LURKING in the shadows of Leyland's historic past is an eerie tale of murder most foul which ended in a harsh and severe punishment.

On March 6, 1766, at about 10pm, William Whittle, who lived with his family in Farington, murdered his wife and two young children in the most cruel and bloody manner.

A signed statement from one Robert Welsh, who arrived at the family's home the morning after the crime, describes how Whittle brutally butchered his wife, axing her head from her body.

It reads: "....so cruel a manner as to cut eleven cuts through her body into the flags with an axe, so that her body lay flat both ways, and her pluck and bowels all cut and mangled."

Welsh testifies that the same barbaric fate befell Whittle's eldest daughter, aged about two-and-a-half, and her nine-day-old sister, whose heart was ripped out.

Whittle was taken to Lancaster Castle and found guilty of the murders. He was sentenced to death and hanged on the gallows on Lancaster Moor, on April 5, 1766.

Two days later his body was returned to the place of the murder at Cliffleanens, in Farington, - now the junction of Fowler Lane and Church Lane -and suspended in chains from a tree on a gibbet, as a warning to others with murder in mind. It is said that Whittle's heart-broken mother visited the gibbet daily and picked up the bones of her son as they rotted and fell, then took them to a secret place for a decent burial.

Whittle's victims are buried in St Andrew's Parish Church, in Leyland, where a slab engraved with a cross, axe and knife, marks the place.

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