Pierrepoint by Steven Fielding Read Free Book Online Page A

Clayton, where he set up a carrier’s business. Working for himself, transporting goods from the local railway station, gave him the freedom to be his own boss and the liberty to go away on official business when required.
    William Billington and Harry carried out two executions in two days in July. On Tuesday, 12 July, they were at Pentonville Gaol, where they executed John Sullivan, a Durham seaman who had battered a young deck hand to death with an axe on the merchant ship Waiwera while at sea. After completing the execution without any incident they travelled together to Northampton, where they prepared the drop for Samuel Rowledge, a carpenter who had shot dead his fiancée on the day of their engagement, following a domestic argument.
    Whether Harry resented the fact that he hadn’t received the offer to carry out an execution as the chief hangman since the turn of the year isn’t recorded, but he must have been dismayed to find that any work that William Billington was unable to carry out was seemingly now being offered to the younger Billington instead of to him. The lack of work would also have had financial implications: Harry’s wife was pregnant again with their third child; he was now self-employed, and the difference between a chief executioner’s pay and that of his assistant was considerable.
    In August, Harry helped John Billington to dispatch John Thomas Kay, a 52-year-old Rotherham labourer who had killed the woman he lived with, then stopped a policeman in the street and confessed abruptly: ‘I did it with a hatchet.’ Kay’s defence had been that he was under the influence of drink at the time of the attack, and therefore, as he was not aware of what he was doing, he was only guilty of manslaughter. The jury had disagreed.
    On 13 December, Harry assisted William Billington in another double execution, this time at Pentonville Gaol. A paperboy had arrived at a newsagent’s shop in Stepney, but was surprised to find the shop open and no sign of his employer, 65-year-old spinster Miss Matilda Farmer. The police were later contacted and, searching the shop, found the deceased old lady lying face-down on her bed, her hands tied behind her back and a towel fastened around her mouth. It was clear that the motive for the crime had been robbery: the bedroom had been ransacked and jewellery was missing. A witness told the police he had seen two men standing near to the shop: one he had never seen before, but the other he recognised as Charles Wade. Another witness described two men he had seen coming out of the shop on the morning of the murder. The descriptions fitted Charles Wade and his half-brother, Conrad Donovan (aka Joseph Potter). Both men had long criminal records for robbery and were picked out from identity parades by the two witnesses.
    At their trial the defence discredited one of the witness’s testimonies by proving he had been shown pictures of the suspects prior to picking them out from the identity parade. Other witnesses who had claimed to see the two men on the morning of the murder had failed to pick them out when they attended the same line-up. Police had also failed to locate any of the missing jewellery, despite thoroughly searching both men’s houses.
    Although there was some doubt as to the guilt of the two men, the jury took just ten minutes to decide that the evidence was strong enough to convict them; as sentence of death was passed, both Donovan and Wade loudly protested their innocence. A few days before they were to hang, workmen at the Stepney newsagents found the missing jewellery under the floorboards in one of the rooms, indicating the thieves had not escaped with as much as police had originally assumed. As the hangmen arrived in London, and with protestations going on outside the prison that a miscarriage of justice was about to take place, Conrad Donovan made a statement to the prison chaplain: ‘No murder was intended.’ Four words that confirmed the sentence was