Class meant a lot in Victorian England. It defined you, and it defined other people’s perceptions of you. Time and time again, in trial coverage and crime reports, you can detect class bias in how the press perceived criminals and victims, and how magistrates, judges and juries may also have been swayed by the class of those who came before them.

Harriet Baker was an example of the hard-working poor. When she died, she was stated to have been a housekeeper who was trustworthy and good at her job; she did not have thoughts above her station but worked quietly and efficiently. People liked her – both those of her own class, and those she worked for. Yet she was, as newspapers sniffed, of working class stock: ‘the parents were of the labouring class and lived some years ago in Dover’. She was the daughter of James Langtry, and was one of a large family. She was born, not in Dover, but at Margate, in 1808. There were at least five Langtry girls, destined to go into service around the country. One of Harriet’s sisters was in service in Kensington; Harriet meanwhile became a servant in the household of Lady Dorothea Stanhope at Holme Lacy. She then moved onto Mr Heywood’s household at Hope End in Ledbury, Herefordshire, where she stayed for ten years – a testament to her ability to do her job well and be accepted by a family.

Harriet appears to have only left the Heywood house when she married, at the age of 39, in 1847. She married a plumber named James Baker, at Colwall, and settled into a new kind of domestic life. Sadly, though, the marriage lasted just 12 years before James died. Harriet, now 51, needed to find work again now her husband’s income had died with him. She returned to her housekeeping work, now taking on a live-in job in Ledbury. However, just seven weeks after James Baker’s death, his widow would also be dead.

Her new housekeeping job was with George Masefield, a local solicitor, who was aided by at least two of his sons, and who also had two other clerks working for him – John Isaac Jones and Richard Dew. This was a busy office, and Masefield needed people around him who he could trust – there was always money on site, locked away in drawers in various rooms. Harriet soon made friends with the other clerks, especially John, who despite being decades younger, would come to her room occasionally in the evening to have a glass of gin and water, and a chat.

Although Harriet was grieving her late husband, this new position offered her companionship and a home, as well as a valuable income. It looked as though she would have a more comfortable later life than many other working-class widows her age. This peace, however, was shattered on 17 May 1859, when the body of Harriet Baker was discovered in George Masefield’s office, smouldering from a failed attempt to set fire not only to it but to the building. She had been hit over the head before being strangled with a rope; her attacker had then ransacked the rooms, stealing money and banknotes. Most disturbingly, evidence suggested that the murderer had had a gin and water with Harriet in her room before killing her.

Suspicion soon fell on John Isaac Jones. This man in his mid twenties had worked for Masefield for over two years, and was good at his job. But he was known to be in debt, to borrow from his co-worker – and to enjoy a gin and water with the housekeeper. As police investigated further – and this investigation involved Scotland Yard – disturbing facts emerged about Jones. He was questioned about his origins: his employer said he believed that John was American, but had been brought up in Australia. When Masefield had advertised for a clerk, John applied with a reference from a former employer in Australia. John corroborated this, stating that his parents had been from either Somerset or Devon, but had emigrated to America shortly before his birth. He had later emigrated to Australia with his brother, where he had worked on the goldfields. There had been a fight there that resulted in John losing a leg – everyone in Ledbury knew that he had a false leg made of cork.

The police were suspicious, however. They took the step of getting a photographer in to make an image of John, which was then distributed around England in the hope that someone might recognise a similarity between him and their family. The result was better than expected – John himself was recognised.

A man got in touch with police to say that he had employed John four years earlier as a solicitor’s clerk. This was not on a goldfield, nor in Australia, but in Burnham in Somerset. This Burnham solicitor stated that he believed John to be from the local area, and to have lost his leg as the result of a childhood accident in Somerset. John had been a bit of ladies’ man, and this resulted in a scandal that saw him have to leave his home county – he had ‘paid his addresses’ to a girl, promising to marry her. As a result of this, his generous employer gave him a sum of money as a present. Unwilling to wait until he married, John seduced his young lady – and then promptly tried to seduce her sister as well.

There is little evidence for John Isaac Jones of Burnham in the archives, but this may be explained by the fact that a couple of press reports refer to him as John Isaac Jones alias Robert Dibble. A look at the records shows a Robert Dibble of around the right age as Jones to have been born and brought up in Huntspill, just three miles from Burnham. This individual was a farmer’s son, one of seven children. Their father died in the 1840s and their mother Maria – another hard-working woman – took over the family farm of some 40 acres, helped by her children. After 1851, Robert Dibble disappears from the censuses, perhaps because he became John Isaac Jones at this point.

Jones was charged with the murder of Harriet Baker and, in early June, committed to take his trial at the summer assizes. The conviction was ‘that the dreadful crime was perpetrated by a person who had been on familiar terms with the deceased woman; and who, moreover, was acquainted with every minutiae of the mechanical details of Mr Masefield’s business’, so it should have been easy to convict Jones – but it wasn’t.

The trial took place at Hereford from Tuesday 2 August to Thursday 4th. There was great excitement in the city about the case, with large numbers of people thronging the court from early each morning. However, on the Thursday, after a long deliberation, the jury returned with a verdict of not guilty. John Isaac Jones seems to have been as surprised about the verdict as anyone. He was exhausted, and started fitting – it took three strong men to restrain him. After a while, he shouted ‘I am innocent – I am – I am innocent!’ as though he thought the verdict had gone against him. He had to be taken aside by the governor of Hereford gaol, Captain Glinn, who explained that he had been acquitted. Jones grabbed him by the hand, saying, ‘God reward you for your kindness.’ The papers reported that he looked like a man ‘whose reason was suddenly lost’.

Did Jones kill Harriet Baker or was he, as the jury found, an innocent man? This was a man who was from a solid, decent, background: educated, in a good job, deemed trustworthy by his employer. Had he been working class, a mere servant, then perhaps the rumours of debt and of borrowing money might have been taken more seriously, regarded differently. The stories about him creating a fake history, of seducing young women, appear not to have been held against him – in fact, perhaps they helped, creating an image of a young, exciting individual; or perhaps people wanted to believe that he had been an Australian gold miner, this individual with the cork leg and the easy ability to chat and drink with all ages and both genders. The photograph of him became an etching, published and sold, together with accounts of his life. He was a real-life hero from a novel or a penny dreadful, and there seems to have been a reluctance to turn him into what he may actually have been – a cold-blooded man who killed a grieving widow for a bit of money.