In Hot Blood by Nicola Sly

Author:Nicola Sly [Sly, Nicola]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: The History Press

17

‘To kill is one thing; to commit murder is another’

Woodhouse Mill, near Sheffield, South Yorkshire, 1893

At just after thre o’clock on the morning of 16 February 1893, George Bradshaw was awakened by a scream from the room directly below his bedroom in his lodgings at Woodhouse Mill, near Sheffield. Bradshaw got out of bed and went to the top of the stairs, calling out, ‘What’s amiss, Ted?’ to the occupants of the room.

‘Nowt,’ was the terse reply from miner Edward Hemmings and, knowing that Edward’s wife Annie suffered from occasional fits, which sometimes caused her to scream out loud, Bradshaw reasoned that her husband was coping with whatever problem had arisen and went back to bed. He was briefly woken again by the sound of a door slamming, at which the thought crossed his mind that Hemmings might have gone for a doctor for his wife but then Bradshaw slept soundly until it was time for him to get up for work. Bradshaw would always knock on Hemmings’s bedroom door to wake him when he went past on his way downstairs but this morning there was no response. Concerned that Annie might need assistance Bradshaw continued to tap on the door but could hear no signs of life from within the room. After calling out ‘Annie’ several times, Bradshaw opened the door and peered into the bedroom. In the semi-darkness, he could just make out someone lying on the floor, covered with bedclothes taken from the bed. Bradshaw pulled the covers aside, recoiling in horror when he found twenty-one-year-old Annie Hemmings in a pool of blood, her head almost severed from her body.

Bradshaw roused his landlord and landlady, as well as the two other lodgers, Frederick Ravendale and Benjamin Rowley, sending Rowley to fetch the police and a doctor. Surgeon Arthur William Scott arrived at the house at 6.30 a.m. and determined that Annie had been hit hard on her forehead above her left eye, fracturing her skull and leaving a gaping hole, through which her brain protruded. Not only that but Annie’s throat had been cut from ear to ear, severing her windpipe and Scott noted another small cut on her neck and one on her right cheek, along with deep cuts on her fingers, as if she had grasped the blade of a sharp instrument. The entire room was awash with blood and Scott gave the cause of Annie’s death as haemorrhage, due to the severing of all the major blood vessels in her throat.

Having ascertained that Hemmings had not reported for work that morning, the police immediately began a search for him, during which a small hatchet was found in a water-filled ditch on his normal route to Treeton Colliery, his place of employment. Hemmings’s landlady, Eliza Kennington, identified it as one that usually hung on a nail in her kitchen and was used for chopping wood. When compared with the hole in the victim’s forehead, the axe head corresponded exactly with the size and shape of the wound.

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