The Cretingham Murder

by Sheila Hardy

  Asked by counsel what assessment Dr Eager had put on his report of that visit on 1 November, he answered, ‘He is now hopelessly insane and irresponsible.’

  The doctor was then asked if he had seen Arthur since that date. He replied that he had that very morning spent two or three minutes with the prisoner in a cell at the back of the court. Describing what had taken place during that brief meeting he said he had asked Arthur for that day’s name and date, both of which he had given correctly. Invited by counsel to give a medical opinion on Arthur’s current mental state, the doctor relied, ‘I think he is able to form a judgement as to why he is here; but I do not think he is able to form any judgement as to instructing his counsel.’

  The learned medical opinions offered were not sufficient to sway the jury who quickly made up their minds that Arthur was indeed fit to plead his case. That jury was then thanked for its service and dismissed. Another jury was sworn in and the trial began in earnest.

  Wearing a thick overcoat over his usual clerical attire, Arthur was led in looking flushed and excited. When he entered the bare dock, he looked round for a chair which was hastily provided for him. From the clean-shaven, moustached young man of just over six weeks before, it was remarked that he now had long side whiskers and a beard. One assumes that it was considered dangerous to allow a razor anywhere near him.

  He stood for the formal charge to be read out and answered ‘Not guilty’ in a firm, clear voice.

  The trial followed the course of the previous hearings, with Harriet Louisa beginning with her account. It was observed that the widow, who was still in deep mourning, seemed to have aged considerably since her last court appearance. She too was allowed to be seated as she gave her evidence.

  During her cross examination, she said she did not know that Arthur had ever been in an asylum but for the first time she admitted that she had been aware from the beginning that ‘his mind was wrong’. She said that Archdeacon Groome had read two letters to her husband which she had not heard, but her husband had later given her the impression that the curate was not quite right but perfectly safe. ‘He [the Revd Farley] said “he is a very worthy, good young man but a little weak. He is perfectly harmless.”’

  Harriet Louisa was later questioned about her correspondence with Arthur’s mother. Was it right that in one letter she had written ‘he is so bright and cheerful’ after his return? ‘Oh yes, he was. He was bright and childish about the house.’ And yet, the defence argued, was it not also correct that in a second letter she had written, ‘he is not at all well and came home sadly’?

  When questioning Dr Jones, Murphy for the defence laid particular emphasis on the doctor’s examination of Arthur while in custody immediately following the murder. Had Arthur, Murphy wanted to know, realized the importance of the situation he was in? The doctor did not think so. In fact, Arthur had given the impression of having some idea of a wrong and that he was to be punished by having his throat cut.

  Witnesses for the defence all set out to reinforce Arthur’s insanity. His uncle Gen C. Gilbert-Cooper told the court of the severe sunstroke and weeks of fever that had followed it when the young Arthur was in India. Then came the revelation of the heredity madness on the Shuldham side of the family; not just one uncle but two great uncles as well had suffered in this way.

  Mr Mickley, the resident medical superintendent of St Luke’s Hospital, having stated that Arthur had been admitted as a patient on 2 November 1878, quoted entries from the hospital records:

  20.12.1878. This morning Cooper made an unprovoked attack upon Baker and when the attendant came to stop him he attacked him, in a violent manner. Was visited upon two occasions by his father this week, who considered him improved since his last visit. Patient told one of the attendants he would commit suicide if he could. Is a dangerous patient and will attack suddenly without warning.

  10.8.1880. In a very unsatisfactory state. He cannot be trusted.

  At the request of the family solicitors, Dr Mickley had visited Arthur at Ipswich Gaol on 12 October. He gave an account of the interview he had had:

  I saw the prisoner in Ipswich Gaol and said to him, ‘How were you feeling just before this occurrence?’ His answer was ‘I was distrait and out of sorts mentally.’

  I said, ‘How did you feel that night when you first went to bed?’

  ‘I felt very comfortable.’

  ‘How was it you went to Mr Farley’s room?’

  ‘I don’t know how or why I went. I could not help it.’

  I then asked whether he knew the Mr Farley was dead.

  To which he replied: ‘I do not know that he is dead. I have not been told so. If he is dead, it is not murder, because it was not planned. Had it been planned then it would have been murder. Were I in a similar state of mind again the same might occur.’

  ‘Had you any feeling against the deceased?’

  ‘No – I can avoid the trial by going to Heaven by having my throat cut by the proper persons.’

  ‘Are you troubled with voices of imaginary people speaking to you?’

  ‘They harass me and worry me. They are spiritual voices.’

  Dr Mickley concluded with the statement that the prisoner’s manner was dull and stupid. He believed that he knew right from wrong up to a certain point; assuming that he knew what he was about to do was wrong, he had not the mental powers to stop himself.

  A second medical expert from St Luke’s, Dr Wood, had accompanied Mickley and he offered a further account of the conversations which had taken place. In his opinion, Arthur had shown no animosity towards the Revd Farley but had said that the thought of murder had come to him that morning. He was under the delusion that he was being influenced by another person who impelled him to commit the crime. He had then asked the doctor ‘Is Robespierre alive?’ On being told he wasn’t, he had replied, ‘perhaps he isn’t dead after all.’ He had then declared with great emotion that Mr Farley was alive. And when told he wasn’t, had declared, ‘I am a Mason.’

  Arthur had also volunteered that there were other people by whom he had been influenced. These he identified as the ‘two at Cretingham’. Asked to name the two, he said he could not tell him.

  When Dr Wood asked Arthur for his motive, the accused had reiterated that there was none and it was not murder. The doctor’s evidence continued: ‘I said, ‘Is the act right?’

  ‘No, it was foolish and wicked but I couldn’t help it. I did not mean to kill him. He is alive now. I suppose I must have been quite mad. I thought if I did something of this sort I should get off my trouble. But I knew it would not, therefore I gave it up.’

  The final medical statement came from Dr Tuke, FRCS, who had been responsible for Arthur’s first committal to a mental institution: ‘Persons might give way to homicidal impulses then be apparently cured and the attacks might come on years later. Recurring lunacy occurred largely in the autumn, the hotter months influencing the brain.’

  In his submission to the jury, Murphy begged them to exercise common sense in their consideration of about ‘the maddest action he had ever heard of. This crime was so extraordinary and unheard of it must be the work of a madman.’ To reinforce this view, he hammered home the question of what motive had Arthur had? Then too, the jury should consider how often was a crime like this committed in the presence of a witness? And if that wasn’t ludicrous enough, surely it was usual for a criminal to have a plan of escape, not to return to the scene as if nothing had happened.

  Throughout the trial, which lasted seven and a half hours, there was little reaction from Arthur himself beyond the occasional hand movements which suggested he was brushing things away from his face.

  It is not recorded how long the jury took to decide that the prisoner was insane at the time he committed the act. The judge would not accept this verdict until he had established that the jury had in fact found him guilty of the killing. The jury agreed this but added the important proviso that the prisoner was insane so as not to be respons
ible according to law for his actions.

  Sentence was delivered. Under the terms of the Criminal Lunacy Act which had come into force as recently as 1884, Arthur Gilbert-Cooper had escaped hanging. However, he was to be detained at her Majesty’s Pleasure. A few week’s later, a short sentence tucked away in the East Anglian Daily Times announced that the curate of Cretingham had been sent to Broadmoor.

  8

  FINALE

  The case is closed, the book is shut, but for the reader there is the niggling question – ‘what happened after that?’ How soon did the villagers at Cretingham settle back to the even tenor of their lives; how long was it before the vicar’s murder and the curate’s incarceration in Broadmoor ceased to be a topic of conversation over the teacups and tankards?

  Unfortunately, there is now no one left to tell us of the events of the months which followed. The Framlingham News however, related that barely two months after the fatal deed for which the muffled bell of the church had tolled, the bells of St Peter’s Cretingham rang out loud and clear. A date-touch peal of 1887 changes in plain bob methods was rung in one hour and twelve minutes at the beginning of December. The ringers, conducted by G. Wightman (father of Annie) included another Wightman, John Self, Thomas Coates (husband of the woman who had assisted at the Revd Farley’s laying out) and the 13-year-old James Durrant.

  By April of the following year, the Revd Henry Brown had been appointed vicar and village life was presumed to be back to normal. However, over the intervening years, the murder has aroused sporadic interest and legends have flourished. Among these has been the occasional sighting of a ghostly figure wandering in the grounds of the vicarage in the early hours of the morning. Those who have seen it believe it to be the curate returning to the scene of his crime. Others say he is searching the grounds for that missing razor.

  The house itself has spawned mysterious happenings. Inevitably, the story grew that the bloodstains remained on the bedroom floor, resisting all attempts at removal. There are tales of keys being suddenly dislodged from the locks on the doors of the two rooms involved in the case, unexplained noises and doors being opened and closed by unseen hands.

  The great hurricane of October 15 1987, which caused havoc in much of Suffolk, has also added to the legends.A hundred years to the day (give or take a couple of weeks!) the fierce wind brought one of the trees in Cretingham churchyard crashing to the ground. Was it some kind of omen, it was asked, that a branch smashed off part of the Revd Farley’s headstone?

  The question which is most asked is what became of Mrs Farley? As the vicar’s widow, she would have been required to vacate the vicarage, it being, as it were, a tied house that went with the job. It is doubtful she would have wished to remain in Cretingham anyway, given the circumstances, but where did she go?

  In his will, made within days of his marriage to Harriet Louisa, the Revd Farley named her as his sole beneficiary: ‘To my dear wife Harriet Louisa the whole of my property household goods plate and life policies that I now have or may become entitled to for her own use and disposal. . .’ The only proviso was that the £100 he had borrowed from his son, Thomas’s Trust Fund be repaid from his estate. A codicil added to the will in 1884 stated that he had already repaid the loan with an additional £50 interest. This left Harriet Louisa beneficiary to his personal estate, which for probate purposes stood at £927 0s 6d.

  So, she had sufficient means to provide her with a small annuity. Where then, would a woman who had been through the horror of a murder and the ensuing legal proceedings go to recover and start a new life? In 1998 I was unable to answer that. Exhaustive enquiries had failed to find any trace of her following the trial in November 1887. There was no record of her embarking on a third marriage, so that raised the possibility that she had left the country and ended her days abroad. Widows often settled on the Continent in the late nineteenth century, the climate being more beneficial to the health and the cost of living substantially lower than in England. Could she have gone to America, Australia or perhaps returned to New Zealand? Even after all the drama in which she had been involved, one could not imagine her settling down to a mundane old age. My own theory was that she re-invented herself yet again with a new name, and in time, a new husband.

  I was wrong on almost every count. According to the 1891 census, Harriet Louisa Farley was living in Kensington, London, acting as a companion to an elderly Canadian-born lady. How long she held that post is unknown but even more surprising was her location in 1901. On census day she was a ‘visitor’ in the Liverpool home of William Argent, a professor of music. So what was she doing there? Had her employer died and left her a legacy or even property in Canada? And was she ‘boarding’ with the Argents while she waited for a passage across the Atlantic? Unfortunately, her name does not appear on any shipping list of the period – not even on that of the Titanic, which would have been another dramatic event in her life. It looks as if the conclusion to Harriet Louisa’s story will continue to tantalize me.

  In April 1927, the Framlingham News ran a short piece recalling the murder of forty years earlier as a way of announcing that Arthur Gilbert-Cooper had died in Broadmoor on the 19th of that month. Unfortunately, the Broadmoor records for that period still remain closed to public scrutiny, so we have no knowledge of his behaviour, or the deterioration or improvement of his mental state during the almost forty years that he remained in custody. Arthur’s father, who died in 1901, made reference to him in his will: ‘I bequeath to my trustees the sum of five hundred pounds in Consols upon trust to apply the income as they think fit for the benefit of my son Arthur Edward during his life.’ That Arthur’s needs were simple is shown by the fact that when he died, his brother was granted probate to his estate valued at £361 11s.

  To all intents, the story of the Cretingham murder was wound up with Arthur’s death. No doubt, the case originally captured the public interest through its unusual cast of players – two clergymen, one from a ‘good’ family, an attractive woman and the setting of a quiet country village. But why should we, in a more sophisticated age, give it a second thought?

  It is that very sophistication that has made armchair detectives of us all. From television programmes we have become familiar with the great variety of police procedures. We also think we know all about forensic techniques, coroners’ duties and the legal proceedings of the courts. In addition, we believe ourselves to have a close understanding of the inner workings of the criminal mind!

  In 1887 the Oxford Times wrote:

  It seems next to incredible that the Vicar’s throat could have been cut whilst he was in bed and no blood stains to be found on the bed or the bed clothes. However, the whole matter has been passed into the hands of the Public Prosecutor and although there is much mystery surrounding the case, there can be no doubt that the facts will be thoroughly investigated and the public curiosity satisfied as far as judicial means can be employed.

  The optimistic hope expressed in the second part of that last sentence was not fully realized and it is with hindsight that we now approach the questions which were not asked at the time and advance some possible answers.

  It was obvious at the inquest that the villagers saw the murder as a crime of passion. They either knew or had concluded that ‘something was going on’ between Harriet Louisa and Arthur. Not content with references to their being openly seen walking together, they dragged out of poor Frank Bilney the gossip that the former maid had spread abroad, namely that Harriet Louisa was in the habit of visiting Arthur’s room in the early morning and had been seen kissing him. Harriet Louisa herself admitted that she might have kissed him but that there was nothing in that; she merely regarded Arthur as she would a younger brother. She boasted that she was quite used to looking after the young men in her former husband’s regiment in a maternal role. But was it? Had Lt-Col Moule appreciated his wife’s efforts to ‘play mother’ to his junior officers?

  As we have already seen, the contents and tone of the colonel
’s will suggest that the almost twenty-year-old marriage was not as happy as it should have been. Could it be that the colonel had become tired of her ‘maternal attentions’ to his ensigns and that they were in fact estranged?

  If she was indeed disinherited by her husband, it is no wonder that when just a year into widowhood she met and married the elderly Revd Farley, she made sure that his will was entirely in her favour.

  It is very tempting to paint Harriet as a manipulative schemer who was bored with life in the country, married to an old man whose health was deteriorating. She also had to endure his uncertain temper which, it was suggested, led to his striking her on occasions. She was tied with little sign of release in the immediate future. No wonder she grasped at the chance of some diversion with the attractive and sympathetic younger curate. Had she during her walks and talks with Arthur confided her problems to him? Had she unwittingly, or even deliberately, planted the idea of getting rid of Farley? Was hers one of the voices he later told the doctors he had heard? Was she one of the ‘two at Cretingham’ to whom he referred as guiding his actions?

  In fact, it is possible to make out a good case that Harriet Louisa herself committed the murder. Let us suppose that she had indeed become fond of Arthur and that the village gossips were right, the relationship had gone further than was appropriate. During the five weeks that he was away, she had time to assess her situation and became depressed, seeing nothing for herself beyond the tedious routine of looking after her ailing husband. She was trapped in a marriage which was nothing more than a duty. Given her age at the time, she might well have been suffering from violent mood swings herself. Did she, during a black moment, conceive that the only way out was her husband’s death? If she had discussed Arthur’s mental health problems with him, did she suddenly see that she could use him to extricate herself from what had become an impossible situation?

  Certainly something happened in the first days after Arthur’s return to change his calm holiday disposition to one of agitation. At the same time Harriet Louisa made sure that it was known that Arthur was ‘not himself’. Was she working towards the fruition of her plan?