The Cannock Chase Examiner. — 1874-06-13 (Cannock, Staffordshire, England)

TEE MATRICIDE NEAR RIPON. AN UNHAPPY FAMILY.  The Bradford Observer publishes the following circumstances of the above shocking affairs—" At the quiet little village of Kirkby Malzeard, seven miles from Ripon, on the r ad to Masham. a man named Barker, on Thursday, June 3rd, murdered his mother iii the most cold. blooded manner. In this village, which is charmingly situated in one of the most lovely of the lovely vales of Yorkshire, lived the family of the Barkers. It consisted of five individuals—father, mothet, and three sons, All the members of the family, wit,h perhaps the exception of the mother, bore the character of being extremely penurious in thsir habits and morose and quarrelsome in their dispositions. The father followed the occupation of a jobbing farm labourer, but was without regular employment, and earned only scanty wages. Out of these he had contrived to save a considerable sum for one so poorly situated; and the family appear to have actually dev privsd themselves of some of the necessaries of life in order to add to the little heard. The mother, however, seems to have been an exception to the rule. It does not appear that she was a spendthrift, but every petty expenditure was regarded with jealousy by both father and sort, and this gave rise to con.' stallt bickerillfla, and not seldom to violence. So frequent had these disturbances become that the neighbours were quite prepared for something worse. Only about a fortnight ago the mother and her eldest son had quarrelled, and he had laid her head open with the buckle of a strap which he ' used for a garter; and some time previously her youngest son had injured her with a stone, which he had thrown at her. The eldest son, John William, the perpetrator of the murder, had served part of an apprenticeship to a butcher, but he Iv .1 the reputation of being lazy, mopish, and I addicted to the vice of reading very trashy " novels, and sensational travellers' stories of 1 the kind supplied by the 'penny dreadfule This did not suit his master, and so they parted; and since then he has lived at home, but has had ' no settled work of any sort. Some two or three years ago a woman eloped from Kirkby Malzeard with about £lO5 of her husband's money. She was, I however, caught at Pateley Bridge and brought! back again, most of the plunder being recovered at the same time. That woman was the victim of the present fearful crime. On the above date, being ' market day, the father came to Ripon, bringing his youngest son, Alfred, with him, and leaving the mother and John at home alone. On his return in , the evening, the father found John sitting on the arm of a chair in the kitchen. On being asked where his mother was, he said. 'l've chopped her head off with a hedging bill,' and he then got up and walked across the room. His father replied, 'Thou surely hasn't;' and the son replied, Yes, I have; I've done it right this time.' As the youngest boy was present at the time, the father sent him down into the cellar to see if his brother's statement was true. On his return, he said that his mother was there on the floor, dead. The father then sent him for the village policeman, who took the murderer into custody.'  'had, - --f- s ---d- -":'-. . ---Tir"-‘- -a ew ay• since, before m the case 0 REAT SALE OF Picruess.—The sale of the lof Morley v. Chapman, in which a motion pictures of the late Mr. Alexander BarkeA by I was made on behalf of Messrs. Grant and CO, !