THE ILFORD MURDER

Otago Witness, Issue 3590, 2 January 1923, Page 18

THE ILFORD MURDER

APPEALS DISMISSED. LONDON, December 21. The appeals of Bywaters and Mrs Thompson have been dismissed. December 22. The Lord Chief Justice (Sir Gordon Hewart) and Justices Darling and Salter dismissed Bywaters’s appeal, which was based -on the grounds of Mr Justice Shearman’s refusal to take the two trials separately, the inadmissibility of the let ters, misdirection of the jury, and a verdict against the weight of evidence. Counsel argued that the letters had confused the issue. The court did not call on the Crown to reply. The Lord Chief Justice said that their lordships regarded the case as a squalid and rather indecent case of lust and adultery in which Thompson was cruelly murdered. The deceased was the only person in the case who excited sympathy. The relations between Bywaters and Mrs Thompson were most culpable and intimate. There - passed „ between them remarkable and deplorable correspondence of a most mischievous and most venomous type. There was no ground whatever, in their lordships’ opinion, for interference with Mr Justice Shearman’s decision to try the prisoners together. By waters heard the result unmoved. December 23. Over 1,000,000 people signed a petition praying for a reprieve of Bywaters. No petition was organised on behalf of Mns Thompson, the public believing that the authorities will not hang a woman. [Bywaters, a 20-year-old ship’s steward, and Edith Thompson were tried on the

charge of conspiracy and the murder of Percy Thompson at Ilford, and were condemned to death. The case created most unusual interest in London, and great queues formed overnight at the Old Bailey, so eager were people to hear the evidence. It was alleged that attempts were made to poison Percy Thompson, who reused to divorce his wife to enable Bywaters to marry her, but the actual killing was done in a street at Ilford, when, one evening, Bywaters met the woman and her husband. Thompson was stabbed in the back and in the back of the neck, and it was apparently this fact which made the jury refuse to believe Bywaters’s story of acting in self-defence. The woman was implicated by letters she had written to Bywaters. Since the passing of the sentence the old controversy as to the hanging of women has been revived. No woman has been hanged in Great Britain since 1907.]