Look back: Mother faced trial for girl’s ‘murder’

“I did it,” she cried.

Her stunned solicitor immediately approached the dock for a hushed conversation.

“No, I didn’t say that,” she then replied in answer to the clerk of the court when re-arraigned. “I know I did it.”

The bemused solicitor then directed her once more and this time she shouted: “No, oh, no. Not that, I am not guilty.”

Mr Justice Cave directed his attention to counsel’s row. “Who defends the prisoner?”

The Hon. Bernard Coleridge MP stood up. “I do My Lord.”

“Well, what does your client say?”

“She says she is not guilty.”

“Very well, let the case proceed.”

And so began the trial of Hannah Pickthall who was charged with the murder of her infant daughter, May.

News of the bizarre circumstances surrounding the infant’s death had gripped Southampton and every seat in the public gallery was taken before the judge took his seat for hearing at Hampshire Assizes on July 30, 1887.

It was accepted by both sides that on the morning of May’s death, she had been acting oddly.

“Some form of mania,” the prosecutor, Mr Tickell suggested.

Her irrational behaviour climaxed with her kneeling on the road outside her house in Millbrook Road with the child in her arms, screaming: “My God and my Lord.”

A compassionate neighbour persuaded her to come into her home and calmed her down.

Pickthall remained there for some two hours, having dinner and once carrying the child for a gentle stroll around the garden. All seemed well when she left but shortly afterwards the neighbour again heard her “screaming and raving”.

She asked a friend decorating her home to investigate and when he scaled the wall dividing the two houses, saw Pickthall entering her back garden through a side gate.

She shouted: “May the Lord forgive me, I have done the deed. I am a sinner now.” And with that, she flung little May to the floor, despite his valiant efforts to catch her. He picked up the child and took her indoors where she soon died from a fractured skull.

The prosecutor told jurors the issue in the case was simple. “Was the child thrown down purposely or whether she fell because of an accident?”

To determine that, he invited them to hear what she told a surgeon after May’s death: “I am a great sinner, Hell is open to me. I threw the child on the ground, God made me do it.”

Furthermore, when charged, she told a constable: “Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus.

Will I be condemned for killing my child?”

Mr Tickell said he would bring evidence to prove that she had been visited by homicidal mania.

“If you come to the conclusions she committed the deed purposely, though not responsible for her actions, you will be able to return a verdict in accordance with the law.”

Not surprisingly, Coleridge did not call Pickstall, who by the start of the prosecution’s case had opened, appeared to take no more than a passive interest in the proceedings.

Instead he concentrated on the decorator’s evidence, attacking its inconsistency. “In one breath he says she threw the child to the ground, in another he cannot say whether she let it fall or whether she stumbled. Indeed his evidence distinctly negatived the assumption she threw the child to the ground.”

In his summing up, the judge told jurors that if they were satisfied she had thrown the child to the ground, she was guilty of murder.

“Though, as she is undoubtedly not responsible for her actions, you could say she is not guilty because of insanity.

“On the other hand, if you consider the death of the child was an accident, you will of course acquit her altogether.”

He told them to principally consider the evidence of the decorator who he viewed as “a muddle-minded man”.

Jurors consulted among themselves before the foreman said they were unanimous in their verdict, only for one to suddenly shout ‘No’.

They then consulted for a further five minutes before reaching a verdict of not guilty.

The judge asked whether her husband was in court. When Coleridge pointed him out, the judge directed: “Let him take charge of her.”

Pickstall, who had been exceedingly quiet during the one-day case, was then discharged.