Read Online Fatal Families - Unleashing the evil within (Infamous Murderers) by Rodney Castleden - Free Book Online

average build and had shapely hands. She was not a beautiful woman, but she had plenty of male admirers – enough for her never to need to work. She launched herself on a short career as a ‘kept woman’.
    She had a relationship with a carpenter called John Pearcey. They did not marry, but Mary even so adopted his surname, perhaps to escape from the inevitable stigma attaching to her father’s name. She kept Pearcey’s name even after their relationship ended, and it ended so that Mary could go off with richer men. It must be significant that Pearcey was ready to give evidence against Mary at her trial: evidence that would help to hang her. One of these better off men, Charles Creighton, rented rooms for her at 2 Priory Street, Kentish Town in North London.
    Mary suffered from depression and took to drinking heavily. Mr Creighton visited her once a week, but she also became involved with Frank Hogg; although Hogg was a furniture remover, he had printed business cards and this impressed the class-conscious Mary Wheeler. She needed to make sure Creighton did not catch her while she was entertaining Hogg, so she had a simple arrangement with Hogg; she put a light in the window to show when she was available. He had his own key and could let himself in. Mary seems to have fallen for Frank Hogg and she increasingly saw his family – he had a wife and a daughter, both called Phoebe – as obstacles to her own happiness.
    Mary Wheeler had learnt nothing from her father’s trial and execution for murder. Just ten years after his execution, she committed her own murder. She murdered Phoebe Hogg, Frank’s wife. Phoebe Hogg was thirty-two and had been ill. She had married Frank Hogg only two years before, when she was three months pregnant by him. But Frank had been having an affair with Mary all the time, not only since their marriage but beforehand.
    On 24 October, 1890, Mary asked a boy called Willie Holmes to run an errand. That morning she gave him a penny to take a note to Phoebe Hogg inviting her to tea in the afternoon. At 4 p.m., tea-time, a neighbour heard the sound of breaking glass coming from Mary’s house and called over the garden fence to see if everything was all right. There was no answer.
    Three hours later a woman’s body was found lying on a pavement in Crossfield Road by a man walking home from work. He reported it to a policeman. The woman’s head was wrapped in a cardigan. When the policeman unwrapped it he found Phoebe’s face covered in blood and a deep gash across her throat. At the mortuary it was found that Phoebe had a fractured skull and that the throat had been cut so violently that the head was nearly severed. She also had bruises on her arms where she had tried to defend herself. There was no blood on the pavement where the body was found, so Phoebe had evidently been murdered elsewhere.
    The next day, the body of a little girl was found. She had been suffocated. Possibly she had been suffocated deliberately after the murder of her mother. Possibly she had been suffocated inadvertently when the mother’s body was dumped into the pram on top of her to wheel it away to dump it somewhere.
    Frank and his sister Clara reported Phoebe missing after they read about the finding of a woman’s body in the evening paper. Frank sent Clara round to Mary’s house to ask if she had seen Phoebe. Naturally she said she hadn’t. She then started behaving very oddly. She agreed to go to the mortuary with Clara to identify the body, but when she was there she tried to prevent Clara from identifying Phoebe. She became hysterical when the extent of Phoebe’s injuries was shown to them. The pram too had to be identified. One of Mary’s neighbours had seen Mary wheeling the pram with a large object in it on the evening when the murder took place.
    Frank Hogg was visited by the police, who had to tell him that his wife was dead. He was also inevitably a suspect, so he was searched. The police found the key to