The 1844 Farr Child Murders Part 2 - From Trial to Legacy
This is part two of the murders of the children of Christopher Farr and the legacy of Mary Ann Johnson. Please read part one before reading this post. The events of this post revolve around the Lincolnshire towns of Benington, Lincoln, Surfleet and Gedney and it is based on contemporary newspaper reports of the court proceedings that took place in 1844. The family involved is that of my third great grandfather - Christopher Farr, his first wife and their children. This story was uncovered through meticulous research by Tony and Peter Packham, descendants of Christopher Farr, so I am sincerely grateful for their efforts. 1 I am also grateful to the help Marjorie Byrne for her ideas and editing skills.
The Second Trial
While Mary Ann Johnson sat in her damp prison cell waiting her own trial, the gears of investigation continued to turn beyond the castle walls. The authorities began to look more closely at Elizabeth’s role in the boys’ deaths. They were spurred on by a damning new confession Mary Ann gave the prison chaplain shortly after her arrival at the castle. The coroner’s inquest had stated that only one of three people could have poisoned the boys: Christopher, Elizabeth or Mary Ann. Initially the Coroner pointed its finger almost entirely at Mary Ann, but as weeks passed, the focus shifted. Detectives and magistrates worked behind the scenes questioning witnesses and chasing inconsistencies in the accounts. They proposed Elizabeth was the planner of the crime who manipulated Mary Ann into poisoning her half-brothers.
On the 6th April, Elizabeth made the same journey to Lincoln Castle as that made by Mary Ann. It is reasonable to assume that goalers and prisoners would have treated her more harshly than they did the young Mary Ann.
Elizabeth Johnson faced three months prison before her day in court, three months of looking up at Cobb Hall and the gallows. Locked within Lincoln Castle’s ancient walls, she quietly awaited her fate.
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| Lincoln Castle |
In the usual manner and ceremony the two judges arrived at Lincoln on the afternoon of Saturday 20th July 1844. Proceedings were opened and then Lord Justice Denman and Justice Sir Thomas Coltman retired to dine with the Lord Bishop of Lincoln. Sunday was a beautiful fine morning and the crowded Cathedral heard a fine sermon from the Precentor. These services on the Sunday of the Assizes were truly spectacular occasions and one of the grandest events in the city’s social calendar.
At eleven o’clock the following Monday, Justice Coltman swore in the Grand Jury, and then addressed them. He advised that there were several cases of great enormity, but the most important was the case of Elizabeth Johnson who was committed on a charge of poisoning two children. He explained that as she was not present when the poison was administered, it was not an ordinary case of poisoning. He stressed however, that a person might be convicted of such a charge, if they got an innocent person to administer the poison. If they found this to be the case in the present instance, they should put her to trial for wilful murder. The law at this time was that a child under the age of 7 could not be indicted for any felony. Above the age of 14 they could, as they can distinguish between good an evil, so were responsible for their own acts. For the ages between 7 and 14, before indicting them, it had to be determined if the child could distinguish between good and evil. Therefore, if it was proven that Mary Ann knew right from wrong and had a clear understanding of the guilt of the action, then Elizabeth could only be found guilty of being an accessory before the fact. Accordingly, Elizabeth had two charges against her. One for being an accessory before the act and the second for wilful murder.
It was a memorable day for the crowd. Prior to Elizabeth’s case was that of a woman named Eliza Joyce. She was being tried for poisoning two of her children in 1841 & 1843 because of a fear of having a large family. She pleaded guilty as “her life was hell on earth” and she was the first woman to be executed in Lincoln for 27 years two weeks later. Her sentence no doubt had a profound impact on Elizabeth, as their charges were almost identical.
Mary Ann was called to give testimony. She related that Elizabeth told her to lie to Mr Overton and the coroner about giving the poison to the lady near the bridge. She said Elizabeth advised that ‘if you say this, they will soon settle it; if you do not, they won’t’ and afterwards Elizabeth praised her and gave her a kiss.
If Mary Ann’s testimony was true, Elizabeth most likely believed the fiction about giving the arsenic to the lady on the bridge would deflect suspicion from both herself and Christopher, and it would cast further doubt on Mary Ann’s innocence. Mary Ann repeated the account at each inquest and before the coroner, but while in prison awaiting her own trial, she confessed to the chaplain that the woman never existed. She also testified that previous to the deaths of her brothers her step-father and Elizabeth did not sleep together, but after, they had shared the same bed.
Witnesses filled in the details:
- Mr. Overton confirmed the sale of arsenic, warning of its dangers. Mrs Chevins recalled the agony of Daniel and William and that Elizabeth told her the blue and white mug the boys drank from had gone missing after that night.
- Dr Cammack reported classic signs of arsenic in the boys’ stomachs. He also recalled Elizabeth’s trembling hands. Elizabeth’s cover stories of broth and sweet tea were dismissed.
- Sarah Johnson spoke of Elizabeth’s ambitions for a “home” which led her to become housekeeper for Christopher. She stated Elizabeth’s involvement deepened as she moved into the household and after the boys’ deaths, there were sharing the same bed. She also recounted tense moments travelling with Elizabeth after court, noting Elizabeth’s warnings to Mary Ann to remain silent.
- Charles Johonson, Sarah’s husband and Elizabeth’s brother, testified that Elizabeth and Christopher seemed very fond of each other and he heard them say at the funeral that there was no poison in the house.
- Mrs Flowers recounted an ambiguous scene at Elizabeth’s mother’s home in Surfleet. She recalled that Elizabeth said, ‘bless the Lord she was innocent’. Her brother Mark who was present observed ‘If thou are innocent, God only knows who are guilty’ to which the Elizabeth replied ‘Yes I know all about it and so does he’. Her mother said ‘If you know all about it why do you not tell?’. Elizabeth answered ‘The child has made a confession and they will believe her before me’.
- Christopher was not called to give evidence.
In final summing-up, Justice Coltman made clear: if Mary Ann’s faculties were sufficient (as the evidence showed), Elizabeth could only be charged as an accessory. Elizabeth’s defense pressed that Mary Ann’s intelligence and concealment made her more than a pawn; the panel withdrew and after only five minutes, returned: not guilty!
Although Elizabeth was acquitted and could not be tried again for the same offence, Mary Ann’s situation was different. Her trial had collapsed on a technicality, not a verdict. In Victorian England, this meant the law did not forbid the authorities from charging her again for the same crime. They could have chosen to fix the faulty indictment. In the end, Mary Ann was never retried, perhaps because of her age and public sympathy.
Meanwhile, Christopher Farr, central to the family’s tragedy, was never called to the witness stand nor formally charged. His absence from both the witness box and the criminal dock remains an unanswered question at the heart of the story. As a journalist wrote at the time:
“This case is so shrouded in mystery … we forbear saying more.”
The Legacy
Sarah Johnson: The Anchor Who Held Fast
Sarah Johnson, Mary Ann’s loyal aunt, embodied the quiet heroism of Victorian womanhood — the kind of strength that held families together through scandal and grief, without fanfare or recognition. When the trial collapsed and Mary Ann walked out of Lincoln Castle acquitted but marked forever by tragedy, it was Sarah who opened her door and her heart. She had married Charles Johnson in April 1840, four years before the poisoning, and together they built a modest but stable household in Surfleet. Sarah, a farm labourer’s wife, likely tended chickens, managed the household economy with skills passed down through generations of fenland women, and now kept watch over her traumatised young niece.
For nine years after the trial, Mary Ann remained in Sarah and Charles’s care, finding in their home the safety and routine that had been shattered at Benington. Sarah became the mother Mary Ann had lost, not just offering shelter, but providing the patient, steady presence that allowed a wounded child to begin healing. When Mary Ann gave birth to an illegitimate son named George Whelpton Johnson in 1850, Sarah and Charles helped raise the baby, extending their protection to the next generation. In 1853, when twenty-one-year-old Mary Ann married William Hardy, a farmer’s son from nearby Gosberton, Sarah stood as witness. Her name in the parish register is more than a legal formality — it is a testament to the bond between aunt and niece, a relationship forged in crisis and sustained by love.
Mary Ann: From Tragedy to Redemption
Mary Ann Johnson left Lincoln Castle in March 1844 acquitted of murder, but she could not leave behind the events that had brought her there. At twelve years old, she had bought arsenic, given the poisoned mug to her half-brothers, and watched them die in agony. The law released her, but the burden of that day remained with her.
For the next nine years, she found refuge in the household of Sarah and Charles in Surfleet, where she lived away from public judgment. On 18 December 1850, aged nineteen, she gave birth in Sarah’s cottage to a son, George Whelpton Johnson. The middle name “Whelpton” is significant: it strongly suggests a connection with the Whelpton family, though the exact nature of that connection is not documented in surviving records.
In 1853, Mary Ann married William Hardy, a farmer’s son from Gosberton. Her father was recorded on the marriage entry as William Dawson, a bricklayer of Leverton. Sarah stood beside her niece at the wedding, marking Mary Ann’s move toward stability and respectability. The couple settled first at Taumberlands Farm in Swineshead and later in Kirton, and George took his stepfather’s surname, becoming George Hardy within the family unit.
Over the following years, Mary Ann and William had four daughters: Betsy (1854), Sarah Ann (1856), Ann (1858), and Selina (1859). With William’s steady agricultural work, the family achieved a modest stability that would have seemed impossible twelve years earlier.
On 4 June 1865, Mary Ann gave birth to another son, William Thomas Hardy. Although born in Swineshead, he was baptised more than a month later at St Mary’s Church in Uttoxeter, Staffordshire, over 100 miles away. For a labouring family, such a journey was unusual and suggests that the family had a connection in that part of the country.
The Whelpton connection
So who was the father of her first-born son, George Whelpton Johnson? The most plausible explanation for the Whelpton middle name lies with the prosperous Lincolnshire family of George Whelpton of Louth and Derby. George Whelpton (1797–1873) began life as a shoemaker in Louth and later built a profitable business manufacturing “Whelpton’s Vegetable Purifying Pills,” which by the 1830s and 1840s had become widely advertised and distributed.
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| “Mayport Advertiser”, 10 July 1868 p2 https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0002274/18680710/017/0002?noTouch=true |
That business success mattered. By the time Mary Ann’s first child was born, the Whelptons had the money, mobility, and social connections to assist younger relatives or acquaintances in ways that poorer families could not. Their religious ties are also relevant. Whelpton was a Methodist, and the family moved in both Methodist and Anglican circles; later benefactions included almshouses in Horncastle and support for St Saviour’s Church, Eastbourne, where one of his sons is connected with the Anglican ministry.
Geography strengthens the case. Sources on the Whelpton family place George Whelpton junior in Derby as a chemist’s journeyman working within his father’s expanding business, while Mary Ann lived in the Surfleet and Boston area of Lincolnshire. In the 1840s, before the railway transformed travel, that was a substantial distance, so any contact would have been deliberate rather than accidental. If George Whelpton junior was indeed the father of Mary Ann’s first child, the child’s middle name would make immediate sense.
The evidence strongly suggests that George Whelpton junior was the father of George Whelpton Johnson, and that the Whelpton family may have provided some form of support or influence thereafter. Tragically, George Whepton (Junior) died young, aged only 22. George Johnson was only 3 years old, so his Whelpton grandparents must have taken an interest in his future.
George’s rise
By the 1870s, George Whelpton Johnson was studying at Queen’s College, Birmingham, a theological training college for Anglican clergy. That step implies access to education, sponsorship, or patronage beyond what would usually be available to the illegitimate son of a rural labourer’s daughter. In Victorian England, working-class boys did not generally enter the Church of England without help from networks of influence and support.
By 1881, George appears in the census as Curate of Rushall in Staffordshire, confirming that he had entered ordained ministry. He had married Eleanor Crane Carr in 1874, and together they were raising a growing family. By 1891, he was Vicar of Holy Trinity, Short Heath, Willenhall, a post he held for more than twenty years.
The 1891 census also reveals the closeness of the family household. George’s younger half-brother, William Thomas Hardy, was living with him and working as a draper’s assistant, a respectable occupation that marked a significant social step up from agricultural labour. That arrangement suggests not only family loyalty, but also a conscious effort to help William Thomas into a better future.[4][1]
George remarried in 1892, taking Charlotte Johnson as his second wife. He continued his ministry at Short Heath through the end of the nineteenth century and into the early years of the twentieth, including the church’s jubilee celebrations in 1905.
His Final years in Sussex
By 1911, George Whelpton Johnson had moved south to Sussex, where he was Vicar of Fairwarp in Maresfield near Uckfield. He remained in active ministry until his death on 4 December 1920, aged sixty-nine. His probate, proved in February 1921, valued his estate at £2,075 12s. 10d., a substantial sum for a man born into hardship and scandal.
His executors included his son Harold Victor Johnson, a bank clerk, and George Court Townshend, a bank manager, both men of standing in their own right. The inventory of his effects—books, clerical vestments, silver, and household furnishings—presents the life of a respected clergyman, not the troubled circumstances of his mother’s youth. In that sense, George’s life stands as a striking example of social ascent in Victorian England, shaped by family support, education, and perhaps the long shadow of the Whelpton connection.
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| George Whelpton Johnson & Family |
Mary Anne’s Last Years
William Hardy died in 1881, leaving Mary Ann a widow at forty-nine. But she lived on, witnessing her sons’ remarkable rise with whatever mix of pride, relief, and wonder she must have felt. She saw George ordained, saw him become a vicar, saw him raise his own children to adulthood. She saw William establish himself in the drapery trade. She outlived Queen Victoria, survived the beginning of two world wars, and witnessed the dawn of the twentieth century.
When Mary Ann Hardy died in 1925 at the age of ninety-three, she had lived longer than almost anyone in her generation. She had outlived the trauma of 1844 by more than eighty years. Whether she ever knew the full extent of Reverend Richter’s influence, whether she thanked him or even saw him again after her release, we cannot know. Richter himself had died decades earlier, in 1878, having served as chaplain until the end of his career.
But Mary Ann lived long enough to see that the worst moment of her childhood did not define her life. She saw her sons become men of substance and respectability. Her story is not one of personal triumph, she never rose above the working class, and never escaped the narrow circumstances of agricultural life. But through her sons, she achieved something more enduring: the transformation of a family’s destiny. She saw grandchildren grow up in circumstances she could never have imagined for herself.
Elizabeth Johnson
Elizabeth Johnson born in Surfleet in 1814, being the eldest in a family repeatedly undone by poverty and parish law. Her father was John Johnson, brother to Mary Farr (Christopher’s mother). Under the Poor Law rules, he was expelled from Coningsby with his wife and children, including a newborn, and forced back to Surfleet (possibly under guard). English Poor Laws were a local system for managing poverty, which often operated with cold, bureaucratic logic. A person’s right to receive aid was tied to their “parish of settlement,” a legal status that was difficult to gain and easy to lose. Agricultural labourers like John who moved for seasonal work, were particularly vulnerable. The system treated poverty not as a misfortune but as a moral failing to be punished and deterred. By age thirteen, Elizabeth’s family’s situation became even more precarious. Her father died and she watched her mother navigate widowhood with at least five children and few options.
Her own path was shaped by hardship and survival. As a farm servant’s daughter, she likely entered service young. By twenty-four, she had a son born out of wedlock, raised not by her but by her mother and stepfather. She was determined to find a man who would support her and her child. When she arrived at Christopher Farr’s household in early 1844, she brought with her a sharpened instinct for self-preservation and a complicated past. She was no stranger to hardship, nor to the quiet judgments of others living on the edge. After her trial, Elizabeth returned to Surfleet and resumed life in the shadow of her past. She worked as a housekeeper in Pinchbeck, while her illegitimate son Mark remained with her mother and stepfather, William Allitt. They lived next door to Sarah and Charles, which would have been difficult for Elizabeth if she visited her child, as Sarah had testified against her during the trial! After her mother’s death in 1853, Elizabeth moved back to care for her stepfather, living in the family home until her own death sometime between 1871 and 1881.
Christopher Farr
My 3rd great grandfather left Lincolnshire within weeks of losing his sons. There is no evidence he attended either trial for the murder of his sons and he was not called to give evidence. He moved in with his brother and family at Gedney Dyke. This town was 25 miles away from Benington at the foot of The Wash. There he met his next wife Elizabeth Gilbert. They soon decided to leave Lincolnshire and the tragic memories it held, to begin a new life in Australia.
Sources
[2] Whelpton, George - Druggist & Benefactor 1 https://slha.org.uk/catalogue_item/whelpton-george-druggist-benefactor-1
[3] A brief history - St Saviour's - A Church Near You https://www.achurchnearyou.com/church/4901/page/62885/view/
[4] Willenhall Genealogy Resources & Parish Registers | Staffordshire https://forebears.io/england/staffordshire/willenhall
[5] Mary Johnson, 12-Year-Old Murderess, England, 1844 http://unknownmisandry.blogspot.com/2015/11/mary-johnson-12-year-old-murderess.html
[8] St Saviour's Eastbourne Anglican Church https://www.stsaviourseastbourne.org.uk
- “The National Archives (United Kingdom); Kew, Surrey, England; Registers of Births, Marriages and Deaths surrendered to the Non-parochial Registers Commissions of 1837 and 1857”; Class Number: Rg 4; Piece Number: 1934. Entry for George Whelpton, 23 June 1831. https://www.ancestry.com.au/search/collections/2972/records/1026948?tid=184863872&pid=342780810680&ssrc=pt
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