Philip Edward Percy Davis was 30 and lived with his wife and his 15-year-old niece at Camborne, in Cornwall. It was not a happy household, and on April 22nd, 1937, Davis told a colleague that his wife and niece had left him. On the same day he rented the garage which adjoined the house, and he was seen carrying buckets of earth into it.
A week later his landlord went to the garage. Seeing earth in the inspection pit, he moved some of it and found the bodies of Daviss wife and niece.
I have done both of them in with a hammer, Davis told the police. What made me do it I dont know. I have been to a mental home. We had a row the night before I went to work.
He had killed his wife and niece on APRIL 21st during a quarrel, and at his trial his defence of insanity was unsuccessful. Although he had spent a short time in an asylum when he was 18, he was said by medical witnesses to be perfectly sane.
Found guilty of murder, he was refused leave to appeal and went to the scaffold.