My local women’s history group has recently launched a website. I’m going to be using inquests to tell the story of women’s lives in Peterborough. They’re shorter than the substacks, and more on life than death, but may be of interest. The first one, about the death of Emma Steels in 1861, is live.
Emma’s mother was a sex worker and today’s murder is also about a sex worker. It’s the penultimate murder of the year, and we’re in Wakefield in 1870.
The McLaveys came to England from Dundalk in County Louth in the late 1820s. James and Owen McLavey initially headed to Staffordshire. Owen went on to settle in Congleton with his wife and children. James and his wife, Charlotte, were less fortunate andtramped between Cheadle, Leek and Congleton looking for work.
They had four daughters. Sarah was born in Ashbourne in 1828, and Mary Ann and Charlotte were both born in Congleton in 1832 and 1835 respectively. Their second daughter was born on the tramp in Cheadle in 1831. Her name was Felicitous. It means lucky.
James McLavey was dead by 1841, and I cannot trace what happened to Charlotte after his death: it’s possible she went back to Ireland. However, when the census was taken in 1841, Charlotte and her girls were living in Leek, on Mill Street. At the age of ten, Felicitous was already working in a silk mill.
We don’t know much about Felicitous’ life for the next few years. It’s likely that she spent some time under the roof of her uncle Owen in Congleton - her sister Mary Ann certainly did - and we know she worked as a servant.
We know that she was beautiful.
At some point in the 1850s, she caught the eye of Joseph Bailey, a much older widowed man living in Newcastle under Lyme. Felicitous was living up to her name: Joseph had worked as a colliery manager and retired to run a pub. He had plenty of money. They lived together as man and wife for some years.
However, they were not married, and when he died in March 1868, Felicitous did not inherit. Instead, Joseph’s estate - £1500 - was distributed between his children. Felicitous was awarded £90 in the will.
The money did not last forever. Felicitous lived with her sister Sarah for a while in Wolverhampton after Joseph’s death. In September 1869, she made her way first to Dewsbury and then to Wakefield. Felicitous did not go to Wakefield by choice, and did not arrive alone: she was accompanied by an older, unidentified man. He abandoned her in the town after one night.
For two months, Felicitous lodged at McAvoy’s lodging house, which must have had provision for lone women. Then Mr McAvoy died, and she found alternate lodgings and work in a pub.
In February 1870, Felicitous was sacked from the pub, because of her alcoholism. She met a man called John, and they lodged together at Padley’s lodging house on Providence Street, as man and wife. They drank together frequently. On 16th April, Easter weekend, Felicitous fell down the stairs when drunk, dislocating her shoulder. She spent weeks in the workhouse medical ward recovering, and John abandoned her during this time.
Felicitous was still recovering from her shoulder injury in the middle of May 1870. She was unable to lift her arm above her head. But she was sick of being in the workhouse, and discharged herself towards the end of May to go on a drinking binge. She returned to lodge at the Padleys, but they threw her out for staying out all night. She came back a few days later with another woman called Emma Welsh, or Walsh. Mrs Padley threw her back out, but gave her threepence so she could find lodgings.
Felicitous and Emma went to the pub, and Felicitous told Emma how much she missed having the use of her right arm. The injury had caused nerve damage, and her hand wouldn’t work. She couldn’t lift her arm above her head. She’d met a widow called John Buxton with two children, and could have been his mistress… if she had two working arms. Then she left Emma, and went to meet someone, but didn’t tell Emma who. It was not John Buxton.
The 25th Regiment of Foot had come into town on 29th May via steamship, escorting military prisoners to the House of Correction. Their ship out was due to depart on June 1st, leaving the men with little to do except hang around and drink.
Felicitous met some soldiers on Kirkgate after leaving Emma, apparently by prior arrangement. They were Corporal James Southam, Private William Sims, and Timothy Farrar, who worked in a mill and had somehow become attached to the soldiers. John Johnson, a collier wearing a white smock, joined the party soon afterwards. Felicitous recognised him as someone who had been kind to her when she first left the workhouse.
Felicitous and the men went to the pub.
John Johnson was aggressive. He told Timothy Farrar to leave them or be punched. Timothy left. Felicitous had sex with the corporal in an alleyway while the others kept watch, and after paying her sixpence, the two soldiers left. This left Felicitous and John alone. The pair staggered from shop doorway to pub for the next few hours, and were separated by the police around 1am. Felicitous told the police officer that she did not want to go with John, and was glad they’d been split up, although she may have simply been trying to avoid arrest for vagrancy.* It does seem, however, that she was afraid of John.
John didn’t go home - he circled through the alleys and found Felicitous - and the pair were seen lying down in an alley off Westgate shortly afterwards. Afterwards, John pulled Felicitous off the ground, called her a bitch and off they went into the night.
Felicitous’ body was found the next morning in a yard on Wood Street. Her throat was cut.
Unusually, the original depositions of Felicitous’ inquest have not just survived, but been digitised as part of the West Yorkshire County Coroner Notebooks, which are available on Ancestry. The inquest was held at the Royal Hotel in Wakefield on 31st May 1870, the same day she died. It was adjourned after the medical evidence was given, and reconvened on the 2nd June. It was adjourned again and recommenced a third and final time on 7th June.
Emma Welsh told the inquest that after Felicitous left her, she’d met a man and had sex with him. Then she’d slept in a privy on Hardy Croft, as she’d been locked out of Padleys. When she’d got up around 7am, she’d met a man in a white smock in a hurry to get rid of his filthy, lice-ridden shirt. He got Emma to wash a mud stain off his jacket, but his shirt was damp, and the pawn broker insisted that it be dried before pawning. Emma dried the shirt before the fire in a nearby pub. Once he pawned the shirt, he took Emma for a drink and she saw blood on his jacket, and a wound on his head. The man gave Emma two different tales about how he’d got the wound. He got drunk, Emma stayed sober. They were both arrested soon after: Emma for vagrancy and the man for murdering Felicitous. He told the police he was not the man they were looking for, although they hadn’t told him what he’d been arrested for.
She didn’t know his name, but identified him in the police station as John Johnson.
Emma was the last friend Felicitous saw, and appeared to have (unwittingly) helped her murderer clean up. Emma spent the next month or so in prison, and left Wakefield after being arrested again for vagrancy in August, but she gave evidence at every stage of the investigation. She wept at times, as she told the successive courts of middle-class men how she hadn’t washed for days.
The doctor who examined Felicitous’ body told the inquest that one of the stays of her corset was recently broken, suggesting a struggle. Her thighs and buttocks were caked in mud, as though she had been dragged. His opinion was that Felicitous had been pulled backwards over the killer’s knee, before he cut her throat. Her throat was cut down to the spine, from the middle of the left collarbone through to her right jaw. It must have been done by a right-handed man. There was only one wound, but the murderer had hacked at her spine, leaving three dents in the bone. He had dragged her with enough force to push one of her hairpins deeply into her neck.
She bled out, but there was less blood at the scene than the doctor expected to see in such a case: he thought she had been killed elsewhere and then dragged to the dump site, but it’s also possible that her blood had drained away through a grate in the yard. When he dipped a sheet of paper in the drain, it came back tinged with blood.
It was an extraordinarily savage murder.
The doctor also examined John Johnson, and stated that although there was mud and shit on his trousers, he would expect the murderer of Felicitous to be covered in blood.
But of course, if John Johnson had washed his shirt, the blood would be much reduced. And the shirt that John had pawned had an extensive washed-out blood stain under the right sleeve.
Other people came forward in between the inquest hearings, saying that they had seen John dragging a woman into the yard, they’d seen him pawning his clothes and using a false name to do so, and that they’d seen him at work with a long handled flick-knife which was now nowhere to be found. The third hearing of the inquest returned a verdict of “Murdered but by whom the evidence does not show”.
John wasn’t the only suspect in the murder, of course. The soldiers, both those who had been with Felicitous and others in the town, were suspected, but had alibis… The weapon used to kill her was ferociously sharp, and never found. Although the wounds were savage, the murder was done methodically, cleanly with just enough care to avoid getting drenched in blood. It was more execution than an impassioned moment of violence. It was practiced.
But there was no real evidence to tie the murder to anyone else. John was the last person seen with Felicitous, and had seemed sexually aggressive towards her all night. He was still in the vicinity of the murder in the morning, when he met Emma Walsh in a privy behind Kirkgate. He had been in a hurry to get rid of his clothes. His knife was missing. He had a small head injury, spots of blood on his clothes. Unlike the soldiers, he knew the alleys of Wakefield well.
He appeared at the magistrate’s court on several occasions, surly and argumentative, dourly proclaiming innocence, explaining away both his head injury and the stains on his clothing. He only showed any emotion when Felicitous’ blood soaked dress was displayed in court on 15th June. The magistrates decided to commit him to trial on the same day, but had to delay proceedings to allow the defence solicitor to present his own witnesses. At the sixth hearing, on 22nd June, he was finally remanded for trial.
He did not react well; “he waxed wroth and wild” according to the florid Wakefield Herald, and attempted to escape. He also accused the police officer who separated him and Felicitous of killing her.
He was held at Leeds, where his trial commenced on 15th August. He was described as 32 years old, and illiterate (although his penmanship was admired at one of the magistrate’s hearings, so perhaps the court recorders simply assumed all Irish miners were illiterate!) He pleaded not guilty. The evidence about the blood on his shirt became a sticking point. There should have been a lot of blood, even though Felicitous was killed in the same manner one might slaughter a sheep, directing the blood flow away from the murderer, into her hair and the drain. The judge felt there was a grievous case of suspicion against John Johnson, but
“I cannot see that the evidence is sufficiently conclusive to make it safe for you [the jury] to find your verdict. I apprehend that you would not think it safe and if so, it is useless to go on calling a number of witnesses who do not make the case stronger. If you wish it to go on, it shall, but you must take it that they cannot prove it more than they have.”
He then acquitted John Johnson, and after John had left the dock, the jury formally returned a not guilty verdict.
*I’ve found multiple instances of prostitutes being followed by men at a discreet distance, and telling the police they didn’t know the man. This seems to have been a planned manouevre to give plausible deniability while searching for a safe place to have sex.
Felicitous didn’t call herself Felicitous. She called herself Elizabeth, or Emma, or Ellen. Her sisters knew her as Eliza, and John Johnson was officially tried for the murder of Eliza McLavly. One can imagine her nickname being Ellie.
Felicitous was about ten weeks pregnant. She must have become pregnant around the same time as dislocating her shoulder. We don’t know if she knew. She had no surviving children at the time of her death, but it’s unlikely to have been her first pregnancy. All she had on her when she died was a letter from her sister, three and a half pence, a comb, some tobacco, a drill, and a small clay pipe. There was some ribbon too.
Felicitous scraped a living in the only way she knew how: working in pubs, meeting men after work for sixpence, drinking it away afterwards. She hoped to find herself a position as a ‘kept woman’ to a widow, but was seriously hampered by her broken shoulder: her right hand was useless.
She couldn’t defend herself either. She was raped before she was killed, then dragged into a yard, and slaughtered.
And at the inquest, the hearings and the trial, people shook their heads and muttered about demon drink and female depravity.
Felicitous McLavey
(1831-1870)