The Tabernacle Murder

 Tabernacle Street as it is today

Life was definitely bad...ish for these two individuals.

In the mid 19^th century one or two body parts began springing up across the bustling city of Norwich (UK) but nobody suspected any ill doing. It was a well known fact that some Norwich medical students had a penchant for pranks and it was assumed that these parts had at one time been connected to cadavers on which the students had been practising their surgery skills and then decided to scatter them willy nilly across Norwich. It was a good while after this grisly discovery it was learnt that the remains belonged to Mrs Martha Sheward. It was 18 years after this discovery that her murderer finally confessed.

Norwich Cathedral

The Shewards lived in Tabernacle Street, now known as Bishopgate. The street is close to the River Wensum and within a couple of minutes' walk to Norwich Cathedral. William Sheward, the deceased's husband and a tailor by trade, confessed that he and Martha had had an argument over money and William had become so angry that he had picked up his cut throat razor and slit Martha's throat. On that day he had a job interview in Great Yarmouth and, rather than miss out on this job, he merely changed his clothes and went off leaving Martha dead and bloody on the floor.

Having returned he had to decide how best to get rid of Martha and opted for the slice, dice and stew method! He cut her body into small pieces and, in order to make the pieces even smaller and less smelly, he boiled them up in a pan. As he completed each batch he took to the streets of Norwich under cover of darkness and distributed his Sheward stew across the streets of Norwich – placing them in drains, under hedges, anywhere where they were unlikely to be found for a while.

As this job was so long and laborious Martha Steward began to whiff a bit and William became panicky in case his neighbours noticed this odd odour so he began cutting out the boiling process and just distributing the raw meat and bones.

In the meantime, he told his neighbours that Martha had left him and gone back to her family and those neighbours readily accepted the explanation. After all, who could ever imagine that their next door neighbour would slit his wife's throat, cut her into small pieces and boil her before throwing her into the local undergrowth?

After his wife's demise he flourished. He remarried after some years and eventually took over a pub in Oak Street, Norwich but, almost 20 years after he'd murdered his first wife, William could no longer bear the guilt so, while in London and having had a boozy New Year, on 1^st January 1869 he walked into a police station and confessed.

William Sheward was hanged at the old Norwich Gaol in April 1869 at the hands of William Calcraft, a well known hangman who was famed for allowing prisoners to die by strangulation rather than the swifter breaking of the neck.

The strange thing is that, by the time of his death, William Sheward had never divulged the whereabouts of Martha's head so we assume it's still lying somewhere around the streets of my home city.

  Bishop's Bridge

I have my own idea on what may have happened to Martha's head. I believe that William may have thrown this into the River Wensum as it was just a stone's throw from where he lived and Bishop's Bridge lies across the river at the top of Tabernacle Street (Bishopgate) but I suspect we'll never know.