Chronicles of Newgate, Vol. 2: From the eighteenth century to its demolitionGriffiths, Arthur
History
Chronicles of Newgate, Vol. 2: From the eighteenth century to its demolition
Griffiths, Arthur
Criminals -- Great Britain; Newgate (Prison : London, England); Prisons -- England; Punishment -- Great Britain
One fine afternoon in August, O'Connor was met walking in the direction
of Bermondsey. He was dressed with particular care, as he was to dine
at the Mannings, and meet friends, one a young lady. He was seen
afterwards smoking and talking with his hosts in their back parlour,
and never seen again alive. It came out in the husband's confession
that Mrs. Manning induced O'Connor to go down to the kitchen to wash
his hands, that she followed him to the basement, that she stood behind
him as he stood near the open grave she herself had dug for him, and
which he mistook for a drain, and that while he was speaking to her she
put the muzzle of the pistol close to the back of his head and shot him
down. She ran upstairs, told her husband, made him go down and look
at her handiwork, and as O'Connor was not quite dead, Manning gave
the _coup de grâce_ with a crowbar. After this Mrs. Manning changed
her dress and went off in a cab to O'Connor's lodgings, which, having
possessed herself of the murdered man's keys, she rifled from end to
end. Returning to her own home, where Manning meantime had been calmly
smoking and talking to the neighbours over the basement wall, the
corpse lying just inside the kitchen all the while, the two set to
work to strip the body and hide it under the stones of the floor. This
job was not completed till the following day, as the hole had to be
enlarged, and the only tool they had was a dust-shovel. A quantity of
quicklime was thrown in with the body to destroy all identification.
This was on a Thursday evening. For the remainder of that week and
part of the next the murderers stayed in the house, and occupied the
kitchen, close to the remains of their victim. On the Sunday Mrs.
Manning roasted a goose at this same kitchen fire, and ate it with
relish in the afternoon. This cold-blooded indifference after the event
was only outdone by the premeditation of this horrible murder. The hole
must have been excavated and the quicklime purchased quite three weeks
before O'Connor met his death, and during that time he must frequently
have stood or sat over his own grave.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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