Shooting Victoria (20 page)

The
Times
was right. There was, at the time, no formal detective branch of the Metropolitan Police. There were, however, the special “active officers” of A Division, particularly Nicholas Pearce, whom commissioners Rowan and Mayne quickly assigned to the case—but not quickly enough; Pearce knew that the best lead to capturing Good had been his wife Molly, and he was enraged by M'Gill's hamfisted intrusion, which stymied his investigation. This tiny and unofficial detective force, therefore, was neither known to the public nor adequate to capture Good. The popular anxiety caused by a monster at large, and the subsequent call by the newspapers for immediate reform, made it clear to the Commissioners
that, in the public mind, the fear of violent crime now outweighed the fear of continental-style espionage. It was time to create a detective branch.

Ten days after the discovery of Jane Jones's body, Good was captured. He had bought himself a laborer's fustian outfit and a bricklayer's hod, and escaped south to Tonbridge, in Kent. There he found work building houses springing up beside the new railway. Thomas Rose, a fellow laborer, recognized him. By a remarkable coincidence, Rose had been a constable in V Division—the division covering Roehampton—where Rose knew Good well. Rose reported his suspicions to the railway police; Good was, in quick succession, arrested, transferred to Bow Street, examined, clapped into Newgate, tried, and sentenced to death.

If the Commissioners needed further evidence that London was in need of a formal detective branch, they soon had it; while Good sulked in Newgate, awaiting trial, a petty criminal in the northern outskirts of the metropolis demonstrated to all the weakness of a wholly uniformed and largely unarmed police force.

Thomas Cooper, a morose 23-year-old who had an obsession with guns, a pathological hatred of the police, and a powerful suicidal urge, had launched a personal crime wave north of Highbury. Equipped with a couple of formidable flintlock horse pistols—but no horse—Cooper fancied himself a highwayman and had taken to brutally mugging passersby on the semi-rural roads of Hornsey. The superintendent of this police division—N division—had assigned extra officers to patrol the area. On the afternoon of 5 May, one of these officers, Charles Moss, was watching carefully a gentleman who ostentatiously exhibited a heavily ornamented watch chain, expecting that this man might encourage his own mugging. Moss then spotted Cooper lurking behind the gentleman. Cooper, perceiving Moss in his police uniform, ducked behind a hedge, where Moss found him, his two pistols lying on the ground beside him. When Moss attempted to take Cooper into custody,
Cooper sprang up and pointed one of the pistols at Moss's head. Moss defensively stooped and raised his left arm as Cooper fired a bullet point-blank through that limb. He then shifted his pistols and pulled the trigger again: the hammer clicked—a misfire. Moss then grappled with Cooper with his one good arm as long as he could; Cooper pushed him away, retreated a few steps, and growled at him: if Moss tried to follow him, or raise an alarm, he would shoot him dead. Moss of course raised an alarm, crying out “Murder!” Cooper then pulled a carving-knife from his coat, menaced the officer, turned, and fled across the fields. Moss followed him as far as he was able, but soon collapsed from loss of blood. But he had raised the hue and cry; a waiter from a nearby inn and another policeman soon ran up to him, and continued the chase. Had Cooper run north, he would have found cover in nearby woods, but he headed south, toward the city, making himself visible to all at some distance, while the alarm traveled faster than Cooper did. A number of men joined in a surreal chase, during which Cooper was always visible, but always out of reach: he outmatched his pursuers in leaping hedges and fences, and thus found time to pause, both to reload his pistols (using grass instead of wadding to hold his bullets in place), and apparently to gulp down a vial of poison—a mixture of arsenic and laudanum that he had been holding for some time. (This slow-acting poison did not kill him, but in time, and for the rest of his short life, it debilitated him.) As he lost some pursuers, he gained even more. After zig-zagging for a couple miles and reaching Highbury, Cooper managed to run into one of the few cul-de-sacs in the area, with a dozen or more men on his heels, including a journeyman baker, Charles Mott, and yet another police constable, Timothy Daly. One pursuer took up a brick, and another—probably Mott—a stick, but Cooper was the only one with pistols, and he used them to keep his pursuers at bay for some time. Daly challenged him—“I don't think those pistols are loaded,” he called out, to which Cooper promised to shoot the first man who tried to take him. While Cooper glanced from
side to side at those grouped around him, the baker, Mott, lunged toward him; he tripped while doing so, and Cooper fired his left pistol, wounding him in the shoulder. Cooper then turned, took deliberate aim at Daly with his right hand, and shot him through the stomach; Daly reeled half a circle and fell dead. The crowd then seized and bound Cooper.

Cooper was well known to the police of N Division, having appeared repeatedly at police court both for assault and for robbery. He was once taken up with his mother for stealing a gown; this charge was unfounded, but he was so angry at the treatment of his mother by the arresting officer, Inspector Penny, that Cooper assaulted Penny brutally, earning himself a month's imprisonment. Ever since, he had harbored a special enmity toward Penny, and, in custody, he only regretted killing Daly instead of Penny. Nonetheless, he seemed pleased to have killed a policeman: it served him right. Witnesses testified that he'd several times stated “I shall never be happy until I am the death of one of them.”

The result of this pursuit was messy: one policeman was dead, and another policeman, as well as a civilian, seriously wounded. Cooper was a sociopath, well known to the police; detectives on the case, in plain clothes—and perhaps armed—would likely have brought about a happier outcome. Commissioners Rowan and Mayne had a second impetus for formally instituting a detective branch.

They would soon have a third, occasioned by the swarthy and good-looking young man standing outside Newgate waiting for Good to be hanged.

Thomas Cooper, occasionally sullen and occasionally violent in custody, was remanded to Newgate to be tried for the murder of Timothy Daly. He would have been tried in the same session as Good, except that his lawyer had successfully pleaded for more time to track down witnesses who could testify to his insanity. When Daniel Good was led to his execution, then, Cooper listened
to the sounds of another man's execution from his Newgate cell, as Edward Oxford had heard Courvoisier's two years before.

For days, all of those surrounding the condemned man—the sheriffs, prison ordinary Carver, Governor Cope—persistently exhorted Good to confess to his crimes. They failed: unlike Cour-voisier, who couldn't confess enough, Good went to his death denying he had committed any crime. He stuck to the same story he had blurted out the moment his sentence of death was spoken. Susan Butcher, he claimed, was the cause of all his troubles. Jane Jones, on discovering Good's relationship with Butcher, despaired and killed herself. Good decided the body needed to be disposed of, and so he enlisted the help of an itinerant match-seller from the neighborhood of Brompton, a man whom no one else ever saw: this helpful gentleman, for a guinea, chopped up the body and burned up the limbs since they were too heavy to carry away; he was supposed to return to Roehampton to finish the job, but never did. According to this story, Good was guilty neither of murder nor of dismemberment: “I never touched the body of the woman, alive or dead! So help me God!” he cried to anyone who would listen. No one believed him, but Good stuck to this story with a religious intensity, dividing his moments before his walk to the scaffold between protesting his innocence vehemently and bestowing passionate blessings on all around him.

The hangman Calcraft stood apart from the rest; he was not concerned with Good's soul—only with his body; in the minute before Good's final walk, he removed his neckerchief and turned down his collar. The party then set out, Good with a firm step, loudly begging God to save his soul. He climbed, unassisted, the steps of the scaffold to the thunderous noise of an enraged mob, with their “hideous yells” and “long-continued execrations.” Calcraft slipped the noose around his neck and prepared to slip a black hood over his head. “Stop! Stop!” Good cried, wanting to address the crowd. It was not in a mood to listen. Calcraft told him he'd be better off listening to Reverend Carver's prayers, slipped on the
hood, and drew the bolt. It was one of Calcraft's short drops, and Good struggled violently before dying.

It was, as Denman predicted, a good deed done: so the now-dispersing crowd thought, anyway, including the good-looking, swarthy young man named John Francis. When the pressing humanity lessened to the point that Francis could move, he set out with a feeling of moral edification up Skinner Street and Holborn Hill, toward the neighborhood in Marylebone, where he shared a room with his good friend William Elam. He made his way to the Caledonian Coffee House, on Mortimer Street, where he spent hours every day, where he had first met Elam, and where he had become well acquainted with many others. A number of his friends were here this morning, some, certainly, returning from Good's execution. Francis was in a gregarious mood: he joked about the hanging over his coffee. It was a damned good job that Good was executed, he told his friends. Hanging “was much too good for such a fellow.”

Francis had every reason to be high-spirited and morally complacent; the contrast between that monster Good and himself must have seemed absolute. Good had rendered himself a pariah in the eyes of all Englishmen. Francis had been for weeks following in the newspapers Good's downward trajectory, and had witnessed his last step into well-deserved oblivion. Good was nothing, while his own moral and economic stock was rising. He was poised to rise above the social status of a craftsman that his father, a stage carpenter at Covent Garden Theatre, had occupied for decades, a life that his father had attempted to force upon him by apprenticing him to the theatre. He had left that all behind, and yearned for middle-class respectability, as the owner of well-appointed tobacconist's business. Later this day he was to take a lease on a shop and parlor at 63 Mortimer Street. He had already engaged for his name to be painted on the door, for business cards to be printed, and for delivery of tobacconists' supplies; these would arrive on Wednesday. Good had fallen. Francis was confident that he would ascend.

Young John Francis had grown up in the heart of the teeming metropolis, with his family at the busy intersection of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street. His parents still lived there with his sisters Mary and Jane. Though he lived in the center of the civilized world, Francis's own existence was strictly circumscribed. When he first began work, he traveled each day to Covent Garden, a few streets southeast, closer to the river. Then, just a few months before Good's execution, he had a violent altercation with his father, and he fled his home. He moved into a nearby room on Great Titchfield Street, James Foster, a tailor, as his landlord and Elam as his roommate. He attempted—feebly, it seems—to survive as a journeyman carpenter in the adjoining neighborhood of Paddington, around the fairly newly built terminus for the Great Western Railway. Since then, he had lived within shouting distance of his family but could have been an ocean away, for all they knew about his life. He might have dropped in on them occasionally—his father mentioned that he came for Sunday dinner—but he was a cipher to them: they did not know where he lived, what he did, what company he kept. He was too proud to tell them that he was finding few jobs and was almost out of money, having been too poor for the last three months to pay rent for his room.

A few months before, it seemed certain that he would follow in his father's footsteps. John Francis Senior was a fixture at Covent Garden, working as carpenter and machinist there for a quarter-century. He was a close and long-standing friend of the head machinist, Henry Sloman, who had been a witness to the marriage of John Francis Sr. and Elizabeth, Francis's mother, in 1817. John Francis Jr. had been born in November 1822, and likely experienced his father's theatrical world at close hand, from backstage—perhaps witnessing as a child the slapstick antics of Grimaldi, the sublime acting of Kean, the dazzling virtuosity of Paganini, or, more recently, the seductive dancing of young Lola Montez. The census of 1841 lists John Francis Sr. as a carpenter, and his son as an apprentice carpenter—an apprentice, in other words, at Covent
Garden. John Jr. showed talent. And in 1841, there were few places in the world where a talented young stage carpenter would be able to culture his talents better than Covent Garden Theatre.

Covent Garden in the early 1840s was one of London's three patent theatres, all under royal license with exclusive rights to perform serious drama. Because of the patent, John Francis Senior saw himself as, in a sense, a servant to the Queen: when, in coming weeks, he had occasion to write to Victoria, he presented himself as “one of the Artisans of Your Majesty's Theatre Royal Covent Garden … for more than 23 years.” The idea was not completely absurd: the Queen was a true lover of drama, and a frequent playgoer in the early years of her reign, and thus a frequent witness to the work of the Francises and their colleagues. Covent Garden's stage crew was expected to perform miracles daily. The theatre was immense, seating upwards of three thousand playgoers, and for years the various proprietors of the theatre faced a losing battle to fill those seats. Their strategy, invariably, was to provide everything for everyone, presenting variety, quality, and quantity, night after night. The plays of Shakespeare were, of course, staples, but the theatre provided the gamut of performance: contemporary drama, melodrama, farce, opera, dance, pantomime, “extravaganzas,” and musical and animal acts. A ticket for an evening's performance would buy admission to not one show, but two or more: Congreve's
School for Scandal
might be followed by the pantomime
Guy Earl of Warwick or Harlequin and the Dun Cow
, Douglas Jerrold's comedy
Bubbles of the Day
by an elaborated version of Milton's masque
Comus
, Mozart's
Marriage of Figaro
by Planché's fairy tale
White Cat
. Victoria and Albert had seen all these shows in the early months of 1842.