Female Executions: Martyrs, Murderesses and Madwomen

by Abbott, Geoffrey

  At midnight the hearse finally arrived, the queues then lining up to file past the cadaver, after which it was taken to Leeds General Hospital for dissection. Not only did that medical institution benefit surgically by the invasive examination of her anatomy, but also financially, its coffers being enhanced by the proceeds from those who had viewed her external torso. As was customary, following dissection her corpse was skinned and after being scraped and tanned, was sold in small pieces as souvenirs to ghoulish-minded collectors.

  In 1949 a case was brought in a London Court against a horse’s owner and its trainer, alleging their negligence in that, on the horse leaving the unsaddling enclosure, it kicked the plaintiff on the head, she thereby sustaining a fractured skull. Some legal argument then arose regarding the correct way in which a horse should be led in order to prevent such an incident. The matter was resolved by the counsel for the defence who proceeded to borrow the stuffed head of a horse from a London shop, which dealt in harnesses, outside which the head was usually displayed.

  Then followed the strange and doubtless unprecedented sight within the hallowed precincts of the court, of the counsel and the usher parading the stuffed head around the chamber, one carrying the head, the other controlling the steed as they demonstrated to the jury the manner in which it should have been done. This evidence, straight from the horse’s mouth, proved conclusive, the case being settled in favour of the plaintiff.

  Becherin, Ursula (Germany)

  On 17 July 1582 Ursula Becherin of Hessdorf, an arsonist, burnt down a stall belonging to her master, a farmer, because people there were harsh to her. Later in the year she did the same to her new employer, and also stole clothing belonging to him and one of his workers, because, she said, in their opinion she could do nothing right. On the scaffold she stood upright while Franz Schmidt, the Nuremberg executioner, beheaded her with the sword, her body afterwards being burnt.

  Barbara Ludtwigin, a barber’s wife of Nuremberg, must have had a vocabulary to be envied, for she was charged with ‘having blasphemed so horribly against the Almighty that a galley and two small ships besides could have been filled with her profanities.’ A picturesque description indeed, and one that resulted in her being pilloried in the town square, a target for all, and then whipped out of town.

  Benwell, Eliza (Australia)

  There is a marked difference between ‘seeing’ and ‘keeping watch’, and this distinction was never more crucial than when Eliza Benwell was on trial for murder. Regrettably in her case, that difference, literally a matter of life or death, was fatally blurred.

  In the days when English convicts were transported in prison ships to penal colonies on the other side of the world, many were then put to work on farms and large estates, some as house servants or members of hotel staff. On the arrival of one such ship in Hobart, Tasmania, four convicts, Thomas Gomm, Isaac Lockwood, William Taylor and Eliza Benwell, were employed in that city’s Derwent Hotel, their various tasks being to attend to the general welfare of the guests. Among the visitors accommodated there in 1845 was a wealthy couple who had brought their own maid, Jane Saunders, with them. One evening, on being told to go to the hotel larder for some food for her employers, she went – but never returned. The entire premises were searched but no trace of the young woman was found until a few days later when a body, identified as hers, was discovered floating in the nearby River Derwent, stab wounds to the head and neck being indicative of a brutal murder.

  Among the hotel staff on duty on the night of her disappearance were Taylor, Gomm, Lockwood and Eliza Benwell. The three men were charged with murder, Eliza Benwell with aiding and abetting them. At their trial, damning evidence against the accused was given by Keo-Moi Tiki, a native of the Sandwich Islands, through an interpreter. He swore that he had witnessed the attack being carried out by the three men and that the maid had also been there, keeping watch for them. After a day’s deliberations the jury found the men guilty of murder, and all three were subsequently hanged, protesting their innocence to the last.

  When Eliza faced the court the same evidence was presented, following which the jury retired. After due consideration, they came to the conclusion that because the murder had not been planned but had resulted when Jane Saunders resisted the men’s advances, they declared the defendant to be innocent. But Eliza had hardly time to breathe a sigh of relief before the judge ordered them to reconsider their verdict on the grounds that the accused was just as blameworthy for keeping watch while a rape was attempted. Again the jury retired, again failing to reach a conclusion; sent back for a further hour’s deliberation they returned to pronounce the prisoner at the bar guilty, whereupon she was sentenced to death.

  In the condemned cell she swore she was innocent, that she had not been ‘keeping watch’ as stated in court, but purely by accident had happened to see Lockwood dragging the murdered maid’s body from the building; moreover, she declared, she had seen neither Gomm nor Taylor at the scene. But despite her statements no attempt was made to reopen the case. To do so might well have been disastrous for the judiciary, forcing it to admit that a gross miscarriage of justice had been committed. Gomm, Lockwood and Taylor were already dead, and the Benwell execution would perforce have to go ahead. And so Eliza mounted the scaffold, her calm demeanour evoking nothing but sympathy and admiration from the large crowd as hangman Solomon Blay, himself an exiled convict, having placed the noose around her slim neck, pulled the lever – and the body of Eliza Benwell dropped the length of the short rope, a seeming eternity elapsing before her lifeless body hung inert and motionless.

  One day in 1744 London housewife Lydia Adler attacked her meek and henpecked husband, knocking him down and kicking him so severely that he later died. At her trial at the Old Bailey she was charged with murder, but this was changed to one of manslaughter when medical evidence was produced testifying that her husband was already suffering from a rupture at the time of his death that was the material cause of his death. She was sentenced to be ‘burned in the hand’, and as the court officials were heating the branding iron, Lydia, as bad-tempered and impatient as ever, exclaimed, ‘Come on, hurry it up, can’t you? I’ve got my linen to do!’

  Bevan, Catherine (USA)

  In England the penalty of being burned at the stake was usually inflicted on those unfortunates who happened to have a different religion to the one more generally practised at the time. Two differing reasons for such a horrific death were that it prepared the heretical victim for the ever-burning fires that surely awaited him or her below, and that only by fire could the victim’s soul be cleansed of his or her heretical thoughts.

  The English colonists brought many of their quaint customs with them into America, including the home-grown methods of execution. Hanging needed no introduction, but strangely enough being burned at the stake rarely occurred except in the notable case of Catherine Bevan, not for being a heretic but a murderer.

  In 1731 she, together with her servant lover, planned the death of her husband. Unable to kill him by herself, it was agreed that the young man would knock him unconscious and she would then strangle him. Having carried out their plan, they reported to the coroner that he had died while having a fit and that the funeral had been arranged. However, the official insisted on inspecting the body and on opening up the coffin discovered the bruised and battered corpse.

  After being sentenced to death, Catherine, her hands bound behind her, was taken to the market square and there tied to a stake by means of a rope around her neck. Kindling was heaped around her and while the local residents either cheered or watched appalled, the tinder was ignited. As the flames leapt upwards the executioner attempted to reach forward and pull the rope with the intention of ending her life quickly by strangling her but, ironically, considering the method by which she had murdered her husband, the rope, singed by the mounting flames, had burnt away and Catherine collapsed, to be slowly incinerated in the roaring inferno.

  Unlike in Catherine’s case, a r
ope did Hannah Dagoe a favour. Sentenced to death for robbery in 1763, this strongly built Irishwoman had no intention of going quietly as the cart stopped beneath the Tyburn gallows. Somehow she got her hands free and attacked the hangman, nearly stunning him. Then, turning to the crowds surrounding the scaffold, she tore off her hat and cloak and tossed them as souvenirs to the many outstretched hands. As she was doing so the hangman gathered his wits again and managed to drop the noose over her head – but rather than submitting to be slowly strangled (as usually happened at Tyburn), she threw herself over the side of the cart with such violence that her neck was broken, and she died instantly.

  Bockin, Margaret (Germany)

  When, in 1580, a neighbour asked Margaret Bockin to look for lice in her hair, Margaret struck her from behind with an axe. Needless to say she was found guilty of murder and was led out in the tumbril to the scaffold in the market square. There, naked to the waist, she was nipped three times with red-hot pincers, then beheaded, standing, with the sword. Finally, as a deterrent to all, her head was fixed on a pole above the gallows and her body buried beneath it.

  On 29 August 1587, in Nuremberg, Elizabeth Rossnerin smothered her companion and stole her money. For that crime, Master Franz Schmidt executed her with the sword as a favour, instead of hanging her, because, as he wrote in his diary, she was a poor creature and had a wry neck.

  Bowe, Alice atte (England)

  A thirteenth-century story that had everything: love, lust, murder, sacrilege, faked suicide, imprisonment in the Tower of London, and ending in death by the rope and the flames – and it all revolved around a reputedly attractive woman named Alice atte Bowe. In 1284 she was the mistress of a man named Ralph Crepin, but Laurence Ducket, a goldsmith who lived nearby, cast covetous and no doubt lecherous eyes on her and made repeated advances for her favours, all of which she spurned. At length, frustrated and vengeful, he broke into their house one night while the couple were asleep and stabbed Crepin to death. At the commotion Alice woke up and recognised the assailant; rushing to the window she saw him cross the street and enter the nearby Bow Church, so, summoning some of her friends and neighbours, they gave chase. In the church they found their quarry cowering beneath a pile of old sacks; dragging him out, they proceeded to put a rope around his neck and hang him before one of the church windows, making it appear that he had committed suicide.

  At the subsequent inquest it was decided that Ducket had indeed taken his own life and so, that being a crime in the eyes of the Law, the corpse was denied a Christian burial but was thrown into the City Ditch, the church being closed and its doors barred with thorns pending a spiritual cleansing.

  But, as related by Alfred Marks in his History and Annals of Tyburn, 1908, ‘shortly after, as related by a boy who had been asleep under the sacks, the truth of the matter was disclosed’. Alice and sixteen of her accomplices were arrested, Tower records showing that they were incarcerated therein. Dire punishment, that of being drawn and hanged, was administered to seven of the men; Alice was burned at the stake.

  Women were to blame for most crimes! So said the eighteenth-century edition of the Newgate and Tyburn Register, declaring that ‘If His Majesty would be graciously pleased to let the law operate in its FULL force against women convicts, it would indisputably produce very happy results. It is to the low and abandoned women that hundreds of young fellows owe their destruction. They rob, they plunder, to support these wretches. Let it not seem cruel that we make one remark, of which we are convinced, experience would justify the propriety. The execution of ten women would do more public service than that of a hundred men; for exclusive of the force of example, it would perhaps tend to the preservation of more than a hundred.’

  Branch, Elizabeth and Mary (England)

  Elizabeth, aged 67, and her daughter Mary, 24, were both charged with the cruel murder of their maid, Jane Butterworth. A transcript of their trial, which took place at Taunton, Somerset, in March 1740, reported that:

  It was obvious, judging by the suspicions of their neighbours, that both the accused had also committed other murders in the past. Mrs Branch’s husband died under circumstances that led others who lived nearby to believe she had poisoned him and they were convinced that she had hanged her mother, after murdering her, to avoid an investigation into the cause of the death. Human bones were also discovered in a well near her [Elizabeth’s] farm, which were believed to be those of one of her servant girls who disappeared and was never heard from again. With such a reputation Mrs Branch found it difficult to get female staff in the locality and when she was in need of one she went further afield and brought Jane Butterfield from Bristol.

  The young girl was hardly in the house before the two women subjected her to a brutal regime, and eventually beat her so savagely that she died. The older woman had Jane’s corpse buried secretly in the graveyard and might have escaped blame, in spite of the complaint of her other maid, who had witnessed the murder and had been forced to lie next to her in bed, if a strange light had not been seen over the girl’s grave, by several persons. This unearthly manifestation confirmed the neighbours’ suspicions, and when the body was secretly removed at night, it was found by Mr Salmon, a surgeon, to be covered with wounds and other marks of violence.

  Elizabeth Branch and her daughter beating their victim

  When the case was first called, it was discovered that Mrs Branch had bribed some of the jurors, and there was some delay before they could be replaced. The trial lasted over six hours, and after a short consultation the jury brought in a verdict of guilty. It was noticed that Mrs Branch’s expression remained unchanged at their findings, but several times kicked Mary Vigor, one of the prosecution witnesses, as she stood by her at the bar while she was giving evidence. When sentence was passed the next day, the condemned elder woman complained bitterly to the court about the illegality of changing the jury, exclaiming that if she and her daughter had been tried by the first jury, they would not have been convicted.

  Some time after they had both been removed from the court, Mary Branch, realising what was to happen to her, fainted, and when she was revived by a wardress her mother cried, ‘Zounds, what are you going to do? Hadn’t she better die like this than be hanged?’

  During their imprisonment Mrs Branch behaved sullenly and seemed more concerned by the conditions under which they were confined rather than the welfare of her soul, but her daughter told the gaoler, with whom, before the trial, she had been allowed to take a walk past Ilchester churchyard, that she would like to be buried there.

  The women were sentenced to die on 3 May 1740, Mrs Branch expressing a wish to be hanged early in the morning before the expectedly large crowd of spectators could assemble. She got up early, called her daughter and told her to get ready, ‘because if they didn’t make haste, the mob would be in on them and they should not be hanged in peace’. On being escorted from the gaol, Mrs Branch called out to a passer-by: ‘I have forgotten my cloak and clogs; pray fetch them, lest I should catch cold.’

  When they reached the execution site at about 6 a.m. it was found that one of the gallows’ uprights and the crosspiece had been cut down, probably by vandals rather than by anyone who might have been in sympathy with the two women. In order to get the ordeal over, Mrs Branch said she would be prepared to be hanged from a nearby tree instead (as befitted her name!) but a carpenter was sent for and a new gallows quickly constructed and erected.

  Giving her cloak and purse to a friend, Elizabeth then helped the hangman to position the noose around her daughter’s neck, afterwards asking him for a dram of strong drink, but he refused, saying that she had already had a couple of drinks earlier in the prison. After brief speeches, in which Mrs Branch swore that she had never intended to kill the deceased and begged for forgiveness, and her daughter Mary beseeched the crowd to pray for her, the halters around their necks tightened as the drop was operated. The bodies were allowed to hang for three-quarters of an hour before being cut down and taken away
to be interred in Ilchester churchyard.

  Horace Walpole, the renowned eighteenth-century author, reported an appalling breach of the law committed by those whose job was to uphold it! In 1742 he wrote:

  There has lately been the most shocking scene of murder imaginable; a parcel of drunken constables took it into their heads to put the law into execution against disorderly persons and so took up every woman they met, till they had collected five- or six-and-twenty, all of whom they thrust into St Martin’s lock-up [a small, temporary gaol] where they kept them all night, with doors and windows closed. The poor creatures, who could not stir or breathe, screamed as long as they had any breath left, begging at least for water; one poor wretch said she had eighteen pence on her and would gladly give it for a draught of water, but in vain!

  So well did they keep them there, that in the morning four were found stifled to death, two died soon after, and a dozen more are in a shocking way. Several of them were beggars who, from having no lodging, were necessarily found in the street, and others were honest labouring women. One of the dead was a poor washerwoman, big with child, who was returning home late from washing.