This sounds like a Max Miller joke, but magistrates’ clerk F T Giles recalled in his memoir Open Court how, when trying to get a maintenance order revoked, one man called his young son to say what the boy had seen at home while he had been at the races. He led the boy through the story of how the wife had given the milkman a cup of tea, taken him upstairs, and taken their clothes off while the boy looked though a crack in the door.

Morton landscape

James Morton

‘And then what did you see?’ asked the man. ‘I saw them do what you did with Auntie Mary when Mum was in hospital.’

‘All little boys are thieves, cheats and liars and you are no exception,’ my form master used to say. As a general proposition, the same can be said for little girls. They can be dangerous witnesses.

The most dangerous ever must have been in 1928 in Lowndes County, Alabama, when Louise Butler and George Yelder, who had been conducting a paid affair, were convicted of the murder of her 14-year-old niece Topsy Warren. Butler found that in her absence Yelder had given Topsy a silver half dollar for services rendered and in turn she gave the child a whipping.

Shortly after, Topsy disappeared. When inquiries were made as to her whereabouts, Butler’s 12-year-old daughter Julia and another niece gave a graphic account to Deputy Sheriff Buck Meadows of seeing Butler kill Topsy and then watching as she and Yelder cut off her arms and threw the body, tied to the chassis of a car, into the river.

Butler was arrested and made a confession which she retracted immediately. She was kept in custody and, when Julia began crying asking why her mother wasn’t coming home, she was told that if she had been lying she should admit it. She replied, ‘She sure done it’. Both she and her cousin told their story at the trial with some skill. Despite trying to establish alibis, on 26 April both Butler and Yelder were sentenced to life imprisonment.

Within a week Topsy, arms still in place, was found living with relatives 20 miles away. The pair were pardoned in June that year. The girls had apparently been coached by an enemy of Yelder.

 

James Morton is a writer and former criminal defence solicitor

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