For over a decade, a man known to his neighbours as “Squire” Higgins lived quietly beside the Heath in Knutsford — hunting with the gentry, dining in the finest local houses, and raising a family. He was, in truth, a convicted felon, a serial burglar, a highwayman, and a murderer. His story is one of the most remarkable — and darkest — in Knutsford’s history.
A Respectable Arrival
In 1756, a well-dressed stranger arrived in Knutsford and took possession of a substantial property overlooking the Heath, then known as the Cann Office — so called because it had once housed the town’s official scales and weights. The new occupant, who gave his name as Edward Higgins, set about renovating the house and fitting out its stables with several fine horses. He took on two local youths as grooms and was soon seen riding to hounds with the Cheshire gentry. His manner was charming, his horsemanship impressive, and his apparent wealth unquestioned.
The following year, on 21 April 1757, the parish register recorded the marriage of Edward Higgins, Yeoman, to Katherine Birtles, a spinster from a respectable local family. The couple settled into the rhythms of Knutsford society — visiting neighbours, hosting dinners, and attending the county’s social events. In time, they would have five children. To all outward appearances, “Squire” Higgins was exactly what he seemed: a comfortable gentleman landowner who made regular excursions to distant estates to collect his rents.
No one in Knutsford knew the truth.
A Criminal Past
Two years before arriving in Knutsford, Edward Higgins had stood in the dock at Worcester. Convicted of housebreaking in May 1754, he was sentenced not to death but to transportation — seven years’ hard labour in the American colonies. He was duly shipped to Boston, Massachusetts. He did not stay long. Shortly after his arrival, he broke into the house of a wealthy merchant, stole a substantial sum of money, and used it to buy himself a passage back to England.
Returning to the north of England, he spent a period in Manchester before moving south to Knutsford, where he invested his ill-got gains in a house, horses, and the trappings of gentility. A transported felon, returned illegally to England, he had reinvented himself entirely — and it worked. For over a decade, no one suspected him.
A Double Life
The social invitations that flowed to the Higgins household served a practical purpose beyond mere pleasure. As a guest in the great houses of Cheshire — including Oulton Park, seat of the Egerton family, and the estates around Tatton — Higgins made careful note of the layout of rooms, the location of valuables, and the habits of the household. He would then return later to help himself.
On one celebrated occasion, the Higginses were staying overnight at the Egertons’ house at Oulton Park. During the after-dinner card game, their host’s jewelled snuff box caught Higgins’ eye. While the household slept, he crept into the dressing room, pocketed the box, and hid it in the garden for later recovery. When the theft was discovered the following morning, Higgins — with commendable public spirit — promptly assembled all the servants and had their quarters searched. Mr Egerton was grateful for his guest’s initiative. The box was never found, and no suspicion fell upon Higgins.
Closer to home, Higgins supplemented his income by slipping out after dark on his horse, hooves muffled with cloth so as not to disturb the neighbours, to hold up coaches on the Chester Road. The road had recently been turnpiked — improved and taken over by a private company that charged tolls — and the volume of traffic it carried made it attractive to highwaymen. Travellers of the era routinely kept a few guineas in an accessible pocket, resigned to surrendering them to any well-dressed man with a pistol who stepped out of the shadows. Higgins obliged them regularly.
Murder in Bristol
Not all of Higgins’ crimes were local, and not all were without violence. Under the pretence of collecting rents, he ranged far across England. During one such expedition to Bristol, he broke into the home of a widow, Mrs Ruscombe, and made off with ninety pounds in gold coins — a very considerable sum. During the course of that robbery, he murdered both Mrs Ruscombe and her maidservant, Mary Sweet. He would not confess to these killings until the day of his death.
On the return journey, he called at the home of a Mr Wilson in Gloucester and stole a further large sum of money. It was for this Gloucester burglary that he was eventually arrested — at his own house in Knutsford, by the local constable. The officer, perhaps overawed by his prisoner’s social standing, made the mistake of allowing Higgins to go upstairs to gather some belongings before being taken to gaol. Higgins went upstairs and did not come down again. He escaped — by what means, through a window or perhaps a hidden passage, Knutsford legend has never quite settled.
On the Run
Now a fugitive, Higgins moved to the Bristol area, where he assumed the alias Edward Hickson and once again insinuated himself into local society. The pattern continued: respectability as a mask, crime as an occupation. But his time was running out.
In 1767, he travelled to Wales on what he told acquaintances was another rent-collecting trip. In the small town of Laugharne in Carmarthenshire, he was caught breaking into the home of Lady Maud and Madam Bevan. He was arrested, identified as an escaped transportee, tried at Carmarthen Assizes, and sentenced to death.
The Forged Reprieve
Even at this extremity, Higgins was not without resource. He contacted friends and family, urging them to secure a reprieve. On 3 November 1767 — four days before the scheduled execution — a letter arrived at the office of the Under Sheriff purporting to carry the handwriting of Lord Shelburne, a minister of the Crown, ordering that the sentence be suspended. It was initially accepted as genuine.
But the Under Sheriff was suspicious. Investigation traced the letter back to Higgins’ wife and sister, who had disguised themselves and delivered it to the office late in the evening. It was a forgery. On the night of 6 November, the Under Sheriff visited Higgins in his cell to inform him that he would hang in the morning.
The Scaffold at Pensarn
At dawn on 7 November 1767, crowds braved a bitter November morning to line the route from Carmarthen Gaol to the gallows at Babell Hill, Pensarn, about a mile away near the old Roman bridge. Among the crowd were those who still believed the reprieve to be genuine and who hissed and jeered at the Under Sheriff as the procession passed.
Higgins walked to the gallows so fast that the guards had to run to keep up with him. He wore a flower in his buttonhole. At the scaffold, he prayed for five minutes, then declared he was ready. But before the sentence was carried out, he pressed a letter into the hand of the Under Sheriff.
The letter was a confession — not only to the burglary for which he had been condemned, but to a number of other crimes, and above all to the murders of Mrs Ruscombe and Mary Sweet in Bristol. It was the first time he had acknowledged those killings. His wife, he insisted, had known nothing of his crimes, and he begged that no blame be attached to her.
“I always kept hid from my wife all my transactions of villainy… I hope the fewer reflections will be cast upon her after my untimely death.”
Edward Higgins, confession delivered at the scaffold, 7 November 1767
Executed Twice
The story of Edward Higgins does not end at the scaffold — or not quite. He had, with characteristic forethought, arranged one final provision for his family. Before his arrest, he had sold the rights to his body after death to a London surgeon named Cruikshank, for use in anatomical education. The fee had presumably been passed to Katherine and the children.
This arrangement meant that, contrary to the usual practice of leaving a hanged man’s body swinging for an hour as a public deterrent, Higgins’ body was cut down quickly and carried away to London. When the post-mortem examination began, it was discovered that he was still alive. The hanging had not killed him outright. It fell to one of Cruikshank’s students to administer the final blow.
His skeleton eventually found its way to Sale, in Cheshire, where it was kept in the anatomical collection of Dr Charles White — founder of the Manchester Royal Infirmary — completing a journey that had begun just a few miles away, on the Heath at Knutsford.
Legacy
Edward Higgins left behind a wife, five children, and an extraordinary story. Katherine Higgins, who had lived for years in ignorance of her husband’s true nature, was left to face her neighbours’ questions as best she could.
The house in what is now Gaskell Avenue — named not for its most notorious resident but for the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, who later lived a few doors away — still stands, bearing a heritage plaque that marks Higgins’ residence. Gaskell herself was clearly fascinated by the story of the neighbourhood’s dark celebrity: she fictionalised his life in her tale The Squire’s Story, published in 1853.
Higgins has sometimes been romanticised as a Cheshire equivalent of Dick Turpin — a dashing “gentleman of the road” who robbed the rich with style and gallantry. The reality was rather less romantic. He was a calculating fraudster who exploited the trust of his friends and neighbours over many years, a violent criminal who murdered two defenceless women, and a man who narrowly cheated justice on multiple occasions. That he met his end with apparent composure — a flower in his buttonhole, a confession in his pocket — adds a theatrical final note to a life of sustained deception.
His plaque on Gaskell Avenue stands close to that of Mrs Gaskell herself, a reminder that history rarely separates its heroes and villains as neatly as we might wish.
Sources: Parish records, Carmarthen Assizes records; Confession of Edward Higgins (1767); Cheshire Magazine; Knutsford Guardian (Paul Hurley, January 2022); Wales Online (Sandra Hembery, February 2019); Iain Monks, Folk Customs (July 2014). Elizabeth Gaskell, The Squire’s Story (1853).
