Unravelling mystery of a murder still unsolved

“Cumberland Lady Murdered” was the single column headline in the West Cumberland Times of August 26, 1908 – and beneath was the story of a murder that still has criminologists guessing.

Caroline Mary Luard died aged 58 on the veranda of a woodland summer house in Seal Chart Woods, Kent. with two 0.32 revolver bullets in her brain. Forensic experts concluded that she had been bludgeoned on the head from behind and then shot twice at close range.

There were no witnesses and no-one has ever been convicted of the murder, but the victim’s husband, Major General Charles Luard (Royal Engineers, retired) killed himself a little over three weeks after her death – and it was his death which effectively ended the police inquiry headed by the chief constable of Kent, Henry Warde, one of Luard’s closest friends.

The facts of the case are so intriguing that they could have come from the pen of Agatha Christie – but this time there was no Hercule Poirot to deliver the sleek and logical conclusions.

Caroline Mary Luard was born (in 1850) Caroline Mary Hartley into one of Cumberland’s wealthiest families. She was one of five children (four of them girls) of Thomas and Georgina Hartley of Gillfoot Mansion (now demolished). The family’s wealth was derived from haematite mining and at the time of the 1851 census there were no fewer than 15 residents in the family home – eight of them servants, including a governess, butler, cook and two nurses.

Caroline Mary Hartley was then eight months old and the youngest member of the household. Her only brother, Tom, was two at the time. He later (in 1880) used some of the family’s wealth to purchase Armathwaite Hall which he renovated as a sumptuous family home. The hall is now a top grade hotel (Tom Hartley’s name lives on in the name of the hotels premier suite of rooms, Hartley Tower).

Tom died in 1929 but is still remembered as one of Bassenthwaite’s greatest benefactors as well as a magistrate and Cumberland county cricketer.

Eighty-five-year-old Mrs Mary Kennedy of Newlands Avenue, Whitehaven, is a daughter of Tom Hartley’s former head stockman John Balmer. She told me: “Mr Hartley was an old man when I was a young girl but I have vague memories of him. I remember more of his daughter because she used to run a Sunday School in Armathwaite Hall for all the children of the estate workers.

“Those were happy days and there was never a mention of a murder in the family.”

The horrible and bloody deaths of both his sister and brother-in-law within 24 days of each other in August/September of 1908 must have rocked Tom Hartley. There is no record of him being called at his sister’s inquest but he was an important witness at the inquest (on September 19, 1908) in to the suicide of Charles Luard, who threw himself in front of the wheels of a locomotive hauling a local train from Maidstone to Paddock Wood.

Hartley was a key witness because he was one of three recipients of letters left by the 69-year-old Luard to be delivered after his gruesome death. The letter read: “My dear Tom, something has shaped at last. My strength has gone. I have gone to join her. I had left her everything but have now written a new will leaving everything to Elmhurst, and you are the sole executor. Goodbye dear brother, ever yours, C. E. Luard.”

Elmhurst was probably the family name for Charles and Caroline’s only surviving son, Captain Charles Luard, who was on his way home from his army posting in South Africa and was due to meet his father on the very day of the suicide.

Charles and Caroline Luard had been married for 32 years at the time of the deaths and had lived in the village of Ightham Knoll for 30 years. Nothing was reported in the newspapers of the day to suggest problems in their marriage (servants said they were happy together).

Whatever the case, within hours of the murder, letters bearing local postmarks and accusing Luard of murdering his wife began dropping though the family letterbox.

Luard apparently destroyed all the letters. Later researchers discovered that, at the time of the murder, it was common knowledge that Charles Luard was having an affair with a woman in the neighbourhood, and that his frequent supposed visits to his golf club were actually a cover under which he was able to pursue his quest of passion.

Luard was also an excellent shot and the owner of a collection of revolvers – all of which were produced at the inquest into his wife’s death and all of them ruled out by the most famous firearms expert of his generation, Edward Churchill, as being the murder weapon.

Establishment figures were gushing in their praise of Major General Luard after his death and expressed outrage at the continuing suggestion that he was the murderer of his wife.

The police, who had brought in Scotland Yard to help with the investigation, never ruled Luard out as a suspect (though that was bizarrely done by the local coroner who alone asserted that Luard had an alibi) – but the performance of the police in pursuing the killer is mystifying. Within 24 hours of the killing of Mrs Luard, the police said they had the description of a man seen leaving the murder site, as well as other valuable clues – and that an arrest was imminent. No such arrest was ever made and at the conclusion of the inquest into Mrs Luard’s death (held just five days after her husband killed himself) the police announced that all trails had gone cold and all their compelling clues at the scene had proved worthless.

Maybe Hercule Poirot would have taken no longer than the interlude required to tease out his waxed moustache and dust off his spats to point an accusing finger directly at the killer. He would also have dispensed with the supposed motive for the killing: the theft of Mrs Luard’s purse from her frock pocket and the theft of four rings, one of them a valuable gift from her mother, which were wrenched from her fingers after death.

The head of the police inquiry, chief constable Henry Warde, dropped one of the biggest clangers of his career eight months later when he ordered the arrest of a workhouse inmate named David Woodruff, a man with a known liking for guns.

Woodruff was charged with Caroline Luard’s murder – but the police failed to produce any evidence at the initial hearing, when it was also proven that Woodruff was under lock and key at the time of the killing. The air was thick with the whiff of a police frame-up – magistrates at Bromley threw out the case and stopped just short of ordering an inquiry into Warde’s actions and motives.

Kent police later destroyed all their files on the Luard murder – an unheard-of decision in the light of the importance of the case. It makes you wonder whether too many people in top positions had their judgements seduced by the undeniably magnificent service which several generations of Luards had given in the colours of the military to crown, country and empire.

Draw your own conclusions – but solutions on a postcard to Kent Constabulary, not The Whitehaven News office!

Two things are certain. No-one was ever brought to justice for the cold-blooded killing of the Cumberland Lady – and no-one ever will be.

I would like to express my grateful thanks to reader and local historian Mrs Janet Thompson of Gray Street, Workington, who did a the magnificent archive research on which this article is based. She is, as Hercule Poirot would have said, magnifique.