I promised that I’d leave Northamptonshire for a bit, so I have: today’s murder comes from Leeds. And once again, it’s a miserable tale of a terrible husband and his abused wife.
The ‘solution’ to some murders - indeed, most murders - is blindingly obvious. A body, a bloodied person in the vicinity, a moment of blind rage, often following a sustained pattern of abuse. There is no mystery, no need for the clever deductions of a super-sleuth.
But what is sometimes mysterious is the charge, and the verdict. Where is the line between accident and manslaughter? Where is the line between manslaughter and murder? Today’s case shows how fuzzy that line can be.
John Robinson was born in Boroughbridge in approximately 1810. He married, moved to Leeds, and was widowed in 1836. On 2nd September 1840, he married Elizabeth Ingram at St Peter’s church in Leeds. This was Elizabeth’s first marriage, although she was ten years older than John. She was born in Ripon.
They lived in the yard behind the Black Swan, at the junction of Lady Lane and Vicar Lane:
John described himself as a greengrocer on the census. Together, they ran a fruit and veg stall at Vicar’s Croft marketplace. Now Kirkgate Market, this was yards from their home.
On Saturday October 15th, 1853, they set up stall as usual and stayed at the market long into the night. Victorian shops and stalls closed far later than you might imagine, and the Robinsons were at their stall until 11:30pm. Both were drunk - their assistant had been bringing them booze all day - although Elizabeth was sober enough to serve customers without her intoxication being noticed. Elizabeth left the stall first. She was observed to fall over a cart (although one witness said John pushed her over it). When she got back to the yard, she was bleeding from the mouth and bruised around the eye. Two neighbours helped put her to bed, and got her some gin and brawn for her supper.
John got in around midnight. One of the neighbours heard one of the Robinsons say “You old bugger!” in anger, but couldn’t identify the voice.
At 1:30am, John went to fetch a neighbour who lived behind the yard on Nelson Street, a Mrs Shepherd. He told her that Elizabeth was terribly ill. When Mrs Shepherd arrived in the room, she found it in complete disarray, with clotted blood and hair all over the front of a chest of drawers. She took one look at Elizabeth and asked John what he’d done to her.
“She was beastly drunk and fell on the floor”
Elizabeth was sitting in a chair, blood pouring down her face. She was weak but conscious, and said that John had knocked her down. He denied it. He later said that he hit her with his hand, and she fell.
Elizabeth did not die until 21st October, and it was reported that John was kind to her as she lay dying. She appeared to be mostly beyond speech during her final days, but was heard to say that John hit her with a poker, and told one of the doctors who attended her that John had ‘poised’ her. A neighbour overheard Elizabeth say to John:
“It’s over with me, this bout”
And John replied
“I hope not my lass, for my sake”
John knew he was likely to be held responsible if Elizabeth died, although nobody seemed interested in arresting him until she died. As soon as she died, he was arrested.
The inquest was held on the day Elizabeth died, at the workhouse near the yard. It was adjourned to the 24th, and Elizabeth was buried on the 23rd. At the second inquest hearing, a great many neighbours and stallmates of the Robinsons gave evidence.
This inquest was a mess, and most of that evidence was conflicting. Some said Elizabeth was sober, some said she was falling down drunk. One (Roman Catholic) witness refused to be sworn because she was pregnant and convinced it could harm her unborn child, and only agreed after a priest was fetched to calm her down. But her evidence was important: she had heard a fracas in the Robinson’s house on the night in question.
Mrs Shepherd, whose evidence was generally clear and consistent, would not swear to having said that John had smashed his wife’s head with a poker, despite having told two other neighbours that this is what had happened.
This is the same kind of evidence I noticed in the Jim Stannard case, which I presented at a conference a few years ago (panel 1): the more interconnected a community, the more difficult their evidence is to decipher. Mrs Shepherd did not want to be the person to condemn John Robinson to a murder charge, whatever her personal thoughts on the matter.
But she didn’t need to be that person. The medical evidence did it for her.
Elizabeth had two black eyes, and numerous bruises across her face, upper chest, neck and arms. In the doctor’s opinion, these were caused by punches. She had several wounds to her head, and some were possibly caused by falls, but the fatal wound was to the front of her head. It was almost certainly inflicted by a blunt instrument. She died from a brain haemorrhage.
And so, Elizabeth’s level of intoxication became the most important aspect of the inquest. Was she too drunk to stand? This was John’s defence: she was too drunk to stand, and had fallen over, pulling the furniture over, and wounded her head.
But drunk or not, Elizabeth had been beaten and had her head smashed with something.
The jury could have returned a verdict of accident, but the medical evidence was compelling. They could have returned a verdict of wilful murder, but they chose not to. If they had, John would have been put on trial for his life. Instead, the jury returned the lesser verdict of manslaughter against John, and he waited for his trial in prison.
His trial was held at York Castle on 15th December. The evidence was the same as at inquest, albeit presented rather more coherently. The doctor’s evidence in particular stands out: the only way for Elizabeth to have acquired her fatal wound independently would be to fall ‘perpendicularly downwards’, directly onto the top of her head.
The defence suggested that a woman hit on the head with a poker would scream out for help, apparently quite oblivious to the idea of such an attack rendering the victim unconscious! And anyway, Elizabeth was overweight, old, drunk and unstable. This was no manslaughter: she’d done it to herself.
The jury disagreed. They found John guilty of manslaughter, and he was sent to prison for one year.
One year.
It appears that Elizabeth was drunk when she went home. It appears that she fell over on her way, and that John gave her a black eye for it. This may have made her more unsteady on her feet. However, when John came home, perhaps ashamed of her public drunkeness (although he was drunk himself), he smashed her over the forehead with a poker. She fell heavily backwards against the chest of drawers, cutting the back of her head badly. This probably knocked her out, which would explain why he went to fetch the help of a neighbour. John then played the loving (terrified) husband for five days until she finally died.
Elizabeth was covered in bruises, some older than others, and acquired a second black eye between leaving the marketplace and seeing a doctor. I would guess that the inhabitants of Black Swan Yard had got used to ignoring John Robinson hitting his wife. They were certainly unwilling to attest to anything that might see him hang.
The coroner’s jury believed that Elizabeth’s death was caused by John…but they weren’t prepared to call it a murder.
The assize jury concurred. Elizabeth Robinson was killed. But she was not worth hanging for.
John left prison, and married for a third time in 1855. He moved to another yard, close to Black Swan Yard, and sold potatoes. His third wife died in 1868, and he died in 1870.
Elizabeth Robinson
(1801-1853)
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