This week in the run up to Halloween we will be telling you some spooky tales from the archives about those buried in Clifton Street Cemetery- including this one on the unfortunate Isabella Kerr.
On the evening of Sunday 29th December 1872, sisters Mary and Charlotte Rea, both servants and both intoxicated, broke into Croft Lodge on Victoria Road in Holywood, County Down – the home of 88 year-old Isabella Kerr. Suspecting that she had heard noises coming from downstairs, Ms Kerr got out of bed, lit a candle and quietly made her way down to the kitchen where she caught the thieves red-handed. Attacked with a salamander (a metal ladle) and a smoothing iron, she fell dead on the floor. Unfortunately, Ms Kerr’s servant Jane Toner suffered the same fate. Having ransacked the house, the sisters did not leave but chose instead to make their way to the bedrooms where they fell asleep.
At 8:30 the following morning they were awakened by a knock at the front door: it was the milk boy accompanied by milk girl Isabella Walsh making their daily deliveries. Thinking it strange that the door was not answered as was usually the case, the boy and girl decided to continue with their other deliveries and call back later. Gathering clothes into bundles and filling their pockets with valuables, the sisters quietly left the house, made their way to town and hired a carman and cart to take them to Belfast.
When the boy and girl returned, there was still no answer: looking through the window, the girl saw Ms Kerr lying on the floor and quickly raised the alarm. The police interviewed witnesses in Holywood and launched an extensive manhunt in and around the Shankill area of Belfast. Having visited or searched approximately 2,000 homes over a period of several weeks, the sisters were eventually caught and brought to Downpatrick to stand trial. At the close of legal proceedings in April, the jury found that the sisters were not guilty of pre-meditated murder but were guilty of manslaughter. They were sentenced to life imprisonment to be served at Mountjoy Prison, Dublin.
Throughout the trial, the press covered every aspect of the sisters’ physical appearance – from the colour and style of their shawls and bonnets to the way they wore their hair. Much to the dissatisfaction of their legal representative Hans McMordie, their facial features, deportment, demeanour and familial backgrounds were also afforded ample comment; what he described as ‘widespread prejudice’. On 22 April, the police escorted the Reas to Mountjoy.
It is interesting to note that during the course of the train journey Belfast man William Robinson from Renwick Place conducted an interview the sisters, the ‘transcript’ of which was published the following month as a four-page religious tract under the title ‘Reflections on a Journey from Belfast to Dublin with Charlotte and Mary Rea’. Isabella Kerr was later buried at Clifton Street Cemetery.
