Damn His Blood (21 page)

A methodical inquest, however, was perhaps more than could have been hoped for. Three members of the coroner’s jury (Marshall, Jones and Hardcourt) had good reason to resent Parker, and that the Captain was involved after arguing publicly with the victim so recently was highly unfortunate if not suspicious. Indeed, John Perkins, Parker’s closest ally among the farmers, was omitted completely, as was Reverend Pyndar, who, as the responsible magistrate, must have expected to be called as a witness. Pyndar, watching the inquest as a spectator, had been caught flat-footed; it had been the constable, William Barnett, who had assumed control of proceedings. Had Pyndar fetched Barneby from Worcester himself, briefed him and furnished him with a list of witnesses, the outcome may have been quite different.

As it was, no mention was made before Barneby or the jury of the feud. Countless villagers had first-hand experience of Captain Evans, Thomas Clewes, John Barnett and George Banks damning Parker, swearing drunken oaths and making chilling predictions of his imminent death, but not one of these was called to testify. The women in particular were excluded. Elizabeth Fowler, Sarah Lloyd and Mary Parker all possessed vital pieces of evidence not brought before the coroner. Fowler had discovered a shotgun which exactly matched the murder weapon and which could easily have been identified; Sarah Lloyd had heard the drunken jeers in the Pigeon House; and Mary Parker could have testified that she and her husband had been disturbed in the night by stones clattering against their window, that Captain Evans had argued with George in the lanes and that for years the parish had been characterised by resentment and anger. Even Susan Surman, the last person to see Parker alive, was somehow overlooked.

These gaping omissions could be attributed to prejudice. Women were generally considered less reliable witnesses than men, and in the countryside such beliefs were stronger. Historian Roy Porter describes the extent of discrimination in English society at this time.

Public life on a grand scale
⁸
was a men-only club (as were almost all clubs themselves). There were no female parliamentarians, explorers, lawyers, magistrates or factory entrepreneurs, and no women voters. For Dr Johnson, the idea of a woman preacher was ‘like a dog walking on his hind legs’ … Public opinion tight-laced women into constrictive roles: wives, mothers, housekeepers subordinate workers, domestic servants, maiden aunts. Few escaped. Such stereotyping created a kind of invisibility: women were to be men’s shadows.

Such shadows loomed long in Oddingley Rectory on 25 June 1806. Perhaps the absence of women from the coroner’s inquest is best explained by pure prejudice; perhaps it was considered indiscreet to have Surman, Lloyd, Fowler and Parker interrogated by men in public, or perhaps these women were marginalised and excluded from the hearing by William Barnett and the Captain, who were desperate to silence their voices. It left much of the story untold. No mention of the quarrel would be made in the newspaper reports over the following days and of all the deficiencies of the coroner’s inquest, the failure to establish any context for the murder was Barneby’s gravest. Thus far the crime was a one-sided story, told from a narrow perspective.

In 1806 murder was an alarming and unusual crime. In 1805, the first year for which there are official records, of the 350 death sentences passed in England and Wales,
⁹
only ten were for murder. Occasionally, following an assize trial, felons would be hanged from the wooden scaffold at Red Hill on the eastern edge of Worcester, but these were rarely murderers. Of the nine people executed in the county since the turn of the century five had been convicted of burglary, two of sheep stealing, one of horse stealing and one of forgery. Parker’s death, therefore, was guaranteed to attract considerable attention, and within days newspapers across the Midlands were carrying stories about the ‘Barbarous and Inhumane Murder’. The news that a clergyman, a minor member of the gentry, had been attacked and killed in his own parish was sensational and disturbing, a story to stand out above even the weekly war reports. The social position of the victim and the familiarity of the setting lent the reports their most chilling edge: if a country parson could be attacked in his own glebe, then who could consider themselves really safe? Details of the murder would ripple across the county: the educated classes reading reports in the newspapers and workers swapping accounts in the inns and market squares, where news of a brutal murder so close to home was the most compelling of all.

There were similarities between Parker’s killing and another case which had so recently horrified the country. On 5 April 1806 a man named Richard Patch had stood before a London jury charged with the murder of Isaac Blight,
¹⁰
his master, a wealthy ship breaker.
^fn1
The newspapers had devoted enormous amounts of coverage to the case, describing Patch as a man of uncertain character who had suddenly appeared outside Blight’s home a number of years earlier under the pretext of visiting his sister. Patch, who was destitute and penniless, had soon won Blight’s confidence, secured a job in his shipyard and been promoted to the point that, eighteen months later, he was considered the most trusted and important of Blight’s servants.

But by 1805 Patch had devised a scheme to kill Blight, inherit his business and all its assets. On a crisp autumnal night he had lured Blight into a carefully arranged trap at his dockside home at Rotherhithe on the south bank of the Thames. As Blight lazed in his back parlour, drunk on grog in the evening gloom, Patch entered and fired a shot at him. The ball from Patch’s pistol passed through Blight’s abdomen and his chair and lodged in the wall. Blight, mortally wounded, had lingered through the night, but died in terrible pain the following day.

Patch very nearly eluded justice. Blight’s assassination was ingeniously devised and almost perfectly executed. The murderer had provided himself with an alibi by feigning an upset stomach and making an ostentatious exit seconds before the fatal shot was discharged. Patch was only betrayed when magistrates searched his privy and instead of finding evidence it had been used by someone suffering from diarrhoea discovered the ramrod of a pistol jammed in the vault. A search of Patch’s bedroom subsequently turned up a pair of white ribbed stockings that, although on first inspection seemed perfectly clean, were in fact soiled on their soles ‘as if the wearer had crept about outside in his stockinged feet’.

In a ‘very awful and important inquiry’ these delicate strands of evidence linked Richard Patch inescapably to the crime. He was arrested and brought to court. In his long and eloquent assessment of the case Lord Chief Justice Baron MacDonald declared famously that ‘the prisoner [Patch] had begun his career of guilt in a system of fraud towards his friend [Blight], he had continued it in ingratitude and he had terminated it in blood.’ Patch was found guilty of murder and hanged at the New Prison in Southwark on Tuesday 8 April, the day after Elizabeth Fowler discovered the shotgun at Church Farm.
Berrow’s Worcester Journal
joined other local newspapers in recording the event, describing in florid prose the ‘awful moment when Patch was about to be launched into late eternity’.

Isaac Blight’s murder shocked and enthralled all London. A long pamphlet detailing the particulars of the case sold in record numbers, and the trial itself was attended by the Dukes of Cumberland and Sussex, along with other members of the aristocracy, who sat in a specially designed box high in the courtroom. Outside, enormous crowds gathered in Horsemonger Lane to steal a glimpse of Patch as he was escorted into court, ‘genteelly dressed in black’.

Blight’s murder was similar to Parker’s in certain ways. Like the clergyman, Blight had been a man of some importance and local standing, a fact which made him both a dangerous and seductive target. But most comment was reserved for Patch. He was described at great length in all the newspapers and pamphlets as their authors tried to get at the strange, terrible collision of personality traits that had created this monster. These writers highlighted his ambition, his unbridled courage, his ingenuity and natural ability, almost like an actor, to slip into different roles: the long-lost brother, the faithful business partner, the sickly patient and, ultimately, the horrified witness. People were becoming more interested in the mechanics of the criminal mind. Just what could drive a man to murder?

There were distinct similarities between Patch and Heming. Both had histories of petty crime, both had abandoned their childhood homes and both had gone on to commit murder. To some Patch and Heming would have been examples of a criminal class: a tightly defined breed of professional outlaws, burglars or smugglers, the most courageous of which, Friedrich Engels would later argue, became ‘thieves and murderers’.
¹¹
But for others such individuals were not products of society but human aberrations. Was there something special in the anatomical make-up of these men that a trained eye or a careful physician could detect? Could a murderer be betrayed by an innocuous physical quirk or by something strange and distinct in their manner?
^fn2

Although Patch and Heming shared similar personal histories, their two cases were actually very different. While Patch had been driven to kill Blight for financial gain, at Oddingley there was no such clarity. No money had been stripped from Parker’s body, nor had he been assaulted at a time of day when he was likely to be carrying any. Furthermore there was no known antipathy or even connection between Heming and Parker. Their only encounters had been brief meetings in the village lanes.

This left Heming without a clear motive for attacking Parker, a fact that must have troubled the coroner. The severity of the assault left little doubt that Heming wanted Parker dead. But why? Heming knew his capture would be swiftly followed by a court case and then almost certain execution. He would have known that Oddingley was busy at five o’clock in the harvest months. He was fully aware it was Bromsgrove Fair day, which meant that there would be more traffic than usual along the lanes. And he would have known that Susan Surman was close by, and that the sound of a shotgun was bound to result in a chase. It was wholly unsurprising that Heming had been disturbed by the butchers while fleeing the scene. The case had none of the accuracy or finesse of Patch’s murder of Blight, but in its own far more muddled myopic way, it was just as puzzling.

The first full printed report of the murder appeared in
Berrow’s Worcester Journal
the following day. The piece must have been written on the Wednesday as it did not contain the verdict of the coroner’s inquest, or designate Heming as the chief suspect. Instead the article referred to ‘the murderer’ throughout. After a long description of the assault, the report concluded,

The unfortunate person
¹²
who was murdered proves to be the Rev. Mr Parker of Oddingley, in this county. It appears that when the man shot him, he did not quite effect his horrid purpose and he beat him around the head with the butt end of the gun in so violent a manner that he broke it, and in his terror put only one of the pieces in his bag. He is described as wearing a blue coat and the forepart of his head rather bald.

In Oddingley the greatest hope for a quick conclusion to the case remained with Reverend Pyndar. Until this point circumstances had played wretchedly against him. There was still no news of Heming, who by now could well have escaped the county. Furthermore, Pyndar had inadvertently allowed William Barnett to outmanoeuvre him. The reverend had spent several hours on the morning of 25 June composing letters to magistrates in London and Bristol, informing them that a murder had been committed and warning them to be vigilant for any sign of Heming. The time Pyndar lost writing these letters had been put to good use by Barnett, three miles away in Oddingley.

Pyndar’s investigation was also handicapped by his lack of experience or training. While country magistrates had wide-ranging and summary powers, they were not well-equipped to conduct murder enquiries – most rural cases involved drunken farm labourers, idlers, petty theft or poaching. Their counterparts in the cities would have had far more experience of violent assaults, but even they would often struggle to formulate a powerful response in the wake of a murder. It was still 26 years before the Metropolitan Police – the first police force in the country – would petition the Home Office to establish a unit for elite ‘detectives’, expertly trained, exceptional policemen schooled in the growing arts of scientific and logical detection. In the middle of the century these men would rise to fame and prominence for their ability to tease truths out of the most knotty situations. They would atomise a case, scrutinise its component parts, uncover clues, interview suspects, covertly gather evidence and arrive at indisputable conclusions.

Half a century before, Pyndar had none of the training of the men who were to follow him. He was a clergyman, educated in the classics, theology and the law. He had little insight into the criminal mind. Pyndar was part of the old police, a loosely knit organisation that the Victorians would look back upon as dreadfully inadequate. Charles Dickens lampooned the system in
Great Expectations
. Following the death of his stepmother, Pip complains:

The Constables and the Bow Street men
¹³
from London – for this happened in the days of the extinct red-waistcoated police – were about the house for a week or two, and did pretty much what I have heard and read of like authorities doing in other such cases. They took up several obviously wrong people, and they ran their heads very hard against the wrong ideas, and persisted in trying to fit the circumstances to the ideas, instead of trying to extract ideas from the circumstances.