THE sickening story of how a father slaughtered his wife and children at their Halesowen home has been published in a new book.

Delving into the history files to 1878, the book includes a story involving Joseph Harris, a man with a long history of mental illness who had just been released from Powick Asylum.

He lived in a cottage in Coombeswood with his wife Amelia, their two daughters Alice and Eve and his in-laws James and Phoebe Jones.

But on February 5, the miner, who worked at the Black Waggon Pit in Old Hill, said he felt unfit to go to work.

He was left alone with his wife and children until Phoebe returned to the home and found bloody red footprints in the snow, leading away from the cottage.

When she went indoors to investigate, Phoebe found her daughter’s battered body in the blood-spattered kitchen, with four-year-old Eve lying next to her.

The grisly tale appears in Victorian Murders, written by Dr Jan Bondeson, a retired senior lecturer and consultant physician at Cardiff University.

Dr Bondeson, from Sweden, details how in spite of the prognosis from the Powick psychiatrists, Joseph was as “morose and paranoid” as ever.

“He developed the fixed idea that his wife Amelia had been unfaithful to him while he had been incarcerated in the asylum, and they quarrelled bitterly,” he wrote.

“Phoebe Jones cooked breakfast for her husband and took it to him at the brickworks at 8.30 in the morning. Amelia urged her to make haste back, since she was frightened of what Joseph might be up to.

“The previous evening, they had quarrelled hard until midnight, and she was apprehensive what her deranged husband was capable of in one of his bad moods.”

After finding Amelia had been brutally beaten to death with an axe, as had Eve, Phoebe found seven-year-old Alice still alive – in spite of her horrific injuries from the axe.

Dr Bondeson wrote: “A doctor and a police constable were called in, but young Alice died a few hours later.

“The constable and two neighbours spotted the blood-spattered Joseph Harris skulking in a field nearby, and they arrested him and applied the handcuffs to prevent him causing any further mischief.”

The coroner’s inquest into the death of the murdered family was opened on February 12, 1878, with Joseph being brought in from the Worcester county gaol.

Dr Bondeson wrote he had maintained the “greatest indifference and unconcern” towards the murders, even when the injuries to his three victims were graphically described.

Joseph Harris was committed to stand trial at the Worcester Assizes on March 15 – where he set up a defence of insanity – and a jury found him not guilty of murder, but he was sent to Broadmoor where he stayed until his death in January 1889.

Victorian Murders by Dr Jan Bondeson was published by Amberley Publishing and is available for £14.99.