Episode 7- The Ballymote Slasher- 1861

In the summer of 1861, the quiet Sligo market town of Ballymote was shaken by a series of strange and unsettling attacks that left locals gripped by fear. This episode unravels the rumours, the newspaper reports, and the social tensions of the time, tracing how a rural community confronted a threat it barely understood. Was it the work of a lone assailant, a case of mass panic, or something more complex beneath the surface of Victorian Ireland? Step back into the shadows of 19th‑century Ballymote as we examine a mystery that has lingered for more than 160 years.

Transcript

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Welcome to Murder Under Gaslight. Your guide to Victorian Era Island's most gruesome crimes. Your host is Don Mortell.

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On the morning of Wednesday, january ninth, eighteen sixty-one, four men climbed over a garden wall in the town of Ballimot, County Sligo. The general shop on the other side had been closed for two days. The shutters hadn't moved. Nobody had answered the door. The men went inside. A local man named Morrison climbed the stairs first. He would later describe in court what he found at the top of those stairs. The bed, a pillow, and beneath that pillow ninety year old shopkeeper, William Callahan. His throat cut from ear to ear. That was only the beginning. Downstairs the door to the shop was difficult to open. Something was blocking it from the inside. When they finally forced it, they discovered the obstruction. It was Fanny Callahan, William's wife. She was dead behind the counter. Her throat had also been cut. The third member of the household, a young servant woman named Anne Mooney, was not in her bedroom. Her room was undisturbed, empty. The men searched the house. They found her in the coal shed, lying on her left side, her hand raised as though in a final act of defence. Her throat had been cut too. Beside her lay a coal scoop, as if she had been fetching coal when she was attacked. A half brick was nearby. Three people dead in one building. The money gone from the till, the house ransacked. My name is Don Mortell. This is Murder Under Gaslight. True stories of crime and justice from the Victorian age, when the world was lit by flame and shadows were long and full of secrets. Today we travel to County Sligo, to the market town of Ballymote, in the bitter January of eighteen six one. Tonight we talk about three people slaughtered in their own home by a man who had been shown nothing but kindness, and who threw it back in blood. Tonight we talk about Matthew Phibbs, the Ballymoat slasher, and the trail of evidence he left behind him almost every step of the way. Ballymoat is a small market town in the south of County Sligo. In eighteen sixty one it was, as it had been for centuries, a trading hub for the surrounding rural parishes. Farmers and labourers, merchants and travelling folk all passed through its streets. Shops like the Callahan's were the lifeblood of such a town. William Callahan was ninety years old in January 1861, a remarkable age for any era, let alone mid-Victorian Ireland. He had operated his general shop for decades, and by all accounts he was still active, still engaged, still running his business alongside his wife Fanny. They were an elderly couple, established and known, and for some time they had employed a young woman named Anne Mooney to help them. She lived in the house with them. The Callahans also had a history with the Phibbs family, and this history is part of what makes the crime that followed so particularly cold. Matthew Fibbs' father had been a draper and shop proprietor in Ballymoak before his death around eighteen forty nine. The family had standing in the town, but after the father's death, the business passed to Matthew and his sister, and for a time it ran reasonably well. Then his sister married and died shortly after. Matthew, now alone at the helm of the family business, began to drink heavily. The business deteriorated. His reputation deteriorated with it. His creditors closed in. By eighteen sixty, the shop had collapsed entirely, sold off to pay the debts, and Matthew's mother had been forced out of the family home, reduced to renting two rooms in a house across the road, owned by a woman named Mrs. Fall. William Callahan, by multiple accounts, had tried to help Matthew during his decline. He had given him advice on business matters. He had tried to guide a young man going wrong. Matthew Phibbs had not been receptive to good counsel. In the months before the murders, Phibbs had gone to England for a time, looking for work or opportunity. He had sent letters back to neighbors in Ballymote begging for money. An auctioneer who later testified at his trial recalled that in the summer of eighteen sixty he had been employed by Phibbs to help sell off what remained of the shop's stock. The man was broke, in debt. By january eighteen sixty one he was back in Ballimotte, staying with his widowed mother in her two rooms. He was about twenty five years old. His life, by any measure, had fallen apart. And across the street in the shop that had been a second home to his family, lived a ninety year old man with money in his till and silver spoons in his drawers. Something in the first days of january eighteen sixty one clicked into terrible motion in Matthew Fibbs' mind. The precise details of how Phibbs entered the Callahan House are not known with certainty. What emerged later, partly from evidence given at trial and partly from a confession Phibbs himself eventually made, was a picture of the crime that was as brutal as it was, in one sense, chaotic. Phibbs later said that his intention had always been to break into the house, steal the money, and kill William Callan. He described this with a chilling rationalization, that the old man was feeble and that it would, in his words, be an act of mercy to end his life. He said that he never intended to kill Fanny Callan or Anne Mooney. But that's not what happened. When he entered the premises, Anne Mooney confronted him. In the panic of that moment, or perhaps the cold clarity of it, he reached for a half brick lying on the ground and struck her with it. He cut her throat. He killed her. When he went upstairs, he killed William Callahan in his bed. He killed Fanny Callahan downstairs behind the counter of the shop she had tended for years. Three people, one knight, a razor, a brick. And a man who had decided that their lives were worth less than what was in their till. He took the money, he took some valuables, among them two large silver spoons, six silver teaspoons, a case of pistols, a watch, a watch chain and seal. These he buried in a turnip field on the property of a family called the Gethens, outside Ballymote for later retrieval. Then he hid William Callahan's distinctive blue coat. He washed himself as best he could. And on Tuesday, january eighth, eighteen sixty one, while the bodies of the Callahan's and Anne Mooney were lying undiscovered in the darkened shop, Matthew Phibbs went to Sligo Town, twenty five kilometers away, and went shopping. What Matthew Phibbs did on the afternoon of Tuesday, january eighth, eighteen sixty one, is so astonishing in its recklessness that it is almost difficult to believe. But every detail of it was later corroborated by the shopkeepers he visited and placed before two separate jewelries. At around two or three in the afternoon, he walked into a boot shop in Sligo, owned by a man named Slater, and bought himself a new pair of boots. While he was there, Slater noticed blood on Fibs' arm, and asked about him. Phibbs said it was nothing. That something had nicked him when he put his hand into the new boots to try them. Slater accepted this, and said nothing more. Phibbs moved on to the second shop on Market Street and bought a new coat and cap. He tried to discard his old hat in the street, simply dropped it on the cobbles and walked away. The shopkeeper called after him. It was a decent hat, the man said. Some poor person could make use of it. He handed it back. Phibbs took it. At a third establishment, he presented a razor for sharpening. The blade was in terrible condition, heavily gapped and damaged. When the shopkeeper asked what had happened to it, Phibb said a neighbour's child had been using it to cut sticks. A razor so damaged it needed regrinding, blood on his arm, new clothes being purchased while old ones were discarded. More than twenty pounds in his pockets, gold, silver, and blood spattered banknotes. That evening Matthew Fibbs went drinking. He drank until he was arrested for drunkenness in the streets of Sligo town. When the police searched him at the station, they found the gold, the silver, and the bloodstained banknotes. They also found his clothes, which were bloodstained. It was Tuesday night. Nobody had yet discovered what had happened in Ballymote. There was no murder investigation. So at six o'clock, on Wednesday morning after he had sobered up, the police returned all of his money and his raises to Matthew Phibbs and let him go. By three o'clock that same Wednesday afternoon, just after the bodies had been found in Ballymote, he was under arrest again, this time on suspicion of murder. Police found him at the doorway of Pat Conway's public house in Riverstown, not far from Ballymote. He was wearing the distinctive blue coat, the coat that had belonged, witnesses would testify, to William Callahan. Inside the pub, wrapped in a parcel, was yet another coat, still bearing its Market Street label from the Sligo shop where it had been purchased the previous day. Matthew Phibbs was taken into custody for the last time. The evidence against Phibbs was, as the trial judge himself acknowledged to the jury, entirely circumstantial. There were no eyewitnesses to the murders. No one had seen him enter or leave the Callahan house on the night of january seventh or eighth, but the circumstantial evidence was formidable. Witnesses placed him lurking near the back of the Callahan property in the days before the murders, perching, they said, on the fourth foot dividing wall between the Callahan's garden and that of the neighbours. The same wall the men would claim on the morning the bodies were found. A former employee of the Callahan's, named Edward Balf, identified the blue coat Fibbs had been wearing at his arrest as the coat had belonged to William Callahan. Balf had cleaned it regularly during his time working in the shop. A second servant confirmed this identification. The tailor who originally made the coat for William Callahan was called to provide his recorded measurements, which matched the garment precisely. The old hat that Fibbs had tried to throw away in Sligo, the hat the shopkeeper had pressed back into his hands, was produced in evidence. It was the hat he would have worn on the night of the murders. The shopkeeper who had sold him the new coat and cap still had it. And there was the matter of the money. The auctioneer's testimony about Phibbs' desperate financial state in the months before the murders was compelling. Letters begging for cash, debts unpaid, a business in ruins. Then, the morning after three people were murdered and their house ransacked, more than twenty pounds in bloody notes, new clothes, new boots, a razor, sent for regrinding. Matthew Phibbs was sent forward for trial at the Sligo Asizes in march eighteen sixty one. He pleaded not guilty. The first trial ended in deadlock. Eleven of the twelve jurors had reached a guilty verdict. One could not decide. Under Irish jury law of the period, the Perrens Act or the Juries Island Act of eighteen thirty three, a unanimous verdict was required. Matthew Phibbs walked away from the first trial unconvicted. He was tried again that summer. This time, the jury reached its verdicts without difficulty. Guilty. While Phibbs was held in Sligo jail awaiting execution, something remarkable happened. He began to talk. His prison guard, a turnkey named Bell, later testified that in the weeks after his conviction, Phibbs confessed to the murders in detail. He also told Bell where he had hidden the items stolen from the Callahan house. Bell took a day off from his duties and travelled to Ballymote, where he located the Gethin's turnip field that Phibbs described. There, buried in the earth, he found the silver spoons, the teaspoons, the pistols, the watch, the chain and the seal. The fourteen pounds Phibbs claimed to have also buried there was not found. Bell later swore under questioning that he had been unable to locate it. Bell was reprimanded by his superiors for failing to immediately report Fibbs' confessions when they were first made. In the confession, Phibbs eventually committed to paper. He gave his account of that night with what seems, in retrospect, like a kind of terrible honesty. He said he had intended from the beginning to kill William Callahan and take the money. He offered that grotesque rationalization, mercy for a feeble old man, that tells us something about the mental architecture he had constructed to justify what he was about to do. He said he had not intended to kill Fanny Callahan or Anne Mooney. Perhaps that's true. Perhaps it isn't. What is certain is that he did kill them, and that he did so with dispatch. In the weeks before his execution, Phibbs also turned to religion. He received ministers from the Church of Ireland, a primitive Wesleyan minister and a Methodist minister. The Reverend Samuel Schon and Mr. Lindsay, and the Reverend George Garrett of Killaney, all named in records, as attending him in his final weeks. Whatever had been absent from Matthew Phibbs' moral character during his brief, ruinous adult life. He appears in his last days to have sought to address it. He also wrote a letter, a warning addressed to the young men of Ireland, penned from his condemned cell. It is, when you read it, a strange document, self pitying in places, but in others genuinely reflective of a young man who understood too late the catastrophe of his own choices. He wrote that he had a good upbringing, and was well advised by his parents to attend Sunday school and church. He had not listened. He had gone instead to whiskey houses and playhouses and races. In words that were later reprinted in newspapers across Ireland, he ended with this appeal. Again, young men, beware of what has brought me to this, my untimely end. On august sixteenth, eighteen sixty one, three days before the date set for her son's execution, Mary Fibbs sat down to write a letter. She was a widow. She had already lost her daughter. She had lost her home, and now she was about to lose her only remaining child. The letter was an appeal for clemency, addressed to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the representative of the crown. It asked that Matthew's death sentence be commuted to life imprisonment. It cited his youth, he was about twenty five years old, as a grounds for mercy. It noted that the evidence against him had been purely circumstantial, and that a previous jury had disagreed. It was a mother's letter, written in desperation, three days before the day she had been told she would become childless. One newspaper reporting on the appeal captured the letter's own words in its account. They are heartbreaking in their simplicity. The letter said of Mary Fibbs that in three days she will be childless, and her erring son passed repentance. No reprieve came from the Lord Lieutenant. The execution was confirmed. On the morning of august nineteenth, eighteen sixty one, crowds gathered outside Sligo Jail to witness the execution of Matthew Phibbs. Public hangings were still a feature of Victorian Ireland at this date. The Capital Punishment Amendment Act, which would move all executions inside prison walls would not be passed until eighteen sixty eight. Phibbs' hanging was, by grim irony, the last public execution ever carried out at Sligo jail. The sheriff that morning was a man named Bernard Owen Cogan. He delayed the execution past its scheduled time, waiting for the morning mail from Dublin, apparently anticipating or perhaps hoping for a late reprieve from the Lord Lieutenant. None arrived. The executioner that day was not a man who inspired confidence. Newspaper reports noted that when he was brought to meet Fibbs, the hangman was nervous, timid, one paper said, and hid behind a door. According to multiple contemporary accounts, he lived for two full minutes after the drop. The Kerry Evening Post reported that a policeman in the crowd fainted, and that several members of the public did the same. He was about twenty five or twenty six years old. He had been born and raised in Ballymote, County Sligo, the son of a draper who had tried to give him a decent start in life. The start was not enough. Or he was not enough for the start, either way. He had thrown it all away and taken three innocent people with him. A curious piece of local folklore grew up around Matthew Phibbs in the years after his execution, in the way that folklore tends to cluster around dark events in small communities. It was said in Ballymoat that after he was taken down from the gallows, a dummy was substituted for his body by friends, and that Phibbs was smuggled out of the country. The story went further that he later returned to Ireland, having lost his mind and roamed the countryside in a state of madness. This story was still being told in Ballymope living memory. Historian Keenan Johnson, writing in the Coron Herald, recalled being told the tale as a child and noted that many households on Teeling Street and Jail Street near the old jail had iron bars fitted to their ground floor windows as a consequence of the fear that Phibbs might return. Some of those bars were reportedly still visible in more recent times. What this folklore tells us perhaps is something about the scale of the crime and its grip on the local imagination. William Callahan, Fanny Callahan, and Mooney, three people from a small town known to everyone. Their killer had been one of them. Someone whose family had shopped alongside theirs, whose father had run a business on the same street. That kind of betrayal leaves a mark on a place. The case of Matthew Phibbs, the Ballymoat slasher, is instructive in a number of ways that go beyond the horror of the murders themselves. The investigation that caught him was by modern standards elementary. There was no forensic science as we understand it today, no DNA evidence, no CCTV. And yet the trail fibs left were so obvious, so brazen, that within hours of the bodies being found, he was He was the chief suspect, and within days he was in custody. The blood spattered money, the dead man's coat, the razor ground to a smooth edge on the day after three throats were cut. The hat he tried to throw away, the shopping spree while three people lay cooling in Ballymoat. Whether this was arrogance, panic, or simply the behaviour of a man who had not thought beyond the act itself we can't say. What we know is that it is remarkable he survived as long as he did. The first jury's failure to convict eleven votes to one for guilty reminds us that the Victorian criminal justice system was not without its complications. The anonymity requirement, then as now, exists to protect the innocent. In this case, eleven jurors were satisfied. One was not. What became of Mary Phibbs after the execution of her son is not recorded in the sources available to us. She had by the time of the trial already lost everything, her husband, her daughter, her home, her son's business. The appeal she wrote on august sixteenth was the last we hear of her voice. William Callahan was ninety years old. He had survived the famines, the tithes, the upheavals of a century of Irish history, and had kept a shop running in a market town through all of it. He was killed for the money in his till by a young man he had tried to help. Fanny Callahan and Mooney. They have no monuments. They are names in a court record, in a newspaper archive, in a local history journal. But they were real people. They lived in a house in Ballimot, County Sligo. They kept a shop. They deserved better than what they got. And they deserve to be more than footnotes. The Ballimot Slasher is a name that carries a dark glamour, the kind of grim nickname the Victorian press loved to bestow on its criminals. But behind that name are three victims who never got a nickname and never got a chance to grow old. You've been listening to Murder Under Gaslight. I'm Don Mortell. Thank you for joining me this week, and join us again next week for more Tyoles of Darkness from the Victorian era.

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Murder under Gaslight is a Westmeath Pocket Cinema production. Historical advisor is Jason McKevitt. Murder under Gaslight is presented by Don Mortell.