One of the first murders I ever wrote up was the story of Christopher Edwards, executed for murdering his wife Rosanna in 1872. He was alcoholic, jealous, and abusive, and was caught literally red handed after beating her to death with a poker.
But Christopher wasn’t the only murderer on trial at the July Stafford assizes that year. He wasn’t even the only wife murderer. However, he was the only one who was sentenced to death.
On trial at the same assize was one Felix Beasley.
Felix Beasley married Olive Payne in 1854 at Dudley. He was twenty-three, a cooper or barrel maker. Olive was probably twenty-two, but may have been younger - I could not trace her baptism.
They settled in Dudley, and three children were born - Elizabeth in 1856, Matthew in 1861 and John in 1863. Matthew died in 1863. Felix worked diligently at a barrel manufacturers, and was considered a solid chap. They lived in Dudley, and they attended the local Wesleyan chapel. And this is where the trouble started.
A minister named William Green usually preached at Wednesbury, but did guest spots at Dudley. He met the Beasleys there, and became a family friend.
A very close family friend.
He stayed with the Beasleys for days on end around his preaching slots, and began to visit when he had no reason to be in Dudley. Gossip spread that William and Olive were having an affair. Felix refused to believe this heresy. Such a thing was not possible of a ‘God-fearing man’, but when Olive asked if they could move house to evade the gossip, he agreed. They moved to 12 Oxford Street before the 1871 census was taken in the April of that year.
The gossip did not stop though. Because it was not gossip. William and Olive were having a most ardent, passionate affair. They were planning to elope.
In early 1872, William and Olive went to a furniture broker, posing as man and wife. They wanted to sell the furniture at 12 Oxford Street. The broker agreed to visit the house, but he turned up when Felix was home. Olive feigned ignorance, and the broker left. Around this time, Felix learned he had a sexually transmitted disease.
In February 1872, William and Olive ran away together, as witnessed by fifteen-year-old Elizabeth, who sobbed and begged them not to go. They took a bunch of Olive and Felix’s belongings with them. Felix summoned a policeman, who tracked them to a lodging house in Wolverhampton, and found the pair in bed. Felix pressed charges of theft against William. William was bailed, and visited Felix:
“How could you have the heart to have me handcuffed and placed in a prison cell?”
he whinged, but Felix barred him from his house. Olive promised to be a faithful wife, they kissed and made up, the world was made right.
Except it wasn’t.
Olive couldn’t keep away from William. God knows what kind of charm the man held, but she wanted to be with him - she told her sister that it wasn’t love, but compulsion. When William was acquitted of theft in early March, he took lodgings in Dudley and Olive met him secretly, and frequently. William’s motives do not appear to have been solely engineered by love: he seemed intent on getting money or possessions from the Beasley household. Perhaps he would have simply abandoned Olive after he got his hands on some money.
Monday 8th April 1872. Felix went home for lunch, left home to visit the tailor in the afternoon, and then went back to work. Olive was observed leaving her house immediately after Felix left. When Felix returned home from work at 8pm, his frightened and concerned daughter told him Olive had gone off with William again.
Felix, terribly distressed, marched off to find her, eventually tracing her to the Black Swan on King Street, at the junction of Vicar Street. In a scene from a soap opera, he stormed into the pub and punched William in the face. The landlord broke it up, and pushed William out, while Felix shouted at Olive to come home. Olive, shocked at this unexpected violence, asked him if he wasn’t ashamed, and he responded by grabbing her and dragging her into the street.
Neighbours watched them argue, but then they seemed to settle and went to the Barrel Inn on the High Street, and then the Windmill on Stafford Street, near their home. They both had a few drinks: Felix was calm, Olive ‘indifferent’. According to Felix, she told him she was leaving with William the next day.
They went home. John, their son, had been with their neighbour most of the day. He popped home and saw nothing amiss - his parents sitting quietly - and went back out to meet his sister. He came back, without Elizabeth, half an hour later and was met by his father at the door.
“I wish you goodbye my dear, you won’t see your father anymore. Go to your aunt and tell her your mother has cut her throat.”
John was eight years old. He RAN to fetch his aunt, Olive’s sister Sarah, arriving around 9pm. She came back to the house with him, and found Olive dead in the kitchen, almost beheaded. Felix crouched next to her. When asked why he hadn’t fetched the police, he said he didn’t see the use of it.
News seeped out, and neighbours began to fill the kitchen. Nobody seemed to dispute that she’d cut her throat: they all knew what she’d been up to. One neighbour suggested they take Olive upstairs and lay her out.
The police arrived as Felix went to remove her boots. They noticed that Felix’s clothes were soaked, as though they’d been washed, and there was blood on his hat and waistcoat. His trousers were found upstairs, dripping wet, hanging on a chair. The floor had also been washed. Felix said he’d tried to drown himself in the well.
What on Earth had happened? Why had nobody heard either of them cry out? Why had Felix spent so much time cleaning up and not fetched help?
It will not surprise you to learn that Olive did not cut her throat.
She was attacked from behind, in the pantry, perhaps while sitting down and combing her hair. First, she had been hit on the head four times, probably with a hammer. Felix then attacked her with a bread knife, cutting her jaw, and dragged her into the kitchen. Olive had fourteen defensive wounds on her hands: she did not die easily.
Once in the kitchen, he cut her throat with staggering force. She was still alive when he started cutting, but decapitation is hard work, so he gave up before he got all the way through.
He suspended a rope from the kitchen beam, and attempted to hang himself. He - again - gave up fairly quickly, perhaps finding it unpleasantly painful or perhaps because he was interrupted by his son. He then cleaned up the blood. He washed the knife and put it back in the pantry.
At inquest, the doctor confirmed that Olive could not have inflicted the wounds herself, and Felix was indicted for murder. However, in the magistrate’s court, Felix continued to claim that Olive had killed herself.
“I have took the knife from her two or three times before that night, and asked her what she had on her mind.”
He also told the court that Olive had contracted a sexually transmitted disease, and passed it to him - this was why she’d been distracted and suicidal. This weighed heavily on her, and they had talked about it shortly before her death. If Felix’s story was true, Olive’s hypocrisy was self-evident. How could a woman acting in such a way be surprised or upset when she caught a disease? How could she be upset that one of her partners was unfaithful?
Olive’s murder was greeted with joyful demonstration in Dudley. No lynch mob was formed to wreak a neighbourly revenge on Felix as with Thomas Chamberlain: quite the opposite. They carried Felix through the town in triumph, if the local paper is to be believed, cheering and praising him. After Felix was committed to a murder trial and imprisoned, the town raised a subscription to pay for both his murder defence, and to provide for his children.
He stood trial in July 1872, at the same assize as Christopher Edwards. The crimes were remarkably similar - two wives brutally slain at home by jealous husbands. But the outcomes were very different.
You see, Felix’s friends had raised money to hire him a decent legal representative. The defence’s first job was to discredit the two medical witnesses. He managed to get one of them to admit that, yes, theoretically, Olive MIGHT POSSIBLY have cut her own throat in the brutal manner described.
The other doctor would not admit this: death was instantaneous, he could form no theory of the wounds being self-inflicted. The knife had been found wet, hastily washed and still smeared with blood, on a shelf in the pantry. There was no way Olive could have almost beheaded herself, washed the knife, put it back in the pantry and then gone to the kitchen to die.
But a teeny tiny hint of doubt was all the jury needed. They immediately acquitted Felix, to cheers in the courtroom.
I’ve written about a lot of dreadful husbands in this substack, but Felix was not quite the same as the others. There was no campaign of domestic abuse, no alcoholism or other antisocial behaviour behind closed doors.
There is no doubt that Olive Beasley’s conduct did not meet social norms. Adultery, especially such shameless adultery with a religious man, was quite beyond the pale. Felix had closed his eyes and ears to the truth for as long as he could, but on the evening of the 8th April, he could no longer pretend he lived in domestic bliss.
But the penalty for adultery is not death, and her murder was brutal. Felix waited until they were home alone, waited until his little boy was out of the house, and vented all his frustration and fury, all his revenge, onto this poor woman. He destroyed her.
Then he tried to claim she had done it herself, out of shame from contracting a venereal disease.
And in court, Olive’s extensive head injuries, defensive wounds and the circumstantial cleanup evidence meant nothing. Olive was a disease-ridden adulteress, brazen in her adoration of another man. As far as the local people were concerned, she deserved to die.
William Green, the sleazy minister, architect of this catastrophic affair, did not appear at inquest. He did not appear in court. It’s not clear why he wasn’t summoned, but he ran away home to his wife in Wednesbury.
Felix remarried in 1874. His second wife was a widow, and they had several children together. He died in Wednesbury 1898. His older children both married, and died in the 1920s.
Olive Beasley
(1832-1872)