A Criminal History of Mankind (73 page)

But the Fieldings died, and no magistrates of comparable energy took their place. The eighteenth-century crime wave continued unabated.

Things began to change as the industrial revolution at least provided jobs for anyone who wanted to work. As Luke Owen Pike has said in his
History of Crime in England
(Vol. 2,p. 406):’... there began to be drawn a broader line than had ever existed before between the criminal classes and the rest of the community.’ Roads were improved, and better communications meant that highwaymen had less chance of remaining uncaught; in 1805, the horse patrols were revived in the London area, with uniformed officers guarding the roads for ten miles around London from five in the evening until midnight. There was still no regular police force, because the English remained convinced that policemen were people who spied on you, searched your home and dragged you off to jail. So methods of detecting a crime after it had been committed were still hit-and-miss.

But then, the crimes themselves continued to be of a curiously commonplace nature, as we can see by studying the
Newgate Calendar
, a compilation of criminal cases from 1700 onward published in 1774 by J. Cooke. We read: ‘executed for sheep stealing’, ‘executed for forgery’, ‘executed for an unnatural crime’ (sodomy), ‘executed for housebreaking’, ‘executed for robbing a poor woman’, ‘executed for highway robbery’, and so on. There are, of course, dozens of cases of murder, most of them family murders - husbands murdering wives - and murders in the course of robbery, many involving smuggling. The language seems absurdly inappropriate to the crimes: ‘this atrocious monster’, ‘this abandoned wretch’, ‘this brutal villain’. Rape is relatively rare, and most of these cases concern upper-class males, such as Colonel Francis Charteris, ‘a terror to female innocence’, who made a habit of seducing his servant girls, and who ‘used violence’ against a girl called Anne Bond who declined his offer of a purse of gold to sleep with him. Charteris was hanged. We observe the incredible cruelty involved in many of the murders: a gang of smugglers who beat two customs men to death in 1749, crushing the testicles of one of them, and a smuggler called Mills who flogged a customs man to death in the same year. Elizabeth Brownrigg used to obtain servant girls from the parish workhouse, then strip them naked and flog them to death - often hanging from a hook in the ceiling. She was hanged in 1767, but her husband and son, who had been equally responsible for a number of deaths, were given six months each on the technicality that they were not the girls’ employers. But all this brutality was merely a reflection of the Age of Gin, when London’s gutters were full of drunks, and life was cheap. The
Newgate Calendar
gives the impression that ten times as many murderers escaped as found their way into Newgate prison.

In 1811, there was a case that made a sensation through the length and breadth of the country, and caused householders everywhere to bolt and bar their shutters. It took place in a house in the Ratcliffe Highway, in the East End of London. On the night of Saturday 7 December 1811, someone broke into the house of a hosier named Timothy Marr, and murdered Marr, his wife, their baby and an apprentice boy of thirteen. A servant girl who had been sent out to buy oysters discovered the bodies. The incredible violence of the murders shocked everyone; the family had been slaughtered with blows of a mallet that had shattered their skulls, then their throats had been cut. The killer was obviously a homicidal maniac, but the motive had probably been robbery - which had been interrupted by the girl’s return. In an upstairs room, a constable of the river police found the murder weapon - a ‘maul’, a kind of iron mallet with a point on one end of the head; they were used by ships’ carpenters. The head had the initials ‘I.P.’ punched into it. Two sets of footprints were found leading away from the house.

Twelve days later, there was a second mass murder at a public house called the King’s Arms, in Gravel Lane, close to the Ratcliffe Highway. The pub was run by a Mr Williamson and his wife, with help from their fourteen-year-old granddaughter, Kitty Stilwell, and a servant, Bridget Harrington. There was also a lodger, twenty-six-year-old John Turner. After the bar had closed at 11 P.M., Williamson served a drink to an old friend, the parish constable, and told him that a man in a brown jacket had been listening at the door, and that if the constable saw him, he should arrest him.

A quarter of an hour later, the lodger had gone to his bed in the attic when he heard the front door slam very hard, then Bridget Harrington’s voice shouting ‘We are all murdered.’ There were blows and more cries. Turner crept downstairs - naked - and peered into the living room. He saw a man bending over a body and rifling the pockets. Turner went back upstairs, made a rope out of sheets tied together, and lowered himself out of the window. As he landed with a crash on the pavement - the ‘rope’ was too short - he shouted breathlessly ‘Murder, murder!’ A crowd quickly formed, and the parish constable prised open the metal flap that led into the cellar. At the bottom of some steps lay the body of the landlord, his head beaten in by a crowbar that lay beside him. His throat had been cut and his right leg fractured. In the room above lay the bodies of Mrs Williamson and Bridget Harrington. Both their skulls had been shattered, and both had had their throats cut to the bone. The murderer had escaped through a rear window.

Dozens of sailors and men in brown jackets were arrested on suspicion, among them a young sailor named John Williams, who lodged at the Pear Tree public house in nearby Wapping. He was a rather good-looking, slightly effeminate youth with a manner that sometimes caused him to be mistaken for a ‘gentleman’. There was no evidence against him. But when handbills with pictures of the maul were circulated, John Williams’s landlord, a Mr Vermilloe (who happened to be in Newgate prison for debt) said that he recognised it as belonging to a Swedish sailor named John Peterson. Peterson was now at sea, so had a watertight alibi, but had left his chest of tools behind, in the care of Vermilloe.

John Williams was now suspect number one. He had been seen walking towards the King’s Arms on the evening of the murders, and had returned to his lodgings in the early hours of the morning with blood on his shirt - he claimed this was the result of a brawl. The stockings and shoes he had worn had been carefully washed, but bloodstains were still visible on the stockings. Williams’s room mates said he had no money on the night of the murders, but had a great deal on the following day.

Williams cheated the executioner by hanging himself in prison on 28 December 1811. An inquest declared that he was the sole murderer of the Marrs and the Williamsons - a verdict that may be questioned in view of the two pairs of footprints that were found leaving the Marrs’ house. He was given a suicide’s burial at a cross roads in East London, with a stake through his heart - the old superstition being that suicides could become vampires.

The details of the Ratcliffe Highway murders are rather less interesting than the effect they produced on the public. It was the first time in English history - probably in European history - that a crime had created widespread panic. Why? Because it was generally accepted that they were committed by one man. In fact, it is rather more probable that they were committed by two, or even by a gang -one witness who lived near the Marrs said he heard several men running away. If that had been believed, there would almost certainly have been no panic - gangs of thieves were still a familiar hazard in 1811. It was this notion of a lone monster, a man who stalked the streets on his own, lusting for blood, that terrified everybody. Jack the Ripper turned this nightmare into reality seventy-seven years later. But in 1811, the ‘alienated’ criminal had still not made his appearance.

Three more cases would produce this same widespread, feverish public interest during the next two decades. The first was the murder of a sportsman and gambler named William Weare by two more members of the sporting fraternity, John Thurtell and Joseph Hunt. Thurtell, a man of strong character and imposing physical presence, was familiar on the race courses and at barefist boxing matches. Weare had won from him a considerable sum of money at billiards, and Thurtell was convinced he had cheated. So Weare was invited for the weekend to a cottage belonging to a man called William Probert, near Elstree. The four set out from London in two horse-drawn gigs - two-wheeled carriages - and as they arrived, Thurtell shot Weare in the face; the bullet bounced off his cheekbone and Weare begged for his life. Thurtell threw him down, cut his throat with a penknife, then jammed the pistol against his head so hard that it went into the brain, filling the barrel with blood and tissue. The body was then dumped in a pond, and the three men went into the cottage and had supper with Probert’s wife and sister-in-law. The next morning, Thurtell and Hunt went to look for the pistol and penknife, without success; but as they left, two labourers found the weapons on top of a hedge. They reported the find to the Bow Street Runners, who soon discovered Weare’s body in another pond, into which it had been moved. Probert quickly turned king’s evidence, and so escaped. Thurtell was hanged, while Hunt was transported for life.

This commonplace murder aroused such widespread interest that it was quickly turned into a play that was performed before crowded houses. A popular ballad of the time - which was sold at the execution - had the well-known stanza:

They cut his throat from ear to ear

His head they battered in.

His name was Mr William Weare

He lived in Lyons Inn.

But why
did
it arouse such horrified fascination? It may have been partly because Thurtell was such a well-known character in the sporting world. But it was more probably the violence of the murder - the cut throat, the pistol filled with brains. Again, the crime touched a sense of nightmare: the ruthless criminal who ignores the laws of God and man. Yet the sensation it caused is also evidence that society was changing fast. In Defoe’s time, the murder of Weare would have been merely one more case to add to the
Newgate Calendar
. But things were different in 1823. Luke Owen Pike says:

England in the beginning of the year 1820, when George III died, was already the wealthiest and, in many respects, the most civilised country in Europe... Stage coaches now traversed all the main roads, which were at length beginning to deserve comparison with the great engineering works given to us by the Romans... Canals intersected the country... All these changes were, in the main, opposed to crime.

History of Crime in England, Vol. 2, p. 407.

In fact, crime was rising steadily - Major Arthur Griffiths estimates in
Mysteries of the Police and Crime
(Vol. 1, p. 84) that there was a ratio of one criminal to every 822 members of the population in 1828. But most of these crimes were the result of misery and poverty, of half-starved factory workers and out-of-work farm labourers. What shocked people about the crimes of John Williams and John Thurtell was that they were not the outcome of desperation. They were deliberately committed for personal gain, for self-satisfaction; in other words, they were acts of ego-assertion, like the crimes of Caligula or Gilles de Rais. The age of individual conscience, inaugurated by Bunyan and Wesley, was changing into the age of individual crime.

This was, in fact, something of an illusion. Williams - and possibly a companion - had merely committed murder in the course of robbery: a hundred similar cases could be cited from the previous century. Thurtell’s murder was a commonplace gangland execution; Weare was a scoundrel, and all four of them were gamblers and crooks. But the public
wanted
to believe that these were monsters; it stimulated some nerve of morbidity, in an age that was becoming increasingly prosperous and increasingly mechanised.

This also explains the excitement generated by the ‘Red Barn murder’ of 1827. William Corder, a farmer’s son who became a schoolmaster, allowed himself to be bullied into marrying Maria Marten, a mole-catcher’s daughter who was known in Polstead, Suffolk, as the local tart. She had lost her virginity to one gentleman (‘an unfortunate slip’ says the
Newgate Calendar
} and then bore a bastard child to another. She also became pregnant to William’s brother Thomas, but the child died soon after birth. After Thomas abandoned her, Maria had an affair with a ‘gentleman’ named Peter Matthews, who thereafter paid her an allowance of twenty pounds a year.

William seems to have been an oversensitive mother’s boy who was harshly treated by his father and made to work on the farm for a minimal wage. His response was to become something of a petty crook - on one occasion he borrowed money from a neighbour ‘for his father’ and spent it; on another, he secretly sold some of his father’s pigs. He was sent away to London in disgrace, but returned to the farm when his brother Thomas was accidentally drowned trying to cross a frozen pond. He soon became Maria’s lover, and they spent their evenings making love in the Red Barn on the farm. Maria’s quarterly five pound note disappeared mysteriously, probably into Corder’s pocket, indicating that he continued to look for the easy way out of his problems. Maria became pregnant again in 1827, and gave birth to a boy; but the child was sickly, and soon died. Maria’s father evidently felt that it was time she became an honest woman, and pressed Corder so hard that he agreed to be married. At which point, he seems to have experienced regrets, and looked, as usual, for the easy way out. He told Maria that they must be married in secret, and persuaded her to meet him in the Red Barn, dressed in a suit of his own clothes. On 18 May Maria kept her appointment in the Red Barn, and was never seen again. Corder returned home and told Maria’s family that he had placed her in lodgings in Ipswich for the time being. He told other stories to other enquirers. Then, tired of the gossip, Corder slipped away to London, where he advertised for a wife in a newspaper. The result was a meeting with a young woman called Mary Moore, whom he married. She had enough money to set up a girls’ school in Baling; Corder bought himself some spectacles and became headmaster.