AtoZ Challenge – J: Jealous Man’s Revenge #atozchallenge

The Blogging from A to Z April Challenge is for bloggers who wish to participate, by publishing a blog post every day in April except for Sundays. Each blog post will focus on a letter of the alphabet. For example April 1 will be A, April 2 will be B, April 3 will be C, and on it goes. By the end of April, a blog post for every letter of the alphabet will have been published.   Blog posts are usually on a theme, or you can choose to post each day with no theme at all. My theme for 2024 is “Haverfordwest in the News”. Haverfordwest is a town in the Country of Pembrokeshire, Wales.

Below are two articles about the same rage of jealousy. The first was published in the Australian newspapers. The second, with a little more detail, was published locally in various Welsh newspapers.

from: from: The Sun, Kalgoorlie, WA, Australia,  Sunday 17 September, 1911, page 16
JEALOUS MAN’S REVENGE 
A shocking tragedy is reported from Cuckoo Village, near Haverfordwest, in Wales. John Vaughan, a cripple, recently became jealous of his wife’s supposed relations with another man, and on (Sunday night he exploded a quantity of blasting powder beneath the bed ‘ in which his wife and her ten-year-old son were sleeping. The explosion blew the woman and  the boy to pieces and unroofed the house. Fragments of the bed were hurled into the fields a considerable distance from the house. The remains of the two victims were subsequently extracted with difficulty from among the ruins of the building.  The explosion took place at midnight, and the neighbors attributed the disturbance to an earthquake. Next morning Vaughan, whose jaws had been blown away, was discovered outside the house. He died shortly afterwards.

from: The Tewkesbury Register, Saturday 16 September, 1911, page 3
FAMILY BLOWN TO PIECES. TERRIBLE TRAGEDY OF JEALOUSY.
There was a terrible at Cuckoo village near Haverfordwest, on Monday morning, resulting in a wife and child, a boy aged ten, being blown to pieces, and the husband receiving fatal injuries. It is believed the deed was committed by the husband in a mad fit of jealousy. He was a cripple named John Vaughan, forty-seven years of age, and recently there had been considerable unpleasantness between him and his wife, because of her supposed relations with another man.
At three o’clock in the morning, the village was startled by a terrific report, and when the neighbours went to see what had happened, they found that Vaughan’s house had been unroofed, and that smoke was issuing from the ruins. Vaughan was found in a shed, bleeding profusely, and with his lower jaw nearly blown away. He was unable to speak, and died shortly after his removal to the infirmary. Meanwhile, a search was made for the wife and child, and their charred remains were found at midday, amid the debris. Fragments of the bed in which they had been sleeping, were picked up in a field some distance away.
In the kitchen was found a fuse of the kind which Vaughan had used in quarries for blasting, and there can be no doubt that the husband, who slept in a separate bed, in the same room, deliberately placed the explosive under the bed, in which his wife and child were sleeping and blew them up. Investigations made by the police leave no room for doubt that this is what happened. In another room were found a loaded shot gun and a Sealyham terrier puppy, which had escaped unhurt. Mrs. Vaughan had taken another house, and next week intended living apart from her husband.

**Please note: Punctuation and paragraphs have been added to the above transcription for ease and speed of reading.

1911 ‘JEALOUS MAN’S REVENGE’, The Sun (Kalgoorlie, WA : 1898 – 1929), 17 September, p. 16. , viewed 10 Mar 2024, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article211097348
1911, FAMILY BLOWN TO PIECES, The Tewkesbury Register, Saturday 16 September, 1911, page 3, Retrieved 8 November 2024, britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk

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