Jonathan Geydon – The Murder of Mary White
This is the curious case of a killer who handed himself in more than 20 years after committing murder. What made him come forward after so long, when he could have continued to lay low, safe in the knowledge that he was unlikely to ever be found, in the days long before the advent of DNA?
On Sunday 21st June 1857, 70-year-old housekeeper Mary White was found dead in a small farmhouse at the foot of Friday Hill in the small Essex hamlet of Chingford Hatch. She lived there with her sister Mrs Small, and brother-in-law Mr John Small, a retired farmer, and sometime while the Smalls were out attending church, Mary had been hit over the head with a walking stick and her throat had been cut with a knife. When the Smalls returned after the service around midday to find Mary bleeding on the floor, they must have had cause to question the faith that had taken them from the house to their weekly worship. The house had also been ransacked, with drawers pulled open and items strewn everywhere. Some of Mr Small’s clothes had been stolen, along with some jewellery.
Suspicion immediately fell on a 26-year-old lawbreaker named Jonathan Geydon, who was well known for various misdemeanours and his bellicose countenance. His father had been a farmer in the parish and as a young boy, Geydon had run errands for him which frequently took him to and from the Smalls’ home, so he was a regular visitor there. The Geydons were a respectable family and Jonathan’s brother was a master tailor, while his two sisters had married into good families. Jonathan himself, however, had recently been released from Chelmsford Jail, after serving 18 months’ hard labour for horse theft, and the experience had done nothing to encourage him to follow a lawful path. On the night of Mary’s murder, Geydon was spotted walking towards the house, and was reported to have looked furtive and conspiratorial. Allegedly he warned the witness, ‘Sssh…Do not say you have seen me’. It turned out that Geydon had stolen a knife from prison before he was released, and it quickly became clear to the police that he was the number one suspect. It was essential to bring him in for questioning.
There was no difficulty in establishing that Geydon was likely responsible for the murder, but the trouble came with finding him. Nobody knew where the young vagabond was, and he had no fixed address. Police traced his parents to Gloucestershire, 160 miles west of Essex, who had tried to put as much distance between themselves and their wayward son as possible. They explained that they had been hounded out of Essex because of his bad behaviour – they couldn’t control him and didn’t want to face the blame for his increasingly violent antics. Detectives were disappointed, having hoped they would find Jonathon hiding with them.
They continued searching the area around Chingford, peering into hollow trees and beating bushes with sticks in case the criminal was lurking somewhere. Police suspected Geydon was hiding out in Epping Forest, which was one of his usual haunts where they had successfully traced him in the past. They even offered a reward of £100 for his capture, describing him as ‘a very ugly, unkempt fellow aged 26, 5’9”, with a dull countenance, small whiskers, and a number of nasty looking boils on his neck.’ One would think that Geydon must have been easy to spot, given his resemblance to an angry gargoyle according to the description, but he was nowhere to be found, and the murder slowly faded from public consciousness.
More than 22 years later in September 1879, a slightly deaf scruffy-looking tramp wandered into Horsham police station and announced, ‘My name is Jonathan Geydon, and I was the murderer of Mary White in 1857.’ He went on to explain that he had been a nomad ever since, moving around the country and sleeping rough, although he had spent some time in India working aboard a ship. He claimed that his conscience had been eating away at him for the last two decades and he had decided to come clean, but it may be more likely that his advancing age and ill-health forced him to the realisation that life as a ’gentleman of the road’ was no longer pleasant or sustainable. He may even have hoped that if he escaped the noose, he would be treated to a bed and a roof over his head in a comfortable prison; an enticing prospect after living so long as a vagrant. He certainly looked as though time had taken its toll, as his grey hair and stoop made him appear older than his 48 years.
Portrait of Jonathan Geydon and the murder house, [IPN, September 1879]
Several people, including Mr Small, identified the man as the Jonathan Geydon they had known 22 years ago, recognising his distinctive features even through the ravages of time. Small had been convinced that Geydon was either dead or had emigrated to Australia, so looking upon the face of the living, breathing man who had killed his sister-in-law came as something of a shock.
Geydon was tried at the Old Bailey, where his defence counsel, Horace Avery, tried to cast doubt on his identity by producing a handful of former soldiers who named the man in the dock as Charles Wilson, a private they had served with in the 5th Fusiliers. Another witness mentioned that the original Jonathon Geydon had a limp and had suffered a hernia while carrying out forced labour during his spell in prison for horse theft. The defence questioned how a limping man with such an injury could be accepted into the army, thereby planting a seed of doubt in the minds of the jury as to whether he was really the same person.
But the prosecution’s argument was strong. The prisoner had confessed and had an intimate understanding of details of the murder that could only have been known by the killer. All the defence testimonies proved was that Geydon had served as a soldier for a short time under a false name – and it wasn’t surprising that he would wish to go by an alias, given his past.
The jury found Jonathon Geydon guilty of murder. Sir Henry Hawkins, known ominously as the Hanging Judge, was behind the bar. When he reached for his black cap and placed it on his head with a sombre expression, Geydon must have known what was coming: those dreadful words condemning him to death like so many men and women before him. But all was not over for the itinerant wastrel. Several of the jurymen and some campaigners with humanitarian leanings petitioned for the sentence to be commuted to life imprisonment. They succeeded, and Geydon was removed from the Victorian equivalent of Death Row and into Pentonville prison in December 1879. By 1881, he had been moved to Woking Invalid Prison, but being indoors with regular meals did him a world of good, and he recovered his health and remained alive for a while longer, dwelling at various times in Dartmoor Prison, and then at Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight. He died in 1896 aged 65.
We don’t know why he decided to come forward after 22 years, and whether he often grappled with feelings of guilt and thoughts of the elderly housekeeper he had viciously murdered in 1857. Unfortunately for those who would like to know more about the strange workings of the criminal mind, the answers to those questions died with Geydon over 100 years ago.
Bondeson Jan, ‘Victorian Murders’, 2017, Amberley Publishing
British Newspaper Archive
https://www.digitalpanopticon.org/life?id=obpdef1-147-18551217