The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime. Judith Flanders

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СКАЧАТЬ ‘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

      Several hundred constables, with their staves …

      The newly-formed Patrole [sic], with drawn cutlasses.

      Another body of Constables.

      Parish Officers of St. George’s and St. Paul’s, and Shadwell, on horseback.

      Peace Officers, on horseback, Constables.

      The High Constable of the county of Middlesex, on horseback

      THE BODY OF WILLIAMS …

      A strong body of Constables brought up the rear.

      Crowds lined the route; more watched from windows and even the rooftops. Shops were shut, blinds drawn as a mark of respect to the Marrs and the Williamsons. The cart travelled first to the Ratcliffe Highway, where it stood for a quarter of an hour outside the Marrs’ house. An enraged member of the public climbed onto the cart and forcibly turned Williams’ head towards the house, to ensure that the murderer was brought face to face with the scene of his crime. Then the procession travelled on to New Gravel Lane, where again the cart rested outside the death site. Finally it processed to Cannon Street, on the edge of the City, and paused again. Then a stake was driven through Williams’ heart (some reports say hammered home by the fatal maul), and his body was tumbled into a grave – some sources say a large one, so he could be tossed in; others that it was purposely made too small and shallow. Either way, the intention was to show deliberate disrespect. The crowd, which had so far watched in almost total silence, howled to see the last of the man who had killed seven people – half as many as had been murdered in the entire previous year throughout England and Wales.

      This was not the last the world was to see of John Williams. Bodily, he reappeared in 1886, when workmen laying a gas pipe in what was now the heart of the City dug up a skeleton with a stake through its heart. Rumour later had it that at some point Williams’ skull appeared in the keeping of the publican ‘at the corner of Cable Street and Cannon Street Road’. In 1886 the Pall Mall Gazette further reported that Madame Tussaud’s waxworks had a ‘beautifully executed’ portrait of Williams, drawn from life by Sir Thomas Lawrence. But when precisely had Lawrence seen Williams? In the two days between his arrest and suicide? Or perhaps in his final, cart-top appearance?

Williams was to cast a longer shadow on the mental attitudes to crime and crime prevention in the nineteenth century than his skeletal remains could do physically. His ghost made several appearances in Parliament in the months that followed his death. The government was slower than the public to embrace the solution of Williams as the sole murderer. In a debate, the radical MP William Smith simply assumed that the crimes had been committed by ‘a gang of villains, of whom few or no traces had yet been discovered’. The Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, agreed with him.* The case ‘was still wrapped up in mystery. It undoubtedly seemed strange that a single individual could commit such accumulated violence.’

      It was not the mystery that troubled the politicians; it was that policing throughout London was now seen to be completely inadequate. The city was still eighteen years away from establishing a centralized police force, and relied on a patchwork СКАЧАТЬ