The re-imagined story …
It was all anyone was talking about on the factory floor the following day – the murder of Fanny Hunter. All the girls were shocked but not so much that Fanny had been murdered, but that her mild mannered boyfriend Walter White had done it.
Everyone branded Fanny a good time girl and we all know what they meant by that. But actually she wasn’t. She liked a laugh and a joke and yes a drink or two sometimes, but I always felt there was a sadness about Fanny, a lonely side to the exuberant young woman.
Some said she had it coming, but not me. I was fond of Fanny and I’d never liked that boyfriend of hers. He was always very polite and friendly but I didn’t like the way he was around Fanny, always standing too close to her as if keeping others away. He was possessive and jealous – never liked her talking to other people. Creepy and vaguely menacing.
Fanny was always attracted to the wrong sort. She was a kind, big hearted girl and that’s how I shall remember her.
The facts …
Two young women each murdered by a sweetheart ten years apart have some striking similarities but a very different response from people in the town where they lived.
Swindonians were shocked by the murder of 19 year old Esther Swinford in 1903 but when Frances Hunter was shot by her sweetheart in one of the outbuildings at the Goddard Arms Hotel they were shocked but for quite quite different reasons.
Walter James White was told that Frances had previously been in a relationship with a married man. He went to her workplace at the Goddard Arms Hotel and challenged her.
In his statement he said that Frances had confessed she had disgraced him and she hoped that God would forgive her. “I told her she would never deceive anybody else as I was going to kill her.”
White was found standing over the young woman’s body, a revolver in his hand. He coolly advised the manager of the hotel to send for the police.
White’s defence counsel pleaded that White was in “such a perturbed state he was not responsible.” A petition signed by 4,000 Swindonians, including the mayor and deputy mayor was sent to the home secretary pleading for mercy, but White was found guilty and executed at Winchester prison on June 15, 1914.
Frances lies buried in an unmarked, pauper’s grave in Radnor Street Cemetery. There was no funeral fund for Frances, no impressive memorial on her grave site.
Esther Swinford’s story is well known here in Swindon. Frances’s story seldom gets a mention.
Radnor Street Cemetery 