I read a book recently by Sue Black, and there was a story in there about an elderly woman who confessed to burying a woman she cared for a good twenty years before. She claimed to have found the victim dead, but forensic evidence showed the poor woman had been beaten to death. The murderer was convicted and imprisoned, despite her age. In the book, Dr Black muses on guilt and the power of absolution.
This week, I’ve moved away from femicide and the Victorian era to discuss a cold case from 1816. A cold case that was solved after forty years, by a deathbed confession. It reminded me of my first ever Friday Murder, Lydia Atley, but this was a very different set of circumstances.
Come with me to late 1816. King George III is still on the throne, George IV is enjoying his regency, Princess Charlotte is newly married, Queen Victoria has not even been concieved. The railways are a distant dream, and Peterborough is a rural market centre with no heavy industry. It’s a different world.
Thomas French was a shepherd in Wansford, he worked for a Mr Gaskill, and was evidently a trustworthy man. We don’t know his age, but he was married with at least one adult son, and lived in Sibson.
At the end of October 1816, Thomas took his employer’s sheep to market in Peterborough. This entailed a long walk along Thorpe Road, into the city. This was an extremely busy thoroughfare for such a rural area, because of the scarcity of places to cross the Nene with livestock in tow.
Thomas appears to have sold all his sheep, and made his way home unencumbered but with a pocketful of cash. His route passed through Longthorpe, Castor and Ailsworth, then to Water Newton, where Thomas could have either gone on to Wansford to cross the Nene at the bridge or home to Sibson via Sutton ford.
It’s a ten mile walk, a long way on a cold and dark October night. Thomas stopped off at the George and Dragon pub in Castor, and there he met three men. The newspaper records their names as Sismey, Burbidge and Browett but Sismey is an error and I cannot be certain of which Burbidge they refer to. Newspapers, even local newspapers that should know better, get things wrong. NotSismey was from Castor, his name might have been Richard Knighton but it might equally have not. The others were from Thornhaugh. They were not particularly young men: if NotSismey was in fact Richard Knighton, he was thirty-one. Robert Browett, identifiable by his later story, was thirty-eight, and Burbidge was somewhere between thirty and fifty-two. It’s likely that Thomas knew them.
The men drank, we can assume Thomas told them about his success in the market, and they left the pub together. Perhaps the men offered to walk a little way with him, in the dark. Perhaps they proposed continuing the party somewhere more private. All we know is that Thomas went with them without making a fuss, and they did not go the way one might expect.
Instead of carrying on along the drover route through to Sutton, they diverted into the fields south of Castor. And there, in the dark, the three men battered Thomas to death with hedge posts.
They took almost all of his money, leaving a little silver in his pocket, and buried him in a manure heap, probably on land worked by NotSismey. Then, they went home.
Thomas was reported missing a day or two later. His disappearance was unexpected, out of character. He was searched for. He was not found. About three weeks after his disappearance, NotSismey got wind that the manure heap was going to be moved. In a panic, he summoned the men from Thornhaugh. In the middle of a late November night, they unearthed Thomas’ body, which must have been a revolting mess, and chucked him in the river at the weir in Water Newton.
By the time Thomas’ body was found, fully clothed on 2nd December, floating along the Nene at Sibson, England was in the grip of civil disobediance. The Spa Field riots and concerns about the Luddite movement took up far more space in the newspapers than the discovery of a missing man in the river. Burbidge and Robert Browett were arrested on suspicion of murder, although NotSismey was not.
The inquest was held, unusually, in Sibson parish church. There was (presumably still is) a prohibition against spilling blood in church, requiring reconsecration, which usually exempted churches from holding inquests. Nevertheless, Thomas’ body was displayed there and the inquest held. His funeral was probably held straight after.
One would imagine that Thomas would be visibly murdered, head beaten by the attack. One would imagine that Thomas showed signs of not being in the water for a month, and that someone would have noticed this. But although the jury may have suspected foul play, they couldn’t prove it. Thomas had presumably decomposed significantly over three weeks of being kept in manure, and being dropped in the weir had probably also banged him about. There was no way of telling the difference between perimortem and postmortem wounding in 1816. Thomas was last seen drinking, perhaps he’d got drunk, got lost, fallen in. Maybe he’d spent all his money and killed himself for the shame of it. There was still cash in his pocket, so the jury wrongly concluded that robbery was unlikely to have been the motive. Post-mortems were wildly unpopular, expensive and avoided where possible, so nobody checked to see if there was water in his lungs.
Instead, the inquest returned a verdict of ‘found drowned’.
In the absence of evidence, Burbidge and Browett were released. Thomas was buried. The case was closed. They got away with it.
Robert Browett married a year later, and in early 1819, was caught stealing sheep from a farmer in Wittering. He was tried at Peterborough, and sentenced to death. Two weeks later, his sentence was respited to seven years transportation. He waited for a ship in the hulk HMS Ganymede, at Chatham docks. He waited and waited and waited. While he waited, he asked Thomas French’s son to come and see him twice. On both occasions, he had nothing to say. In January 1825, he was pardoned and released, without ever having left England.
Robert went home to Thornhaugh, although I doubt his return home was celebrated by many. He probably saw Burbidge (who still lived in Thornhaugh), saw NotSismey, and all three of them kept quiet, an omertà. Burbidge probably died first, in 1845. Robert died in March 1853.
NotSismey, who was perhaps Richard Knighton, lay dying in March 1859 and confessed. He told the story of the beating, the robbery, and the body disposal. He did not say why they did it, although financial gain was the most obvious motive.
And then he died, absolved of sin.
Thomas French
(c.1776-1816)