"Such interminable Chancery suits were no rare things when Bleak House was written to expose them.   The case on which Jarndyce and Jarndyce was founded was probably Jennens -v- Jennens which related to a property in Acton, Suffolk belonging to an intestate miser who died in 1798. The case was only concluded some time in the 80's." - The Dickens Encyclopaedia: A. Hayward 

Murders, Murderers and Ghosts

The two murders mentioned below are well documented and authentic.The ghost, however, is more suspect. 

Charles Drew:  a murderer buried in consecrated ground. On the night of Thursday, 31st January 1740, Charles Drew, aged 25, went to Upper House, Long Melford, occupied by Charles John Drew, a wealthy attorney and his own father, and shot him through the body with six bullets. 

The father had kept the son on a small allowance because of the company the young man kept. He was mixing with smugglers and poachers.  Taunted by his asssociates, the son took a dreadful revenge.  He hid the gun in a hollow tree by the roadside at Liston. 

Charles Drew went to London to prove his father's Will but on his return found a search was being made for him. He returned to London but was later caught in Leicester Fields and was committed to Newgate. From there he was brought to Bury St. Edmunds, convicted at the Assizes on 27th March, and hanged. 

The same evening, the murderer's body was surreptitiously interred under the Chancel of Acton Church, the Vicar, the Revd. Charles Umfreville, having married Mary Drew, the murderer's eldest sister. 

Catherine Foster:   In 1846, Catherine Foster of High Street, Acton murdered her husband, whom she had married only three weeks before in Acton Church, by giving him dumplings poisoned with arsenic. 

Dr. Jones of Long Melford assumed the death to be "English Cholera" but at the inquest a post mortem was ordered. Tests on the fluid taken from the stomach soon revealed arsenic, and the body which had been buried was exhumed on 27th November 1846 and examined in the Churchyard. 

At the trial the murdered man's eight year old brother remembered having seen Catherine put a black powder in the dumpling mixture. Hens that had eaten the remains of the meal had died, with strong traces of arsenic in their bodies. 

Catherine was tried at Bury St. Edmunds and after retiring for only fifteen minutes, the Jury brought in a verdict of Guilty.     She was hanged at Bury before 10,000 onlookers - the first criminal to be buried at the Gaol and the last woman to be hanged at Bury St. Edmunds. 

The motive, if such it can be called or even discerned, was almost touching in its childish inadequacy. She had no real affection for her husband although he was kind to her,   she had married to please her mother but found that she had been happier in service and would have liked to return - so she got rid of her husband. She was aged 17.