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The Bethlehem murder: footprints in the snow
Curiously enough
The Bethlehem murder: footprints in the snow
Here is a winter’s tale to chill your blood.
If you like a good murder story, this is one you’ll never forget – a truly ‘Orrible Murder’. It all happened on a frosty snowy night two hundred and forty years ago, three miles south east of Llandilo in a district known now as Bethlehem, but then called Dyffryn Ceidrych. The precise location was Pompren Araeth, where a wooden bridge (pont bren) bestrode the little Araeth brook with its nearby waterfall. A remnant of the house is still there, and the date-of-build plaque above the door (1762) was placed there by the victim – one William Powell.
The ‘natural’ son of Walter Powell of nearby Glantowy, high sheriff of Carmarthenshire, William was, by all accounts, a ‘blaggard’ of a man. If a case can be made for the crime of justifiable homicide, then his slaughter deserves consideration. So strong was the feeling of just deserts locally that the murderers’ trial was heard in Hereford, as justice in Carmarthenshire would have proved difficult.
The circumstances leading to this conspiracy to murder are so convoluted as to be beyond the scope of a short article, but the usual motives raise their heads – money and women.
"An exact REPRESENTATION of the CRUEL MURDER of WILLIAM POWELL, Esq"
The money aspect was property. Powell’s claim to his father’s 3,500-acre estate was considered tenuous. A notorious cheat, land-grabber and miser by disposition he was known, worst of all, to be the murderer of his father’s housekeeper and her unborn child – potential claimants on his inheritance. A witness saw him push the pregnant woman out of a window at Glantowy. He was nonetheless acquitted on trial in 1752.
The other woman involved was Catherine Bowen of Gurrey Manor, Llandilo, who 5 years later puzzlingly became William Powell’s wife. From a miniature portrait that survives she was a woman of some character and seductive charm. Though closely watched, she was having an affair with William ‘Billy’ Williams, a haberdasher of Llandovery whose brother seems to have had a claim on the Powell estate. Another ‘natural’ son perhaps.
"Catherine, daughter of John Bowen of Gurrey and wife of William Powell
Billy Williams, a truly alarming and ruthless character, was so passionate and determined to possess Catherine that, as a preliminary, he twice tried – unsuccessfully - to dispose of his own wife by hanging and then poison. Neighbours heard her cries and cut her down; and the white powder the children saw him put in her tea killed the dog.
He once visited Glanaraeth intent on shooting Powell, but found him in company, so his next resort was to hire assassins to do the job for him. Monitoring his movements, the plan was to ambush Powell on his way home from a visit to his Swansea solicitor, but the hit-men got drunk at Llandilo fair. A further scheme to serve a writ on Powell and kill him in resisting arrest failed as the squire was still a’bed.
This ineptitude, amounting to burlesque, derives from Williams’s decision to recruit the assistance of a murderous wild bunch, all habitués of The New Bear in Llandovery. Lazy the tinker, Spiggot the barber and Blink the tanner owe something to Snow White’s dwarves, while the rest of the dirty-dozen a glover, a pedlar, two tinkers, two servants and three small farmers were drunkards, derelicts and ne’er-do-wells.
Well primed with drink, this, ‘the Llandovery gang’ all were assembled on a Sunday night in January, 1770, at the house of one of the desperadoes, Charles David Morgan, now known as Cwmdu, once an inn 4 miles south of Glanaraeth. They hung out there drinking for 24 hours before setting out to do their foul deed.
It was just after dusk. The weather was cold and snowing. Powell was entertaining two neighbours by the light of a single candle in the hall when there came a thunderous knock on the door. The little girl answered it.
He had long lain in dread of this moment, and, hearing the clamour of rough voices, ‘My God I am a dead man.’, he mourned, ‘My enemies are upon me!’ Ten conspirators burst into the room, their faces blackened. Some were wearing smocks and brandishing ‘hangers and tucks’ (swords and daggers), pistols and knives.
In the melée a pistol was fired off and Powell was thrown to the floor. They slashed and stabbed him as at a pin cushion. His nose was cut off, his thumb and finger severed and his gut burst out ‘to the size of a man’s hat’. In all, he was stabbed 20 times, eight of them reckoned fatal. Williams broke the point of his sword against Powell’s spine. The dying man’s words were ‘God, Oh God!’ And eerily, ‘Hubbub! Hubbub!’.
No one had attempted to defend him - neighbours or servants. Many ran out into the snow-bound field, soon to be overtaken by the assassins who, stumbling, returned to Cwmdu before dispersing to their various homes. Williams had rewarded them apportionately. Some got a guinea, others 3/= or 3/6d ‘to buy cheese for their children’. The remainder got a hiding for their cowardice. Billy was also a bully.
Nobody did anything about the corpse till the following day when surgeon and magistrate were summoned to the scene. Every coin of money is said to have been taken by the house-keeper and her husband who were probably owed some of it.
Pogson the magistrate observed footsteps and blood-stains in the snow leading away south across the now frozen snow. Two footprints were conspicuous: one whose heel was clumsily tapped with five broad nails, another a fine foot – William Williams’s, whose boots, he boasted, were made on the same last as the king of Denmark.
Upon this early ‘forensic’ and witness evidence, they were all tracked down and arrested. All, that is, except Williams who escaped into history. Six were hanged in Hereford - three of their bodies being given for surgical dissection, the others hung in chains on Hardwick Common, three miles from Hay.
Billy Williams, undoubtedly clever but half mad, became the most hunted man in Britain. Somehow he joined a French privateer as a common sailor and became a prisoner of war in 1780. Guarded by the Glamorgan Militia when passing through Alton it was noted that overnight one prisoner from the detail was missing. The notorious Williams.
He turns up again, this time dead, a school master in St Omer, France, drowned with a party of children whose boat overturned. In his papers, a diary entry for 8 January comments ‘my finger bled today. How singular!’
-o0o-
Lynn Hughes
30 Nov 2010
Published in the Carmarthen Journal