Greater London Murders by Linda Stratmann

Author:Linda Stratmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Greater London Murders
ISBN: 9780752483832
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2012-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

Mrs Gibbons’ version of events.

Elizabeth Gibbons never deviated from her story that her husband had committed suicide, but the medical experts were unanimous in stating that it was impossible for the wound in the back to have been self-inflicted, and the inescapable conclusion was that she had shot him. The defence tried to suggest that the gun had gone off when James had fallen, but it was thought extremely unlikely that this could have produced such a neat horizontal wound.

It took the jury just half an hour to deliver a verdict of guilty and Mr Justice Hawkins sentenced Elizabeth Gibbons to death. The prisoner listened to the judge’s words with her eyes closed, and then, in an almost inaudible voice, said that she had no reason to urge why the sentence should not be carried out. The execution was fixed for 5 January.

The Times, while agreeing with the verdict, commented that ‘it is rare to see a capital sentence so completely unsupported by what may be called direct or primary evidence.’ Other newspapers declared that the public conscience was uneasy about the case. There was no apparent motive, the main evidence was the position of the wounds, and even if she was guilty the crime had been committed in the heat of passion.

A surgeon called Miller wrote to the newspapers about a case of suicide in which a student had first shot himself in the chest, the ball passing through the left ventricle, and then reloaded his pistol and shot himself in the head. The student had not however managed to shoot himself in the back. Other correspondents suggested that the wound in the back had been caused when the revolver was dropped or from a ricochet. Most saw Elizabeth as a woman to be pitied rather than punished.

William Garner, Elizabeth’s solicitor, prepared two petitions, one for signature in London and one in Uxbridge, which omitted any criticism of the local doctors. Many people in Uxbridge, Hayes, West Drayton, Hillingdon, Cowley and other towns in the vicinity signed the local petition. Both were presented to the Home Secretary, Sir William Harcourt, asking him to consider a reprieve on the grounds that Elizabeth had no motive to murder her husband, whose death was more likely to be a case of suicide. Elizabeth, awaiting execution in Newgate Gaol, only showed emotion when visited by a nephew and niece from Hayes, otherwise she remained impassive and did not discuss the case at all. She achieved a brief celebrity when her likeness appeared in Madame Tussaud’s, and the case opened up a fresh round of correspondence in the newspapers recommending the establishment of a Court of Criminal Appeal.

To the relief of the public, the Home Office confirmed on 31 December that the sentence on Elizabeth Gibbons had been commuted to penal servitude for life.

It was later reported that 500 people had ‘chiefly from morbid curiosity’ attended the sale of James Gibbons’s goods, which did not realise ‘fancy prices’. The dead man’s favourite retriever dog,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.