inster, so that everybody might have free access to see the same,
with some of the parish officers to attend, hoping by that means a
discovery of the same might be attained. The high constable of
Westminster liberty also issued private orders to all the petty
constables, watchmen, and other officers of that district, to keep a
strict eye on all coaches, carts, etc., passing in the night through
their liberty, imagining that the perpetrators of such a horrid fact
would endeavour to free themselves of the body in the same manner as
they had done the head.

These orders were executed for some time, with all the secrecy
imaginable, under various pretences, but unsuccessfully; the head also
continued to be exposed for some days in the manner described, which
drew a prodigious number of people to see it, but without attaining any
discovery of the murderers. It would be impertinent to mention the
various opinions of the town upon this occasion, for they being founded
upon conjecture only, were far wide of the truth. Many people either
remembered or fancied they had seen that face before, but none could
tell where or who it belonged to.

On the second of March, in the evening, Catherine Hayes, Thomas Wood,
and Thomas Billings took the body and disjointed members out of the box,
and wrapped them up in two blankets, viz., the body in one, and the
limbs in the other. Then Billings and Wood first took up the body, and
about nine o'clock in the evening carried it by turns into Marylebone
Fields, and threw the same into a pond (which Wood in the day time had
been hunting for) and returning back again about eleven o'clock the same
night, took up the limbs in the other old blanket, and carried them by
turns to the same place, throwing them in also. About twelve o'clock the
same night, they returned back again, and knocking at the door were let
in by Mary Springate. They went up to bed in Mrs. Hayes's fore-room, and
Mrs. Hayes stayed with them all night, sometimes sitting up, and
sometimes lay down upon the bed by them.

The same day one Bennet, the king's organ-maker's apprentice, going to
Westminster to see the head, believed it to be Mr. Hayes's, he being
intimately acquainted with him; and thereupon went and informed Mrs.
Hayes, that the head exposed to view in St. Margaret's churchyard, was
so very like Mr. Hayes's that he believed it to be his. Upon which Mrs.
Hayes assured him that Mr. Hayes was very well and reproved him very