Five Devonshire Murderesses

by Julia Joyce

The Devon Lent Assizes were opened on Saturday 10 March 1866. Charlotte Winsor was awaiting a fourth attempt by her solicitor Mr Folkard to ward off the hangman’s noose with the use of legal technicalities. Mary Jane Harris was awaiting her Majesty’s Pleasure, to discover her fate after she had removed the noose from her own neck by placing it solely on the neck of Charlotte Winsor.Young Cornishwoman Elizabeth Duff had smothered the infant she had brought into the world. Elderly Alice Dobb’s ‘demonic propensity for poisoning’ almost resulted in the death of five victims, all of whom were members of her own family.Finally, Mary Ann Ashford, whose deliberate death plot was based on the worst of motives, and aimed against the one who of all others should have been safe from her wickedness.These five women, languishing in Exeter Gaol in the spring of 1866, were in many ways, very different, but they had several things in common. They were all West Country women who had taken, or tried to take the lives of those entrusted to them to cherish and care for. Their crimes were those normally seen in large towns and cities with their seductions of sensuality and vice. Urban profligacy had no place in the beautiful hills and valleys and the picturesque hamlets and fishing ports of the idyllic Devonshire countryside.Here are their stories.

321 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 24, 2020

About the author

While taking an MA in English at the University of Reading, I was particularly interested in the link between fictional and factual nineteenth century murders, and I carried out a lot of research around the subject. A couple of years later, I was curious to come across an article regarding the death by poisoning of Annie Holmes in St Neots, Huntingdonshire (now Cambridgeshire), as I had never heard of this particular case before. The article set me off on a hunt for more information, and after spending so much time on the research I decided to write a book for Kindle in the hope that it might be of interest to others.
I am really thrilled to see that family members of the people involved in the story have read, and hopefully have all enjoyed, my account of events.

All the facts in the narrative have been very carefully researched and all dialogue has been taken from contemporary trial and newspaper accounts.