George Parker Ledger Slab (Oddingley Murders)

One of the most notorious unsolved English murder mysteries, found via a search of Historic England's own listings for the word 'murdered'. On Midsummer's Day, 24 June 1806, George Parker, Rector of Oddingley, was shot in a glebe meadow after a long-running dispute with local farmers over tithe payments (his fixed tithe income hadn't kept pace with wartime inflation). Witnesses heard a shot and a cry of 'Murder, murder!' and saw the assailant flee - identified as Richard Heming, a local odd-job man with no obvious grievance of his own. Heming vanished and was rumoured to have fled to America. The case went cold for twenty-four years. In 1830, a skeleton was found buried beside a barn wall at nearby Netherwood Farm - Heming's remains. The farm's former leaseholder, Thomas Clewes, was arrested and confessed: Heming had been paid £50 by a conspiracy of local farmers to kill Parker, then murdered himself the very next night to silence him, bludgeoned with a horse-bleeding 'blood stick' by a farrier named James Taylor while the plot's mastermind, a magistrate named Captain Evans, held a lamp and called Heming to sit up before the blow fell. Evans and Taylor had since died, and a legal technicality (accessories couldn't be tried unless the actual killer, Heming, was tried too - and he was dead) meant Clewes and two other surviving conspirators, John Barnett and George Banks, could only be charged over Heming's death, not Parker's. All three were acquitted in 1830, and some Oddingley villagers celebrated by ringing the church bells. Nobody was ever convicted for either murder. The case was significant enough that a contemporary author, Mary Martha Sherwood - herself the daughter of a Worcestershire rector, who had personally known some of those involved - wrote two accounts of it.