Read The Invention of Murder Online
Authors: Judith Flanders
The Invention of Murder (4 page)
De Quincey then takes the story of the Marr and Williamson murders and himself turns them into art. The main figures are given psychological depth, and a motive is imagined. Most importantly, Williams is turned, as one literary critic observes, into ‘a sort of Miltonic, ruined God’, with a glamorized physical description to match his inward corruption of spirit. A sandy, undistinguished-looking man in life, in art Williams has a ‘bloodless, ghastly pallor’, and hair of ‘the most extraordinary and vivid colour … something between an orange and a lemon colour’. His clothes, too, undergo a metamorphosis. He no longer wears the rough dress of a sailor. Instead de Quincey imagines a dandified being, dressing for an evening’s slaughter in black silk stockings and pumps and with a long blue coat of ‘the very finest cloth. richly lined in silk’. The murderer is now more vampire than cash-strapped sailor, more great actor than street thug.
In reality, there were few of de Quincey’s type of murderer. Yet, as his imaginary lecturer knows, ‘the world in general. are very bloody-minded; and all they want in a murder is a copious effusion of blood’. How this desire was transformed over the nineteenth century, and how it, in turn, transformed that century, is my subject.
*
Even a decade later, after the arrival of some gas lighting, the streets were still darker and more confusing than can be imagined today. In 1822 Daniel Forrester, a detective for the City of London, became involved in a street fracas. It was only when he got the man who rescued him under a street lamp that he realized it was his own brother. With streets as dark as that, it is not surprising that ‘One gas light is as good as two policemen’ was a common maxim.
*
The stages of prosecution for felonies and serious crimes were as follows: fi rst, the accused appeared before a justice of the peace or a magistrate, where it was decided whether there was a suffi ciently strong case; if so, the prisoner was committed for trial; a bill of indictment was drawn up, setting out the charge; a Grand Jury then considered the written depositions of the witnesses and, if they found a ‘true bill’ that there was a case to answer, the prisoner was tried by a jury. For murder cases, the early hearings often coincided with the inquest on the body, which was held separately. For concision’s sake I have omitted the repetition of evidence from one stage to the next.
*
Perceval would himself be murdered four months later, the only British Prime Minister ever to be assassinated, but for some reason the crime barely captured the imagination of the public, and will feature no further in this book. Similarly, I will not be discussing the seven attempts to assassinate Queen Victoria.
*
Colquhoun and the River Police were among the first to use the word ‘police’ in English. There had been a London Police Bill in 1785, and the magistrate John Fielding used the word that same year, but it was not yet common. In 1814 the Irish police (Sir Robert Peel’s first attempt to form a centralized force) were called the ‘Peace Preservation Force’ and manned by ‘constables’ not ‘policemen’.
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Joseph Fouché (1759–1820) was Napoleon’s Minister for Police. He had been an ardent Jacobin in the early part of the French Revolution, eventually being dubbed the ‘Executioner of Lyons’, as he oversaw so many executions that the victims’ blood blocked the city’s gutters. Under Napoleon, he exerted an iron grip on state security, and the British considered – rightly – that his police force consisted almost entirely of spies and agents provocateurs, hence Dudley’s comment.
Trial by Newspaper
‘A copious effusion of blood’ was something that John Thurtell certainly provided. His crime has been said to have founded newspaper fortunes, for his was the first ‘trial by newspaper’, his actions read and judged by people across the country long before he was brought to trial. That it should have been Thurtell who caught the imagination of the public in this way is extraordinary, for his was a sordid, brutal and remarkably unsuccessful crime. John Thurtell, failed cloth merchant, failed publican and failed gambler, was also a failed murderer.
On 28 October 1823, one Charles Nicholls, of Aldenham in Hertfordshire, arrived in Watford, anxious to notify the magistrates of ‘some singular circumstances pointing to foul play’. He had been passing through Gill’s Hill Lane (then countryside, now in the small town of Radlett) when he saw some road-menders combing the bushes. They told him that that morning they had met a stranger searching the verge. He explained that his gig had overturned the previous night, and he was trying to find his missing penknife and handkerchief. After he left, the road-menders continued his search, hoping that valuables might also have fallen from the gig. Instead they found a knife and a pistol, both of which had dried, caked, brownish deposits on them, looking suspiciously like blood; the pistol, furthermore, had hair and what might even be brains sticking to its butt. Charles Nicholls consequently hot-footed it to Watford.
One of the magistrates immediately went to Gill’s Hill – with no police, magistrates did their own investigation. He learned enough there to lead him to arrest a man named William Probert, who rented a cottage nearby. Two men, John Thurtell and Joseph Hunt, were reported to have spent the night at Probert’s cottage, but they had returned to London that morning. The next day, therefore, the magistrate sent for the Bow Street Runners.
The Runners had no formal status, and were not linked to the metropolitan police offices, which were under the aegis of the Home Office. The Bow Street magistrates were, for historical reasons, paid from a secret-service account, while the Runners were in turn Bow Street’s own, privately paid detective force. The Runners’ salary was small, 25
s.
a week plus 14
s.
expenses, their main income coming from hiring themselves out to other police offices or to private individuals across the country. Now two Runners were hired to locate the suspicious Thurtell and Hunt. After a brief visit to Gill’s Hill the senior Runner, George Ruthven, returned to London, where:
I found [Thurtell] at the Coach and Horses, Conduit Street. I said: John, my boy, I want you. Thurtell had been anticipating serious proceedings against him for setting his house on fire in the city [see p. 24] … It was highly probable that he supposed that I wanted him on that charge. My horse and chaise were at the door. He got in and I handcuffed him to one side of the rail of my trap … On the road nothing could be more chatty and free than the conversation on the part of Thurtell. If he did suspect where I was going to take him, he played an innocent part very well, and artfully pretended total ignorance. I drove up to the inn, where Probert and Hunt were in charge of the local constables. Let us have some brandy and water, George, said Thurtell. I went out of the room to order it. Give us a song said Thurtell, and Hunt, who was a beautiful singer, struck up ‘Mary, list awake’. I paused with the door in my hand and said to myself – ‘Is it possible that these men are murderers?’
The newspapers had no such doubts, even though no charges had yet been laid and there was as yet no body. One week after the crime took place, six days after the weapons were found in the bushes, two days after the arrest of Thurtell, the
Morning Chronicle
ran its first piece on the ‘Most Horrible Murder Near Watford’.
Thurtell and his friends had the disadvantage of poor reputations. Thurtell himself had been born into relative gentility: his father was a prosperous Norwich merchant, later an alderman and in 1828 mayor. Thurtell had been commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Marines in 1809, when he was fifteen or sixteen. Despite the French wars, he saw action only once, and in 1814 he retired on half-pay and returned to Norwich. His father set up him as a bombazine (woollen cloth) manufacturer, but Thurtell became enamoured of ‘the fancy’, the world of Regency prize-fighters, gamblers and their followers.
This was his first downward step. Prize-fighting was illegal, and fights were held in fields, for preference near county boundaries, so that in case of trouble the crowds could disperse across more than one jurisdiction. Thurtell became what in modern parlance would be called a fight promoter, or manager, although the role was then much more informal. The first fight that we know he was involved in was between Ned ‘Flatnose’ Painter, a Norwich fighter, and Tom Oliver, in July 1820. This meeting was later immortalized by George Borrow, in
Lavengro
in 1851 (‘Lavengro’ is Romany for ‘philologist’, supposedly the name given to Borrow himself by the Rom he befriended). Much of
Lavengro
is fictionalized, but the description of Thurtell is based on reality:
a man somewhat under thirty, and nearly six feet in height … he wore neither whiskers nor moustaches, and appeared not to delight in hair, that of his head, which was of light brown, being closely cropped. the eyes were grey, with an expression in which there was sternness blended with something approaching to feline; his complexion was exceedingly pale, relieved, however, by certain pockmarks, which here and there studded his countenance; his form was athletic, but lean; his arms long. You might have supposed him a bruiser; his dress was that of one … something was wanting, however, in his manner – the quietness of the professional man; he rather looked like one performing the part – well – very well – but still performing the part.
Borrow recounted how one day Thurtell and Ned Painter called on a local landowner, asking for the use of a small field in which to stage a fight. They were refused, the man explaining that, as a magistrate, he could not become involved. ‘Magistrate!’ says Thurtell, ‘then fare ye well, for a green-coated buffer and a Harmanbeck.’
*
The magistrate was wiser than he knew, as Thurtell had a reputation for being ‘on the cross’ – involved in match-fixing. When in September 1820 Jack Martin, ‘the Master of the Rolls’ (he was a baker), fought Jack Randall, ‘the Nonpareil’, the match was thought by many to have been a cross arranged by a gambler named William Weare to allow Thurtell to recoup some of the money Weare had won off him. Thurtell, ultimately, would be the death of Weare – and vice-versa.
Borrow, although obviously impressed by Thurtell, had no illusions about him: ‘The terrible Thurtell was present. grim and pale as usual, with his bruisers around. He it was, indeed, who
got up
the fight, as he had previously done twenty others; it being his frequent boast that he had first introduced bruising and bloodshed amidst rural scenes and transformed a quiet slumbering town into a den of Jews and metropolitan thieves.’
Thurtell by now had a thorough knowledge of metropolitan thieves and Jews. (All moneylenders were regarded as Jewish, whether they were or not.) He had failed as a cloth merchant in Norwich, after defrauding his creditors by claiming to have been robbed of the money he owed them. Few believed in these convenient thieves, and Thurtell was declared bankrupt in February 1821. Shifting his base of operations to London, where his reputation might not have preceded him, he set up as the landlord of the Black Boy, in Long Acre, but the pub became a byword for illegal gambling, and soon lost its licence. Thurtell moved from job to job, from money-making scheme to money-making scheme. At the Army and Navy pub he met Joseph Hunt, briefly its manager, a gambler who had already been to prison once; he met William Weare and his friends at yet another pub. Weare claimed to be a solicitor, and lived at Lyon’s Inn, formerly an Inn of Chancery and now lodgings frequented by legal professionals. In fact he had been a waiter, then a billiard-marker, and had finally joined a gang ‘who lived by blind hooky [a card game], hazard [dice], billiards, and the promotion of crooked fights’. He was a legendary figure in the gambling underworld, and it was reported that he always carried his entire savings, said to be £2,000, with him.
Thurtell’s brother Thomas was the landlord of the Cock Tavern, in the Haymarket, and there they became acquainted with Probert, a spirit merchant who helped them to raise money on dubious lines of credit. Thurtell was operating once more as a cloth merchant, but just as his credit ran out, by an amazing coincidence his warehouse, insured to the hilt, was destroyed by fire. The insurance company refused to pay, and in 1823 Thurtell sued. Despite witnesses testifying that he had earlier discussed arson with them; despite information that he had bought fabric on credit and resold it for less than he had paid; despite evidence that he had blocked up the single window that would have permitted the nightwatchman to see the flames as they started – despite all this, the jury found for Thurtell, with £1,900 damages.
*
The insurers appealed, withholding the insurance money, while the money from the damages went to Thurtell’s creditors. The Thurtell brothers’ financial situation continued parlous.They were by now reduced to selling off the drink from the pub they managed in order to eat, while they couldn’t leave the building in case the insurance company had them arrested for conspiracy to defraud; they would have been unable to post bail.
Weare, meanwhile, was doing splendidly, alternating between trips to the races and days spent in billiard saloons. Then one day he said he was off to Hertfordshire for the weekend to go shooting with Thurtell. There would be shooting, it is true, but it was not Weare who held the gun.
On 24 October, two men who very strongly resembled Thurtell and Hunt bought a pair of pistols from a pawnbroker in Marylebone. The same day, Hunt hired a gig and horse, and asked at the stable where he could buy a rope and sack; at a public house in Conduit Street, he was overheard to ask Probert if he wanted to be ‘in it’. In the late afternoon, Thurtell drove Weare down to Probert’s cottage at Gill’s Hill in the gig, leaving Probert to follow on with Hunt. Their horse was a grey with unusual markings: a white face and white socks. Probert dropped Hunt at an inn near Gill’s Hill, to wait for Thurtell as arranged, and drove on to his cottage on his own. As he neared home, he found Thurtell in the lane. Thurtell asked him where Hunt was, and grumbled – or boasted – that he had ‘done the business without his help’. Probert returned to the inn to collect Hunt, and on his return Hunt and Thurtell reproached each other for missing the appointment. It didn’t matter, said Thurtell off-handedly, he had killed Weare on his own: the pistol had misfired, so he had bludgeoned him to death, ‘turning [the pistol] through his brains’, and then slitting his throat.