"I Know My Doom"
If At First You Don't Succeed...
I’ve mentioned before how there’s no real methodology to how I choose murders to write about. They’re just ones that crop up, usually on a newspaper trawl, to catch my eye.
This one caught my eye because of the way the victim was described in a provincial paper some hundred miles away. “The woman Quinn”. Not even the dignity of her first name. And what I uncovered was a terrifyingly casual violence, from a repeat offender.
We’re in Manchester this week, in 1887.
Thomas Leatherbarrow was born in Pendleton in Salford on 18th January 1836. Salford, at this point, was a filthy textile town, with a dismally low life expectancy.
Thomas was the child of John and Susannah Leatherbarrow, who’d married in 1819. The full extent of John and Susannah’s family is unknown, but they had at least four other children: Richard, born in 1828; Henry, born in 1831; Sarah who lived a short life in 1834; and Mary, born either in 1833 or 1835. There is no record of any children born to them in the first nine years of their marriage, but the infant mortality rate was so high that this is not surprising.
It does not appear that Thomas grew up in the bosom of a loving family. When the 1841 census was taken, the family were scattered around Pendleton. Richard and Mary were lodging with a bricklayer, and two other families. Henry and Thomas, aged ten and four, were lodging on Garden Street (which ran parallel to Belvedere Road) with a mother and daughter. John and Susannah are untraceable on this census, and the one taken in 1851 (the copy of which is terribly damaged for Salford). Susannah was widowed before 1861, and died herself in 1869.
The damaged census means we cannot be sure where Thomas was in 1851, but it’s likely that he remained in Pendleton, working in a textile mill. He may have been alone, or supported by family. On 22nd September 1860, aged twenty-four, he married Elizabeth Birds. Elizabeth was seventeen, born in Preston, and had moved to Pendleton to work in the mills. Their first baby was born within a few weeks.
Thomas and Elizabeth lived on Hodge Lane in Salford, and a tiny portion of this road still stands - this is quite rare in the Regent Road area of Salford. The road was jammed between two different dye factories, and the railway. On the other side of the railway was the union workhouse:
Thomas was a dyer, and it’s likely that Elizabeth had been before their marriage. They lived here until approximately 1870, and had five children: Mary in 1860, Sarah who died soon after birth in 1862, John in 1864, Sarah Ann in 1866 and Margaret in 1869. Elizabeth had no more children after Margaret, which suggests that either she suffered some kind of injury that left her infertile or that they stopped having sex.
When the 1871 census was taken, the family were in Bury. Thomas was still working as a dyer. However, they returned to Salford before 1880. They lived on Cook Street in Pendleton. Pendleton had exploded with terraces since Thomas’ youth: thousands of houses now filled the area between Broad Street and Hodge Lane in Salford. Cook Street was off Whit Lane, roughly along the line of modern Withycomb Place, albeit much longer:
It was here that the first major incident happened to the Leatherbarrow family. Thomas was a drinker, and as has become a common theme in these stories, abandoned his work to drink on a fairly regular basis. He had been drinking and not working for three weeks, which coincided with May Day. On 31st May 1880, Thomas attempted to kill Elizabeth, and injured his only son, John, in the process. He was found, bloody and ‘excited’ afterwards, and arrested.
Elizabeth was not expected to survive. However, after a few days she was able to tell the police what had happened. She’d gone to call Thomas up for the day, at 5am, and given him a tot of whisky to wake him up. However, he did not get ready for work.
They had a fight, and Elizabeth threw the chamberpot at him althought it missed. Elizabeth got back into bed. He went and fetched a hammer and razor, and attacked her in the bed. First he hit her several times with the hammer, fracturing her skull, then attempted to cut her throat.
Elizabeth - despite the fractured skull - fought back, cutting her hands and losing a finger in the process, and screamed for help. John, aged sixteen, got between his father and mother to protect her. Thomas cut his hands with the razor too. While Thomas and John struggled, Elizabeth smashed a window pane and screamed for help.
Thomas almost succeeded in killing his wife. She had a three inch cut to her throat, as well as a fractured skull. However, Elizabeth survived, and in court on 10th July, she asked for mercy. The judge asked her if she would be glad to get him off [the hook].
“Yes I would sir, to work for his children for he is not deserving of [prison]. I forgive him what has happened because he was not in his proper senses or he would not have done it […] I have beat him many a time and he has never hit me back.”
Elizabeth’s testimony gave the impression of a couple who argued robustly, drank copiously, but never resorted to unnecessary violence. The jury found Thomas guilty of unlawful wounding, rather than attempted murder.
The jury were merciful. Elizabeth was merciful. The judge was not. He gathered Thomas, and three other men convicted of violently assaulting their wives and told them
“You four men have been found guilty, each of you, of a crime about as detestable to my mind as can be committed. You have used violence which would be inexcusable if you had used it to men of your own size and your own strength, who could have defended themselves, and retorted upon you the cruelty which you were guilty of. But it was not to men your equals that you used this violence, it was to women and to the women who above all the people in the world you were bound to protect ad be careful of. They may have provoked you from time to time. I dare say possibly they may have done it, perhaps with cause, perhaps without cause ; but if they had provoked you to the utmost of which it is possible for one human being to provoke another, a tenth of the punishment and the wrong you have inflicted upon them, would not have been justified. And you four men ought to stand there particularly ashamed of yourselves when you think that the women you have so wrong would have screened you if they could. You ought to be thoroughly ashamed of yourselves; you ought to think which what aversion and disgust every man in court must look upon you at this moment.”
He sentenced Thomas to five years penal servitude, the maximum sentence for unlawful wounding. Thomas served his sentence in Strangeways, then Pentonville, then Chatham. Elizabeth and the children stayed in Salford, working in cotton mills and in furniture polishing shops.
Thomas was discharged in the summer of 1885. If he was hoping to be embraced by his wife and returned to the heart of his loving family, he was disappointed. Elizabeth died on 28th February 1885, aged just forty-two. Her death certificate records that she died of alcoholic paralysis, but it’s likely that the old skull fracture caused lasting brain damage. Thomas’ children were now adults, and didn’t need him. Thomas was homeless.
Thomas resumed his old dyeing work job, and in late 1885, moved in with Kate (Catherine) Quinn. Kate was Irish, married and aged about forty. She had been separated from her husband on-and-off for at least five years, and had lodged in Pendleton, working as a cotton spinner. Kate and her husband had separated for the last time around the same time that Thomas was discharged from prison. Thomas doesn’t seem to have cared that he couldn’t marry Kate, and in October 1886, they went to lodge with Mrs Sweeney, in a house on Franchise Street. This was roughly where Rossall Way now stands, and was close to where Thomas had spent his childhood and early married life.
Thomas and Kate both drank a lot. Thomas went on a drinking spree at Christmas 1886, and didn’t stop. He told Kate he was going to work, took his packed lunch, and instead went to the pub. The mill had no work for Kate, so she’d been at home drinking. She badly burned her arm on 4th January, falling against the fire when drunk, and hadn’t been able to go back to work when her boss offered her some. The rent was due, there was no money, only booze. It was a scenario Thomas had been in before. Thomas appears to have been furious about the burned arm, and tried to hit Kate over it on the evening of the 4th - Mrs Sweeney interrupted the blow.
On the morning of Saturday 8th January 1887, Mrs Sweeney was not at home. Kate and Thomas hey had an argument over money. And as he had done six and a half years earlier, Thomas hit Kate with a hammer. Nobody heard a thing.
At noon, a young boy popped to the house with Kate’s wages from a week earlier. Thomas took the money without properly opening the door, gave the boy tuppence in thanks, then left the house. A neighbour heard that Kate had been paid, and sent her daughter round to get back a few pence that Kate owed her. Her daughter came back sobbing.
Kate was dead.
The alarm was raised, and Thomas was captured after a few hours. He didn’t make any serious attempt to escape: he had clearly spent the day in the pub, drinking Kate’s last wages. He told the police
“I will swing for her at the next assizes. I know my doom and I am ready to die.”
Kate’s inquest was held on 11th January at the Royal Hotel in Pendleton. She was identified by her estranged husband, and the doctor did a very thorough post-mortem, including checking her reproductive organs. The doctor was not sure whether a hammer found in the house had caused her extensive head injuries, or whether they were caused by Thomas’ clog. However, the hammer had been washed, and was still wet, when the police examined the house. It seems most likely that Thomas hit her from behind with the hammer and then kicked her to death, stamping on her face.
Mrs Sweeney had heard Thomas threaten to kick Kate’s brains out. Another neighbour heard Kate tell him to bring home four days wages or Kate would leave. She’d heard Thomas tell Kate that she’d get sixteen shillings and a beating. She’d heard Thomas repeatedly threaten Kate. The jury returned a verdict of wilful murder.
When Thomas appeared in the magistrate’s court, he made quite the scene. After nearly killing Elizabeth, he had been silent and reserved. Not this time. Mrs Sweeney was the first witness, and Thomas relentlessly yelled abuse at her:
“There she is! And a nice looking bitch she is! She’s got [Kate’s] shawl on now! Speak up so people can hear you, and turn your face this way so people can get a look at you! You’re a nice looking bitch you are! You’ll die like a rotten sheep!”
Thomas seemed to blame Mrs Sweeney for everything, and had planned to go and kill her after killing Kate. He didn’t calm down until she was removed from the court after giving evidence. Thomas told the court he never used a hammer, that he gave her “just one kick under the jaw and she was dead in two minutes” which was…a lie. He was remanded to face a murder trial at the next assize.
He didn’t have to wait long at all. His trial was held on 26th January 1887, and he pleaded guilty. The judge and counsel tried to persuade him otherwise, but he would not be moved. He was entirely indifferent as he thanked the judge for passing the death sentence. He spent his final days in Strangeways, silent, brooding, and although he had alluded to having a secret when sentenced to death, did not admit it. He was indifferent to the priest, and refused to confess further. His children visited him to say goodbye.
He was executed privately, on 15th February 1887, at Strangeways.
Thomas Leatherbarrow was a man who did not like being in debt to women. He murderously attacked Elizabeth and Kate for identical reasons: they asked him to go and earn some money, which he preferred to drink. Both Elizabeth and Kate were accustomed to earning their own money, and it’s not clear how the household economics worked. He planned to kill Mrs Sweeney, his landlady, who also wanted his money.
Elizabeth did not want her husband in prison, primarily for financial reasons (and see Crimes of Outrage by Shani d’Cruze for more on this). She stood in court and admitted that she was violent, a nag, and a drunk to try and save his skin. She had been perilously close to dying: he had not been content to simply hit her with a hammer, but also tried to cut her throat. But the loss of an adult income to the family was far more of a threat than mere violence.
The jury took pity, the judge did not. But if the jury had not taken pity, it seems likely that the judge would have imprisoned Thomas for life, and Kate Quinn would never had died in such an awful manner.
Thomas attacked both his victims in the same way: he waited until they were vulnerable (Elizabeth in bed, Kate with her back to him) and struck them with a hammer. Not content with stunning them, he then went in to finish the job. He tried to cut Elizabeth’s throat, but her extraordinary courage made it difficult. He took no chances with Kate: once she was unconcious, he stamped her to death.
Thomas was likely always a very violent man. Perhaps he stopped caring after his first long sojourn in prison. Perhaps it hardened him. Or perhaps he was far more violent than Elizabeth was willing to admit in court, as she tried to avert a prison sentence. Elizabeth was not a woman to seek help for domestic violence: if the attack in May 1880 hadn’t almost killed her, she probably would not have gone to the police. Thomas’ violence towards Kate was noticed and much better documented, perhaps because his history was well known in Pendleton.
Thomas’ children were all adults when he was executed. Mary, Sarah and John were married, and Margaret lived with Mary. In 1904, Margaret - who witnessed her father’s attack on her mother, her mother’s death, and her father’s execution between the ages of eleven and seventeen - was admitted to the asylum in Whittingham. She died there in 1943.
Catherine Quinn
(1846-1887)