Caught out by her carelessness
John Pinckard was going to take a horse to be sold at the Michaelmas Fair in Daventry.
It was October 3, 1851. He left Lower Thrupp Grounds Farm and walked the short distance to his father, Richard's, cottage. Richard left his wife, Bess, cooking dinner.
Back at Lower Thrupp, John's wife, Elizabeth, asked her servant, Ann Cross, to go to John Farr the baker in Welton to get some bread.
It was only about a mile across the fields and over the canal bridge. Elizabeth knew exactly long it would take.
As the stableyard clock struck ten, one of John's farm labourers saw Elizabeth walking in the direction of Bess's cottage. She looked pretty in her light pink dress.
He wasn't spying but he did notice that she came back at about a quarter to twelve.
At ten to twelve, Ann arrived back with the bread and noticed that her mistress had changed her dress; now she had on a mauve one that was torn at the gathers and hung down. When Ann remarked on this, Elizabeth said she'd caught her dress on the dairy door.
After they'd had some bread and cheese, Elizabeth went upstairs to change her dress. She said she might go to the fair, but she didn't; instead she and Ann finished their chores.
Then they heard someone at the kitchen door.
It was John Letts, a farm labourer and he had a grave look on his face.
He looked at Elizabeth: "Your mother-in-law's hung herself."
Next morning, Elizabeth told Ann that she'd washed her mauve dress twice.
Ann wondered why.
Dr Sharman arrived at Bess's cottage.
Her swollen, discoloured face had a bruise over the right eye.
The wounds suggested a blow with a large blunt instrument.
There was cloth tape round the neck and more tape on a ceiling hook and blood smeared on the wall.
Was it suicide? Dr Sharman thought not.
Bess had been attacked and then strangled. But who was responsible?
Dr Sharman went to Lower Thrupp Farmhouse and suggested to Elizabeth that her mother-in-law had been murdered.
Elizabeth sobbed: "You could live and die with her and never have a cross word".
Then PC Osborne went to see Elizabeth.
He said: "No doubt someone had done the deed that had an interest in it." She said "I can assure you that I did not want to take Mrs Pinckard's life for the sake of money.
I have plenty."
But she hadn't. She and her husband were broke.
They were in arrears with their rent and desperate.
They knew that old Bess had inherited 1,000 from her great uncle Francis, but John and Elizabeth would not see any of that until the old woman died. Hmm!
And so it was. Elizabeth Pinckard thought she'd planned it all so carefully. John and his father went to the fair. Ann went for bread.
The farm workers were doing jobs around the farm. Bess was alone.
Elizabeth took tape from Bess's sewing box and strangled her.
Bess struggled; Elizabeth hit her with a mallet and tightened the tape to the hook to make it look like suicide but accidentally smeared blood on the wall.
The thin tape broke and she failed to realise that it had left no strangulation marks round her mother-in-law's neck.
She didn't reckon on a labourer seeing her as she left Bess's cottage, or a local bobby on his way to Daventry spotting her standing at the door of the cottage at about half past eleven.
Nor should she have worn the ripped dress or admitted to washing it twice.
She had been careless.
And she had been evil. In February 1852, Elizabeth Pinckard was sentenced to death.
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