Mr Briggs' Hat: The True Story of a Victorian Railway Murder (35 page)

Thomas Beard, meanwhile, laboured over the preparation of his petition.
What he needed was new evidence
to corroborate Müller’s presence in Camberwell and to substantiate the claim that the condemned man bought Briggs’ watch and chain at the London docks.

Despite Parry’s attempts to show that Müller had bought the silk topper in a second-hand market, Beard knew that Müller had claimed that he had bought it at Digance hatters in the City and that he had described the shopman who served him. Since Digance had employed only one assistant for the last twelve years, Beard brought that man to the condemned cell in Newgate on the Thursday after the trial. The interview lasted only minutes and it was a failure.
Neither man was able to recognise the other
.

Beard was also pursuing rumours that on the day after the murder, a Mr Poole from Edmonton had been startled when his window was smashed by a parcel thrown from the windows of a cab passing rapidly by on the road from London. Giving chase, he overtook the vehicle and found it to contain four men including one whose head was bandaged. The men paid Poole for his trouble but when the parcel was subsequently examined it contained a pair of trousers stained with human blood. The GLPS were attempting to trace those men.

During the week following Müller’s trial, Thomas Briggs’ watch, chain, hat, stick and bag, as well as the contents of his pockets on the night his body was found, were finally returned to his widow at 5 Clapton Square. A cheque for five pounds, five shillings was sent back to Scotland Yard addressed to Detective Inspector Tanner
as a
small token of our appreciation
of the courteousness and delicacy with which he has conducted the case in all communications with the family
. The Treasury added a further five pounds for
his help in this case
.

At the same time,
Jonathan Matthews wrote
to the Commi -ssioner, Sir Richard Mayne, to ask for financial help. He claimed that he had been given seventeen shillings and sixpence for loss of employment while attending the trial but that he owed a great deal of rent – twelve pounds and eighteen shillings – and he complained of mobs collecting in front of his house to sing ballads about him and Müller. Matthews’ pleas were ignored. According to police records, local constables could find no evidence of intimidation by gangs and concluded that
he has no truth in him
. The cab driver’s reputation was in tatters.

CHAPTER 31

Condemned for a Thumbmark

After the rush to judgement that had characterised most newspaper reports prior to Müller’s trial, printed pamphlets now questioned his guilt. Several anonymous tracts appeared with titles like
Who Murdered Mr Briggs?
,
Müller’s Guilt or Innocence?
,
The Great NLR Tragedy
and
Was Mr Briggs’ Death a Murder?
A traditional element of the paraphernalia surrounding notorious crime, they
sold in their hundreds of thousands
, and they all fostered uncertainty about Müller’s guilt.

The same unanswered questions flared. Should Lee’s evidence have been discounted? Did Müller’s alibi warrant further investigation? Why was there no blood on his clothes? Had he had enough money for his fare before the murder? Was Matthews to be believed? Where was the murder weapon? Public bloodthirstiness had led to the prejudgement of Müller’s guilt so that the trial had been a farce, its outcome directed by society’s craving for vengeance and its demand for the apparent reimposition of security. Would Müller, then, be
condemned for a thumbmark when many thousands of other hats also have thumbmarks?
Would the country stick to
an omnipotent faith in
Digance and HIS hat
and Matthews and HIS hat
?

It was not only the profit-seeking press. Armchair detectives, abolitionists and the devout all took up their pens to write to the Home Office or the papers and even eminent lawyers were excited by the case.
James Walter Smith
, an Inner Temple barrister practised at expressing his discontent with the English system of criminal justice, published a document asking
Has Müller Been Tried?
Positing that Briggs’ death could have been caused by the fall from the train, he criticised Digance for concealing that his clients’ names were inscribed three inches up inside his hats while Müller’s hat was cut down only by an inch and a half at most. He wondered why the police had not taken seriously reports of the man with the head wound seen in Victoria Park or the parcel thrown in Edmonton and he repeated a question of burgeoning significance to the public: why had no one asked the Blyths whether the carriage hat was Müller’s?
All of these questions
, he wrote,
bear as much weight as the circumstantial evidence heard in court.
Smith considered that the poor tailor was paying the penalty for the German war against the Danes.

Privately, London solicitor James Aytoun sent carefully considered arguments to the Home Secretary outlining his belief that more time should be allowed to investigate Müller’s alibi and that the prosecution’s case, resting on the two hats, could easily be undermined. Hearing that the Blyths were denying that the broken hat had ever belonged to Müller, he posited that
in a civil case
this kind of new evidence would demand a new trial
… In France if similar happened the verdict would be referred to the Court of Cessation and set aside.
He believed that to refuse a delay now would be equal to judicial murder. A Temple barrister called
W. F. Finlason
also wrote to Sir George Grey that a growing body of legal minds thought Pollock’s failure to advise the jury about the importance of Matthews’ evidence –
and therefore the
importance of his credibility
– had impaired the impartiality of the trial.

Press prejudice, the perilous difficulty of circumstantial evidence, the inability of the accused to speak in his own defence, the lack of a proper Court of Appeals and a growing scepticism of the probity of capital punishment were all raised as arguments in the convict’s defence. In the absence of any apparent motive for the murder and in the face of the incompatibility of the crime with Müller’s character, questions were also asked about why the defence of insanity or temporary insanity had not been introduced at trial.

An insanity defence would have proved thorny, however. In 1843 a deluded Daniel M’Naghten had tried to murder Prime Minister Robert Peel, killing his secretary instead. When M’Naghten’s lawyers argued successfully that he had not understood the nature of his act, a legal precedent was established, encouraging a surge of insanity pleas to be lodged by defence counsels on behalf of their clients. But there was a problem. No clear definition of insanity existed and the rule recognised no middle ground between the extremes of madness and its opposite. Lawyers disagreed with medics and early psychological scientists about how the nature of madness diminished criminal responsibility and
most judges remained unconvinced
by the argument that an impulse could not be resisted based only on the evidence that it had not been.

Recent cases proved the difficulties of diving into these controversial waters. In 1856 James Hill was tried for decapitating his nephew in a fury entirely out of character. His defence succeeded in having him committed to a lunatic asylum rather than condemned to death. Three years later James Pownall – a man with a history of infrequent violence but who seemed in every other way entirely rational – was also acquitted of murder in Gloucester when the jury found evidence for homicidal mania. More often, legal counsel failed to make the defence stick. In
1863 Robert Burton was executed for the murder of a boy in Maidstone despite the fact that many doctors viewed his crime as desperate, self-centred and motiveless, and attributed his violent impulse to insanity.

It would be almost twenty more years before courts began to accept new definitions of mental disease, accepting that juries should be allowed to
return
any one of three verdicts
: Guilty, Guilty but the power of his self-control was diminished by insanity or Not Guilty on the grounds of insanity
. In the meantime, despite Müller’s good character and apparent lack of real motive, Parry must have known that a plea of insanity was very unlikely to succeed.

*

The pamphlets and legal rumblings, most of them reprinted in various newspapers, might have been altering public opinion towards Müller, but to Thomas Beard they were immaterial and he set out, instead, to procure new statements. John Hoffa’s was designed to negate the supposition that Müller could have taken a change of trousers with him when he left the Repschs. Hoffa swore that Müller had carried no parcel with him and that his pockets were not large enough to carry spare clothing. Another statement was taken from a boot maker at the London docks who described a peddler frequently hawking dubious goods in that area and who had disappeared around 13 July. Jacob Weist, a porter at the docks, then confirmed what no one at the trial had been able to do – that he saw Müller at the docks on the morning of Monday the 11th, early enough for him to have bought Briggs’ stolen watch and chain before visiting Death’s Cheapside shop.

Late on Tuesday 8 November, less than a week before the date set for Müller’s execution, Beard went before the magistrate at the Worship Street Police Court in the City with the Blyths and a third new witness in order to make further declarations.
At last
Ellen Blyth answered the question
neither counsel had put to her at the trial:
Franz Müller never wore any hat which in any way approached a shabby hat. He was careful of them and always protected them from the rain with an umbrella
. Both Ellen and her husband George swore on their oaths that neither of them recognised the broken hat found under a seat in carriage 69.

Beard had also secured the assistance of a character styling himself André Massena, Baron de Camin. Camin stated that on 9 July he had got lost walking from Mile End to Hackney Wick Station. Arriving at the embankment between Hackney Wick and Bow stations he had seen a man, bloody from head to foot, staggering from the line where it met the canal. He complained that he gave his statement immediately to Sergeant Clarke who had failed to pursue it. Camin’s testimony was heady stuff but it was also problematic. When Inspector Williamson asked Clarke about de Camin’s affidavit, the policeman could neither remember it nor find a report in the files to confirm his story. Further, Beard seemed to be unaware that Camin was an
inveterate publicity-seeker and reputed fraud
– less a Baron of note than an English actor motivated by money and fame.

The lengthy Memorial finally prepared by Müller’s solicitor asked for a reconsideration of Müller’s guilt on the grounds that new evidence had emerged which, had it been set before the jury, would have strengthened his defence. It submitted that the parcel thrown through the window at Edmonton, and the state of the men in that carriage, threw suspicion elsewhere. Additionally, a new report from a chemist in Victoria Park stated that two rough men came to him late on the evening of the murder July asking him to administer to a severe head wound. Sending them away,
the chemist had made a statement
to the police on the following day but
as they could not make my description tally with that of Müller, whom they appeared to have made up their minds must have been the guilty party, they let the matter drop
. Both theories
supported Thomas Lee’s evidence that there had been more than one person involved in the crime and that neither was Müller.

Beard also submitted further proof of Müller’s alibi. Dr Ernest Juch, editor of the
Hermann
, had visited Müller before his trial and was then told by the prisoner that when he was returning from Camberwell on 9 July he had stopped for a beer in a public house two hundred yards or so from the Camberwell Gate. Müller had told Juch that as he left the pub at about twenty to ten there had been a disturbance when a small child was bitten by a dog.

The statement alone proved nothing, but a second affidavit corroborated the story. A man called William Curtis said that on 9 July he was at the Red Lion pub on Walworth Road close to Camberwell Gate when, at about twenty minutes past nine, a foreigner came in and asked for a glass of ale. The man had been wearing a red carpet slipper on his right foot, had fair hair and was about middle stature with dark clothes and a lowish-crowned hat. Curtis knew the date by business that he had in town and he also remembered the incident with the dog and the child. If Müller was still in Camberwell at half past nine, then his intention to take the late omnibus was corroborated and he could not possibly have made it to Fenchurch Street Station by the time Briggs’ train departed.

There was more. The conductor of the omnibus leaving Camberwell Gate at 9.40 p.m. had been traced and he also remembered the incident with the dog. On that journey, he recalled that there had been five passengers including a man with fair hair wearing a red slipper on one foot. Checking the ‘way-bills’ of the omnibus company, Beard discovered that on the night of 9 July the conductor of the last ’bus from Camberwell Gate to the City had recorded five passengers. Not only did this incident with the dog fix the date as that of the murder, not only was it clear that one of the passengers had injured his foot, but Müller had independently stated to Ernest Juch that there had been four other passengers in
his ’bus that night and he had described them. On the basis of these new facts, Beard requested time for further investigation.