It began when Dr Buchannan was called to the brickyard, near Kirby Wiske, to attend Ann Elizabeth Nendick, who was in bed in “a state of insensibility”.
He was told she was 17 years of age, but he thought she was “barely 15”.
Having examined her, the doctor said the poor girl had recently given birth, but there were no signs of a baby. He reported the matter to Thirsk police.
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Inspector Nicholson then visited the brickyard and interviewed the girl’s stepfather, Thomas Checkley, a widower aged 44.
“It’s a bad job,” Checkley told the inspector. “I wish I had called the doctor in first.”
He said that in the early hours he had been awoken by his stepdaughter’s crying, and had discovered how downstairs with a child.
The next part of the story is shocking, but it was carried, often in much more explicit detail, by almost every newspaper in this country and many around the world.
The Echo’s sister paper, the Darlington & Stockton Times, said that Checkley told the inspector: “At her request I put it into a pan and put it on the fire and boiled it, and then took it and put it over the wall.”
Then, in a cotton rag, the inspector found the body over the wall in the ashpit. It was female and without a left arm.
Worse, Dr Buchannan testified that the child had breathed and, from marks around its neck, it had been strangled by a ligature before it had been boiled.
Checkey was arrested and charged with murder.
At the inquest a few days later, the full gruesome story emerged. Not only had the baby been strangled, boiled and dismembered, but it was Checkey’s – his 11-year-old son testified that he had been sleeping with Annie ever since his wife had died two years earlier.
The inquest meant the baby’s body could be buried in the graveyard of Thirsk parish church, and both father and mother were sent to York Assizes to stand trial for murder.
The Assizes sat two months later, and Checkley was found guilty of manslaughter. He was sentenced to penal servitude – imprisonment with hard labour – for life. Ann was found guilty of concealing a birth and was sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment.
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