The Invention of Murder (2 page)

In the morning, a magistrate from the Thames Division Police Office took over the case. An officer from the Thames Division Police Office had responded the night before, and therefore the magistrates at the Thames Office were now in charge. A magistrate ordered the printing of handbills offering a reward, and visited the site of the murder, where the bodies lay where they had fallen the night before.

He was not the only one. What might be termed murder-sightseeing was a popular pastime, and many went ‘from curiosity to examine the premises’, where they entered ‘and saw the dead bodies’. Inquests were held as quickly as possible after the event, usually at a public house or tavern near the scene of the crime. The bodies were left
in situ
for the jury to view. Until they had been, visitors traipsed through the gore-spattered rooms, peering not only at the blood splashes and other grisly reminders of the atrocity, but also at the bodies themselves.

For those who wanted a tangible souvenir, there were always broadsides, which were swiftly on sale on street corners. Broadsides had been around since the sixteenth century, but modern technology made their production easier, cheaper and quicker, and their distribution more widespread. A typical broadside was a single sheet, printed on one side, which was sold on the street for ½d. or 1d. Broadsides had their heyday before the 1850s, when newspapers were expensive. Most commonly, sheets were produced sequentially for each crime that caught the public’s imagination: the first report of the crime, with further details as they were revealed; the magistrates’ court hearing after an arrest; then the trial; and finally, and most profitably, a ‘sorrowful lamentation’ and ‘last confession’, usually combined with a description of the execution. These ‘lamentations’ and execution details were almost always entirely fabricated for commercial reasons: they found their readiest sale at the gallows, while the body was still swaying. For those who could not find a penny, pubs and coffee houses pinned up broadsides of popular crimes, to be read by customers as they drank. Other broadsides appeared in shop windows, frequently attracting crowds of bloodthirsty children.

One broadside, published before the Marrs’ inquest, which opened three days after the murders, reported that ‘the perpetrators are foreigners’, which could have done little to reassure readers in this dockyard area of town, filled with sailors from across the world. Another spent less time on the possible murderer, and more on the gory details and the rumours that were prevalent: that Mrs Marr had, several months before, discharged a servant for theft. ‘Words arose, when the accused girl is said to have held out a threat of murder. Mrs. Marr … gently rebuked her for using such language’; later Mrs Marr ‘remonstrated with her on her loose character and hasty temper’. Anyone with a penny to spare would get a fair idea of the crime and the latest news of the search for the murderer.

Those with a few more pennies could buy a pamphlet on the subject. These were available nearly as swiftly as the broadsides. One covered all the details of the inquest, so it was probably on sale within five days of the deaths. While the pamphlets looked more substantial at eight pages, much of their information was identical to that in the broadsides. In some, such similar wording is used that either they must have shared an author, or one was copied from the other. Mrs Marr again sacks her servant, who ‘is said to have held out a threat of murder. Mrs. Marr … gently rebuked her for using such language’; later she again ‘remonstrated with her on her loose character and hasty temper’. Now, however, we get the additional detail that the servant was leading a ‘prostituted life’. This is reinforced by a description of her clothes: ‘a white gown, black velvet spencer [jacket], cottage bonnet with a small feather, and shoes with Grecian ties’. No servant could afford such fashionable items: they were signs that her money was earned immorally.

Another way to savour the thrill of murder was to attend the funerals of the victims. Many people did so out of respect, as friends or as members of the same community. But far more did so out of curiosity. Still more read about them afterwards. Even four hundred miles away the
Caledonian Mercury
gave a detailed account of the funeral of the murdered apprentice: its readers were able to follow the precise path of the cortège as it travelled ‘from Ratcliffe-highway, through Well-close-square, up Well-street, to Mill-yard’. In Hull too newspaper readers followed the crowds that turned out for the Marrs’ triple funeral: ‘The people formed a complete phalanx from the [Marrs’] house to the doors of St. George’s church.’ The church itself was so crowded that the funeral procession could only enter ‘with some difficulty’. Then the paper gave the order of the procession, as was normally done for royal weddings and funerals, or the Lord Mayor’s parade:

Newspapers churned out stories, handbills circulated, witnesses were questioned. But none of this got any closer to finding the murderer or murderers. Then, like a recurring nightmare, twelve days after the Marrs’ deaths it all happened again. On 19 December a watchman found John Turner, half-dressed and gibbering with fear, scrambling down New Gravel Lane, a few hundred yards from the Ratcliffe Highway. He had gone to bed early at his lodgings above a public house. After closing time he heard screaming and he went part-way down the stairs, where he saw a stranger bending over a body on the floor. After a panicky attempt to leave via the skylight (he was so frightened he couldn’t find it), Turner tied his bedsheets together and slid out of the window into the yard, shouting, ‘They are murdering the people in the house!’ The watchman was quickly joined by neighbours, and they broke in through the cellar door to find, yet again, bodies lying with their heads beaten in and their throats cut. The body of John Williamson, the publican, was in the cellar; his wife Elizabeth had been in the kitchen with their servant Bridget. Only the Williamsons’ granddaughter, asleep upstairs, had escaped. Once more, money was scattered about, but little of value had been taken; once more, the escape was via the back door and over the yard fence.

The newspapers covered the story widely, but the information they gave was not terribly helpful. The
Edinburgh Annual Register
described John Turner as being ‘about six feet in height’, while
The Times
said he was ‘a short man’ with ‘a lame leg’. The
Morning Chronicle
described his ‘large red whiskers’, but thought he was ‘about five feet nine inches’ and ‘not lame’. Turner, therefore, was either tall, short, or in-between; he was lame, or possibly not; and he had large red whiskers, unless he didn’t. This was the description of a man who had stood in front of journalists at an inquest. Imagine how reliably the papers described the man briefly seen by Turner, or those who had been glimpsed running away from the Marrs’ house.

The police had no more idea where to look for the perpetrators of this new outrage than they had had after the deaths of the Marrs. They arrested plenty of people: people who were violent; people who looked in some way suspicious; people against whom a grudge was held. But one by one they were questioned and released.
*
In small communities criminals were usually revealed fairly swiftly; in areas with larger populations, handbills with descriptions of the wanted person and offers of rewards generally brought in information, frequently from fellow criminals who found this a convenient way of earning a bit of cash and removing a competitor at the same time. With no response to the initial reward offered after the murder of the Marrs, the only thing the magistrates could think to do was increase the sum. To the initial £50 reward, another £100 was added by the Treasury, and that was increased two days later to an astonishing £700 – a very comfortable middle-class annual income, the sign of increasing government anxiety, verging on panic. After the Williamsons were murdered, another 120 guineas was offered: twenty guineas to anyone who could identify the owner of the weapons, and 100 guineas more if that person were to be convicted of the murders.

One man, arrested on suspicion, attempted to turn king’s evidence, identifying eight men as his fellow murderers. Unable to come up with a motive, the newspapers attributed a love of wholesale slaughter to this mysterious gang. The gang theory was widely popular. A magistrate from the Thames Police Office wrote to his colleague at the Lambeth Street Office that the crime ‘gives an appearance of a gang acting on a system’, but to what end was not clear. Many were caught up: at one point seven men were held for questioning because ‘In the possession of one of them were found two shirts stained with marks very much resembling blood, and a waistcoat carrying also similar marks.’ The men turned out to be hop-pickers, and the stains were vine sap.

The first clue that led towards an arrest was noticed only on the day of the Williamsons’ murder, twelve days after the death of the Marrs, when it finally registered that the peen maul found in the kitchen had the initials ‘JP’ scratched on it. A handbill advertised this, and Mrs Vermiloe, the landlady of the Pear Tree Tavern, reported that her lodger, a Danish sailor named John Petersen, had left his tools in her care on his last shore leave. Petersen was at sea at the time of the murders, but his fellow lodger, John Williams, was said to have shaved off his whiskers the following day; furthermore, he had been seen washing his own stockings at the pump in the yard; and both he and another lodger, John Ritchen, knew Petersen. This was enough for an arrest. On 27 December the magistrates’ court was packed with eager spectators when the news came that Williams had committed suicide in his cell.

The immediate reaction was that the suicide was an outright confession. Anything that contradicted this comforting notion was pushed to one side. On reflection, the questions greatly outweighed the certainties. It was not even clear that John Williams’ name was John Williams – he had told the Vermiloes it was Murphy. Mr Vermiloe, the landlord, had been in prison for debt when his wife directed the police to Williams. The twenty-guinea reward for identifying the maul would pay off at least some of his debts, possibly all of them; how much weight could be given to her evidence? And two men at least had been at the Marrs’: the footprints of two men were found, and at least two men had been seen running down the road. Who were they? Vermiloe had used the maul to chop wood, and both it and the ripping chisel that was also found in the Marrs’ kitchen had been used as toys by his children in the yard – anyone could have taken them.

None of these questions was asked. Instead everyone agreed that they had long suspected Williams. One witness swore that, three weeks before the Williamsons were murdered, he had seen Williams with ‘a long French knife with an ivory handle’. No one else had ever seen that knife and Williams together, but the
Gentleman’s Magazine
reported that on 14 January 1812, miraculously, a lodger at the Pear Tree had found a blue jacket which he said had belonged to Williams, and it was reported that the inside pocket was marked, ‘as if a bloodstained hand had been thrust into it’. But bloodstains could not definitely be identified until the twentieth century – what the witness meant was that the stain was brown. Furthermore, no one else had seen Williams wear this jacket, nor was there any discussion about who might have had access to it during the period of the murders, or in the following month. Mrs Vermiloe turned it over to the police, at which point they returned to the Pear Tree, searched the house once more and found a clasp knife, ‘apparently dyed with blood’, hidden behind a wall. The
Edinburgh Annual Register
added that a pair of trousers had been found shoved down under the ‘soil’ in the privy in the Pear Tree yard, which ‘are spoken to very confidently by Williams’ fellow-lodgers’.

Half a century later, magazines were still reprinting these rumours, and creating new ones: ‘Williams was so notorious an infamous man, for all his oily and snaky duplicity, that the captain of his vessel, the Roxburgh Castle, had always predicted that. he would mount the gibbet.’ This comes from
All the Year Round,
Charles Dickens’ magazine, and Dickens was evidently fascinated by Williams, and in no doubt about his guilt. As well as commissioning this article, he owned an illustration of ‘the horrible creature’, and had also touched lightly on the subject in
Dombey and Son
(1847–48): when Captain Cuttle, who lives down by the docks, keeps his shutters closed one day, the neighbours speculate ‘that he lay murdered with a hammer, on the stairs’.

Meanwhile, the authorities had to decide how to respond to Williams’ death. Most immediately, they needed to show the local residents that he would not escape justice by his suicide. It would be another century before a British judge decreed that it is ‘of fundamental importance that justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done’, but the idea was already well understood. So on the last day of 1811, an inclined wooden platform was placed atop a high cart. Williams’ body was laid out on this, dressed in a clean white shirt (frilled, say some sources), blue trousers and brown stockings: in other words, in the neat, clean dress of a labouring man, although without a neck-handkerchief or hat, marks of decency and respectability. His right leg was manacled, as it would have been when he was in gaol. The maul was placed on one side of his head, the ripping chisel on the other.

At ten o’clock, a macabre and unprecedented procession set off at a stately walking pace. The head constable led the way, followed by