Did he get away with murder?
Tony Clayton came across this rather gruesome entry in the burial registers for St Mary’s Church, Whitechapel, dated 16 May 1827, when Charles William Sheen, alias Beadle, died in the workhouse aged four months. In addition to the entry itself, there was a rather gruesome comment added to the register by the parish clerk: ‘this child’s head was severed from the body by the father William Sheen’.
Tony couldn’t resist the challenge of looking into this entry a little deeper, which revealed a tragic story. In January 1827, at the workhouse in Whitechapel, Lydia Beadle gave birth to a child and when this came to the notice of the parochial officers of St Katherine’s, they offered William Sheen, the alleged father, £5 if he married her, which he duly did that March. However, he had no interest in the baby and on 8 May, after a prolonged drinking session, he returned home and murdered the child while his wife Lydia was out. Fleeing back to South Wales, he was apprehended and appeared at the Old Bailey on 1 June charged with the wilful murder of William Sheen. The defendant’s counsel objected to the charges on the grounds that the description of the child was incorrect, he had been baptised, ‘William Charles Beadle Sheen’. This resulted in the judge having no option but to deliver a verdict of ‘not guilty’. A second indictment was obtained, rectifying the naming of the deceased and the prisoner was sent to trial again, on 13 July. This time a plea of ‘autrefois acquit’ was entered by the defence and the judge duly ruled that the prisoner could not be charged a second time for the same offence, so the defendant was released. It was extremely rare for a defendant to be found ‘not guilty’ on a technicality. So, did William Sheen literally get away with murder?
Janet Freeman has also found a tragic set of circumstances surrounding the death of a mother and her unborn child. Janet found written in very small writing on the burial entry for Mary Lambourne on 11 June 1834 in the
