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Susan
NEWELL
Classification: Murderer
Characteristics:
Susan made no
confession and gave no reason why the boy had to die
Number of victims: 1
Date of murder:
May 20, 1923
Date of arrest:
Same day
Date of birth: 1893
Victim profile:
John Johnston, 13 (newspaper boy)
Method of murder:
Strangulation
Location: Glasgow,
Scotland, United Kingdom, USA
Status:
Executed by hanging at Duke Street Prison in Glasgow on October 10, 1923
(the last woman to be hanged in Scotland)
Susan Newell (1893–1923) was the last
woman to be hanged in Scotland. She killed newspaper boy, John
Johnston during a petty squabble, having failed to obtain a
newspaper without paying for it. She killed her victim via
strangulation on 20 May 1923.
Newell was caught after she and her daughter
made an attempt to dispose of the body. She tried to implicate her
husband for the crime, but he had a solid alibi as he could prove
he was at his brother's funeral at the time of the murder. Her
daughter Janet, testified against her, describing how the body of
the paperboy had been wheeled through the streets on a pram.
At the trial her defence put forward a plea of
insanity, but she was convicted on a majority verdict with one
juror against.
Newell was executed on October 10, 1923 at Duke
Street Prison, Glasgow.
Susan Newell - A senseless murder
Background
Susan Newell was born in 1893 and had lived a
hard life in constant poverty. In June 1923 she was living in a
rented flat in Newlands Street, Coatbridge, a suburb of Glasgow,
with her husband John and 8 year old daughter, Janet McLeod, from
her previous marriage. John was apparently a drunkard and a
womaniser. After just three weeks their landlady, Mrs. Young, had
become fed up with their rows and had given them notice to quit.
Susan was noted for having a bad temper and
also had some history of violence. On June the 19th 1923 she had
assaulted her husband, John, beating him round the head, which he
reported to the police. The following day they had another violent
argument and he left home going to his sister's house that night.
The crime
On the evening of Wednesday June the 20th 1923
around 6 45 p.m. 13 year old newspaper boy John Johnson knocked on
Susan's door to see if she wanted the evening newspaper. She told
him to come in and took the paper from him. However John insisted
he had to have the money for it. At this Susan lost control of
herself and strangled the poor little boy. Her daughter was to see
the boy's body when she came in from playing lying on the settee.
Janet had to help her mother wrap it in an old rug. Susan had the
age old problem of what to do with John's body. She slept on this
problem and by the morning had decided how she would dispose of
it.
Susan and Janet carried John's body down stairs
and put it in an old pram, which she had found, still covered by
the rug. With Janet perched on top of the bundle and they set off
together on foot towards Glasgow. Several people were notice them
as they walked along the roads towards Glasgow. A passing lorry
driver offered them a lift which Susan accepted and dropped them
off in Glasgow's Duke Street. As the pram was being got down from
the truck the bundle containing John's small body came undone and
a foot was seen sticking out of one end and the top of his head at
the other end.
Apparently the lorry driver failed to notice
this but a lady, who was looking out the window of her house
nearby, did before Susan could cover up the body again. She
decided to follow Susan and Janet and enlisted the help of her
sister. They met a man and asked him to fetch the police while
they continued to follow Susan. The man was able to keep up with
her and saw Susan leave the bundle containing John's body at the
entrance to a tenement. Susan attempted to escape over a wall and
was immediately arrested by a policeman waiting for on the other
side.
Susan had already worked out her story if she
was caught and had primed Janet as well. She told the police that
her husband had killed the boy and that she had tried to stop him.
He had then forced her and Janet to dispose of the body for him.
John was now also arrested and they were both charged with the
murder.
The trial
Husband and wife came to trial in Glasgow on
the 18th of September 1923, before Lord Alness. The case against
John collapsed as he could prove that he was not in the house when
the murder took place. He was able to produce several witnesses to
prove his whereabouts. The judge freed him immediately saying that
he should never have been brought to trial. He left the dock
without even a glance at Susan.
The main and most compelling evidence against
Susan was given by her daughter Janet. She told the court how she
had come back to the flat from playing outside to see the body of
John lying on the sofa and how she had helped her mother wrap it
up. She also related to the court how she had helped her mother
try to dispose of the body and what her mother had told her what
to say if she was questioned by the police. Susan had given Janet
a full story that she was to tell of how her step father had
killed John.
In her defence it was argued that Susan was
insane although this was rebutted by the prosecution's expert
witness, Professor John Glaister who had examined her while she
was on remand. Her counsel pointed out that the killing was not
premeditated and had no obvious motive.
The jury retired and reached their verdict in
37 minutes. Somewhat surprisingly in view of the weight of
evidence Susan was only convicted by a majority verdict. At least
one of the jurors believed her defence of insanity. The jury
unanimously recommended mercy for her.
Upon receiving the guilty verdict Lord Alness
sentenced her to death and she was taken back to Duke Street (yes
the same Duke Street) where Glasgow's prison stood at the time.
Here she was examined by psychiatrists and found to be legally
sane.
Execution
No woman had been hanged in Scotland for over
50 years and there were considerable efforts made to secure a
reprieve for Susan. However the application of the law in Scotland
had to be seen to be in line with that in England where Edith
Thompson had been hanged for what most of us would regard as a
much less serious crime only 10 months earlier.
The Secretary of State for Scotland therefore
decided that she could not to be reprieved and her execution was
set for October the 10th 1923. Susan showed emotion for the first
time when told by the Lord Provost of Glasgow that there was to be
no reprieve. She cried out for her daughter and then fainted.
She was to be hanged by John Ellis, assisted by
Robert Baxter, who together had also hanged Edith Thompson. (Ellis
heartily disliked executing female prisoners and always seemed to
have some sort of incident). He was noted for the speed at which
he conducted executions and it is perhaps for wanting to get the
procedure over with quickly and not wanting to hurt Susan he did
not pinion her wrists properly. Ellis decided to use the leather
body belt that he had had made for Edith Thompson which had an
additional strap to go round the thighs. This was necessary
because as skirts had got shorter over the years there was concern
that they would billow up as the prisoner dropped.
On the gallows Susan allowed Baxter to strap
her legs and thighs without protest but was able to get her hands
free from the lose wrist straps on the body belt and defiantly
pulled off the white hood, saying to Ellis "Don't put that thing
over me". Rather than risk another trying scene Ellis decided to
proceed without it, as the noose was already in place and so he
simply pulled the lever and Susan went through the trap with her
face in full view of the small number of officials who were
present. She became the last woman to hang in Scotland and was
said to be the calmest person in the execution chamber accepting
her fate with both courage and dignity although she never admitted
her crime.
Comment
There seem to be few mitigating factors in
Susan's case - both she and John Johnson were the victims of her
violent temper. The evidence against her was clear and
overwhelming.
There is the question of motive. John's father
had told the court that his son wouldn't have had more than nine
pence on him at the time of the killing. So it seems doubtful that
Susan killed him for money and rather more likely that she simply
could not control her temper.
Perhaps John was somewhat cheeky and said
something to Susan when he asked her for the money that made her
snap. She was already in an "wound up" state after the rows with
her husband and it is quite possible that, unwittingly, young John
just pushed her over the edge.
Undoubtedly there are a significant number of
murders committed due to temporary loss of control by people who
are sane on normal definition of that term. The M'Naughten rules,
which came in to being in 1843, were the basis of the legal
definition of sanity. They required that, for a person to be found
insane, it had to be shown that they were, at the time of the
crime, suffering from such defect of mind that either they did not
know what they were doing or that what they were doing was wrong.
Clearly Susan at least knew what she had done was wrong.
One wonders whether it was Susan's natural
defiance that made her refuse to admit her crime, at least in
public. Some people who have committed a dreadful crime go into
denial and are unable to admit it even to themselves. Some know in
their own hearts what they have done but see denial as the best
way forward. Perhaps because they think it might win a reprieve or
because they want their loved ones at least to believe they were
innocent.
CapitalPunishmentUK.org
NEWELL, Susan
(England)
A woman who
committed an inexplicable murder in 1923, and the hangman who
executed her attempting to commit suicide ten months later, proved
to be the news headlines of the decade.
Susan was charged
with murdering John Johnstone, a 12-yearold schoolboy who
delivered newspapers for pocket money, a crime that seemed totally
motiveless.
It all started in
June 1923 when Mrs Helen Elliott was about to leave her house to
go shopping. A lorry had pulled up a little further along the road
and she noticed the driver climb out and help a woman lift a small
handcart out of his vehicle. He then drove away, but as the woman
manoeuvred the cart on to the pavement, Mrs Elliot noticed
something else, something that made her gasp in disbelief, for
from the wrapped-up bundle in the cart protruded a head and a
foot. Hardly believing her eyes, she called to her sister who was
nearby and, at a discreet distance, they followed the woman as she
went down a narrow alleyway, to see her dump the bundle in a
corner. Fortunately a policeman was passing by and, summoned by
the two sisters, he proceeded to arrest the woman, a Mrs Susan
Newell. On unwrapping the contents of the bundle he found that it
contained the doubledup and mutilated body of the aforementioned
newsboy.
Subsequent
forensic examination showed that the boy’s body had been burned
while he was still alive, and then violently throttled.
Susan, her husband
John and their eight-year-old daughter Janet, lived in a Glasgow
lodging house, and on the morning of 21 June 1923 the landlady not
only noticed that the front door was open, but also that the
handcart she owned was missing. At about the same time, a lorry
driver along the street had noticed a woman pushing what was
obviously a heavy cart and offered to give her a lift; further
into town she asked him to stop, saying that she did not have much
further to go. Had she waited a mile or so before speaking, Helen
Elliott would not have had such a horrific story with which to
regale her neighbours for months to come, and the police would
have been faced with an unsolvable crime. As it was, Susan was
questioned, her only explanation being that she was disposing of
the body to protect her husband, who had actually committed the
murder. That this was a falsehood became clear when John was able
to prove that he had been away in another town during the two days
previous to his wife’s arrest.
The prosecution at
this stage faltered for the lack of evidence; Susan Newell could
have been charged with being an accessory to a murder, but nothing
more serious than that. But then Susan’s young daughter provided
the evidence, if not the motive, for she recounted how she had
seen the boy arrive to deliver the papers but had not seen him
leave. She had then been taken by her mother to a nearby public
house, and on returning with her later, saw him lying in a chair.
Little realising, at her age, that what she was saying virtually
condemned her mother to death, the girl described how she had
helped to wrap up the body, and had watched her mother lift it
into the cart.
Despite a plea of
insanity, Susan Newell was found guilty by the jury on a majority
verdict, albeit with a recommendation for mercy. The judge agreed
with the first decision but rejected the adjunct, and sentenced
her to death.
Susan made no
confession and gave no reason why the boy had to die, and on 10
October 1923 in Duke Street Prison, not far from where she had
attempted to leave the corpse of her victim, she came face to face
with John Ellis, the executioner, as he drew the hood down over
her head and positioned the noose.
Unresisting, her
hands and ankles pinioned, she stood motionless as he moved to the
lever, her body falling through the aperture, death coming within
minutes.
As for the hangman
himself, although he always denied that that particular execution
had affected him in any way, in the following December he
resigned, having been executioner for 23 years. Shortly
afterwards, apparently suffering from depression, he attempted to
commit suicide by shooting himself.
In the years that
followed he appeared on the stage in the role of a hangman and
also gave talks about his experiences on the scaffold, but in
September 1932, by then a sick man, he killed himself by cutting
his throat.
The profession of
executioner was generally regarded with revulsion and disgust,
hangmen being frequently abused, even violently assaulted. This
irrational attitude of the public was challenged by the late
French executioner Henri Anatole Deibler, who wrote sarcastically:
‘To kill in the name of one’s country is a glorious feat, one
rewarded by medals. But to kill in the name of the law, that is a
gruesome, horrible function, rewarded with scorn, contempt and
loathing by the public.’
Amazing True
Stories of Female Executions by Geoffrey Abbott
John and Susan Newell at their
trial.
Newell Indictment 20.06.23
(Image courtesy of Glasgow University Archive Services)
