Last updated 16:44, Thursday, 08 May 2008

ONE hundred years ago this year, a notorious murder took place in a wood in Kent – a murder with a very local connection.

The 57-year-old murder victim, who was gunned to death, was Mrs Caroline Luard, the former Miss Caroline Hartley of Gillfoot, Egremont, and the wife of a retired high-ranking army officer.

The cold-blooded killing became a national sensation – but the case remains unsolved to this day.

Almost as sensational as the murder was the death of the victim’s husband, Major General Charles Luard (Royal Engineers, retired) who, 24 days after the death of his wife, took his own life by throwing himself under the wheels of a train en route from Maidstone to Paddock Wood.

His death, you may think, tells its own story – and many agreed at the time.

The Hartley family were thought to have lived at Gillfoot Mansion, and a brother of the murder victim may be the same Thomas Hartley (1847-1929), who made a fortune from mineral mining and bought Armathwaite Hall, near Bassenthwaite, in 1880.

Thomas Hartley, who also played cricket for Cumberland and served as a magistrate, was a well-known Bassenthwaite benefactor and it was his money which restored Armathwaite Hall into a magnificent family home. It is now, of course, a hotel with an international reputation.

Caroline Luard, who had been alone, was murdered on August 24, 1908 on the veranda of a summer house in the a secluded Seal Chart Woods near to the Luards’ home in the village of Ightham Knoll.

There were no witnesses to the murder – but forensic experts concluded the mother of two had been bludgeoned to the floor from behind and then shot twice in the head with a 0.32-calibre revolver from point blank range. Several people heard the shots.

The motive appeared to be the theft of Mrs Luard’s purse and four rings, which were pulled from her fingers. But many suspected the killer to be Mrs Luard’s husband, who was 12 years older than his wife and who owned three revolvers. He was said to have a lover in the neighbourhood and the theory grew that the missing rings and purse were his work, designed to throw police off his track. Dozens of hate mail letters, bearing local postmarks and accusing him of the murder, dropped through his letter box in the days after the killing.

Whatever the truth, the distressed general, who had taken the decision to sell up and leave the district, took his own life in a very bloody fashion on the day (September 17, 1908) he was due to meet his soldier son on his return from service in South Africa.

Separate inquests concluded that Mrs Luard had been ‘murdered by person or persons unknown, and that her husband’s death was from ‘suicide while temporarily insane.’

Eight months later, a workhouse inmate named David Woodruff, was arrested and charged with Mrs Luard’s murder. Magistrates threw the case out without hesitation and came close to ordering an inquiry as to why Woodruff had ever been arrested in the first place. A put-up job by the police was strongly suspected.

There has been a serious suggestion that John Dickman, who was hanged for robbing and shooting to death a colliery wages clerk on a train from Newcastle to Alnmouth in 1910, may have been involved in Mrs Luard’s death after trying to con her out of money.

The Luard deaths received scant coverage in the West Cumberland media of the day – and The Whitehaven News would like to know whether there are still members of the Hartley family living in West Cumbria with any letters, photographs, newspaper cuttings or other material which relate to the case.

If anyone has any information on the murder of Caroline Luard (the case became known as the Seal Chart murder), we would like to hear from you.

Contact the newsdesk on 01946 595136 or e-mail news@whitehaven-news.co.uk.

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