BELIZE CITY, Thurs. Mar. 10, 2022– In the coming weeks, a posthumous pardon is likely to be granted to Nora Parham, the only woman to have been hanged in Belizean history. The motion to exonerate her was approved by Cabinet recently, and the proposal is now set to be sent to Governor-General H.E. Froyla Tzalam and the Belize Advisory Council for consideration.
Nora Parham was condemned to death not long after being arrested for allegedly setting her abusive husband, Ketchell Trapp, on fire in the latrine of their shared Orange Walk home. At the time, Belize was still under British rule, and British law determined that Parham was guilty. It was a decision ultimately made by a jury of twelve men in a trial presided over by Chief Justice Sir Clifford de Lisle Innis and Crown Counsel J. K. Havers. Despite pleas to the then governing party, led by First Minister George Price, and despite a petition that garnered over 2,000 signatures, Parham was denied mercy on the grounds that “sympathy” should not be allowed to “change court rulings.” And while a recommendation for mercy was sent to the British Governor at the time, Sir Peter H.G. Stallard, nothing was done to reduce the sentence or change the ruling. Additionally, a request for a Stay of Execution was sent to the Queen of England on behalf of Nora, to which the Queen had agreed, but her correspondence did not arrive on time.
On June 5, 1963, a 36-year-old Nora Parham was escorted to the gallows by prison officer Eustace Pandy. In a 2015 interview with AMANDALA, Pandy described Parham as “brave”, noting that, although she said nothing before her death, she was smiling. Cabinet’s approval of the posthumous exoneration comes just three months shy of the 58th anniversary of Parham’s execution, with the official announcement being made this past Tuesday, March 8, on International Women’s Day.
Parham, a mother to eight boys, was a victim of domestic abuse at the hands of her common-law husband—a constable in the British Honduras police force and father of four of her sons. Despite her complaining to the police on numerous occasions about the violent nature of her partner, nothing was ever done, as is often the case with such incidents. On Wednesday, February 6, 1963, Ketchell Trapp would run out of the family’s latrine, naked and on fire, and Nora Parham, who rushed to get help, would later be arrested. Trapp would succumb to his injuries one day later and be buried with full police honors. While Nora admitted to throwing gasoline on Trapp, she testified that she did not light the fire that killed him. Her testimony, excerpts of which were recorded in The Belize Billboard, detailed the moments that led up to the fire.
She related, “…he was going outside, saying to me he was going to the toilet. While going to the toilet he used threatening words to me. I then replied to him saying, ‘I will make the Sergeant know about your threatening words.’ He then returned back in the bedroom. While he came back in the bedroom, I had a gasoline iron [in] my hand with a pan of gasoline.
“He came in the bedroom with a stick in his hand and hit me on my head. When he was going to hit me another hit, I threw the gasoline on him and he grabbed away the pan from me, and I went through the backdoor and he stone me with the said pan,” she further said.
It was after that scuffle that Trapp would go to use the latrine and emerge shortly after on fire.
Before he died, Ketchell Trapp confessed to police that after the fight with Nora, he went to the restroom and lit a cigarette, which then caused the gasoline to ignite. He also confessed to hitting Nora, stating he “gave her a few blows”. But according to Agripina “Pinita” Espejo, M.B.E., J.P., a personal friend of both Parham and Trapp and Orange Walk’s first woman mayor, Trapp’s dying declaration was changed at Parham’s trial, with the prosecution accusing her of dousing the police officer with gasoline before setting him ablaze and locking him in the outhouse. This was not the only thing that was changed. During an interview in April 2009, Espejo also told AMANDALA that she and a nurse had visited Nora on the night of the incident while she was in police detention. Nora’s face was visibly swollen, but the medic, Fernando Zetina Rosado, failed to mention this in his court testimony, stating that the only thing he noticed on Nora was an 8-day-old shoulder wound. Despite Espejo’s constant attempts at telling people Trapp’s statement had been changed, no one ever acknowledged her.
Nora Parham was arrested and charged for the murder of Ketchell Trapp, and on Saturday, February 16, 1963, she was transferred to the Belize Central Prison. In April, the court would deliver a guilty verdict and Judge Clifford de Lisle Innis would sentence her to death. In the moments before her execution on June 5, an estimated 200 persons, including Nora Parham’s sons, kept vigil outside the prison.
“No black flag, no bell, and not even any noise audible to the public was made when eight o’clock came and Nora was hanged,” reported Belize Billboard, run by Philip Goldson, the day after Parham’s death. On several occasions, the newspaper’s editor had called for the pardoning of Parham, if only for the sake of her eight children, but like all other previous appeals for clemency, it fell on deaf ears. The Belize Billboard was the main paper to provide a thorough account of Parham’s trial and the events that occurred between February and June of 1963. The paper described Parham as being neatly dressed, erect in posture, and well-spoken when she had pleaded “not guilty” to the charge of murder.
From Colony to Nation, a book on political women’s history in Belize written by Anne S. Macpherson, references the unjust trial and sentencing of Nora Parham and the denial of mercy by the then governing party, arguing that Nora was treated, not as a battered woman, but as a “cop slayer”. In it, Macpherson notes that “by refusing to treat the pair [Parham and Trapp] as wife and husband, not just cop slayer and cop, the government deepened its own highly political silence about domestic and community gender oppression and violence.”
Minister of Human Development, Hon. Dolores Balderamos Garcia, who first brought the issue of a possible pardoning to the House of Representatives in February this year, has expressed that she believes a historic wrong will be righted. On April 29, 2020, Dr. Samantha Parham-Casey, granddaughter of Nora Parham, wrote in this newspaper about the silent suffering that her father and uncles have endured over the past fifty-seven years.
“We say, clear Nora Parham’s name once and for all and rewrite history,” she wrote, demanding that the children of Nora Parham be given the justice that they deserve while they are still alive.
And while the symbolic gesture will ease the pain of Nora Parham’s descendants at least a little, there is still much work that needs to be done in regards to tackling domestic violence in Belize. The decades after the unjust execution of Nora Parham, and, undoubtedly the years before as well, have seen countless incidents of a similar nature in which victims of domestic violence have been ignored and even ridiculed, and their voices left unheard. The dismantling of the culture of domestic abuse that prevails in our society requires continued effort, not just from Government officials in the form of legislature reform, but from all of us.