The Chronicles of Newgate, vol. 1/2Griffiths, Arthur
History
The Chronicles of Newgate, vol. 1/2
Griffiths, Arthur
Criminals -- Great Britain; Newgate (Prison : London, England); Prisons -- England; Punishment -- Great Britain
Vincent Davis was another miscreant who murdered his wife, under much
the same conditions. He had long barbarously ill-used her; he kept a
small walking-cane on purpose to beat her with, and at last so
frightened her by his threats to kill her that she ran away from him.
She returned one night, but finding that he had put an open knife by the
bedside, she placed herself under the protection of the landlady, who
advised her to swear the peace against him and get him imprisoned. Next
day the brutal husband drove her out of the house, declaring she had no
right to be in his company, as he was married to “Little Jenny.” But she
implored him to be friends, and having followed him to an ale-house
seeking reconciliation, he so slashed her fingers with a knife that she
came back with bleeding hands. That same night, when his wife met him on
his return home, he ordered her to light him to his room, then drawing
his knife, stabbed her in the breast. The poor woman bled to death in
half-an-hour. Davis after the deed was done was seized with contrition,
and when arrested and on his way to Newgate, he told the peace officer
that he had killed the best wife in the world. “I know I shall be
hanged,” he added; “but for God’s sake don’t let me be anatomized.” This
man is said to have assumed an air of bravado while he lay under
sentence of death, but his courage deserted him as the time for
execution approached. He had such a dread of falling into the hands of
the surgeons that he wrote to several friends begging them to rescue his
body if any attempt should be made at the gallows to remove it. He was
hanged at Tyburn on the 30th April, 1825; but the calendar does not
state what happened to his corpse.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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