Six Little Heads: The 1905 Amesbury Murders

By Neil Berrett 

Published by Neil Berrett 

143 pages  Softback AME.343

This slim volume came to my attention as it was sitting in a pile of books waiting to be catalogued. I have had a lifelong interest in true crime so this account of a mass murder in Amesbury just had to be read, though I was too impatient to wait until the cataloguing process was completed before reading it. 

Neil Berrett was a serving police officer and uses his knowledge and experience to examine the known facts and relay this sad tale. He openly acknowledges that he does use conjecture in the telling but does not indulge in speculation or flights of fancy. Neil has quietly, calmly and gently told us the story of Peter Robert Head from his birth to his death and beyond to his descendant’s lives. 

This is the story of one man who had a difficult start in life but who made a success of himself in the artillery. He was outgoing, gregarious and popular as well as being a loving husband and father. The tale goes on to describe the decline in Peter’s fortunes and the sad road he travelled to reach the point of taking the lives of six of his children and then his own life. Neil, through records and direct contact with Peter’s descendants, illustrates how the past travels down the years and decades to affect those left behind and those yet to be born. No crime is an incident that stands alone in isolation. 

This story has been told with great compassion for all involved. It was not treated salaciously at the time but with sorrow and grief. Peter has not gone down in history as a mass murderer but has almost slipped away out of the history of this community. It is thanks to people like Neil Berrett and Jim Fuller before him, that these stories are still with us. 

I recommend this book to you, not just as a tale of murder and family sorrow, but as a comment and illustration of the lives people led in the late Victorian and early Edwardian period. Hard and difficult lives at times but also good and fulfilling. It is a story of love, success, hardship and desperation. 

I was very moved by this well written tale and Peter Robert Head and his family will stay with me for a long time. 

Neil Berrett’s Six Little Heads is available to view at the Wiltshire & Swindon History Centre or borrow via your local Wiltshire library under AME.343. Please ask your local librarian. 

Eileen Sutherland , Community History Advisor