The Petts Wood Murders: How Joseph Waller Took the Lives of Edward and Elizabeth Ellis

Joseph Waller was born in St Mary Cray near Chislehurst, Kent, in 1857 and seemed by all accounts to be a perfectly ordinary child. He aspired to join the police force and went to London to become a constable with the Metropolitan Police, having no inkling that his dream profession would lead to his downfall.

One day in 1878, when Joseph was 21, he and several fellow officers were chasing a band of robbers, who tried to take shelter inside a church. The gang hid inside a vault, and as one of the youngest and newest recruits, Waller drew the short straw. His fellow police officers lowered him down into the vault on a rope so he could make the arrests. As he was suspended above the dark, gaping chasm, the rope snapped, sending Waller plummeting below, where he landed awkwardly, sustaining a concussion and spinal injuries.

He spent three weeks in hospital and by the time he was discharged, his physical injuries were on the mend, but the unseen effects of his fall ran far deeper. His parents noticed that his behaviour was more aggressive, and on his return to the constabulary, he didn’t last long in his job before he was sacked for disorderly conduct. He went back to live with his parents in St Mary Cray and supported himself by taking up various labouring jobs. In 1879, a year after the accident, he started working for a 74-year-old gamekeeper named Edward Ellis, who patrolled the Petts Wood estate of local Justice of the Peace, Mr Berens, looking for poachers. Ellis had been working for Berens for 50 years and lived in a small cottage on the grounds. He had lived in Kent all his life and had two grown-up daughters, Harriet and Sarah. His wife Mary had died in 1871, and Edward had recently remarried, to a 60-year-old maid named Elizabeth who also worked for the Berens family. Now that Edward was getting older, he found it helpful to have the assistance of a younger man looking after the estate, but he was disappointed with Joseph’s unreliability and aggressive attitude and told him to look for work elsewhere, refusing to employ him again.

On Saturday 30 October 1880, Joseph Waller was still out of work and went for a drink in the Five Bells pub in St Mary Cray. He started an argument with another patron and was thrown out, so he wandered about aimlessly until the early hours of the following morning. He climbed over a locked gate, ignoring a sign which read, ‘No Trespassing’, and took up residence in an empty pigsty. The farmer was awake long before sunrise to begin his duties and found Joseph on his land shortly afterwards. He told him to leave, and immediately went to the police to report him for trespassing.

On his way home, Joseph Waller felt the uncontrollable urge to kill spreading over him. He had a revolver in his pocket, and he let his fingers brush against the metal as he tried unsuccessfully to fight the temptation to use it. Blaming the elderly gamekeeper Edward Ellis for all his troubles, he marched towards the Berens estate where he fired a shot into the night, then knocked on the door of Ellis’s cottage and told him there were poachers in the area. Ellis was half asleep and didn’t stop to question why Joseph had been on the estate and was simply grateful that he had informed him of the danger. He quickly got dressed and came outside with a lantern in one hand, and a truncheon in the other. They walked for about a quarter of a mile, at which point Ellis asked in confusion where the poachers were. Joseph did not reply, but suddenly grabbed Ellis’s truncheon and bludgeoned the 74-year-old gamekeeper over the head repeatedly. Ellis was an active man and desperately tried to defend himself, receiving several broken fingers in the process. He managed to gasp out a question to his attacker, saying, ‘Joe, did I ever do you any harm?’ In response, Joseph pulled out his revolver and shot him in the head without a second thought.

Joseph Waller searched the old man for valuables and left his body lying in the woodland, before returning to the gamekeeper’s cottage and knocking on the door. Edward’s wife Elizabeth opened it and asked where her husband was. Joseph already had a plan. He told her that Edward had been attacked by poachers in the wood and needed her help, so Elizabeth lit another lantern and quickly followed him. Once they were deep inside the woods, Waller repeated his violent outburst, beating Elizabeth over the head with the truncheon and then shooting her with his gun.

Joseph Waller left the two bodies behind in Petts Wood and returned to the gamekeeper’s cottage, trying to get inside to steal any money or items worth taking. A police constable spotted him and demanded to know what he was doing, but when Joseph calmly replied that he was waiting for Edward Ellis, the constable accepted his story and walked away, not noticing his bedraggled appearance and the blood on his clothes and hands.

Joseph walked back to his parents’ house in St Mary Cray but was surprised to see a police officer waiting for him there. They had no idea yet about the atrocity he had committed but had come to question him over the trespassing incident reported earlier by the local farmer. The officer took Waller to the police station, and when they searched him, they found his revolver and saw for the first time that his clothes were stained with blood. Before they had a chance to ask him about it, Waller calmly announced, ‘You have a good charge. If you have eight men and two stretchers, you go to old Ellis’s, and there you will see two dead bodies.’

‘Who are they?’ asked Inspector Higgins.

‘Edward Ellis and his wife,’ came the calm reply. ‘I have knocked them to pieces.’

He explained where he had left the bodies, and the police found them exactly as Waller had described. He freely gave a written statement confessing to the murders, but claimed he had no animosity towards Ellis, allowing the police to believe that the motive had been robbery. While awaiting trial, he scratched a picture onto the wall of his jail cell depicting the cottage and the woods that had been the scene of the savage double murder, then wrote underneath, ‘Joseph Waller, charged with wilful murder of Edward and Elizabeth Ellis; shot down with a revolver by me, Joseph Waller.’ Next to it, he drew a macabre picture of a gallows with a figure dangling from a rope, aware that this would be his likely fate.

The coroner’s inquest was held on Friday 12 November 1880, less than two weeks after the murder, and a large crowd gathered outside, repelled and intrigued in equal measure by the ghastly crime. Joseph’s mother pushed her way through into the courtroom screaming, ‘I will see my darling, he’s my child, I will stand by his side at the dock to the last. I will give my evidence for him. I will speak for him myself and you shall not keep me away. I am determined to stand here and speak to the gentlemen for him.’ She stood resolutely by the side of the dock and waited for her son to appear, handcuffed and flanked by two police officers. The evidence was presented, and the magistrates returned a verdict of wilful murder against Joseph Waller. At the end of the inquest, Mrs Waller told the court, ‘He should have been in the madhouse a long time ago. I have been afraid of him all my lifetime. Since he was a child, he has served me just as bad as the dead people.’ She then turned to her son and said, ‘We will have plenty of witnesses for you at the trial.’ Joseph sneered and said sarcastically, ‘Yes, you’ll have a fine lot of witnesses for me, you’ll get the same witnesses there as you’ve got here, and no more, and I shall be hanged.’ The mood of the crowd outside was so violent that the police had to smuggle Waller out of the back exit and across a field to get him safely back to his cell without being lynched by the angry mob.

The trial was held at Maidstone Assizes on Friday 21 January 1881. Despite his premonitory sketch in the police cell and the statement he made to his mother, Joseph was not to be hanged after all, as the medical evidence showed him to be insane. He was admitted to Broadmoor but gave no sign that he understood what this meant. He lived at the asylum until his death in April 1923 at the age of 66. Some sources claim that he was sent to St Luke’s Asylum instead, but admission registers and census documents prove that he was an inmate of Broadmoor.

The tombstone of Mr and Mrs Ellis reads poignantly, ‘Died by the hands of an assassin in Petts Wood, St Paul’s Cray Common’, while the gamekeeper’s cottage still exists and is lived in today by a member of the National Trust. Did Joseph Waller’s accident in the line of his duties as a police constable cause some kind of head injury which led to his sudden aggression? Or maybe his mother’s words at the inquest, ‘I have been afraid of him all my lifetime’, implied that his compulsion to kill had always been there under the surface, waiting for the right moment to present itself…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sources

Leicester Journal – Friday 05 November 1880

Bury Times – Saturday 13 November 1880

Grantham Journal – Saturday 13 November 1880

Christchurch Times – Saturday 13 November 1880

Illustrated Police News (IPN), 13^th and 20 November 1880

Ancestry

 

PG 04/11/24