The Sun.
London, England, 1854-03-13 00:00:00

THE BU.RNHA3I MURDER.

It has already been announced that Hatto has mad
full confession of his guilt. The confession was made to
the chaplain of the county prison, in the presence of
Mr. Lowndes and others of the 'visiting magistrates, on
the night of his condemnation. Throughout the entire
of the first day's proceedings. in the course of which
nearly the whoie of the evidence for the Crown was pro-
duced, the prisoner evinced a frightful degree of levity,
but on the second day he preserved a serious and almost
unmoved countenance, which was adopted at the sugges.
tion of his solicitor.
When the jury returned into court after an absence
of three hours, and the foreman pronounoed the verdict of
guilty, the colour forsook the countenance of Hatto for a
moment, but he never appeared to lose his self-posses-
sion ; and, during the delivery of the sentence, when
there was scarcely a dry eye in court, and the utterance
of the venerable Lord Chief Justice was at times stifled
by emotion, the prisoner stood firm and upright in the
duck. When. he was removed to the cell below, and all
hopes of an acquittal were gone, his first impulse was to
make a clear breast ; but his admissions scarcely war-
rant the character of a full confession. Before his exe-
cution, he may probably modify some of his statements,
and make large additions.
Hatto says that some short time previous to the Ist of
November, the date of the murder, Mary Ann Sturgeon,
the murdered woman, asked him to lend her a sovereign.
This he at first refused to do, and angry words passed
between them. After consideration, however, he told
her she might have the sovereign, or two or three, if
she liked, and they were again good friends. On Tues-
day, the Ist of November, he was employed almost the
whole of the day in the house, cleaning the plate and
other things, and had much conversation with the de-
ceased, and when night arrived they were far from being
on friendly terms. In the evening Sturgeon went; •
Dunce's cottage, and when she had been gone some time
Hatto says he took off his shoes that he might not be
heard, and proceeded to the door of the cottage, when
he listened and overheard the conversation between de-
ceased and Mrs. Bunco. That conversation, he says, vexed
him very much, and he returned to the kitchen of the
farm-house, jumping over the wall, in order that he
might make no noise by the opening and shutting of the
gates. Soon after he arrived back, the deceased he says
cameinto the kitchen, put him out his supper, and in-
stead of the customary pint of beer, served him with only
half a pint. He complained of the short allowance, and
a quarrel ensued, in the course of which he says Sturgeon
twitted him very much. He then says the devil came to
him, and he struck deceased a violent blow across the
nose and mouth with the larding-iron. After the blow,
he says, a scuffle took place between them ; the deceased
struggled hard, got uppermost, and he thought at one
time she would have mastered him. She ultimately
got away from him, and ran upstairs to her bed-room,
followed by him. He says she fell on her face just in
the position in which she was found, and he added,
" I then took up the poker and smashed her brains out."
With respect to the burning of the body he is silent ;
he says that the clothes of the deceased must have
caught fire. On going down stairs he found he was
covered with blood. He then changed everything he
had on. He cut up his boots (high shoes) with his
master's razors, completely severing the upper leathers.
from the soles. He then went into the paddock
where the colts were kept, and threw the soles of the
shoes into a pool of water about five:feet deep, called the
well ; the upper-leathers he stuffed into a drain which
empties itself into the well. The feet part of his stock-
ings being very bloody, he cut away from the leggings,
and deposited them under tho coping of the immense
wall which formerly enclosed a portion of the Burn-
ham Abbey lands. The leggings he placed in the manger
in the stable. The shirt and trowsers he secreted in the
orchard on the Tuesday night. On the night of Thurs-
day, when he took his master's horse out of the stable
under the pretence of going to the Maidenhead Railway
Station for a parcel, he carried the shirt and trousers
with him, for the purpose of getting rid of them. The
trousers, all but the waistband, he cut into small shreds,
and strewed them on the hedges and by the side of the
road as he went along. When he arrived at the top of
the Maidenhead-bridge, he threw the stocking leggings
over into the Thames, and was about to throw the shirt
after them, when the thought struck him that it would
swim, so lie brought it back again, and buried it beneath
the manger of the centre stall of his niaster's stable.
Some of these fragments have been found, but others
the police could not discover. A few gentlemen connected
with the county of Bucks subscribed a handsome sum
towards the legal expenses of the defence. It is under-
stood that Lord Carington and Baron Rothschild sub-
scribed ten guineas each, and that the fund was aug-
mented by a donation from the Society for the Preven-
tion of Capital Punishment.