The following day a friend of Mrs Duncomb’s called at the block of chambers but, on getting no reply, contacted a woman working in the next room, who, by dint of climbing out of her employer’s room and breaking a window in Mrs Duncomb’s chambers, succeeded in gaining an entrance. When the two women went in, they were horrified at the gruesome sight that greeted them, for there, to quote the Newgate Calendar ‘was the body of Ann Price, lying on her bed, wallowing in blood, with her throat cut from ear to ear’. In the next room lay Elizabeth Harrison, who had obviously been strangled, as had Mrs Duncomb in an adjoining room. A chest, in which the old lady had kept her valuables, had been broken into and the contents removed.
The news spread swiftly round the locality and Mr Kerril, on going to his quarters, found Sarah Malcolm there, lighting the fires. He noticed a bundle lying on the floor and on querying its contents, she replied that it was her gown, together with other garments and she said she hoped decency would deter him from opening it. So, of course, he refrained from doing so. However, two watchmen, the police officers of the day, started to search the building, and on finding some of Mr Kerril’s belongings hidden in her rooms, Sarah was arrested. A further search by her employer revealed more linen, and a silver tankard with a bloodstained handle concealed in the lavatory. On being interrogated, Sarah alleged that they belonged to her mother and that the blood was from her hand, having cut her finger that morning.
Such excuses being regarded as frivolous, Sarah was taken to Newgate Prison, and in accordance with regulations she was searched. On doing so, Mr Johnson, the turnkey, was astonished to find a small bag containing coins amounting to over a hundred pounds in value hidden beneath the thick coiled tresses of her hair. At the discovery, Sarah admitted that the money belonged to Mrs Duncomb, adding brazenly, ‘I’ll make you a present of it if you will but keep it to yourself and let nobody know of anything of the matter; for the other things against me are nothing but circumstances, and I shall come off well enough.
So I only desire you to let me have threepence or sixpence a day till the court sessions are over, and then I’ll be at liberty to shift for myself.’ Johnson, however, was a man of integrity; yielding not to temptation, he promptly sealed up the bag and locked it away to await her trial.
In court Sarah claimed that the murders had been committed by the Alexander brothers; that having all the keys to the chambers, as required by her job, she had admitted them to Mrs Duncomb’s rooms, but had taken no part in the crimes but had watched from the stairs. Whether this account was true or not, so overwhelming was the evidence of the bloody-handled tankard, and the clothing and money in her possession, that the verdict was not long forthcoming. She was found guilty and sentenced to death.
On 7 March 1733 she was taken in the horse-drawn cart from Newgate, accompanied by the hangman ‘Laughing Jack’ Hooper, to the set of gallows erected near Fetter Lane in Fleet Street, it being the custom in those days to execute a murderer as near as possible to the place of the crime. An onlooker said that Sarah had rouged her cheeks heavily to conceal her prison pallor, and was wearing a black gown, white apron, a hood made of sarsenet (a fine soft silk fabric) and black gloves; she appeared very serious and devout, crying and wringing her hands in an extraordinary manner. She was helped in her devotions by the Reverend Peddington of the Church of St Bartholomew the Great, and Mr Guthrie, the Ordinary of Newgate Prison went with her in the cart en route to the scaffold. Another observer declared that ‘at one time that she was in the cart, what with praying, Agony and Passion, she fell down, but was immediately rais’d, and laid her head against hangman John Hooper, and Mr Peddington read to her.’
On arrival she called out to the bellman who had been ringing his bell to warn everyone of the vehicle’s approach, and gave him a shilling with which to buy himself a bottle of wine; she then declared to the crowd ‘that her employer Mr Kerril knew nothing of her intentions of the robbery and the terrible deeds that followed’ and also said that ‘she had given Mr Peddington a letter in which she related what she had to say about the fact’.
On the scaffold she was seen to sway momentarily but swiftly recovered as Hooper dropped the noose over her head and tightened it. Climbing down out of the cart, he gave the horse a sharp slap on its flanks, causing the steed, and the cart, to move away and leave Sarah swinging and kicking for some little time in the empty air. At length she was cut down and taken by coach back to Newgate and buried.
The inevitably vast crowd watched Sarah’s execution and so great was the surging and jostling after she had been cut down that the scaffold itself almost collapsed; the gangs of thieves who usually attended such profitable events seized the opportunity to enhance their bank balances, and many of the more affluent of the spectators found their pockets empty, their purses and watches gone.
Manning, Maria (England)
Despite being married, Maria, an alluring 28-year-old Swiss woman, fell in love with Patrick O’Connor, a middle-aged money lender, a relationship that was accepted seemingly wholeheartedly by her husband Frederick. O’Connor, using his business acumen, recommended that the Mannings should rent a public house in Shoreditch, but when the concern failed to make any profit, Maria accused O’Connor of cheating them and demanded compensation. On 8 August 1849 she invited him to visit them at their home at No. 3 Minerva Place, Bermondsey, in order to discuss the situation; instead she cold-bloodedly shot him through the head. It would seem that the couple had formulated their plan in advance, for when O’Connor appeared to be still alive, Frederick picked up the crowbar he had bought with the intention of using it to bury their victim, and proceeded to batter O’Connor to death. He then used the makeshift weapon to lever up some of the paving stones in the kitchen, and with Maria’s help, concealed the body beneath them.
Whether Maria then deliberately decided to double-cross her husband, or whether she panicked at the murder they had committed and made up her mind to go abroad, is not known, but, saying nothing to Frederick, she went to O’Connor’s house and after stealing cash and valuables, including some railway stock, she caught the train to Edinburgh. Meanwhile their victim’s absence had been reported to the police and on tracing O’Connor’s last movements they visited the Mannings’ residence. During a detailed search of the premises one of the officers noticed the fresh cement around some of the flagstones in the kitchen and, on lifting them, they discovered a man’s body, his wrists bound behind him, his legs doubled up and tied to his haunches. Quicklime had been poured over the corpse in an attempt to prevent any identification, but dental checks on the set of false teeth found in the remains confirmed that the victim was indeed O’Connor. That the death was not accidental was evidenced by the single bullet discovered within the mutilated skull.
On reaching Scotland, Maria later attempted to sell the railway stock she had stolen, and, the alarm having been raised among the brokers, she was arrested. Frederick, realising that his wife had deserted him, also took to his heels, only to be similarly taken into custody in Jersey.
At their trial each blamed the other for the crime, although the facts that the shares were found in Maria’s possession, and that she could not possibly have buried O’Connor’s body singlehanded, left the jury in little doubt that both were equally culpable. After just 45 minutes a verdict of guilty was announced.
Defending herself to the last, Maria furiously declared that she was innocent, and the only man she would have killed would have been that man – pointing to her husband – who had made her life a hell on earth. On both being sentenced to death, Maria gave vent to a furious tirade against Judge Cresswell and British juries, claiming that such an injustice would never have happened in Switzerland! Her outburst was ignored by His Worship; ‘Take them down,’ he ordered, and the couple were escorted below, and from thence to Horsemonger Lane Gaol, the county gaol for Surrey, situated near the Elephant and Castle in Southwark, there to await execution.
Even in the condemned cell Maria refused to giv
e up her fight for freedom. She had once been a servant in the household of Lady Blantyre, whose mother, the Duchess of Sutherland, had been a close friend of Queen Victoria, so she sent a letter to Her Majesty, appealing for mercy. Not receiving a reply, desperately she attempted to take her own life. Taking advantage of a moment in the middle of the night when her three wardresses were dozing, she tried to pierce her windpipe with her sharp pointed fingernails. One of the wardresses, waking up, realised what was happening, and it took the efforts of all three to tear her hands away from her throat and subdue her.
On Tuesday morning, 13 November 1849, the doomed couple met in the prison chapel and it was reported that as they stood before the altar, Frederick expressed his wish that they should not part in animosity; she replied that she had none, and then kissed him. The Ordinary administered the last sacrament, after which Frederick said, ‘I think we shall meet in heaven.’
The veteran executioner William Calcraft then appeared and pinioned the arms of his prisoners. It was a bitterly cold morning and the hangman tried to show some solicitude for his female victim, urging her to allow the wardress to wrap her cloak around her, but Maria refused; instead she asked that her black silk handkerchief be tied about her eyes beneath the black veil she already wore, so that she would not have to see the waiting gallows, or the vast crowds, whose hubbub she could hear in the distance. Thus blindfolded she was led by Mr Harris, the surgeon, in the sombre procession, the sonorous bell tolling the while along the seemingly endless passageways and up the steep steps to where the scaffold had been erected.
Horsemonger Lane Gaol had a flat roof and so provided a perfect stage for the drama due to take place. Below was a veritable sea of upturned faces, more than 30,000 spectators filling every available space on the cobbles, in balconies and clinging to chimney stacks on rooftops, with no fewer than 500 police constables attempting to maintain some semblance of order.
Journalistic hyperbole, not necessarily factual, was extensively used in the newspapers of the day when describing an execution, but this time a more authoritative description was penned by none other than Charles Dickens and printed in the next edition of The Times. He wrote:
I was a witness to the execution at Horsemonger Lane this morning. I went there with the intention of observing the crowd gathered to behold it and I had excellent opportunities of doing so at intervals throughout the night, and continuously from daybreak, until after the spectacle was over. I believe that a sight so inconceivably awful as the wickedness and levity of the immense crowd could be imagined by no man, and could be presented in no heathen land under the sun. When I came upon the scene at midnight, the shrillness of the cries and howls that were raised from time to time, denoting that they came from a concourse of boys and girls already assembled in the best places, made my blood run cold.
When the day dawned, thieves, low prostitutes, ruffians and vagabonds of every kind flocked on to the ground, with every variety of offensive and foul behaviour. Fightings, faintings, whistling, imitations of Punch, brutal jokes, tumultuous demonstrations of indecent delight when swooning women were dragged out of the crowd by the police, with their dresses disordered, gave a new zest to the general entertainment. When the sun rose brightly – as it did – it gilded thousands upon thousands of upturned faces, so inexpressibly odious in their brutal mirth or callousness, that a man had cause to feel ashamed of the shape he wore, and to shrink from himself, as fashioned in the image of the Devil.
His account was endorsed by a Times reporter, who described ‘the disorderly rabble smoking clay pipes and muzzy with beer, pickpockets plying their light-fingered art, little ragged boys climbing up posts, a ceaseless din of sounds and war of tongues’. He went on to paint a picture of the couple’s last moments:
And when Frederick Manning ascended the steps leading to the drop his limbs tottered under him and he appeared scarcely able to move. Upon his wife approaching the scaffold, he turned round, his face towards the people, while Calcraft proceeded to draw over his head the white nightcap and adjust the fatal rope. The executioner then drew another nightcap over the female prisoner’s head and, all the necessary preparations being now completed, the scaffold was cleared of all its occupants except the two wretched beings doomed to die.
The mob fell hushed and silent as Calcraft swiftly drew the bolt, all eyes fixed on the two hooded and noosed figures silhouetted against the morning sky; the trap opened and the bodies dropped, swaying and twisting slowly with the momentum of their fall, and dying almost immediately. Dickens, with his literary flair for words, wrote how ‘the woman’s fine shape, elaborately corseted and artfully dressed, was quite unchanged in its trim appearance as it slowly swung from side to side’.
After an hour the Mannings’ corpses were cut down and buried, ironically enough, beneath the same type of paving stones within the prison as those under which they had buried Patrick O’Connor. And the multitudes of scaffold aficionados slowly drifted away, savouring the morbid memories of what they had just witnessed, and looking forward with sadistic anticipation to the next occasion on which human beings would be so primitively dispatched into the next world.
Surely though, nothing could be more appropriate for the victim than to wear black for her execution, yet when Maria Manning appeared on the scaffold clad in an ankle-length black satin dress edged with black lace, with black silk stockings completing her ensemble, and hangman William Calcraft allowed her to have her eyes covered with her black handkerchief beneath the black veil she wore, it is hardly surprising that material of that colour rapidly went out of fashion for many years to come.
One satirical magazine quoted a model in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors saying to another, ‘I’ve got a nice black dress I’ve only worn once!’ And Punch printed an acerbic item entitled ‘Fashions for Old Bailey Ladies’ reporting, tongue-in-cheek, how: ‘At the elegant reunion on the occasion of the late Matinée Criminelle at the Old Bailey, the lovely and accomplished Lady X […] carried off les honneurs with her lovely Manteau á la Mannings, trimmed with ruche en gibbets and têtes de port bouffonées. The neck is surmounted with a running cord, la Calcraft, which finishes in a noeud couland in satin, under the left ear. With the chapeau is worn a bonnet de pendue; this sweet cap can be arranged to cover the whole face and is likely to be thus worn during the approaching season.’
Marek, Martha (Austria)
Marrying Martha Lowenstein cost young Emil Marek an arm and a leg – well, a leg anyway, and later his life and that of his baby daughter. It all started when Emil, a young engineering student, met 20-year-old Martha. She was quite wealthy, having some years earlier met Moritz Fritsch, a rich dress shop owner, who enjoyed her company so much that he made her his ward and in order to give her a good upper-class education, sent her to finishing schools for young ladies in England and France. When she returned she lived with Moritz, but then, in 1924, she met and fell in love with Emil. Fortune smiled on them, and a fortune came their way, for her elderly benefactor died and left her his estate and all his money. The young lovers promptly married and wasted little time in squandering the assets on the good things in life.
Eventually funds ran low, so low in fact that they concocted a plan which, although it entailed a sacrifice on Emil’s part, would bring them a large amount of cash. The first step was for Martha to take out a £10,000 policy insuring Emil against accidents. This would be followed, some weeks afterwards, by the young man losing a leg while using an axe to cut down a tree; except that it would happen not when Emil was wielding the axe accidentally – but when Martha was wielding it on purpose!
One can only conjecture the mentality of a woman who could deliberately aim a blow with an axe at someone’s leg, not just once, doubtless because it only caused a flesh wound, but then strike twice more until the limb was so badly mutilated that a surgeon had to amputate it below the knee. In his subsequent clinical write-up, the medical man reported his findings: that the injury was caused not by one, but
three separate blows, and the angles of the wounds were inconsistent with being struck by the alleged holder of the axe. At that, Martha, seeing the prospects of the £10,000 rapidly slipping away, tried to bribe one of the surgeon’s assistants into testifying that he had seen the surgeon deliberately create the additional wounds at the instigation of the insurance company. This attempt failed, and the couple were sentenced to four months in gaol for bribery, Emil probably being excused hard labour while his drastically shortened leg was healing. As a result of the fraud, the insurance company charitably paid out only £3,000, which was rapidly dissipated by the legal costs the Mareks had incurred.
They were once more in the poverty trap, made worse by the fact that by now they had two young children, but Martha pinned all her hopes on the life insurances she had taken out on her husband and offspring, one hope being realised when Emil suddenly died, the doctors diagnosing tuberculosis. The relatively small amount of insurance money she received was further increased when, only weeks later, their seven-year-old daughter Ingeborg also passed away.
Her faith in the insurance system now fully restored, Martha became a companion to an aunt, Susanne Lowenstein, ingratiating herself in the old lady’s affections so much that when her relative died, as she soon did, Martha inherited all her aunt’s property, which consisted mainly of a well-furnished mansion. As much a spendthrift as ever, Martha spent what money had been left to her, then had no option but to rent out some of the rooms in the house, one of the lodgers being a Frau Kittenberger. It is hardly necessary to mention that Martha, as forward-looking as ever, took out a policy on her tenant’s life, nor that the lady died shortly afterwards.
Female Executions: Martyrs, Murderesses and Madwomen Page 14