Episode 12- A land to die for- The Castletownroche murders- 1877

 In the summer of 1877, the quiet Cork village of Castletownroche was shattered by a crime so brutal it echoed far beyond its fields and farmsteads. What began as a dispute over land—an ordinary tension in a country shaped by ownership and survival—spiralled into a double murder that gripped Ireland and exposed the darker currents running beneath rural life. A Land to Die For revisits the Castletownroche murders, tracing the events, the people, and the legacy of a tragedy that still unsettles more than a century later. 

Transcript

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Welcome to Murder Under Gaslight. Your guide to Victorian Era Island's most gruesome crimes. Your host is Don Mortel.

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Somewhere beneath your feet, right now, there is history. Beneath the fields and the bogs and the farmyards of rural island, there are stories the earth has swallowed and kept sometimes for years, sometimes for decades. In the parish of Castletown Roach, County Cork, in october eighteen seventy seven, three people were murdered on that farm a mother, a brother, a sister. Their bodies were thrown down a disused well and covered in lime, and then nothing. Life went on. A man got married, neighbors held their tongues, and for seven years the earth kept its secret. It was the smell that gave them away. My name is Don Mortel, and this is Murder Under Gaslight. True stories of crime and justice from the Victorian age, when the world was lit by flame and shadows, were long and full of secrets. Tonight we travel to County Cork in the year eighteen seventy seven. Tonight we talk about land and inheritance, and the terrifying lengths one man would go to to possess them both. Tonight we talk about William Sheehan, the Castletown Roach murderer, a man who killed three of his own family, fled to the other side of the world, and still could not outrun the truth. To understand what happened in the autumn of eighteen seventy seven, you need to understand the world the Sheeans lived in, because this is not a crime born of madness. It was not a crime born of passion in any romantic sense. It was a crime born of land. And in nineteenth century rural Ireland, land was everything. The Sheehan family lived at Carrigdenane, just outside the village of Castletown Roach in County Cork. By Irish standards of the mid-1800s, they were comfortable, more than comfortable. They farmed over twenty acres of fertile land at the edge of the Golden Vale, one of the most productive agricultural regions in the country. They also owned a public house in the nearby village of Rock Mills. When the Great Famine struck Ireland in the late eighteen forties, devastating entire communities, emptying the countryside, sending a million people to early graves and another million onto emigrant ships, the Sheans were among the relatively fortunate. They had land, they had income, they weathered it. In the decades that followed, as the Irish economy slowly recovered, the Sheehan Farm not only survived, it grew. By the eighteen seventies, the family's landholding had tripled in size from what it had been before the famine. The patriarch of the family had died by this point, but his widow, Catherine Sheehan, managed the household and the farm with her remaining children. There were several children, but we know the names of the ones who matter most to our story. There was William, the eldest son still living at home. There was Thomas. And there was another son, John, who had interests of his own, including a stake in the family pub. In 1877, Catherine Sheehan decided it was time to settle the matter of inheritance. This was not unusual. In rural island, the question of who would get the farm and when was a deeply serious one. Land was wealth, land was security, land was status. And the custom of the time dictated a kind of practical arrangement. The eldest son living at home would inherit the farm, while the remaining siblings, Thomas and Hannah in this case, would need to move on and make their own way. William stood to inherit. He was, in the eyes of the law and the community, the natural heir. Under the proposed arrangements, Thomas and Hannah were to leave the family home. Catherine would remain. This should have been, if not simple, at least manageable. Families across Ireland navigated such arrangements every year. But William Sheehan was not a manageable man. There was a complication. William had fallen in love, or at least had fixed his intentions, on a woman named Mary Anne Brown. And reportedly, Catherine Sheehan did not approve of the match. Whether this was a matter of the Brown family's standing, some perceived incompatibility, or simply a mother's reluctance to see her household upended, we cannot say with certainty. What we do know is that Catherine withheld her blessing. For a man as consumed by land and ambition as William Sheehan appears to have been, this was intolerable. He was about to inherit a fine farm. He wanted to marry, he wanted to bring his new wife home, and the people standing between him and that life, his own mother, his brother, his sister, were in his mind obstacles. He began to plan. On the morning of october twenty second, eighteen seventy seven, William Sheehan committed what would later be described in the press as a cold blooded, premeditated triple murder. He attacked his brother Thomas first in the farmyard, away from the house. The weapon was a plough. Thomas was beaten to death. When Catherine and Hannah came out to find out what was happening, when they heard the commotion, when they ran to sea, William turned on them too. He strangled them both. Three members of his family dead before midday. Now I want you to sit with that for a moment. Three people, a mother who had raised him, a brother, a sister in the space were mourning, because they stood between him and what he wanted. What happened next tells us something about William Sheehan's coldness. Because he didn't panic. He didn't flee. He didn't confess or break down, instead, he disposed of the bodies with deliberate care. The remains of Catherine, Thomas, and Hannah Sheehan were thrown down a disused well on the farm property. To help conceal them and to accelerate decomposition, lime was thrown in after them. Then William Sheehan tidied himself up and went on with his life. Less than a month after the murders, William Sheehan married Marianne Brown. Whether she knew anything of what happened, we can't say. The community around Castletown Roach noticed, of course, that Catherine Thomas and Hannah had disappeared. When pressed, William told people his family had simply moved away. He said they'd gone to Nina in County Tipperary to open a public house there. People accepted this, or and this is the darker possibility, some people had their suspicions, and chose for various reasons, not to act on them. Even William's brother John, who had not been present on the farm that morning, never travelled to Nina to look for his mother and siblings. He had, it must be said, practical reasons not to look too hard. After Catherine's disappearance, John was able to transfer the family pub in Rock Mills into his own name. He also received a share of Marianne Brown's dowry. There were benefits for John to keeping his head down. And so the secret held. For months. For years. Ireland in the late 1870s and early 1880s was in upheaval. The land war had begun, a mass movement by Irish tenant farmers against exploitative rents and evictions, led by figures like Michael Davitt and Charles Stuart Parnell. The Land League organised resistance, promoted rent strikes, and brought the plight of rural Ireland onto the national and international stage. William Sheehan was not immune to these forces. Despite inheriting a substantial farm, the years following the murders were economically brutal. Ireland was hit by recession. Rents went unpaid, arrears mounted. And in eighteen eighty two, William Sheehan, the man who had killed three people for the right to the land he stood on, was evicted from that very farm by his landlord. The land he had murdered for was gone. In eighteen eighty three, William and Mary Anne emigrated to New Zealand. They crossed the world, leaving County Corp behind. Perhaps William felt safe. Perhaps after six years of silence he believed the secret would be kept forever. He was wrong. He was wrong. Within months of William and Marianne's departure for New Zealand, some accounts suggest it may have been as soon as the summer of eighteen eighty four. The neighbours of Carrigdanain noticed something was very wrong with the water supply. There was a smell coming from a disused well on the old Sheehan farm. When investigators peered down into the darkness of that well, more than seventy feet below the surface, they found the source. The decaying remains of three people Catherine Sheehan, Thomas Sheehan, Hannah Sheehan. Dead for seven years hidden in lime and darkness. But still there. Still present. Still waiting. The Royal Irish Constabulary were called immediately. The case was unmistakable. Three bodies, one family, a farm recently vacated by the very man who stood to gain most from their deaths. The RIC identified William Sheehan as the prime suspect without much difficulty. The puzzle was where to find him. The answer, it turned out, was on the other side of the globe. What followed was a remarkable piece of international police work for the Victorian era. Word was sent to New Zealand. William Sheehan was located and placed under arrest. He was charged with the murder of his mother, his sister, and his brother. And then, in a logistical undertaking that would have been immensely complex in the eighteen eighties, he was transported back to Ireland to stand trial. The case had by now attracted significant attention. It was reported in newspapers not just in Ireland and Britain, but in Australia and New Zealand as well. The Australasian press covered it with considerable interest, partly because Sheehan had emigrated to their part of the world, and partly because the story had all the elements of a compelling Victorian sensation land, family, hidden bodies, a fugitive brought to justice from the Antipodes. The trial of William Sheehan took place at the Caucasus on the fourteenth of december eighteen eighty five, eight years after the murders. He was charged with the murders of Catherine, Thomas, and Hannah Sheehan. A second man was also tried separately in connection with the case, David Brown, his brother in law. A relative of Mary Ann was accused of having aided Sheehan. Brown was acquitted. The evidence against him was insufficient. For William Sheehan himself, there was no such escape. Throughout the trial, he maintained his innocence. Observers reported that he was extraordinarily composed, some describing it as chilling. Even as the evidence mounted against him, even as witnesses testified, even as the verdict was read, the jury found William Sheehan guilty of murder. He was sentenced to death. Contemporary press accounts described Sheehan's behavior throughout the proceedings as marked by what one reporter called a thorough insensibility, an apparent absence of any of the feelings of our better nature. He had protested his innocence loudly, and apparently continued to threaten dire consequences for his accusers even after the verdict. When he was placed in the condemned cell. He appeared, journalists wrote, utterly oblivious of his position, remorseless and callous to a degree. That at least is how he appeared publicly. What happened behind the walls of Cork Jail in the weeks that followed was, by all accounts, a very different matter. On the morning of january twentieth, eighteen eighty six, William Sheehan was woken at three o'clock in the morning, at his own request. He had spent the hours since midnight in prayer. At half past six, the prison chaplain, the Reverend Father Barrett, came to his cell. Together the priest and the condemned man walked to the prison chapel, where Sheehan made his last confession and received Holy Communion. A journalist writing for the Freeman's Journal, whose account was later reprinted in newspapers as far away as the Waikato Times in New Zealand, described what followed. At a quarter to eight the prison chapel began to ring, slowly, in what the journalist described as a slow and melancholy measure, the death knell. Sheehan, hearing it in the chapel, heaved a long, deep sigh. At six minutes to eight, the chief warder appeared at the chapel door and gave the order to move. Sheehan was scarcely able to walk. He leaned on the arm of the priest. A warder walked alongside him. Behind them came the sub sheriff, the governor of the jail, a major Roberto, and the deputy governor, a Mr Patterson, followed by three warders. William Sheehan was thirty-two years old. He stood five foot four inches tall. He was hanged at eight o'clock in the morning. Before his execution, Sheehan finally admitted his guilt. He also stated clearly that David Brown, his brother in law, who had been tried separately and acquitted, was entirely innocent. Whatever else William Sheehan was, he did not in his final hours, allow an innocent man's name to remain under suspicion. He gave as his reason for the murders the fact that his mother had refused to allow him to marry Mary Anne Brown. Three lives extinguished over a family disagreement, over a woman's choice over land and marriage, and a kind of possessive rage that we will never fully understand because we are not inside his mind and perhaps should be grateful we are not. The Castletown Roach murders were at the time a genuine national sensation, and yet, as historian Finn Dwyer has noted, they have been almost entirely forgotten. Eclipsed by other great crimes of the era like the Mount Trasna murders in Galway or the Phoenix Park murders in Dublin. There are reasons for this. Perhaps the Castletown Roach case did not have political dimensions. It was not entangled with questions of Irish nationalism or British rule in the way those other cases were. It was at its heart a story about family, about land, an inheritance, and the violence that can erupt when people treat other human beings as obstacles rather than people. That's perhaps why it still resonates if we let it. Because the forces at work in that farmyard in october eighteen seventy seven, greed, frustration, entitlement, the desperate desire to possess and control are not Victorian forces. They are human forces. They are as present today as they were then. The community of Carrig Danain also left questions unanswered. There are strong suggestions that neighbours suspected something had happened, that William's story of his family moving to Nina did not quite hold up, and yet no one spoke. Some, like John Sheehan, had financial reasons to look the other way. Others may simply have been afraid or unwilling to become involved. The code of silence that surrounded this case for seven years is in its way as troubling as the crime itself. Mary Ann Brown, William's wife, who emigrated with him to New Zealand, occupies a strange, unresolved space in this story. What she knew, if anything, is unknown. The historical record does not tell us what became of her after her husband's arrest, extradition, and execution. What we do know is this. Catherine Sheehan, Thomas Sheehan, and Hannah Sheehan were murdered on the twenty second of october, eighteen seventy-seven. They lay in that well, seventy feet underground, covered in lime for seven years. They were found. Their killer was identified, extradited across twelve thousand miles of ocean, tried and hanged. Justice in this case was slow. But it came. One journalist writing of William Sheehan's execution in 1886 remarked that if there was ever an argument in favour of the death sentence, it was in the case of a cold-blooded triple murder such as this. Now, whether you agree with that sentiment or not, the story of the Castletown Roach murders is a story worth remembering. Catherine, Thomas, and Hannah Sheehan deserve to be more than a footnote. They were real people. They lived and worked on a farm in County Cork. And they were killed by someone who should have loved them.

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Murder under Gaslight is a Westmeath Pocket Cinema production. Historical advisor is Jason McKevitt. Murder under Gaslight is presented by Don Mortell.