Bio

Richard Hemming resided in the historic spa town of Droitwich in Worcestershire, England, during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He was trained as a skilled tradesman, operating locally as a wheelwright and carpenter. While Hemming maintained a steady trade, he struggled financially and was known in his local community as an individual who could be influenced by monetary persuasion. 

His profession regularly brought him into contact with landowners and agriculturalists in the surrounding rural hamlets, including the nearby village of Oddingley. Through these local networks, Hemming became entangled with an elite group of disgruntled farmers who sought an illicit solution to a bitter community grievance.

Murder Story

By 1806, an intense and volatile dispute over agricultural tithes (church taxes) had divided the parish of Oddingley. The local rector, Reverend George Parker, was widely despised for his uncompromising, stringent extraction of taxes from the local populace. A contingent of wealthy local farmers and figures—including Thomas Clewes, Captain Evans, John Banks, George Barnett, and a farrier named James Taylor—conspired to eliminate the rector. They contracted Hemming, offering a sum of money to assassinate Parker. On Midsummer Day, June 24, 1806, Hemming concealed himself in a hedgerow along a lane where Reverend Parker was herding livestock. Hemming fired a fatal shot, killing the rector in broad daylight. A pursuing villager chased Hemming toward Trench Woods, but retreated after Hemming turned and discharged a weapon in his direction.

Hemming effectively vanished that afternoon, sparking an extensive manhunt and the offer of a 50-guinea reward. Authorities assumed he had successfully fled the country. However, his employers had never intended to let him survive to blackmail or implicate them. On the very night of the assassination, Clewes and his accomplices enticed Hemming into a barn at Netherwood Farm under the pretense of providing him food and protection. Once inside, the group ambushed Hemming, clubbing him to death to permanently secure his silence. They buried his remains in a shallow grave beneath the barn floor.

The true sequence of events remained buried for nearly 24 years. In January 1830, a new property owner ordered the demolition and alteration of the Netherwood Farm barn, unearthing a human skeleton with a fractured skull. Hemming's widow, who had since remarried, positively identified the remains using surviving fragments of his clothing and a wooden carpenter's rule discovered in his pocket. Following the discovery, Thomas Clewes was arrested and delivered a full confession outlining the assassination plot and subsequent cover-up. By 1830, several of the primary orchestrators, including Captain Evans and James Taylor, had already died. Clewes and the remaining living conspirators were brought to trial at the Worcester Guildhall. Due to complex legal technicalities of the era regarding accessories and principals in a murder trial, the jury ultimately acquitted the defendants. Upon their return to Oddingley, the local church bells were rung in celebration by the anti-tithe populace.