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Frances KIDDER
Frances Kidder (c. 1843 – 2 April 1868) was the
last woman to be publicly hanged in Britain.
Twenty-five-year-old Kidder was executed in front of Maidstone
Gaol at 12 noon on 2 April 1868, following her conviction
on 12 March for murder. It was alleged that she had drowned her
11-year-old stepdaughter, Louisa Kidder-Staples, in a
ditch. The jury, directed by Mr Justice Byles, returned their
verdict in only 12 minutes.
Around 2,000 people, including Kidder's husband, are reported to
have witnessed the execution performed by hangman
William Calcraft.
Frances Kidder - the last woman publicly
hanged in England
The Hothfield connection with a historic woman
By Chris Rogers - Hothfieldmemories.org.uk
Frances Kidder was the last woman publicly hanged in England and
her story is told in a book that also relates to Hothfield.
Frances was convicted of murdering her own step-daughter Louisa
(Kidder) Staples who was born in Hythe.
Louisa's birth mother was Eliza Staples who was
born in Hothfield in 1837. Eliza's father, Richard, was also born
in Hothfield and is recorded in the Hothfield Church register of
Baptisms as the illegitimate son of Sarah.
Frances was arrested at her parents' house in New Romney on 25th
August 1867 - the very evening that she drowned Louisa. The next
day she was tried in New Romney and subsequently taken to
Maidstone to be sentenced. She was hanged outside what is still
Maidstone prison at noon on 2nd April 1868. Ironically her horse
and carriage would have taken her past Hothfield en route to
Maidstone, and close to where Louisa’s birth mother, Eliza Staples
had lived and where some of the Staples family were still living.
It is said that there was a crowd of 2000 watching the execution
which was undertaken by a bungling hangman, William Calcraft.
Frances had drowned her 11 year-old step-daughter in a ditch at
New Romney.
2 April 1868 – Frances Kidder
Eotd.wordpress.com
A jury took a mere 12 minutes to convict the last woman to be
hanged publicly in Britain.
Frances Kidder was sentenced to death for murdering a child, and
public opinion was to be so divided that some 2,000 people turned
up to view the macabre spectacle.
There was no room in William Kidder’s life for three females, at
least, so thought Kidder when she married the man. You see, he
came with two kids in tow from a previous relationship – Louisa
and a younger child. The younger child did not live with them
luckily. However, Louisa, to her misfortune, joined her dad and
his new wife and child Emma in Hythe, Kent. And in doing so,
Louisa mysteriously incurred the wrath of her 25-year-old
step-mum.
Theirs was a volatile relationship and Kidder, fuelled by
jealousy, would often treat the 11-year-old with such extreme
cruelty that she was eventually fined. Nevertheless the spiral of
abuse continued until it culminated in her drowning the child
unceremoniously in just 300mm of ditch water.
Can't kid a Kidder
Kidder tried to blag it that she didn’t know where Louisa was, but
when her muddy clothes were unearthed, her husband became
suspicious of his young wife. Given her previous history relating
to the mistreatment of Louisa, he took no time in shopping her to
the police. Of course, Louisa’s body was dredged up and Frances
was taken in and held on remand for six months. Apparently, while
she was in custody, William wasted no time in jumping straight
into bed with Kidder’s kid sister, who was helping him to look
after his other daughter Emma.
It was this kind of callous behaviour that swung the public’s
opinion in Kidder’s favour, but that didn’t stop her heading for
the noose.
Kidder’s trial took place in March 1868 – after a six-hour court
case, the jury took just minutes to decide her fate. Indeed after
she’d been found guilty it transpired that she confessed her guilt
to the priest as she awaited her death.
Death came soon enough and was carried out by Calcraft at
Maidstone Prison. As the trap opened, she is said to have dropped
18 inches and struggled for up to three minutes before succumbing
to her strangulation. She was left to hang for an hour before
being cut down and buried in the prison grounds. Kidder is known
primarily as the last woman to be executed in public.
Frances Kidder – The last woman to hang in public
Capitalpunishmentuk.org
Frances Kidder made history by becoming the last woman to be
publicly hanged in Britain, when she was executed at
Maidstone at midday on Thursday, the 2nd of April 1868.
25 year old Frances had been born in 1843 to John and Frances
Turner of New Romney in Kent. She married William Kidder
in 1865 as she was pregnant by him and she gave birth to the baby
daughter they named Emma before the marriage. What
Frances did not know at the time was that William had two children
by a previous relationship with a woman called
Staples.
The younger child was sent to live with relatives after
its mother died but his daughter, Louisa, who was about
ten years old came to live with Frances and William at Hythe in
Kent. From the outset things did not go well between
Louisa and Frances.
Although corporal punishment in the home was
considered normal in the 1860’s, Frances inflicted
wanton cruelty on the little girl who turned from being a typical
lively ten year old into a withdrawn and sullen girl
over the next two years. Frances beat the child with anything that
came to hand, made her wear rags and often deprived
her of food. She was also frequently excluded from the house,
irrespective of the weather, or was made to sleep in the
cellar with old sacks for bedding.
Such was the abuse that their
next door neighbour William Henniker reported William
and Frances to the police who charged Frances with cruelty for
which she was fined. Louisa was sent to live with a
guardian. However William did not make his regular maintenance
payments to the guardian and Louisa was returned to them.
Louisa’s presence re-kindled France’s resentment and the abuse of
the little girl resumed. William and Frances began to
quarrel over her treatment of his daughter and at least once he
threw Louisa out of the house.
Frances helped William in his work as a potato dealer and in July
1867 was quite seriously injured in an accident when
she was thrown from their horse and cart due to the horse bolting.
The accident may have caused brain damage. In any
event she took some time to recover from it and it did nothing to
reduce her enmity towards Louisa.
On the 24th of
August 1867, she had taken Louisa to visit her parents in New
Romney and also took her own daughter, Emma, with her. She
was to tell her parent’s neighbour, Mrs. Evans, of her feelings
towards Louisa and that she intended to get rid of her
before returning to Hythe.
On the Sunday Frances told her parents that she was ill and would
not be going out for a walk with them, preferring to
stay at home with the children. Once they had left she suggested
to Louisa that they visit a nearby fair and told her
that it would be sensible to change into their old clothes before
going. This they did and then started out on foot for
New Romney. They came to Cobb’s Bridge and it was here that
Frances grabbed Louisa and forced her into the stream that
ran under the bridge. She held the girl face down in the stream
and drowned her in less than a foot of water.
Frances’
father and her husband who had come to collect his wife and
daughter started searching for them. Frances got back to her
parent’s house just before William returned and he immediately
noticed that Louisa was not with her. Neither William or
his mother could get a satisfactory explanation from Frances as to
Louisa’s whereabouts. She ran upstairs to her bedroom
and was discovered by her father, having changed into dry clothes.
He found her previous clothes which were very wet and
muddy but could get nothing out of her regarding Louisa.
In view
of the history of violence towards the girl, he and
William decided to go to the police. Constable Aspinall returned
with her father and husband and took Frances into
custody on suspicion of Louisa’s murder. The constable questioned
her and she told him that Louisa had fallen into a
ditch after being frightened by passing horses near Cobb’s Bridge.
A search was organised and little girl’s body was
soon discovered. It was removed to the Ship Inn to await an
inquest and Frances was charged with murder.
The coroner’s
inquest opened the next day and heard various witness testimonies
which led to a verdict that Louisa had been murdered by
her mother. She was thus taken before the magistrates for a
committal hearing who remanded her in custody to appear at
the Kent Spring Assizes at Maidstone. She was transported to
Maidstone prison the following day, suffering fits during
the journey and having to stop at Ashford Police Station until
they subsided.
She remained on remand for over six months
and was ministered to by the chaplain, Reverend W. Fraser, who
managed to teach her to read and get some grasp of
religion. William did not visit her on remand and it was rumoured
that he had started a new relationship with Frances’
younger sister who had been helping him look after Emma.
Frances’ trial took place at Maidstone on the 12th of March 1868,
before Mr. Justice Byles and was to last six hours.
She had a court appointed barrister, Mr. Channell, to defend her.
The prosecution brought in evidence of the widespread
abuses of Louisa and of previous threats to kill her.
A local
doctor who had examined Louisa at the Ship Inn told the
court that the girl had died from drowning but that he had found
no marks of violence on her body. Mr. Channell
suggested to the jury that some of the witness evidence against
Louisa, whilst not actually lies, may well have been
exaggerated, but made little of the injuries sustained in the
accident with the horse and cart and the effect of them on
her mental and physical health, nor of the doctor’s findings of no
marks of violence on Louisa’s body.
Frances clung to
her defence of the two of them being frightened by the horse and
of Louisa falling into the water, from where she claimed
she had tried to rescue her. Mr. Justice Byles made a careful
summing up and told the jury that they were to give Francis
the benefit of the doubt if they were not wholly satisfied with
the largely circumstantial evidence against her. All of
this was rejected by the jury, after just twelve minutes of
deliberation. Francis had shown an interest in the
proceedings and particularly in the judge’s summing up but was
calm when she was sentenced to death and walked unaided
from the dock.
In the condemned cell, she confessed the murder to Reverend
Fraser. She was visited twice by William whilst here and on
both occasions they quarrelled over his relationship with her
younger sister, which he strongly denied at the first
meeting although he admitted it at the second. She was also
visited by her parents and Emma. She frequently became
hysterical while awaiting her death and this behaviour continued
until the moment she was hanged.
The execution was set for midday on Thursday the 2nd of April and
William Calcraft again officiated The gallows that had
been used to execute Ann Lawrence the year before was again
erected for the hanging outside the main gate in County Road.
Around noon the under sheriff of the county, the chaplain,
Calcraft and the other prison officers formed up outside her
cell and Calcraft went in to pinion her, with a strap around her
body and arms at elbow level and another around her
wrists. She was then led out across the yard to the main gate
which opened to reveal the gallows.
Frances had to be
helped up the steps onto the platform and held on the trapdoors by
two warders where she prayed intently while Calcraft
made the final preparations. Her last words were “Lord Jesus
forgive me”. With that Calcraft released the trap and she
dropped some eighteen inches, struggling hard for two or three
minutes, writhing in the agonies of strangulation. A well
behaved, but quite small crowd estimated at 2,000 people, a lot of
them women, had come to watch her final moments
although they could only see the top half of her body above the
platform.
Her body was left hanging for an hour before
being taken down and buried in an unmarked grave within the
prison. There was some sympathy for Frances in the press and
amongst the public. The Times commented on the way William had
treated her and the fact that he had deserted her in
prison and taken up with her sister. It was reported that an
effigy of him was burned in Hythe after the execution.
On the 29th of May 1868 Parliament passed the Capital Punishment
Within Prisons Bill ending fully public hanging. Six
more men were to die in public before this Act came into force.
The last of these was Michael Barrett who was hanged at
Newgate on the 26th of May for his part in the Fenian bomb outrage
in Clerkenwell.