The Sun.
London, England, 1861-07-31 00:00:00

THE DANBURY MURDER.

Our readers will remember that at the late
assizes for the county of Essex, a married woman
named Martha Spencer Weaver was convicted of
the murder of an illegitimate child, two years
and a half old, belonging to another woman re-
siding at the village of Danbury, near Chelms-
ford, by strangling it with a shawl under very
peculiar circumstances. The prisoner, who was
separated from her husband, who is a workinc, man
living in London, had gone down to Danbury,
which is her native place, and she subsisted upon
an allowance of seven and sixpence per week made
her by her husband, and any work she was able to
obtain, and it appeared that she was very fond of
the child in question, and was constantly playing
with it, and sending it upon errands, and she
always seemed pleased to have it with her. On
the day the murder was committed she asked the
mother of the child to allow him to go into the

lage to buy a box of lucifers for her, and she, of
course, willingly consented, and the poor child
went to the prisoner's cottage, and was never seen
again alive. Upon an alarm being given he was
discovered quite dead in the prisoner's bedroom,
with the end of a shawl tied so tightly round the
throat as to cause an abrasion of the skin, and the
prisoner herself was lying upon the bed in the same
room in a state of almost deadly stupor, and appa-
rently utterly unconscious of what had taken place.
The condition of the prisoner was accounted for by ,
the fact of her being in the habit of taking large
doses of laudanum for the purpose, as she described
it, of "stilling her nerves," and there was no doubt
that on the day the fatal occurrence took place she
had taken a very large dose of that deadly ingre-
dient ; and when the discovery took place she
appeared to be almost stupefied, many hours
elapsed before she recovered her consciousness, and
she then seemed to be utterly incapable of giving
any explanation of the circumstances under which
the unhappy child met its death. The defence set
up for the wretched woman was that at the time the
act was comitted she was not in a condition of mind
to enable her to distinguish between right and
wrong; but as there was no evidence to show that
her mind was really affected, the jury, after a good
deal-of deliberation, found her guilty ; and sentence
of death of course followed upon that verdict, and,
according to the usual custom in the county of
Essex, the execution would have taken place to- 1
morrow. It is always the custom in those painful
cases, after all the facts have been submitted to the
consideration of the Secretary of State for the Home
of the
Department, if they should be considered of a
character to justify a recommendation of the cri-
minal to the mercy of the crown, for an application
tried the prison
was to the effectetrh
to be made to the learned judge to state his opinion
case, and whether it was one that would
jitusti isfyuanaceormstmooudtattihoant ofm trl.iesucastpiictealwseinutieanmese: an
whoand
the case was one that was referred to, and his reply
if the Government considered
punishment,
ttdid not call for the infliction
were circumstances connected of capital
the time
with the condition
he was of opinion that there
into theoon act was com-
mitted,g extended justify
the
of the prisoner at
that sw.doeirialdtio.nusttilfiye
and also taking
tuhtetermaerbcsyencoef of motive octirveewnforbeiitl;
prisoner. A respite during her Majesty's pleasure
was of course the result, and a formal document
to that effect was received at the gaol at
Springfieldonce
on Monday morning, and it was at
the under-sheriff of Essex, in the presence of Capt.
communicated to the prisoner by Mr. Capp,
MrGnewly-appointed governor of the
p
have all along entertained
prison. rerSYhi the
em
an idea that her life would be spared, and the com-
eseed to
com-
munication, therefore, did not seem to have so
much effect upon her as it otherwise would have
done, and she merely expressed her thanks, and
then shed a few tears. As a matter of prudence she
was informed of the terms of the respite, and that
the sentence was merely postponed during her Ma-
jesty's pleasure ; but, Of course, there is no chance
lof the capital punishment being inflicted, but,