Frances Colpitt could no longer mount the stairs. The child, barely ten years of age, was nonetheless attempting to scrub them, as Esther Hibner the younger had commanded. She collapsed, too feeble to proceed. According to the indictment presented at the Old Bailey, the younger Hibner dragged her upstairs, struck her with a stick and a rod, and sent her back to finish her task. When Frances, unable to control her bowels, soiled the steps, her mistress rubbed her face and nose against the floor before plunging her head into a pail of cold water. Ann Robinson, looking on, urged her to repeat the punishment.
On the 10th of April 1829, Esther Hibner the elder, her daughter Esther the younger, and Robinson were brought to the bar for the murder of Frances. The girl had been placed as a parish apprentice with the elder Hibner at Platt Terrace, on Pancras Road. The churchwardens and overseers of St Martin’s parish had bound her thither on the 7th of April 1828 to learn the art of tambour embroidery. Under the indenture, the child entered her mistress’s household; scarcely six months later, the treatment she endured degenerated, by the prosecutor’s account, into a ceaseless course of privation and blows.
The prosecution depicted days that commenced at three or four in the morning and dragged on until eleven at night, sometimes until two, and on occasion through the entire night. The children possessed scarcely any bedding: during the bitterest weather, they slept upon the bare floor under an old blanket. They were never permitted into the open air. The prosecutor contrasted this abject destitution with the comfortable beds, good clothes, and ease enjoyed by the Hibners and their kinsfolk.
Food, likewise, was severely rationed. Breakfast consisted of a single slice of bread and a cup of milk; when the children had not “earned” their meal, they received only a few potatoes at midday, and nothing more until the morrow. Nine pounds of potatoes were made to serve the twelve persons of the household. Meat appeared but once a fortnight. On Sundays, the apprentices were locked in the kitchen with the shutters fast closed. According to the prosecution, they wept with hunger, occasionally devouring scraps set aside for the dog or picking morsels of meat from the hog-wash.
Frances was not the only apprentice subjected to this discipline. The children bound out by St Martin’s and other parishes were, the prosecution asserted, compelled to endure identical toil, identical privation, and identical beatings. It was alleged that three among them had already perished as a consequence of this treatment. In Frances’s case, her debility was accompanied by ulcerated sores upon her feet; her toes mortified and sloughed away. The prosecution directly linked this deterioration to an abscess of the lungs and to prolonged starvation.
The indictment further recounted an incident antecedent to the scrubbing of the staircase: Esther the younger had forcibly pulled Frances from her tambour frame and dashed her twice against the floor. When the mother was informed that the child lay sick upon the floor of an adjoining room, she reportedly answered: “Let her lie there.” The three apprentices summoned as witnesses confirmed the narrative brought forward by the prosecutor, corroborating both the violence and the systematic starvation. The case did not rest upon a single, sudden act of ferocity, but upon the established regime governing the household, from the workshop to the domestic drudgery.
Charles James Wright, the surgeon, described the condition of the body. He testified that he had examined Frances prior to her demise, finding ulcerations on her feet and her toes in a state of gangrene. She expired on the 15th of March. Post-mortem examination revealed an extensive abscess that had almost entirely destroyed the lungs, inflamed viscera, various other internal lesions, and extensive external contusions. Wright ascribed death to the abscess and gangrene, affirming that starvation, lack of exercise, and persistent ill-usage were their primary causes. The plunging of her head into cold water, he observed, was calculated to have accelerated the pulmonary disease. Messrs Gozna and Bellin, surgeons, declared their concurrence in his opinion, considering that such cruelties had aggravated the malady and contributed to her death.
Called upon to answer the indictment, the three prisoners offered diverging defences. The elder Hibner entrusted her defence to her daughter. The younger Esther asserted that the children were liars and that both she and her mother had treated them with unfailing kindness. Robinson likewise denied the allegations, maintaining that she had merely assisted the Hibners in their needlework and had returned to her own home every evening at eight o'clock.
Baron Garrow charged the jury, entreating them not to allow the horror of the narrative to cloud their dispassionate assessment of legal guilt. Frances had been entrusted to the elder Hibner, who was bound by law to protect her. Yet the question of murder, he observed, hinged upon the strict causal nexus between the alleged acts and the fatal result. If the elder woman’s general course of ill-usage had destroyed the child, the other two prisoners must be acquitted of murder. If, on the contrary, the immersion of the child’s head by the younger Esther, in the presence of Robinson, had directly occasioned or primarily accelerated the pulmonary disease, both younger women must be found guilty of the capital charge and the elder prisoner acquitted.
After deliberating, the jury found Esther Hibner the elder guilty of murder, while acquitting her daughter and Robinson of that felony. Sentence of death was immediately passed upon the elder prisoner. The two younger women were detained to be tried separately for assault upon Frances. This distinction was material: their acquittal upon the indictment for murder did not imply innocence of the acts of violence.
The same chronicle records a second indictment for murder preferred against the elder Hibner, regarding the death of another apprentice. To this she pleaded not guilty. No second verdict was sought, the capital sentence having already been pronounced; Pelham treats her guilt in this second death as unquestionable, though the record furnishes no separate judicial finding. Following the trial, the convict was removed to the condemned cell. She assured Mr Wontner, the governor of Newgate, that she would never hang, and displayed violent anger when refused a mutton chop.
On Sunday, her daughter was admitted to take her final leave. They parted, Pelham records, without shedding a tear. Later that day, a turnkey took alarm at Hibner’s demeanor and set a watch upon her movements in the yard. She was discovered with a severe wound across the front of her throat, having cut herself with a knife she had clandestinely obtained. She subsequently confessed to Wontner that her intent had not been self-destruction, but to inflict an injury severe enough to gain a reprieve of several days. A strait-waistcoat was applied to prevent her from tearing open the dressings.
The Reverend Mr Cotton, the Ordinary, tendered his spiritual ministrations, which she peremptorily rejected: she knew her Bible well enough, she remarked, and required no interpreter. Mr Cotton persevered late into the night; she heard him out without uttering a word. The warrant had fixed the execution for the morning of Monday, the 13th of April. That morning, Hibner was attired in a black gown, over which she wore a white night-dress and a white cap. A few minutes before eight o'clock, she was conducted from her cell. Refusing to walk, she was borne along by two men. The multitude assembled near the scaffold received her with furious execrations. No minister of religion accompanied her upon the drop. Shortly after eight o'clock, the sentence of the law was carried into effect; the chronicler notes that she struggled little and seemed to expire almost instantaneously.
Hibner’s body was delivered to the surgeons for dissection. On the very same day, her daughter and Robinson were tried for assaults upon the children committed to their care and were duly convicted: the former was sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment in the house of correction, the latter to four.