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 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 that of 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.
Photographs from our recent cemetery walk.
Radnor Street Cemetery 