Mr Briggs' Hat: The True Story of a Victorian Railway Murder (26 page)

*

The second act of the strange drama that had absorbed so much public interest had drawn to a close. Only the third and last act remained to be played out and attention turned to the anticipated trial. The next day, Tuesday 27 September, the
Daily Telegraph
judged Thomas Beard wise to have reserved the substance of his defence, though it also believed the case against Müller might have been strengthened during Monday’s two hearings. The absence of any real motive for the crime (the intricacies of the various pawnbroker deals revealed that Müller had enough money for his fare without resorting to the sale of the watch,
ergo
he need not have stolen it) and the difficulty of reconciling his behaviour with that of a guilty man both told in the prisoner’s
favour. Nevertheless, while the negative evidence in Müller’s favour was strong, most thought that the positive evidence outweighed it.

There were some who considered that Beard’s reluctance to offer evidence in defence was a sign of weakness, an indication that nothing had been discovered to substantiate an alibi. Müller had not contested Matthews’ story about the purchase of the Walker hat. The new evidence of the two hatters appeared to prove that the hat found on Müller really had once belonged to Thomas Briggs, its alteration effected by someone clever with needle and scissors. These people believed that, if the defence was not more cunning, Müller would undoubtedly hang.

Taken from life expressly for this
exhibition
, a model of Müller had been added to Madame Tussaud’s waxwork museum in the Baker Street Bazaar in Portman Square, open daily from ten o’clock until five, and again in the evening from seven to eleven, admission one shilling (children half-price). Established in 1843 and known first as the Separate Room and then as the Chamber of Comparative Physiognomy, the re-named Chamber of Horrors offered an alternative to the wax models of statesmen, royalty, warriors and thinkers. Here, three-dimensional likenesses of renowned ruffians and criminals catered to the Victorian appetite for the odd, the deformed and the monstrous. Indeed, all over London – in side-street exhibitions, peepshows, penny-gaffs and dank upstairs rooms – ‘living skeletons’, Siamese twins and humans with ‘enormities and deformities’ were paraded for cash, feeding a rampant appetite for morbid entertainment.

The Chamber of Horrors was, advised
Cruchley’s London: A Handbook for Strangers
, viewed at its alarming best in the gloomy hours of night. The public could stare at the figures of notorious Victorian murderers such as Courvoisier, Frederick and Maria Manning and James Mullins – all translated into wax within days of their arrests, trials or executions – and at bloodcurdling casts of guillotined heads from the first French
Revolution. Never mind the fact that the
Spectator
(much like the critics of ‘sensation novels’) dubbed it all
a disgrace to our nation
, there was a strange thrill in being able to look the freakish duplicate of a killer in the eye.

Tussaud’s effigy of Müller was widely reported to be
an excellent likeness
and it may have been the reason why the Briggs family decided to write a letter for publication in the daily papers. Concerned that the public seemed to have accepted the impression that Briggs was a large, strong man who could have been overwhelmed only with great difficulty, they wanted to put the record straight.
An argument has been founded
favourable to Müller
, they wrote,
that so slight a man as he would hardly have ventured to attack one so powerfully made.
[We]
write to say that Mr Briggs’ height was not more than 5 feet 8½ inches; his weight about, but certainly not over, 11 stone, and his muscular development not above average for men of his size. He had further been weakened by a very serious illness, from which he had not long recovered, and was in his 70th year.

Hitherto, the family had refused to react publicly to the tragedy overtaking their lives. The Unitarian codes of conduct regarding hard work, sober living, compassion, tolerance and restraint, added to class codes of polite behaviour, all ensured that they maintained their silence. It was the supposed criminal, Müller, rather than the respectable, self-improving victim, Thomas Briggs, whose name edged its way into every conversation. All that Briggs had stood for seemed to have been defeated by the dominance of conjecture about the prisoner and his motives; Briggs’ industrious decency paled into insignificance before the crime and its implications for society as a whole.

Despite a few vague suspicions aired against the family at the start of the police investigation, they had been proved beyond reproach, yet considerably more sympathy had begun to attach itself to Müller than to the Briggs’ personal grief. As tension mounted over the date of Müller’s trial, the family could no
longer read newspaper reports and speculations without being piqued into reaction. While they were at pains to stress that they had no desire to prejudice Müller’s case, they thought that
the public should be made aware that what has been relied upon by many as an argument in favour of the accused is founded upon a misapprehension
.

*

Inspector Tanner and his team were still fixed on plugging gaps in the investigation, finally asking the chemistry professor Dr Henry Letheby to provide a second opinion on whether the stick belonging to one of Müller’s co-lodgers at 16 Park Terrace bore any signs of human blood. Members of the public continued, sporadically, to come forward with their own tales. One,
Mr Flemming
, told the Westminster police on 7 October that he had also seen Thomas Briggs on the night of his murder sharing a compartment with two other men. Flemming said that he saw them at Fenchurch Street Station but, since Briggs was occupying Flemming’s favourite corner seat, he had gone into the next carriage along. It took over a week for the report to be written up and sent to the Commissioner. Mayne forwarded it to Inspector Tanner. It was then, apparently, filed without further action.

At the end of the third week of October the Home Office confirmed that Müller’s trial would take place during the October sessions commencing the following week, on Monday the 24th. The judges on the rota were the Lord Chief Baron Pollock, Mr Baron Martin and Mr Justice Willes and the prevailing impression among the journalists was that the first two of these would sit together.

Lord Chief Baron Frederick Pollock was one of England’s leading and most learned judges. With a long face and a deep vertical furrow between sharp eyes, he was approaching the end of a glittering career – as Attorney General in Sir Robert Peel’s first
Tory administration, as successful defender of the Chartist insurrectionists, and as the presiding judge in the murder trials of the Mannings in 1849 and of James Mullins in 1860. Scholarly, polished and impressively strong-minded, Pollock had a reputation for demanding hasty verdicts from his juries and for focusing on substantive justice over bravura legal showmanship. Beside him in co-judgement would sit Ulsterman Samuel Martin. Pollock’s former pupil and now his son-in-law, Martin was also impatient of pedantic legal stickling but was less predictable in his judgements and could veer between the imposition of the harshest penalties and a striking liberal-mindedness.The practice of trying capital cases at the Central Criminal Court with two judges was an ancient one, already in decline, but it offered the advantage of allowing them to confer over complicated points of law without undue delay. The two courts of the Old Bailey had a
substantial calendar
to get through in the forthcoming sessions: one charge of murder, two of manslaughter, one of attempted murder, one of rape, four of feloniously wounding, one of arson, four of bigamy, eight of burglary and the rest of counterfeiting, forgery, stealing, threatening and other misdemeanours. There were 114 prisoners and no time for delays.

The previous year, eminent nineteenth-century judge and legal historian Sir James Fitzjames Stephen wrote that the
five common rules of evidence
in the English criminal court were that the burden of proof was cast upon the prosecutor; that evidence must be confined to the points at issue; that the best evidence must always be given; that hearsay was inadmissible; and that confessions under police questioning should not be considered as evidence. Most importantly, he stressed that the presumption of innocence was enshrined in all criminal trials:
crime must be proved beyond all
reasonable doubt
… The word ‘reasonable’ is indefinite. It is an emphatic caution against haste in coming to a conclusion adverse to a prisoner
. Juries, in other words, should convict only when they believed that no
reasonable hypothesis
existed to explain the facts of the case other than the prisoner’s guilt.

Better, it was repeatedly avowed, ten guilty men should escape than one innocent man should suffer. Yet the reality was that Victorian trials often moved at extraordinary speed.
Charles Cottu
, sent by the French government to England several decades earlier to inquire into the British judicial system, was shocked by precipitate trials. He believed that the English were practically
indifferent whether among the really guilty such be convicted … so much the worse for him against whom the proofs are too evident, so much the better for the other in whose favour there may exist some faint doubts
. English criminal trials, reported Cottu, were less about justice than about setting examples to the criminal classes in order to inspire in them
a wholesome terror of the vengeance of the law
.

In Müller’s trial, as in all those scheduled for the October sessions, both the prosecution and the defence would be required to present their cases swiftly. Witnesses might be called to attest to the prisoner’s good character but the law was clear:
evidence of character
meant evidence of reputation as opposed to disposition and – confusingly – previous ‘good deeds’ were considered irrelevant. The body of
circumstantial evidence
against him was considerable and damning. It was the kind of indirect evidence that inferred rather than proved his guilt, yet the majority of English judges were intolerant of the widespread public opinion that indirect evidence was too fallible to justify a capital conviction. They argued robustly according to their experience: that murder was rarely witnessed, that men did not commit crimes openly and that circumstance and presumptions were the raw materials out of which substantial proof was often made. Like Judge Stephen, even liberal-minded judges were impatient of defence barristers using the phrase ‘circumstantial evidence’, to
puzzle juries
, believing that it provided
them with a loophole for avoiding a painful but most important duty
.

Müller’s trial would doubtless centre on the concept of ‘reasonable doubt’. All twelve men of the jury must unanimously be convinced of his guilt in order to convict. Should a single man harbour uncertainty, should just one of them shrink from the burden of sending a man to the gallows, then the duty of the jury as a whole was clear: they would be required to return a verdict of not guilty.

CHAPTER 26

The Great Müller Case

Straw was laid on the narrow roadway of the Old Bailey on the morning of Monday 24 October to deaden the noise of carts and cabs and it was soon filled with people, signalling
the start of the sessions
. Within the building, attention centred on the grand jury. Twenty-four men, aged between twenty-one and sixty, each a tradesman or professional, had been summoned by the sheriff; those who failed to appear were heavily fined, while all those who turned up – subject to a quorum of twelve – were required to decide by majority vote whether enough evidence existed in each case to justify a trial. Weak or baseless cases would be dismissed while, for all the rest, they would pass a ‘true bill’ of indictment. Only then could the prisoner be arraigned and asked to state his plea.

The recorder of the court outlined all the important cases that morning, telling
the grand jury
that there was
only
one trial for wilful murder
and the circumstances of that case have become familiar, unfortunately, to most of the public. But for the purposes of the present inquiry it was probably sufficient to say that they would be aware Mr Briggs was murdered in a railway
carriage on the night of the 9th July.
He reminded them of the main thrusts of the evidence and explained that they would hear a general overview of the facts including summary testimony from the key witnesses. They must then judge whether a prima facie case was made out for the prosecution and, if so, return a true bill allowing the trial to begin.

Freezing rain fell steadily outside the narrow window of Müller’s Newgate cell, chasing the falling leaves into the courtyards of the gaol. The outlines of the capital were muted as cloud, sleet and fog met smoke and mud. On Tuesday 25 October several of the prosecution witnesses gave their evidence privately to the grand jury. The following day it returned a bill of indictment, or true bill. The day after that, Müller’s lawyers would fight for his life.

*

More than three months since the death of Thomas Briggs, a horde described by
The Times
as
numerous and urgent
, almost beyond precedent
began to gather outside the Sessions House from three o’clock on the morning of Thursday 27 October. Ten policemen guarded the outer door and only those involved in
the great Müller case
, as the
Telegraph
dubbed it, were allowed to pass inside. Once admitted, they waited in the narrow passage with rising impatience for the similarly guarded inner door to be opened. By nine o’clock the fifty public seats within the court had been filled. MPs and aristocrats pressed together on the reserved bench, beside Police Commissioner Sir Richard Mayne and a handful of men believed to be Thomas Briggs’ relatives. Chairs had been squeezed into every available corner. Seats were improvised on every ledge. Outside, knots of disappointed spectators rushed towards every arriving cab in the hope of glimpsing one of the witnesses.
Pubs and taverns
in the area enjoyed a roaring trade.