The Supernatural Murders Read online

If you wish to make a criminal tell the truth, take care that he has no mistletoe leaves in his shoes, that he does not catch hold of one of his trouser buttons and twist it off, and that he does not double up his fist in his pocket, for though the latter may be merely a preparation for striking home his assertion, yet, in common with others, it is supposed to counteract the harms associated with a false oath. A more effectual method of evading the committing of perjury is for the deponent to place his left hand in exactly the opposite position to that occupied by his right hand when swearing, it being pretty generally believed that then the oath passes through the body without doing the individual any harm.

  In times past, the liver of a child was supposed to confer invisibility, and as late as 1650 a child was murdered in order that its liver might be used for that purpose. Again, in old magicians’ books we learn that to drink the blood of a human being, obtained by crime, is a certain cure for epilepsy, and, incredible as it may seem, the South of Europe can still produce cases where this cannibalistic remedy has been employed.

  A belief in these same books led a couple of German soldiers to be charged with murder some three years ago. These learned ‘magicians’ had read that if a certain formula was repeated several times, a man’s head could be cut off and put on again without him suffering the least in consequence. Furthermore, a man thus treated would have the power to find any treasures which might be hidden in the district in which he was. After a little persuasion, one of their comrades consented to submit to the operation, and after the spell had been repeated, his head was struck off with one blow of a sword. Alas! he went to look for treasurers in another world, and was quickly followed by his two companions.

  Aptly at the end of the account of ‘The First Trunk Murder’ (of Celia Holloway by her husband John, a labourer on the Chain Pier at Brighton, in 1831) which appears in The Seaside Murders, a description of the hanging of Holloway, at Lewes, is followed by this description of a supposedly curative spin-off:

  Fifteen minutes or so after Holloway had been launched into eternity, a superstitious rustic from the village of Cowfold haggled with the hangman to have a wen, or cyst, on his forehead rubbed by the hanged man’s hands; having agreed a price, the hangman escorted the afflicted man on to the scaffold, undid the manacles and placed Holloway’s hands on the wen. He kept them there for some time, while the rustic knelt, eyes closed, lips moving, body trembling; then, really giving value for money, he untied the man’s kerchief and thrust it inside Holloway’s shirt, proximate to the stilled heart, and in one deft movement transferred the kerchief to the wen. The treatment over, the man descended the steps – not without some difficulty, for he was holding the kerchief to his forehead with one hand, searching his purse for the hangman’s fee with the other. Two women spectators, both with wens, pled for similar Laying on of Hands, but their transactions with the hangman were curtailed by the under-sheriff, who, worried that his breakfast was getting cold, ordered them to take themselves and their wens elsewhere.

  The under-sheriff was understanding, though, about the hangman’s traditional perk, and merely stood muttering impatiently while that worthy gave the rope that had hanged Holloway to a gentleman of Lewes in exchange for half-a-crown.

  Whether the gentleman thought of the rope as a souvenir of the occasion or superstitiously, he seems to have got a bargain. Only two years before, in Edinburgh, the executioner of William Burke (lately the business partner of William Hare) had refused to accept less than half-a-crown for inch-long snippings of the rope, and, even so, had exhausted the supply before running out of prospective customers. I reckon, by a comparison of prices of like products and services, that the present purchasing power of an 1830ish half-crown would be at least ten pounds: still a lot to pay for a few yards of rope, and extravagantly expensive for a snipping – which darkens the mystery of why, so far as I know, none of the many purchased ropes or bits of rope remains extant.1 Some, surely, were kept safe – perhaps coiled, if the length allowed, in a hat-box, or displayed in a glass globe intended to keep the dust off flower arrangements – and some of those have surely been handed down among heirlooms. Not that I want a specimen – but I should be glad if anybody owning a provenanced one could tell me so.

  I intended to end this introduction with that request; but I have just received newspaper cuttings about a murder trial in California, the prosecutional basis of which strikes me as being quite as spectacularly ‘spectral’ as that of the witchcraft trials at Salem three centuries ago, and so I must continue a while longer.

  The murder (if it was murder: there seems to be some doubt) was of a small girl whose body, dreadfully decomposed, was discovered in a wood more than twenty years ago. Only a year or so ago, a woman in her late twenties, a friend of the dead girl, happened to glance at her small daughter – and, simply from noticing something that appears to have escaped her notice before, that her daughter’s eyes were the same colour as the dead girl’s (the colour? – oh, that was, most peculiarly, blue), all of a sudden remembered something that had quite slipped her mind for two decades, viz. that she had seen her own father kill her friend, whereupon he, understandably indignant at her snooping, had said that he would kill her too if she breathed a word of what she had seen. She told someone, perhaps a policeman, what she said she remembered – and though there was not a spot of evidence against her father, he was arrested and sent for trial – at which, needless to say, the other star-witness for the prosecution was a psychiatrist. That person, having taken the oath that doesn’t apply to ‘expert’ witnesses, who can be as opinionative as they or their hirers like, testified that the number-one star of the show had locked a horror deep in her subconscious as a ‘traumatic response’, otherwise known in the psychiatrical trade as ‘repressed memory’, till the sight of her daughter’s eyes (sorry: her daughter’s blue eyes) triggered recollection – and that testimony must have been swallowed by the twelve good men and women and true, for they returned a verdict of Guilty. (They had, I gather, unanimously pooh-poohed suggestions by the defence attorney that his client’s daughter had ulterior motives for saying what she had said, one of those motives being a great hatred of her father, another being a great deal of money that, all being well for her so far as the verdict was concerned, she would receive from both a book publisher and a movie producer.) Her father is appealing against the conviction. For several sakes, among them that of the meaning of the word evidence, I hope, and I hope you do too, that the appeal succeeds – that the judge or judges of it will be as critical of those responsible for the prosecution and the conviction as American judges so often are of police officers who have failed to observe a nicety of arresting etiquette – for instance, by leaving out one or two of the 130 words of the mandatory Miranda Warning that a considerable number of arrested persons have learned by heart through repetitious hearing of it.

  1. Richard Whittington-Egan has reminded me that there is an apt passage in Osbert Sitwell’s autobiography, Left Hand, Right Hand! (Macmillan, London, 1946) – that title chosen, Sitwell explains, ‘because, according to the palmists, the lines of the left hand are incised inalterably at birth, while those of the right hand are modified by our actions and environment, and the life we lead’. He was born in 1892, and one gathers that he was about three when his mother, Lady Sitwell, allowed him, at set times on certain mornings, to wander unchaperoned around her room. He says that he ‘recognised all the detail on the bed-side table’ -

  but I did not understand one thing, a loop of thick rope, a foot or two long, twisted in a knot round the head of the bed…. Eventually, after many implorings, I was told what it was. ‘It’s a bit of a hangman’s rope, darling. Nothing’s so lucky! It cost eight pounds - they’re very difficult to get now. Old Sir William got it for me.’ … And, suddenly, I was back in a world, instinctively comprehended, of Hogarth and Gay.

  As it happens, the last story in this book is of the Gutteridge case, which I have included because of two widely-held beliefs – f
irst, that one or both of the murderers of Constable Gutteridge shot him through the eyes because of a fear that a corpse’s retinas retain, like a photographic image, a semblance of the final thing they saw, and second, that the fear was justified. There is a similarity, I trust you will agree, between those beliefs and the young-blue-eyes mumbo-jumbo. If the appeal in the Californian case is turned down, I shall, in any subsequent editions of this book, break with the thirteen-account tradition of the series, and make the collection up to fourteen with a horror story.

  Jonathan Goodman

  London, 1992

  A Slaying on Saint Valentine’s Day

  IVAN BUTLER

  ON SAINT VALENTINE’S DAY, 1945, as many people discussed the results of the Yalta peace-making Conference with tense interest (and perhaps more confidence than was justified by the outcome), at the foot of Meon Hill in Warwickshire an elderly jobbing farmer named Charles Walton, a native of the nearby village of Lower Quinton, was savagely slashed and pierced to death.

  Mention the subject of English witchcraft, and the first particular response may be ‘Ah, yes, the Pendle Forest covens’ – they having been made famous by the colourful (and highly coloured) novel by Harrison Ainsworth, The Lancashire Witches. In fact, the cult was widely spread over the country during the 16th and 17th centuries; a long list of major trials recorded in contemporary pamphlets ranges from those of the Chelmsford Witches in 1566 to those of the Exeter Witches in 1682. Although cases associated with Warwickshire do not appear in that list, and although none of the local weird characters bore such memorable names as Old Chattox or Mother Demdike, the county was as notorious as any other for the scope of its black-magical practices – particularly in the district around Lower Quinton, a Tudor village lying between Stratford-upon-Avon and Chipping Campden (about a mile from the present-day A34).

  Of Meon Hill itself, legend asserts that the Devil hurled a great clod of earth at the newly-completed Abbey at Evesham, intending to bury it, but that Saint Egwin, Bishop of Worcester from 693 until 711, happened to see the missile approaching and, using the diversionary powers of prayer, swerved it to an undamaging landing-place, where it became known as Meon Hill. It was, so a story goes, haunted on New Year’s Eves by a ghostly huntsman and his hell-hounds; but the origin of its name is disappointingly prosaic, deriving from a British river-name and probably related to the Gaulish ‘moenus’, or ‘main’.

  Long Compton, a short way south-west of Lower Quinton, was renowned for its witches. As a saying had it: ‘There are enough witches in Long Compton to draw a load of hay up Long Compton Hill.’ As late as 1875, a weak-minded young man, John Hayward, murdered a woman of eighty, Ann Turner, by pinning her to the ground with a hay-fork and then inflicting a cross-shaped wound on her throat with a bill-hook. He claimed that she had bewitched him, adding that Long Compton was full of witches, sixteen more of whom he would have killed if only he had had the chance of doing so.

  Close to that witch-infested village, just across the border with Oxfordshire – and thus also within easy reach of Lower Quinton – are the famous Rollright Stones. In all probability, they are the remains of a Bronze Age place of worship. Legend has it, however, that they are the remains of a king and his army, turned to stone by an apparently well-meaning witch, to prevent him from conquering the Cotswolds. The story is that the king, determined to rule all England, met a witch on the high hill on which Little Rollright stands. She told him that if he could see Long Compton after taking seven steps forward, he would achieve his purpose. Confidently, for he knew that that village was close by, he strode forward – only to find his vision obscured by a tiny mound. The witch, cackling triumphantly after the manner of her kind, turned him and his army into stone, doomed to stay in the same place and in the same uncomfortably restricted condition until he was able to ‘see’ the village. (The legend further states that ‘the man will never live who shall count the stones three times and each time find the number the same’.)

  On the hilltops around Lower Quinton are other sites said to have been popular among witches. ‘In the dark ages, the Quintons were overpopulated with witches,’ one of the locals told Donald McCormick, the author of Murder by Witchcraft.1 ‘Today I reckon the population have overtaken ’em. But of course, a witch can hide in a crowd.’

  It has been suggested that Shakespeare conjured up Macbeth’s ‘blasted heath’ and its alfresco residents from his memories of this haunted countryside near his Stratford home.

  I have said enough, I think, to show that the ground of this part of Warwickshire was fertile for the growth of rumours regarding the unnatural death of Charles Walton.

  At seventy-four, he was one of the oldest inhabitants of Lower Quinton, where he had spent all his life. A sufferer from rheumatism, he dwelt in a thatched cottage with his spinster-niece Edith Walton. He was regarded as a ‘loner’. In earlier years he had worked as a farm labourer, but as he grew old and less mobile, walking almost always with a stick, he did little more than trim hedges for local farmers, and then only when the weather was kind. Although or because his life-style was very modest, he was believed to be reasonably well off. Despite his lack of conventional sociability, he seems to have been generally regarded as a quiet and inoffensive, if at times short-tempered, old chap.

  There were, however, eccentricities that caused some people to treat him with caution, even to surmise that he dabbled in wizardry. He claimed, for instance, to possess the power of communicating with birds and animals – and sometimes, if he had had one too many, went further than that, boasting that he understood animal ‘languages’. He rarely joined his neighbours in a friendly drink at either of the local pubs, but was known to imbibe cider (considered by some to be ‘witches’ tipple’), having lugged barrels of the brew home in his wheelbarrow. On the whole, though, he was reckoned to be a harmless oddity; in his small community (numbering fewer than five hundred at the time), he seemed to have no enemies.

  1. John Long, London, 1968.

  On the morning of that fatal Saint Valentine’s Day (a day of rituals and superstitions, which chanced in that year of 1945 to be also Ash Wednesday), Walton took advantage of the sunny weather to set off to cut hedges bordering a farm belonging to a Mr Albert Potter, on a slope of Meon Hill about a mile away, taking with him his walking-stick, his hay-fork and his bill-hook – or slash-hook. His niece Edith also left the cottage, to go to a nearby factory where she worked on a wartime job. Her uncle told her that he would return at his usual time, four o’clock (she would not be back until about six), and would, as was his custom, prepare his own tea before resting from the day’s labour.

  When Edith entered the cottage that evening, she found it cold, dark – and empty. She called a neighbour, Harry Beasley, and they hurried along the dark lanes to see Mr Potter at his farmhouse, The Firs, and inform him that Charles Walton was missing. Potter appeared surprised; he told them that, around noon, he had seen Walton (or ‘someone’, he cautiously amended later) trimming hedges in a field about five hundred yards from the farmhouse. (An odd discrepancy was recorded on this point at the subsequent inquest. When asked why he thought the trimmer was Walton, Potter replied that, though he could not be sure, he was fairly certain because of the old man’s shirt-sleeves. The coroner inquired, ‘Have you been told that Walton had no shirt-sleeves?’ A short-sleeved white shirt was then produced. Potter answered, ‘I never saw the whole of him, only his shirt-sleeves,’ and the coroner left it at that.)

  Potter, Beasley and Edith set off by torchlight to the field in question. As they approached an old willow tree, Potter suddenly stopped and told Edith not to come any nearer. Walton lay dead, spiked to the ground with his own hay-fork. Beasley took the distraught Edith home and then called on another neighbour, who got in touch with the police. Meanwhile, Potter was left alone with the body. His fingerprints were found afterwards on the handle of the hay-fork, but he explained this at the inquest by stating that he had tried to withdraw it from the body.
/>
  Later, Detective-Superintendent Robert Fabian, called in to head the murder investigation, described Walton’s injuries as ‘hideous … [looking] like the kind of killing the Druids might have done in ghastly ceremony at full moon’. How familiar ‘Fabian of the Yard’ was with the sacrificial rituals of the Druids is open to question, but there is no doubt that the sight was horrific.1

  The manner of Walton’s death recalls, rather than Druidism, the practice of impaling a witch’s corpse to the ground to prevent it from walking … or flying.

  The hay-fork had been plunged into the old man’s body with such force that the prongs penetrated several inches into the ground; two burly police officers needed all their combined strength to extract it. In addition, a jagged cross-shaped wound had been cut into the chest and neck with the slash-hook, almost separating the head from the body. Perhaps indicating the fight Walton had put up, his walking-stick, saturated in blood, lay close by.

  1. Druidism was the faith of the Celtic inhabitants of Ancient Gaul; the Druids were their priests. Though the name seems to have been derived from the word dru (meaning wise man – or magician), the priests were only very slightly, if at all, connected with what might be called conventional wizardry. Celts are thought to have arrived in Britain around 500 BC, but the only reference to Druids in this country in Roman history appears to be that in the Annals of Tacitus (AD 61): describing an invasion of the island of Anglesey by the Imperial Governor Suetonius, Tacitus writes of the islanders lining the shore in an armed mass, while ‘close by stood Druids, raising their hands to heaven and screaming dreadful curses’. The Druids, firm believers in immortality, sought to placate the gods by sacrificing human beings. These were generally criminals, but when there was too great a fall in the crime-rate, use was made of innocent people. The usual method of sacrifice was to erect an enormous construction of tree-branches and twigs (‘the Wicker Man’), fill it with humans and animals, and set the thing alight. Certain trees, such as the oak and the rowan (as well as the parasitic mistletoe), were sacred to the Druids: hence the superstition of ‘touching wood’.