The Invention of Murder (51 page)

At the police court hearing Prince’s landlady testified that he was virtually starving. The Actors’ Benevolent Fund had made several payments to him, at Terriss’s urging, but had recently informed him they could help him no further, which he took as a sign of increasing malignancy on Terriss’s part. A theatre manager from Newcastle testified to Prince’s erratic behaviour, saying that company members had refused to work with him: he could not learn his tiny part, and when taxed with this he suggested that they shut the production down until he was better. ‘His brain was gone,’ he concluded. The stage-doorkeeper had seen Prince hanging about the Adelphi for a couple of months, and had purposely told him that Terriss used the stage door, when in fact he used a private door further along Maiden Lane.
*

At the trial at the Old Bailey, Prince’s mother told of her son’s long history of erratic behaviour, persecution complexes and delusions – he insisted at one stage that he was Jesus Christ, although, Mrs Archer told the court pathetically, ‘he did not say that very often’. She also said he had a half-brother who was ‘silly’.
†
She protested feebly that he was not violent, but admitted that he had attacked his brother with a poker and a knife. Later a foreman at the works where Prince had been employed as a labourer said that when he lost his temper he ‘would not be quietened down, and the white foam was at his mouth and we had to lock him down’. Prince was found guilty but insane, and was sent to Broadmoor. From there he continued to write letters, including several to the editor of
Lloyd’s Weekly,
who remarked dryly that ‘they did not exhibit more delusions than are common with newspaper correspondents’.

Lloyd’s
had had closer dealings with Prince than the editor was willing to recall in his memoirs, however: a man named Eayres was arrested for forging an order of admission to Holloway, in order to interview Prince. He had succeeded, and only his hubris in selling the piece to
Lloyd’s
led to his discovery. (He got £20 for the article, of which he said £12 had gone to Prince, with the remaining £8 to follow, but if that were the case, what was in it for him? One wonders if Prince ever saw the first sum.) Other newspapers, without
Lloyd’s
exclusive, spent less time on the sad, crazed murderer. Instead, the crime provoked a raft of stories of precognition. Terriss’s understudy gave interviews to the press: ‘I dreamt I saw Mr. Terriss lying in the landing surrounded by a crowd, and that he was raving. It was a horrible dream … I tried to forget it … but to-night … when I came to the theatre, I was going down Bedford-street when something seemed to say, “Don’t go there” … a few minutes afterwards I heard a great noise, and found that he had stabbed Mr. Terriss.’ Jessie Millward likewise claimed she dreamed before his death that Terriss cried out, ‘Sis! Sis!’ warningly from behind a locked door. In the new year another story was picked up by many magazines: on the night of Terriss’s death, Mrs Terriss was at home at the bucolically named ‘The Cottage’ in Chiswick, when, at 7.20 precisely – the very moment the fatal blows were struck – her dog leaped off her lap and ran frantically around the room. The journalist who reported this in
Country Life Illustrated
seemed less than entirely convinced, ending his report, ‘Whatever the cause’, the dog’s behaviour ‘has added one more touch of pathos to the terrible tragedy with which England has but lately been ringing’. Another journalist, however, was so overwhelmed by this synchronicity that he suggested the dog should be taken to court to confront the murderer, for identification purposes.

Meanwhile, many of the newspapers broke into verse. Broadsides were long dead, but the valedictory poem was finding a place in the mainstream press. A number of the poems had no more connection to reality than the old execution broadsides sold under the gallows had had. In the
Daily News
the poet and man of letters Richard Le Gallienne lamented the loss of ‘London’s young Galahad … Romance’s own proud image of a lad’ (young Galahad was in fact fifty when he died).
Fun
and
Punch
caught more accurately the aura Terriss had projected – ‘Poor Terriss will ne’er charm again,’ said the former, while the latter said farewell to ‘Splendid Will!’, ‘our hero’, ‘BREEZY BILL!’ Madame Tussaud’s had a model, but of the victim, not the murderer – only Maria Marten, perhaps, had had such a profile.

Breezy Bill’s funeral was a production in itself. Six hundred flower arrangements were received from theatre aristocracy and real aristocracy, including the Prince of Wales, two Rothschilds, as well as the staff of Charing Cross Hospital and the Otter Swimming Club. Fifty-eight carriages followed the hearse to Brompton Cemetery, and the procession was estimated to be half a mile long. The newspapers reported that at least 10,000 people gathered at Turnham Green station to watch the cortège leave Terriss’s house; at Hammersmith Broadway station another 15,000 stood silently as it arrived, and several thousand more were at the cemetery gates. Street hawkers worked the crowds, selling funeral cards for 1d. – the execution broadside of the 1890s.

But the new century was coming, and with it new means of entertainment. The
Era
advertised: ‘We have succeeded in taking a good Cinématograph Film of the Funeral Procession of this lamented actor passing from the hearse to the grave, embracing a large number of his personal and professional friends.’ Music halls now included short films as part of the evening’s entertainment, and in the same issue of the
Era,
‘Joe Hasting’s Unparalleled Combination’ was advertised as already showing ‘Mr Lear’s Biograph with the Funeral Procession of the Lamented Actor Mr William Terriss’. New technology was selling the old stories.

What class the murderer was, what class the victim was, how the death occurred, all these things made a great deal of difference to public interest. In 1848, at the height of the poison panic, when seemingly anything concerning working-class women murdering their husbands was of interest, Harriet Parker’s back-street murder of her two stepchildren produced resounding apathy. Absolutely no one was interested. And yet the story was pathetic enough.

In 1845 Robert Blake, a twenty-six-year-old grinder (he sharpened blades), deserted his wife in Birmingham and ran off to London with Harriet Parker, aged thirty-five, taking his two children, Amina and Robert, aged six and three, with him. They lived in the inappropriately named Cupid’s Court, a tenement behind Golden Lane, in the City, and were averagely unhappy. At 4 a.m. on New Year’s Day 1848 a distraught Mrs Parker banged on her neighbours’ door, calling, ‘Oh, Mrs. Moore, I have done it … I went out with Blake last night, intending to go to the play, when he met with a little strumpet, and took hold of her arm, and he immediately left me!’ An exhausted Mrs Moore more or less said that four in the morning was not the time for visiting. Mrs Parker’s response ensured sleep was banished: ‘I have murdered the two children.’ And they were indeed both lying dead in their bed.

The story as it unfolded was a sad, ordinary one, with only the violence at the end making it extraordinary. Blake had been a good provider, a steady, reliable worker. But he had taken up with Jane Jones, spent less time working, and Mrs Parker was not only rampagingly jealous, she and the children were going hungry. On New Year’s Eve Blake had come home, saying brusquely: ‘Make haste and get the tea, and get me some water to wash me for I’m in a hurry, and have got to meet a girl at the top of Old-street. I’m going to take her to a play.’ He meant to be provocative, and Mrs Parker rose to the bait. When he went out, she followed him openly, and at a milestone in the road he goaded her, saying, ‘I’ll kiss [the milestone] for the sake of them I’m going to see,’ and ‘He did kiss it,’ said the desolate woman. She followed him into the local pub, where they sat briefly drinking gin before Blake managed to slip away. ‘He shall repent this, I will do something before morning.’ she said. Later that evening she told her neighbour, ‘There will be a pretty spectacle for him when he does come home.’ She made no secret of her action, telling the police after her arrest: ‘I doted on the ground he walked on,’ but ‘I blew the candle out, jumped on the bed and killed the girl. After I had killed her, I felt as though I could have killed a thousand children. I turned round, saw the boy, and showed him no mercy, and I want none shown to me.’ She later summed up the situation as she saw it: ‘Him and that woman have been the cause of all our misfortunes, and the death of the children lies at their door. Until he became acquainted with her we had plenty, but during the fortnight he knew her, me and the children had nothing to eat but bread and dripping. That is all.’

At the trial, Blake admitted to sleeping with at least six other women during his relationship with Harriet Parker, although, he added truculently, ‘there was no cause for her being jealous’. He agreed that he had goaded her by telling her about other women, and that on the night of the murders he had been with Mrs Jones. He only heard of the deaths when he returned to his house the next morning at eleven (a clear indication that he was unemployed – artisans started work by seven at the latest).

Mrs Parker was unable to afford legal representation, and the sheriffs had ‘out of charity’ arranged someone to represent her, but from the record little was actually done. The trial was quickly over, and the jury had no choice but to find her guilty; but they added a strong recommendation to mercy, ‘in consideration of the unparalleled provocation under which she perpetrated the crime’. The judge was terse: ‘The children gave her no provocation.’

The newspapers wanted no part of this story.
The Times,
that usually indiscriminately murder-loving newspaper, didn’t cover the execution. Most Birmingham papers ignored the case altogether, even though the participants were from that city. The
Observer
attempted some formulaic characterizations – the murderer was ‘a repulsive, downcast looking woman’, while Mrs Jones was ‘genteel looking’ – but its heart wasn’t in it. The
Morning Chronicle
published what it said was a letter from Mrs Parker to Blake while she was awaiting execution, but it sounds as if it had been lifted from a sorrowful lamentation: ‘My days are numbered; this day fortnight I shall be
silent
in the
grave,’
followed by more routine aspirations: that she would be redeemed in death etc., etc., God in his wisdom etc., etc., while living in sin has ‘brought us to misery, shame, and sorrow’ and more.

An even more violent and bloody, and even less discussed, story was that of Elizabeth Martha Brown, who was executed for murdering her husband in 1856. Her story was so ordinary, and therefore so disregarded, that if there had not been one transformative eye in the crowd at her execution, she would not figure even here. Mrs Brown lived in Beaminster, in Dorset. She was forty-four years old and married to John Anthony Brown, a nineteen-year-old carrier (he conveyed goods and parcels from towns and villages, along fixed routes). They had been servants at a farm together, and it appears that the older woman may have had enough money to set the young man up in business when they married. They too appear to have been unhappy in a routine fashion: Brown drank, and was cheating on his wife with a woman named Mary Davies. He was also violent. On 5 July 1856 he was seen giving Mrs Davies a lift on his cart; he then joined a friend and drank and played skittles all afternoon, before drinking, without the skittles, until midnight. At five o’clock the next morning, Mrs Brown arrived at a house nearby: at about two o’clock, she said, her husband had arrived home covered in blood, gasped out, ‘The horse,’ and collapsed on the floor, clutching her dress so tightly in his death-grip that she had only just been able to release herself.But no blood could be found anywhere outside the house, there was no blood on Brown’s face, no dirt on his clothes or hands – Mrs Brown’s story, that he had been kicked by his horse, looked dubious. At the post-mortem, the doctors agreed that his wounds were not consistent with a kick from a horse, while they were consistent with being struck by a poker or a flat-iron. In addition, they stated, their extensive nature would have knocked Brown out: he could not have walked with a head wound such as he had. Mrs Brown was arrested on a charge of murder.