Damn His Blood (45 page)

Captain Evans’ role in the murder, though, is beyond dispute, and this was plain to all of those who attended the inquest and trial in the opening months of 1830. Having spent almost a century building his reputation, within nine months of his death the Captain was being vilified in all the local newspapers. In mid-March
Jackson’s Oxford Journal
printed a scathing piece.

Capt. Evans (and we cannot refer to that man’s name without horror)
⁷
was evidently the prime mover in the diabolical conspiracy, which gave rise to two murders. He passed to his last great account a few months before the discovery which led to this investigation. We have heard many and dreadful details of the horrors which agitated his spirit when about to pass before the dread tribunal of HIM ‘unto whom all hearts be open, and from whom no secrets are hid’; and though all that is related of his last hours may not be true, it is vain to imagine that the soul of a man whose conscience stung him with the recollection of a double murder, could anticipate death without these horrors which some of the most callous of mankind have exhibited in the prospect of eternity.

The newspapers had passed their verdict. Evans may have avoided justice in life, but he was already being punished in death. He had damned all those who had stood in his path, but those curses that he had thrown so liberally at others seemed to have come true for himself. It was too late for him to be saved. It was too late to repent. As a victorious Sherlock Holmes would exclaim to Dr Watson, later in the century, ‘Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent,
⁸
and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.’

It was a judgement that might equally be applied to Heming, who met with a far brisker punishment.
Berrow’s Worcester Journal
wrote:

The fate of Heming is replete with instruction:
⁹
here was a man who, probably for some paltry gain, was seduced to murder a fellow-creature against whom he does not appear to have entertained the slightest enmity; but how long did he enjoy the wages of inquiry? In a few hours after the perpetration of the deadly-deed, the avenger of blood overtook the murderer and those who tempted him to the deed of darkness were made the instruments for hurrying him before his offended MAKER with all his sins upon his head.

Just a few weeks after the conclusion of the trial the newspapers announced that Mary Parker, widow of Oddingley’s murdered clergyman, had died at her home in Lichfield. Perhaps the ordeal had been too much for her, although she had lived long enough to discover that Heming had not escaped unpunished. Another piece informed readers that Charles Burton had attempted to claim the substantial rewards offered back in 1806 for the apprehension of Heming, arguing that he had delivered the fugitive to the authorities. It was a spirited effort but was batted swiftly away by unimpressed officials.

Over the next two years Reverend Pyndar and Pennell Cole died, and in March 1834 John Barnett was laid to rest at the age of 60. ‘We have not heard whether the deceased, as his end approached, made any reference to the heavy imputation under which he rested, of having been concerned in this double deed of blood, or divulged any thought tending in any degree to remove the mystery in which those horried transactions have hitherto been shrouded,’ remarked the local paper, its appetite for new information as strong as ever. John’s death left William Barnett head of the family, and he carried on for 24 years more, dying in 1858 at the age of 81. But even he was outlived by Thomas Clewes, who like Captain Evans before him lived to a remarkable age. Rather than fading from view after his acquittal, Clewes seemed rejuvenated. He took the lease of a public house on the fringes of Oddingley parish in the little hamlet of Dunhampstead and supplemented his income by setting up as a coal merchant on the little quay that flanked his home. George Banks, meanwhile, lived out the rest of his days in Hanbury, never again appearing in the local or parish news.

Taken alone, Thomas Clewes, George Banks and John Barnett were not notable individuals. A traveller in rural England would expect to find men like them in any small village: managing the fields, bullying their workers, drinking in the local inns and monopolising the official positions that existed in each parish. Had they lived at a different time or in another place their stories may have been quite different and completely anonymous, for what happened over the few ill-tempered months and two dramatic days in Oddingley in 1806 was an aberration. The man responsible was Captain Samuel Evans.

One can only imagine the first meeting between Parker and Evans. It is 1798, the year of Nelson’s glorious victory at the Battle of the Nile, and
Lyrical Ballads
, with which Coleridge and Wordsworth gave a fresh voice to the new Romantic age. But detached from such events and hidden among the rolling hills and fruit orchards north of Worcester, the village of Oddingley lies apart. Here, outside St James’ Church, the clergyman – a haughty man, some say, yet fair and able – is talking to his newest parishioner across a little stone wall. The new master of Church Farm, Samuel Evans, is an old military man, stoical, swollen with success and equipped with a cool heart and a quick mind. As the men shake hands they stare into each other’s eyes. They cannot know it yet, but this meeting will be fatal. For Reverend George Parker it will culminate with his murder in the tall clover of a summer meadow, and for Captain Samuel Evans it will end many years later, tortured by an uncontrollable mania. Damned, some said.

^fn1
John Curwood and Judge Littledale would be reunited in 1831 in the trial of Bishop, May and Williams, bodysnatchers accused of killing a street boy. The case was a sensation and is the subject of
The Italian Boy
, by Sarah Wise.

Epilogue

Netherwood Farm, Oddingley, April 2011

A skinny tarmac road, Netherwood Lane, sweeps down from Oddingley towards Crowle to the spot where Netherwood Farm lies low and lonely in the south of Oddingley parish. It’s a damp April day, and I have come to Oddingley to see where Heming was murdered for myself. A stretch of white metal fencing flanks the five-bar entrance gate, which stands open, leading into a muddy fold-yard criss-crossed with the prints of tractor tyres. A restless collie scampers in and out of sheds and outhouses, engaged on some determined quest, as I speak to the farmer. He is young and friendly, and talks with a gentle Birmingham lilt. He tells me about a legend they have at Netherwood. They say that when it rains, and the rushing water runs over the stiff red clay, the ruby pools that collect in the nearby ditches contain the blood of Richard Heming, the murdered murderer. He points to a spot behind the barn where a little section of an old hawthorn hedge is interrupted several times by sudden gaps, wide enough to allow workers to pass into the meadow beyond. These gaps are supposed to mark the route along which Richard Heming’s corpse was dragged on 25 June 1806.

He tells me these stories with half a smile and then disappears into the farm, leaving me alone by the barn. It’s a tall red-brick structure, riddled with ventilation holes in its outer walls, standing to the left of the yard on the site of the original pulled down by Charles Burton in early 1830. Today there is no element of mystery to the place that once drew officials, curious locals, journalists and artists from across England, desperate to capture the scene. The only clue that the barn was ever at the centre of a sensational news story is a worn plaque nestled into its brickwork. This is the final tangible trace of the artful life and violent death of Richard Heming. The plaque comprises two slabs of local limestone. Each carries a bleak inscription: the top one ‘1806 RH 1830’; the second – deeply set, in a Roman typeface – ‘RH’. The stones seem deliberately cryptic: just dates and initials, almost as if they dare not spell out Richard Heming’s name.

Perhaps even this stark, dismal memorial will not last much longer. The barn has come to the end of its long working life and is shortly to be demolished. Its blue-tiled roof is half-consumed with wispy moss and at one point bulges inwards in semi-collapse. Its walls are chipped and crumbling, and the edge of the bridle path, which runs behind the building, is strewn with mounds of bricks, offcuts of timber and bundles of rope. It feels apt to have found the barn in this condition – about to be replaced, just as it was in 1830. I’m left with a sense of history turning. Just a few feet from where I stand the earth dips into a damp hollow. One hundred and eighty-one years ago Charles Burton was labouring here on a winter day, digging and clawing at the foundations beside the waters of a frozen pool. Just one yard beyond this and one yard below, he would find Heming’s skeleton, and the story of the Oddingley Murders would erupt.

People still visit this spot, some from as far away as America, to see the barn, which stands like an almost forgotten outpost of English history that nonetheless retains a flicker of its old pull. And for those who do make the journey to the mid-Worcestershire countryside, Oddingley remains very much as it was back in 1806. Its grassy meadows and tangled hedges still flank the narrow lanes that weave and dive through the valley. Pound Farm is still here, as are Pineapple Farm, Park Farm and Old Mr Hardcourt’s former home near the crossroads. Church Farm and St James’ Church both survive intact too, lasting symbols of the struggle between the farmers and Reverend George Parker. They gaze out across a sedate, picturesque landscape – the Birmingham and Worcester Canal in the foreground, Trench Wood looming darkly in the distance.

Other buildings connected with the murders have vanished. The Barnetts’ Pigeon House has been converted into a modern home; the rectory is gone, as are the farms that were leased by Samuel Jones and John Perkins. Lost too is Parker’s glebe and the site of the first murder. In the early twentieth century Captain Hubert Berkeley of nearby Clink Gate Farm developed a special interest in the murders. To commemorate the events, he erected a stone in the old glebe meadows on the spot where he estimated Parker had been shot. It was another plain memorial: an irregularly shaped stone no more than two feet in height several yards from a sparse hedge and a shallow ditch. The stone was adorned, presumably by Captain Berkeley himself, with the pithy inscription ‘G.P.’ and, below, ‘24 JN. 1806’.

Parker’s stone remained until the early 1960s when Oddingley gained another national transport artery. In 1962–3 the opening stretch of the new M5 motorway sliced unsentimentally through the parish, passing Berkeley’s old home at Clink Gate, through the glebe meadows and towards Worcester. At some point during construction Parker’s memorial stone was lost. Some say it was thrown into a nearby pool; others maintain that after being rescued by an interested villager it was declared unlucky and discarded. Whatever the truth, Reverend Parker must be accustomed to such discourtesies by now, the scene of his death being – and perhaps uniquely so – now crossed by many thousands of travellers every day.

A handful of miles away, at St Peter’s Church in Droitwich, I find Evans’ grave similary disturbed. ‘Pitifully behold the sorrows of our hearts,’ reads an inscription carved into the oak of a pointed lychgate at the entrance to the churchyard. I walk along a tunnel of neatly clipped conifers which opens out into a sombre mass of stones and crosses. The Captain lies in a far corner, to the left of an old yew tree. There was room for an epitaph on the face of his stone, but the job was never completed as Evans intended. After Heming’s skeleton was discovered at Netherwood and the coroner’s inquest and trial exposed the role he had played in the conspiracy, it was decided to utilise the space for a different purpose. The alternative inscription carried not an air of malice or vindictiveness, but one of calculated rectitude; so much so that the words could almost have come from Judge Littledale himself. Under the name of Catherine Banks, with whom the Captain shares the grave, it reads, ‘Here also lies Captain Samuel Evans whose name is connected with the double murder at Oddingley in the year 1806.’

The monument the Captain had intended to serve as testament to his power and importance in Droitwich had been turned forever for another use, standing for more than a century and a half as a reminder of what he did. I cannot read the inscription today, and perhaps nobody has been able to decipher the words clearly for a generation. Two centuries of English rain, wind and frost have worn down the lettering and eaten into the stone, which is now half-consumed by moss. The grave was in this state in the early 1990s, when vandals broke into the churchyard. The attack was indiscriminate. They hit the Captain’s stone with something like a sledge-hammer and left it very nearly cracked in two, as it remains today.