On Wednesday morning, a youth was asked to scale the wall of the Franks’ garden. A woman wished to ascertain whether the pig had been fed. He complied, peered into the sty, and recoiled from what he beheld: Mrs. Franks, who had been missing for two days, lay dead within. His outcry summoned the miller Dudgeon and several neighbours; making their way to the house, they found Magdalene, the widow’s daughter. Thus, records Camden Pelham, the silence of a household which none believed deserted was broken by a routine domestic errand, wholly unconnected to the crimes it was about to disclose.
Mrs. Franks’s husband had died three months earlier. Formerly a gamekeeper in the service of Lord Elcho, he had retired when infirmity precluded his duties; his lordship, Pelham notes, had granted him a modest livelihood. Left alone, the widow, aged about fifty, and Magdalene, who was fifteen, resided in a dwelling near the small village of Abbey, in East Lothian. The account places the cottage some hundred yards from the hamlet, behind a garden wall exceeding six feet in height. The villagers, long accustomed to the family and to their garden gate being left open, had not construed their absence as a portent of danger.
On Sunday, 25 October 1829, mother and daughter attended the chapel of the Reverend Hogg, according to their habit. Pelham places the murders on that very night. He relates that a man first shut the garden gate, then attempted to enter through a window whose shutters resisted his efforts. A second window yielded after several panes were shattered. The intruder traversed the room, a passage, and the kitchen before reaching the chamber of the two women. In the version given by the chapter, Magdalene was assaulted first; her mother, attempting to flee toward the village by the garden gate, was intercepted there and slain. The narrative is that of a chronicler writing sixty years after the events, not that of an identified eyewitness.
After the murders, Pelham continues, the man ransacked the drawers and hiding places of the house. He tore away the plaster around a small opening beneath the roof, the compiler presuming he sought money there. The chronicle states that earrings were torn from Mrs. Franks, that three gold rings were stripped from her fingers, and that a silver watch disappeared. It provides no accounting of the sums stolen or recovered. These particulars belong to Pelham’s narrative; they cannot replace depositions which do not feature within this bounded source.
On Monday and Tuesday, Mrs. Franks and her daughter were nowhere to be seen. Their absence occasioned no alarm among the neighbours, who supposed them to be visiting the widow’s sister at North Berwick. This familial connection soon directed suspicion toward Robert Emond, the husband of that very sister. He had resided in North Berwick; Pelham notes that he harboured an aversion toward his sister-in-law and had threatened vengeance, holding her responsible for domestic discords in his household. Such are the motives advanced by the chronicler to explain the authorities’ suspicion. The source reproduces neither the full inquest nor the examinations that would allow one to weigh their actual significance.
Emond was arrested a few days after the discovery. At Liverpool, according to Pelham, he made a general confession of his guilt to Officer Fuller, though the compilation does not transcribe it. It was not until 8 February 1830, however, that he stood before the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh. Pelham affirms that he was found guilty and sentenced to be executed on 17 March. His chapter does not detail the course of the trial, names none of the witnesses examined, and distinguishes none of the proofs laid before the jury. It is therefore essential to separate what this account affirms—a conviction for the two murders—from what it leaves impossible to reconstruct: the judicial demonstration, in its successive stages and contradictions.
Immediately following the trial, according to the same narrative, Emond confessed to the crimes laid to his charge. Pelham offers no transcript of this admission. Instead, he summarizes the posture he attributes to the condemned man: Emond is said to have depicted Mrs. Franks’s death as justified by her past conduct, whereas the slaying of Magdalene awoke within him remorse and despair. The compiler records that he cried aloud that innocent blood cried out for vengeance. This phrase cannot stand in place of the trial record or of a word-for-word declaration; it belongs to the retrospective narrative that arranges the affair.
As the execution drew near, Pelham pauses upon a visit paid by Emond’s wife, who came to see him for the first time during his imprisonment. She stood at first upon the threshold of the cell. Her husband begged her to draw near and take his hand; she hesitated, then yielded to the chaplain’s persuasion. When he sought to assure her that he had always loved her, she replied that his conduct had never shown it. The chronicle records that the exchange soon lapsed into mutual reproach, and it was deemed prudent to cut it short.
The presence of Mrs. Cron, who had accompanied the wife, provoked another outburst of rage. Emond accused her of having fostered his domestic strifes, declaring he wished he had seen her in Magdalene’s place. In the words recorded by Pelham, he even threatened to avenge himself upon her should he ever regain his liberty. This threat reveals less a reasoned explanation than a displacement of malice: the young girl, depicted throughout the chapter as a stranger to the adult quarrels, is thus invoked by a man already condemned, who persists in fixing blame upon those around him. Yet this scene must be kept to its true status: a colloquy recorded by a compiler, not a prison logbook. On the Friday preceding the execution, Mrs. Cron attended the wife during her first visit; the source thus situates this threat within that same interview of hesitant farewells, rather than during a formal examination or a renewed confession.
On 17 March, Emond was led to the scaffold at Libberton’s Wynd. Pelham describes a multitude assembled from Edinburgh and the neighbouring countryside; the Reverend Porteous arrived toward six o’clock to perform the devotions, and the condemned man was pinioned for execution toward seven. His brother joined him with the clergyman and took part in the prayers. Pelham writes that he remained firm and composed, yet changed colour several times as the executioner set about his task. The account concludes with the removal of his body to the College to be publicly dissected. This final destination, extending punishment beyond death itself, recalls the severity of a sentence whose trial proceedings the compilation recounts in but a few lines.
There remains, then, an affair narrated by its outcome, yet silent upon the machinery of proof: two women murdered in a dwelling they had left open to their neighbours; the widow’s brother-in-law, suspected amidst family quarrels; a conviction, followed by a summarized rather than transcribed confession. Pelham’s relation closes the record at the foot of the scaffold, denying us the forensic debates that led thither. This limitation in no way diminishes the weight of the facts it transmits; it merely requires that one not confound the voice of the compiler, the words attributed to the felon, and that which judicial records might truly have established.