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Wednesday, October 10, 2012

A Notorious Crime

I decided to tell you a story that I read , and I have changed the names because the story is based on a true story. I will begin with the first part of the story, but before I continue I would like to share some of my products with you. I am hoping you will check them out.

In the eyes of the press of the time of Jane X may have been repulsive at worst but in the eyes of the two men in her life, she was a desirable and attractive woman. She married John Doe around 1840 ,she was 22 and she bore him eight kids before he got sick. Leprosy was very common in the last half of the 19th century and a very debilitating disease. And John was forbidden to make love to Jane by the parish priest.

Jane was born into poverty and ignorance, John was a woodcutter by trade. As he got worse he was less and less able to work and provide for his family , so the kids became wards of the parish. Now Billy Brown a 25 year old man as poor as the Doe’s befriended them and the whole family moved into his one room cabin . Husky Billy Brown fathered Jane’s next two children over the following ten years of misery for John who’s body was covered with sores. He was often confined to bed because of his terrible pain. Yet surprisingly, in the spring of 1872 his condition started to improve. Soon he was moving from bed to a chair and then walking with a cane. He started going to the woods to chop wood.

Jane was then pregnant with Billy’s third child. She had been bugging Billy for the past two years to kill her husband, now with John’s health improving Jane became more persistent. Even in front of visitors she would urge Billy to kill him. At one time she openly debated the merits of a knife, blows to the head, or strangulation, and options she believed might be considered a natural death. Billy regularly told her he didn’t have the heart to do it. John apparently was aware of Jane’s plotting. ( are you still following the story? To be continued further in my blog…. Now I would like you to just have a look at a few of my products that you can find at

 
All the pictures I have posted  will be at the following urls:
 
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Part Two of the story

On April 10th when Billy’s sister was visiting them, John took his axe and went to the woods around 8 o’clock in the morning. Billy left about an hour later, he came back and talked to Jane outside in the yard then went back to the woods for a half hour. When he got back the second time, Jane went to the woods and she too came back in a half hour at which time Billy washed himself and changed clothes. Jane threw the clothes into the loft and continued her visit with Billy’s sister. By four o’clock Billy’s sister wondered where John was , so Jane told her where to go and she set out into the woods, to find John was lying dead in a clearing, it looked as if John had been hit on the head with an axe but she could not see the axe anywhere. Billy was distressed with the news but Jane was her usual easy going self. Billy and his neighbor went to get John’s body , and brought it to the cabin where Jane washed the blood off and tied a white bandanna around John’s head to hide the cut. Billy kept saying he did not kill him. The inquest held two days later attached no blame but the next day Billy went to the magistrate and confessed in front of witnesses ,that he had killed John. He said he killed him with a stick and his fists, not with an axe and he said that Jane had nagged him into committing the murder. The medical evidence did not agree with Billy’s confession but indicated that the fatal wound might have been with the blunt edge of an axe. Billy was put in jail to await trial, telling anyone who would listen that Jane had been after him for two years to kill John and warned him that if he didn’t do it, she would. He also said that when he left ,John was alive and trying to crawl. Jane was arrested and charged with the murder of her husband. The police believed that when Billy returned after beating John, Jane went into the woods and finished the job. But they couldn’t prove itBilly went to trial, and it took the jury only 20 minutes to reach a guilty verdict and recommended mercy because he had confessed and said he was sorry. Jane was next, she was charged with being an accessory before the fact, and the same evidence which convicted her lover was presented by the same lawyers before the same judge and heard by the same jury but with one exception, Billy was called to testify against her. But the judge later said that Jane’s influence over him was apparently as strong as ever. The jury took an hour to deliberate but they came back with a guilty verdict, with no recommendation for mercy. They were both sentenced to death ,Jane was given a reprise because she was pregnant. To the amazement of reporters, neither prisoners showed any reaction to the sentence, it was some time because they learned the reason why. The judge had delivered the sentence in English and the interpreter forgot to translate to French. Because they could not speak English , Jane and Billy left the courthouse ignorant of their fate. In October they hanged Billy. Strangely Jane’s sentence was commuted in December to life in prison where she remained for the next ten years. She was pardoned in June the following year and lived with one of her children. Was justice served?

Thanks for reading today’s blog, and don’t forget to visit my store at

http://www.zazzle.com/allicor

Chow for now.

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