by Peter Moore
Here there is no real reason to doubt Clewes’ statement. Heming’s ambush was devised on 25 June, a plot which emerged as the hours passed. Indeed, at seven in the morning, when Banks was dispatched to Netherwood, it seems that the Captain had little idea of what to do with Heming. The decision to have him killed must have come at some point during the day. It was a nimble and ruthless move. Heming had a brittle character: if he could be persuaded to kill a man, it seems likely that he could also be convinced to confess. In such a desperate situation it was logical for the Captain to turn to James Taylor, a man with such a foul reputation he was considered ‘the biggest rogue in the county’. And once Evans had brought Taylor into the scheme, he would only have to ensure that Clewes was not kept informed. If Clewes had foreknowledge of the plan to kill Heming he might refuse them entry to his barn or warn the fugitive and allow him to escape. Time was crucially important. The job had to be done – and concealed – that night.
Thereafter, Heming’s murder bears the marks of an intellect far closer to that of the Captain than Clewes. The blood stick was a suitable murder weapon because it was silent. A shotgun or pistol would have roused all Netherwood and caused the same problems that Heming had faced the day before. Its second quality was that it allowed for a clean execution. Several forceful blows would shatter Heming’s skull in an instant, but no blood would be spilled on the floor or splashed against the bricks. There would be no telltale signs. ‘There was no blood, not a spot on the floor,’ Clewes said in his confession – a slight detail but one that rang true.
Heming was attacked seconds after they entered the barn. Once again the scene fits together. The barn door creaks as it swings open. Heming flinches beneath the straw as he hears the boots of four men softly enter from the fold-yard. Who are they? Could it be Evans, who has promised to come with his money? Or might it be Clewes or one of his servants? Why are there four people? There is a pause. Heming can see the dull glow of a lantern through the straw. A second later, through the thick summer air, comes the sound of the Captain’s voice. Heming answers timorously. He puts his hands down to push himself up towards the light. There is the gentle tread of feet, the smooth rustle of wood against fabric, the smell of burning oil, and then there is only darkness.
Clewes did not have an opportunity to intervene, and once Heming was dead, he was hopelessly implicated. Just as the Captain had hired someone to remove Parker, he had subsequently engaged Taylor to dispose of Heming. This is a pattern: a delegation of tasks or a gift for putting others in harm’s way before himself, demonstrated once again perhaps by the fact that the murder took place at Netherwood and not Church Farm. Once the body was buried, Clewes would have been ill advised to have dug it up and carted it about the parish. And how could he have explained the presence of a corpse in his barn if it was found?
As for George Banks’ attacks, all presented eloquently and persuasively, several of them can be unpicked. His main argument, that Taylor was an elderly man physically incapable of murder, contradicted what he described elsewhere. Banks asserted that Taylor could not possibly have killed Heming as he was travelling at the time of the two murders. ‘I shall show you that on the day the Rev. Mr Parker was shot, in the morning of that day he [Taylor] went to Cotheridge about 11 miles from Droitwich, and thence on to the Hyde Farm near Bromyard in Herefordshire, a distance of about 23 miles from Droitwich, to attend to some cows of a Mr Gardiner’s, which were ill of the black water.’
A popular reconstruction of Richard Heming’s murder that shows his lantern jaw and high forehead. It also gives us our only glimpse of Captain Evans
These claims served only to undermine his argument. If the farrier could complete 40-mile round trips in less than two days, stopping to drive fleams into the arteries of diseased cows, then murdering Heming wouldn’t have been difficult. Taylor’s alibis for these journeys were his son and daughter in-law, both of them compromised witnesses, and if the farrier is removed from the barn then so is the blood stick, the weapon that Pierpoint was certain had caused the injuries. Unlike scythes, pitchforks, spades and harrows, blood sticks were not typical agricultural instruments, and there was never any suggestion that Clewes owned one himself. No alternative murder weapon was ever proposed at either the coroner’s inquest or the trial, so if a blood stick was present then it is almost certain a farrier was too.
Banks also declared erroneously that Taylor had no motive to attack Heming, but John Rowe’s evidence shows that before Parker’s murder on Midsummer Day Taylor was already involved in the scheme. He had approached Rowe on behalf of Captain Evans with the offer of £50 so would have had a vested interest in the crime being executed cleanly. When he learnt that Heming had been seen and pursued, he knew he was as exposed as Barnett, Clewes, Banks and the Captain, and if Rowe or anyone else spoke out, equally likely to be arrested as an accessory before the fact. In addition, Clewes asserted that he was only given between £26 and £27 by Banks and Barnett at Pershore Fair on 26 June. If a total of £50 had been originally raised for Heming, what became of the rest? It’s highly likely that the Captain split the blood money between Clewes and Taylor. One paid to keep quiet, the other rewarded for his work.
A third strand of Banks’ defence that can be debunked relates to his allusion to a feud between the Captain and himself. ‘I was driven from Captain Evans’ house by his cruel treatment of me,’ he declared. But this occurred after June 1806 – by Banks’ own admission as much as a year or two later. All other evidence suggests that during the summer of 1806 he remained firmly in the Captain’s favour. And although the rift between the men was certainly deep, by the time of the Captain’s death in June 1829 they had settled their differences. Banks inherited much of the Captain’s estate and had visited him during his last weeks.
There are however elements of Clewes’ confession that are questionable. Clewes’ desperation to absolve himself from any connection to Heming’s murder leaves him looking like that most familiar of judicial paradoxes, the unwilling criminal. John Curwood, the prosecution barrister, had quipped, ‘I never knew an accessory who did not, according to his statement, fill a very insignificant part in the transaction.’ Surely Clewes played a greater role than he admitted? If Clewes had not unlocked the barn, how could Heming had gained entry to the building in the first place? As Charles Burton’s evidence showed, one of the two pairs of double doors was barred by a thick rail and the other secured with a padlock. Also, how did Heming get into the barn without rousing Clewes’ hounds? Then there was the spade – rightly cited by Banks as mysterious. It was possible that it had been brought along by Captain Evans, but Clewes’ outburst, ‘It was no spade of mine,’ seemingly shoehorned into his confession, has an almost exaggerated element of protest about it. Almost as if Clewes was trying too hard to conceal something.
Most peculiar of all was Clewes’ failure to identify the fourth man in the barn. He supposed that it was George Banks, although he would not swear to it. This is difficult to square. With all the details and dialogue of the night so strongly retained in his mind, he must have known who this individual was, but all he would assert in the confession was ‘I thought it be George Banks5 – I believe it be him.’
To Banks this was a scurrilous falsehood. But why should Clewes place him in the barn if he was not there? Clewes had nothing to gain by doing so and would only incur Banks’ wrath as a result. The only plausible explanation is that Clewes suggested Banks was in the barn because he was. There is evidence that supports this theory very strongly.
This clue is contained in Reverend Clifton’s6 first letter, written to Robert Peel at the Home Office after Thomas Clewes’ oral confession on Sunday 31 January. Clifton subsequently tried to destroy all traces of this confession, but he had no access to this letter – copied by a clerk in Peel’s Whitehall office – which was released on the declassification of the information decades later. In his letter to Peel, Clifton wrote that Clewes had admitted to being present at Heming’s mur
der. In addition to him, there were ‘three other persons, two of whom are since dead’. Clifton told Peel that he had already issued a warrant for the arrest of the third person, and he expressed his hope that they should ‘doubtless have him in gaol tonight’. ‘The person whom I have sent to apprehend is the nephew of the man who planned the whole affair, & who assisted to drag the body to the hole in which it was immediately buried in the barn where the murder was committed. The great principal, & the man who struck the blow, by which Heming was killed, are both dead.’
If this small scrap of evidence had been destroyed or lost, then the case against Clewes would be far stronger. As in Clewes’ second confession, the Captain is accused of planning Heming’s murder and Taylor lands the fatal blow. But it is the reference to the ‘nephew of the man who planned the whole affair’ which is interesting. This must be Banks: he was arrested the night that this confession was given amid swirling rumours about his links with Evans, and Clifton must have mistakenly recorded him as the Captain’s son or nephew. The crucial point is that in his first confession Clewes asserted that Banks was present at the murder and taking an active role – dragging the body into the grave.
Therefore, rather than incriminating Banks, the likelihood is that Clewes was actually covering for him. There was little need to shield either Evans or Taylor as they were both dead, but to be vague about both his own and Banks’ roles might just have saved their lives. In this version of events Clewes is not the sly tactician that Peel had him down for; he is a scared and depressed farmer, locked away in a miserable gaol with evidence quickly mounting against him. For years he had been tormented by the events of 25 June 1806, and when Clifton visited him in his cell he told him everything. It is revealing that Clifton, who as a clergyman and magistrate would have conducted many interviews of various types during his life, believed Clewes to be telling the truth. A reasoned guess would also have Clewes, as well as Banks, in a more active role: perhaps unlocking the barn for Heming earlier in the day, providing the lantern and a mattock to break the earth, pointing Evans to the dampest corner and helping George Banks to haul the body across the ground. Such things, however, can never be known.
Captain Evans’ role in the murder, though, is beyond dispute, and this was plain to all of those who attended the inquest and trial in the opening months of 1830. Having spent almost a century building his reputation, within nine months of his death the Captain was being vilified in all the local newspapers. In mid-March Jackson’s Oxford Journal printed a scathing piece.
Capt. Evans (and we cannot refer to that man’s name without horror)7 was evidently the prime mover in the diabolical conspiracy, which gave rise to two murders. He passed to his last great account a few months before the discovery which led to this investigation. We have heard many and dreadful details of the horrors which agitated his spirit when about to pass before the dread tribunal of HIM ‘unto whom all hearts be open, and from whom no secrets are hid’; and though all that is related of his last hours may not be true, it is vain to imagine that the soul of a man whose conscience stung him with the recollection of a double murder, could anticipate death without these horrors which some of the most callous of mankind have exhibited in the prospect of eternity.
The newspapers had passed their verdict. Evans may have avoided justice in life, but he was already being punished in death. He had damned all those who had stood in his path, but those curses that he had thrown so liberally at others seemed to have come true for himself. It was too late for him to be saved. It was too late to repent. As a victorious Sherlock Holmes would exclaim to Dr Watson, later in the century, ‘Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent,8 and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.’
It was a judgement that might equally be applied to Heming, who met with a far brisker punishment. Berrow’s Worcester Journal wrote:
The fate of Heming is replete with instruction:9 here was a man who, probably for some paltry gain, was seduced to murder a fellow-creature against whom he does not appear to have entertained the slightest enmity; but how long did he enjoy the wages of inquiry? In a few hours after the perpetration of the deadly-deed, the avenger of blood overtook the murderer and those who tempted him to the deed of darkness were made the instruments for hurrying him before his offended MAKER with all his sins upon his head.
Just a few weeks after the conclusion of the trial the newspapers announced that Mary Parker, widow of Oddingley’s murdered clergyman, had died at her home in Lichfield. Perhaps the ordeal had been too much for her, although she had lived long enough to discover that Heming had not escaped unpunished. Another piece informed readers that Charles Burton had attempted to claim the substantial rewards offered back in 1806 for the apprehension of Heming, arguing that he had delivered the fugitive to the authorities. It was a spirited effort but was batted swiftly away by unimpressed officials.
Over the next two years Reverend Pyndar and Pennell Cole died, and in March 1834 John Barnett was laid to rest at the age of 60. ‘We have not heard whether the deceased, as his end approached, made any reference to the heavy imputation under which he rested, of having been concerned in this double deed of blood, or divulged any thought tending in any degree to remove the mystery in which those horried transactions have hitherto been shrouded,’ remarked the local paper, its appetite for new information as strong as ever. John’s death left William Barnett head of the family, and he carried on for 24 years more, dying in 1858 at the age of 81. But even he was outlived by Thomas Clewes, who like Captain Evans before him lived to a remarkable age. Rather than fading from view after his acquittal, Clewes seemed rejuvenated. He took the lease of a public house on the fringes of Oddingley parish in the little hamlet of Dunhampstead and supplemented his income by setting up as a coal merchant on the little quay that flanked his home. George Banks, meanwhile, lived out the rest of his days in Hanbury, never again appearing in the local or parish news.
Taken alone, Thomas Clewes, George Banks and John Barnett were not notable individuals. A traveller in rural England would expect to find men like them in any small village: managing the fields, bullying their workers, drinking in the local inns and monopolising the official positions that existed in each parish. Had they lived at a different time or in another place their stories may have been quite different and completely anonymous, for what happened over the few ill-tempered months and two dramatic days in Oddingley in 1806 was an aberration. The man responsible was Captain Samuel Evans.
One can only imagine the first meeting between Parker and Evans. It is 1798, the year of Nelson’s glorious victory at the Battle of the Nile, and Lyrical Ballads, with which Coleridge and Wordsworth gave a fresh voice to the new Romantic age. But detached from such events and hidden among the rolling hills and fruit orchards north of Worcester, the village of Oddingley lies apart. Here, outside St James’ Church, the clergyman – a haughty man, some say, yet fair and able – is talking to his newest parishioner across a little stone wall. The new master of Church Farm, Samuel Evans, is an old military man, stoical, swollen with success and equipped with a cool heart and a quick mind. As the men shake hands they stare into each other’s eyes. They cannot know it yet, but this meeting will be fatal. For Reverend George Parker it will culminate with his murder in the tall clover of a summer meadow, and for Captain Samuel Evans it will end many years later, tortured by an uncontrollable mania. Damned, some said.
fn1 John Curwood and Judge Littledale would be reunited in 1831 in the trial of Bishop, May and Williams, bodysnatchers accused of killing a street boy. The case was a sensation and is the subject of The Italian Boy, by Sarah Wise.
Epilogue
Netherwood Farm, Oddingley, April 2011
A skinny tarmac road, Netherwood Lane, sweeps down from Oddingley towards Crowle to the spot where Netherwood Farm lies low and lonely in the south of Oddingley parish. It’s a damp April day, and I have come to Oddingley to see where Heming was murdered for myself. A stretch of whi
te metal fencing flanks the five-bar entrance gate, which stands open, leading into a muddy fold-yard criss-crossed with the prints of tractor tyres. A restless collie scampers in and out of sheds and outhouses, engaged on some determined quest, as I speak to the farmer. He is young and friendly, and talks with a gentle Birmingham lilt. He tells me about a legend they have at Netherwood. They say that when it rains, and the rushing water runs over the stiff red clay, the ruby pools that collect in the nearby ditches contain the blood of Richard Heming, the murdered murderer. He points to a spot behind the barn where a little section of an old hawthorn hedge is interrupted several times by sudden gaps, wide enough to allow workers to pass into the meadow beyond. These gaps are supposed to mark the route along which Richard Heming’s corpse was dragged on 25 June 1806.
He tells me these stories with half a smile and then disappears into the farm, leaving me alone by the barn. It’s a tall red-brick structure, riddled with ventilation holes in its outer walls, standing to the left of the yard on the site of the original pulled down by Charles Burton in early 1830. Today there is no element of mystery to the place that once drew officials, curious locals, journalists and artists from across England, desperate to capture the scene. The only clue that the barn was ever at the centre of a sensational news story is a worn plaque nestled into its brickwork. This is the final tangible trace of the artful life and violent death of Richard Heming. The plaque comprises two slabs of local limestone. Each carries a bleak inscription: the top one ‘1806 RH 1830’; the second – deeply set, in a Roman typeface – ‘RH’. The stones seem deliberately cryptic: just dates and initials, almost as if they dare not spell out Richard Heming’s name.
Perhaps even this stark, dismal memorial will not last much longer. The barn has come to the end of its long working life and is shortly to be demolished. Its blue-tiled roof is half-consumed with wispy moss and at one point bulges inwards in semi-collapse. Its walls are chipped and crumbling, and the edge of the bridle path, which runs behind the building, is strewn with mounds of bricks, offcuts of timber and bundles of rope. It feels apt to have found the barn in this condition – about to be replaced, just as it was in 1830. I’m left with a sense of history turning. Just a few feet from where I stand the earth dips into a damp hollow. One hundred and eighty-one years ago Charles Burton was labouring here on a winter day, digging and clawing at the foundations beside the waters of a frozen pool. Just one yard beyond this and one yard below, he would find Heming’s skeleton, and the story of the Oddingley Murders would erupt.