Author Keith Henson tells STEPHEN LEWIS about York's dark and grisly past.

Keith Henson insists he is not ghoulish, he simply has a healthy interest in the darker aspects of York's history. And they don't come much darker than the Pinkney murders which, in November 1905, traumatised the peaceful village of Heslington.

Under the heading A Village Tragedy, the case makes up one of the more chilling chapters in Keith's new book, Foul Deeds And Suspicious Deaths In York.

If you believe horrific, brutal murders are a modern phenomenon then think again.

In a case that has eerie echoes of Robert Mochrie - the businessman from Haverfordwest in Wales who recently bludgeoned his wife and four children to death before hanging himself - former soldier John Pinkney took a billhook from the shed behind his cottage at 14 Baker Street, Heslington, and hacked to death his wife Sarah and three of their five children. He then committed suicide by cutting his throat with a razor.

The bodies were discovered ten hours later by a family friend, insurance agent Herbert Daniels. After repeatedly knocking on the door and getting no answer, Mr Daniels lifted the sash window and pulled the curtain aside - and realised there had been a murder.

He went to fetch the village bobby, PC Farmery, and together the two climbed through the window.

They were shocked by what they found.

John Pinkney lay by the door, a razor by his side and his throat so badly cut his head was nearly severed. On the hearth rug lay the body of his wife, Sarah, her head hacked open. Across the room rested the body of two-year-old Madge, so mutilated she was beyond recognition.

The horror did not end there. Clutched in Sarah Pinkney's arms was a bundle of rags which turned out to be five-year-old Arthur. He was still alive: but so badly injured his head was gashed to the bone on both sides and the thumb and finger missing from one hand.

Upstairs in the back bedroom, Daniels and the policeman found two more bodies. On the bed, dressed only in a shirt, lay the body of eight-year-old Jack, his face almost cut in two. On the floor beside the second bed was the slumped body of ten-year-old Elsie. The mattresses and walls were covered in blood and the murder weapon, a bloodstained hedging billhook, lay abandoned.

As in the case of Robert Mochrie, says Keith, those investigating the tragedy had trouble explaining what led Pinkney to slaughter his own family. "It affected the whole village," he says. "And they could never really explain it at the time. All his neighbours said he was a loving father."

Keith makes no apologies for re-acquainting the people of York with the gory details of what was possibly the city's most brutal murder.

"I'm not a macabre sort of person," he says. "But you've got to write about things that sell and people do like reading about other people's misfortunes. I think it's a feeling of 'there but for the grace of God...'"

His book, out now at £9.99, is the latest in Wharncliffe Books' Foul Deeds series. Other volumes have dealt with gruesome crimes in areas such as Rotherham, Chesterfield, the Tees and the Yorkshire coast.

Keith - a 42-year-old freelance photographer with a wife and two children who lives in Doncaster - says when he first told friends he had been asked to write a Foul Deeds book about York, they laughed at him. "They said 'you will never find anything like that in York!'" he says.

They were wrong. York, such a pleasant place to live now, was a grim, impoverished city of slums and open sewers where - for the poor who had few job opportunities - life was grindingly hard, says Keith. In the slums of Walmgate and Hungate, there wasn't much hope and crime flourished.

We often look back on the past with rose-tinted spectacles, says Keith, and think things such as child abduction and murder didn't happen then.

How wrong we are.

Keith, who pursued his researches through old newspaper reports and the public records office, uncovered a sorry catalogue of child murders from York's dismal past.

He claims that in one long, hot summer in the 1880s there were children's bodies being pulled out of the River Ouse all the time. And that was just one year. Why? "Imagine living in Hungate in one room," he says. "You haven't got the money to feed your child which is ill, and there are only really two choices of employment - domestic service or prostitution, neither of which fit with being a mother.

"There was one woman who threw her baby boy into the river. She had been driven to the point where, really, she had no other choice. There wasn't a social welfare back-up system like there is today."

One particularly heartbreaking story is that of a little girl called Hannah. She was born in the summer of 1837 to a young woman called Jane Norton. Jane was unmarried and living in the Pocklington Workhouse.

A baby daughter meant nothing but trouble so Jane placed her in the care of the Pocklington Poor Union.

Jane then moved to Poppleton to become a servant and married fellow servant Charles Gowland.

The couple moved to a house in Acomb, overlooking what is now Acomb Green. Jane told her husband about her little girl, and the couple even occasionally visited her.

But Charles insisted she would never be allowed to live with them. "He basically said, 'if she comes to live with us, I'm off,'" explains Keith.

Meanwhile, The Pocklington Poor Union, hearing about Jane's marriage, insisted she was now able to take care of the little girl who was, by then, three years old.

"They wouldn't take no for an answer," says Keith.

So Jane, driven to the point of desperation, did the unthinkable. She killed the little girl and hid her at the back of her coalshed.

There the little body lay until, six months or so later, husband and wife suddenly vanished. New tenants moved into the house a few days later and, detecting a strange smell from the shed, found the little girl's body at the back.

Jane Gowland and her husband were never found: but Jane was convicted in her absence of murder.

What makes the story so heartbreaking, however, is that the little girl was never even given a proper name of her own.

Her mother never named her and during her time with the Pocklington Poor Union, she remained simply "Jane Norton's baby girl."

It wasn't until she was more than two years old that anyone bothered to call her Hannah... and a few months later, she was dead.

Foul Deeds And Suspicious Deaths In York by Keith Henson is published by Wharncliffe Books, at £9.99.

Updated: 11:07 Thursday, August 07, 2003