When Betty Edge awoke one morning at her family home, she was overcome by what she would later describe as a ‘heat’.
The 56-year-old went downstairs and picked up an axe. She returned to her aunt Ann’s bedroom and struck three blows across the woman’s head and face.
Betty’s father Thomas managed to grab the weapon off her and alerted a neighbour, who was dispatched to get a doctor and the police.
By the time they arrived at the farmstead near Alstonefield in the Staffordshire Moorlands, Ann was dead.
Betty said: “I cannot tell why I did it. I was in such a heat when I awoke that I went downstairs and fetched it up. After I killed her, I meant to kill myself, but the heat went off.”
She was arrested for ‘wilful murder’ and remanded into custody awaiting trial. But a Sentinel report revealed Betty was then transferred to Stafford Asylum, where she died later that year in 1856.
It emerged she had been under ‘medical attendance’ for…