Upon the confession of John, the cousin of the same name was apprehended for the murder of his elder brother, Dominick Bodkin, and accused of sitting on his mouth and breast until he was suffocated. He was taken in a moss, or turf bog, near Tuam, covered over with straw, and disguised in an old hat and peasant’s clothes, for which he had given his own laced coat and hat. Being examined before Lord Athenry, he said that he had fled for fear of being loaded with irons in a jail, and denied having any hand in his brother Dominick’s death, affirming that he had died of a surfeit, as had been reported. He was present at the execution of his relations, but confessed nothing; and thus (there being no positive proof against him) he escaped justice.
A case in which more cold-blooded cruelty has been displayed than in this, has seldom fallen under our notice. The murder of an indulgent parent must be insufferably shocking to every humane mind: but when we consider, as in the present instance, what a variety of unprovoked murders were added to the first, the mind is lost in astonishment at the baseness, the barbarity, the worse than savage degeneracy of those beings who could perpetrate such horrid deeds.
JONATHAN BRADFORD.
EXECUTED FOR MURDER.
THE details of this case reach us in a very abridged form; and we have been unable to collect any information on which any reliance can be placed beyond that which is afforded us by the ordinary channels. It would appear that Jonathan Bradford kept an inn in the city of Oxford. A gentleman, (Mr. Hayes), attended by a man-servant, put up one evening at Bradford’s house; and in the night, the former being found murdered in his bed, the landlord was apprehended on suspicion of having committed the barbarous and inhospitable crime. The evidence given against him was to the following effect:—Two gentlemen who had supped with Mr. Hayes, and who retired at the same time to their respective chambers, being alarmed in the night with a noise in his room, and soon hearing groans as of a wounded man, got up in order to discover the cause, and found their landlord, with a dark lantern and a knife in his hand, standing in a state of astonishment and horror over his dying guest, who almost instantly expired.
On this evidence, apparently conclusive, the jury convicted Bradford, and he was executed. But the fate of this man may serve as a lesson to jurymen to be extremely guarded in receiving circumstantial evidence.