James Sarginson, twenty years of age, was yesterday put upon his trial at the Leeds Assizes for the wilful murder of John Cooper.
The story of the tragedy has passed into history under the name of the Roche Abbey murder. The murder was atrociously perpetrated. It was accomplished in a most cowardly manner, and the magnitude of the crime was increased by the diabolical plotting which compassed the death of the deceased. John Cooper was a man of twenty-six years of age, working gardener who hid been for some time in the employ of Messrs. Fisher, Holmes, and Co., nurserymen, of Handsworth. His parents lived at Stone, fifteen miles from Handsworth, and on the 9th April, he started from Handsworth to go home.
Between nine and ten o’clock that night he arrived at place called Brook House and repaired to a public house kept a person named Mottram. The prisoner other persons were there playing dominoes. In the conversation which passed among the company the time of night was talked about, and the deceased showed his watch in order to tell the company the Sheffield time. After getting some refreshment he went away, and immediately before or after him the prisoner left the public-house. At that time, a boy in the road noticed man, supposed to be in light clothes, standing opposite the public house if watching; and shortly after the deceased was seen to walk down the road towards Abbey-lane. The man in light clothes, who was smaller man than the other, was seen following on the opposite side of the road where there was footpath.
The deceased never reached his friends’ house, but on the following morning William Greaves, of Woolley Tree Farm, found Abbey Lane, the body the deceased a pool blood, with a great hedge stake lying his side, which was human blood and hair. The case was for some time shrouded in mystery, but at length the prisoner was apprehended, and he admitted that he had seen the deed done by another man—he said he was there when the murder was committed, and he described the mode—and he moreover got a portion of the property which had been taken from the deceased’s person.
A bunch of keys, proved to have belonged to the deceased, were also found in the pigsty. But for his own statements there was little against the prisoner except the discovery of property. After a protracted trial, the prisoner was found guilty and sentenced to death.
BNA – The Daily Telegraph – Thursday August 18th 1864.
