March 12, 13, and 14, 1845, Spring Assizes, Aylesbury, before Baron Parke.
HISTORY OF THE CASE.
The trial of John Tawell, of Berkhampstead, Berks, for the murder of Sarah Hart, at Hall Place, Slough, attracted more than usual attention, from the cruelty of the act in poisoning the woman whom he had seduced, the position and popular character of the murderer as a benevolent and hospitable Quaker, noted for his charities, and the novelty of the mode by which his detection was mainly insured. The electric telegraph had only very lately been established on the line of the Great Western Railway, and though Tawell lost no time after committing the act, in getting into the train for London at Slough, the telegraph outstripped him, and on his arrival at the Paddington station he was recognised, and tracked to his lodgings, and thus his immediate arrest secured.
Tawell’s life had been of a remarkable character. Originally a commercial traveller, he had exhibited a strange mixture of great shrewdness and money-making talent, combined with an outward show of religious observance. As a young man he had been indicted for forging a bill for £1000, and had he been tried on the counts for forging, or uttering, he would doubtless have been executed. By some influence, however, he was allowed to plead guilty to the count for having the bill in his possession (a nolle prosequi being entered on the others), and sentenced to transportation for life. “Accordingly,” says Mr. Justice Therry, who knew him well in Sydney, “he came out to the colony as a convict. Besides being a commercial traveller for some time, he had been in an apothecary’s shop in England, and on obtaining partial exemption from convict discipline, became the principal druggist in Sydney. After a prosperous career he sold his business for, it was said, £14,000, and judiciously invested this sum in buildings and other pursuits of profit. For nearly two years he occupied the house opposite to mine in Sydney, which gave me almost daily opportunity then of seeing him. He struck me as being a remarkably well-conducted person. He had once been a member of the Society of Friends; he wore a broad-brimmed hat, appeared always in a neat and carefully adjusted costume, and his whole appearance and manner impressed one with the notion of his being a very saintly personage. He always sought the society in public of persons of reputed piety. I have often met him in the street accompanied by a secretary or collector to a charitable institution, whom he assisted in obtaining contributions for benevolent objects. At one time he took up the cause of temperance in such an intemperate and silly spirit, that he ordered a puncheon of rum he had imported to be staved on the wharf at Sydney, and its contents poured into the sea, saying that, ‘he would not be instrumental to the guilt of disseminating such poison throughout the colony.’ At another time his zeal took an apparently religious turn. He built, in Macquarie Street, Sydney, a commodious meeting-house for the Society of Friends, on the front of which was inscribed on a large square stone inserted in the wall some such words as these—
John Tawell
to
The Society of Friends.
He conveyed no title, however, to the Society to secure them the tenure of the property. After his execution it was sold, I understood, with other portions of his property, for the benefit of the party entitled to it under his will, the Crown having waived its right to the forfeiture of the estate.
“Tawell was himself a liberal contributor to charities, and the opinion of his character was so favourable, that the act for which he suffered created great astonishment in Sydney. A considerable part of his money had been realised by buying up all the whalebone that trading vessels, at an early period, imported into Sydney. This he sent to a London house, where it was manufactured into combs, handles for brushes, and various other articles of domestic use. He was the first person in the colony who converted whalebone into an article of profitable export. When he left the colony, he had a considerable property from rents and other sources which became much reduced by the general distress that prevailed in New South Wales in 1843.” Hence the anxiety expressed by him for his Sydney letters, referred to in the course of his trial. Still, however, a man of good means, occupying a respected position in his town, and noted, through a long and industrious life, for his benevolence and straightforward conduct in his relations with his neighbours, he might well say when first charged with the murder of his mistress, “My station in society places me beyond suspicion.” Such had been the remarkable career, and such was the ostensible character of the man to whom the most cold-blooded of murders was clearly brought home in the following trial.”
At the trial before Mr. Baron Parke, at Aylesbury, on the 12th, 13th, and 14th of March, 1845, Sergeant Byles and Mr. Prendergast appeared for the prosecution, and Mr. Fitzroy Kelly, Q.C., Mr. Gunning, and Mr. O’Malley, assisted by Messrs. Herapath, of Bristol, Professor Graham and Dr. Letheby, of London, the eminent chemists, for the defence.
In consequence of the excitement in the county caused by the event, numerous objections were taken to jurymen by the prisoner’s counsel. At length, however, a jury was formed, and after a brief recapitulation of the leading facts of the proposed evidence by Sergeant Byles, Mary Ashley, a next door neighbour of the deceased, was called, who had seen Tawell go to Sarah Hart’s between 4 and 5 in the afternoon of the 1st of January, and between 6 and 7 the same evening, “hearing a sort of stifled scream,” had gone to her door with a candle and seen him leaving the cottage. The cottages stood in a row, with small gardens in front, with rails and gates, and contained four rooms, two on the ground floor, and the same number above.