Murder by Candlelight (12 page)

Thurtell was hanged on January 9, 1824, on the gallows in front of Hertford Gaol, conducting himself to the end with manly firmness. It is said that his last words, spoken after he learned that the boxer Spring had won the fight against Langham, were “I am glad of it, for Spring is a good fellow.”

Hunt, who had been found guilty of aiding and abetting his friend in the murder of Weare, was also sentenced to die upon the scaffold. But at the last moment, he was spared: his sentence was commuted on the advice of Mr. Peel, the Home Secretary, and he was transported to Botany Bay. In Australia he became a changed man and was made custodian of the assize court at Bathurst, New South Wales. He died in 1861, if not in the odor of sanctity, at least with the respect of his neighbors.

Probert's destiny was less happy. He was shunned as a treacherous wretch who had escaped a just retribution by peaching on his mates, and he was unable to obtain employment. In 1825 he was accused of stealing a horse. He was tried at the Old Bailey, found guilty, and sentenced to death. Addressing the court, he said that “since the calamitous event that took place at Hertford, I have been a lost man, and at times on the eve of self-destruction.” He was hanged on the gallows at Newgate in April 1825.

It was the fate of Mrs. Probert to live out the remainder of her life as a “hempen widow,” whose husband had been hanged. She took to calling herself Mrs. Heath, and moved to Cheltenham. She was found drowned in the Chelt in the autumn of 1857, not far from Barrett's Mill.

*
Sir James Alan Park. Born at Edinburgh in 1763; educated at Northampton Grammar School and Lincoln's Inn; elevated to the bench as a judge of Common Pleas in 1816 and knighted in the same year; died in 1838.

†
The murder of Weare was variously referred to as the “Radlett Murder,” the “Elstree Murder,” and the “Gill's Hill Tragedy.”

PART TWO

The Mystery of the Mutilated Corpse

Torn limb from limb, he spreads his horrid feast. . . .

—
Pope

CHAPTER ONE

The Parcel in the Canterbury Villas

While smooth Adonis from his native rock
Ran purple to the sea, supposed with blood
Of Thammuz yearly wounded . . .

—
Milton

T
oward the end of December 1836, a bricklayer was engaged in building a garden wall for the Canterbury Villas, a cluster of newly erected houses in the Edgware Road. About two o'clock, he observed something dark lying behind an as-yet-unlaid paving stone. On going over to it, he saw what appeared to be a sack of coarse canvas. He removed the stone and found the sack stiffly fixed in a pool of reddish ooze.

The supervisor was summoned and the parcel removed from the gore. Wrapped in rags (a piece of twilled jean patched with nankeen, a scrap of huckaback toweling, and a cotton shawl) was the remnant of a human body. The head and legs were missing and appeared to have been sawn off; the arms and hands, however, remained. Together with the flesh and the bones, there was also, in the sack, a quantity of blood-stained mahogany shavings.

The constable was called, and at his direction the remains were taken to the police station. The parish surgeon, Dr. Gilbert Finlay Girdwood, pronounced them to be those of a woman in the middle of life, and he conjectured that, up to the time of her death, she had been in good health. From the condition of her arms and hands, he supposed that she had for many years worked hard at some form of manual labor.

The carving of a human being joint from joint has long occupied a special place in the cabinet of horror. The myths of Greece, Egypt, and Mesopotamia abound in extravagant mutilations, the flesh-carvings undergone by such colorful sufferers as Orpheus, Osiris, and Thammuz. The Christian martyrologies are not less copious of sliced and shredded flesh, and may even have excited a deeper revulsion, at least among those who believed that the butchery of one's body was an obstacle to the salvation of one's soul. For if one's vile body was to be made “like to His glorious body” (so the popular superstition ran), it had to be buried whole, preferably with the feet pointing toward Jerusalem.

It is true that, in the year of grace 1836, the fear inspired by Judgment Day was grown much fainter among the English than it had been of old. In the dawn of the steamship, the railway, and the first Reform Bill, England seemed to bask in the very sunshine of Reason and Progress. Yet some vestige of the old religious terror remained and perhaps accounts for the hysteria that colored London's reaction to the gruesome discovery in
the Edgware Road.
^*
Clearly, new forms of fiendishness were incubating in Albion, in spite of the enlightened exertions of Lord Grey and Sir Robert Peel; there were even prophets abroad in the land, like Carlyle and De Quincey, who went so far as to suggest that Reason and Progress themselves were not all they were cracked up to be.

*
Six years earlier, the murder and dismemberment of Celia Holloway at Brighton had produced a similar sensation. James Catnach, the gutter poet and catchpenny printer, published a ballad,
The Lamentation and Confession of John William Holloway
, which purported to be the husband's account of the killing:

In Donkey Row I took a house, and there enticed my wife,

'Twas then by strangulation that I took away her life:

Alas, a tender womb-snug babe I murdered in the strife,

And cut the flesh to pieces with a freshly sharpened knife.

I chopped her up and—Oh!—it was a most appalling sight:

I wheeled her all the way to Preston under cover of the night.

Her head and arms, her legs and thighs, were rudely sawèd off,

And with the trunk two thighs I buried in the turf of Lover's Walk.

When, in the spring of 2009, pieces of the body of Jeffrey Howe, the victim in the “jigsaw” murder, were found north of London, the police kept the “harrowing details” of the dismemberment from the public “so as not to spread panic.”

CHAPTER TWO

Gory Locks

O heaven! that one might read the book of fate,
And see how chances mock,
And changes fill the cup of alteration
With divers liquors! O, if this were seen,
The happiest youth—viewing his progress through,
What perils past, what crosses to ensue—
Wouldst shut the book, and sit him down and die.

—
Shakespeare

T
en days after the discovery of the remains in the Edgware Road, a barge in the Regent's Canal was navigating the lock near Ben Johnson's Fields, close by Stepney Green in east London. The floodgate would not close. “It's a dead dog,” the lock-keeper said, “ease the gate.” He (or his assistant) thrust the hitcher, or grappling hook, into the water; but the impediment, when it was drawn out, proved to be not
the carcass of a dog, but the head of a woman; her gory locks were remarkably long.

The grisly object was brought to the bone-house of Stepney Churchyard, where a local surgeon, Dr. John Birtwhistle of Mile End Road, examined it. The jaw had been fractured during the lock-keeper's attempts to close the floodgate, and one of the cheeks had been pierced by the grappling hook. But it seemed to Dr. Birtwhistle probable that the contusion about the right eye had been made while the woman was yet alive.

“It was what I should call a tremendous black eye,” Dr. Birtwhistle said, and “was caused in my opinion before death.” The cervical vertebrae immediately below the skull, he observed, had been sawn clean through; and when, afterwards, he compared the saw marks to those of the remains from the Edgware Road, he found that they fitted together as neatly as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

London was more alarmed than ever. Before the discovery of the severed head, it had been just possible to dismiss the mutilated flesh in the Edgware Road as merely the fragment of a cadaver carelessly disposed of by medical men, who in the 1830s were dissecting carcasses at a rapid clip. The Anatomy Act of 1832 had rescinded ancient taboos, and with its passage the anatomists had ceased to be dependent, in their search for susceptible corpses, on the remains of executed murderers, as they had been under older statutes.
^*
They were now free to exercise their art upon a more plentiful class of bodies, those of the innocent but unclaimed dead—paupers, for the most part, whose loved ones could not afford the expense of burial, or who had died unloved. But with the fishing up of the head in the
Regent's Canal, it was only too evident that the poor dead woman had not been the object of a legitimate anatomical curiosity. She had met with foul play, and at the hands of someone who had attempted to conceal his crime by the partition of her corpse and the artful distribution of its parts.

On February 2, a third discovery was made. A laborer near Coldharbour Lane, Camberwell, was cutting osiers (a kind of willow used in making baskets) when he saw a bundle lying partly submerged in a ditch. A toe protruded from it. When afterwards the bundle was opened, it was found to contain a pair of human legs. Dr. Girdwood, who examined them, was of the opinion that they had once formed a piece with the trunk from the Edgware Road and the head fished out of the Regent's Canal.

With each revelation the mystery deepened, and the consternation of the public grew. The Metropolitan Police, which as a result of Sir Robert Peel's legislation had superseded “Mr. Fielding's People,” the Bow Street Runners, diligently investigated. The new police officers, known as “Peelers” or “Bobbies,” went out into the murk of the London winter wrapped in oilskin capes and, threading their way through the slums and rookeries, sought clues to the identity of the killer. But their inquiries were in vain.

*
Before the passage of this legislation, a number of anatomists had conspired with grave robbers and even murderers in the quest for cadavers, practices which came to light after the murders committed by Messrs. Burke and Hare in 1828. An Edinburgh physician, Dr. Knox, was implicated in the traffic in corpses but was not prosecuted; his infamy, however, lived on in the couplet: “Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief, / Knox the boy who buys the beef.”

CHAPTER THREE

William and Maria Gay

Our sorrow is the inverted image of our nobleness.

—
Thomas Carlyle

T
here was in London at this time a Norfolk man named William Gay. At the beginning of 1837, Mr. Gay was perhaps forty years of age; he did not know the precise day or even year of his birth. He was employed as an assistant to a a pawnbroker in Goodge Street called Mrs. Blanchard; he and his wife, Maria, had a room above the shop.

The couple had come to London two years before. Like many others freshly arrived in the metropolis, they were doing their best to adapt themselves to a new age. They had grown up in the English countryside, amid thatched cottages and village greens; but the England of their childhood was passing away; Oliver Goldsmith had pronounced its epitaph so early as 1770, in his poem
The Deserted Village
.

In London, the Gays encountered the new England that was rapidly superseding the old one into which they had been born. It is an England that is even now familiar to us, preserved as it is in the engravings of Gustave Doré and in the early daguerreotypes, with their weird tints and unearthly chiaroscuros. It is the England of the young Dickens, whose
Oliver Twist
was just then appearing in
Bentley's
magazine—an England that had for its chiefest symbol London itself, choking under its pall of smoke and soot and river mist. London in those days had a Gothic morbidity peculiar to itself; Doré was to bring it out in his engravings, and Dickens in his books—the sense that there lurked, in the murk and shadow just beyond the reach of the tallow-light, an unspeakable beastliness.
^*

The days were short now, and darkened by yellow fogs. At midday there was “hardly light enough,” Thomas Carlyle said, to see one's way in Chelsea. Farther east, in the heart of the metropolis, it was darker still: “beyond Hyde Park Corner, think what it must be,—Erebus, Nox and the great deep of gases, miasmata, soot and despair. . . .”

William and Maria Gay brightened the gloom with newspaper accounts of the latest demonism to afflict the capital. The mystery of the mutilated corpse was for them, as it was for so much of Londonry, a diverting story, one with a quantity of hellishness sufficient to beguile a long winter evening. The truth is, William and Maria Gay needed diversion. Newly arrived in London as they were, they had not many friends—had perhaps not had time to make them, for in those days working people were commonly about their business twelve hours a day, six days a week. When once Mr.
Gay was asked about those with whom he habitually conversed, he replied, “I hold very little conversation with any one.”

Boredom and curiosity might have induced William and Maria Gay to take an interest in the anonymous corpse of a murdered woman; but by degrees the sensations of pity and pleasure which appalling acts naturally arouse in the human heart gave way to the apprehension that they themselves might be closely related to the victim.

*
In 1837, a creature of diabolic countenance known as Spring-Heeled Jack was said to be preying upon lone servant girls in London, swooping down upon them in forlorn places and ripping their gowns with his claws. Such stories were widely credited in an age in which ghosts and ogres and scaly things in their naïvest forms still haunted men's imaginations. Matthew Arnold told the story of a man who ventured to ask the poet William Blake whether he had ever seen a ghost, and “was surprised when the famous seer, who ought, one might think, to have seen so many, answered frankly, ‘Only once!'”

CHAPTER FOUR

Hannah Brown

Yes, yes; a very good woman, in the main.