Woman at the Devil's Door by Sarah Beth Hopton

Author:Sarah Beth Hopton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2018-06-26T16:00:00+00:00

As she waited in the holding room, Mrs Pearcey’s much commented-on composure left her entirely. Those with her said she trembled violently and couldn’t sit still for more than a minute. Her committal to trial at the Old Bailey meant that her time was running short. If she was going to change tact, now was the time. Still, she held steady.

On her mother’s next visit, Mary told her what to do with the furniture and sundry items at her house and which small articles should go to which family member and what should be thrown out, should the worst happen, suggesting she still had faith in a long-end legal run. She valued the pages of music on her piano stand most, and begged her mother not to sell them, but to keep them and take care of them, as they were expensive, and she might want them again some day.

On November 25, Mary received a letter from her mother to which she replied in part, “Dear mother, do not fret for me, as I have not got anything to be afraid of.”67 But Charlotte was less naïve than her daughter, and believed there were many things to fear. These prison visits may have bolstered her daughter’s spirits, but they left Charlotte wracked with grief. Sometimes, after a visit, she would stand in the hall passage of Holloway prison “lifeless,” and unable to move.68

By the week’s end, Mrs Pearcey was in “excellent spirits” again, buoyed by a long interview with Freke Palmer in which they planned her defence, such that it was. She was heard later that day singing.69

The press tried to anticipate the legal cards that Freke Palmer would play at trial, but Palmer declined “in any way” to indicate his line of defence, and, frankly Mrs. Pearcey hadn’t left him with many cards to play. Some suggested Palmer would call into question the conduct of a person as yet suspected in the crime, or propose an alternative theory and play on the doubt that many had about Mrs Pearcey’s physical ability to commit such a murder, which even her uncle William had publically questioned. In an interview with Lloyd’s, William, a tradesman in the East End, said that he used to work as an undertaker and he knew how difficult it was to lift a dead body. He couldn’t understand, then, how his niece could get Phoebe Hogg’s body into the pram unaided.70 Others said Palmer would drill the fact that she had no motive for the crime. Whatever his line of reasoning, the press surmised the Old Bailey Sessions would offer disclosures of a “very startling character” that would change the complexion of the charge entirely.71

On November 24, 1890, exactly one month after the body of Phoebe Hogg was found butchered and dumped at Crossfield Road, the November Sessions for the jurisdiction of the Central Criminal Court were formally opened at the Sessions House in the Old Bailey.72 The calendar contained the names of 117 prisoners for trial, with just three charged with murder and only one of those three a woman.

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