Tag Archives: armley prison

1952: Alfred Moore

Posted on by

On this date in 1952, poultry farmer and burglar Alfred Moore hanged at Leeds (Armley) Prison for shooting two Huddersfield policemen dead. Many believe he was wrongly convicted.

Suspected (accurately) of robbing several rural domiciles around Kirkheaton in West Yorkshire, Moore’s farmhouse had been staked out late one night in 1951 by ten plainclothes cops hoping to catch the guy coming or going.

Near midnight, two of their number challenged someone approaching. Was this the master criminal?

Several shots rang out in the gloom, and the midnight rambler fled into the night. By the time their comrades reached them, Duncan Fraser lay dead while Gordon Jagger was mortally wounded.

The latter man would live on several more hours, enough to provide a deathbed identification of Moore as the shooter. That was damning enough to hang Moore at the time.

But years later, Moore’s claims of innocence in the shootings have returned to headlines: we’re far more conscious now of the unreliability of eyewitness identifications — of a stranger seen in the dark — made amid medical duress. And there was never any other evidence implicating Moore save the circumstantial inference following from the fact that it was Moore’s house that was being surveilled. But no ballistics evidence, no blood (the shooting occurred at near point blank range), and no other witness. Investigators even have the name of an alternate suspect. (It’s Clifford Mead, who committed several armed robberies in the area, was known to receive Moore’s stolen goods, and allegedly boasted of shooting two policemen.)

These innocence claims, latterly supported by some Yorkshire police officers, have been welcome news to Moore’s descendants; however, as of this writing, the official reviews of the Criminal Cases Review Commission which could potentially queue Moore up for formal posthumous exoneration have failed to persuade authorities.

On this day..

1903: Emily Swann and John Gallagher, the Wombwell murderers

Posted on by

On this date in 1903, a 42-year-old mother of 11 was hanged side by side with her 30-year-old lover for murdering an abusive husband in the small South Yorkshire town of Wombwell.

That June, Emily Swann had shown her outgoing boarder and lover John Gallagher (together with some neighbors) the results of William Swann’s latest beating. John returned to the house and repaid the injuries in kind — and with interest.

After some minutes of fighting audible to the neighbors, Bill had been beaten to death.

Emily’s battered-wife situation might cut a lot more ice today, but by the jurisprudence of the day it was a fairly straightforward case, especially since all kinds of incriminating remarks were attributed by the neighbors to both Emily and John — “Give it to him, Johnnie, punch him to death,” for instance, and Gallagher’s own mid-bout respite at a neighbor’s house where he reported having broken four ribs with plans to break more. Both illustrated a level of intent among both parties beyond the heat of passion.

And you wouldn’t say the authorities were disposed to sympathize with Emily’s situation in general. They rather viewed her immorality — with John and otherwise — as the cause of the thrashings William gave her.

the wonder is that he has not killed her. He has frequently gone home after leaving work and found his wife drunk in the house and nothing prepared for him in the way of food. (case file comment, quoted here)

Fortified by a stiff drink of brandy, Emily Swann glided onto the platform at Leeds’ Armley Prison beside her already-trussed defender and delivered the somewhat famous greeting, “Good morning John.” Gallagher managed to return the salutation, and a few seconds before both were launched into eternity, she replied, “Good-bye. God bless you.”

It was an unusual exchange because the English execution protocol did not solicit remarks from the doomed prisoner, and in the occasional double hangings,* most participants were too frightened, awed or preoccupied to make small talk with their fellow-sufferers in the few seconds available.

* England would soon do away with double hangings altogether. Subsequent convicts to be hanged “together,” like Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters, were in fact executed simultaneously but at different prisons.

On this day..