Murder by Candlelight (26 page)

The bell of St. Sepulchre began to toll the knell. An “immense sway and movement,” Thackeray said, “swept over the whole of that vast, dense crowd.” The men instantly “uncovered”—took off their hats—and “a great murmur arose, more awful,
bizarre
, and indescribable than any sound I had ever heard before.”

Courvoisier appeared, and mounted the steps to the gallows; Calcraft followed. It was just after eight o'clock.

In the opinion of most of the observers who afterwards recorded, in the formulaic phrases of the time, their impressions of the event, Courvoisier acquitted himself well. He displayed, it was said, an extraordinary nerve. His step “was steady and collected,” and his countenance, though pale, was “calm and unmoved.” Thackeray, with his artist's second sight, saw a very different man, one who “turned his head here and there” and “looked about him for an instant with a wild, imploring look.”

The noose was placed around Courvoisier's neck and the hood drawn over his head. He clasped his hands one within the other and lifted up his head, perhaps in supplication. The bolt was withdrawn, and he died without a struggle; he was twenty-three. After hanging for an hour, the body was cut down and taken into Newgate, where it was buried, that evening, in Birdcage Walk.

*
The Capital Punishment Amendment Act of 1868, which received royal assent on May 29, 1868, ended public executions in the United Kingdom. Hangings thereafter took place within the walls of the prison in which the condemned man or woman was then incarcerated. Michael Barrett was the last person publicly hanged in the kingdom: convicted of bombing Coldbath Fields Prison in an attempt to liberate Fenian prisoners, he died on the gallows at Newgate on May 26, 1868.

†
It is possible that Courvoisier emulated one of the heroes of the
Newgate Calendar
, James Hall, a servant who in June 1741 murdered his master, John Penny, in his chambers in Clement's Inn. To avoid getting blood on his clothes, Hall stripped himself naked before he cut his master's throat.

PART FOUR

Toward the Ripper

The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist.

—
Baudelaire

CHAPTER ONE

Wapping

Nor can I refuse myself to those events, which, from their uncommon magnitude, will interest a philosophic mind in the history of blood.

—
Gibbon

D
e Quincey was apt to be picky about his murderers. In his 1827 satire, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” he makes his imaginary lecturer, addressing the Society of Connoisseurs in Murder, conclude that Jack Thurtell's murder of Weare was “much overrated.” There was “something
falsetto
” in the man's style which forbade his induction into the pantheon of really remarkable killers. De Quincey always held that the
ne plus ultra
of homicidal horrors were those that took place in the purlieus of Wapping in December 1811, killings so gruesome, he wrote in “Three Memorable Murders,” that in committing them the transgressor asserted his “supremacy above all the children of Cain.”

Undoubtedly, what De Quincey called the “scenical features” of the murders contributed to the impression of horror they left upon the mind. The very name,
Wapping
, savors of something disgusting. The district lay in the “most chaotic quarter of eastern or nautical London,” where, De Quincey said, a “manifold ruffianism” was “shrouded impenetrably under the mixed hats and turbans of men whose past was untraceable to any European eye.” He shuddered to contemplate the sinister “Lascars, Chinese, Moors, and Negroes” who were to be met at every step, yet he conceded that the delinquencies of seafaring Asians and Africans were no more terrible than those of their European counterparts, the navies of Christendom being, in his estimation, “the sure receptacle” of all those “murderers and ruffians” whose crimes gave them a “motive for withdrawing themselves for a season from the public eye.”

Wapping's ambiguous and even sinister reputation was not new. During several centuries, pirates were hanged there, on a gibbet near the low-water mark of the Thames. In the eighteenth century, a network of tenements overspread the marshy lowlands, where the air was heavy with the odors of cesspools and tidal sludge; in the rancid streets, cheap lodging houses stood cheek by jowl with ale-houses and gin-shops that catered to sailors on the spree. De Quincey's own knowledge of the district perhaps owed something to another of its characteristic features, the innumerable dens where, at any hour of the day or night, an assortment of spectral figures, ravaged by opium, might be found in supine thrall to the juice of the poppy.

Hard times compounded the misery of Wapping in 1811. As a result of Napoleon's Continental Blockade, trade between Britain and Europe had fallen off precipitously, with British exports declining by as much as one half. It was the winter of Luddism and scarce food; and in Wapping ship-chandlers, sail-makers, and anchor-smiths, whose livelihoods depended on the sea, struggled to make ends meet, while out-of-work sailors, released from shipboard constraints, fell into a kind of feral life.

CHAPTER TWO

The Murder of the Marrs

All other murders look pale by the deep crimson of his . . .

—
De Quincey

T
he night, De Quincey said, was one of exceeding darkness. A little before midnight, a young merchant named Timothy Marr was preparing to close his silk-and-linen shop in the Ratcliffe Highway, on the northern edge of Wapping. With him, in the dwelling that served him both as a workplace and a residence, was his young wife, Celia; their three-month-old son, Timothy Junior; a Devonshire lad, James Gowen, whom Marr had engaged as an apprentice; and Margaret Jewell, a young woman who was the family's maid-of-all-work.

Marr was twenty-four years old on this particular Saturday, December 7, 1811. Before taking up silk mercery and linen draping, he had been a sailor aboard the
Dover Castle
, an East Indiaman.
His new mode of getting a living, if it was more settled than his previous one, was no less laborious, and long after darkness had fallen he might be seen, through the window of his shop, hard at work over his merchandise.

On this particular night, Marr was hungry. He gave the girl Margaret Jewell a pound note and told her to fetch some oysters; with the change she was to pay the baker. It was not quite midnight when she set out; she would later remember how, as she left the shop, she saw, on the opposite side of the street, a man's figure in the light of the oil lamp, “stationary at the instant, but in the next instant slowly moving.” She withdrew her gaze and went off over the wet cobblestones toward Taylor's oyster shop.

Midnight struck. The night watchman, Mr. Olney, cried the hour as he passed by Marr's house. He afterwards remembered seeing Marr engaged in putting up his shutters. A quarter of an hour later, when he passed the house again, he went (as was his custom) to examine the shutters, to make sure they were fast. They were not. He called to Marr to inform him of the fact.

“We know of it,” a voice returned.

In the meantime, Margaret Jewell reached the oyster shop and found it shut. The baker, too, had closed his door for the night. The girl expended some additional minutes in a fruitless search for oysters before making her way back through the silent streets to Marr's house. When she reached it, it was dark. She rang the bell and knocked gently on the door. “She had no fear of disturbing her master or mistress,” De Quincey said; her anxiety was rather “for the baby, who, being disturbed, might again rob her mistress of a night's rest.” Yet to her consternation, there was neither stir nor murmur within, but rather an unaccountable silence. Margaret Jewell became afraid and “rang the bell with the violence that belongs to sickening terror.”

At last there came an answering sound—the creak of a stair. Not, De Quincey says, one of the stairs “that led downwards to the kitchen,” but one “that led upwards to the single storey
of bedchambers above.” Someone was coming down this staircase: “one, two, three, four, five stairs were slowly and distinctly descended.” The sound of footsteps approached the door and ceased. In her terror, Margaret Jewell began “to ring the bell and to ply the knocker with unintermitting violence.”

It was near one o'clock now, and Mr. Olney, coming along the highway to cry the hour, perceived Miss Jewell's distress. He went to her and began himself to ring and knock.

“Mr. Marr! Mr. Marr!”

Next door to Marr there lived a pawnbroker called Murray. Exasperated by the noise at his neighbor's door, he rose in something like anger to investigate. But on learning the reason for the disturbance, he became grave. He recalled how, about midnight, he and his family had heard, through the party wall, the sound of a heavy thud, followed by a sort of cry. They had dismissed it as being of no consequence; yet it now wore a different aspect, and Murray went over the garden wall and approached the back of his neighbor's house to see what might be learned. Through the open doorway he perceived a glimmer of candlelight.

He went inside and mounted the staircase. The candle stood on the landing. “Marr, Marr,” he said softly, “your window shutters are not fastened.” But response there was none. He took the candle and went down to the shop room. Stepping over the threshold, he came across something on the floor. To his horror, he beheld a crumpled figure, a bloody face, a spatter of brains, all lurid in the candlelight. It was young James Gowen, or what remained of him. Turning away, he came upon another corpse: Celia Marr lay face down in a pool of blood. Her throat had been cut, and the left side of her skull was horribly broken. Appalled by the carnage, Murray made his way through a slaughter-house “so floated with gore,” De Quincey writes, “that it was hardly possible to escape the pollution of blood in picking out a path to the front door.”

He unlocked it to admit Mr. Olney, who came into the house followed by another watchman and an assortment of gapers to
find a scene of uniform calamity. The body of the master of the house was discovered behind his counter: Timothy Marr's nose was broken, and the occipital bone at the base of his skull fractured; his face bore the marks of a tremendous blow to the right eye. Three members of the household were positively dead: but what of the baby—where was little Timothy? Search was made, and the infant was found in the kitchen, in his cradle. His innocence had not escaped the wrath or cruelty of the killer. His throat had been cut and his tiny face beaten to a pulp.

CHAPTER THREE

Bloody Revels

my wit's diseased

—
Shakespeare

I
t would be impossible, De Quincey said, to describe “the frenzy of feelings” which news of the Wapping murders excited throughout Britain. For “twelve succeeding days, under some groundless notion that the unknown murderer had quitted London, the panic which had convulsed the mighty metropolis diffused itself all over the island. I was myself at that time nearly three hundred miles from London; but there, and everywhere, the panic was indescribable.”

The delirium had not yet subsided when, on the twelfth night following the murders, John Williamson was sitting beside the fire in the King's Arms on New Gravel Lane in Wapping. Fifty-six years old on that mild night, December 19, 1811, Williamson had been the proprietor of the King's Arms since the 1790s. Shortly before
eleven o'clock, one of his neighbors, Mr. Anderson, a constable of the parish, came in for a pot of ale.

“You are an officer,” Williamson said to Anderson. “There has been a fellow loitering at my door with a brown coat on: if you should see him, take him into custody, or tell me.”

“I certainly will,” said Constable Anderson, “for my own safety as well as yours.” He bade his neighbor good night and went away with his ale.

The King's Arms was a respectable house, and Mr. Williamson a respectable publican. He had been long enough about his business to know that very little good occurs in a pouring establishment after midnight, and as early as eleven o'clock he began to put up his shutters. On this particular night, four others remained in the house with him: his wife, Elizabeth; his granddaughter, Kitty Stillwell; a middle-aged serving woman, Bridget Harrington; and a lodger, John Turner, a sawyer by trade.

About half past eleven, Constable Anderson, having consumed the last of his ale, left his house to procure some more. He had scarcely come into the street when he was astonished to see a man, practically naked, lowering himself by knotted sheets from an upper window of the King's Arms. The twisted bed linen, however, reached only so far, and upon reaching the end of it the man found himself dangling a dozen or so feet above the New Gravel Road. A passing watchman, perceiving his plight, had gone to his assistance. The naked man dropped into his arms. He was John Turner, Mr. Williamson's lodger, and his face was “as white as a corpse's.” “There's murder inside,” he said; “he's at it now, killing 'em all.”