The Chronicles of Newgate, vol. 2/2Griffiths, Arthur
History
The Chronicles of Newgate, vol. 2/2
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 a
pistol close to the back of his head and shot him down. She ran
upstairs, told her husband, made him go down to 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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