FT277


On 10 July 1896, a pistol shot rang out in a lonely back road just outside the village of Fairwater, near Cardiff, and a loud scream was heard. A traveller saw a man hurrying away from the direction of the scream; this individual “wished him a gruff good-night”. Later, the traveller saw the body of a man lying on the side of the road. He had been shot about 100 yards behind, but had not died outright, instead running in terror up the road, spouting blood as he went. Both men and women fainted at the ghastly sight.

The murdered man turned out to be 33-year-old workman David Thomas, who was married with two children, and lived in a cott­age near Ely. He had never been involved in anything illegal. A few months earlier, he had been employed as a carpenter by Lord Windsor at St Fagans Castle, and seemed to like his new job. The evening Thomas was shot dead, he had gone to the local to have a few pints, and people had seen him start walking home at a brisk pace.

There were several more or less far-fetched theories about the Fairwater Mystery, as it was called. Firstly, it was suspected that one of the unsuccessful applicants for the St Fagan’s position had killed him as revenge. But after it had been discovered that Thomas had actually been earning less than the recommended union wage, it was instead suspected that the carpenter’s trade union had murdered him, in order to set an example in such matters.

The South Wales Police made little headway with this mysterious crime. After a while, they seem to have adopted the prin­ciple that if there are no suspects closer to home, then look for a dodgy Irishman. But although a drunken Irish sailor, and later also a dodgy Dublin shoemaker, were said to have closely resembled the description of the murderer given by the solitary witness, both of them turned out to have an alibi. The only casualty was the shoemaker’s landlady, who was said to have lost her reason when the police came and arrested her lodger. The Cardiff Evening Express roundly criticised the police for their lack of initiative, and offered a £50 reward for the apprehension of the murderer. Not unreasonably, the newspaper demanded that Scotland Yard was called in, but this never seems to have happened.

Some journalists from the Western Mail instead made use of an approach not unfamiliar to aficcionados of modern American crime drama: they got hold of a psychic detective. At a Cardiff séance, a young lady medium had recently gone into a state of trance, with a strange convuls­ion, and hissed out “I – WILL – have – my – revenge!” When the interlocutor asked “Who are you, friend?”, the spirit answered “David Thomas. I – was – shot!”

This was good enough for the journalists, particularly since the girl was young and not bad looking. They decided to bring her to the murder scene, to see what would happen. And they were not disappointed. The histrionic girl first claimed to see the murderer approaching, describing him in some detail. She then screamed and moaned in agony, reliving the murder scene, and clasping her back in intense agony, as if she had just been shot. After she had collapsed, David Thomas’s spirit returned, demanding revenge, and actually naming his murderer. After reviving, the hysterical medium rushed round the murder scene, screaming “Look, look! Look at the blood!” Before the journalists were able to drag her away, she yelled “He is there!” Ask who she meant, she pointed into empty space and screamed “The ghost!”

This unedifying scene would not have been out of place in the “Cartman’s Incredible Gift” episode of South Park. The Western Mail journalists wrote a full-length feature about the experiences of their psychic detective, which was of course later reproduced, with the illustration shown above, by the sensational Illustrated Police News. The police do not appear to have taken it seriously, which is probably good; what if one of the Cardiff detect­ives had been a late 19th-century equivalent of his foolish South Park colleague, and what if the name of one of the arrested Irishmen had matched that given by the medium?

The Fairwater Mystery is still unsolved. One might speculate that an enemy of David Thomas, perhaps enraged that he was an unemployed pauper when Thomas had found security at St Fagans, had been lying in wait for him outside the pub, but there are still no clues to the identity of the murderer.