The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser. — 1842-11-11 (Liverpool, Merseyside, England)

HORRIBLE INFANTICIDES.—We have this week the painful duty of recording a case of long-continued and inhuman depravity almost unp ,ralleled in the annals of crime. It appears that a woman named Frances Bennett, residing at Ruardeanhill, in the Forest of Dean, being very ill, and not wishing to die with the undivulged guilt of murder upo ated to the Rev. Henry Formb )ut twelve months  and and succeeded  servatives  At Hasti  her conscience,  curate of Ruardean, that  ago she be  named Thos. Yapp with whom s been cohabiting for' about eight or ten years, which 1, after it had lived a few days, she destroyed by poisoning it, after which she and Yapp buried it beneath the pavement of the brewhouse. The wretched woman further added that she had been the mother of five children by the same man, all of whorn she had murdered at their birth, and, With Yapp's assistance had buried their bodies at separate spots beneath the floor of the brewhouse, and near a barn adjoining her cottage. These horrid confessions seemed, from their unexampled atrocity, to be more like the ravings of delirium than truth; but upon information being given to the police, and a search being made in the spots indicated by the unnatural woman, the skeletons of her six murdered offspring were all found and stamped truth upon a tale too horrid else for belief. Upon this Yapp. was taken into custody, and a policeman, we believe, remained to take ch,irge of the woman, who repeated her confession to her sister and afterwards to the policeman, Fowler. The facts were intimated to J. Cook, Esq., and a warrant was issued for summoning a jury to hold an inquest. By this time, however, the woman, Frances Bennett, had recovered in a measure her hardihood of character, and on the inquest, which was held on Tuesday last, she positively denied that she had ever given birth to any children, except to two which she bore to her late husband, and which were alive now, and she strongly persisted that she had never made any communication such as that above stated, either to her sister, to the policeman Fowler, or to the clergyman, the Rev. Mr. Formby. The latter gentleman was examined by the coroner, and deposed as above ; and he further admitted that the woman had subsequently made further disclosures and confessions to him, but as they were made to him in his spiritual capacity, he must decline to divulge them. After, without effect, endeavouring to prevail upon Mr. Formby to state all that the woman had told him, and after unavailing remonstrances against the withholding of evidence, the coroner left the point as it stood, and passed on to the examination of the sister to Francis Bennett, whose evidence was to the effect, that, on Saturday, the 29th of October she was with her sister, who had been in a weak state of health for some time, and had been confined  to her bed about a week ; that, before Mr. Formby called, her sister made an alarm, and exclaimed that she would have  her dead children dug up and buried in the churchyard. She said that, immediately after the infants were born, she held them under water till they were dead, and then she and Yapp buried them. She added that the last of the six children was not served in this way, but lived for two days ; that it was weakly, and she gave it some arsenic and it died; that Yapp was very sorry when he found that this child was dead, and said he would not have lost it for £5O ; and that they both together buried the child in the brewhouse. At this stage of the proceedings it was thought advisable to adjourn the inquiry, in order to afford opportunity for further and more deliberate inquiry into the circumstances of the mysterious and very extraordinary case, and the inquest was accordingly adjourned till Wednesday, the 9th instant.—Gloucester Chronicle.