Damn His Blood (20 page)

In the eight years up to 1806 he continued with his magisterial duties. ‘Captain Evans used to go up to Droitwich
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every Friday’, remembered Elizabeth Fowler, his dairymaid. This left him for the remainder of the week at home in Oddingley, where once again the Captain’s irrepresible personality was to prevail. ‘Captain Evans was the leading man in the parish,’
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William Barnett would later declare, which makes his quarrel with Parker doubly compelling, and shows Perkins’ verbal attack at the Plough – when he reminded Evans that as a magistrate he should not be breaking the peace – to be even more admirable.

Captain Evans’ position in Droitwich and Oddingley was unquestionable. But what had not yet been established, as Pyndar set about his hunt for Richard Heming on Midsummer night, were his movements that day. Where had he spent the afternoon? Why had Heming been working at Church Farm that morning? Just how well did Evans know the man who had just murdered his clergyman?

There were no answers as the shadows of that summer evening stretched over Oddingley’s fields. Clewes left the Captain at Church Farm and was now returning along the lane to Netherwood. ‘[He] seemed much confused and cut up,
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as if he had lost a friend,’ remembered William Smith and John Collins, who saw him when he returned.

At Church Farm nothing had changed, despite the dramatic events of the day. Elizabeth Fowler, Thomas Langford and the other live-in servants prepared for bed. They slept soundly and did not hear anything at all.

CHAPTER 10

Seduced by the Devil

Oddingley, 25–27 June 1806

‘THERE IS A wound on the right side of the head, towards the back,’ explained Pennell Cole, a surgeon from Worcester Infirmary. ‘Here the skull has been fractured
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and the bone beaten in upon the brain. This in itself is sufficient cause of death.’

It was Wednesday 25 June, the day after Parker’s murder. All interested parties had been called to Oddingley Rectory, where the coroner’s inquest was being held, and Cole, the fourth witness of the day, was delivering his evidence. Already the 13-man jury had heard Thomas Giles’ and John Lench’s detailed accounts of what they had witnessed the previous afternoon, and they had just listened to James Tustin’s tacit defence of his master, John Barnett, and his timorous assertion that ‘to the best of his knowledge
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he had never seen the bag or the gun before’.

At 56 years old, Pennell Cole was an enormously experienced and respected local figure. He was one of six full-time surgeons and physicians employed at the Worcester Infirmary, an imposing example of enlightened architecture dubbed by one pamphlet one of the city’s most ‘ornamental structures’.
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Like Captain Evans, Cole was a military man and had served as a medical officer during the American war, but for the past 21 years he had been based in Worcester, tending to a daily professional staple of feverish, dyspeptic, rheumatic and gouty patients. But at the rectory he had been confronted with a quite different proposition as he performed a relatively simple yet highly unusual autopsy. Parker’s wounds were severe and resembled those of a soldier killed at close quarters in a pistol battle or a dissident hacked down in a furious riot. They were not those commonly sustained by a country parson wandering in his glebe.

Cole had identified two major wounds to the corpse. The first was a broad bloodied hole in the right side of Parker’s torso, a result of the shotgun blast. The skin around this area, between the bottom of the ribcage and the top of the pelvis, was charred black, and, peeling it back, Cole found a reasonable quantity of shot buried beneath. Some had perforated the main artery, he explained to the jurors – presumably meaning the descending aorta. The massive blood loss precipitated by the injury would have sent Parker into a lethal haemorrhagic shock.

The bludgeoned head constituted a second fatal injury. Parker had been struck three separate times: once on either temple and once on the right side of his head. Though the blows to the temples had laid his skin bare, the third impact had been the most devastating, leaving Parker with a horribly depressed fracture which had caused further haemorrhaging. The enormous quantity of blood lost from the first wound would have killed him in minutes; the second silenced him even more quickly. Cole’s testimony was plain and pointed. He stood down.

The coroner’s inquest was a necessary first step that followed any murder or, more commonly, any unexplained or accidental death. It was designed to expose all the evidence surrounding an incident, calling eye witnesses and medical men to testify before the coroner and his jury – who were usually respected men from the parish. When a hearing was concluded, the coroner would give his verdict on the case, indicating the most likely cause of death. Coroners worked closely with magistrates, who were responsible for pursuing cases on behalf of victim’s families, locating and arresting suspects and having them committed for trial at the assize – grand court trials presided over by one of the King’s judges touring the country.

It was traditional for proceedings to take place in full view of the deceased body and usually in the closest public house to the crime scene. Inns were a logical choice: they were familiar to everyone in a community and capable of catering for the swell of witnesses, family members and curious locals. In
The Maul and the Pear Tree
P. D. James and T. A. Critchley describe an inquest that took place at a London inn during the Ratcliffe Highway murders in 1811.

The inquest was arranged for Tuesday,
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10 December, at the Jolly Sailor public house in Ratcliffe Highway, nearly opposite to Marr’s [the murdered man’s] shop. While his wife bustled from taproom to kitchen preparing for an unusual influx of customers, the landlord suitably arranged his largest room. An imposing table sat ready for the coroner, bearing candles to lighten the gloom of a December afternoon: two longer tables were placed together for the jury; a chair was set in place for witnesses. The fire was banked high. Outside could be heard the mutterings and movements of a vast crowd.

As there was no public house in Oddingley, the rectory had been selected as the most suitable alternative. The building was spacious, centrally located, close to the crime scene and also a place of authority – which, along with the need to keep the inquest within the parish boundaries, made it an obvious setting. Perhaps it was also considered a dignified choice, as rather than dispatching Parker’s corpse on a further inglorious tour of the lanes, he could instead remain under his own roof. For Mary Parker, however, the influx of officials, witnesses and onlookers must have amounted to a horrible invasion of her shattered family home, the sight of her husband’s dead body exposed on a table a frightful one to endure.

William Barnett, the parish constable, had summoned the coroner to Oddingley from Worcester that morning. At 29 years old, William was four years younger than his brother John, but he displayed many of the same family traits. He was hard-working, stoical and reticent. He had the community standing and spirit to be elected to one of the foremost parochial positions and he was a capable deputy to his brother at Pound Farm.

William Barnett, though, had been away from Oddingley on Midsummer Day, at Bromsgrove Fair, not arriving back in the village until dusk. Customarily he would be one of the first to be informed about a crime, but Oddingley’s constable was among the last to learn of Parker’s murder. Later Barnett’s absence in the minutes and hours after the attack would be carefully examined. Had he been present he would have been expected to assume a leading role: sounding the hue and cry, encouraging villagers to pursue the suspect on horseback and sending for the nearest justice of the peace. He would have been a first point of contact for Surman, Tustin or the butchers, and as the attack happened minutes from Pound Farm Barnett should have been nearby and able to act swiftly. But at 8 p.m. he had still not returned, and Pyndar had been forced to appoint a number of deputised constables (John Lloyd, George Day, John Perkins, Edward Stephens and John Pardoe among them) to act in his place.

As important parochial officials, constables held real power. They could arrest and imprison felons without requiring warrants, and they could detain suspects until a justice arrived on the scene. If a constable had information that a felon was concealed within a house, he had the right to break open its doors if entrance was denied. And if a criminal resisted arrest or attempted to escape, then it was not considered murder if the constable killed him.

‘It was very late when I got back
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[from Bromsgrove Fair],’ William Barnett later told magistrates. ‘It was nine o’clock. I did not wish otherwise than to go in search of him [Heming]. I heard other people were going in search.’

The following morning, though, Barnett assumed his duties with vigour and interest. He had risen early and ridden to the Worcester residence of Richard Barneby, the coroner, asking him to come to Oddingley at once. Following this he had called on Pennell Cole at the infirmary, briefing him and engaging him to perform the autopsy before the inquest began in the afternoon. Coroner’s inquests were usually arranged some days following a fatality (the inquest into the Marr murders in Ratcliffe Highway in 1811 was held three days after they were killed), but Barnett was already acting with much more speed. By midday a 13-man jury had been assembled, which included three farmers (Marshall, Jones and Hardcourt), and the rectory had been prepared for the day’s business. At five o’clock the day before, Reverend Parker had been alive and busy with his daily tasks. Less than a day later his dead body was laid out in front of a crowd, the subject of an official investigation. A contested report, years later, asserted that in his role as a magistrate Captain Evans sat as foreman of the jury.

Richard Barneby chaired the proceedings. Barneby was a young coroner who had been elected unopposed to his position in August 1801. Since then most of his cases had related to grim but common-place instances of accidental death, of men trampled by their horses, destitute or drunk city dwellers who had perished in the icy winters. On 9 January 1806 Barneby had conducted an inquest on the body of a female child found on the foot road from Powick to Stanbrook. The week after he had investigated the death of a man from exposure. Murder, though, was rare, and when it did happen the victim was usually a woman: as many as half of the recorded number being wives, mistresses or sweethearts, commonly members of the poor working classes. Parker’s case was altogether different.

It was customary to view the crime scene before an inquest began, and presumably Barneby and the jury were taken to the glebe before returning to the rectory. Barneby opened the inquest with an initial address, and Thomas Giles and John Lench were called to deliver their evidence. For the next half-hour the butchers delivered detailed lucid accounts of their interrupted journey through the parish. Lench told the jury that after Giles disappeared after the murderer, he had seen John Barnett at Pound Farm and asked him directly ‘if he would please go to the place to look at him [Parker]’, to which Barnett had responded starkly, ‘I will not go.’
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This was an awkward moment for the farmer. Lench’s evidence cast him as callous and indifferent, disinclined to offer the least help when it was desperately needed. His position was only somewhat improved by James Tustin’s subsequent testimony, with the carter claiming that he had not heard the conversation between the two men.

After Pennell Cole’s cogent analysis of Parker’s corpse, the final witnesses were called. These were Thomas Colwell, who told the coroner that he had been startled by Richard Heming vaulting over the hedge in the lanes near Hindlip shortly after the murder, and George Lloyd, who informed the room that he had assisted Richard Allen, the Droitwich constable, to search Heming’s home ‘several times’ without success. The witness testimonies concluded on this dispiriting note and Barneby prepared to sum up. The whole inquiry had amounted to little more than a fleeting tour through the facts of the previous day. Lench’s and Giles’ evidence aside, a breezy air had permeated the hearing, and none of the witnesses had been challenged on any points of detail or invited to speculate. It was a missed opportunity. Corner’s inquests were not guided by the same stiff rules that existed in English courts of law, where suggestive comment was closely monitored and hearsay expressly prohibited. Had he lingered longer and studied the evidence more closely, Barneby may have elicited far more.

The corner and each of the jurors then read and signed every sheet of the clerk’s account, which recorded in ornate and vivid prose their assessment of the facts.
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‘Some person to the jurors afore-said at present unknown, not having the fear of God before his eyes, but moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil’ had ended the life of Reverend George Parker. The official verdict was ‘wilful murder by some person or persons unknown’.

Barneby left Oddingley for Worcester, leaving behind him a sense of mounting frustration. A murder merited much more than the insipid investigation that had just taken place. In establishing the causes of death and movements of those involved, Barneby had performed his duty, but he had done no more. He had shown little inquisitive rigour, had failed to interview several crucial witnesses and had allowed an ambiguous verdict to be passed down by the jury, who fixed the crime on an unknown rather than boldly declaring Heming the chief suspect – a fact already generally held in the village.