The Campden Wonder

The Campden Wonder was a series of events in the town of Chipping Campden that attracted popular attention in England in the years 1660–1662.

The Perry trial

On Thursday, August 16, 1660, an Englishman named William Harrison, aged about 70 years old, left his home in Campden intending to walk to Charingworth, about two miles away. When he did not return at the expected time, his wife sent his manservant John Perry to look for him. By the next morning, neither Harrison nor Perry had returned. William Harrison's son, Edward Harrison, was then sent out to look for the pair. While on his way to Charingworth, Edward met John Perry, who revealed to him that he had not been able to find his master. The pair then continued their journey to Ebrington, where they questioned one of the tenants whom Harrison had been going to see. The tenant revealed that Harrison had been there the previous night. With this information, Edward Harrison and John Perry continued their journey to the local village of Paxford. Their search, however, proved fruitless.

Deciding that further searching would be useless, Edward and John headed back to Chipping Campden. During this journey, they heard that some of Harrison's personal effects, including a hat, shirt, and collar, had been found on the main road between Chipping Campden and Ebrington. Upon going to find these items, the two discovered that the hat had been slashed by a sharp implement. The shirt and collar were covered in blood. Harrison's body was not found.

In the official investigation, the manservant John Perry confessed that he knew Harrison to have been murdered, although Perry himself claimed to be innocent of the crime. Perry claimed that his mother Joan and his brother Richard had killed Harrison for his money and hidden the body. Joan and Richard strenuously denied that they had had anything to do with their master's disappearance, but John kept up his assertion that they were guilty, and convinced the jury partly on the grounds that he had no apparent reason to be lying about the matter — according to John, he was the one who suggested the robbery to Richard, and therefore he was putting himself in jeopardy by telling his story. In the course of the trial, it further came out that John accused Joan and Richard of stealing 140 pounds from Harrison's house the previous year; and that John had lied about being attacked by robbers a few weeks before Harrison's disappearance – he had made up that story because he himself had been planning to rob Harrison's house.

The judge presiding at the trial decided to grant all three defendants a pardon for the 1659 robbery, in order to speed the trial along. When the court next convened — it being by then the spring of 1661 — John joined his mother and brother in pleading "not guilty," claiming that his original claims had been false by reason of insanity. However, the jury found all three of the Perry family guilty of Harrison's murder, and sent them to hang. (It was also suspected that Joan Perry, the mother, was a witch; she was to hang first.) On the scaffold, Richard and John reiterated that they were innocent of the murder, but to no avail.

Harrison's return

In 1662, Harrison returned to England aboard a ship from Lisbon, bearing a remarkable story. He claimed to have been abducted from England by pirates and taken abroad; then taken onto a Turkish ship and sold into slavery near Smyrna. After about a year and three quarters, Harrison said, his master died; then he went to a port and stowed away on a Portuguese ship, finally returning to Dover by way of Lisbon, as mentioned above. Whether or not Harrison's marvelous tale was in fact true, it certainly disproved John Perry's claims that he had been murdered in August 1660, and thus posed a mystery: with what motive could Perry have made up such a claim?

Later accounts

The most accurate account of the Campden Wonder was published in 1663 by Sir Thomas Overbury ( 1684; the nephew of a famous poet of the same name).

John Masefield wrote two plays on the subject: "The Campden Wonder" and "Mrs Harrison". The latter dealt with the popular myth that Harrison's wife had committed suicide on learning that her husband was alive; in reality, little is known about Mrs. Harrison – she may even have been dead before 1660, and the "Mrs. Harrison" of Overbury's account the wife of William Harrison's son Edward.

This case, along with the Sandyford murder case, was mentioned in E.C. Bentley's 1920 detective story "Trent's Last Case", and provided some of the inspiration for that novel's plot.

External links

* [http://www.thecampdenwonder.com/index.htm "TheCampdenWonder.com"]
*http://www.campdenwonder.plus.com/
* [http://www.campdenwonder.blogspot.com/ Pete Clifford's Campden Wonder blog]