Yorkshire Almanac 2025

Unedited excerpt

The excerpt in the book is shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.

MURDER OF IMBECILE SON. MOTHER SENTENCED TO DEATH
Mrs. Kathleen Mumford, 40, formerly of Throstle Grove, Middleton, Leeds, was at Leeds Assizes yesterday sentenced to death for the murder of her five-year-old imbecile son, Derek, who died from gas poisoning.
No evidence was called for the defence, and Mr. H. B. H. HYLTON-FOSTER, addressing the jury, said: I am not instructed by Mrs. Mumford to say she has any regrets for what she has done. What she says is this: “There was no cure whatsoever for the child. He would never be normal with his hands, therefore what was the child to live for? All the days of his life he would have been an imbecile. Was it right that such a child should have to live like that? Therefore, I ended his sufferings. I thought everything I did was in the interests of the child, and as God would not take him away I thought it my duty to help. If it were possible to have the boy back as he was, and me to have my freedom, I should say ‘No.'”
MR. JUSTICE WROTTESLEY, summing up, pointed out that there was nothing in law that could justify Mrs. Mumford in taking the life of her son.
The jury, having found Mrs. Mumford Guilty, entered their “very strongest recommendation to mercy.”

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

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Comment

More here. As far as I know, only one woman has been executed at Armley – Emily Swann on 29 December 1903

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• Murder (38) W/G ·
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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Comment

Comment

More here. As far as I know, only one woman has been executed at Armley – Emily Swann on 29 December 1903

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Similar

19 October 1808: William Perigo of Bramley finds that Mary Bateman defrauded him in promising to cure his wife Rebecca’s palpitations, and suspects she died of poisoning

25 February 1879: 500 await the black flag signalling the hanging at Armley Gaol (Leeds) of Charles Peace – steelworker, violinist, picture-framer, burglar, stalker, murderer

24 January 1680: Miners rob, murder and burn a pit-owning nonconformist minister and his mother and maid at Beeston (Leeds)

12 September 1856: Band-leader John Hope tells an inquest of the life and murder of his daughter, the dancer Jane Banham, by her ex-lover, a Mancunian tailor, at the Malt Mill Inn, Armley

27 July 1612: Jennet Preston, the only Yorkshirewoman among the Pendle witches, is found guilty at York of the murder of Thomas Lister of Westby Hall, Gisburn (Ribble Valley)

31 July 1667: Thomas Danby, Leeds’s first mayor, is stabbed to death late at night in London

13 September 1893: A local inquest jury struggles with the death of James Gibbs, a miner shot by Staffordshire troops amid rioting at Samuel Lister Jr.’s mine at Pontefract

12 January 1825: Safety failings kill 24 in an explosion at Gosforth Pit, Middleton (Leeds), owner Charles Brandling MP, manager John Blenkinsop

20 December 1868: The Leeds authorities try to make Eliza Thurkill calmly admit she is dying so that, under English law, her hearsay statement may later hang her abortionist

8 July 1840: Hairdresser John Kitching of Wellington Road, Hunslet (Leeds) misinterprets the disposal by the murderer of the corpse of rag merchant William Rothery in the Aire as the drowning of a dog

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Comment

Comment

Kitching’s evidence is confusing:

1. His “Tuesday morning” must have been Wednesday morning, or the body would surely no longer have been losing blood. One would have thought too that it would have been discovered on Tuesday, since there is no evidence that it was weighted.
2. Though I have followed the Mercury in altering his “canal” to “river,” he must have known the difference.
3. Could he really have seen anything much at 3 in the morning over a distance of 400m? (Here‘s a slightly later map overlaid on OpenStreetMap – fiddle with the transparency.)

More on the Monk Pits Bridge / Monk Bridge.

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