Chronicles of Newgate, Vol. 1: From the twelfth to the eighteenth centuryGriffiths, Arthur
History
Chronicles of Newgate, Vol. 1: From the twelfth to the eighteenth century
Griffiths, Arthur
Criminals -- Great Britain; Newgate (Prison : London, England); Prisons -- England; Punishment -- Great Britain
George Price, who murdered his wife in 1738, had an analogous motive:
he wished to release himself from one tie in order to enter into
another. He was in service in Kent, his wife lived in lodgings in
Highgate, and their family increased far more rapidly than he liked.
Having for some time paid his addresses to a widow in Kent, he at
length resolved to remove the only obstacle to a second and more
profitable marriage. With this infernal object in view he went to
Highgate, and told his wife that he had secured a place for her at
Putney, to which he would himself drive her in a chaise. She was
warned by some of his fellow servants against trusting herself alone
with him, but "she said she had no fear of him, as he had treated her
with unusual kindness." They drove off towards Hounslow. On the way
she begged him to stop while she bought some snuff, but he refused,
laughingly declaring she would never want to use snuff again. When they
reached Hounslow Heath it was nearly ten o'clock at night. The time
and place being suitable, he suddenly threw his whip-lash round his
wife's throat and drew it tight. As the cord was not quite in the right
place he coolly altered it, and disregarding her entreaties, he again
tightened the rope; then finding she was not quite dead, pulled it with
such violence that it broke, but not till the murder was accomplished.
Having stripped the body, he disfigured it, as he hoped, beyond
recognition, then left it under a gibbet on which some malefactors were
hanging in chains, and returned to London with his wife's clothes, part
of which he dropped about the street, and part he gave back to her
landlady, to whom they belonged. Being seen about, so many inquiries
were made for his wife that he feared detection, and fled to Portsmouth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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