James Henry Hancock - did he kill the wrong person during a temper tantrum?


James Henry Hancock - did he kill the wrong person during a temper tantrum?

54 year old James Hancock was born in Sheffield and in 1894 he moved to Cambridge, where two years later he met and went to live with Eliza Marshall in Water Street, Chesterton.  

They frequently quarrelled and Eliza sought the help of her brother, Alfred Doggett, to protect her.  Both James and Alfred were coke (as in fuel) dealers and this together with the strained domestic relationship made for a tense atmosphere when they came into contact.

A row developed between James and Eliza on the morning of Friday, March the 4th 1910 and as usual Eliza fetched her brother, who having calmed things down somewhat, proceeded to take over James' coke round for that day.

When Alfred returned in the late afternoon, James was in Eliza's house.  James challenged Alfred in the stable over "stealing" his round and a fight broke out in which Alfred was stabbed in the neck with a carving knife. This being witnessed by Eliza.  Alfred died in hospital soon afterwards.

Hancock was arrested and came to trial at the Spring Assizes in Cambridge on the 28th of May 1910.  Mr. Justice Phillimore was the trial judge, the prosecution was led by Theobald Mathew and James was defended by Grafton Pryor.  

The defence claimed that in the struggle Alfred must have fallen on the knife and that Hancock had no intention of killing him - therefore he was, at most, only guilty of manslaughter.  Hancock had told witnesses after the killing that he was sorry that he had killed Alfred but had meant to kill Eliza.  He repeated this to the police and also told them that it would be three weeks before "he got his neck stretched".

Toward the end of the trial medical evidence was admitted showing that as Hancock was left handed he could not have inflicted the single (fatal) stab wound if he had fallen under Alfred as had been claimed by his defence.  The jury came back with the inevitable guilty verdict very quickly and Hancock was duly sentenced to death.  There was no appeal.

At 8.00 a.m. on Tuesday the 14th of June 1910, Henry Pierrepoint carried out the death sentence within the execution shed at Cambridge Gaol, assisted by his brother Thomas.  Hancock weighed 142 lbs. and Pierrepoint gave a drop of 7’ 3” on account of his “short and muscular neck and general muscular development”. Later that day, after the formal inquest, Hancock's body was buried in an unmarked grave within the prison walls, with the Chaplain, the Rev. Frank Hird, conducting a short burial service.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

War crime hangings at Landsberg in May 1946.

Image
War crime hangings at Landsberg in May 1946. With special thanks to Traugott Vitz for his help with this article. Over two days at the end of May 1946, 28 German war criminals were hanged at Landsberg am Lech prison in Germany (US War Criminals Prison No. 1). The Dachau concentration camp was liberated by two divisions of the U.S. Seventh Army on the 29th of April, 1945.  40 members of it staff were tried at the camp by a US General Military Court, presided over by Brigadier General John Lenz. The trials lasted from the 15th of November to the 13th of December 1945.  36 defendants received the death sentence.  Eight of these sentences were reduced to terms of imprisonment by the Reviewing Authority, the remaining 28 death sentences being confirmed. The trial went under the designation “USA against Martin Gerhard Weiß (Weiss) et al.”, Case No. 000-50-2. Martin Gerhard Weiss was the camp commandant at Dachau.  This trial became the “Parent Case” for 488 other trials (a...
Read more

Kristina Zhuk was 23 years old, her daughter Kira was 10 months old when they were killed in Gorlovka.

Image
Kristina Zhuk was 23 years old, her daughter Kira was 10 months old when they were killed in Gorlovka.  The young mother was buried with the baby in her arms.  A terrible tragedy then excited the world, the pictures spread all over the world, and the deceased Christina was then called the Gorlovka Madonna.  Two years have passed since the murder of the "Gorlovskaya Madonna"...    On July 27, 2014, the city of Gorlovka was subjected to massive shelling by Ukrainian security forces.  The Grad multiple launch rocket launchers were launched.  As a result of shelling Gorlovka from heavy guns from July 27 to July 29, 100 people were injured, 27 more died, four of them were children, the city council reported.  Among the dead were Christina Zhuk and her daughter.  A picture from the square on Rudakova Street, which depicts the dead Kristina and Kira, was posted on the Internet by blogger Oleg Zhelyabin-Nezhinskiy.    After filming at the s...
Read more

U.S. Army Hangman John C. Woods Intentionally Botched Nazi Executions To Ensure Their Agonizing Deaths.

Image
U.S. Army Hangman John C. Woods Intentionally Botched Nazi Executions To Ensure Their Agonizing Deaths. The  Nuremberg executions  took place on 16 October 1946, shortly after the conclusion of the Nuremberg trials. Ten prominent members of the political and military leadership of Nazi Germany were executed by hanging: Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Alfred Jodl, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Wilhelm Keitel, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg, Fritz Sauckel, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, and Julius Streicher.  Hermann GΓΆring was also scheduled to be hanged on that day, but committed suicide using a potassium cyanide capsule the night before.  Martin Bormann was also sentenced to death  in absentia ; at the time his whereabouts were unknown, but it is now thought that he committed suicide or was killed by Soviet troops while attempting to escape Berlin on 2 May 1945. The sentences...
Read more

Freedomite

Image
Freedomite The  Freedomite  movement consists of a split-off of the Doukhobors, a community of Spiritual Christians began a mass migration from Russia to Canada in 1898. The Freedomite movement first appeared in 1902 in Saskatchewan, and later in the Kootenay and Boundary Districts of British Columbia. Freedomites began to divide from Doukhobors in 1902 in Saskatchewan, Canada, self-named as "God's people" and  Svobodniki  (Russian: "sovereign people"). The faction, later called "Freedomites", opposed land ownership, public schools, using work animals, etc. and are mainly known for protesting nude. By 1920 the common English term for them became  Sons of Freedom . Of about 20,000 active Doukhobors in Canada today, ancestors of about 2,500 were Freedomites, and many descendants have joined the USCC Community Doukhobors. Doctrine Freedomite meetings were similar to other spiritual Christian folk-Protestants fr...
Read more

THE RED ROOMS OF THE DEEP WEB

Image
THE RED ROOMS OF THE DEEP WEB This topic seems so simple that it is almost obvious, but you will find that it is far from so. Many of us, even just out of curiosity, have tried to inform us on the internet if there really is a deep web and to what extent sites go down illegally. The Red Room would be "the apotheosis of illegality", where through a live streaming viewers can decide the fate of a victim, even going as far as his death. But do such sites really exist or are they an urban legend? I will try to get there by steps. The term "Red Room" derives from the Japanese metropolitan legend "Red Room Curse", which in turn refers to a horror animation created in Adobe Flash of 2000 in Japan. So if we really want to be picky, we will never find a site called "Red Room" on the deep web (unless the authors are very, very stupid). Until a few years ago the red rooms were considered a hoax invented by some perverted individual and with a bad morality, ...
Read more

Lina Medina the youngest confirm mother

Image
Lina Medina the youngest confirm mother Lina Medina was a Peruvian girl who was born in 1933, and she is the youngest confirmed mother in medical history. At the age of five, her parents brought her to a hospital in Pisco, Peru, because they believed she had a tumor that was causing her abdomen to protrude. However, the doctors determined that Lina was actually about seven months pregnant. Lina gave birth to a healthy baby boy via caesarean section on May 14, 1939, at the age of five years, seven months, and 21 days. The identity of the biological father has never been determined, and there have been various theories and speculations about how Lina became pregnant at such a young age. Some have suggested that she may have been the victim of sexual abuse, while others have proposed that she may have had a rare hormonal condition that caused early puberty and fertility. Lina and her son were raised by her parents, and both lived relatively normal lives. Lina never revealed the identity o...
Read more

During World War II, millions of people were sent to concentration camps, including women.

Image
During World War II, millions of people were sent to concentration camps, including women. Women in concentration camps were subjected to brutal treatment and often faced more severe conditions than their male counterparts. The conditions in the camps were inhumane, and women were often subjected to forced labor, starvation, and medical experiments. Women were treated differently in concentration camps than men. They were often separated from their families, forced to perform hard labor, and subjected to sexual abuse. Women who were pregnant were also subjected to harsh conditions and medical experimentation. Many women were killed, either as part of the genocide or because they were deemed too weak to continue working. One of the most notorious concentration camps where women were held was Auschwitz-Birkenau. There, women were subjected to forced labor, starvation, and medical experimentation. Many were killed in gas chambers or through other forms of execution. The camp was designed ...
Read more

The capture of brave Russian officer Rosinski

Image
The capture of brave Russian officer Rosinski This is a shocking image and I apologize in advance for sharing it, but here’s one that truly got to me… in Belarus, 1918, after WWI had already ended, the brave Russian officer Rosinski was captured by the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks tortured the captain, likely to get information out of the man, which he bravely refused to give. After that, they simply continued with the torture out of some sick sense of innate cruelty. He was ‘the enemy’ and he was at their mercy, so they brutally murdered their captive. The brave captain was emasculated. And anally impaled on a tree branch. All this while still alive. Alfred Savoir, the man who published the picture and was an eye witness to the death of the brave military officer, described "M. B.", who ordered this atrocity, thus: I knew him not long ago; he was a charming teenager with an ironic wit and joker. He was rubbed with French culture, he admired the novels of Barres and he quot...
Read more

The Top 6 Deadliest Genocides.

Image
  The Top 6 Deadliest Genocides . Throughout human history, there have been several terrible genocides where millions of people lost their lives. These genocides were carried out with deliberate and systematic violence, targeting specific groups based on their ethnicity, religion, or politics. Even though these events are very dark, it’s important to talk about them so that we can prevent them from happening again. The top 7 deadliest genocides in history have left a lasting impact on the world and are still studied, discussed, and debated by historians and scholars today. From the Holocaust, which claimed the lives of 6 million Jews, to the Bengali Genocide, which resulted in the deaths of 3 million people, each of these genocides represents a harrowing chapter in human history. Here, we will examine the shocking reality of the top 7 deadliest genocides that shook the world to its core. 1 Moriori massacre The Moriori people were the indigenous inhabitants of the Chatham Islan...
Read more

The Ocean Sunfish.

Image
The Ocean Sunfish. Also known as the 'Mola Mola', the Ocean Sunfish is the largest fish in existence, measuring up to 4 meters in height and 3 meters in length, with an enormous weight estimated between 200 and 400 kg. With its unique oval shape and a caudal fin resembling that of a shark, it is a completely harmless species. You might wonder why it suffers so much. Well, it is the perfect prey for all predators in the ocean: it is slow, clumsy, large (making it easy to spot and catch), with a thick layer of fat and skin (15 cm thick), a practically harmless set of teeth (as it feeds almost exclusively on plankton), and very limited reflexes. Because of these characteristics, the Ocean Sunfish inhabits the most central, isolated, and remote areas of the ocean, far away from the coasts and their proximity (which are rich in predators). Unfortunately, if this creature comes into contact with a shark, an orca, or a sea lion, its fate is inevitably the following: ...
Read more