This week’s Friday Murder is a Saturday Murder because of the UCU strikes. a digital picket is still a picket!
I don’t usually ‘do’ London. There’s a few reasons for this. A LOT of homicide history is based in London because the records are good (The Old Bailey Online is the holy grail of digitised, modernish crime sources). This is fine, but means the provinces get overlooked. What I’m interested in is the everyday, the humdrum average murder, not the voyeuristic scandals that people almost expected of the big cities. And despite London being very well sourced, trying to find local accounts of murders can be really difficult. Trying to find *people* in London can also be a pain, especially when they lived on the fringes of respectability.
But London is a collection of villages. I found this murder working on a family history recently. It’s only tangentially linked to the family I was researching, but it stuck in my mind.
I don’t usually bother with trigger warnings on this newsletter. If you find murder a bit much, you’re in the wrong place, and I try to keep the gore to a minimum. But the victim is a child who was raped.
This week, we are in Acton, 1880.
London is a great place to go if you have sin to hide, and perhaps that’s why John Shephard made his way there from Kingsey in Buckinghamshire in the late 1860s. He married Ann Green in Paddington in August 1869.
According to him, their first child - Ada - was born on 10th December that year. I cannot find a birth registration for her, and one newspaper reported that she was the child of an earlier marriage. Ann’s first confirmed child was born in late 1870, and although it’s not impossible that she could have had two children in quick succession, it does seem likely that Ann was not Ada’s mother. The long gap between Ada and Clara’s birth may suggest a short marital separation.
Regardless of the circumstances of her birth, Ada was raised in the Shephard household, which quickly filled with children. Clara was born in 1873, Herbert in 1875, Dora in 1878 and Edith in November 1879. John was a decorator, and successful. By 1880, the family lived at Herbert Villas on Cowper Road in Acton, a brand new house on mains gas, with running water.
Ada, the eldest, was often left in charge of her younger siblings. This was the case on Friday 22nd October 1880. John and Ann had business in the city - John had just sold two houses - and took Edith with them. John had a man - George Pavey - employed at his house at the time, and asked George to keep an eye on the house as well.
George was from Brighton, but lived in Notting Hill with his wife and little boy. He struggled to stay in work, struggled to keep a roof over the family’s head, not least because he had a paralysed left arm and hand, probably from a mismanaged birth. John had employed him in April, despite having not much work going, because he felt sorry for him. By October, running low on jobs to give George, John had him painting the steps and doorframes in his own house.
John, Ann and the baby headed off to Norwood. Herbert was not home, but Ada had charge of Clara and Dora. She took them to the shop and bought them some sweets, then dropped them off at school for the afternoon at 1:45pm. She went home via a different shop, and bought some nuts around ten past two.
She was not seen alive again.
Several people knocked at the Shephard house between 2 and 3pm, but nobody answered. George was seen to leave the Shephards house, in his shirtsleeves, at 3:15pm. He was seen five minutes later in the street, in his jacket. He went straight to the pawnbrokers on Norland Road in Notting Hill and pawned some boots. Then he disappeared.
At 6:35pm, the Shephards returned home. All the lights were out, which disorientated them. They lit the gas in the kitchen, and saw Ada lying on the ground, covered in blood with a handkerchief over her face. Both John and Ann were hysterical: they assumed all of the children had been murdered and raised the alarm.
John found the upstairs of the house was ransacked, money and a diamond (used for cutting glass) had been stolen. It’s not clear where Dora and Clara went after they finished school at 4pm, but they were found safe and well.
The doctor arrived at 7:20pm and found Ada had been stabbed twice, and her throat was cut. She had also been viciously raped.
She was ten years old.
The murder weapon was a recently-sharpened table knife, found nearby and covered in blood.
George was the only possible suspect at this point, and finding him was the priority of the investigation. He was found at Hendon workhouse two days later, hiding out in the casual ward. He admitted the handkerchief found on Ada’s face was his:
“It is my handkerchief. I placed it there.”
George claimed that he had been called away from the house under false pretences, returned to find Ada dead, and placed the handkerchief over her face. Then he realised how bad it would look…because of his prior convictions of sexual assaults against children.
“I could see that it looked so black against me that I was afraid to stop, knowing at the same time that I had been convicted of a similar offence before; I was frightened to say anything about it, as they would think I had done it, and I then went away.”
Funnily enough, the police didn’t believe his story of him happening upon Ada’s body. Nor did the coroner, nor did the magistrates. He was indicted for murder, and went to trial at the Old Bailey on 23rd November.
He was found guilty, and sentenced to death.
He asked his wife to sell his clothing to Madame Tussauds.
In 1870, George Pavey was convicted of attempting to rape his own sister, a girl of ten and a half. He served two years in prison. He married Sarah Parrott in 1875, and they lived between London and Brighton. At the end of 1876, with Sarah in the early weeks of pregnancy, George committed a crime which horribly foreshadowed Ada’s murder. He was an artificial flower seller at the time, going door to door. When a thirteen-year-old girl answered the door, he pushed her into the kitchen, knocked her over and held his arm across her face until she blacked out, at which point, he assaulted her. He was charged with indecent assault rather than rape, and served another two years in prison.
Both crimes were tried as misdemeanours.
At the time of Ada’s murder, he had a nine-month-old daughter.
As he waited to die, George wrote to John Shephard and admitted what he’d done, and asked for forgiveness. John did not respond.
George was executed on 13th December. Nothing of value was lost. We like to imagine that predatory paedophiles are a new thing, a modern phenomena, something people in ye olden dayes didn’t have to worry about. George Pavey was a sympathetic figure in Acton, a man with a very visible disability doing his best for his wife and child. And although the people of Brighton knew better, there was no way to warn people in London of the danger their children could be in.
Ada had no idea what horror waited for her as she came home from dropping her sisters off.
John had no idea of the evil he was bringing into the house when he employed George.
John and Ann Shephard moved on to Churchfield Road in Acton, and another four children were born in the next decade. By 1901, however, they had separated. Ann died in late 1902, and John remarried within six months. He died in 1925.
Ada is buried in Hanwell cemetery.
Ada Shephard
(1869-1880)