Harry Leigh was a young man who lived in the village of Sutton near Macclesfield, with his wife.

He had worked as a weaver, but lost his job due to his general incompetence and unsuitability.

A short, thin man, and very shabby and unkempt, he was fond of drinking beer at various public houses.

He did not dare to tell his wife about losing his job, and soon found it very difficult to provide victuals for the family.

His parents, who were both alive and well, handed him a shilling or two, but this did not prevent him becoming desperately poor.

Next door to Harry Leigh’s parents lived a widow named Mrs Halton and her eight-year- old daughter Mary Ann.

Mrs Halton worked as a weaver, and on March 23 1877, Harry overheard her telling his father that the following day, she would send her daughter to pick up her wages from Bamford’s factory.

The impoverished Harry Leigh thought of a cunning plan. He went to the factory, where he met some boys lounging about. He persuaded two of them to go and see the factory manager, with a note saying “Please pay the bearer my wages as my daughter is sick and cannot come. Wrap it up with paper and a piece of string, so he won’t lose it, and oblige, yours, E. Halton, 60 Fence Street.”

The boys, who had been promised a couple of pennies for themselves, duly went to see the manager, but he did not want to give away twelve shillings and sixpence to some unknown urchins.

When the boys returned to Harry Leigh, he cursed angrily at having been thwarted in his scheme to lay his hands on the money.

But Harry did not go home, but remained skulking outside the factory until Mary Ann Halton appeared.

When she started walking home with the money, he came up to her and started a conversation.

Since she knew him as the neighbour’s son, she was not alarmed, although it took some persuasion to make her take a longer route home, by the canal.

All of a sudden, when the two were alone, Harry cut away the pocket in Mary Ann’s dress and stole the purse with the twelve shillings and sixpence.

The girl, who was strong and vigorous for her age, gave a yell and started struggling fiercely.

Harry tried to hold her mouth, and to choke her, but she fought back angrily. In the end, he lifted her up and threw her into the canal with great force. The coward then stood and watched her drown, since the canal was deep and she could not swim.

Harry Leigh then walked to the Old Ship public house, where he had three pints of beer, before returning home and giving his wife three half-crowns and sixpence for the household expenditure.

But when Mrs Halton realized that her daughter was missing, she went to the police, and since several witnesses had seen Mary Ann with Harry outside the factory, the local constables came calling at Leigh’s cottage.

The coward Harry ran to the outhouse and locked himself in, but the constables broke open the door and took him into custody.

As Harry sat in his cell at the Macclesfield police station, a number of witnesses came forward to further incriminate him: the boys he had tried to bribe to get the wages, several witnesses who had seen him with Mary Ann, and a girl who had seen him outside the factory carrying a basket answering the description of one found where the murder had been committed.

Mary Ann Halton’s body had been retrieved from the canal, and it showed clear injuries from the assault that had preceded the murder.

On March 26, Harry Leigh was charged with the murder of Mary Ann Halton.

A large and hostile crowd of locals stood outside the Macclesfield court-room, and they would have lynched him had he not been protected by the police.

The Liverpool Mercury unflatteringly described him as a “dwarfish, dark-complexioned, puny man, and of somewhat irregular habits.”

He was committed to stand trial for murder at the Chester Assizes, before Baron Bramwell.

His defence council could not deny the formidable evidence inculpating his client, but he tried to persuade the jury that Mary Ann had become frightened after the money had been stolen, and fallen into the canal.

But the jury was impressed with the callousness of the crime, and the youth of the victim, and they refused to accept the manslaughter theory.

Harry Leigh was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death; since his crime had been a dastardly one, there was no hope of a reprieve. In the condemned cell at Chester Castle, he was visited by his parents, wife and cousin.

He wrote a full confession, detailing his premeditated and cowardly murder of a little girl, to obtain the sum of twelve shillings and sixpence.

He was hanged at the county gaol in Chester on August 13 1877; the executioner was Marwood, who made use of the long drop due to the murderer’s diminutive stature, with ‘good success’.

  • The story of the killing is republished from a new book of terrifying Victorian murders. Jan Bondeson, a former senior lecture and consultant physician at Cardiff University, has compiled a true crime book ‘Victorian Murders’ based on drawings and tales from the ‘Illustrated Police News’. Below we reprint Jan’s account of the killing. The book is a collection of cases from 1867 to 1893, and features the cowardly murder in 1877 of Mary Ann Halton by Harry Leigh, from Sutton.
  • Victorian Murders by Jan Bondeson is published by Amberley Publishing, and is available for £14.99. You can buy a copy of the book by searching for Jan Bondeson on Amazon.