The Tragic Case of Frances Kidder Who Drowned Her Stepdaughter at Cobb's Bridge 1868

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[00:00:08]On a Sunday evening in August 1867, on the edge of the Romney Marsh in Kent, an 11-year-old girl was drowned in less than 12 inches of water. Her name was Louisa Kidder Staples. She was small for her age, smaller than she should have been because for 2 years she had been starved, beaten, forced to sleep on old sacks in a cellar, and dressed in rags by the woman who was supposed to care for her, her stepmother, a 24-year-old woman named Frances Kidder. The stream ran under a crossing known locally as Cobb's Bridge, [music] just outside New Romney. It was shallow, barely a trickle in high summer, barely deep enough to cover a child's face, but it was deep enough. Frances grabbed the girl, forced her down the muddy bank, and held her face beneath the surface until she stopped moving. Then she walked back to her parents' house, went upstairs, changed out of her wet and muddy clothes, and sat down. When her husband arrived and asked where Louisa was, Frances said nothing. When her mother found the sodden dress stuffed under the bed, Frances said nothing. When the police came, Frances told them the girl had been frightened by horses near the bridge and fallen in by accident. Nobody believed her, not her husband, not her parents, not the constable who arrested her that same evening, and not the jury that would convict her 7 months later in 12 minutes. Frances Kidder was hanged at noon on the 2nd of April 1868 outside the main gate of Maidstone Prison in front of a crowd of 2,000 people. She dropped 18 inches through the trapdoor, and she struggled at the end of the rope for 2 to 3 minutes, writhing in the agonies of strangulation, before the life went out of her. She was 25 years old. She was the last woman to be publicly executed in Britain. Less than 2 months after her body was cut down and buried in an unmarked grave inside the prison walls, Parliament passed the Capital Punishment Amendment Act, ending public hangings forever. This is the story of Frances Kidder and the ditch at Cobbs Bridge. It is a story about a child nobody protected, a woman nobody understood, a husband who betrayed everyone he touched, and a country that watched a young woman strangled to death on a rope in the April sunlight and decided [music] finally that it had seen enough. 12 inches of water killed Louisa Kidder Staples.

[00:02:27]And the spectacle of what happened to the woman who held her under it helped kill an institution that had lasted for centuries. If this is your first time here, welcome to the Crimson Files. We cover history's most chilling true crime cases with the [music] depth and the detail they deserve. Subscribe now, turn on notifications, and drop your location in the comments. I read every single one. Now, back to Frances Kidder. To understand what happened at that ditch, you have to understand the people who lived in its shadow. The Romney Marsh stretches along the southern coast of Kent, flat, [music] windswept, veined with drainage ditches and tidal channels, a landscape reclaimed from the sea over centuries. In the 1860s, the towns that dotted the Marsh, New Romney, Hythe, Lydd, Dymchurch, were communities of laborers, fishermen, and small tradespeople. Life was hard, poverty was common. The moral framework of the era, the high Victorian insistence on respectability, [music] self-discipline, and the sanctity of the home, pressed down on people who had little margin for error and even less for failure. Into this world, around 1843, Frances Turner was born. Her father, John Turner, was an agricultural laborer in New Romney. Her mother, also named Frances, kept the household. The family was poor, illiterate. Frances would not learn to read until [music] a prison chaplain taught her in the condemned cell at Maidstone, 25 years old and waiting to die. There was no education for girls like Frances Turner.

[00:03:56]There was service. By the 1861 census, she was working as a house servant in Folkestone, employed by a bookmaker named John English and his family. She might have gone on like that, anonymous, unremarkable, a Victorian working class woman whose name would appear in no history book. But, in the mid-1860s, she met a man named William Kidder and everything changed. William Henry Kidder was born in 1827 in Saltwood, near Hythe. His father was a baker. William grew up to become a carrier, a potato dealer, a hawker of vegetables, a man with a horse and cart who moved goods between the market towns of Kent. He variously described himself as a greengrocer, a carrier, or a dealer, depending on [music] the occasion. He was, by the standards of his community, a man of modest enterprise and no particular distinction. He was also a man who left wreckage behind him. Before he met Frances Turner, William had formed a relationship with a woman named Eliza Staples, born in Hawkhurst, Kent, in 1837. They were not married. They lived together in Theatre Street in Hythe and had two children. Louisa, born in 1856 or 1857, and a younger daughter, Ellen, born in 1862. Eliza died before Ellen's first birthday. Ellen was sent to live with Eliza's parents, the Staples family, in Sellinge. Louisa stayed with her father. When William married Frances Turner on the 1st of February, 1865, at St. Leonard's Church in Hythe, Frances was already 8 months pregnant with his child. The baby, a girl named Emma, was born shortly after the wedding. It was, by the conventions of the time, a marriage of necessity, a scramble for respectability before the neighbors could count the months. And it was into this marriage, a marriage that began with a lie of timing and was built on a foundation of financial strain and mutual resentment, that 10-year-old Louisa Kidder Staples was delivered her father's daughter by a dead woman, a child Francis had not expected, did not want, and would come to hate with a violence that horrified even the [music] neighbors who heard it through the walls. The stage was set. A marshtown, a volatile marriage, a man who would not pay his debts, a woman whose temper was on a permanent short fuse, and a child, a lively, spirited little girl by the accounts of those who remembered her before who was about to become the focus of everything that was wrong in that household. What Francis Kidder did to Louisa Kidder Staples over the 2 years between 1865 and 1867 was not discipline. It was not the ordinary [music] corporal punishment that Victorian society permitted and even encouraged. It was systematic abuse of a kind that shocked the neighbors, alarmed the police, and would >> [music] >> ultimately provide the prosecution with the motive they needed to send Francis to the gallows. The testimony that emerged at the inquest, the magistrate's hearing, and the trial painted a picture of relentless cruelty. Francis beat Louisa with whatever came to hand, broomsticks, household implements, her fists. The child was frequently seen with black eyes, bruises on her arms, blood on her pinafore. Her nose bled from the blows to her face. She was dressed in rags while Francis' own daughter, Emma, was clothed properly.

[00:07:09]She was fed scraps, bread and butter, when she was fed at all. She was locked out of the house in all weathers or sent to sleep in the cellar on a pile of old potato sacks. Francis called her that [ __ ] She called her Kidder's bastard.

[00:07:24]She told anyone who would listen that she hated the sight of the child and wanted to be rid of her. Isaac Sage, a relative of Louisa's dead mother, would testify at the inquest. He had known Louisa before Francis came into her life. When she was younger, she was a nice, spirited little thing, he said, but for the last two or three years she has grown quite dull, as if losing her senses. I attributed this to the ill usage she has received. Asked whether the news of Louisa's death had surprised him, Sage replied, "No, not at all. I had been expecting it for a long time. I thought it would end like this. The abuse was not a secret." The walls of their house in Hythe were thin, and William Heniker, the next-door neighbor, heard enough to go to the police.

[00:08:06]Francis was charged with cruelty and fined. Louisa was removed from the household and sent to live with a guardian, a lifeline, a chance at safety. But William Kidder, who earned enough to deal in potatoes, but apparently not enough to care for his own daughter, failed to make the maintenance payments. The guardian could not keep Louisa without the money. She was sent back, back to the broomstick, back to the cellar, back to the rags and the hunger and the woman who called her a [ __ ] and meant it. William and Francis quarreled about Louisa. He was not indifferent to the abuse, at least not entirely, but his interventions were erratic and inadequate. On at least one occasion, he threw Louisa out of the house himself. The household was a place of constant friction, shouting, violence. Emma was spared. Louisa was not. And then, in July 1867, something happened that may have made everything worse. Francis was helping William with his potato round when the horse bolted.

[00:09:04]She was thrown from the cart and seriously injured. William himself would later testify that she was in a fit for about 4 hours after the accident and that she has been strange in the head ever since. The injury may have caused brain damage. It certainly caused a period of convalescence, during which Francis returned to her parents' house in New Romney to recover. She took both children with her, Louisa and Emma, the girl she loved and the girl she hated.

[00:09:31]And she told her parents' neighbor, Mrs. Eliza Evans, what she intended to do. "I mean to get rid of that [ __ ] Kidder's child, she said. I hate the sight of her because she is always making mischief.

[00:09:42]Mrs. Evans, one assumes, did not understand how literally Frances meant it. The 25th of August, 1867, was a Sunday. Frances had been staying with her parents in New Romney for some days.

[00:09:54]William was expected to arrive that afternoon to collect his wife and daughters and bring them back to Hythe.

[00:10:00]That morning, Frances's parents invited her to join them on their customary walk. Frances declined. She told them she was feeling unwell and would prefer to stay at home with the children. Her parents left. The moment they were gone, Frances told Louisa to change into her old clothes. There was a fair in New Romney, she said, and they would walk there together. Louisa did as she was told. Frances left 2-year-old Emma at the house, and the two of them, the stepmother and the stepdaughter, set out across the fields on foot. They walked toward New Romney. They reached a spot known locally as Cobbs Bridge, where a shallow stream, one of the marsh's countless drainage ditches, [music] ran beneath a small crossing. The water was negligible, a summer trickle, less than 12 inches deep. What happened next was described by Frances in her confession to the prison chaplain weeks before her execution. She grabbed Louisa. The girl struggled. Frances forced her down the muddy bank and into the stream. She held the child's face under the water. Louisa was 11 years old. She was small, malnourished, weakened by 2 years of systematic abuse.

[00:11:07]Frances was 24, an adult, and despite her injuries from the cart accident, strong enough to hold a child under 12 inches of water until the struggling stopped. There were signs of the encounter in the mud. The constable who later searched the area found evidence of a significant struggle on the banks of the stream. Churned earth, disturbed vegetation, the marks of a fight that had been brief but violent. A neighbor, Mary Fagg, who lived near Cobb's Bridge, would testify at the inquest that around 8:00 [music] that evening she heard a noise as of a child crying or screaming.

[00:11:42]She heard it twice. It came from the direction of the ditch. She did not go to investigate. "I was not alarmed enough about it," she said. Francis left Louisa in the [music] ditch and walked back to her parents' house. She went upstairs immediately. She changed out of her wet, muddy clothes. She hid them under her bed. Her parents arrived home around the same time. William arrived from Hythe. He called out for Louisa.

[00:12:06]There was no answer. William looked at Francis. She was sitting in the front room. Her gown was sodden. Louisa was not with her. He knew the history. He knew what Francis had said about the child, how she had treated her, what the neighbors had witnessed. He asked her what she had done with his daughter.

[00:12:23]Francis would not answer. Her mother rushed upstairs and found the wet, [music] muddy clothes stuffed under the bed. Her father tried to get an explanation. Nothing. William and John Turner took lanterns and went out into the August evening to search. It did not take long. Constable Aspinal would describe the scene.

[00:12:42]"It was a clear, starlit night, and we were furnished with lamps. There was a very heavy dew on the grass. Someone noticed something white in the ditch. I threw my light in that direction. It was the body. She was lying on her back, and her head was under the water."

[00:12:57]They brought Louisa's body to the Ship Inn, where it was laid out to await the coroner. Constable Aspinal returned to the Turner house and arrested Francis on suspicion of murder. Her story, which she would repeat for months, was simple.

[00:13:10]She and Louisa had been walking near Cobb's Bridge when two horses came along the road at speed. The horses frightened them. Louisa ran along the bank and fell into the water. Francis tried to save her, but could not reach her. She screamed for help, but no one came.

[00:13:26]Eventually, she climbed out of the ditch herself and ran home. It was a story that nobody who heard it believed. The coroner's inquest opened the following [music] day at the town hall in New Romney, and it produced a cascade of testimony that condemned Francis Kidder more thoroughly than [music] any prosecutor could have. Eliza Evans, the neighbor's friend who had heard Francis's declaration of intent, told the inquest what Francis had said, "I want to kill the child. Those whom you did not want to live never would die."

[00:13:55]She repeated Francis's words about getting rid of that [ __ ] Kidder's child before returning to Hythe. 15-year-old Jane Smith gave testimony that was devastating in its specificity. She had spoken to Louisa just days before the murder. She said, "Look here, Jane.

[00:14:11]Mother was trying to strangle me last night." Jane told the court.

[00:14:14]She showed me two marks on her neck.

[00:14:16]There was one mark under the ear and another a little lower down. The marks, Jane said, were red and looked as if they had been caused by the pressure of fingernails. She also told me that her mother said she meant to make off with her in some way before she went home.

[00:14:31]She would drown her in the dyke going along. She didn't mean to take her home with her to Hythe. Louisa had been told by her own stepmother how she was going to die, and she had told a friend, and no one had been able to stop it. Isaac Sage, the relative by marriage, described the transformation of a lively child into a dull, withdrawn girl who seemed to be losing her senses.

[00:14:53]Neighbors described [music] the beatings, the black eyes, the blood on the pinafore. The constable described the scene at the ditch, the signs of struggle, the body in the water. Doctor Francis Henry Wood, who examined Louisa's body at the Ship Inn, confirmed that she had died from drowning. He found some scratches on her neck and a mark under her ear consistent with what Jane Smith had described, but noted, in a finding that the defense would later seize upon, that there were no bruises on the body. This absence of heavy physical trauma would become a point of contention at trial, though it ultimately counted for [music] little.

[00:15:29]A child held underwater does not need to be beaten. She only needs to be held.

[00:15:34]The inquest jury returned a verdict of willful murder against Frances Kidder.

[00:15:38]In the aftermath, one voice stands out, not from the courtroom, but from a school logbook. Christianna Potter, the headmistress of the girls' school in Hythe, wrote in her log on the 26th of August 1867, "Received news that one of the scholars was dead, murdered by her mother." There was no presumption of innocence, not in Hythe, not among the people who had watched Louisa shrink over 2 years. They had seen it coming.

[00:16:03]Isaac Sage had been expecting it for a long time, and when it happened, no one was surprised. Frances was committed to stand trial at the Kent Spring Assizes in Maidstone. She was transported to Maidstone Prison the following day.

[00:16:17]During the journey, she suffered several fits, and the carriage had to stop at Ashford Police Station until the seizure subsided. She would spend the next 6 months on remand, waiting. Maidstone Prison stood, and still stands, in County Road, close to the town center, a forbidding structure built between 1811 and 1818 at a cost of £200,000.

[00:16:39]Its four-story roundhouse dominated the skyline. It had been the place of execution for Kent since 1831, when the gallows was moved from Penenden Heath, a mile outside town. By the time Frances Kidder arrived in August 1867, the prison had seen dozens of public hangings, men and women alike hoisted on the new drop scaffold erected outside the main gate on the day. Before each execution, Frances was placed on remand and left there for over 6 months. There was no winter assize in 1867, which meant her trial could not take place until the spring assizes in March 1868.

[00:17:15]6 months of waiting in a prison cell for a woman who could not read, who had no education, and who had lived her entire life in a world measured by the next day's labor and the next meal's preparation.

[00:17:28]It was during this period that the Reverend W. Fraser, the prison chaplain, undertook something that no one in Frances Kidder's previous life had bothered to do. He taught her to read.

[00:17:38]He gave her some grasp of religion, the basic framework of Christian theology, the language of prayer, the concept of sin and redemption. Whether this education brought Frances comfort or simply made her more aware of the magnitude of what she had done is impossible to say, but it is a striking detail. The woman who would hang for murder arrived at prison illiterate and left it in a coffin, having learned for the first time to decipher the words in a prayer book. William did not visit her during the remand, not once in six months. He was busy. The rumors filtering back to Frances through the prison grapevine were specific. Her husband had taken up with her younger sister. Some sources name her as Ruth Cutty, already married, and had moved her into the house to help look after Emma. The word help was doing considerable work in that sentence. By the time Frances came to trial, the relationship was an open secret in Hythe. Frances, in her cell, stewed. She had committed a terrible crime, but she was also a woman abandoned, abandoned by the man who had fathered her child, who had failed to pay for Louise's guardian, who had failed to protect either his wife [music] or his daughter from the consequences of their shared misery, and who was now, while she waited to die, sleeping with her sister. The public, which had [music] initially been united in horror at the drowning of a child, began to fracture in its sympathies. The Kentish Gazette of the 24th of March 1868 reported that Frances had been very badly brought up and sadly neglected.

[00:19:09]The paper noted her illiteracy, her complete ignorance of Christian teaching, and her good behavior in domestic service before she met William Kidder. He, the paper said, had behaved shamefully towards her and had treated his daughter almost as badly as Fanny had. In Hythe, the mayor, James Watts, organized a petition for clemency. The citizens of New Romney did the same. The petitions were sent to the Home Secretary. The Home Secretary considered them and declined to intervene. We are halfway through the story of Frances Kidder. The trial, the confession, and the hanging are still to come, and the ending changed British law forever.

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[00:19:51]Now, back to 1868. Frances Kidder came to trial at the Kent Spring Assizes on the 12th of March 1868 before Mr. Justice Byles. The proceedings were held at Maidstone and lasted 6 hours. She was represented by a court-appointed barrister, Mr. Channel. William had refused to pay for her defense. The prosecution's case was built on three foundations: the history of abuse, the statements of intent, and the physical evidence of the evening itself. The witnesses from the inquest returned to tell their stories again. Eliza Evans repeated Frances' declaration that she intended [music] to get rid of Louisa.

[00:20:28]Jane Smith repeated Louisa's own words that her stepmother had tried to strangle her and had said she would drown her in the dike. Isaac Sage described the long deterioration of a spirited child into a dull, broken girl.

[00:20:41]The neighbors described the beatings.

[00:20:43]The constable described the ditch, the body, the wet clothes hidden under the bed. And then Frances' own family took the stand against her. Her mother testified. Her father testified. Her sister testified. Her husband testified.

[00:20:56]William Kidder, the man who had not visited her in 6 months, who was now living with her sister, who had failed to pay for Louisa's guardian, and thereby sent the child back into the house where she would be killed, stood in a court of law and gave evidence that helped send his wife to the gallows. The prosecution brought in the doctor, Dr. Francis Henry Wood confirmed that Louisa had died from drowning. He had found scratches on her neck and a mark under her ear, but no heavy bruises on the body. Channel, the defense barrister, did what he could with limited material.

[00:21:30]He suggested to the jury that some of the witness testimony, while not outright lies, may have been exaggerated. He pointed to the doctor's finding of no marks of violence as evidence that the drowning might not have involved the physical struggle the prosecution described, but he made little of the injuries Francis had sustained in the cart accident a month before the murder. The possible brain damage, the fits, the personality changes that William [music] himself had described. This failure to mount a serious diminished responsibility defense, a concept that existed in embryonic [music] form in Victorian law, but was rarely deployed for working-class defendants, was arguably most significant shortcoming of Francis's representation.

[00:22:12]Francis herself clung to her story, the horses, the fright, Louisa falling, her own failed attempt to rescue the child.

[00:22:19]She maintained this version throughout the trial and it convinced no one. Mr. Justice Byles, to his credit, summed up carefully. He told the jury explicitly that the evidence against Francis was largely circumstantial and that if they were not wholly satisfied, they must give [music] her the benefit of the doubt. The jury retired. They were gone for 12 minutes. Guilty. Mr. Justice Byles read the sentence of death.

[00:22:44]Francis stood calmly in the dock. She did not cry. She did not collapse. She walked unaided from the courtroom. Her execution was set for 3 weeks later, noon on Thursday, the 2nd of April, 1868. In the condemned cell at Maidstone, Francis Kidder finally told the truth. She confessed the murder to the Reverend Fraser, the same man who had taught her to read, who had given her a framework of sin and repentance in which to place the thing she had done. She admitted that she had deliberately drowned Louisa, but she added a qualification that the court had not heard. She claimed the act was not premeditated. This distinction between an impulsive killing driven by long-simmering hatred and a calculated murder planned in advance may have mattered to Frances. It did not matter to the law. William visited twice. The first visit was a disaster. Frances confronted him about her sister. He denied the relationship. They quarreled violently. He stormed out. The second visit was worse. William admitted the truth. Yes, he was living with her sister. Frances screamed at him. He left again. The Reverend Fraser, who witnessed the aftermath, told William to go home and remember that he was the cause of his wife's suffering and to mend his ways.

[00:23:57]William went to the pub near the jail and stayed, and then took the road back to Hythe. His reception in Hythe that evening was instructive. A mob of 3 to 400 people, neighbors, townspeople, men and women [music] who had watched this whole squalid drama unfold, paraded through the streets carrying an effigy of William Kidder. They burned it in front of his house while pelting the building with stones. The message was clear.

[00:24:22]Frances had killed a child, and she would hang for it. But William Kidder, the man who had fathered children he could not support, who had married a woman he could not keep, who had failed to protect [music] his daughter, who had abandoned his wife, and who had replaced her with her own sister before the rope was even knotted, William Kidder was not innocent, either. He was merely unpunishable. Frances was also visited by her parents and by Emma, her own daughter. These meetings were emotional.

[00:24:50]Frances wept. Her parents wept. The child was too young to understand, but Frances did not admit her guilt to her family. She showed no sign of contrition to them. Whether this was stubbornness, pride, or simply the last wall she could hold against the complete collapse of her self-image, we cannot know. In the final days, she oscillated between hysteria and composure. She had outbursts of violence and temper. Then she would calm and pray and accept. The Reverend Fraser stayed with her, a steady presence in the small world of the condemned cell. On the evening of the 1st of April, the night before the execution, her mother and two of her sisters visited. One of the sisters was only a few months old. The family said goodbye. On the morning of the execution, Francis dictated a letter to her parents through the chaplain. In it, she said she was sorry for her crime. It was, so far as we know, the only time she expressed remorse in any form that reached beyond the walls of the cell.

[00:25:47]Thursday, the 2nd of April, 1868, noon.

[00:25:51]The gallows had been erected the day before, outside the main gate of Maidstone prison in County Road. It was the same scaffold that had been used to execute Ann Lawrence, a 29-year-old woman who had murdered her 4-year-old son, alongside a male prisoner, James Fletcher, just 14 months earlier in January 1867.

[00:26:12]The structure consisted of a platform supported by heavy beams containing trapdoors surrounded by a railing. In the center stood a simple gallows, two uprights and a crossbeam with an iron hook for the noose. The lower portion of the platform was draped in black [music] cloth to prevent the crowd from seeing the prisoners' legs and lower body as they dropped through the trap. The hangman was William Calcraft. Calcraft was 67 years old and had been Britain's principal executioner since 1829.

[00:26:41]A career spanning nearly four decades and an estimated 450 executions. He was a cobbler by trade who had started out selling pies outside Newgate prison on hanging days, where he had befriended the previous hangman and been recruited to flog juvenile prisoners. He was known as a family man who was fond of rabbits.

[00:27:01]He was also known for using the short drop method, a fall of no more than 2 ft, which did not break the prisoner's neck, but instead killed by slow strangulation. In cases where the process took too long, Calcraft had been known to hasten death by pulling on the condemned person's legs or by climbing onto their shoulders. This was the man who came to Frances Kidder's cell just before noon. The procession formed up outside the cell, the under-sheriff of the county, the Reverend Fraser, Calcraft, and the prison officers.

[00:27:31]Calcraft entered the cell to pinion Frances, a leather strap around her body and arms at elbow level, another around her wrists. The Reverend Fraser told her to close her eyes and hold his hands while the hangman did his work. She did, and it made Calcraft's task considerably easier. She was led out across the prison yard to the main gate. The gate swung open. Beyond them, in County Road, the gallows was waiting. The crowd was estimated [music] at 2,000 people. A large number were women. They were well-behaved, quiet, no jeering, no carnival atmosphere. This was not the execution of a notorious highwayman or a famous poisoner. This was the hanging of a 25-year-old woman from a marsh town.

[00:28:12]And whatever the crowd had come to see, many of them already seemed uncertain about whether they wanted to see it.

[00:28:18]Frances had to be helped up the steps to the platform. Two warders held her on the trap doors while Calcraft made the final preparations. He placed a white cotton hood over her head. He adjusted the noose around her neck. He strapped her legs to hold her long skirt down.

[00:28:34]Frances prayed intently, fervently, her lips moving beneath the hood. Her last words were, "Lord Jesus, forgive me."

[00:28:41]Calcraft withdrew the bolt. Frances dropped 18 in through the trap. The rope caught, and then she struggled hard, violently, [music] writhing at the end of the rope in what the witnesses described as the agonies of strangulation. Two minutes, three minutes, the crowd watched. The upper half of her body was visible above the platform, the lower half concealed by the black cloth, and what they could see was a woman dying by inches, her body convulsing against the rope, the hood over her face moving with each desperate attempt to breathe. It took two to three minutes for all signs of life to become extinct. Her body was left hanging for an hour. Then she was cut down and buried in an unmarked grave within the prison walls. She was 25 years old. She had been married for three years. She had a daughter she would never see grow up, and she had killed a child [music] in 12 inches of water, and died in 18 inches of rope, and neither death had been quick. There was no satisfaction, no sense that justice [music] had been cleanly served. Instead, there was discomfort, a collective unease that spread through the press and the public in the days and weeks that followed. The Times published a report that criticized William Kidder directly. The paper noted his behavior during his wife's imprisonment, his failure to visit, his affair with her sister, his refusal to pay for her defense. The implication was clear. Frances Kidder may have been a murderess, but she was also a woman who had been failed, exploited, and abandoned by the man who bore significant [music] responsibility for the conditions that produced the crime.

[00:30:15]In Hythe, the effigy burning that had greeted William on the night before the execution was only the beginning. He became a pariah, not arrested, not charged, not punished by law, but punished by the community in the only way it could. [music] He stayed in Hythe. He lived there until his death in 1908, 40 years after his wife's hanging.

[00:30:35]He never remarried. The relationship with Frances' sister did not endure. In 1904, he was offered a place in St. John's Almshouse in Hythe, one of the conditions for which was that the applicant be of good character. Somehow, the passage of four decades had laundered his reputation enough for that. Emma, Francis and William's daughter, lived with her father until she married in 1891 at St. Leonard's Church, the same church where her parents had married 26 years earlier.

[00:31:05]Her husband was a groom working for the army in Hythe. They had no children.

[00:31:09]They lived quietly. There is no record of Emma ever speaking publicly about her mother. Louisa was buried in the churchyard at Sellinge, the village where her Staples grandparents lived, the family that had taken in her younger sister Ellen when their mother died. Her grave, unlike Francis's, was marked. She was between 10 and 11 years old, but the true aftermath of Francis Kidder's execution was not measured in the lives of the [music] people it touched. It was measured in law. Francis Kidder was hanged on the 2nd of April, 1868. Less than 2 months later, on the 29th of May, Parliament passed the Capital Punishment Amendment Act, formally titled An Act to Provide for Carrying Out of Capital Punishment Within Prisons, which received royal assent the same day and ended public executions in Britain. The connection between the two events was not coincidental. The movement to abolish public hanging had been [music] building for decades. As early as the 1840s, prominent voices, Charles Dickens among them, who had attended the execution of the Mannings at Horsemonger Lane Gaol in 1849 [music] and written a famous letter to The Times describing his horror at the crowd, had argued that public executions were degrading, brutalizing, and counterproductive. Far from deterring [music] crime, the spectacle of a public hanging attracted pickpockets, prostitutes, drunks, and vendors of snacks and souvenirs.

[00:32:33]>> [music] >> The crowd came for entertainment, not moral instruction. The ritual had become in the eyes of reformers a festival of death that cheapened human life rather than affirming its value. But the hanging of women posed a particular problem for Victorian sensibilities. A society that idealized [music] feminine modesty, domesticity, and moral purity could not easily reconcile those ideals with the spectacle of a woman strangling on a rope in front of a crowd. The execution of Catherine Wilson at Newgate in 1862, [music] the last public hanging of a woman in London, witnessed by an estimated 20,000 people, had already generated significant discomfort. The execution of Ann Lawrence at Maidstone in 1867 had added to it. And then came Frances Kidder, young, poor, uneducated, the victim of a terrible marriage, the perpetrator of a terrible crime, dying slowly on a short drop rope while 2,000 people watched. The revulsion was not universal, but it was widespread enough to accelerate a legislative process that had been stalled for years. The Capital Punishment within Prisons Bill was debated in Parliament on the 21st of April 1868, less than 3 weeks after Frances Kidder's hanging. Some members argued not just for the end of public executions, but for the abolition of capital punishment altogether.

[00:33:53]That motion was defeated, but the compromise that executions would continue but behind prison walls, witnessed only by officials and invited observers, was passed into law. Six more men were hanged in public before the act took effect. The last of them was Michael Barrett, a Fenian convicted for his role in the Clerkenwell Prison explosion, who was executed outside Newgate Prison on the 26th of May 1868, 3 days before the act received royal assent. The first execution carried out under the new law was that of 18-year-old [music] Thomas Wells, hanged by William Calcraft at Maidstone Prison, the same prison where Frances Kidder had died on the 13th of August 1868 for the murder of his employer, the station master at Dover Priory railway station.

[00:34:40]The gallows was now inside the walls.

[00:34:42]The crowd was gone. The spectacle was over. It had taken centuries to build the institution [music] of public execution and less than two months after Francis Kidder died on the scaffold to dismantle it. She was not the [music] only reason and she was not the most important reason, but she was the last woman the public would see hanged and the image of her, 25 years old, struggling at the end of rope, dying by strangulation in front of 2,000 silent [music] witnesses, was among the images that finally tipped the balance.

[00:35:12]There is a temptation in cases like this one to choose a side, to make Francis [music] Kidder a monster or a victim, to condemn her absolutely or to pity her unreservedly. And the truth is that she was both and neither and the discomfort of that ambiguity is precisely what makes this case impossible to put down.

[00:35:30]She killed a child. That fact is not in dispute. She confessed it to the chaplain.

[00:35:35]She held an 11-year-old girl's face under 12 inches of water until the struggling stopped and then she walked home and changed her clothes and said nothing. There is no version of this story in which that [music] act is anything other than what it is, but she was also a woman who could not read, who had been raised in poverty and sent into service as a girl, who married a man who had hidden his other children from her and then delivered [music] one of them into her care, who lived in a house of violence and financial strain, who was thrown from a cart and may have suffered brain damage a month before the murder, who was abandoned by her husband the moment she was arrested and replaced with her own sister before the trial began, who was given a court-appointed barrister because her husband would not pay for one, who was not visited once in 6 months of remand. None of this excuses the murder. Nothing excuses the murder, but it explains the murder, or at least some of it, in a way that the 12-minute jury verdict does not. And then there is Louisa, the child at the center of everything, the girl who was lively before and dull after, who was beaten with broomsticks and fed scraps [music] and made to sleep on sacks in a cellar, who told her friend Jane Smith days before she died that her stepmother had tried to strangle her and was going to drown her in the dike, who was 11 years old and who new what was coming and could not stop it. In 1867, there was no prevention of cruelty to children act.

[00:37:01]That would not arrive until 1889, more than two decades after Louisa's death.

[00:37:06]There was no NSPCC. That would be founded in 1884. There was no legal framework for the systematic protection of children from abuse within their own homes. The neighbor could report, the police could fine, the guardian could take the child, but when the payment stopped and the child was sent back, there was nothing. No safety net, no second chance, no one standing between Louisa and the ditch. She was buried in Sellinge. Her grave is still there.

[00:37:33]Frances was buried inside Maidstone prison in an unmarked grave, no headstone, no inscription. A woman who had never been taught to read buried without a word. Between them, between the child in the churchyard and the woman in the prison yard, stands a distance of about 40 miles across the Kentish countryside. And between their deaths, the drowning and the hanging, stands a distance of 7 months and 8 days. 12 inches of water, 18 inches of rope, two to three minutes of struggling in each case, more or less. A child who could not fight free and a woman who could not stop herself from holding on.

[00:38:09]I keep thinking about the crowd, >> [music] >> 2,000 people, most of them women, standing in County Road on a Thursday at noon, watching the upper half of Frances Kidder's body convulse above the black cloth of the scaffold. They had come to see justice done. Some of them had come to see a monster punished. Some had come because it was a spectacle, and spectacles drew crowds. But, something shifted in that crowd that day.

[00:38:33]Something that had been shifting for years in courtroom galleries and newspaper columns and parliamentary debates. And what it came down to in the end was a simple recognition. This was not justice. This was theater. And the theater was ugly, and the audience was complicit. And it was time to bring the curtain down. Seven weeks later, the curtain came down. Parliament passed the act. The scaffold moved behind the walls. The crowd was sent home. Francis Kidder did not end public hanging.

[00:39:02]History is never that simple. But, she was the last woman the public saw die that way, and her death, slow, visible, agonizing, was one of the reasons the public decided [music] it did not want to see it anymore. 12 inches of water for Louisa.

[00:39:16]18 inches of rope for Francis.

[00:39:19]And the country that looked at both measurements and finally understood that some things should not be measured in public. That is the story of Francis Kidder, the ditch at Cobb's Bridge, and the hanging that helped end an era. If this case stayed with you, if you are still thinking about the water, >> [music] >> the rope, and the girl who told her friend what was coming, then subscribe to the Crimson Files. Share this with someone who needs to hear it, >> [music] >> and leave a comment telling us, do you think the punishment fit the crime? We will see you in the next one.