The Campden Wonder

On 16 August 1660 William Harrison, aged 70, walked from Chipping Campden to Charingworth to collect rents, and did not come back. On the road between Campden and Ebrington a woman gleaning found his hat and comb, hacked and cut, and his bloodied neckband. There was no body.

The confession

Harrison's servant, John Perry, said that his mother, Joan, and his brother, Richard, had killed Harrison for his money. He said the body had been thrown into the great sink by Wallington’s Mill; the sink was searched and Campden’s fish-pools drained, but nothing was found. The three were first tried for robbery and pardoned, but at the spring assizes of 1661 they were convicted of murder, though John had retracted his story. All three were hanged on Broadway Hill, Joan first, because she was suspected of witchcraft.

The return

In 1662 William Harrison came home. He said he had been attacked, wounded, abducted and sold into slavery in the Ottoman lands, and had escaped by way of Lisbon. Historians have doubted his story. Overbury himself thought Harrison had been carried off by force, and recorded that some had hard thoughts of Harrison’s eldest son, who took over the stewardship after him. What happened to him is still unknown.

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Why it matters

The case was told in a pamphlet by Sir Thomas Overbury in 1676 and inspired plays by John Masefield. At the first assizes the judge, Sir Christopher Turner, refused to try the Perrys for murder because the body had not been found. The case is remembered as a warning against convicting anyone of murder without a body.