Mr Briggs' Hat: The True Story of a Victorian Railway Murder (19 page)

*

The United States Circuit Court house
had been an opera house and a comedy theatre before being turned over to the federal government in 1856. The proceedings of Friday 26 and Saturday 27 August would be no less dramatic.

Commissioner Chas Newton entered the packed courtroom at eleven o’clock. Everyone waited for Müller’s defence counsel ex-judge Beebe to arrive until, to their surprise, word came that he had defaulted on his responsibility, pleading a conflicting engagement. Turning to the prisoner, Newton asked if there was anyone in the city who might support him. Standing, holding a blue cotton handkerchief tightly in one hand, Müller’s voice wavered, betraying a slightly foreign accent as he repeated quietly that he still expected his sister to appear in court in order to help him.

Has your sister any friends here?
asked Newton.

I do not know, sir, she came to this country by herself.

He had her address in
Nassau Street
, only a few blocks south of the courtroom, but if she could not be found, and since he was a stranger here, Müller said he would be satisfied with the assistance of the court. Exasperated, Newton considered his options. Mr Chauncey
Shaffer
happened to be in the courthouse that day. He was swiftly assigned to Müller’s defence.

This was a stroke of luck for the prisoner. Shaffer was an impressively canny criminal attorney, renowned for his eloquence and flair and admired for his successful defence at some of the most notorious murder trials in New York’s Southern District
Court. As he agreed to go into battle for Müller, a whisper went round the room that this prominent lawyer rarely lost a case. Calling on the assistance of Mr Edmond Blankman to act as his junior, the formidable Chauncey Shaffer asked for, and was allowed, a short time to confer with Müller.

The British consul’s legal representative, Francis Marbury, had advised Tanner that the purpose of the hearing was summarily to hear both the evidence accumulated against Müller and in his defence. Commissioner Newton’s responsibility was simply to consider whether, had the offence happened on American soil, there would be sufficient evidence to commit the German for trial under American law. If so, under the terms of the
British– American extradition treaty
signed in August 1842, a certificate of criminality would be issued and permission granted for his release into the custody of the London detectives.

Silencing the shuffling of the courtroom spectators, Comm -issioner Newton signalled for Marbury to begin his case and the lawyer rose, recapitulated the main points of the case and then proposed to read out both sets of witness depositions taken at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court on 19 and 22 July. Shaffer objected immediately on a point of law, declaring that since the majority of the witnesses were unavailable for cross-examination, their statements could not be heard. Marbury was ahead of him, countering that the Act of Congress provided for their reading. Shaffer tried again, submitting that there was no proof to show that the depositions were properly authenticated. Marbury returned that not only had they been certified by the American minister in London but that the London officers had witnessed the proceedings at Bow Street. Shaffer was overruled.

Müller’s defence changed direction. Shaffer’s junior, Edmond Blankman, waxed on the vulnerability of the prisoner, a stranger in a strange land, charged with a most heinous offence
. It is our duty
, he said,
to see that none of the rights and privileges of the accused are neglected. It is our duty to see that no slipshod
examination
[takes]
place and that the forms of law are strictly complied with. These depositions
[are]
not legally and properly authenticated as required by the law
. Since they were not in the form that could be used in an English murder trial, Blankman contended that, under the Act of Congress, they were
not admissible in New York
. It was an audacious contention, though Newton disagreed, ruling that all the London depositions must be heard.

Over the next hour, Francis Marbury read aloud all the papers submitted by both Tanner and Kerressey. He gave particular emphasis to the statements demonstrating that Thomas J. Briggs had identified the chain exchanged at Death’s and that John Death had subsequently confirmed that the prisoner was the man from whom it was received. Marbury laboured over each fact, uninterrupted, emphasising that collateral evidence had been accumulated from a great number of different sources. Then he turned to call his first witness.

Inspector Richard Tanner stood and took the oath, confirming that the Metropolitan Police Commissioner had directed him to lead the investigation. Asked about the battered hat found in carriage 69, he confirmed
I have kept that hat in my possession under lock and key
.
It is a black, ordinary man’s hat … bent – the name of T. H. Walker, maker, was in it, Number 49 Crawford Street. The hat appeared to have stains of blood on it. I exhibited it to Matthews who is here present.

Marbury pressed Tanner to prove that the hat could not have been swapped or misidentified.
I had the hat in my possession before
[the coroner]
Mr Henry and on that occasion I showed
[it]
to Mr Ames and the witness examined it. It was the same hat I got from Kerressey.
Tanner also confirmed that he had been present during the witnesses’ oaths on 19 July, that he was in the habit of seeing warrants issued and depositions taken and that they were all
in the usual form in which depositions are taken in London
, delivered into his hands directly by the magistrate. He
asserted that he had seen the blood-spattered carriage and the dead body of Thomas Briggs, and he produced the pawn ticket received from Hoffa which related to the chain Müller was supposed to have carried away with him from Death’s shop.

Marbury’s questions over, Chauncey Shaffer pushed back his chair and rose purposefully to his feet.

Were you acquainted with Mr Briggs during his lifetime?

Can you be sure that it was the body of Mr Briggs at the inquest?

Did you apply tests to determine whether the stains on the hat were stains of blood?

Surely it is a very ordinary hat?

Tanner replied firmly in each case to questions designed to destabilise his testimony. He said that he had not known Thomas Briggs, that no tests had been applied to the hat which was, he accepted, a very ordinary one.

It was Marbury’s turn again. He prompted Tanner to describe the production of the circulated handbills. He pressed him to explain that Briggs’ own watchmaker had provided a detailed description of the missing watch, as well as the serial numbers on the case and the workings. The inspector confirmed that both those numbers corresponded with numbers on the watch found in Müller’s box when he was arrested on board the
Victoria.

Shaffer let it go. Could Tanner tell him
how many persons occupied the compartment of the car in which Mr Briggs had a seat from Bow to Hackney?

I do not know
, said Tanner.

When was Mr Henry, the magistrate, appointed?

I do not know.

When Shaffer suggested that the authenticity of the depositions was in doubt, the detective showed emotion for the first time, raising his voice to state
I have had many cases before the magistrate
and adding, emphatically, that
the depositions are similar to those I have seen in hundreds of cases
.

Walter Kerressey was the next to take the oath. He, too, was asked by Marbury to confirm that he had been present throughout the second Bow hearing and had watched each witness properly sworn and each statement duly signed, emphasising that there had been no room for official error. Once again, Marbury posed questions designed to leave no doubt that the crushed hat was genuine: Kerressey confirmed that the hat shown in court on 22 July was given to him by Tanner and separately identified by Elizabeth Repsch.

The only flaw in Kerressey’s testimony was that he had not been present when the American minister in London signed the papers now in court and that, never having seen Mr Adams’ signature, he was not personally able to verify it. Suggesting that these facts rendered the depositions invalid, Shaffer was again overruled by Commissioner Newton.

Edmond Blankman hoped to shake the certainty of the next witness, John Death, under cross-examination. But the jeweller stuck firm to his belief that he could identify the prisoner. He accepted that he served
maybe twenty people a day
and that with reference to Müller
there was no special mark about him by which I knew him.
Nevertheless, Death countered, he had found it easy to pick Müller out from
eight or nine persons all strangers to me
when he boarded the
Victoria.

He was also resolute and convincing about his identification of the chains.
I never saw the same pattern of chain before
, he said of the one belonging to Thomas Briggs.
It has a certain peculiarity by which once seen I would recollect it again.
John Death was, demonstrably, a man trained to notice the detail of things and was so unruffled by the questions put to him by the defence that he even added weight to his testimony by criticising the police’s description of the chain as partly inaccurate:
a chain somewhat like this is called the Clyde chain
, he said.
I would not call this an Albert chain. And this is a swivel seal. The description of this seal given in the proclamation does not properly
describe it.
Death’s confidence was unshakeable: Müller was the customer who came to barter with him on 11 July and Blankman could not rock his certainty.

Franz Müller watched impassively as Jonathan Matthews was asked to stand.
I have known him about two years
, said the cab driver.
I once bought a hat for him.
Matthews’ testimony centred on the hat he claimed to have procured, the same hat he had seen Müller wear several weeks prior to the murder, the very one shown to him by Detective Tanner and exhibited at the Bow Street Court.
I could not well be mistaken about the hat
, he growled. Conceding under cross-examination by Chauncey Shaffer that
the accused was a steady man and I should have given him a good character but for this case
, Matthews remained unmoved by Shaffer’s apparent preoccupation with their being two Walker hats, each identical to the other. On the contrary, he seemed to find the questions amusing. The hat he had bought for Müller was
a little easier
than his own, he replied. It crossed no one’s mind to ask whether the cabman had been asked to try on the bent hat in London to see how well it fitted.

Marbury had only two more witnesses to call, George Clarke and John Tieman. Both described the arrest of Müller on the
Victoria
and repeated Müller’s denial that he had ever travelled on the North London Railway line. Clarke identified the gold watch and the hat found in Müller’s box.
He said he had the hat about a
year, Tieman said in response to Shaffer’s questions,
and the watch two years.

The British government’s case for the prosecution was closed. Dusk was falling over the city and Commissioner Chas Newton adjourned the hearing until the following morning at eleven o’clock.

CHAPTER 19

Gathering Clouds

Wagons and carriages jostled against each other outside the Chambers Street court on Saturday morning as eager spectators hurried to arrive on time. The ladies’ wide cotton crinolines filled the corridors as they pressed into the courtroom, their straw bonnets competing with the gentlemen’s toppers. Along with the pack of newspapermen, they waited keenly for the arrival of the German prisoner, wondering aloud what Shaffer and Blankman might achieve in Müller’s defence.

Blankman began by asking for a postponement, citing the
exceedingly intricate and voluminous
nature of the depositions and the fact that they had been given only ten minutes to confer with their client. As precedents, he cited two recent cases in which the British government had obfuscated over American demands for the extradition of two men accused of murder. The first concerned
a negro slave called Anderson
who had fled to Canada. The case had been delayed for months, said Blankman, before it was finally adjudicated in London and then Anderson had been released on the grounds that, as a slave, he had been justified in making his escape by any means. The second case
centred on the murderous capture of an American vessel, the
Chesapeake
, by American men who had fled to Liverpool. Again, said Blankman, the British government had prevaricated for months before refusing American demands to return them for trial.

I do not claim
that because one nation refused to do right another should follow its example,
he averred, appealing to a latent American hostility to a perception that their former colonial masters had behaved with patrician arrogance.
The court erupted into applause
.

Further, contended Blankman, no finding from a coroner’s inquest had been produced for the American court. Since the jury at the inquest in Hackney had not yet returned a verdict, the case for murder had not been made and, if the inquest’s judgement were to be one of manslaughter, then there was no provision for prisoner extradition within the law.
Our client positively asserts his entire innocence of the charge
, concluded the lawyer.
The small delay we seek is as little as the court could grant.