The Murder of Mary Ashford by Naomi Clifford

Author:Naomi Clifford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: TRUE CRIME / Merder / General
ISBN: 9781473863408
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2018-07-18T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Habeas Corpus

On the morning of 22 October, John Bedford rode to Penns Mill Lane to ask William and Fanny Lavell to call on all the Erdington witnesses and tell them they would be required to give new depositions at his New Street office. He travelled on to see Joseph Webster and later, when he was back in Birmingham, received Paul Moon James, a Quaker banker and businessman who had become a supporter of the case against Thornton. Later that day, Bedford also squeezed in letters to the Reverend Booker and to his London agents and on the following he visited some of the new witnesses, as well as Mary’s mother and uncle Charles Coleman, and wrote more letters; in the evening, he called on William Bedford and on another supporter, Josiah Robins, a surveyor and auctioneer who lived at Aston Manor. Friday 24th was spent on legal paperwork and in examining the witnesses who had come from Erdington, during which he made rough copies of their depositions. Then he called on Mr Davis, the ailing stonemason who had told his surgeon what Thornton had said to him at Birmingham Gaol (‘the girl died under him’) and who now denied having said anything like that. Saturday was a precious day off but on Sunday he was back at his desk, writing another letter to the Reverend Booker and, once again in the saddle, riding off to interview witnesses about the exact whereabouts of William Jennens, the Birmingham milkman, early on 27 May when he said he saw Thornton at Holden’s farm.

And so it continued. Witnesses, letters, documents, consultations with his uncle. Tuesday 28 October was a turning-point, the day Bedford sent the affidavits to his London agents applying to a judge for a writ of habeas corpus (in Latin, literally ‘you have the body’), the requirement to bring a prisoner before the court so that it could be determined whether or not that person was imprisoned lawfully and whether or not he should be released. The writ would require Thornton to be taken from Warwick to London to appear at the Court of King’s Bench at Westminster Hall.

As ever, there was more work to do, more people to meet. That evening John Bedford received another supporter: Sir Richard Phillips, a notable reformist and the publisher of The Monthly Magazine, which afterwards printed an article praising the public-spirited inhabitants of Birmingham for their ‘humane attention to the tragical case of Mary Ashford’, and singled out William Bedford, his fellow magistrates and the local gentlemen and clergymen for their zeal in pursuing the ‘real perpetrator’ of the crime. The Bedfords’ coterie of concerned gentlemen who could be relied on for support in the press and contributions to the legal fund was growing.

Despite this, the Bedfords must have been apprehensive about the next stage. They had extensive additional evidence but much of it was insubstantial. The best they could hope for was that the individual statements of the new witnesses, while not compelling

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