Mr Briggs' Hat: The True Story of a Victorian Railway Murder (34 page)

Two days after the conclusion of his trial, on Monday 31 October,
Müller turned twenty-four
. News of the verdict had spread like wildfire and
The Times
reported that public interest in the case had
rarely been
equalled
… the prisoner having excited the utmost curiosity wherever the incidents have become known
. To
them it all seemed stranger than fiction. Who would have dreamt that when each man bought a new hat within weeks of each other their purchases would ultimately lead to the identification of the one as the murderer of the other? English law had been seen to be upheld and the nation could congratulate itself on the scrupulousness of its judicial system even while it debated the weakness of the defence, the slipperiness of circumstantial evidence, the
foolishness
of Mr Lee or the probability of premeditation. There was some confusion over the actual words spoken by Müller following Judge Martin’s sentence, speculation about who would receive the reward and wonderment that a determined and desperate killer could appear so cool and unperturbed.

The real problem was that neither Müller’s arrest, nor his trial nor the sentence under which he now laboured provided the absolute resolution that the nation sought. The big questions – the how and the why – remained unanswered so that while the editor of
The Times
expressed the view that
there ought not to rest
on the mind of any human being
[any]
doubt that on the night of the 9th July last Müller did assault and rob this old man in the railway carriage and leave him dying between the rails
, there was still a general feeling of dissatisfaction. People felt that the trial had reached a truth, but not its entirety.

The indirect nature of the evidence on which he had been convicted left people nervous and things remained unexplained. How was it possible for an attack of such violence to be perpetrated in a matter of minutes and attract no attention? Why were Müller’s clothes not covered in blood? What was the murder weapon? Who were the two men seen in carriage 69 that night? What should they really think of the proof that Müller’s ankle was injured days prior to the attack, slowing him down and making him conspicuous? The judges were certain that the prosecution’s case had been made beyond reasonable doubt but the
Telegraph
recognised that
the public will feel
a lurking doubt
whether we have at present got to the bottom of the mystery
.

There was only one sentence for murder – death – and only one escape:
to appeal to the Queen’s mercy
through the office of the Home Secretary. Appeals usually took the form of a request for the death penalty to be commuted to lifelong imprisonment with hard labour.
They were not unusual
– solicitors regularly complained of perjured evidence, unexamined witnesses and over-hasty trials – and only two months earlier the Home Secretary, Sir George Grey, had agreed to reduce
Mary Hartley’s death sentence
for the murder of her illegitimate child to one of a life of penal servitude. Despite this recent decision, though, most appeals were rejected. Grey was disinclined to neutralise verdicts by acting as a thirteenth juryman, both reticent about being seen to interfere with the process of the law and in favour of demonstrating to the ‘mob’ its swift retribution.

The consensus was that
the date of Müller’s execution would be delayed for the longest allowable period in order for the GLPS and Thomas Beard to request a reprieve. That would be in three Mondays’ time, 21 November. In fact, first thing on the Monday after the trial, the sheriffs advised Müller that the date had been set a fortnight hence.

Müller would be hanged by London’s public executioner, William Calcraft, a short, thickset, shambling man with straggling grey hair and beard who had served since 1829. Unlike his successor William Marwood, Calcraft was notorious for favouring the clumsy ‘short drop’ method, making no attempt to calculate from the prisoner’s weight and height the length of the rope needed swiftly to dislocate their spine. Instead, by using a short rope, he frequently left convicts to struggle as they died slowly from strangulation.

Eight years earlier, William Bousfield had managed to draw up his legs and lodge his feet on the side of the drop to prevent himself being throttled. Pushed off by one of the prison turnkeys, Bousfield found purchase for a second time before Calcraft dashed down the steps to hang onto his legs. Still he managed to
raise himself. On the fourth fall he submitted, but writhed violently for more than ten minutes before he died. Horrified, the prison officials withdrew from the scaffold and the crowd erupted into enraged yells. The
Morning Chronicle
would report that
the effect was rather that of a slaughtering
than an execution
but it was neither the first nor the last time that Calcraft failed to dispatch his victims with speed.

Each bungled occasion prompted short-lived outbursts of editorial feeling but scorn was traditionally voiced less at the hangman’s errors than at the behaviour of the crowds. In the previous century, Dr Johnson had asserted that if executions did not draw spectators then they
did
not answer their purpose.
During the nineteenth century, that point of view began to lose its force and the question of whether the public spectacle of judicial killing exercised any deterrent effect began
vigorously to be debated.

The earliest record of parliamentary dissent was recorded in 1819. Twenty-one years later the House was given its first vote on the abolition of capital punishment. It failed. As the 1840s progressed, arguments about the effectiveness of capital punishment were energised by the bestiality of the vast hordes that congregated for the executions of notorious murderers including the Swiss valet Courvoisier for the murder of Lord William Russell in 1840, and husband and wife Maria and Frederick Manning nine years later.

Witnessed by several writers, philosophers and politicians, they generated an outpouring of written and visual material, including a tirade from William Makepeace Thackeray after attending the murderer Peytel’s execution in France in 1839. Describing the savage spectacle, Thackeray was unconvinced that any of the spectators had been
deterred, or frightened or moralised
;
he had gratified his appetite for blood, and this was all
. Unable to reconcile capital punishment with Christian morality, the novelist asked,
Who gave you the right to do so? You,
who cry out against suicides as impious and contrary to Christian law? What use is there in killing him? You deter no one.

A year later, Thackeray’s horror was compounded by the
sickening, ghastly, wicked scene
of Courvoisier’s execution in London.
Where is the reason
for the practice,
he wrote in
Fraser’s Magazine
,
knowing … that revenge is not only evil, but useless? … I came away … that morning with a disgust for murder, but it was for the murder I saw done … So salutary has the impression of the butchery been upon me … that I feel myself ashamed and degraded at the brutal curiosity which took me to the … sight.
Charles Dickens agreed, writing of the
odious levity
, the lechery, ribaldry, vice and drunkenness of crowds that had turned Courvoisier’s death into a shameful theatrical spectacle. Yet by the Mannings’ execution a decade later, Dickens had
abandoned his abolitionist stance
in favour of private executions, arguing that – far from demonstrating the resumption of order by the ruling classes and instead of providing an antidote to the anxiety of the age – public executions served no useful reformative purpose. Worse, they brutalised and corrupted.

1864 had so far provided few opportunities for London mobs to congregate at the ghoulish spectacle of public death. In February, a
crowd of thirty thousand
had jeered at the ‘exhibition’ of five foreign sailors being hanged simultaneously for murdering the captain of their British ship. Just a few thousand gathered for the executions of murderers John Devine in May and Frederick Charles Bricknell at the start of August.

Their crimes paled, though, beside the widespread horror occasioned by the murder of Thomas Briggs on his suburban train and, with the date now set for Müller’s sentence to be carried out, the sheriffs exhorted him to spend his time in preparation for his death. Above all, what they wanted was a confession. To meet God with a lie on one’s lips and a stain on one’s heart was to invite an everlasting damnation dreaded by most Victorians. A confession would also serve a wider purpose:
illuminating the motive behind the murder and clarifying whether it really had been the act of a single man; it would erase any doubt about his innocence and minimise the potential for riots at his death. Fearful of allowing him false hope, the prison authorities considered it crucial that Müller should not be told of the efforts by the GLPS on his behalf.

*

Sixty-five-year-old Sir George Grey, a trained lawyer and lifelong politician, had held the position of Home Secretary twice before. Grave, patrician and somewhat dismissive, he ran a department that was the repository of every petition concerning prisons, asylums, the police and the country’s institutions. In preparation for the anticipated legal arguments for a reprieve – known as a ‘Memorial’ – he followed custom by asking both trial judges for their opinion. Both Pollock and Martin confirmed their faith in the conclusive evidence of Müller’s guilt. As far as they were concerned, no legal reason existed to justify either a postponement of the execution or a reprieve.

The anxiety for Müller to confess contained
a perplexing inconsistency
. If the public mind was destabilised by doubt, should those very uncertainties not have played to his benefit in court? The newspapers were, on the whole, convinced that a Memorial would fail: even if his alibi could be strengthened, even if the dubious docks peddler were to be found, what could explain the possession of those two hats? The
Daily News
believed that the process would only strengthen the
circumstantial evidence on which the jury proceeded. It is seen that it is not a chain which breaks at its weakest point but
a solid pyramid of facts
rising to an apex of conviction.

Yet
letters in their hundreds
began arriving at the Home Office, some from abolitionists petitioning for Müller’s reprieve on religious grounds
lest the curse of innocent blood should be brought on the whole nation
, and others from correspondents
who wondered why Thomas Lee had never properly been believed. All of them raised questions. If the convict had jumped from the train how was it possible that he had escaped injury? Given the saturation of pre-trial publicity, was it possible to find an unbiased jury? Should Müller not have been allowed to speak in his own defence? Was it right to believe Mrs Repsch’s and Matthews’ testimonies without asking either the Blyths or Hoffa – who knew him better – the same questions about the ownership of the Walker hat? Had Judge Pollock’s summation been impartial and fair?

The facts of Müller’s good character and of his diminutive stature were pressed in his defence while Matthews’ reputation elicited furious censure. There were letters expressing anger that the police had failed to pursue statements made during the summer months. Others focused on Müller’s denial upon his arrest that he would not know his way to either Bow or Hackney Wick stations, pointing out that his lodgings were not close to either while the omnibus from the City passed conveniently close to his door. All these correspondents believed that irretrievable sentences demanded infallible judges, and that a shadow of doubt had attached itself to Müller; all demanded a postponement of his sentence in order to reinvestigate the facts.

No details of Müller’s immediate family had been included in the material sent from Germany. In New York he had mentioned, and watched for, a sister who had not appeared. Now, interleaved among the bulging papers shuffled by Home Office staff into paper files, were short notes from Sophia Pearson of 15 Shaftesbury Terrace, Pimlico. Pearson claimed to be another of Müller’s sisters and wrote to Sir George Grey that, on the Monday following his conviction, she had presented herself at Newgate in the hope of visiting her brother but had been
thrust from the Door like a Dog and told I was Drunk. I then walk
[sic]
to and fro the street pleading to God to save and protect poor Müller
.

Grey’s secretary wrote cursorily to advise Sophia Pearson to
apply to the prison authorities, and then he washed his hands of her. Turning to every quarter – including the Queen – for help but, receiving no further replies, Pearson’s letters grew desperate as the days passed.
Grant me an interview with poor Müller
, she wrote.
I have waited 12 hours in the deepest suspence
[sic]
no answer came. So this is what is called justice to the condemned man. I plead in the name of God.
As the days passed, Müller received other visitors while she was refused and ignored, questioning whether there were
two rules – one for the Rich and another for the Poor?
Her words fell on deaf ears. The letters petered out. Presumably she was forced to give up hope and, for a second time, no sister appeared to comfort Müller in his adversity.