Foul Deeds & Suspicious Deaths in Cumbria by Nicholas Corder

Author:Nicholas Corder
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783408467
Publisher: Wharncliffe
Published: 2013-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

After this pounding, Mrs Simpson became sicker still. She spent all week in bed, not taking any food, sustained only by small amounts of rum and water given to her by Elizabeth Airey. On 5 April, Simpson came home from the market in his usual state of market day intoxication. He went into his mother’s room, where she was lying in bed and asked her if she was going to get up. She said she couldn’t. He then asked her if she was going to give him some money and if she refused, he would go and get his gun and shoot her. When she said that she didn’t have any money to give him, Simpson dragged her out of bed and began beating her again.

Poor Elizabeth seems to have had to have witnessed an awful lot of violence. She was the only other person present in the house when Simpson exploded again. When she warned Simpson that if he continued beating his mother he might end up killing her, he replied ‘the sooner she’s out of the way the better’. Fearing for her own safety, Elizabeth Airey ran away and stayed away from the house for at least two hours before venturing back to see what had happened. She again found Mrs Simpson lying on the floor, bleeding from her head and face, incapable of speech. When she told Richard Simpson that his mother was very ill, he said ‘oh, she will come round again’ and gave Elizabeth some rum with which to bathe his mother’s face – medicine and cleanliness revolved round drink chez Simpsons.

Mrs Simpson survived the night and died at around mid-day the following day. Simpson sent Elizabeth Airey to fetch two neighbours, Mary Scott and Margaret Faulkner, to help ‘straight her out’. When he called for the joiner, John McLean, to come and measure his mother for a coffin, McLean said that he didn’t realise that his mother had been poorly, to which Simpson replied that she had ‘killed herself with drinking and tumbling about’.

The inquest into Mrs Simpson’s death was held at Middleshaw Head. As the officials arrived, Simpson was leaving in his gig, but changed his mind and went back into the house to hear the details of the case. The first thing he did on going back into the house was to fill several decanters with spirits with which he then plied the jury.

The post-mortem revealed just how brutal Simpson had been. James Noble and William Longmire, who were both surgeons from Kendal, conducted the examination and stated:

We find on the head, on the posterior portion of the frontal bone, on the left side, an incised wound about one inch and a half in length; and about an inch backwards from this wound on the left parietal bone, there is another wound of the same extent in a transverse direction towards the ear. These wounds appear to have been made by an instrument with a sharp edge. The poker now produced is likely to have caused them.

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