Yorkshire's Murderous Women by Stephen Wade

Author:Stephen Wade
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783408580
Publisher: Wharncliffe
Published: 2013-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

Leeds Town Hall, where Arty Calvert learned the truth behind his wife’s lies. Author’s collection

It is pathetically banal to report that when Louie Calvert was asked if she had anything to say before the sentence was passed, she said simply: ‘Yes, Sir, I’m pregnant.’ There is something profoundly informative about that statement. It indicates the naive facility she had for a child-like defence when cornered. Saying an infantile thing like that was tantamount to admitting that her sense of reality was very slender and her inner fantasy, feeding the outer criminal who was a predator in the streets of Leeds, was a truly frightening aspect of her.

Then something occurred that had happened many times, perhaps most famously in the case of Mary Bateman (see Chapter 8): because Louie had constantly avoided any statements in the witness box with the argument that she was ill, and now supposedly pregnant, a medical inspection was essential. Dr Hoyland Smith went to examine her in the court cell and, as with Bateman, a woman had to attend. This woman was from a jury of mothers selected for the purpose. But the difficulty was in keeping with Louie’s muddled and crazy career: there was no proof either way.

The result was that the death sentence was passed. A Leeds City Councillor said at the time that he felt pity for her and added: ‘She was a thin, wan-looking creature, only weighing a few stone. I should never legislate on the lines of hanging a woman.’ But others soon realised that there were two Louie Calverts. In the dock she had been quiet, restrained and polite. But down in the cell she shouted abuse at her husband, trying to say that he was to blame. All he could say was: ‘It can’t be helped lass.’ Other interpretations of her actions and responses to graphic descriptions of the attack on Lily Waterhouse, and of the corpse, indicate that she was unfeeling and mentally distant from any sense of the events unfolding being in any way ‘real’.

But the woman, who was seen by some as undersized and pathetic, had done the awful deed, and of course she had also been wily and cunning in the extreme. Her actions in court and before the magistrate when first charged show an amount of guile too. She dressed in black and to the local reporters she became ‘the woman in black’. It has been noted that she fussed over her appearance, as if she were still putting on clothes to be someone else – to project a persona which was not really her. In the magistrates’ court, even as evidence was being spoken, she changed her hat, putting on a black silk one instead of her everyday mauve.

There was an appeal. In London, she was again dressed all in black, and the context at the time was a difficult one with regard to the hanging of women. Since the notorious Thompson case in 1923, the eight women given a death sentence had all been reprieved.

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