Damn His Blood

by Peter Moore

  Richard Allen saw Burton at once. He listened to his story and then hurried him to the home of the nearest magistrate. From there, in a chain of whispered confidences, reports of the find began to circulate.

  Burton was sent south, back to Worcester, carrying a carefully worded letter drafted by Allen and addressed to William Smith, a solicitor and the city coroner, who lived at Newport Street on the banks of the River Severn. Allen’s letter to Smith10 was tentative. A skeleton had been found buried under a barn floor in Oddingley, he wrote. Burton supposed it to be Heming, the supposed murderer of Reverend George Parker. Perhaps Richard Allen had been unfavourably scarred by false rumours before; in any case he chose not to commit himself. He requested that Smith take charge of the incident and ‘give what directions you thought necessary’.5 He implored Burton to deliver the letter with all possible haste.

  From the very beginning of his involvement William Smith approached the Oddingley case in a wholly different manner to that adopted by Richard Barneby years earlier. When the coroner received Burton at his home later that afternoon he instantly took the matter seriously. Smith was earnest, well-intentioned, intelligent and dogged: traits that would combine spectacularly over the forthcoming days. He heard Burton’s account then set about reacquainting himself with the facts of the case. He immediately composed a letter to Reverend Pyndar, by now an elderly man, who was living at Areley Kings near Stourport. ‘If you have any depositions that can throw any light on the murder, perhaps you would be kind enough to send them to me?’ Smith enquired.

  Smith then asked Charles Burton – who must have been exhausted from his travels between Oddingley, his home at Smite Hill, Droitwich and Worcester – whether he would accompany a pair of constables to Netherwood so they ‘could watch the bones’ until officials could attend. Once the carpenter had left his office, the coroner penned his final letter of the day. It was addressed to Mr Matthew Pierpoint – a surgeon at Worcester Infirmary – and desired him to exhume a skeleton in Oddingley the following morning.

  By remaining tight-lipped, Charles Burton had afforded William Smith a luxury that neither Pyndar nor any others investigating Parker’s murder had previously enjoyed. He had generated some quiet hours in which official action could be taken before anyone with either the motivation or influence to distort the facts had the chance to do so.

  Friday 22 January was a strange day at Netherwood. Henry Waterson still had no idea that a skeleton had been uncovered in his fold-yard, but the family were perplexed that, after leaving abruptly the night before, Charles Burton had not reappeared for work the following morning. In the afternoon rumours began to reach the farm that ‘everyone in Droitwich was talking about the discovery of Heming’s body’. The reports were dismissed by Mrs Waterson as gossip. Only when her son arrived home with the same news did she begin to think that they might be true. Minutes later Charles Burton had knocked at the front door accompanied by two constables.

  It was already dark, and as the Watersons learnt about Burton’s discovery, outside the constables settled into their disquieting vigil. That night temperatures dipped to their lowest levels since 1812. The men had been ordered to keep the site in the exact condition Burton had left it until Smith and Pierpoint arrived the following morning. But the cold was so intense they were forced to work in shifts, moving between the fold-yard and the farmhouse to warm their hands at the fire and beg a little beer. ‘They didn’t relish their employment at all,’ Mrs Waterson recalled. ‘They were cold and frightened;6 and as to ourselves we had none of us much rest that night. I shall never forget it as long as I live.’

  Inside, the Watersons were left to absorb the implications of Burton’s discovery. For years perhaps these bones had lain just yards from their door. The Gentleman’s Magazine,3 years later, explored the horror of such a thought. In the 14 years since Clewes had left, their children had played in the old barn. Exhausted labourers had rested there, eating their wheaten bread and sipping perry or beer. Temporary harvest hands had been quartered there when the farmhouse was full, and the dogs had scratched and rooted just above the site, as if they were looking for rats.

  At nine o’clock on Saturday morning Charles Burton4 arrived back at the mound of marl and debris he had abandoned on Thursday evening. He was accompanied by a little party of officials including Smith, the coroner, and Pierpoint, the surgeon. A woodcut produced several weeks afterwards shows Burton standing beside the grave leaning languidly on a spade; Henry Waterson joins him wearing a flowing smock, along with his wife and two stout constables in tall hats and three-quarter-length coats. They are directing William Smith, a rotund man with lank thinning hair and a round inquiring face, to the bones. While Burton seems assured and still, all of the others wear expressions of horror and wonder as they point down into the trench. The woodcut shows that the stone had been removed, the marl brushed aside and the bones exposed for all to see. It was at this point that Matthew Pierpoint stepped forward to commence the exhumation.

  Pierpoint began at the foot of the grave and then worked assiduously up, uncovering the fibula, the femur, the pelvic girdle, the vertebrae and ribcage, the bones of the arm and finally the skull. As each subsequent piece was revealed, it was carefully scrutinised for clues. It was immediately clear, Pierpoint noted, that the body had been thrown in on the left side with the subject’s back to the wall of the foundations. When the full length of the skeleton had been exposed, he produced a rule and measured it to be ‘as near as possible 5ft 3in in length’.7 The left arm had been resting under the skull, almost as a cushion; the right arm was doubled up across the ribs. The grave’s dimensions, Pierpoint calculated, were about 4 feet in depth and 14 inches across.

  Questions loomed over the exhumation of the skeleton. Was it Heming’s? If not, then whose was it? Could it have been the ancient remains of a farmhand or destitute labourer, lost to memory generations before? How had the person died? Was there any evidence to suggest violence or was this simply a natural death? Pierpoint worked on under a weak sun that struggled through the wintry sky, the gloom and sharp cold air numbing his fingers and rendering the task ever more difficult. The surgeon noted that the body had almost certainly been deposited in the grave fully clothed. This was clear, Pierpoint said, as the many different bones of the feet were still contained within the shoes, indicating strongly that the body had been concealed while the flesh was still whole. All of the skeletal bones, he said, had subsequently fallen into positions consistent with the subsequent rotting away of the softer parts.

  Pierpoint now drew each of the bones carefully out of the grave and placed them one by one in a deal box. As he lifted the skull from its resting place, he noticed that there were a series of severe irregularities which, he instantly pointed out, were most probably the cause of death.

  On the forehead there was a blunt crack or ‘fissure’ which extended fully down the orbit. Despite the fact that the teeth were still in remarkably good condition, the surgeon noted that both the upper and lower jaw had been loosened from their sockets and beaten into many pieces. ‘Great violence must have been used to fracture those parts of the head,’ Pierpoint told Smith. The nature of these multiple fractures, he continued, was such that it seemed impossible for them to have been self-inflicted. Only heavy blows or a horrendous collision could have caused such severe damage, and interestingly, it did not appear that the force had been cushioned by a protecting hand. He concluded, in his professional opinion, ‘that the injury must have been done to the skull before the body was put there – and that such an injury was committed whilst the person was alive or immediately after death’.

  With the complete skeleton stowed away, Pierpoint explored the grave in greater detail. Aside from the leather shoes, almost all the fragments of accompanying clothing had wasted away. There were, however, a number of objects strewn about the skeleton. To the right side of where the femur had lain, Pierpoint found the wooden rule that Burton had glimpsed on Thursday night. Something
that faintly resembled the waistband of a pair of breeches was pulled from the area around the pelvis, and from near the ribs came a portion of a waistcoat pocket. Other artefacts were salvaged too: a rusty knife, a whetstone used for sharpening knives, a sixpence marked ‘F.W’ and three half-pennies from the year 1799.

  These clues, rescued from the frosty grave, suggested that Burton had discovered the body of a labouring man whose bones could not have been buried for longer than 30 years. His early conclusions were entirely consistent with the irresistible theory that Charles Burton had now entertained for almost two days: that these were Richard Heming’s remains.

  At Worcester that afternoon William Smith wrote directly to the home secretary, Robert Peel. The implications of Matthew Pierpoint’s intial conclusions were of such gravity that Smith felt obliged to inform the government immediately. The coroner outlined the developing situation. He told Peel that a skeleton had been discovered in the parish of Oddingley within the bounds of a dismantled barn. He suspected these bones to be those of a labourer called Richard Heming who had disappeared many years ago after supposedly murdering the parish parson. Smith added that the skull of the skeleton had been fractured by one or more blows, and that he could only conclude that a second murder had been committed by the same farmers who themselves were likely to have organised the first murder.

  Smith was writing to Peel for advice, but also with the same request that Pyndar had made to Earl Spencer more than two decades before: he wanted to secure a royal pardon for anyone who could be tempted into providing information about the skeleton. His actions were driven by excitement and a genuine possibility of solving a case which had bewildered his predecessors. Smith had been thrown into a situation full of excitement and possibility. But any hope that he entertained of securing swift governmental backing would soon fade.

  At 41 years old, Robert Peel was among the brightest lights in the Duke of Wellington’s government. Two decades earlier he had come down from Oxford with a double first, and in the years since he had become a lynchpin at the centre of British politics. By 1830 Peel was an experienced home secretary, now occupying the post for a second time, and he was well placed to judge the merits of Smith’s letter. He had served his political apprenticeship in Dublin as chief secretary for Ireland, a country consumed by religious divisions that tore across entire communities. Murders were far commoner in Ireland than mainland Britain and Peel had learnt to react to the violent cases he encountered with careful tenacity rather than a natural sense of outrage, an icy habit that led Daniel O’Connell, the Irish political campaigner, to compare Peel’s smile to the silver plate on a coffin.8

  For Peel a murder9 case was to be treated and examined carefully before any speculative conclusions could be made. He had a tidy administrative mind. ‘There is nothing like a fact,’ he declared in 1814, a theme he returned to two years later, when he reaffirmed his belief that ‘facts are ten times more valuable than declamations’. These views were entrenched in his political philosophy, and for William Smith they would be a stumbling block. Smith’s letter had declared much but proved nothing. To Peel at the Home Office it appeared amateurish, hasty and speculative, traits that he instinctively shied away from and qualities that he was actively trying to dispel from England’s policing system.

  About four months earlier, on 29 September 1829, Peel’s police force – the first of its kind in England – had been deployed in parishes within a 12-mile radius of Charing Cross in London. Four months on, Peel was still caught up in the introduction and workings of the new body, which had faced stiff opposition and contempt from the beginning. The policemen, dressed in blue, were derided as spies and snitches and – worst of all – a standing army released onto the streets of the capital. An unflattering crop of nicknames had arisen in the few months since Peel’s police had been operational. Peel’s Bloody Gang, the Plague of Blue Locusts, the Blue Devils and Raw Lobsters were all insults circulating in the streets and printed in the newspapers.fn1

  But for Peel the introduction of such a body was a necessity in a rapidly developing society in which crime, so he argued, was rising sharply. He considered the old system of policing, which had its roots in the Middle Ages, unfit to deal with the challenges posed by innovative nineteenth-century felons. In a society where criminals could make use of swift modes of travel and fast transmission of information, there needed to be a trained, professional force that was equal to them. Peel’s police were to be a disciplined and effective tool of the state in this new modern age. They were expected to react to crime intelligently, to protect and pursue.

  This was the climate in which Smith’s letter from Worcester was received. And for Peel in Whitehall it contained several flaws. First, although it appeared the skeleton belonged to Heming, there was no firm proof that this was the case. For a positive identification to be made a new inquest would have to be held, and after the passage of so many years it was uncertain that the bones could be shown to be Heming’s. Second, Peel was more accustomed to corresponding with magistrates, whose role it was to investigate cases and apply to the Home Office for support. He was not just a man of detail but also a man of form, and to receive a request for the royal pardon from a coroner was irregular and an example of just the type of unregulated procedure that annoyed him.

  In his reply the home secretary mingled inquisitiveness with non-commitment. He assured Smith that he understood both the gravity and significance of his letter, but he implored him to investigate the matter further. Peel ignored the coroner’s request for a royal pardon entirely and instead asked Smith to keep him abreast of any further developments, pointedly asking for the name of the local magistrate at Oddingley. It was a typical, ponderous response.

  While Peel remained sceptical, others took far less convincing. By 24 January reports of Burton’s find were sweeping across Worcestershire. It was a news report like no other, as if a story had been plucked deliciously from the past to tantalise imaginations and set conversation alight. Those under the age of 25 would have only known the tale through local rumour or taproom gossip; for the older generation it would have been a misty memory, jumbled with other tales from the war years. Others who remembered Parker’s murder well were now among the elderly and many of those directly involved in the manhunt were dead. Everyone, though, now returned to the story afresh and conjecture flared. Was this second killing the work of a single man or a band of murderers? How many of those implicated were still alive? Would they be finally brought to justice?

  Following the exhumation, Pierpoint had spent Saturday evening at his home carefully reassembling the skeleton to complete a more detailed analysis. By Sunday morning he was able to present Smith with a list of further observations. Once again they matched Heming’s profile. Without doubt, Pierpoint said, the bones were those of a man aged between 30 and 50 years of age. Having examined the fracture on the forehead more closely, he now declared the skull to have been shattered into twenty or more pieces. It was a fearsome injury, he said, ‘quite sufficient to produce instantaneous death’.11

  Although Pierpoint was sure that the man had been bludgeoned, he had no idea what kind of weapon could have caused such fractures. He told Smith that it must have been something very blunt and heavy but was certainly not a pistol, as the coroner had initially speculated. He was also sure that it was not a self-inflicted wound, which ruled out suicide. To cause such an injury several blows would have been required. It was murder, of that he was certain.

  As Matthew Pierpoint continued with his assessment of the skeleton, in the villages and towns that surrounded Worcester, Droitwich and Oddingley rumours started to circulate. It was well known that at the time of Heming’s disappearance Thomas Clewes had been the master of Netherwood Farm. Clewes had cursed Parker with Evans and Barnett in the months before the murder. He had been seen at Heming’s home in Droitwich, and his subsequent troubles with money and alcohol were well documented. That a grave could be concealed at Netherwood without Cle
wes’ knowledge or approval seemed impossible.

  Within days the newspapers were speculating, too. They focused their attentions on the barn, hoping that a careful description and analysis of the structure or the identification of an unusual feature might expose another of its secrets. Berrow’s Worcester Journal dwelt on the geography of the fold-yard, ‘the spot chosen for the grave12 being close to a pool which received the drainings of the fold-yard, appears to have been selected in the expectation that its contiguity to the pool would hasten the decomposition of the body’.

  The use of ‘selected’ lent an eerie note of premeditation to the piece. To dispose of the body in the dampest corner of the barn demonstrated either a thorough knowledge of the farm, or sheer good luck. That Thomas Clewes must have been involved was also inferred by Charles Burton, who noted that access to the barn came from two strong double doors. The pair in the fold-yard were secured by a padlock, he said; the others opened out into the bridle path and were held shut with a strong wooden pole. Burton argued that nobody could have entered the barn without first acquiring the key, which, Henry Waterson explained, was always kept in the house.

  On Sunday 24 January the number of curious locals who wandered into frozen Netherwood Lane to see the site for themselves rose from a steady trickle to a small crowd. The farm was surrounded by snowy meadows that behind the farmhouse sloped gently upwards towards Trench Wood, where Thomas Clewes now lived with his family. But Clewes was not yet the object of their attentions. Instead they looked at the small damp plot where the barn had so recently stood. The building had been rectangular, a little over 20 yards by four across, and split into three distinct sections: a single bay at the front, a threshing floor in the middle and at the rear a large double bay. It was in this part of the barn that the skeleton had been found, not ten seconds’ walk from the farmhouse door.