief meetings in the village lanes.
This left Heming without a clear motive for attacking Parker, a fact that must have troubled the coroner. The severity of the assault left little doubt that Heming wanted Parker dead. But why? Heming knew his capture would be swiftly followed by a court case and then almost certain execution. He would have known that Oddingley was busy at five o’clock in the harvest months. He was fully aware it was Bromsgrove Fair day, which meant that there would be more traffic than usual along the lanes. And he would have known that Susan Surman was close by, and that the sound of a shotgun was bound to result in a chase. It was wholly unsurprising that Heming had been disturbed by the butchers while fleeing the scene. The case had none of the accuracy or finesse of Patch’s murder of Blight, but in its own far more muddled myopic way, it was just as puzzling.
The first full printed report of the murder appeared in Berrow’s Worcester Journal the following day. The piece must have been written on the Wednesday as it did not contain the verdict of the coroner’s inquest, or designate Heming as the chief suspect. Instead the article referred to ‘the murderer’ throughout. After a long description of the assault, the report concluded,
The unfortunate person12 who was murdered proves to be the Rev. Mr Parker of Oddingley, in this county. It appears that when the man shot him, he did not quite effect his horrid purpose and he beat him around the head with the butt end of the gun in so violent a manner that he broke it, and in his terror put only one of the pieces in his bag. He is described as wearing a blue coat and the forepart of his head rather bald.
In Oddingley the greatest hope for a quick conclusion to the case remained with Reverend Pyndar. Until this point circumstances had played wretchedly against him. There was still no news of Heming, who by now could well have escaped the county. Furthermore, Pyndar had inadvertently allowed William Barnett to outmanoeuvre him. The reverend had spent several hours on the morning of 25 June composing letters to magistrates in London and Bristol, informing them that a murder had been committed and warning them to be vigilant for any sign of Heming. The time Pyndar lost writing these letters had been put to good use by Barnett, three miles away in Oddingley.
Pyndar’s investigation was also handicapped by his lack of experience or training. While country magistrates had wide-ranging and summary powers, they were not well-equipped to conduct murder enquiries – most rural cases involved drunken farm labourers, idlers, petty theft or poaching. Their counterparts in the cities would have had far more experience of violent assaults, but even they would often struggle to formulate a powerful response in the wake of a murder. It was still 26 years before the Metropolitan Police – the first police force in the country – would petition the Home Office to establish a unit for elite ‘detectives’, expertly trained, exceptional policemen schooled in the growing arts of scientific and logical detection. In the middle of the century these men would rise to fame and prominence for their ability to tease truths out of the most knotty situations. They would atomise a case, scrutinise its component parts, uncover clues, interview suspects, covertly gather evidence and arrive at indisputable conclusions.
Half a century before, Pyndar had none of the training of the men who were to follow him. He was a clergyman, educated in the classics, theology and the law. He had little insight into the criminal mind. Pyndar was part of the old police, a loosely knit organisation that the Victorians would look back upon as dreadfully inadequate. Charles Dickens lampooned the system in Great Expectations. Following the death of his stepmother, Pip complains:
The Constables and the Bow Street men13 from London – for this happened in the days of the extinct red-waistcoated police – were about the house for a week or two, and did pretty much what I have heard and read of like authorities doing in other such cases. They took up several obviously wrong people, and they ran their heads very hard against the wrong ideas, and persisted in trying to fit the circumstances to the ideas, instead of trying to extract ideas from the circumstances.
Pyndar performed much better than this. While limited in experience and expertise, he was gifted with a natural sense of duty, a talent for organisation and an inquisitive streak. He was untrained but he had guile, and in the days following the murder he applied himself to the case with diligence. He sought out villagers, interviewing each one alone, and instead of committing facts to memory, he made records of everything on scraps of parchment which he stowed away for future reference.
One of his first moves was to engage John Perkins, who was proving a tractable ally, to lie in wait for Heming on the foot road between Droitwich and Oddingley. Perkins was instructed to seize the fugitive if he saw him. The letters to Bristol and London left Worcester in Wednesday’s post and by now the handbill was in wide circulation. Pyndar knew that the chances of Heming still being in the neighbourhood were slim, but the possibility could not be completely discounted. In the first few days of the investigation he had received news of a number of potential sightings. Two came from nearby parishes: one in Tibberton, one in Warndon, just a mile to the west. Other reports arrived from Whittington and Pershore, villages further to the south. None, however, proved to be correct. As Pyndar waited in Oddingley for a lucky turn in events, his collection of notes began to mount. His pithy observations were often no longer than 50 or 60 words in length, but they showed that he was unearthing far more than Barneby had achieved before him.
Constructing a plausible narrative was chief among Pyndar’s concerns. He was already convinced of Heming’s guilt and from the start of his investigation set about discovering as much as he could about the labourer’s movements. Working backwards he hoped to discover just where he had been on Midsummer Day, and to reveal the route that had wound from Heming’s Droitwich home to Parker’s glebe at five o’clock.
First he established that there was a working relationship between Heming and the Captain. Several labourers told Pyndar that Heming had laboured for Evans for some months as a carpenter and wheelwright, sawing wooden rails from local elms, mending buckled cartwheels and treating hurdles in the pool. Pyndar learnt that Heming had been at Church Farm on Midsummer Day, doing work for the Captain. He visited the property and found Evans. In his notes, he wrote, ‘Cap. Evans says:14 That he paid Heming his wages of
6th of May & has not employed him since nor to the best of his recollection seen him till 24th June when he called at his house in the morning and pulled out some poles, that he had a mug of drink, but had no conversation with him.’
Evans’ evidence seemed precise and emphasised how thin the ties between Heming and himself were. It did, however, include an admission that the suspect had visited his house on the morning of the murder, a fact that suggested to Pyndar the Captain’s role was worth examining in more detail. He underlined the point in his notes with a bold, thick stroke of his quill.
Pyndar then questioned George Greenhill, a 15-year-old labourer rumoured to have been the last villager to see Heming before he vanished. Greenhill had been working for John Barnett in a meadow behind the rectory. At between nine and ten o’clock in the morning he had encountered Heming, who climbed over a stile into the field. Heming told the farmhand that he had been ‘drinking a cup of ale’ at the Captain’s. He didn’t seem to be carrying a weapon.
This scrap of evidence corroborated what the Captain had already said, but it also raised the question of what Evans had been doing the morning Heming had called. The Captain’s claim that ‘he had no conversation with him’ seemed to settle one point, but it did not account for his movements. It seemed that, as he had not attended Bromsgrove Fair with Clewes and the other farmers, he must have spent the day at Church Farm. But then the Captain’s story became more difficult to square. As a serving magistrate, he would have been expected to have been far more involved in the evening’s events and yet he had played no part. It seemed perplexing that the Captain, so often the dominant parochial figure, would remain so detached from the action.
Pyndar’s suspicions hardened when he talked to Thomas Green, the tailor from Upton Snodsbury. Green told Pyndar about his visit to Church Farm shortly after the murder, explaining how he had found Barnett and Evans in the parlour drinking. Green said that they both reacted with surprise when he told them about Parker’s murder. Pyndar had already assembled enough facts to know that this was contrived. John Lench had testified at the inquest that he had informed Barnett of the murder only minutes after the attack, and according to Susan Surman’s later evidence Pyndar had confronted Barnett an hour before Green saw him in the Captain’s parlour. It seemed inconceivable that Barnett would not tell the Captain that the man they both despised had been shot dead. Pyndar returned to Church Farm and questioned Evans on this point.