By seven of the clock, the populace was already pressing hard against the doors of the County Hall. The proceedings were not appointed to begin for two hours, yet the benches were overflowing and the passages choked with spectators. Samuel Fallowes was conducted to the bar. He stood arraigned for the murder of Betty Shawcross, whose body had been discovered in the outhouse of the farmstead where she served. The chapbook printed in 1823 mingles the depositions of the prosecution with the severe moral judgment of its chronicler.
The deed was alleged to have been committed on the night of Friday, the 21st of March. Betty was employed as a servant in the house of Robert Cheetham Murrey, at Bredbury. The witnesses described her as being five or six months advanced in pregnancy, and Fallowes as the man with whom she had maintained a carnal intimacy. Another condition of the same nature ran parallel through the trial: Mary Coups, formerly in the service of Captain Humphreys, was likewise with child by Fallowes and had been promised in marriage for the preceding January. These were two distinct women. The subsequent commentary of the pamphlet confuses their names, but the victim whose cause was pleaded at Chester was Betty Shawcross alone.
The first link in the inquiry appeared in the guise of a letter. On Friday, the 21st of March, Betty had delivered the paper to Rebecca Leigh, who was setting out for Stockport market, charging her to carry it to Ann Hickman, an alehouse keeper. Betty desired to know whether Fallowes would call there, and urged that the missive be conveyed to him without delay. Hickman testified that Fallowes entered her house that day and received the letter towards half-past twelve. He read it in her presence without demanding an answer. Later, he admitted to the parish constable that he had indeed received it, adding that Betty asked for money towards the maintenance of their child. He declared he had thrown it into the parlour fire.
The movements of Fallowes during that day were reconstituted by several hands, though no single witness traced him uninterruptedly from dawn to dusk. His servant-boy, Thomas Oakes, saw him depart for market about ten in the morning, and return near five. After the milking of the kine, about half-past six, the lad saw him no more. John Walton, another farm-servant, remembered seeing his master near the stable, and watching him walk away down the road leading to Stockport and Bredbury. Fallowes then wore a black coat and waistcoat, corduroy breeches, and light-coloured gaiters. He had not returned when the servants retired to their beds.
David Clarke swore he recognised him at Stockport between six and seven that evening, near Millgate, walking in the direction of Bredbury. The narrative of the chapbook attaches this sighting to that selfsame Friday; yet the date deciphered in the optical transcript of his deposition remains open to doubt without scrutiny of the facsimile. Such an hour seemed hard to reconcile with a departure from his own dwelling after the milking was done. The pamphlet notes, however, that the clocks at Bramall were faster than those of Stockport—a circumstance which might explain the discrepancy without fixing the precise moment of his passage. Fallowes had thus been seen on the road towards Betty’s dwelling shortly before she disappeared from her master’s roof.
Robert Thorniley, who was also in Murrey’s service, saw Betty in the kitchen about a quarter before twelve that night. He stated that she had stepped outside earlier, bidding him leave the outer door unlocked. When she presently went up the passage, he imagined she was retiring to her chamber, though he could not affirm it. In the morning, Joseph Barker went out to seek her. He came upon her in the shippon, lying upon her face, behind a barn which hid the place from the view of the house. He shut the door, hastened to warn another servant, and the neighbours were summoned. Mary Twedale presently viewed the body: Betty lay cold and dead, her cap cast beside her, her clothing disordered.
Mr. John Cheetham, a surgeon, examined the body upon the premises. He described two wounds upon the crown of the head and another upon the back, inflicted, as he conceived, by some blunt instrument, together with a deep cut across the throat which had severed the jugular vein. Betty’s hand was bruised, and her thumb cut. The surgeon considered that the wound in the neck was sufficient to cause death by hemorrhage; he concluded she was pregnant of some five or six months. The court received these findings in his deposition. The pamphlet, in dilating upon the atrocity of the crime, clothes the event in a moralising rhetoric far more vehement than the plain testimony of medicine.
William Saxon discovered a razor near the body, which he declared to be bloody, and delivered it to the coroner. But Thorniley, being recalled, deposed that he perceived no blood upon the razor when he saw it on the Saturday. Mary Murrey, the mistress of the house, and Thorniley both swore they had never seen such an instrument in their dwelling. James Hodgkinson, who had worked for Fallowes the year before, was questioned concerning a blade his master was wont to use. He hesitated to identify it; he could not swear that the piece produced in court was the same, though he thought it like. This distinction is of moment: the weapon was gathered in the shippon, but its connection to Fallowes rested upon an uncertain recollection and upon the missing garments, rather than upon any mark or irrefutable proof.
On the morrow, James Ridgeway, a lad of ten years, said he saw Fallowes about seven in the morning under Croft Bridge, not two hundred yards from his house, clad in a black coat and light trousers. According to the child, the man perceived him and fled along the brook. Ridgeway had known Fallowes for two years and swore positively to his person. Other witnesses placed the master absent from his hearth. When he at length reappeared, he wore a light jacket, an old black waistcoat, and a pair of trousers which a servant declared he had never seen before.
The apparel worn on the Friday could not be found. Fallowes gave various accounts of it. To Barratt, the constable, he first declared that he had gone as far as Toft to see another young woman with child; that the rain had driven him back, and that he had slept in an outbuilding upon some hay. He claimed to have reached home about two in the morning, but refrained from waking his people. Being pressed as to his black coat and trousers, he answered that they were wet, had been laid upon a hedge to dry, and were stolen thence. His gaiters, he said, he had bestowed upon a beggar. Yet none under his roof remembered to have heard him speak of any missing or stolen raiment.
Before the coroner, Fallowes recanted his story, declaring that his first tale to Barratt was “a lie,” and that he had spoken so because he was told men would swear against him. He advanced another plea: after the milking, he had kept watch for poachers in the fields until five in the morning, and had then laid down upon the hay in an outhouse lest he disturb his household. This defense was likewise disputed by the servants and by William Hamilton, the gamekeeper, who denied having ever taxed Fallowes with setting snares or destroying game. The court possessed no eyewitness to the act itself; the Crown built its edifice upon his absence, the hours of the road, the letter, the changed apparel, and his contradictory utterances.
Fallowes did not speak in his own defense. His counsel called neighbours who spoke well of his former life: he was represented as a sober, industrious man, well regarded until that hour. Captain Humphreys deposed he had known him thirteen years without reproach. His testimony recalled, it is true, the broken promise of marriage to Mary Coups the previous January, but this concerned not Betty. Sundry persons who knew Fallowes affirmed him to be of respectable character. Their voices made no direct answer to the circumstances of the night of the 21st of March; they merely offered the jury a portrait clean contrary to the suspicions raised by the prosecution.
The report observes that the chronicler could not distinctly catch the charge of Mr. Justice Warren, who spoke very low. The nine “points” which follow in the print are therefore the writer’s own summary, not the judicial charge delivered from the bench. The author insists upon the criminal connection with Betty, the letter, the nocturnal absence, the sightings upon the road, the razor, and the missing clothes. He underlines, too, the shifting tales of the prisoner and the contradictions brought by the witnesses. This distinction preserves the reader from mistaking the editorial deductions of the broadside for the formal direction of the court.
After deliberating for some six-and-twenty minutes, the jury returned a verdict of Guilty. Fallowes made no answer when asked what he had to say why judgment of death should not be pronounced against him. The judge passed sentence, appointing the following Monday as his last day upon earth. A letter from Humphreys, written the next day, recounted that Fallowes had wept in secret. This testimony stands in contrast with the unyielding coldness attributed to his demeanor in the dock.
Upon the day of execution, the pamphlet relates that Fallowes walked from Chester Castle in the early dawn, and was thence carried in a cart to the city gaol, where he was executed about one of the clock. He refused to make any public confession; he was reported only to have told the chaplain that he had made his peace with God. The chronicler construes this silence as an obstinate refusal, casting blame upon his kin without direct proof of any collusion. He also cites sundry witnesses who maintained that Fallowes never asserted his innocence after the verdict. What stands attested by the printed record is the verdict, the sentence, and the death; no confession of the deed is to be found.
Thus did the trial translate a disappearance between two rural thresholds—the farmhouse of Bredbury and its cattle-shed—into an alignment of signs and hours: a delivered letter, an unlocked door, an absent man, a changed coat, an unproven blade. The jurymen deemed these elements sufficient for a conviction. The pamphleteer asserts that they formed an unbroken chain, and urges his reader to share that certainty. One may record the verdict without claiming a material certainty which the archive denies: the testimonies clash in several particulars, and the scaffold tract is no substitute for an admission of guilt. The tragedy abides in this very fissure between the finality of the law and the frailties of the record.