Dorset Murders (3 page)

The men examined the dead body and noted the presence of a great many wounds on John Brown's head. One of his boots was unlaced and one hand was bent at a strange angle. They looked for evidence of blood in the passageway, along which Martha would have helped her husband, and also in the road outside the cottage, but found none.

Martha continued to repeat her account of her husband being kicked by his horse. George Fooks, who arrived later that morning, asked if Brown had managed to say anything before he died. According to Martha, he had pointed to his head and said simply, ‘the horse'. She told Fooks that she had sat on the floor cradling her husband's head from two o'clock onwards, while he clung to her waist. She had only managed to escape to summon help when he grew weak and fainted.

Initially, Martha's account of events was believed. The horse was known to be a particularly vicious animal and Brown's frequent drunkenness was also legendary in the area. However, Brown had several wounds to his head and his skull was completely smashed like an eggshell. In addition, the horse had been locked in its stable and, in spite of the fact that Brown had lost a great deal of blood, no traces whatsoever had been found outside the house. At the inquest, held at the Rose and Crown public house in Birdsmoorgate, it was pointed out that blood and brain matter were found adhering to the walls of the room in the cottage in which the body lay.

Richard Broster and Joachim Gilbert, the two surgeons from Beaminster who had carried out the post-mortem examination, testified to the extent of Brown's wounds. He had a broken nose and a triangular wound above his left eyebrow, through which the bone of his skull protruded. A further cut adjacent to his left eye ran vertically down his face and there were numerous separate injuries to the top and back of his head, as well as a fracture to the front of the skull. In total, seven pieces of bone, from half an inch to three inches long had been driven into his brain, which had bled extensively. At least three of the blows to Brown's head were judged sufficiently severe to cause his death and, in the opinion of the surgeons, the damage to his brain was so great that, after the first blow, he would have been instantly paralysed. There was absolutely no possibility that he could have crawled, or even spoken, after being hit. In addition, both of the medical witnesses felt that the injuries – particularly the broken nose – would have bled profusely and there would certainly have been copious quantities of blood on the road and on Brown's doorstep had his death occurred in the manner related by Martha. They also believed that Brown would have been unable to grip his wife and thus could not have prevented her from going for help.

The jury at the inquest recorded a verdict of wilful murder by person or persons unknown and, given the rumoured unhappy state of the Brown's marriage, Martha was the most obvious suspect. In due course she was arrested for the murder of her husband and committed by local magistrates to Dorchester Gaol to await her trial at the next Assizes.

Her trial opened at Dorchester on 21 July 1856 and Martha showed no emotion as she pleaded ‘Not Guilty'.

Counsel for the prosecution, Mr Stock, acknowledged that the evidence against her was entirely circumstantial. He instructed the jury to weigh up these circumstances carefully before arriving at their verdict.

Harriet Knight, the woman Martha had wanted Damon to fetch, lived near to the gate of the field where John Brown kept his horse. She told the court that she had heard the field gate slam closed at about 2 a.m. on the morning of Brown's death, followed by the sound of a horse grazing and footsteps leading towards the Brown's cottage. Although she had not checked, she believed those footsteps to have been John Brown's. Another villager, Mrs Frampton, told of hearing a frightful scream coming from the direction of the Brown's home at around 2 a.m.

The court heard evidence from Richard Damon, George Fooks and Francis Turner, who all described what they had found when they went to Brown's house on the morning of his death. The curate of Broadwindsor, the Revd Augustus Newland de la Foss, also addressed the court. He spoke of accompanying Brown's mother to the house two days after the death of her son, describing how she fainted into his arms when she went into the room where his body lay in its coffin. Everyone who had been in the room at the time had been grief-stricken and emotional, with the sole exception of Martha Brown.

According to Revd de la Foss, Martha had told him that she was accused of murdering her husband but was as innocent as the angels in heaven. When de la Foss remarked that all the evidence pointed to Brown having met his death in that very room, Martha assured him that blood would be found outside and also ‘the thing it was done with'. She then asked him, ‘What should make I kill him to lose my home and have to lie under the hedge?' [
sic
].

The surgeons then repeated the evidence they had given at the inquest, adding that they were of the opinion that the wounds to Brown's head had been caused by blows from a blunt instrument, such as a hatchet, rather than resulting from a kick or kicks by a horse. Mr Broster told the court that he had examined the horse's shoes and, although he found one shoe to be in two pieces, he still didn't believe that the horse had kicked Brown. Questions were asked in court about a hatchet that John Brown was known to have owned, which had disappeared since the murder. Both Richard Damon and the local police had searched high and low for it, but it could not be found.

Damon's wife provided the court with a motive for the murder, describing Martha's intense jealousy of Mary Davies, a woman Martha consistently referred to as ‘an old bitch'.

Martha Brown did not enter the witness box since her defence counsel, Mr Edwards, was undoubtedly wary about what might be revealed under cross-examination by the prosecution. In fact, Edwards called just one witness, Martha's previous employer, Mr Symes, who supplied a character witness for her, describing her as ‘as kind and inoffensive a woman as ever lived'.

Edwards concentrated his defence on showing that the evidence against his client was purely circumstantial. He complained that nothing had been said about a hatchet until that day – if it had been mentioned before, then Martha might have been able to produce it.

He dismissed the evidence suggesting that Martha and John had not lived together in harmony and pooh-poohed the notion that Martha was jealous of Mary Davies. He pointed out that, far from thinking of murdering her husband, on the night of his death she had been concerned only with his comfort.

Addressing the question of the lack of blood, Edwards pointed out that Martha had already told police that her husband had bled copiously onto her apron. He could find nothing to suggest that a search for the apron in question had ever been conducted.

Edwards also suggested to the court that it was not Martha who was responsible for the theory that the horse had killed her husband, but visitors to the house after his death. He also maintained that a person would need great strength to inflict such serious wounds and that Martha would simply not have been strong enough.

Finally, he challenged the medical evidence, stating that the doctors freely admitted that they had seen cases before where a patient had received what should have been a fatal blow on the head, only to live for years afterwards. As one surgeon had put it, ‘nature often excited itself in a way that was quite unexpected'. Edwards then put forward the theory that John Brown had been attacked on his doorstep by some other party; someone who knew that he would be carrying money from his day's work.

The jury retired to consider their verdict, returning after almost four hours to enquire whether they might ask some further questions of the medical witnesses. Joachim Gilbert was recalled to the witness box and the jury asked if there would have been any difference to the victim's head wounds had they been examined immediately after the murder, rather than three and a half days later at the post-mortem. Gilbert assured the jury that the time delay had made no difference to the nature of the injuries and also dismissed the idea that the pieces of skull may have been driven into the brain when the body was moved after death. The doctors also refuted the judge's suggestion that Brown's grip on his wife might have been a death grip, saying that, given the extent and seriousness of his wounds, Brown would have been quite incapable of gripping anything or anyone.

It took just a few more minutes of deliberation for the jury to find the accused guilty of the wilful murder of her husband and, with Martha steadfastly protesting her innocence, sentence of death was passed. Before Martha was led from the court to await her execution, Revd de la Foss managed to ask her if the story about the horse was a ‘trumped up' one. Martha conceded that it was, but swore that she had never hit her husband. She then stated that he had met his death by falling downstairs.

With the date of her execution set for 9 August 1856, Martha waited until two days before to dictate a statement to the prison governor.

She told of her husband arriving home drunk in the early hours of the morning, his hat missing. When she questioned him as to where he had left it, he responded with a tirade of abuse. He then demanded a drink of cold tea. Martha said she had none, but offered to make him some fresh tea, which prompted a further outburst of shouting and swearing. Martha had then asked him why he was so angry – had he been to see Mary Davies? At this, Brown erupted into violence. He struck her on the side of her head with sufficient force to confuse her, then snatched a horsewhip from the mantelpiece and hit her three times across the shoulders with it. He then said that he hoped he would find her dead in the morning, delivering a final kick to her left side before bending down to unlace his heavy boots.

In a rage at being so abused and beaten, Martha had grabbed John's hatchet and retaliated, striking him several blows on the head. After the first blow, Brown fell to the floor and never moved again. According to Martha, as soon as she had hit him, she would have given the world not to have done it. John had hit her so hard, she said, that she was almost ‘out of her senses' and scarcely knew what she was doing.

The then Home Secretary, Sir George Grey, had already received a lengthy petition asking for clemency for Martha Brown but had decided against granting it. In the light of Martha's new statement and the provocation she claimed to have received before killing her husband, the prison chaplain determined to have one last attempt at securing a reprieve.

He hurried to London but was unable to see the Home Secretary in person, Grey being in Ireland at the time. His under-secretary, Mr Waddington, had no means of contacting him and no authority to stay the execution himself. Thus, at 8 a.m. on the morning of 9 August, Martha Brown was escorted to the gallows at Dorchester by two clerics.

Wearing a long black dress, she walked bravely to the gallows and shook hands with the officials. Hangman William Calcraft placed a white hood over her head and strapped her legs together in order to preserve her modesty by preventing her skirt from billowing up as she fell. Her death was not instantaneous and she was seen to struggle briefly before finally dying. After hanging for one hour, the body of Elizabeth Martha Brown was removed from the scaffold and buried within the prison grounds.

A crowd of between 3,000 and 4,000 people watched the execution from a vantage point in North Square. Among the spectators was a youthful Thomas Hardy, on whom the execution had a profound effect. He was still writing about it almost seventy years later and Martha Brown was certainly the inspiration for – if not the subject of – one of his best-known novels,
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
.

[Note: Martha and John's name is sometimes spelled Browne in contemporary accounts of the murder. Likewise, Mary Davies and her husband are sometimes referred to as Davis.]