A most inhuman murder

Christian Jefferies and Wm. Harrison, the latter twelve years of age, were committed to Warwick gaol charged with a most inhuman murder, committed on the body of Wm. Sellard, a boy of only ten years old. The coroner's inquest sat four days for the full investigation of this crime, the cruelties of which are thus related: that these boys having the care of a boat on the Oxford canal left to their charge, they had exercised numberless and excessive cruelties upon the deceased; that after unmercifully beating and otherwise ill treating him, he was lashed to the rudder and then thrown into the canal, and dragged along to a considerable distance; and stripping off his shirt at another time, they had thrown it upon the top of a thorn, and forced him in that state to climb up after it, and that from divers abuses too shocking to relate, the wounds having at length mortified, they dragged him out of the boat to a bank contiguous, where he died.