Damn His Blood (29 page)

There were other objects too: hints of rotted fabric, something resembling a carpenter’s rule and a coin. The terrible collection was scattered over a plot inside the boundary of the demolished barn, up against where the outer wall had previously stood. Here, under the barn floor, was a human skeleton, sprawled silent and undetected. A shallow grave in the red clay.

For a moment Burton recoiled from the scene, lost in thought. Seconds later he was working again, disguising the site and gathering up his tools. There was no chance to investigate further. The wintry daylight had almost gone, and by a quarter to five it would be dark. Forced into a decision, he chose not to alert the Watersons and instead told his son they were done for the day. Already Burton’s mind was racing. Could these be the remains of Richard Heming, his brother-in-law?

Before he left Burton ensured his find was perfectly concealed. The trench was situated on the very edge of the fold-yard, beside a bridle path that branched off at a right angle from Netherwood Lane, wending away through several low thistly fields towards Trench Wood and Sale Green. To disguise the grave from passers-by or the attentions of the farm dog, Burton covered the trench with debris and heaved a stone over the plot.

Inside the farmhouse Mrs Waterson and her daughter saw Burton minutes afterwards. They noticed ‘he looked pale and agitated’. He told them he had finished for the day and then set off.

Charles Burton’s actions over the subsequent hours were striking. Having chosen not to speak to Henry Waterson he also decided against visiting a local magistrate. He simply went home. Burton had much to think about and for the moment remained silent as the questions burned. Were these Heming’s remains? If so, then who had buried them under the barn floor? How long had they been hidden? Could anything be proved? If it wasn’t Heming then who might it be?

That night Burton talked these riddles through with his wife, and the following morning acted decisively. On Friday 22 January he rose early and set off along the icy turnpike road to Droitwich. He soon arrived at the post office on Worcester Road, where he asked to speak to the postmaster. Richard Allen was well known locally; as postmaster he lay at the apex of local communications, managing the daily flow of letters and parcels across the county. Earlier in the century he had served as one of the town magistrates alongside Captain Evans and as such had been involved in the original hunt for Heming. On the night of Parker’s murder Allen had executed the warrant to search Burton’s home, so from that unhappy meeting, at the very least, the two men knew one another.

Richard Allen saw Burton at once. He listened to his story and then hurried him to the home of the nearest magistrate. From there, in a chain of whispered confidences, reports of the find began to circulate.

Burton was sent south, back to Worcester, carrying a carefully worded letter drafted by Allen and addressed to William Smith, a solicitor and the city coroner, who lived at Newport Street on the banks of the River Severn. Allen’s letter to Smith
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was tentative. A skeleton had been found buried under a barn floor in Oddingley, he wrote. Burton
supposed
it to be Heming, the
supposed
murderer of Reverend George Parker. Perhaps Richard Allen had been unfavourably scarred by false rumours before; in any case he chose not to commit himself. He requested that Smith take charge of the incident and ‘give what directions you thought necessary’.
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He implored Burton to deliver the letter with all possible haste.

From the very beginning of his involvement William Smith approached the Oddingley case in a wholly different manner to that adopted by Richard Barneby years earlier. When the coroner received Burton at his home later that afternoon he instantly took the matter seriously. Smith was earnest, well-intentioned, intelligent and dogged: traits that would combine spectacularly over the forthcoming days. He heard Burton’s account then set about reacquainting himself with the facts of the case. He immediately composed a letter to Reverend Pyndar, by now an elderly man, who was living at Areley Kings near Stourport. ‘If you have any depositions that can throw any light on the murder, perhaps you would be kind enough to send them to me?’ Smith enquired.

Smith then asked Charles Burton – who must have been exhausted from his travels between Oddingley, his home at Smite Hill, Droitwich and Worcester – whether he would accompany a pair of constables to Netherwood so they ‘could watch the bones’ until officials could attend. Once the carpenter had left his office, the coroner penned his final letter of the day. It was addressed to Mr Matthew Pierpoint – a surgeon at Worcester Infirmary – and desired him to exhume a skeleton in Oddingley the following morning.

By remaining tight-lipped, Charles Burton had afforded William Smith a luxury that neither Pyndar nor any others investigating Parker’s murder had previously enjoyed. He had generated some quiet hours in which official action could be taken before anyone with either the motivation or influence to distort the facts had the chance to do so.

Friday 22 January was a strange day at Netherwood. Henry Waterson still had no idea that a skeleton had been uncovered in his fold-yard, but the family were perplexed that, after leaving abruptly the night before, Charles Burton had not reappeared for work the following morning. In the afternoon rumours began to reach the farm that ‘everyone in Droitwich was talking about the discovery of Heming’s body’. The reports were dismissed by Mrs Waterson as gossip. Only when her son arrived home with the same news did she begin to think that they might be true. Minutes later Charles Burton had knocked at the front door accompanied by two constables.

It was already dark, and as the Watersons learnt about Burton’s discovery, outside the constables settled into their disquieting vigil. That night temperatures dipped to their lowest levels since 1812. The men had been ordered to keep the site in the exact condition Burton had left it until Smith and Pierpoint arrived the following morning. But the cold was so intense they were forced to work in shifts, moving between the fold-yard and the farmhouse to warm their hands at the fire and beg a little beer. ‘They didn’t relish their employment at all,’ Mrs Waterson recalled. ‘They were cold and frightened;
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and as to ourselves we had none of us much rest that night. I shall never forget it as long as I live.’

Inside, the Watersons were left to absorb the implications of Burton’s discovery. For years perhaps these bones had lain just yards from their door. The
Gentleman’s Magazine
,
³
years later, explored the horror of such a thought. In the 14 years since Clewes had left, their children had played in the old barn. Exhausted labourers had rested there, eating their wheaten bread and sipping perry or beer. Temporary harvest hands had been quartered there when the farmhouse was full, and the dogs had scratched and rooted just above the site, as if they were looking for rats.

At nine o’clock on Saturday morning Charles Burton
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arrived back at the mound of marl and debris he had abandoned on Thursday evening. He was accompanied by a little party of officials including Smith, the coroner, and Pierpoint, the surgeon. A woodcut produced several weeks afterwards shows Burton standing beside the grave leaning languidly on a spade; Henry Waterson joins him wearing a flowing smock, along with his wife and two stout constables in tall hats and three-quarter-length coats. They are directing William Smith, a rotund man with lank thinning hair and a round inquiring face, to the bones. While Burton seems assured and still, all of the others wear expressions of horror and wonder as they point down into the trench. The woodcut shows that the stone had been removed, the marl brushed aside and the bones exposed for all to see. It was at this point that Matthew Pierpoint stepped forward to commence the exhumation.

Pierpoint began at the foot of the grave and then worked assiduously up, uncovering the fibula, the femur, the pelvic girdle, the vertebrae and ribcage, the bones of the arm and finally the skull. As each subsequent piece was revealed, it was carefully scrutinised for clues. It was immediately clear, Pierpoint noted, that the body had been thrown in on the left side with the subject’s back to the wall of the foundations. When the full length of the skeleton had been exposed, he produced a rule and measured it to be ‘as near as possible 5ft 3in in length’.
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The left arm had been resting under the skull, almost as a cushion; the right arm was doubled up across the ribs. The grave’s dimensions, Pierpoint calculated, were about 4 feet in depth and 14 inches across.

Questions loomed over the exhumation of the skeleton. Was it Heming’s? If not, then whose was it? Could it have been the ancient remains of a farmhand or destitute labourer, lost to memory generations before? How had the person died? Was there any evidence to suggest violence or was this simply a natural death? Pierpoint worked on under a weak sun that struggled through the wintry sky, the gloom and sharp cold air numbing his fingers and rendering the task ever more difficult. The surgeon noted that the body had almost certainly been deposited in the grave fully clothed. This was clear, Pierpoint said, as the many different bones of the feet were still contained within the shoes, indicating strongly that the body had been concealed while the flesh was still whole. All of the skeletal bones, he said, had subsequently fallen into positions consistent with the subsequent rotting away of the softer parts.

Pierpoint now drew each of the bones carefully out of the grave and placed them one by one in a deal box. As he lifted the skull from its resting place, he noticed that there were a series of severe irregularities which, he instantly pointed out, were most probably the cause of death.

On the forehead there was a blunt crack or ‘fissure’ which extended fully down the orbit. Despite the fact that the teeth were still in remarkably good condition, the surgeon noted that both the upper and lower jaw had been loosened from their sockets and beaten into many pieces. ‘Great violence must have been used to fracture those parts of the head,’ Pierpoint told Smith. The nature of these multiple fractures, he continued, was such that it seemed impossible for them to have been self-inflicted. Only heavy blows or a horrendous collision could have caused such severe damage, and interestingly, it did not appear that the force had been cushioned by a protecting hand. He concluded, in his professional opinion, ‘that the injury must have been done to the skull before the body was put there – and that such an injury was committed whilst the person was alive or immediately after death’.

With the complete skeleton stowed away, Pierpoint explored the grave in greater detail. Aside from the leather shoes, almost all the fragments of accompanying clothing had wasted away. There were, however, a number of objects strewn about the skeleton. To the right side of where the femur had lain, Pierpoint found the wooden rule that Burton had glimpsed on Thursday night. Something that faintly resembled the waistband of a pair of breeches was pulled from the area around the pelvis, and from near the ribs came a portion of a waistcoat pocket. Other artefacts were salvaged too: a rusty knife, a whetstone used for sharpening knives, a sixpence marked ‘F.W’ and three half-pennies from the year 1799.

These clues, rescued from the frosty grave, suggested that Burton had discovered the body of a labouring man whose bones could not have been buried for longer than 30 years. His early conclusions were entirely consistent with the irresistible theory that Charles Burton had now entertained for almost two days: that these were Richard Heming’s remains.

At Worcester that afternoon William Smith wrote directly to the home secretary, Robert Peel. The implications of Matthew Pierpoint’s intial conclusions were of such gravity that Smith felt obliged to inform the government immediately. The coroner outlined the developing situation. He told Peel that a skeleton had been discovered in the parish of Oddingley within the bounds of a dismantled barn. He suspected these bones to be those of a labourer called Richard Heming who had disappeared many years ago after supposedly murdering the parish parson. Smith added that the skull of the skeleton had been fractured by one or more blows, and that he could only conclude that a second murder had been committed by the same farmers who themselves were likely to have organised the first murder.

Smith was writing to Peel for advice, but also with the same request that Pyndar had made to Earl Spencer more than two decades before: he wanted to secure a royal pardon for anyone who could be tempted into providing information about the skeleton. His actions were driven by excitement and a genuine possibility of solving a case which had bewildered his predecessors. Smith had been thrown into a situation full of excitement and possibility. But any hope that he entertained of securing swift governmental backing would soon fade.

At 41 years old, Robert Peel was among the brightest lights in the Duke of Wellington’s government. Two decades earlier he had come down from Oxford with a double first, and in the years since he had become a lynchpin at the centre of British politics. By 1830 Peel was an experienced home secretary, now occupying the post for a second time, and he was well placed to judge the merits of Smith’s letter. He had served his political apprenticeship in Dublin as chief secretary for Ireland, a country consumed by religious divisions that tore across entire communities. Murders were far commoner in Ireland than mainland Britain and Peel had learnt to react to the violent cases he encountered with careful tenacity rather than a natural sense of outrage, an icy habit that led Daniel O’Connell, the Irish political campaigner, to compare Peel’s smile to the silver plate on a coffin.
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