IT was the sort of story the tabloid press would make hay with today. Because the suspicious death of prominent Worcester publican Henry Powell back in 1888 seemed to have it all: juicy rumours of marital infidelity, a toy boy lover with a penchant for molesting children, a potentially huge insurance pay-out and a crafty cover-up to escape justice.

At 8.50am on Easter Tuesday (April 3) 1888, Powell, the 52-year old landlord of the Golden Hart in Sansome Street, died in his bed, not having set foot outside the pub since Christmas.

He’d been a staff-sergeant in the Worcestershire Militia with exemplary service in India, the Cape, Ireland and at home, and had been in charge of the Golden Hart for a little over three years, having previously run a tobacconists’ shop in St John's and later in New Street with his wife Mary Eleanor, aka Nellie, who was almost 20 years his junior and known to be a bit flighty.

His body showed signs of narcotic poisoning and assiduous sleuthing by the city’s top detective, Det Sgt William Preece, revealed that Nellie had only recently insured her husband’s life with the Refuge Insurance Company, first for £100 then for £200. Both policies had been taken out without his knowledge and with his signature so badly forged that comparisons were later described in court as being “as different as light and

darkness”.

Further investigation turned up the fact that Nellie –  the sole beneficiary of Powell’s will – had also bribed an insurance official to pass her invalid husband as A1 fit without even seeing him.

As even more incriminating facts emerged, a man who had been tending Henry Powell in the three days he’d suddenly become worse and died – while Nellie Powell remained in bed, uncaring and unwilling to attend to her husband – also became suspected of involvement in what was now seen as an open-and-shut case of murder.

This was James Henry Keatley, an out-of-work hairdresser and known paedophile, who at 32 was 20 years younger than the dead publican. He had been living in Bowling Green Terrace until three days before Powell’s death when, at Nellie’s instigation, he moved into the Golden Hart.  That Keatley was unpaid for his services, both as barman and carer, heightened rumours there was more going on between him and Nellie Powell than seemed proper.

In addition to several local chemists all testifying to having sold laudanum and opium to Keatley over the previous few weeks, DS Preece and his team amassed a wealth of damning circumstantial evidence against the pair, which also implicated the Golden Hart’s 20-year old barmaid Helen Humphries, who was in her first job. 

With evidence mounting against them, all three were arrested and committed for trial.

At the police court hearing at the Guildhall on April 9, Keatley and Nellie steadfastly maintained their silence, although at one point the magistrates had to halt the proceedings as Keatley was giving his two co-accused signals across the court-room. 

Berrow’s Worcester Journal reported that a huge crowd had gathered, “with hundreds within and without. The girl Helen Humphries was but little affected. Mrs. Powell on the other hand was sobbing as she was placed in the dock and continued to do so during the few minutes the proceedings occupied. When the charge of murder was formally read over to her by the clerk, she exclaimed ‘Oh, no sir, oh!’ and on leaving the dock after the remand she had to be supported by policemen”.

By the time of the committal trial two weeks later, Keatley had managed to get himself jailed and was just days into a 16-month sentence with hard labour for another crime – indecent assault against 11-year old Florence Mason of Portland Street, committed by the steps to the cathedral ferry just two weeks earlier. Keatley claimed he had assaulted her fully expecting to be tried and transported to Australia where he’d hoped to evade the Powell murder charge and once his time was served, to start afresh. No such luck.

Keatley was brought from Worcester Gaol to hear the verdict after a nine-hour hearing. He appeared in his prisoners’ garb to learn the case against Helen Humphries was being dropped through lack of evidence, but that he and Nellie Powell were both being formally tried for murder.

The pair appeared in a packed court in Worcester Shirehall in the first week of  July 1888 before Mr Justice Denman – Nellie Powell with her widow’s veil covering her face, with Keatley ordered to remain in his prison uniform.

The trial lasted two-and-a-half days, during which 45 witnesses were called. The judge’s summing-up lasted three-and-a-half hours and the jury was out for 35 minutes.

To everyone’s disbelief – especially the members of the local press – both were found not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to 12 years apiece. 

It was a verdict no-one had expected, and it meant that Nellie Powell and James Keatley were spared the same noose that had already hung three Worcestershire murderers that same year: Thomas Wyre, who’d thrown his four year-old son down a well at Wolverley, near Kidderminster,  George Daniels, once of the Angel pub in St John's, who’d murdered his lover in Birmingham, and 71-year-old Droitwich shoemaker Samuel Crowther, who knifed gardener John Willis following a row over a few scrumped pears.

Extracts taken from Bob Blandford’s top-selling book “The Spike”, which tells the often violent history of Worcester City Police.