Killed in His Bed on Halloween: The Murder of 12-year-old Teddy Haskell
By: Chloe Wells
Tags: History, Unsolved, True Crime, Murder, Halloween

Killed in His Bed on Halloween: The Murder of 12-year-old Teddy Haskell

Edwin Richard Haskell, known as Teddy, who was murdered aged 12 in 1908. Photo Source

It is Halloween night 1908, and Teddy Haskell, 12, has been put to bed by his widowed mother, Flora Haskell age 34, at 9.40 pm. According to Flora, less than an hour later she heard a noise and, thinking it was a visitor at her front door, walked the few steps from her kitchen into the narrow front hallway of the small terraced house she shared with Teddy on Meadow Road in the city of Salisbury.

As she stood in the hall, an unknown man came running down the stairs of the house. He was holding a blood-covered knife which he threw at Flora, splattering her clothes with blood. He then fled the house, turning right out of the front door and then, two doors down, turning onto another residential street called York Road.



Flora first told this story to her nephew Percy Noble, who had arrived at the back door of the house at about 10.30 pm to return some money he had borrowed. Waiting for someone to answer his knock, Percy heard what he thought was a chair being moved across the floor and a ‘thumping noise’ but did not hear the front door open or close. He was startled to then hear Flora scream. She flung open the back door and shrieked at him:

“Go and see if you can see that man. He has killed my poor Teddy. Go for a doctor!”

Percy looked up and down the Meadow Road, but could see no one. He went to fetch a doctor, as well as a Police Sergeant.



A neighbour, alerted by Flora’s screams, then went upstairs and found Teddy lying dead in bed with his throat cut but ‘looking peaceful. His bedroom seemed undisturbed.

Teddy’s death will remain the city of Salisbury’s most famous unsolved murder for the next 110 years until the Salisbury Poisonings in 2018.

The Short Life of Teddy Haskell

Teddy was born in 1896, at the end of the Victorian era, and spent his childhood in the prosperous and peaceful Edwardian era. He may have had hazy memories of Queen Victoria’s death and the coronation of King Edward VII in 1901 when he was four. Teddy’s father died when he was six or seven. The summer before Teddy was killed, London had hosted the Olympic Games. 1908 also saw the opening of Salisbury’s first cinema.

Postcard of Salisbury Cathedral, 1900s.

Teddy was by all accounts a cheerful boy and was popular in the neighbourhood. At age six, Teddy had had his lower right leg amputated due to complications of tuberculosis and walked and played football with the aid of crutches. He had been saving up money to purchase an artificial limb when he was killed.

This saved money, which was kept in the house, may have been the motive behind Teddy’s murder. According to Flora, some of the money went missing at the same time Teddy was killed. The Police also thought the stash of cash was a motive for Flora to have killed her son. Flora was a laundress who had little money.



On the day of Teddy’s funeral, crowds lined the streets as the hearse progressed the mile from his home in Meadow Road to the graveyard on Devizes Road, Salisbury. His coffin was followed to the graveside by twelve of his classmates from Fisherton School and he was buried alongside his father.



The inscription on his gravestone read:

“Edwin Richard Haskell By his school fellows and friends Died at the age of 12 years October 31st 1908 In thy presence fullness of joy”

Teddy’s grave as it looked in 2013. Image: Find A Grave / Moonraker.

The Police Investigation

Flora repeated her story of the unknown knife-wielding man to the police. She could give only a partial description of the man, and he was not seen by anyone else. As was the procedure at that time, Chief Constable Richardson of Salisbury Police immediately contacted the Police Detectives at Scotland Yard in London. At the same time, a telegram alert was sent to ‘All Stations’ to look out for the mysterious man. There was an intensive search over the next couple of days, but the police could find no trace of him.

Before the police had been able to examine the crime scene or Teddy’s body, local doctors had washed and moved his body and disarranged his bedclothes. Evidence such as fingerprints was therefore lost. The police were able to determine, however, that the murder weapon was a kitchen knife belonging to Flora. It had recently been sharpened.

Chief Constable Richardson of Salisbury Police in c.1905. Image: Wikipedia / Public Domain.

Detective Dew

Chief Inspector Walter Dew of London’s Scotland Yard was sent to Salisbury — which is about 90 miles west of London — to investigate the murder. Detective Dew had been involved in the hunt for London’s most famous serial killer Jack the Ripper in 1888 (although he may have exaggerated the extent of his involvement). Dew would also later arrest wife-killer Dr Crippen in July 1910 before retiring that same year.



Sending a London detective to investigate a Wiltshire family for the murder of their child reminds us of a case from 48 years earlier where Scotland Yard took over from local police.

The local Chief Constable, Ernest Richardson, told his family that Dew formed an opinion on Flora’s guilt from the outset of their inquiries, whereas Richardson preferred to establish the facts first. Detective Dew was convinced Flora was guilty. She was arrested and charged with murder just five days after Teddy died, on the 4th of November. Teddy’s funeral took place the next day.

A Mother on Trial

Flora Haskell, date unknown. Image Source

Flora was tried twice for the murder of her son. The first trial was in December 1908 and the second in April 1909. Flora also appeared at the inquest into Teddy’s death in late November 1908. The inquest’s verdict was that Flora had killed Teddy during a “moment of temporary insanity.”

The murder, the inquest, and the two trials caused a sensation in the British press: a clearly distressed widowed mother accused of murdering her ‘crippled’ son, it was a story that tugged at people’s heartstrings. One newspaper headlined a story Mrs Haskell’s Ordeal.

The press coverage of this case echoes that of the 1860 murder of three-year-old Francis Saville Kent, who was allegedly killed by his 16-year-old half-sister Constance at Road Hill House, Wiltshire. At the centre of the press, speculation was the question of how a respectable woman could brutally murder a member of her own family as they slept at the family home?

At her trial, Flora was described as “a careworn, listless, frail woman.” She also broke down sobbing and fainted several times during proceedings.

The prosecution argued that Flora cut Teddy’s throat in a ‘mercy killing’ to end and prevent the ‘crippled’ boy’s suffering. The prosecution also stated, however, that the murder was not pre-meditated but was the result of a ‘moment of madness,’ one of those extraordinary abnormal conditions which overtake human beings sometimes.

Their main piece of evidence against her was the blood-stained clothing Flora had been wearing on the night of the murder, and which she explained away by saying the mysterious man ‘splashed her with blood’ from the knife as he fled the scene.

There were certainly strange things about Flora’s account of events: according to Flora, she did not go upstairs after seeing the unknown man come downstairs with the bloody knife in his hand, but she immediately concluded that he had murdered Teddy, screaming this at her nephew Percy.

How the mysterious man got hold of Flora’s kitchen knife when, by Flora’s telling, he entered the house through the front door and went directly upstairs without going near the kitchen, remained unexplained.

But could Flora have killed her only child? In court, a witness described Flora’s parenting: “Everything a mother ought to be, she was.” A long-time friend of the family stated that there was the “greatest affection” between mother and son.



The defence argued that Teddy had been killed by the mysterious intruder described by Flora. They could not explain, however, why this man would murder a defenceless Teddy in cold blood but would leave Flora, equally defenceless and now a witness to his crime, unharmed.

“If I did it…I don’t remember”

Whilst being held in custody awaiting trial in early December 1908, Flora had spoken about the crime saying words to the effect that “If I did it…I don’t remember” or “If I did do it, I don’t know anything about it.” A Priest who visited her several times hinted that she had confessed the crime to him. The Reverend also believed that Flora was not in her right mind at the time of the murder.



After Flora’s first trial, the jury was deadlocked and unable to return a verdict. There was evidence against Flora but nothing conclusive, and no strong motive: she apparently loved her son. At her second trial, in April 1909, Flora was acquitted by a jury.



After her acquittal, Flora left Salisbury for Stockwell, London and died on November 6, 1920, aged just 46, from tuberculosis. This cause of death perhaps explains her ‘frail and listless’ appearance in court; she may have already been suffering from the effects of the disease.



Although she was acquitted, Flora is named on Teddy’s death certificate as his killer. Historian Ruby Vitorino told the Salisbury Journal in 2016 that: “the death certificate says clearly that the cause of death was murder. That was written before it even went to court.” The coroner who made the finding that Flora killed Teddy was directed to do so by Scotland Yard, says Vitorino.

The Mysterious Intruder

No other suspects besides Flora and the unknown man she said she saw have ever been named in the case, and Flora was acquitted of the crime. So let us examine the possibility of a man being able to enter Flora’s home and murder Teddy unnoticed by Flora and unseen by anyone else.

Based on a floor plan and photos of 40 Meadow Road, the front door opened directly onto the street and there was also a back door that gave access through a courtyard to a small pedestrian alleyway. The house has one staircase which is along a short hallway directly opposite the front door. If the mysterious murderer Flora told police about did indeed exist, he must have entered through the front door (as Flora, sitting in the kitchen near the back door, says she did not see or hear him enter), gone upstairs, killed Teddy, come back downstairs, pushed passed Flora in the narrow front hall and fled out of the front door.

I have lived in the same type of small narrow terraced house as Flora and I find it hard to believe that someone, even in the ‘back room’, would not hear a person enter the house and climb the stairs. At the same time, however, my housemates were robbed whilst they slept with the thief entering and exiting through the back door, and they heard nothing.

Over 110 years have now passed since the Halloween night when Teddy Haskell was murdered in his bed. On October 31st, 2008, exactly 100 years after Teddy’s death, local historians Jeremy B. ‘Frogg’ Moody and Bruce S. Purvis published the book ‘If I Did It… I Don’t Remember’: Salisbury’s Edwardian Murder Mystery about the case. In 2016 they, along with other local historians, called for Teddy’s death certificate to be changed so that it no longer states that he was killed by his mother Flora.

The modest two-bedroom terraced house where the murder happened — 40 Meadow Road, Salisbury — is still lived in today. It was put up for sale in 2018 with a price tag of 220,000 GBP (302,000 USD). The house’s grim history was not mentioned in the Estate Agent’s documents.