Shropshire Murders by Nicola Sly

Author:Nicola Sly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2012-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

15

‘YOU HAVE GOT THE WRONG MAN’

Prees Lower Heath, 1887

George Pickerill had spent much of his working life in service to Lord Hill on the Hawkestone estate. Now in his eighties, he had retired to a two-roomed, one-storey cottage on the edge of the estate’s timber yard and was in receipt of a small pension from his former employer.

His daughter, Annie Porter, lived nearby at Dogmoor and habitually visited her elderly father to do his shopping and cleaning. On 12 November 1887, Annie visited her father at about nine o’clock in the morning, but found the door of his cottage locked. She went to the old man’s bedroom window and knocked, but there was no response. Unable to gain entry, she went to James Adams, a foreman at the timber yard, to ask for his assistance. Having tried unsuccessfully to force the front door, Adams broke a windowpane and opened the window, before climbing through it into the house.

He found George Pickerill lying dead on the floor. His pipe, still filled with unsmoked tobacco, lay beside him. The house was liberally spattered with blood, although none of the furniture in the living area had been disarranged and there was no evidence of a struggle having taken place. George had been savagely beaten about the head and face and his throat had been slashed, presumably with the large, bloodstained butcher’s knife which still lay on the kitchen table. He was quite cold and had evidently been dead for some hours.

The police were immediately sent for and PC Barnett of Prees went straight to the cottage and began a search of the premises. He found the key to the locked front door in the garden, approximately 13 yards from the house. Although the living area appeared relatively undisturbed, it was a different story in the cottage bedroom where several items of clothing seemed to have been stolen from the wooden box that George Pickerill had kept under his bed.

By coincidence, his daughter had opened the box only the day before to get some camphor and, although she had not closely examined its contents, she was able to determine that items were missing. Whoever had rifled through George Pickerill’s box had not found its secret drawers, one of which still contained three sovereigns and four half-sovereigns. A second secret drawer contained two half crowns and a bankbook.

A search of the garden revealed two pieces of metal, one an iron stanchion and the second described as a ‘barrow tang’. Both bore traces of blood, to which a few grey hairs adhered and, when a post-mortem examination, conducted by Dr Venables Williams, determined that the old man had been hit on the back of his head, fracturing his skull, the police surmised that both pieces of metal had probably been used as weapons against him.

The police also found several fresh, if rather indistinct, clog marks in the soft earth outside the cottage, which they measured and documented carefully before covering them with pieces of slate to preserve them from the elements.

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