Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [56]
The fourteen day window was usually, of course, enough to cause escaped patients to turn up. When Bisgrove did not, then as with other runners before there was little choice but to wait until something happened. So Orange waited, as nothing happened, and the murderer on the run was quietly forgotten. Bisgrove’s description remained in circulation for a long time. Years later, in 1891, the Metropolitan Police asked Broadmoor whether they thought Bisgrove could be a man called James Sadler, who they had arrested for the murder of a Whitechapel prostitute – and who has occasionally been mentioned in connection with the Ripper murders – but the authorities were not convinced. It is an inconclusive end to the story, and Bisgrove’s disappearance remains without a satisfactory coda.
Orange, a diligent and dedicated man, must have worried at the time that his errant charge was capable of committing an act that would lead to their eventual reunion. At the age of nineteen, Bisgrove, an epileptic coal miner from Wells, had spent a long August evening drinking with another youth and his girlfriend. Staggering towards home, they had reached a cornfield where they stopped. Bisgrove offered the girl two shillings if she would have sex with him, and she was inclined to accept. They laid down a short distance from an older man, George Cornish, who was asleep under the stars. As the other boy sat on a stile beside the byway, Bisgrove took the girl, then got up, walked across the field and picked up a large and heavy stone. He carried it over to Cornish, the sleeping stranger, and dropped the stone on his head. Cornish was mortally wounded, and died where he lay.
Bisgrove and his male friend were arrested and sentenced to death at the Somerset Assizes in December 1868. Both would have hanged, but Bisgrove confessed that he alone had committed the crime, though he had no recollection of it. His companion was set free and Bisgrove’s own sentence was commuted to one of life imprisonment. The west country adolescent had then been admitted as a convict to Broadmoor in early 1869, where he became one of those patients who broke the windows and made threats to the staff. During the last couple of years he had become calmer, hence his strolls around the grounds, though as Orange noted, Bisgrove was ‘always a morose and sullen man...inclined to recklessness partly from natural disposition and partly from there being so little apparently to be either hoped for or feared by him in this world’. Bisgrove’s character was such that it seems incredible that he might have kept himself out of trouble for any great length of time after his escape, so perhaps this occasionally suicidal young man did end up at the bottom of the Basingstoke Canal in 1873 after all.
Less than a month after this unscheduled decrease in the lunatic population, and while Orange was away on a long weekend, the Asylum lost another patient. This would prove to be another long-term loss, and at the time, his departure was considered to be as permanent as Bisgrove’s. On this occasion it was the turn of John Walker, a thirty-five year old stonemason from Birmingham, to breach the staff’s defences. Walker was known to be a difficult patient. When he was ten years old, he had taken his older brother’s breakfast to the factory where he worked, seen a mouse, chased it, and been struck on the head by the fly wheel of some industrial machine. He had suffered from learning disabilities ever since, and had been convicted of burglary in 1866 and given ten years inside. While in prison, he had begun to sense that he was controlled by witchcraft, hence his removal to Broadmoor in 1867.
The circumstances of the case were similar to