THE newly-born boy had suffered a fatal fractured skull, but had he slipped from his mother’s grasp or had she smashed him over the head with a stone?

That was the simple issue for jurors to decide when Ann Goodhall sat in the dock at Hampshire Summer Assizes in 1855, charged with murder.

Everyone had a good word to say about her. She came from a respectable home and had worked diligently and honesty for her widowed employer in a Hampshire hamlet.

But perhaps the quiet life did not appeal to her and she left her service to join friends living near Portsmouth.

However, Mrs Evans, who lived at Droxford, invited her to tea one afternoon and asked if she would return to her job.

Goodhall accepted but over the course of the next few days and weeks, the widower noticed she was getting a fuller figure and was not trim as she once was.

“Are you pregnant?” she asked out of her concern.

“No,” she insisted.

Perhaps the question upset Goodhall and she determined to leave again, seemingly being picked up by chance by a man on a horse and cart en route from Alton to Gosport.

Goodhall was sleepy and said nothing of account until they reached Fareham where she asked to be dropped off and slowly began walking down a country lane.

Shortly afterwards a local farmer saw her sitting beside a hedge, rocking to and fro as though she was in pain.

Then he heard a child cry and Goodhall told him she had just become a young mother. The farmer, concerned at how freely she was perspiring, offered her refreshment but said she had just eaten at a local inn.

He went on his way but then turning round, noticed the woman had disappeared. Puzzled, he called in his young farm labourer and tracing his tracks, they found a large puddle of blood where the woman had sat.

They followed the trail of spots of blood, crossing a turnpike road and a wheat field where they suddenly heard a baby’s pitiful cry. His head and face were covered with bruises and by his side lay a stone smeared with blood.

The farmer gently carried the baby home but his endeavour was ill-rewarded with the infant dying within minutes.

Goodhall was traced to her family home in Portsea, Portsmouth, and arrested.

At her trial in front of Mr Justice Coleridge, the crucial evidence came from surgeon William Case who confirmed the child had died from a fractured skull.

“I think the stone might have produced such injuries, which might have been done by striking the head with it or knocking the head against it. I should think the injuries to both sides of the head could not have been caused by one fall.”

However, under cross-examination, Case accepted that from the state of the mother, it was very likely she had dropped the child from her arms.

Mr Slade, who was defending, seized the point.

In his speech to the jury, he asserted the medical evidence was far from decisive.

“The mother, from whom blood was dropping, had become so weak that the child had dropped from her arms.

"To suppose that the woman had used the stone as an instrument of destruction is absurd. Had she struck the head of so young an infant there would not have been a vestige of the head remaining. It would have been smashed to atoms.”

Mr Slade then called Mrs Evans who spoke of Goodhall in the highest terms.

“She is of the kindest disposition and her family has always taken a great interest in her.”

Following a detailed summing up and the need to concentrate on the evidence of the surgeon, the judge asked them to retire to consider their verdict.

It was not long before the jury returned with a ‘not guilty’ verdict and she was discharged.