Edith Jessie Thompson (25 December 1893 – 9 January 1923) and Frederick Edward Francis Bywaters (27 June 1902 – 9 January 1923) were a British couple executed for the murder of Thompson's husband Percy. Their case became a cause célèbre.
Early life Edith Thompson was born Edith Jessie Graydon on 25 December 1893, at 97 Norfolk Road (now Cecilia Road) in Dalston, London, the first of the five children of William Eustace Graydon (1867–1941), a clerk with the Imperial Tobacco Company, and his wife Ethel Jessie Graydon (née Liles) (1872–1938), the daughter of a police constable. During her childhood, Edith was a happy, talented girl who excelled at dancing and acting, and was academically bright, with a natural ability in arithmetic. After leaving school in 1909 she joined a firm of clothing manufacturers, Louis London, near Aldgate station in London. Then, in 1911, she was employed at Carlton & Prior, wholesale milliners, in the Barbican and later in Aldersgate. Edith quickly established a reputation as a stylish and intelligent woman and was promoted by the company several times, until she became their chief buyer and made regular trips to Paris on behalf of the company.
In 1909, at the age of 15, Edith met Percy Thompson who was three years her senior. After a six-year engagement, they were married at St Barnabas, Manor Park on 15 January 1916. At first, the couple lived in Retreat Road in Westcliff-on-Sea, before buying a house at 41 Kensington Gardens in the then-fashionable London suburb of Ilford in July 1920. With both their careers flourishing, they lived a comfortable life.The Murders of theBlack Museum: 1870-1970 p. 243
Acquaintance with Bywaters
In 1920, the couple became acquainted with 18-year-old Frederick Bywaters, although Bywaters and Edith Thompson had met nine years earlier when Bywaters, then aged nine, had been a schoolfriend of Edith's younger brothers.
Frederick Bywaters had enlisted in the merchant navy. The 26-year-old Edith was immediately attracted to Bywaters, who was handsome and impulsive and whose stories of his travels around the world excited Edith's love of romantic adventure. To Edith, the youthful Bywaters represented her romantic ideal; by comparison, 29-year-old Percy seemed staid and conventional. Percy – oblivious to the emerging romantic attraction between his wife and Bywaters – welcomed the youth into their company. Shortly thereafter, the trio – joined by Edith's sister Avis – holidayed in Shanklin on the Isle of Wight. Upon their return, Percy invited Bywaters to lodge with them.
Affair While holidaying upon the Isle of Wight in June 1921, Edith and Bywaters began an affair. Initially, Percy was unaware of this although he gradually noticed his wife was drifting away from him. Matters came to a head barely a month after the affair started. A trivial incident in the Thompsons' garden triggered a violent row during which Percy Thompson struck his wife and caused her to fall over some furniture. Bywaters intervened and Thompson ordered him out of the house. The Thompsons' sitting tenant, a Mrs Lester, commented on Mrs Thompson's bruises in one of her statements to police. From September 1921 until September 1922, Bywaters was at sea and during this time Edith Thompson wrote to him frequently. After his return, they met up again.
Murder On 3 October 1922, the Thompsons attended a performance at the Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly Circus, London, together with Edith's uncle and aunt, Mr and Mrs J. Laxton. They left the theatre at 11 pm and all went to Piccadilly Circus tube station, where they separated. The Thompsons caught the 11:30 pm train to Ilford. As they walked along Belgrave Road, between De Vere and Endsleigh Gardens, a man jumped out from behind some bushes near their home and attacked Percy. After a violent struggle, during which Edith Thompson was knocked to the ground, Percy was stabbed. Mortally wounded, he died before Edith could summon help. The attacker fled. Neighbours later reported hearing a woman (here assumed to have been Edith) screaming hysterically and shouting "Oh don't, oh don't" several times. By the time police arrived Edith had not composed herself. At the police station the following day she was distressed. She was unaware that Bywaters was already a suspect: he was arrested that evening and taken to Ilford Police Station. The police confronted her with Bywaters. One of the inspectors, Frank Hall, untruthfully told her that Bywaters had already confessed. She then admitted to the police that she knew who the assailant was and provided the police with details of her association with Bywaters.
The police investigated further and discovered a series of more than 60 love letters from Edith Thompson to Bywaters. The letters were the only tangible evidence linking Edith Thompson to the killer. In Stratford, London Magistrates Court her defence argued that the letters did not connect Mrs Thompson to the place or manner of the murder. Accordingly they did not allow for consideration of common purpose, namely that if two people agree to achieve the death of a third, and one of these people acts on the expressed intentions of both, both are equally guilty. The presiding magistrate decided that the letters should be admitted and that the court at the Old Bailey would rule on it again. Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters were each committed for trial, charged with murder.
Trial The trial began on 6 December 1922 at the Old Bailey, before Mr Justice Shearman, with Bywaters defended by Cecil Whiteley KC, and Thompson by Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett KC. The prosecution for the Crown was led by the Solicitor-General Sir Thomas Inskip, assisted by Travers Humphreys. Bywaters had cooperated completely. He had led police to the murder weapon he concealed after the murder, and consistently maintained that he had acted without Edith's knowledge.
Edith Thompson's love letters were produced as evidence of incitement to murder. The extant letters date from November 1921 to the end of September 1922. They run to over 55,000 words and afford a day-to-day account of her life in London when her lover Bywaters was at sea. In a few passages of these letters, she writes about her longing to be free of her husband, Percy. She refers to grinding glass light bulbs to shards and feeding them to Percy mixed into mashed potato, and on another occasion feeding him poison. She wrote of a woman who had lost three husbands and remarked, "I can't even lose one." Thompson described how she had carried out her own abortion after becoming pregnant by Bywaters.
Edith Thompson's counsel urged her not to testify, stressing that the burden of proof lay with the prosecution and that there was nothing they could prove other than that she had been present at the murder, but she rejected his advice. She was determined to give evidence, imagining that she could save Bywaters.Edward Grice, Great Cases of Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett KC, 1937, pp. 41-42 As Curtis-Bennett later observed, she had no conception of the danger she was in. She made a poor impression on the judge and the jury, particularly when she repeatedly contradicted herself. She had claimed that she had never attempted to poison her husband and references in her letters to attempting to kill him were merely attempts to impress her paramour. In answer to several questions relating to the meaning of some of the passages in her letters, she simply said "I have no idea."
Bywaters stated that Edith Thompson had known nothing of his plans, nor could she have, as he had not intended to murder her husband. His aim had been to confront Percy, he claimed, and to force him to deal with the situation. When Percy threatened to shoot him and reacted in a superior manner, Bywaters lost his temper. Edith Thompson, he repeatedly claimed, had made no suggestion to him to kill Percy, nor did she know that Bywaters intended to confront him. In discussing the letters, Bywaters stated that he had never believed Edith had attempted to harm her husband, but that he did believe she had a vivid imagination, which was fuelled by the novels she enjoyed reading. He felt that in her letters she viewed herself in some way as one of the fictional characters she had read about.
Conviction On 11 December the jury returned a verdict of guilty against both defendants. Both Thompson and Bywaters were sentenced to death by hanging. Edith Thompson became hysterical and started screaming in the court while Bywaters loudly protested Edith Thompson's innocence, stating: "I say the verdict of the jury is wrong. Edith Thompson is not guilty."
Imprisonment Before and during the trial, Thompson and Bywaters were the subjects of highly sensationalist and critical media commentary, but after they were sentenced to death there was a dramatic shift in public attitudes and in media coverage. Nearly a million people signed a petition against the death sentences. Bywaters in particular attracted admiration for his fierce loyalty and protectiveness towards Edith Thompson but she was widely regarded as the controlling mind that had set it all up. It was generally considered abhorrent to hang a woman (no woman had been executed in Britain since the baby farmer Rhoda Willis in 1907). Despite the petition and a new confession from Bywaters (in which he once again declared Thompson to be completely innocent), Home Secretary, William Bridgeman refused a reprieve. A few days before their executions, Edith Thompson was told that the date of execution had been fixed, at which point she lost her composure. She spent the last few days of her life in a state of near-hysteria, crying, screaming, moaning and unable to eat.
Execution On 9 January 1923 in Holloway Prison, the 29-year-old Edith Thompson collapsed in terror at the prospect of her hanging. Heavily sedated by the prison governor, almost unconscious, she was carried to the gallows by four prison warders. In Pentonville Prison, the 20-year-old Frederick Bywaters, who had tried since his arrest to save Thompson from imprisonment and execution, was himself hanged.
The ordeal of executing Edith Thompson had a profound effect on her hangman John Ellis.
The two executions occurred simultaneously at 9:00 am, only about apart. Holloway and Pentonville prisons (respectively for women and men) are very close together in North London. Later, as was the rule, the bodies of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters were initially buried within the walls of the prisons in which they had been executed.
Burial
The body of Edith Thompson was initially buried in an unmarked grave within the walls of Holloway Prison, as was customary. In 1971, the prison underwent an extensive programme of rebuilding, during which the bodies of all the executed women were exhumed for reburial outside the confines of the prison.Edith Thompson-Executed p. 188 With the exception of Ruth Ellis, the remains of the women executed at Holloway (Edith Thompson, Styllou Christofi, Amelia Sach and Annie Walters) were reburied in a single grave at Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey.