Banged Up! by David Leslie

Author:David Leslie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black & White Publishing
Published: 2014-09-12T16:00:00+00:00

18

The Haunted Hangman

AT PRECISELY NINE O'CLOCK on the morning of 9 January 1923, at separate London prisons, hangmen launched into eternity Freddie Bywaters, aged twenty, and his mistress Edith Thompson, who’d heralded her twenty-ninth birthday a few days earlier. Edith was literally carried unconscious to the scaffold at Holloway, where executioner John Ellis gently placed the noose around her neck. Four warders held her, and at a signal from Ellis, let go. At that instant he pulled the lever, opening the trap. A few hundred yards away in Pentonville Jail, Freddie, protesting his mistress was innocent, was being put to death by William Willis.

The execution of Edith Thompson continues to be regarded as the most controversial and unjust hanging of a woman in British legal history. One million people who signed a petition demanding she was reprieved had their hopes rejected; warders who witnessed her death were so sickened they quit their jobs; Ellis, a veteran of 203 executions did not believe she should be hanged. In Diary of a Hangman he wrote, ‘I genuinely hoped she would be saved from my rope.’ He resigned as hangman just months after her execution and went on to commit suicide. The case had one more victim. It was the only occasion when a hanging almost resulted in the prison governor being locked up in one of his own cells.

Lively and intelligent, Edith’s bubbly brightness had led to her becoming chief buyer for a firm of London milliners. When she was fifteen she met shipping clerk Percy Thompson, three years her senior. They finally wed in 1916 after courting for six years. Edith soon realised she had signed into a loveless, dull marriage. She longed for fun and adventure and found these when she and her husband became friendly with handsome Bywaters, who fascinated her with stories of voyages around the world in the Merchant Navy. Percy fatally invited the young seaman to join them on holiday and then to stay with them. That set off a passionate affair between housewife and lodger, and when Percy discovered them making love, a violent quarrel ended with Bywaters being sent packing. The lovers continued their affair, exchanging dozens of letters when Freddie was at sea, and secretly meeting when he came ashore.

In their letters they not only vowed an everlasting desire to be with one another, but Edith wrote of trying to get rid of her husband by feeding him mashed potato mixed with ground glass and then trying to poison him. ‘Be jealous so much that you will do something desperate,’ she implored Bywaters. And he did. One night as the Thompsons walked home from the theatre, Bywaters leapt out from behind a hedge and stabbed his rival dead before running off. He was soon caught, because Edith gave police his name and said he was the killer. She revealed details of the affair, but when detectives discovered the love letters and the incriminating contents, she and Bywaters were charged with murder.

At their trial Freddie shouldered the blame, saying Edith did not know he was going to kill her husband.

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