THE case of these diabolical criminals, as it was proved at the trial, which took place at Shrewsbury on the 2nd of August 1828, before Mr. Justice Gazelee, scarcely finds a parallel in the whole series which we present to our readers. It exhibits the dreadful features, of a mother and father-in-law combining to procure the commission of murder, to save their son from justice; and that son, the object of their solicitude, procuring the conviction of those by whose means he had been before saved from an ignominious end, for the offence to which they had made themselves parties on his behalf, to relieve himself from the due reward of further crime committed by himself.
It appeared that, in the neighbourhood of Market Drayton, on the borders of Shropshire and Staffordshire, there existed a dreadfully depraved set of people; and that a gang, to the amount, it was said, of from forty to sixty, was confederated for general purposes of plunder. The nucleus of this gang consisted of several persons, closely knit by ties of relationship, of connexion, and of neighbourhood, as well as of guilt; while the general depravity of the district enabled them, as occasion required, to add to their numbers, to almost any extent. One of these persons, by name Thomas Ellson, was in 1827 taken up for stealing potatoes; and, whilst in jail upon that charge, an accusation of sheep-stealing was brought against him. The chief evidence upon which this latter charge, a capital one, depended, was that of a man who had occasionally joined in the proceedings of the gang, named James Harrison. It became, therefore, the object of the friends of Ellson to get this man out of the way. First, they determined to poison him; and Ellson’s father-in-law, John Cox, went to an apothecary’s shop to buy arsenic for that purpose. The boy in the shop refused to sell it to him, unless some one else were by, which, as there was no one else in the house, could not then be the case; and Cox, probably not liking such formal proceedings, retired.
The next step was one of the most extraordinary in the whole case. Ann Harris, Ellson’s mother, who had married a second husband of the name of Harris, went to a woman living in Drayton, whom she knew, and asked her if her husband were not going to Newcastle. The woman answered that he was. “I wish then,” said Harris, “that he would buy me an ounce of arsenic.” “What do you want it for?” “I want it to poison that damned scoundrel, James Harrison.”—The woman upon this remonstrated—assured her it was a very wicked thing to poison James Harrison,—and, after some conversation, old Ann Harris went away, promising that she would not carry out her expressed intention.
Poison having failed, it was determined to have recourse to more direct means; and Ann Harris and old Cox subscribed fifty shillings a-piece, to hire Cox’s two sons, and a young fellow of the name of Pugh, to put Harrison to death! Harrison lodged in the house of Pugh’s father, and, it was said, occupied the same bed with Pugh himself. On the night of the murder, Pugh, to use his own expression, “ticed” Harrison out of the house, to go and steal some bacon. At a spot previously agreed upon, they met the two younger Coxes; and proceeding to a remote place, Pugh seized Harrison by the throat, while John Cox, the younger, took hold of his legs, and throwing him down, they strangled him. Meanwhile, Robert Cox was digging the grave!
The wretched man thus disposed of, everything remained perfectly quiet and unsuspected. It was generally supposed that he had gone out of the way to avoid giving evidence on Ellson’s trial; though it seems very extraordinary that, after the latter had been acquitted, the non-return of Harrison excited no suspicion. No supposition of his death, however, appeared to have arisen, and the murder was discovered only by the means of Ellson himself. As soon as this fellow came out of jail, the Coxes, Pugh, and his mother, at various times, sometimes when several of them were together, and sometimes separately, told him all that had taken place, vaunting to him how they had saved him. The very night of his release, old Cox, one of his sons, and Pugh, bragged to him, that “if it had not been for them, he would not be there,”—and the next day, when he was at his mother’s, Robert Cox came thither, and said to her with oaths and abuse, “If thee doesn’t give me more money, I will fetch him, and rear him up against thy door!”—alluding to the murdered man!
Nothing, however, transpired till towards the end of June 1828, when Ellson was taken up for stealing fowls, and then, in order to save himself from the punishment attending this offence (at the most seven years’ transportation), he told all that the guilty persons had told him; and on his evidence they were apprehended.
Such are the facts of this revolting case; but we must describe some of the peculiarities of the trial itself.
The five prisoners were placed at the bar: old Ann Harris stood first;—she seemed what would ordinarily be called a smart old woman—her features were small and regularly formed, and her countenance was remarkable only for a pair of exceedingly keen and sparkling black eyes, the expression of which, however, was certainly in no degree indicative of ferocity. Old Cox stood next to her, and his countenance presented a most unpleasing, almost revolting, aspect. It was easy to believe the current story that he was at the head of the gang at Drayton—the very patriarch of all the thieves and scoundrels in that part of the country. He had, undoubtedly, brought his sons up to robbery as to a trade, and he had now hired them to commit murder! The two sons were next to him, and were not remarkable in their aspect. Pugh was last—and he was an ill-looking fellow enough, though not strikingly so.
As the trial proceeded, one of its peculiarities soon became apparent. This was that a vast proportion of the witnesses were of the closest kindred to the accused. And what was more horrid, was the fact of the father of the murdered man being called to speak to the identity of the body, which, having lain in the earth nearly a year, was so totally decomposed as to be recognizable only by the clothes; but to this the father added that “the colour of the hair was that of his son!”
It shocked all present greatly, when the father and mother of Pugh were called to speak to some minute facts with regard to the night on which Harrison was murdered, with reference to his leaving their house, where he lodged. The chief evidence was what the prisoners themselves had told to Ellson; but he being a person of execrable character, it was necessary to support his testimony by every corroborative circumstance that could be proved. Accordingly, in the early part of the trial, these wretched old people were brought forward to give testimony to facts bearing against their son’s life: they were but very slight, but, as far as they went, they were confirmatory of the main story; and it is difficult to say whether the extreme coolness and composure with which the parents gave their evidence were not still more dreadful than if they had been violently affected.