Welcome back to the Friday Murder Club! It’s a new academic year, and I have Some News.
The weekly Friday murder is not a lighthearted task, it’s not something I do for a laugh. Researching and writing these tales of injustice is a big time commitment, and one with an emotional cost. I don’t want to reduce the level of research I do - that would feel like an injustice to the victims - but I am entering the phase of my PhD where I must bloody well stay on task, and as my PhD is ALSO about justice and death, it’s a lot.
So, in the interests of balance and self-care, I have made the decision to publish a murder every TWO weeks instead of weekly. That’s still two a month!
Since I last wrote, Lucy Letby has been convicted and imprisoned for life for the murder of seven babies at a NICU in Chester. Far better historians than I have written about this crime, and their work is worth reading if you’re looking to contexualise this impossibly harrowing crime.
Professor Lizzie Seal has written about how our desire to RECOGNISE evil makes Letby’s crimes difficult to understand (and this is something I’ll be talking about today). Dr Daniel Grey, in a twitter thread, cited his work on the crimes of Eva Thompson, a murderous early-20thC nurse.
Entirely coincidentally, this week’s murder also took place in Cheshire: Birkenhead, 1876.
Birkenhead, facing Liverpool, was an industrial dream in the nineteenth century. Ironworks, dockyards, shipbuilding, the town flourished thanks to its position on the Mersey.
Patrick and Ellen Wall came to Birkenhead before 1861, from Cork in Ireland. Like Liverpool, Birkenhead had a significant Irish population due to the Great Famine. By 1851, around a third of the town’s residents were Irish. As we don’t know when the Walls came to England, it’s impossible to know for certain whether they were escaping starvation, but it’s likely.
Patrick was born in around 1816. Ellen was older, with her year of birth given variously as 1804, 1809 and 1814. They married in Ireland, and if they had children, they did not live with them in Birkenhead. According to the 1861 census, Patrick and Ellen lodged on Elizabeth Street (now Salisbury Street), sharing a single house with nineteen other adults and ten children. Almost the entire household was Irish.
Patrick worked as a stone breaker. Broken up stones were used for building roads, railway ballast and ship ballast, among other reasons. It was not a job that paid well. I can’t find the couple on the 1871 census, and it’s possible that they travelled back and forth to Ireland. It’s also possible that they simply weren’t enumerated.
By 1876, they lived on Warwick Street, which once ran between Warwick Close and Maritime Park. This house was also shared, although they rented two rooms: a bedroom and a scullery. Their rooms were at the top of a steep, narrow staircase. Across the small landing was another bedroom, shared by Mrs McKenzie the landlady, and Mrs Scholes. Both these ladies were elderly. At the bottom of the staircase was a wider lobby.
The Walls argued, and they drank, and Patrick beat Ellen, but this was not unusual and raised little comment. Their neighbours thought they lived “very comfortable” together, despite the occasional row. The fact that Ellen sometimes sat at the top of the narrow stairs to hide from her violent husband was barely worth mentioning.
On the 25th September 1876 - a Monday night - Ellen was alone. She spoke to her neighbours as she stood in her kitchen and went to bed at 10pm. An hour or so later, Patrick came home, drunk. He went to their room and was heard shouting:
“Come out you bloody bitch! You flaming blasted bitch, I’ll have my revenge if I wait twenty years for it”
One of the neighbours called out to him to shut up because she was trying to sleep. This neighbour was deaf: he must have been very loud. But Patrick did not shut up. He kept shouting, stomping about up and down the stairs, until around 1:40am.
After about twenty minutes of quiet, he knocked on the bedroom door of Mrs McKenzie, the landlady.
“My wife is in a pool of blood at the foot of the stairs”
The two old ladies came out to see what he meant.
Ellen lay sideways in the lobby, at the foot of the steep, narrow steps. She was indeed in a pool of blood. There were bloody fingerprints up the stairwall, and on the Wall’s bedroom door. The women sent for the police.
Somehow, Ellen was still alive when she left the house, but she died in hospital at 7am on Wednesday morning.
Meanwhile, Patrick sat in their bedroom concocting a story, an alibi. His first story, which he told to Mrs Scholes, was probably the closest to the truth: he claimed to have pawned his trousers, gone to the pub and spent all the money on drink, and come home in a violent and drunken rage. He claimed to remember nothing about assaulting his wife.
He told the police that he’d been wearing his shoes - a pair of light brown Oxford brogues - since 6pm the previous evening. But his heavy work boots, saturated in blood, were by his bed. There was blood on towels, blood on the wall, blood in the basin. When he was arrested, he invoked his second explanation, and said
“I neither rose hand nor foot to my wife this night, whatever I did to her at any other time. I got up off my chair and went downstairs and found my wife lying at the bottom of the stairs.”
At Ellen’s inquest, held at the Queen’s Hotel on the 28th September, Patrick gave a third story. This time, he blamed Ellen’s death on an unidentified man. He said this man came into their bedroom two days before Ellen’s death, and assaulted her while he lay in bed. This upset Patrick, so he got drunk. He got home, had a row with Ellen, she left the room and he next saw her two hours later, dead at the bottom of the stairs.
This story ignored the bloody boots, and overlooked the simple fact that Ellen did not die from falling down the stairs. It does not seem likely, considering where she was found, that she fell down the stairs at all. It’s more likely that she ran down them to get away from her husband.
She died from being kicked in the head, from an indented skull fracture the size of Patrick’s boot.
However, the confused narrative led the jury to return a verdict that she’d died from a skull fracture, but ‘there was no evidence to show how the deceased recieved the injury.’
Nevertheless, Patrick was charged with murder and taken before the magistrates on Monday 2nd October. The magistrates were unconvinced by any of his three tales, partly because the medical evidence suggested that Patrick stood on Ellen’s side to get the momentum to kick her in the head. This was no accident, no moment of impassioned rage. This was a sustained and brutal murder. He was remanded, to stand trial for murder.
His trial was supposed to happen on 4th December, but was delayed for a day because Patrick’s defence solicitor withdrew. A new solicitor was hastily found, and the trial proceeded at Chester Castle the next morning. It took all day.
Patrick’s defence, his fourth and final story, was that Ellen fell down the stairs in the dark, and he got covered in blood trying to help her.
The jury took twenty-five minutes to return a verdict of guilty…
…of manslaughter.
Now, as you’ll know if you’ve been here a while, sentences for manslaughter could be as short as a few days, a week. But the judge in Patrick’s case considered that the jury had been extremely lenient, saving him from the noose. The judge recognised that Patrick had abused Ellen for two and a half hours before he summoned help; that he’d left her dying at the bottom of the stairs and changed his shoes to cover up his crime; that he’d made up story after story to try and cover up what he’s done.
The judge sentenced him to life imprisonment.
And so Patrick went into penal servitude. He died at HMP Dartmoor, on 26th February, no earlier than 1885.
Patrick spent the first months of his prison sentence in Millbank, and was photographed. This photo has been digitised and a copy is held by Ancestry, in their Prison Commission Records collection. I looked at this photo while researching the case, and considered reproducing it here.
I decided not to.
I decided not to because Patrick isn’t worth looking at.
As the Letby case has demonstrated, we stare at the photos of violent convicts hoping to find something that marks them out as Bad, some commonality that means we can recognise it when it walks among us. But what you find, as you look at these photos, is the banality of evil.
Lucy Letby is just a woman. Patrick Wall was just a man.
There are no photos of Ellen, at least none that are digitially available. Ellen is, as is common in these cases, invisible. She is described only through her injuries: contusions, fractures, indentations, blood. We don’t know what colour her hair was, or her height. We don’t even know her age with any certainty.
We don’t need to see Ellen’s death throes to know she was murdered.
We don’t need to see the man who did it to know this happened.
Ellen Wall
(c.1809-1876)