Damn His Blood

by Peter Moore

  Like Parker’s glebe, Netherwood’s barn had become a place of horror, its very ordinariness lending it a disturbing quality. But while the skeleton suggested much, it proved very little. In his office at Worcester this fact was troubling William Smith, who had thrown all his energies into arranging an inquest. For twenty-three-and-a half years secrets had festered beneath conversations just as the bones had been hidden beneath the ground. Almost all attempts to extract the truth had been met with blank denials and stony faces. Now, though, things felt different. Smith hoped the skeleton would prove more than a wondrous find, a cause of fantastical imaginings in the parishes and the newspapers, but rather a catalyst to loosen unwilling tongues.

  Smith consulted Pyndar’s notes and began to draw up a list of all of those involved, however slightly, in the events of 1806. Thomas Clewes, the previous master of Netherwood Farm, was his first name, but also on the list were John and William Barnett, both of whom were still farming in the parish. He also wrote to Elizabeth Newbury, John Rowe and John Perkins, and began a search for the two butchers – Thomas Giles and John Lench – who had disturbed Heming in Parker’s glebe over two decades before. Smith invited each of these individuals to Worcester the following Tuesday morning, where a second inquest would commence – this time on the Netherwood skeleton. Several men, though, would elude the coroner’s summons. One of them, by just seven months, was Captain Samuel Evans.

  fn1 Raw lobsters are generally blue, the colour of the police uniform. But when placed in boiling water they turn red, the colour of the army tunic.

  CHAPTER 14

  Extraordinary and Atrocious Circumstances

  Worcester, 25–31 January 1830

  AT A QUARTER to eleven on the morning of Monday 25 January, a clear, frosty winter’s morning with the remnants of a new moon fading in the sky above, William Smith prepared to open the inquest on the Netherwood skeleton at the Talbot Inn in Worcester. The Talbot lay near the end of a little row of pleasant Georgian houses which lined the Tithing, a long thoroughfare that snaked from the north into the city centre towards the cathedral. It was an impressive hostelry, an elegant assembly of gleaming red brick, ancient beams and pretty dormer windows. It stood three storeys tall and was lit from the outside by the glow of two gas lamps that arched imperiously over its oak entrance door.

  Smith had considered Oddingley an unsuitable location for the inquest. Not only was it a small parish and therefore ill equipped for the anticipated influx of visitors, but it seemed improper to continue the investigation in a place which for so long had shielded the truth. As a statement of intent, Smith had taken the unusual step of drawing the inquiry out of the village and forbidding Oddingley parishioners from serving on the coroner’s jury. Instead the evidence was to be laid before 23 men from the surrounding area: six from Crowle, six from Claines, four from Tibberton and the remaining seven from Himbleton. Like any parish, Oddingley was accustomed to administering its own business. Now it would be judged by its neighbours.

  Long benches had been pulled across a large room to the rear of the building, which jutted back into the stable yard. The makeshift courtroom was filled with Oddingley men, many of them familiar to one another yet this time drawn together in an unusual environment. There was Thomas Clewes and the two Barnett brothers. Charles Burton was there along with other farmhands – James Tustin, William Chellingworth and George Day, Parker’s old tithe boy. The occasion had the air of a reunion, nearly a quarter of a century having passed since the events they had been summoned to recall. There was also a hint of paradox. Smith was about to stir memories of a warm and lively June afternoon in Oddingley’s airy fields in the cold bleak atmosphere of a city courtroom. The witnesses were not wearing smock frocks, but were wrapped tightly in thick greatcoats and over-cloaks, warm breeches and riding boots. At the head of the room the coroner and his jury huddled about a long rectangular table. The skeleton, now cleaned and glimmering brightly in the dim light, lay like a macabre trophy before them.

  A plan of Netherwood Farm in January 1830. Published by E. Lees, an innovative Worcester printer

  The jury was sworn in at 11 o’clock. Smith welcomed the men to the inquest and invited them to examine the bones. Then the first witness was called. Charles Burton narrated his movements over the past month and explained how he had discovered the skeleton ‘on Thursday last’. He told the jury that Heming was his brother-in-law and he suspected the shoes found belonged to him. The shoes were exhibited, and Burton was asked whether he recognised them. ‘These shoes now produced are as near as the size of Heming’s as possible. I believe them to have been his,’ Burton replied.

  Burton’s evidence was illuminating and precise, but at times it was also faintly speculative, as if he had already settled on his own theory. When a plan of the barn was produced and he was asked to indicate the location of the skeleton, he did so, pointing to the double bay while repeating several times that the barn was situated ‘near to the house’.

  This must have jarred for Thomas Clewes. In all, he would have heard his name mentioned three times during Burton’s testimony – each time in connection with his spell as master at Netherwood. Both Smith and Burton seemed to dwell on the links between the skeleton, Netherwood Farm and Clewes. Much of the day’s questioning would examine these connections, but the evidence against Clewes was far from conclusive. Burton told Smith that Heming had not worked for any farmer in the village but Captain Evans and that he had never once seen Clewes and Heming together. Burton remembered his brother-in-law well and retained a clear mental image of him: ‘Heming had a full mouth; a most perfect set of teeth. I thought immediately on seeing the shoes and the rule that they were his.’

  Matthew Pierpoint followed Burton to the stand. The surgeon represented a wholly different type of witness to the carpenter. He had no family ties to Heming and for the most part refrained from speculation. He was a man of science and logic: dispassionate, cool-headed and assiduous. The facts Peel desired were far more likely to flow from the erudite surgeon with 11 years of experience at Worcester Infirmary than from Burton, the theorising carpenter with a vested interest in the outcome.

  Pierpoint replied to Smith’s questions with brisk statements. He informed the jury of the dimensions of the grave and described the bones of the skull, ‘which were beat into a great many pieces’. There was a crack or fissure in the frontal bone of the skull, Pierpoint said, ‘which must have been occasioned by a very severe blow’. He explained that he was sure that what had been found were the remains of a male body.

  Smith asked Pierpoint how long he felt the bones may have been buried.

  ‘I should say the body, from its appearance, had laid there a good many years but this would much depend on the nature of the soil.’

  ‘And do you have any observations about the nature of the soil?’

  ‘The soil was damp, from its neighbourhood to the pool, and as such was calculated to hasten decay,’ Pierpoint replied.

  Smith then returned to the fractured skull. He asked Pierpoint if he could elaborate on the evidence he had already given.

  ‘It [the injury] must have occasioned instantaneous death and must have been caused by many blows,’ Pierpoint explained. ‘The injuries were such as could not have been inflicted by the party himself and I should judge the remains to be those of a person between 30 and 50 years of age. I consider them to have remained there undisturbed, from the time of their being placed there.’

  As the jury absorbed the implications of Pierpoint’s testimony, the third witness was called. Elizabeth Newbury had long cut a tragic figure. For all of her qualities, her life had come to very little. She informed Smith that she was a widow and lived just to the south of Worcester in St Martin’s Parish. As none of Heming’s family from Bredon were present, Newbury was the only witness to have known him intimately and over a significant amount of time. Smith’s chief motive for calling her was to achieve a positive identification of the skeleton and it was to be a
further harrowing ordeal for Newbury. If she could identify Richard Heming, then she would confirm her fears that she was a widow not once, but twice.

  Smith questioned Newbury gently. She remembered that Heming had risen at half past five in the morning on Midsummer Day 1806, saying he had a ‘dirty job to do for Captain Evans, of Oddingley Church Farm.’ ‘What dirty job?’ she had asked. ‘To pull some poles out of the pool,’ he had replied. Thereafter Heming had complained that he was late and had asked for his dark blue coat. Soon after that he left the house. She had never seen him since.

  ‘Was he carrying a gun with him?’ Smith asked.

  ‘He had no gun at that time but some time before he had one, which he said he had sold.’

  ‘Did he have any other tools with him?’

  Newbury said he owned a rule, ‘which he generally carried with him’. She remembered this distinctly as it did not close properly at the bottom and had a small crack by the rivet. The carpenter’s rule which had been recovered from the grave was produced and given to Elizabeth to examine. It was cracked exactly as she had described.

  ‘I firmly believe this to be the rule Richard took out on that day,’ Newbury said.

  So far Elizabeth Newbury’s evidence had been lucid and cogent. This identification of the rule was important. Coupled with her brother’s evidence regarding the shoes it was a second tangible link between Heming and the skeleton. A strand of circumstantial evidence quickly followed. Heming was five feet three inches tall, she recalled, precisely the length that Pierpoint had declared the skeleton to be. She was certain of this as Heming had been drawn to serve in the militia, only to be excused as he was an inch below five feet four, the minimum admissible height.

  The coroner was satisfied with Newbury’s answers so far; she appeared intelligent and in possession of a spotless memory. He now invited Pierpoint back to the table and asked him to hold together the jaws of the skeleton.

  What followed was a hideous moment which silenced the room. For a second Elizabeth Newbury was confronted with the ghostly form of Heming’s skull, clamped between Pierpoint’s hands. All of the dark torments of the past two decades seemed to descend upon her in an instant. She rocked back on her heels. It was a ‘peculiarly painful situation’, the Worcester Herald observed; ‘she was placed under considerable emotion and nearly fainted’.

  ‘The mouth greatly resembles that of Richard Heming,’ she stammered.

  For Smith it was a distressing but necessary step. Newbury was allowed a short time to recover, while he turned and addressed the jury. ‘Gentlemen, are you satisfied that these bones are those of Richard Heming?’ The jury expressed themselves convinced; Smith had achieved the first of his aims. It was a rudimentary identification, but in 1830 forensic science remained a nascent discipline undergoing a difficult infancy. At a lecture on medical jurisprudence at the University of London in 1834 Professor A. T. Thomson noted, ‘No part of testimony1 is more difficult or dangerous in its effects, if incorrect, than that which is intended to prove identity.’ Once physical features and distinguishing marks – birthmarks, moles, burns, tattoos and so on – had wasted away, all that was left of the body was the peculiarities of its frame, and coroners were forced into blunt empirical reasoning. A careful coroner, such as Smith, would engage a surgeon to determine the height, age and gender of a body, but some inquiries barely did this. In 1834 a Dr Cummin, a lecturer on forensic medicine, wrote to the London Medical Gazette complaining, ‘A “tale” of great mystery2 has been going the round of the newspapers during the last week. A skeleton, it seems, was found in a field near Oxford; and an inquest was held upon it. It does not appear that any professional investigation was made as to the sex, or age of the individual to whom the bones belong, nor as to the condition of those parts, whereby an opinion might be formed how long they had lain in the earth.’

  In cases where murder was suspected, very little could be gleaned from a skeleton, which usually withheld most of its secrets. Whether the deceased had met with a natural death or had been poisoned, suffocated, strangled or had their throat slashed open, the bones would not say. ‘Attempts have been made to identify persons who have been murdered from the skeleton,’ Professor Thomson told his audience in 1834, ‘but except as I have already pointed out to you in reference to age or unless some malformation affecting the bones or fractures, anchyloses or amputations have occurred, little confidence can be reposed on evidence from the osseous frame of the body.’

  Smith had overcome all of these difficulties. There was little doubt in the room that the bones spread across the table belonged to Richard Heming. He was dead and had been for some time. The cracks which spread out across his skull like a spider’s web stood testament to his murder. Only in very rare cases could such a certain identification take place. This was such an occasion. Charles Burton’s suspicions had been converted into a fact no jury could dispute. Robert Peel would be satisfied.

  Elizabeth Newbury had by now regained her composure. She told the court that Richard Allen had called at her house late on Midsummer Day, ‘very reluctantly’ informing her of his business on the third occasion. More episodes were recalled: the account book which detailed work done for Captain Evans, her suspicions about the clover rick and Heming’s odd connection with Thomas Clewes, who ‘was in the habit of coming to see Richard in the three months preceding the 24th of June’.

  ‘When was the last time that Clewes came to your house?’ Smith enquired.

  ‘I think that he was there within a week before, but I cannot recollect properly the last day he came.’

  ‘Did anybody else from Oddingley visit Heming during this time?’

  ‘I do not recollect any other person besides Clewes coming from Oddingley,’ she said.

  Henry Waterson was interviewed next. Netherwood Farm’s current master explained that he had succeeded Clewes in 1816 and had never met him before that date. He had inherited the barn in which the skeleton had been found, which had been in a state of disrepair for some years. Waterson had used the building to store grain and had noticed that one corner sloped down a little lower than the rest. This was where the grave was discovered. ‘I do not think the body could be put there since I took the farm without my knowledge,’ Waterson said. He added that he always locked the barn with a padlock.

  Richard Barneby, the original coroner, then appeared, producing the broken gun that had been recovered from Parker’s glebe as well as Heming’s account book, which Elizabeth Newbury was asked to identify. Next John Lench, the butcher, recalled the minutes surrounding Parker’s murder and how Thomas Giles (who had since died) had chased Heming across the fields. Though an interesting witness, Lench’s memory appeared clouded by time and it was necessary for his original deposition to be read, which he then swore to be accurate. Following Lench was George Day – Parker’s old tithe boy – who displayed similar forgetfulness, only very faintly recalling details from the years of village quarrelling. Day could not remember having ever seen Heming and Clewes together.

  But if Clewes was cheered by Day’s evidence, then his spirits were to be lowered once more by the appearance of Thomas Barber. Barber had lived around the Oddingley area for many years, keeping a store in Sale Green, just half a mile from Netherwood. He recalled the time Clewes and Parker had crossed each other in his shop, when Clewes had looked over his shoulder and muttered that he would give ‘£50 for any man who would shoot the parson’. The room quietened.

  ‘Did you ever hear Clewes say anything else against Reverend Parker?’ Smith asked.

  ‘I have heard him damn the parson,’ Barber replied. ‘He never spoke in the praise of Mr Parker.’

  Barber’s evidence was significant. He was the first of those involved in 1806 to speak before a court against any of the farmers. His evidence seemed all the more important as he claimed not to have any ill feelings towards Clewes, who had visited him regularly and had been there ‘as little as a week ago’. It was a propitious beginning for Sm
ith, who knew that the success of the inquiry depended on the willingness of witnesses to speak openly.

  Proceedings continued at an intense pace. The afternoon passed and the skies darkened as the farmhands Thomas Lloyd, William Nash and Richard Crockett were called. Their answers were more guarded. Crockett, who had worked for Clewes at Netherwood, said that there were holes in the side of the barn, but not of such a size that a man could crawl through. William Chellingworth, who spoke next, was evasive. His testimony ended with a stiff rebuke from Smith and was later described in an article in the week’s Worcester Herald as given ‘in a very unsatisfactory and contradictory manner’.

  The gas lamps were lit and darkness had fallen by six o’clock, when Susan Surman, the final witness of the day, was called. While the four farmhands who had just testified had been reticent and opaque, Surman demonstrated herself far more eager to speak. She was a spinster, she told Smith, living in Swinesherd to the east of Worcester. This in itself was interesting. Having left Oddingley and constructed a life elsewhere, Surman was no longer constrained by ties of loyalty to the Barnett brothers. And this proved to be the case, as Surman instantly embarked on a testimony full of colour and suspense. She explained how she had met Heming regularly in the weeks before 24 June, how she had been the final person to speak to Parker before he was shot, and how on Midsummer morning she had seen Clewes on horseback near Mr Barnett’s stable.