Eat Thy Neighbour (10 page)

Todd invested some of his ill-gotten loot in a property located in Bell Yard directly across the street from the east front of the Royal Courts of Justice, and installed Margery as proprietor. In the basement of the shop he built a large furnace designed to supply heat for several baker’s ovens with a capacity great enough to turn out batches of 100 or more pies at a time.

Accomplished in her trade, Mrs Lovett’s veal and pork pies quickly became the rage of the neighbourhood and attracted a large luncheon crowd drawn mostly from among the judges, solicitors, barristers and clerks who worked at the courts across the street. Lovett dutifully churned out pies of all sizes from small individual-sized pies which sold for a penny to large, family-sized pies which patrons could take home with them to share with their loved ones as an evening meal.

At what point Todd suggested the use of his victims as a substitute filling for the pies, or whether it had been the plan from the day the shop was opened, is unknown, but obviously his partner in crime agreed to the abominable suggestion.

To facilitate moving the ‘meat’ from the basement of his shop to the basement of hers, Todd extended a tunnel from one of the westernmost crypts of St Dunstan’s so that it crossed beneath Chancery Lane and ended in the subterranean bakery of the pie shop. Each time he dispatched one of his customers, Todd hurried to the cellars beneath the shop, stripped the victim of their clothes and valuables and carved them up like a side of beef. Amid the flowing fountain of blood, he lopped off the head and removed the entrails. He then skinned the carcass, removed the limbs and carved the ‘meat’ from the bones, all by the dim light of a candle or a small oil lamp.

The offal, heads and bones were carted to one of the crypts where they were heaped among the ancient coffins while the boxes of meat, along with the edible organs such as heart, liver and kidneys, were hauled along the dark, blood-spattered floor of the tunnel to a secret entrance at the back of the bakery. Here, Lovett carved the flesh into small pieces and boiled it until it was tender and ready to be mixed with animal meat where it became an invisible ingredient in the succulent pie filling. The fame of Mrs Lovett’s cannibal pies is attested to by one of the earliest authors of the Sweeney Todd tale, Thomas Peckett Prest, who worked in Fleet Street at the time of the events and would have
been familiar with the people and places involved. According to Prest’s 1841 account:

On the left side of Bell Yard, going down from Carey Street, was, at the time we write of, one of the most celebrated shops for the sale of veal and pork pies that ever London produced. High and low, rich and poor, resorted to it; its fame had spread far and wide; and at twelve o’clock every day when the first batch of pies was sold there was a tremendous rush to obtain them.

Their fame had spread great distances, some even carried them into the country as treats for friends. Oh, those delicious pies! There was about them a flavour never surpassed and rarely equalled; the paste was of the most delicate construction, and impregnated with the aroma of delicious gravy that defied description; the fat and the lean meat were also artistically mixed.

As the popularity of the pie shop continued to grow, Margery Lovett was forced to hire assistants; a young girl helped wait on the customers who crowded around the horseshoe-shaped counter and a baker’s helper was put to work in the kitchens below. While it is entirely possible that an assistant baker would be unable to tell human flesh from that of an animal, it has been suggested that if an employee became suspicious they soon joined the pile of hapless victims destined to become pie filling. One is forced to wonder, though, if there
was
a kitchen helper at the time of Mrs Lovett’s arrest, why they were not called as a witness at Todd’s trial.

For more than a decade and a half, Lovett and Todd grew rich in their unspeakable enterprise, throughout which they were apparently also lovers. Amazingly, there is no record of the two of them ever being seen together in public. The answer may lie in the tunnels and crypts beneath their respective shops. To keep
their connection a secret, Todd only visited Lovett clandestinely; slopping his way through the bloody mud to her pie shop where they would retire to her lavishly appointed upstairs apartment and make love.

Their scheme began to unravel during the summer of 1800 when an unspeakable stench started to permeate the sanctuary of St Dunstan’s church next door to Todd’s barber’s shop. Failing to find the source of the smell, the vicar, the Revd Joseph Stillingport, and the sexton called in the local beadle, Mr Otton. Although Otton was as mystified by the smell as the vicar and the sexton, he duly reported the incident to his superior, Sir Richard Blunt, head of the Bow Street Runners. In his report, Otton said the smell reminded him of rotting corpses, but the vicar had assured him that none of the crypts beneath the church had been used in decades. Blunt, however, decided to investigate for himself.

Accompanied by Otton, Blunt descended into the crypts beneath St Dunstan’s. Although the crypt doors were sealed and intact, and there was no evidence that the sewers had backed up into the vaults, the rotten smell was so overpowering that the men had to cover their noses and mouths with cloths soaked in vinegar to keep from retching. Blunt retired from St Dunstan’s none the wiser than when he had entered.

A few weeks later Blunt heard a strange report from another of his men who told him that a number of customers had been reported as having gone into a barber’s shop at 186 Fleet Street and apparently failed to reappear. When Blunt located Todd’s shop on a city map, he saw immediately that it was next to St Dunstan’s church. What connection, if any, there might be between the stench in St Dunstan’s and the supposed disappearance of Todd’s customers, Blunt could not imagine – but he decided to post a team of constables in an upstairs room opposite Todd’s shop to keep an eye on the place. Over the next three months at least three customers who went into the
shop failed to reappear on the street. With this evidence – and a mounting pile of dark suspicions – in hand, Blunt decided to take another team of men and re-examine the vaults beneath St Dunstan’s.

Prising open the long-sealed doors of one crypt after another, Blunt and his men were confronted by scenes of unimaginable horror. Piled around and on top of one coffin after another were mountains of bones, skulls and decaying entrails. Some had obviously been there for years while others still had relatively fresh flesh clinging to them. By the light of their candles, Blunt and his men followed a blood-soaked path from the crypt and found that it led in two directions. To the right, it came out beneath Todd’s shop and to the left it wound its way beneath Chancery Lane and into the basement bakehouse of Margery Lovett’s pie shop. The horrible, unthinkable truth dawned on Blunt and his men: Sweeney Todd was murdering his clients and sending their bodies to Mrs Lovett to be made into pies.

If further proof were needed, Blunt assigned one of his men to break into Todd’s house when the barber was away and see what he could find, but cautioned him not to remove anything that might be used as evidence. When the constable reported back several days later, he read the names of a number of missing persons whose names he had taken from the inside of watch cases and the sweatbands of hats found stashed in Todd’s closets. A furious Blunt immediately prepared to close in on Todd and Lovett.

A group of constables was rushed to Bell Yard with a warrant for the arrest of Mrs Margery Lovett and the seizure of the contents of her pie shop as evidence. When the men burst into the shop and read the warrant, customers at the counter, as well as a few curious passers-by who were drawn by the commotion, were first stunned beyond words and then thrown into confusion that quickly turned to rage. As the crowd grew, constables were afraid the swelling mob would grab Lovett and string her up to
the nearest lamp post. Hustling their suspect out of the back door, they hailed a passing coach and sped her off to Newgate prison.

Inside the coach, wedged between two guards, Lovett broke down and began mumbling a nearly incoherent confession. Once safely inside Newgate, she asked to see the governor and said she wanted to make a statement. In the presence of the governor, a recording clerk and witnesses, she claimed that the real criminal was Sweeney Todd and that she was only his accomplice and had no intention of hanging alone. Although the original confession has been lost, a creditable version was later printed in the
London Chronicle
and runs, in part, as follows:

Believing that I am on the edge of the grave, I Margery Lovett, make this statement.

Sweeney Todd first conceived the idea of that mutual guilt which we have both since carried out. He bought the house in Bell Yard . . . and . . . excavated an underground connection between the two, mining right under St Dunstan’s Church, and through the vault of that building.

When he had completed all his arrangements he came to me and made his offer . . . I was willing.

The plan he proposed was that the pie-shop should be opened for the sole purpose of getting rid of the bodies of people whom he might think proper to murder in his shop . . . He murdered many. The business went on and prospered and we both grew rich. This is how we fell to our present state.

The only question she posed to the governor was to ask if her confession could be used as evidence against Todd himself. The governor assured her that it could, and would, be so used.

While the distraught Mrs Lovett was stumbling through her confession, Sir Richard Blunt and his Bow Street Runners were
preparing for their raid on Todd’s barber’s shop. Covering both the main and rear doors, Blunt and several constables burst into the shop and read out the warrant for Todd’s arrest. Although he tried to bluff his way out of the mess, Todd was arrested, shackled and hustled into a coach, which was waiting to bear him to Newgate prison.

The frenzy that gripped London after the pair’s arrest threw the city into turmoil and virtually destroyed the meat pie market for months to come. Sensationalised newspaper accounts – dubbing Todd ‘The Demon Barber of Fleet Street’ and inventing ‘facts’ where none had been released – made an already horrific situation even worse. Meanwhile, Blunt and his men stolidly began building a watertight case against the felonious pair. Although Blunt pressed for as early a trial as possible, his efforts in bringing the cannibal-pie-maker to justice would prove to be a case of too little, too late. A few days before Christmas 1801, Sir Richard was brought the news that despite her stated desire to turn King’s Evidence against Todd, Margery Lovett had committed suicide in her cell.

How she obtained the poison with which she ended her life is not known, but it is likely that she had sent word to one of her servants to bring her a change of clothes, or some other necessity, and secreted among them was a small vial of poison. When the guards brought her breakfast at eight o’clock the following morning they found her dead. Not only had she escaped justice, but also left unanswered the nagging question of why she had agreed to be a part of the monstrous scheme in the first place.

In spite of the loss of one of his prime suspects, and the most creditable witness against Todd, Blunt forged ahead with the case. A full search of the barber’s shop and the crypts below yielded up sufficient clothing, jewellery and skeletal remains to account for somewhere in the neighbourhood of 160 victims. Although nearly everyone in the city was well aware of the
general facts in the case long before Todd’s trial began, the recounting of the mountain of physical evidence brought repeated gasps and ‘Ohhhs’ from visitors and jury alike. It seems that at the height of his murderous rampage, Todd was committing an average of one murder a month, and may have worked at this frenetic pace for as long as five years. When all the evidence was in, and the time came for the jury to deliberate, it took them scarcely more than five minutes to find Sweeney Todd guilty of murder.

On 25 January 1802, only days after the verdict was handed down, Sweeney Todd, the 46-year-old ‘Demon Barber of Fleet Street’ was taken to the gallows at Newgate prison where, according to newspaper accounts, he ‘died hard’ – kicking and choking away his last moments of life.

After his execution, according to common practice of the day, Todd’s body was handed over to the Royal College of Surgeons where it would be dissected by medical students. In the end, Todd himself wound up in the same dismembered condition as had so many dozens of his victims. Today, more than two centuries after their demise, Sweeney Todd still holds claim to being the greatest mass murderer in English history and, together with his cannibalistic cohort, Margery Lovett, inspired one of the most successful musical plays of all time.

Seven

A Hunger for Adventure: Alfred Packer (1874)

I
n the nineteenth century most of the American West was inhospitable at the best of times. In addition to its endemic lawlessness and the threat of attack from angry Indians and white outlaws, it was blessed by a climate that ranged from blistering heat and drought to freezing cold. It was the kind of place that brought out the best, and worst, in those brave enough to challenge its perils, often turning otherwise ordinary men and women into legendary figures. One of those apparently ordinary people whose story turned out more grotesque than most was Alfred Packer.

Like most of the individuals who populated the Old West, Alfred Packer was born in the eastern USA, in his case Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, in January 1842. As a teenager he was apprenticed to a shoemaker but, as with most young men, Alf was too full of energy to be tied to one job for long. He wanted to go to important places and see big things.

In 1862, with the American Civil War at its height, the twenty-year-old Packer joined the Union Army where he served for only nine months before being discharged because of a mild case of epilepsy. Six months later he tried to re-enlist, but again he was discharged on the same medical grounds. So far as we know, the only notable event during his time in the military was the evening when he, along with some of his buddies, decided to get a tattoo. The tattoo artist, either because he was only
semi-literate, or drunk, or both, misspelled his client’s name. There, for all time, was the word ‘Alferd’ etched into the boy’s flesh. Making light of the sloppy mistake, throughout his life Packer joked about the misspelling, often referring to himself as ‘Alferd’ Packer.