Gnawed by pigs: a gruesome moors double murder from 150 years ago

Chorus:

No one pities the sad monster
For the deed that he has done,
Although, he killed the poor old farmer
Why didn’t he spare the helpless son?

IN its editions of 150 years ago this week (above), The Northern Echo was fascinated by a story of murder so horrid that it would grip North Yorkshire for months. It was a story so gruesome that penny dreadfuls were composed so that people across the country could sing of its notoriety, and it was a story so grisly that even the respectable Echo about pigs gnawing at the bones of a murdered boy.

The Wood family had farmed at Cropton Lane, near Pickering, on the edge of the moors, for generations. They were regarded as good farmers, if prone to eccentricity.

Joseph Wood had lived at the farm for decades, and his eccentricity had grown since the death of his partner/housekeeper, Catherine Thompson, who had lived with him for 20 years and with whom he had three children. He had taken to keeping a large amount of cash – £3,000, according to the Echo – in the house.

Pickering, on an Edwardian postcard

But on May 17, 1872, Joseph and his nine-year-old son, also Joseph, had suddenly disappeared leaving cousin Robert Carter, from Lastingham, in charge of the farm.

To prove this, on May 23, a letter from Liverpool was brought to the farm “by the Rosedale letter carrier, Francis Ellis,” said the Echo.

“On sounding his whistle in the lane, Ellis was met at the gates by Charter who, after opening the envelope, asked Ellis to read it.”

The letter read: “Dear Cousin, I write these few lines to let you know that I am going to take the water, foreign, you must stay at Cropton Lane and get my affairs settled up as soon as you can, we are going either today or tomorrow, I will let you know in my next what I have done and where I am going. Excuse my bad writing, a bad pen and in haste. – Joseph Wood.”

Joseph’s brother, John, who farmed nearby, was deeply suspicious. Joseph’s signature, he said, “had an easy, confident flow about it, strangely contrasting” with the one on the letter. But his investigations with the railway company and in Liverpool drew a blank – it was as if Joseph had suddenly upped and emigrated to New York, as the letter said.

Robert moved his family onto the farm and did a good job looking after Joseph’s affairs, although many visitors remarked on the bad smell coming from the cellar.

With the summer over and the harvest safely gathered in, Robert returned to his farm on the North York Moors at Lastingham, which left the Cropton Lane premises empty for suspicious John Wood to search.

In mid-November 1872, after weeks of investigations, he found Joseph’s best Sunday boots hidden beneath straw in a barn, which encouraged him to dredge a nearby pond. His first go with a grappling iron pulled out pieces of clothing; his second go, “a left hand, clenched, with fragments of a shirt adhering to it”, came out.

He then paid attention to the “strange behaviour” of his brother’s sheepdog. “At night it moans piteously, and in the daytime it cannot be kept away from a turnip field where it is supposed the murders were committed,” said the Echo.

The dog’s behaviour prompted John to dig in the orchard where he discovered another hand and a couple of feet.

At this point, he called in Superintendent Jonas who in turn called on Robert’s farm at Lastingham, where he noted a new water course had been dug. In it, a couple of feet down, the Echo said “Mr Jonas found a bag which contained Mr Wood’s body, buried head downwards, and some smaller parts, which are supposed to belong the child”.

Analysis of the bones, as the Echo’s headlines told, revealed they had been chewed on by pigs – Robert, it was alleged, had spent the summer dismembering the lad’s body and feeding it to his father’s animals.

This part of the story really caught the imagination of the penny dreadful writer who finished his dreadful poem:

They tried to find the poor boy’s body,
They searched around both night and day,
Human bones they have discovered
That ravenous pigs had gnawed away;
The cruel monster perhaps did murder
The helpless unoffending boy,
And threw his body in the pigsty,
There all traces to destroy.
But God's all-seeing eye was watching,
To bring to light this fearful crime,
And now the murderer, pale and trembling,
Awaits for trial the appointed time.
If the jury found him guilty,
To eternity he'll soon be hurled,
To meet his mutilated victims
Face to face in another world.

However, the penny dreadful writer, and all those who presumed Robert to be the double murderer, were a little premature.

In his defence, Robert eventually settled on a story in which Joseph had killed his own son and when Robert was about to expose this terrible crime, Joseph had then turned on him. This led to Robert killing Joseph in self-defence.

He then said that he feared that because there were no witnesses to this unlikely course of action, he would be accused of a double murder, and so he tried to cover it all up, even paying a chap who was emigrating to post the letter from Liverpool.

And because there was no eye-witness evidence to the contrary, Robert’s trial in March 1873, decided he was not guilty of murder, only manslaughter – which he admitted for he said he killed Joseph in self defence.

So Robert, 53, was sentenced to 20 years. He served his time on the Isle of Wight and on release returned to the North York Moors only to find that Lastingham villagers had pulled his house down stone by stone.