The British public and therefore the British media have always enjoyed a “good murder.”  The early months of 1752 brought not one, but two such events.  Their cases filled the newspapers for weeks and we are led to believe that the two murderesses corresponded with each other while awaiting trial and execution. 

Elizabeth Jeffries had aided and abetted the murder of her uncle and was hanged in Epping Forest on Saturday the 28th of March. Mary Blandy had poisoned her father at Henley on Thames and was hanged at Oxford, just over a week later, on Monday the 6th of April.

Mary had apparently become aware of Elizabeth being in a similar predicament to her own and was allowed to write to her while both were in prison.  The ensuing correspondence, between the 7th of January and the 19th of March 1752, was published under the title of “Genuine Letters between Miss Blandy and Miss Jeffries.”  Initially both women protested their innocence to each other, but later Elizabeth acknowledged her guilt to Mary.

In her last letter to Elizabeth on the 16th March, Mary reportedly wrote: "Your deceiving of me was a small crime; it was deceiving yourself: for no retreat, tho' ever so pleasant, no diversions, no company, no, not Heaven itself, could have made you happy with those crimes un-repented of in your breast." So, with the promise to be "a suitor for her at the Throne of Mercy" Mary finished the correspondence.

The crime

Mr. Joseph Jeffries was a wealthy, but childless man who lived in Walthamstow, Essex and who adopted his niece, Elizabeth.  He made his will in her favour but threatened to change it because of her rebellious teenage ways, her good behaviour having been a condition of inheritance. 

Elizabeth had been thinking of murdering her uncle for some 2 years but did not see a way of doing it unaided. Finally fearing that he would carry out his threat to disinherit her, the by now 21 year old Elizabeth, enlisted the help of Mr. Jeffries’ gardener, John Swan, with whom she was believed to have been “intimate” to use the contemporary term.  They had tried to persuade a former servant, one Matthews, to kill Mr. Jeffries by offering him a substantial share of the proceeds, but in the end he declined, although was probably present at the killing.  

The plan to kill Mr. Jeffries involved Matthews obtaining a brace of pistols for which Jeffries and Swan had given him half a guinea (52.5p in today’s money).  He spent this on drink but still joined the others in Mr. Jeffries’ house at around ten o'clock on the night of Tuesday July the 3rd 1751. 

Matthews hid himself in the pantry and was joined there by Swan and Elizabeth around midnight.  They asked him if he was ready and where the pistols were but he told them "I cannot find it in my heart to do it." To which the furious Elizabeth replied: " You may be damned for a villain, for not performing your promise!"  Whether Swan feared that Matthews would prove unreliable, we don’t know, but he had brought a brace of pistols.  He also produced a book, and insisted that Matthews should swear not to disclose what had passed between them, "unless it was to save his own life."  Matthews then left Mr. Jeffries’ house but remained long enough to hear a pistol shot. 

Elizabeth and John had devised a plan whereby they would both pretend to have been in their respective rooms at the time of the shooting, having first staged what was to appear to be a botched robbery by hiding some plate and silver in a sack downstairs.  Later that evening they would raise the alarm and claim that  Mr. Jeffries had been robbed and murdered by an intruder.

Initially the authorities arrested Elizabeth as there was no sign of forced entry, and began a search for Matthews whom she had implicated.  However, they could produce no evidence against her and she was released.  Upon release she took control of her uncle’s assets and began spending them.  In the meantime Matthews was located and gave a full statement of events, if only to save his own neck.  On receipt of this information Elizabeth and John were re-arrested and committed to Chelmsford prison for trial at the next Assizes.

Trial

They were tried together some 8 months later at the Essex Assizes, before Mr Justice Wright, on Tuesday the 10th of March 1752.  They had missed the previous year’s Assize which had opened on the 31st of July 1751.  Matthews was the principal witness for the prosecution and both were found guilty. The Crown counsel summed up Elizabeth’s motive for killing her uncle thus "to alter his will, if she did not alter her conduct." John Swan, as he was a servant of Mr. Jeffries, was convicted of Petty Treason “for the cruel and wicked murder of his late master” and Elizabeth “of aiding, helping, assisting, comforting and maintaining the said John Swan to commit the murder”.  Note that she was not charged with murder, as she would have been under the doctrine of common purpose that applied in the 20th century, but rather with the crime she had actually committed. 

She reportedly confessed her part in the crime on the Thursday and they were brought back before the court on the Saturday to be sentenced (It was normal practice to sentence all the prisoners at the end of the Assize)  She fainted as her death sentence was pronounced.  Nine men also received death sentences of whom five were reprieved and the other 3 hanged at Chelmsford on the 26th of March.