Years afterwards the notorious Charles Peace, when lying under sentence of death in Leeds prison, made full confession to the writer of these pages that it was he who had killed constable Cock on the night in question. The case was taken up at once, and after thorough investigation of the facts, as stated by Peace, Habron received a full pardon and an indemnity of £800.
THE EDLINGHAM BURGLARY.
Almost at the very time that William Habron was receiving tardy justice a new and still more grievous error was being perpetrated in the North of England. The Edlingham burglary case will always be remembered as a grave failure of justice, and not alone because the circumstantial evidence did not appear sufficient, but because the police, in their anxiety to secure conviction, went too far. As the survivors of the Northumberland police force concerned in this case were afterwards put upon their trial for conspiracy and acquitted, they cannot be actually charged with manufacturing false evidence, but it is pretty clear that facts were distorted, and even suppressed, to support the police view.
The vicarage at Edlingham, a small village near Alnwick, was broken into on the 7th of February, 1879. The only occupants of the house were Mr. Buckle, the vicar, his wife, an invalid, his daughter and four female servants. The daughter gave the alarm about one a.m., and roused her father, a still sturdy old gentleman although seventy-seven years of age, who slipped on a dressing-gown, and seizing a sword he had by him, rushed downstairs, candle in hand, to do battle for his possessions. He found two men rifling the drawing-room, and thrust at them; one rushed past him and made his escape, the other fired at the vicar and wounded him. The same shot (it was a scatter gun) also wounded Miss Buckle. This second burglar then jumped out of the drawing-room window on to the soft mould of a garden bed.
The alarm was given, the police and a doctor were summoned. The latter attended to the wounds, which were serious, and the police, under the orders of Superintendent Harkes, an energetic officer, immediately took the necessary steps to discover the culprits. Officers were despatched to visit the domiciles of all the poachers and other bad characters in Alnwick, while a watch was set upon the roads into the town so that any suspicious persons arriving might be stopped and searched. Then Mr. Harkes drove over to Edlingham to view the premises. He found the window in the drawing-room through which the burglars had entered still open, and the room, all in confusion, ransacked and rifled. One of the servants gave him a chisel which she had found in an adjoining room, another handed over a piece of newspaper picked up just outside the dining-room door. The police-officer soon saw from the marks made that the chisel had been used to prise open the doors, and so soon as daylight came he found outside in the garden the print of feet and the impress of hands and knees upon the mould.
Meanwhile, the officers in Alnwick had ascertained that two men, both of them known poachers, had been absent from home during the night. Their names were Michael Brannagan and Peter Murphy; both were stopped on the outskirts of the town about seven o’clock on the morning of the 8th. There was nothing more against them at the moment than their absence during the night, and after having searched them the police let them go home. Brannagan was quickly followed, and arrested as he was taking off his dirty clogs. Murphy, who lodged with his sister, had time to change his wet clothes and boots before the officers appeared to take him. A girl to whom he was engaged, fearing
something was wrong, quickly examined the pockets of his coat, and, finding some blood and fur, tore these pockets out, and hid the coat. When the police returned and asked for the clothes he had been wearing, she gave them a jacket belonging to Peter’s brother-in-law, an old man named Redpath.
At the police-station, the prisoners were stripped and examined. There was no sign of a sword wound on either of them, nor any hole or rent that might have been made by a sword-thrust through their clothes. That same day the prisoners were taken to Edlingham, and everything was arranged as during the burglary. But Mr. Buckle could not identify either of them, nor could Miss Buckle. The case against the prisoners was certainly not strong at this stage. Moreover, there was this strong presumption in their favour—that people engaged in such an outrage as burglary and wounding with intent would not have returned openly to their homes within a few hours of the commission of the crime. When brought before the magistrates for preliminary inquiry, the prisoners found fresh evidence adduced against them. The police, in the person of Mr. Harkes, had traced foot-marks going through the grounds of the vicarage, and out on to the Alnwick road. Plaster casts were produced of these footmarks, also the boots and clogs of the prisoners, and all were found to correspond. The chisel found in the vicarage had been traced to Murphy. His brother-in-law, old Redpath, had been induced to identify it as his property. This admission had been obtained from Redpath by a clever ruse, as the police called it, although they had really set a trap for him, and he had owned to the chisel although it was not his at all. Another damning fact had been elicited in the discovery of a scrap of newspaper in the lining of Murphy’s coat (which, as we know, was not Murphy’s, but Redpath’s), which fragment fitted exactly into the newspaper picked up in the vicarage. This scrap of paper was unearthed from the coat on the 16th of February, by an altogether independent and unimpeachable witness, Dr. Wilson, the medical gentleman who attended the Buckles. It may be observed that the coat itself had been in the possession of the police for just nine days; so had the original newspaper.