The comparison in this case to The Banshees of Inisherin was too good to miss. This is how Charles Fookes shot his cousin in the head one day in 1862, for no apparent reason good enough to justify such a crime.
Killer: Charles Fookes
Victim: Daniel Joseph Stone
Dates: 29th August 1862
Location: Walditch, near Bridport
Method of Murder: Shooting
Timeline 1814? | Charles Fookes born 28.08.1862 | Martha Hallett flees the house 29.08.1862 | Fookes shoots and kills Stone 27.03.1863 | Fookes hanged for murder
The atmosphere in the village was a tense one. Charles Fookes, or Fooks as some spelled it, was not a happy man. He had low moods which often turned in the direction of paranoia or rage, and his neighbours all knew it.
At one point earlier in his life, he had locked himself into his house and worn a blanket over his head for a full six weeks, refusing to speak to anyone1.
He was described as a “tall, strong, dark-complexioned, fiery man, and not very well-liked in the village, where he was born and bred”2.
His neice was Martha Hallett; she lived in his house and had done for two decades by 1862, but she complained that he often threw her out as punishment for smiling or laughing. Whenever she did so, he believed she was poking fun at him3.
His mood was so black that week that she had fled their home, not wanting to stay for whatever might come next.
Another niece, Jane Fookes, testified that her uncle had actually warned her to stay away so that he would not hurt her4.
One of the thorns in Charles’ side was another distant relation of his, Daniel Stone. Daniel and he had quarrelled for many years. They were related by marriage - Charles' cousin having been married to Daniel’s sister5. In a town of only 200 residents, relationships like this were no doubt commonplace.
Stone was described as “of short stature, light-complexioned, a little joking man6”. Neither of the men were married, in spite of Charles being 48 and Stone about 30. Charles had reportedly fallen in love twice in his life, but after both of the women died prematurely, he apparently gave up on the idea7.
Sources are no longer clear on what caused them to fall out in the first place, but they certainly had bad blood for some time. Fookes reportedly thought that Stone was repeatedly spreading malicious rumours about him, to try to drive him out of the village.
The reports have it that Charles was sitting in his kitchen at about 8 in the morning on the 29th, reading a newspaper. He looked up and saw two men passing by his window: Parrett, a local man, and Daniel Stone, lost in conversation. Perhaps he thought Stone had snubbed him by not looking over and nodding a greeting.
Charles grabbed his gun, leapt to his feet, rushed outside - and fired.
Daniel Stone was killed instantly as one or both of the bullets from the double-barrelled gun hit him in the back of the head.
Immediately on seeing Stone drop to the floor, Charles rushed back inside his own home and locked the door. He then ran upstairs, and the townspeople heard a third shot fire from inside the house.
A neighbour named Mr. Shepherd grabbed a ladder and looked into the house from an upstairs window. There he saw Charles sprawled across the floor with a wound in his own head - though after bursting open the doors of the house with a crowbar, he discovered that this injury was not fatal.
Charles had apparently reloaded both barrels and attempted to fire them with his foot, resulting in only a superficial wound that nonetheless knocked him senseless.
Mr. Shepherd was heard to remark that “this was not the work of a day, but of 15 years, and he hoped it would be a warning to the parish”8.
Police-sergeant Lavender came to arrest Charles and take him away.
“See what comes of annoying a nervous man,9” Charles said, apparently delighted that he had managed to kill Stone. He did not seem to repent of his crime at any point in his trial.
Dr. Smith of Weymouth looked Charles over and declared he was suffering from little more than indigestion - but Charles had a different idea. He told him of persistent headaches that he insisted were caused by a demon, which he asked the doctor to drive out so he would not be sent to an asylum10.
Charles’ lawyers tried to plead insanity, but there were enough people from the village prepared to testify that he had threatened violence against Stone on more than one occasion and had a violent temper.
Psychiatrist Dr Harrington Tuke told the court that Charles suffered from a homicidal and suicidal “monomania” that he could not control. But prison surgeons Dr Good and Mr Hyme, on the other hand, argued that he seemed in full possession of his faculties and therefore must also have been so at the time of the murder.
Dr Tuke sent a letter to the medical journal The Lancet, though it was not published until Fookes had been hanged. “It has been found difficult – so strong is the prejudice against him in Dorsetshire – to procure sufficient signatures to a petition for a remission of his sentence,” the doctor wrote. “[We have]... laid the evidence of the insanity of the convict before the Home Secretary and have petitioned for a pardon, or for a reprieve in order that the mental state of the unhappy man may receive further investigation. I can only express my hope that… the mercy of the Crown may be extended to the unhappy prisoner, now in peril of death for a crime which he struggled long against… a crime inconsistent with the tenor of his blameless life.11”
The intervention of the doctor came to nothing. Charles Fookes was not to be saved. He went to the gallows on Friday 27th March of 186312; alongside him on the platform was Edwin Preedy, a 20-year-old who had killed a prison warder.
A grandstand was built13 to allow some five thousand people to watch their execution. Many of them were women from lower classes, gathering out of morbid curiosity or perhaps lack of entertainment. The seats cost 2s and 6p each. So many people had gathered that the stand actually collapsed under their weight.
Charles was at first indifferent and sullen, according to newspaper reports at the time14, but later cheered up a little and engaged in enthusiastic prayer. He was at least six foot two and heavy; this worked in his favour. When the gallows dropped, he died instantly.
A cast of his head made by Thomas Voss is now stored in the Dorset County Museum.
This was the last public hanging carried out in Dorset.
https://www.dorset.live/news/history/dorset-murder-case-charles-fookes-6441150#
https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0002039/18620911/132/0007
https://www.dorset.live/news/history/dorset-murder-case-charles-fookes-6441150#
https://www.dorset.live/news/history/dorset-murder-case-charles-fookes-6441150#
https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0002039/18620911/132/0007
https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0002039/18620911/132/0007
https://www.dorset.live/news/history/dorset-murder-case-charles-fookes-6441150#
https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0002039/18620911/132/0007
https://www.dorset.live/news/history/dorset-murder-case-charles-fookes-6441150#
https://www.dorset.live/news/history/dorset-murder-case-charles-fookes-6441150#
https://www.dorset.live/news/history/dorset-murder-case-charles-fookes-6441150#
https://www.truecrimelibrary.com/crimearticle/charles-fooks-and-edwin-preedy/
https://www.dorsetecho.co.uk/news/features/lookingback/18522037.doctor-john-goods-surgery-48-high-west-street-dorchester/
https://myancestors.wordpress.com/2008/08/21/execution-at-dorchester/