Mr Briggs' Hat: The True Story of a Victorian Railway Murder (18 page)

The pilot boarding the ship off Sandy Hook conveyed to her captain, Champion, the facts about his passenger Müller.
Two armed crewmen
were ordered to watch the suspect without alerting him to their surveillance. Meanwhile, the telegraph station sent a message to Quarantine Landing confirming that the vessel making its approach was the
Victoria
.

Instead of heading out towards the ship, Tanner turned away from the shore, forced back into the city to meet Francis Marbury. Their quarry was now in American waters and within Marshal Murray’s federal jurisdiction and the Crown’s solicitor could petition for a formal warrant to be issued for his arrest. Only when the paperwork had been finalised would the detective get the chance to confront the man he’d been chasing for weeks.

At Staten Island, George Clarke, NYPD Officer John Tieman and the medical officer Dr Swinbourne scrambled into a small boat and pushed away from the shore. Drawing up alongside the sail packet just before six o’clock, they boarded and made straight for Captain Champion’s cabin.

An excursion boat had passed close to the ship earlier that evening as she began to negotiate the bay and its passengers had called loudly for ‘the murderer Franz Müller’. It could have meant disaster for the London detectives, but their calls appeared not to have been heard or understood by those on deck. In the warmth of the summer’s evening as the ship loomed towards it,
landfall, more passengers emerged to stand talking and laughing in clusters, to lean over the sides or to squint at the Manhattan shore as the sun settled towards the horizon. It seems that none of them wondered at the thousands of people thronging the Staten Island shoreline in the hope of witnessing the arrival of Mr Briggs’ murderer. On board the
Victoria
belongings had been packed away ready for disembarkation and the air buzzed with anticipation. Tense faces broke into smiles and relief sounded in bursts of laughter after long weeks at sea.

Emerging from his cabin, Captain Champion – followed by the medic and the two police officers – stepped out onto the deck and made his way through the huddles of passengers towards the stern of the ship. After a moment, he shouted for all steerage ticket holders to come forward in order to be checked by the quarantine doctor. Gradually, the milling passengers congregated, several names were called and men and women began to step up, answer questions, allow their eyes, mouths and foreheads to be examined and then retire again. When Franz Müller’s name went up, a compact young man of about twenty-four, wearing neatly fitting but shabby clothing, came forward. Sergeant Clarke and Officer Tieman moved to stand one on either side of him. Waiting for questions from the doctor, Müller instead felt
his arms grasped firmly
by the two men as he was led forcibly to one side.

The German simply asked,
What is the matter?

It was not the reaction that Clarke, the only British policeman

on board, had expected. There was nothing starting or nervous about the young man’s behaviour as Officer Tieman made his arrest for the murder of Thomas Briggs. Instead, Clarke watched the tailor’s eyes widen in apparent bewilderment. There was a moment of silence before Clarke realised that Officer Tieman appeared to have forgotten the details of the charge. Then Clarke spoke for the first time:
Yes. On the North London Railway between Hackney Wick and Bow, on 9th July
.

Müller’s response was straightforward:
I never was on the line
.

It was a calm process. As he escorted Müller downstairs to the empty saloon, Clarke explained who they were. Tieman then searched the prisoner, finding eleven shillings in his trouser pocket and a small key in his waistcoat.

It is the key to my box
, Müller said.

Under instructions from the captain,
a large black trunk
ornamented with brass nails was retrieved from Müller’s berth in cabin 9. When it was brought into the saloon, the prisoner confirmed that it belonged to him.

Bending to unlock it, Sergeant Clarke threw back the lid to reveal Müller’s belongings: one or two dirty shirts and their separate collars, a spare pair of working trousers, a few scarves, a couple of brushes, a towel, an umbrella, a pair of gloves and a handkerchief. Packed on one side were the tools of the tailor’s trade: a measure and a pair of scissors or shears. There was no spare waistcoat, coat or overcoat.

In the corner of the trunk George Clarke found a top hat made of fine black silk with a white silk lining, with the maker’s name of Digance, Royal Exchange – but it was low-crowned rather than the tall style habitually worn by Thomas Briggs. There was also something sewn into a piece of cloth and tied with a ribbon. Weighing the pouch in the palm of his hand, Clarke’s back straightened. Pulling open the ribbon, Clarke fixed his gaze on Müller as a heavy gold pocket watch, maker’s mark Archer of Hackney, fell from the folds of the bag. The prisoner held Clarke’s eye and
answered all his questions
without hesitation. He claimed that the watch – whose serial number corresponded to the watch stolen from Briggs – had been his for about two years, bought from a man at the London docks. He said he had owned the hat for twelve months. Forgetting, perhaps, what he was said to have told Mrs Repsch, he mentioned that he had bought it in the second-hand markets of Petticoat Lane.

Nothing in the tailor’s demeanour indicated evasion. Under
Tieman’s care, Müller was confined to his cabin and his clothes were minutely examined for traces of blood. The shipping agent Gifford had said that Müller took several parcels on board. Conjecturing that one of them might have contained clothes worn on the night of the attack, Clarke searched for it to no avail. The policeman also sought out a fellow passenger in order to repossess a waistcoat Müller said he had given away in exchange for a small leather reticule – it was newer than the tatty one currently worn by the German but it, too, appeared clean. There was nothing about any of Müller’s clothing to indicate that it had been worn by the murderer, barring that Clarke noted that the cuff from one shirt sleeve was missing.

*

By the early hours of the following day,
a crowd of thousands
had once more gathered around Manhattan’s Battery to witness the landing of the ‘English Murderer’. Richard Tanner and John Death were already on board, conveyed by police harbour boat earlier that morning.

Tanner had had weeks to prepare for this meeting. He was purposeful and unhurried. Leaving John Death on deck,
he disappeared below
to place Müller in a group of male passengers corralled by a ship’s officer and then summoned the jeweller. It took just moments for John Death to identify the prisoner as the man he served on 11 July at his Cheapside shop.

There was still the question of the ring. Asked by Tanner whether the box contained all his belongings, Müller complained that a piece of jewellery had been stolen from him while on board. Pressed to describe it (
was it a red stone?
) the German spoke of a gold ring with a white stone engraved with the figure of a head, the very ring Death had already described as a part of the transaction the morning after the murder.

Since the black silk hat found in Müller’s box was reserved as evidence against him, he was lent a cap to wear before being
escorted to a Custom House barge that steamed ashore to its dock, dwarfed by the hulking prows of moored transatlantic packets. Rushed through immigration, he can have caught only glimpses of the excited crowd. By ten o’clock he was at police headquarters at Mulberry Street where his arrest was formalised. Tanner offered him breakfast, urging him to take a mutton chop, and he spoke so kindly that Müller broke down for the first time, weeping for several minutes before gathering his wits and accepting tea, bread and butter. Then he was driven up to Broadway to Bleeker Street to be
photographed for police files
. Just before two o’clock, he was taken to
the office of Marshal Robert Murray
in the courthouses at Chambers Street – an appointment that would ratify his arrest and set the machinery of extradition grinding into gear.

Reporters and spectators jostled around the steps of the Marshal’s office, anxious for the first sight of the murderer, yet, as the prisoner emerged from the police cab, they fell quiet. With his short stature, light hair and small, grey, inexpressive eyes, dressed in the only suit of clothes he possessed, Müller appeared to the reporter from the
New York Herald
to be less fierce villain than
cowering wretch
who seemed more dead than alive
. Expecting, perhaps, a powerful presence equal to the publicity he had received, the crowd was confused by the mundane, flesh-and-blood reality.

To look at him
, the
New York Times
reported the next day,
one would think he was about the last person in the world who could deliberately plan and successfully execute any very heinous crime
. Müller’s face was unremarkable: skin pulled tightly over prominent cheekbones; rippling, dark blonde hair combed back carefully from a narrow forehead; a fine, small nose and eyebrows so pale they all but vanished. His grey eyes were so deeply set that from a distance only the shadows cast by his prominent brow bones were visible. In the pockets of soft flesh between his brows and over his thin upper lip, there was a slackness. Despite
a firm jaw, the receding chin was weak. The
New York Tribune
wrote that his mouth was
decidedly repulsive
, from its extreme width and protuberance impressing one with the idea of dogged and vindictive restlessness
, but to most who set eyes on him, Müller seemed to be inoffensive rather than cunning. His very inconsequentiality, his ordinariness, seemed instead to mark him as a victim.

CHAPTER 18

No Slipshod Examination

The extradition hearing opened
on 26 August in the imposing United States Circuit Court building located behind City Hall at 39 Chambers Street. On one side of a large table in front of the presiding Commissioner Chas Newton sat Francis Marbury, the three English policemen and their two witnesses, John Death and Jonathan Matthews. On the other, the tailor sat alone, wearing a dark tweed coat, a dark waistcoat buttoned nearly up to his chin and a white necktie. The room was crammed with onlookers. As he waited for the man assigned by the authorities to defend him –
ex-judge Beebe
– Müller’s lips remained tightly compressed, betraying no sign of emotion. He looked
small and stupefied.

Since his arrest there had been a forbearance about the prisoner that some found disturbing. Even the police were struck by his lack of emotion. What the
New York Herald
had described as the
diabolical
locus
of the murder and the thrilling transatlantic chase had put the story on the front pages of the newspapers, but the inscrutability of the supposed murderer was something of a disappointment. The previous afternoon, hustled
before US Marshal Murray, he had remained implacable as he confirmed his name and explained to the Marshal that he had a sister in the city and expected her to come to his aid. Only once, when he caught sight of Matthews at the back of the room, did his face momentarily but visibly blanch.

The agent apparently employed
by the German Legal Protection Society in London failed to appear at that preliminary hearing and Müller appeared to be helplessly alone. Under American law, had he been able to afford the two thousand dollars for bail, he would have been released and might have escaped into the battlefields. Instead, he was shuffled back into the police van and returned to the police cell at Mulberry Street.

Up at the Everett House Hotel that evening, Inspector Kerressey had sat down
to write with breathless lack of punctuation
to Daniel Howie at the Bow police station. He relayed the details of Sergeant Clarke’s arrest, the discovery of the missing watch and hat and the disappearance of the ring. Müller, he wrote, was said to have been
one of the most agreeable passengers on board … The murder of Mr Briggs was frequently a subject of conversations
. He told of the throngs along the shoreline at Castle Gardens and the pack of spectators lingering around police headquarters at Mulberry Street. He wrote of his surprise that Müller’s co-passengers had suspected nothing, that they had thought the German’s
appearance rather more gentlemanly
than most and his appetite more robust. Clarke was relieved and excited. He was enjoying the mood of satisfaction that had settled over his colleagues.

Richard Tanner had written too:
a short, triumphant telegraph
addressed to the Police Commissioner that would leave on the fast steamer, the
Baltimore
, on Saturday morning. As the boat passed between Ireland and the west coast of Scotland, his words would be telegraphed to Greenock, forwarded from there to Reuters in Fleet Street, and then rushed by messenger to Scotland Yard. On 6 September, nearly two weeks after Müller’s arrest, Sir
Richard Mayne would read the news he had been waiting for:
the
Victoria
has arrived at New York and Müller has been arrested. The hat and watch of Mr Briggs were found in his possession. Müller protested his innocence and the legal proceedings in reference to his extradition are progressing.
Released to the press, the news would be shouted from newsstands and England would hold its breath for the outcome of the American hearing.