Mary Ashford and Barbara Forrest: The Erdington Murders, Fact-Checked

Updated 6 October 2026. This article has been rewritten to correct claims in the earlier version, including that the two women shared a birthday and were killed by the same method, which the historical record does not support.

Pype Hayes Park, on the north-east edge of Birmingham, is an ordinary suburban park with a stream, a stretch of woodland and dog walkers. It is also the setting for one of the most retold coincidences in British crime. Twice, 157 years apart, a 20-year-old woman was found dead near its edge after a holiday night out. Both were found on or around the same date. In both cases a man named Thornton was charged with murder, and both men walked free.

Online, the story usually comes with a longer list: that the women were born on the same day, killed in the same way, in the same spot, after wearing new dresses to a dance. Some of that is true. Some of it isn't. The real story is strange enough without the extras.

Mary Ashford, 1817

On Whit Monday, 26 May 1817, Mary Ashford, 20, who kept house for her uncle at Langley Heath near Sutton Coldfield, walked to Erdington to meet her friend Hannah Cox. The two went to a holiday dance at the Tyburn House, an inn on the Chester Road. There Mary spent much of the evening with Abraham Thornton, a 25-year-old bricklayer and farmer's son from Castle Bromwich.

They left together around midnight. At about four in the morning Mary knocked at the house in Erdington where she had left her day clothes, changed, and set off for home. She was seen walking towards Langley at around half past four. At about half past six a labourer on his way to work, George Jackson, found a bonnet, a pair of shoes and a bundle of clothes beside a water-filled pit near Penns Mill. When the pit was dragged, Mary's body was in it. She had been raped and had drowned. In a freshly harrowed field nearby, two men from the local mill traced the footprints of a man and a woman, running and struggling.

Those footprints make the case an early landmark in forensic history. The two men, William Lavell and Joseph Bird, were not investigators, and as the historian Naomi Clifford has shown, they made mistakes no modern officer would: they and dozens of onlookers trampled the field, and no one sketched or lifted the prints. But they worked out a plausible sequence of events from the marks in the soil, a struggle across the field, an impression in the grass where Mary had been assaulted, and a single deep footprint at the edge of the pit, where someone seemed to have braced himself to throw her in. The depth of the prints suggested a heavily built man. Thornton was heavily built.

Thornton was arrested the same day. He admitted having sex with Mary but insisted it was consensual and that he had left her alive. At his trial at the Warwick Assizes on 8 August 1817, defence witnesses placed him miles away, walking home through Castle Bromwich, at times that made the prosecution's account hard to sustain. The jury took six minutes to acquit him. Much of the country was outraged.

The timing was the heart of the defence. Mary was seen alive heading for Langley at around half past four. Several witnesses said they had seen Thornton miles away, on the road home, at roughly the same time, some of them chatting with him and finding nothing odd in his manner. If they were right, he could not have been at the pit. The press had already decided otherwise, casting Mary as poor, honest and virtuous and Thornton as her destroyer, and the acquittal did nothing to change public opinion.

Trial by battle

Mary's brother, William Ashford, refused to accept the verdict. He used an ancient procedure called an appeal of murder, which let a victim's relative bring a fresh prosecution after an acquittal. Thornton answered with an even older right that had never been abolished: wager of battle, a trial by combat. In the Court of King's Bench, before Lord Ellenborough, he threw down a glove and challenged William to fight. The judges, after much argument, ruled that the right still existed and that he was entitled to it. William declined, and in 1818 Thornton was freed for good. Parliament, embarrassed, abolished both the appeal of murder and trial by battle in 1819. Thornton emigrated to America.

Her gravestone, at Holy Trinity Church in Sutton Coldfield, is now badly worn. Its inscription goes on to say that she had "incautiously repaired to a scene of amusement without proper protection". Even in death, the women at the centre of this story were judged for going out.

Barbara Forrest, 1974

Barbara Forrest was 20 and worked at the Pype Hayes Children's Home. On the late-May bank holiday of 1974, the successor to the old Whitsun holiday, she spent the evening out with her boyfriend. She was last seen in the early hours waiting for a bus home. She never arrived. Her body was found days later, hidden in long grass on the fringes of Pype Hayes Park, about 500 yards from her home on the Chester Road and close to the children's home. She had been raped and strangled. Most accounts date her death to 27 May 1974, the 157th anniversary of Mary Ashford's.

About 100 officers worked on the hunt for her killer. Detectives put up appeal posters around Erdington, and in June 1974 a policewoman dressed in clothes like Barbara's retraced her last known route past the spot where her body was found, in the hope of jogging someone's memory. Suspicion fell on Michael Thornton, a child care officer who worked with her at the children's home. He was charged with her murder and tried in 1975, but on the seventh day of the trial the judge directed the jury to acquit him, saying there was no evidence linking him to the crime. A directed acquittal is not a finding that someone is innocent. It means the prosecution's evidence was too weak for a jury to convict safely, so the judge stops the case. In the mid-1970s, more than a decade before DNA profiling was used in British courts, investigators had far fewer ways to tie a suspect to a body found days after death. No one else has ever been charged. In 2012 her family publicly pressed West Midlands Police over the case, including the whereabouts of jewellery taken from her body. Her murder remains unsolved.

What's true and what isn't

It is not clear exactly when the parallels were first pointed out, but Erdington had never forgotten the Ashford case, and they were not hard to see. Over the following decades the story was retold in local histories and newspaper features, and then online, where a 2015 article syndicated by USA Today introduced it to a global audience. Each retelling tended to add a little. That is how a list of five or six genuine parallels became, in some versions, a dozen.

Line the two cases up honestly and the core of the legend holds. Both women were 20. Both died after a holiday night out, on or around 27 May. Both were sexually assaulted and left near the edge of what is now Pype Hayes Park, a few hundred yards apart by most accounts. In both cases a man named Thornton was charged with murder, and both were acquitted.

Then there are the premonitions. Later accounts say Mary told a friend's mother she had bad feelings about the week ahead, and that Barbara told a colleague ten days before her death that "this is going to be my unlucky month". Both remarks are repeated in almost every retelling, but their original sources are hard to trace, and they are the kind of detail that tends to attach itself to a story after the fact. They belong in the category of things that might be true, not things we know.

The embellishments are not hard to explain. The shared date is partly a product of the calendar: both deaths fell on the late-May holiday, when young people went out and walked home late. The shared location reflects geography: the park sits between the old Chester Road and the homes of people who lived nearby. Thornton was a common enough local name. None of that makes the coincidence less eerie. It just means it does not need a curse, and that repeating the invented details turns two real women into a puzzle.

Retellings have a way of outgrowing the record, as with Ellen Sadler, the Victorian girl said to have slept for nine years. And unsolved cases are not always closed for good: modern forensics have reopened decades-old crimes, as in the 1997 Philadelphia fire that turned out to be a kidnapping.

Mary Ashford changed English law without ever getting justice. Barbara Forrest got neither. What both deserve, more than a list of spooky parallels, is to be remembered accurately.