Another admirer was a furniture remover, Frank Samuel Hogg. Him she apparently loved; she used to put a light in her window to let him know when she was free. A feckless, sentimental and selfish man, who had known Eleanor Pearcey for some time, he was vain enough, it appears, to imagine that all women who looked on him loved him, and was pleased to be proved right. One conquest, however, turned out to be a careless triumph in more ways than one. She became pregnant, and such was the weight of her family’s opinion, backed up by several large brothers, that Frank Hogg was persuaded to marry her. The marriage was not happy, and when his wife, Phoebe, a large, plain woman, duly produced a baby girl, also called Phoebe, this apparently so lowered her bearded husband’s self-esteem and increased his self-pity that he used to speak of suicide to his young bosom-friend, Eleanor Pearcey. He would weep in her arms and bemoan his wretched state, adding his frustrations to hers. As an alternative to suicide he talked of emigration. Both were anathema to Mrs Pearcey.
Although she had known Phoebe Hogg before her marriage to Frank Hogg and had been friends with his sister Clara – the actual relationship between the three women appears to have been quite complex – Mrs Pearcey seems to have become increasingly jealous of Mrs Hogg and full of hate. Apparently Eleanor Pearcey felt that Frank was essential to her happiness and that the realisation of his happiness must be her prime aim. She wished to be his wife, to have him all to herself.
In her letters she besought him not to kill himself, to go on living for her sake if not for his. In one, she wrote:
You ask me if I was cross with you for coming only such a little while. If you knew how lonely I am you wouldn’t ask. I would be more than happy if I could see you for the same time each day, dear. You know I have a lot of time to spare and I cannot help thinking. I think and think until I get so dizzy that I don’t know what to do with myself. If it wasn’t for our love, dear, I don’t know what I should really do, and I am always afraid you will take that away, and then I should quite give up in despair, for that is the only thing I care for on earth. I cannot live without it now. I have no right to it, but you gave it to me, and I can’t give it up.
It must have seemed that her emotional dilemma could only be resolved by the destruction of Phoebe Hogg, and all Mrs Pearcey’s passionate envy and frustration focused on the other, older woman, who had the benefit of Frank’s company every night and every day.
Frank and Phoebe Hogg lived with his sister Clara and his mother in rooms at 141 Prince of Wales Road, Kentish Town. On Thursday, 23 October 1890 Mrs Hogg (now aged thirty-one) received a note from Mrs Pearcey inviting her to 2 Priory Street for tea. She showed the note to her sister. It said: ‘Dearest, come round this afternoon and bring our little darling. Don’t fail.’ But Mrs Hogg was for some reason unable to go there that day. Her sister later told the police that Mrs Pearcey had once invited Phoebe to go with her to Southend and look over an empty house.
The next day, Friday the 24th, Eleanor Pearcey gave a small boy a penny to deliver a second note, and this time, without telling anyone where she was going, Phoebe Hogg left her house about 3.30 pm and set out, pushing her daughter in a bassinette or pram down Kentish Town Road and into Royal College Street towards the drab little road (now Ivor Street) where Mrs Pearcey lived. Mrs Hogg pulled the pram up the steps and parked it in the narrow entrance hall. Carrying the child, she then followed the younger, smaller woman either into the front parlour or into the pokey kitchen at the end of the hall.
It was in the kitchen that Phoebe Hogg was slaughtered, despatched with a poker and more than one knife. Her skull was fractured and her throat so severely cut that her head was almost severed from her body. It seems that Mrs Hogg was not easy to kill, that she struggled and fought for her life: the arms of both women were bruised. Two window panes were broken and the kitchen’s walls and ceiling were spattered with blood. Mrs Pearcey’s neighbours heard what they called ‘banging and hammering’ at about four o’clock. Another neighbour said she heard a child screaming – or what sounded like a child. But like most good neighbours they hesitated to intrude, readily assuming in a noisy neighbourhood, where cries and fights were not unknown, that the rumpus was in some way connected with workmen repairing a pub on the corner.
Afterwards, Mrs Pearcey probably washed her hands and the weapons, took off and washed her top-skirt, tried to scrub out the bloodstains on a rug, on the curtains and on an apron. At some point she heaved the body of the murdered woman into the pram, in which the little girl, whether alive or dead, also lay. She covered them both with an antimacassar. About six o’clock Mr and Mrs Butler, who lived in the second floor flat at the top of the stairs, returned separately to 2 Priory Street. Both knocked against the bassinette parked in the darkened hallway: Mrs Pearcey heard them and called out to each of them to take care.
Some time after this, when it was quite dark, she put on her bonnet and went out, bumping the pram down the few steps at the front door on to the pavement and, turning right, wheeled her dreadful load away from the house into Chalk Farm Road, then up Adelaide Road and into Eton Avenue. Pushing the weighty pram before her, she sought some deserted place in the gas-lit streets where she might unburden herself, unobserved, of the pram and what it contained. The body of Mrs Hogg was deposited by a partly built house in Crossfield Road, near Swiss Cottage. The child was dumped on some waste land in Finchley Road.
By now the child was dead, having suffocated, it is said, in the pram – no signs of violence were found on her. On the other hand, the little girl may have been suffocated in the house, perhaps by a cushion. The child is unlikely to have remained silent while her mother was murdered, or when both were put in the pram.
As if in a daze, as if tied to the now empty pram, Eleanor Pearcey walked on for over a mile through the quieter, richer streets around Abbey Road, finally abandoning the pram in Hamilton Terrace, between Maida Vale and St John’s Wood. She then began the long walk home through the shadowed streets. In all, she walked about 6 miles that night.
Evidently the horror of her deeds was too much for her. She was seen about 8 pm by a friend – possibly before she started out on her terrible errand – standing on a pavement near her home, staring vacantly about her, her face drawn and pale, her clothes much disordered and her hat askew. The friend, who had at first failed to recognise her, assumed that Mrs Pearcey was drunk and passed on without a word.
Eleanor Pearcey seems not to have returned to her home until late at night. For at about 10 pm, Frank Hogg called on her. He had a latch-key and let himself in. No one answered his calls. Apart from a lamp in the bedroom, Mrs Pearcey’s rooms were in darkness, he said later. He peered, he said, into the front parlour, saw nothing untoward and withdrew. But he left a note saying ‘Twenty-past ten. Cannot stay.’
Frank Hogg later alleged that he was unaware that his wife and Mrs Pearcey were on friendly terms. It seems that after calling at the house in Priory Street on his way home from work about ten o’clock, he walked on to Prince of Wales Road, where his wife’s absence had apparently caused no alarm. It was assumed in the Hogg household that Phoebe had gone to visit her sick father in Rickmansworth. Nonetheless, Frank Hogg sat up until 2 am awaiting her return.
On Saturday morning he left home soon after six o’clock and went to work – he was employed in the furniture-moving business by his brother. He came home for breakfast about 8 am. About the same time the Hoggs’ landlady, Mrs Styles, who had heard rumours of a murder in Hampstead, said to Clara Hogg: ‘Have you heard of this dreadful murder?’ ‘What do you mean?’ asked Clara, adding ‘Tell me all about it. My sister-in-law has not been home all night. You gave me quite a turn. We have been enquiring in all directions and can’t find a trace of her.’ Clara went