The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime

Half a century later, magazines were still reprinting these rumours, and creating new ones: ‘Williams was so notorious an infamous man, for all his oily and snaky duplicity, that the captain of his vessel, the Roxburgh Castle, had always predicted that. he would mount the gibbet.’ This comes from All the Year Round, Charles Dickens’ magazine, and Dickens was evidently fascinated by Williams, and in no doubt about his guilt. As well as commissioning this article, he owned an illustration of ‘the horrible creature’, and had also touched lightly on the subject in Dombey and Son (1847–48): when Captain Cuttle, who lives down by the docks, keeps his shutters closed one day, the neighbours speculate ‘that he lay murdered with a hammer, on the stairs’.

Meanwhile, the authorities had to decide how to respond to Williams’ death. Most immediately, they needed to show the local residents that he would not escape justice by his suicide. It would be another century before a British judge decreed that it is ‘of fundamental importance that justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done’, but the idea was already well understood. So on the last day of 1811, an inclined wooden platform was placed atop a high cart. Williams’ body was laid out on this, dressed in a clean white shirt (frilled, say some sources), blue trousers and brown stockings: in other words, in the neat, clean dress of a labouring man, although without a neck-handkerchief or hat, marks of decency and respectability. His right leg was manacled, as it would have been when he was in gaol. The maul was placed on one side of his head, the ripping chisel on the other.

At ten o’clock, a macabre and unprecedented procession set off at a stately walking pace. The head constable led the way, followed by

Several hundred constables, with their staves …

The newly-formed Patrole [sic], with drawn cutlasses.

Another body of Constables.

Parish Officers of St. George’s and St. Paul’s, and Shadwell, on horseback.

Peace Officers, on horseback, Constables.

The High Constable of the county of Middlesex, on horseback

THE BODY OF WILLIAMS …

A strong body of Constables brought up the rear.

Crowds lined the route; more watched from windows and even the rooftops. Shops were shut, blinds drawn as a mark of respect to the Marrs and the Williamsons. The cart travelled first to the Ratcliffe Highway, where it stood for a quarter of an hour outside the Marrs’ house. An enraged member of the public climbed onto the cart and forcibly turned Williams’ head towards the house, to ensure that the murderer was brought face to face with the scene of his crime. Then the procession travelled on to New Gravel Lane, where again the cart rested outside the death site. Finally it processed to Cannon Street, on the edge of the City, and paused again. Then a stake was driven through Williams’ heart (some reports say hammered home by the fatal maul), and his body was tumbled into a grave – some sources say a large one, so he could be tossed in; others that it was purposely made too small and shallow. Either way, the intention was to show deliberate disrespect. The crowd, which had so far watched in almost total silence, howled to see the last of the man who had killed seven people – half as many as had been murdered in the entire previous year throughout England and Wales.

This was not the last the world was to see of John Williams. Bodily, he reappeared in 1886, when workmen laying a gas pipe in what was now the heart of the City dug up a skeleton with a stake through its heart. Rumour later had it that at some point Williams’ skull appeared in the keeping of the publican ‘at the corner of Cable Street and Cannon Street Road’. In 1886 the Pall Mall Gazette further reported that Madame Tussaud’s waxworks had a ‘beautifully executed’ portrait of Williams, drawn from life by Sir Thomas Lawrence. But when precisely had Lawrence seen Williams? In the two days between his arrest and suicide? Or perhaps in his final, cart-top appearance?

Williams was to cast a longer shadow on the mental attitudes to crime and crime prevention in the nineteenth century than his skeletal remains could do physically. His ghost made several appearances in Parliament in the months that followed his death. The government was slower than the public to embrace the solution of Williams as the sole murderer. In a debate, the radical MP William Smith simply assumed that the crimes had been committed by ‘a gang of villains, of whom few or no traces had yet been discovered’. The Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, agreed with him.* The case ‘was still wrapped up in mystery. It undoubtedly seemed strange that a single individual could commit such accumulated violence.’

It was not the mystery that troubled the politicians; it was that policing throughout London was now seen to be completely inadequate. The city was still eighteen years away from establishing a centralized police force, and relied on a patchwork of overlapping organizations that had developed independently. By 1780 there were 800,000 inhabitants living in London’s two hundred parishes, which were responsible for the watch and policing, and also for lighting, waste disposal, street maintenance and care of the poor. But nothing was straightforward: Lambeth parish had nine trusts responsible for street lighting, St Pancras eighteen for paving; by 1800 there were fifty London trusts charged with maintaining the turnpike roads alone. In 1790, a thousand parish watchmen and constables were employed by seventy separate trusts. And even twenty years before that, in a city that was then much smaller, Sir John Fielding, the famous Bow Street magistrate, had warned Parliament that ‘the Watch. is in every Parish under the Direction of a separate Commission’, which left ‘the Frontiers of each Parish in a confused State, for that where one side of a street lies in one Parish, the Watchmen of one Side cannot lend any Assistance to [a] Person on the other Side, other than as a private Person, except in cases of Felony’.

In 1792, in a preliminary attempt to rationalize this motley collection of responsibilities, the Middlesex Justice Bill was passed, creating seven metropolitan police offices, each to be staffed by three magistrates and six constables, with at least one magistrate in each of the offices having legal qualifications (previously magistrates had simply been men of a certain status and level of wealth). In 1798 a privately funded force was set up to police the river and docks, paid for by the local West Indies merchants. In 1800 this force was taken over by the magistrates, and named the Thames River Police, with its own magistrate, Patrick Colquhoun.

By the end of the eighteenth century, with the population of London approaching a million, crime prevention was the responsibility of fifty constables and eight Runners at Bow Street magistrates’ court and the seven police offices, plus a thousand additional constables and two night-time Bow Street patrols of 122 men. There were also 2,000 parish watchmen, who covered the 8,000 streets of London after dark. Some indication of the attitudes towards these two groups of men can be seen from their pay. The Bow Street patrols were paid between 17s.6d. and 28s. a week; by contrast, many watchmen received a beggarly 4s.11d. Colquhoun commented on the contempt that was shown these forces: ‘It is an honourable profession to repel by force the enemies of the state. Why should it not be equally so to resist and to conquer these domestic invaders of property, and destroyers of lives who are constantly in a state of criminal warfare?’

The answer was that this ‘honourable profession’ was shrouded in mystery, and what people did know of it, they despised, the prevailing mental image being not a law-enforcer, but more a law-breaker: the eighteenth-century thief-taker, the criminal turncoat. That was about to change, partly through the publication of the memoirs of the French detective Eugène Vidocq (1775–1857). Vidocq had started his career as a not terribly successful criminal. After a number of convictions, he became a police spy, or informer, working secretly for the government while still in prison. In 1811 he was one of four ex-convicts to be made a detective, and in 1812 he became the head of the newly created Brigade de Sûreté, with thirty men under his command. None of this would have been of more than passing interest in Britain, had it not been for his Mémoires, which in translation swiftly became a best-seller.

It is almost certain that Vidocq did not write his own Memoirs. Nor can they truly be called biography. The last two volumes borrow wildly from a variety of sources, including a short story previously published by one of his ghost writers, while entire passages are blatantly lifted from The Police of London, a work of policy reform by Patrick Colquhoun, with French place names substituted for Colquhoun’s original English ones. Nonetheless, the Memoirs were brilliant PR, with Vidocq transformed from an old-style thief-taker to a sympathetic outlaw, and then to a new thing altogether – both in literature and in life – a detective, although what he described barely resembled what was later to be known as detection (and it would be another twenty years before the word itself was invented). For the moment, Vidocq merely intensified the spy system of the Revolution, keeping extensive records on known criminals and paying informants. Mostly in the Memoirs he disguises himself and hangs about in low haunts in order to overhear criminals plotting, or just bribes someone to tell him about a planned crime, which he then foils.

Vidocq’s Memoirs found a ready audience, and, more importantly for popular recognition, in 1829 they were adapted in two theatrical versions: at the Coburg Theatre, as Vidocq, the French Police Spy, by J.B. Buckstone; and, just down the road from the Coburg, at the Surrey, in Douglas Jerrold’s rival version, with only an exclamation point’s difference: Vidocq! the French Police Spy. That year the words ‘police spy’ had particular resonance, as Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel finally managed to finesse through Parliament the Act that created the Metropolitan Police, replacing the old parish watch system and creating what has been called the first professional police force.*

Three decades earlier, Colquhoun had written, ‘Police in this country may be considered as a new science, the properties of which consist not in the Judicial Powers which lead to Punishment, and which belong to the magistrates alone, but in the Prevention and Detection of crimes.’ This, today so routine, was groundbreaking, in a single sentence setting policing on an entirely new track: that it was a professional job; that it and the legal system were two different arenas; and that it should be preventative, acting prior to the commission of criminal acts. John Fielding, a remarkable magistrate, had, it is true, begun to move towards detection when he set up a ‘Register of Robberies, Informations, Examinations, Convictions, suspicious Book [sic], and Newgate Calendars’ – that is, not a register of crimes only, but of potential criminals and potential crime. But for the most part, prosecution after the commission of a crime was all that was expected. This had been fairly efficient in rural communities and towns, where populations were small and people all knew each other. In rapidly urbanizing areas, however, crime detection was more difficult, and the number of cases that came before the magistrates put them under enormous pressure.

Frequently the system functioned well: there were six House of Commons select committee reports in the decade leading up to 1822, and many parish watch schemes were commended as ‘exemplary and meritorious’. But others were unimaginably venal and corrupt. When Sir John Fielding was on the bench, Bow Street magistrates’ court had been a model of what might be achieved under the old methods. For example, a Runner named John Clarke, previously a silversmith, used his knowledge of metalworking to track down counterfeiters, testifying at nearly half of the Old Bailey coining trials between 1771 and 1798. When he gave evidence, the conviction rate was 82 per cent; when he was absent, it dropped to 40 per cent. But by the time William Mainwaring took over in 1781 as Chairman of both the Middlesex and the Westminster Sessions, corruption was endemic. Mainwaring persuaded the government to pay him a secret extra salary, while institutionalizing cronyism and nepotism.

The lack of success following the Marr murders ensured that changes were swiftly made at local level. The watchmen in Shadwell were relieved of their duty and replaced by two companies of eighteen men patrolling nightly, each equipped with a rattle, a lantern, a cutlass and a pistol. At Wapping, sixteen extra men were drafted in, and the Thames Police Office arranged for further street policing over Christmas. Several neighbouring parishes also drew up volunteer patrols to augment the watch. Even so, a letter to the Home Office on 28 December 1811 warned that ‘the frequency of the late horrible Outrages must induce a Belief that the wicked Part of the Community is becoming too strong for the law’. The Morning Post concurred: ‘Either respectable householders must determine to be their own guardians, or we must have a regularly enlisted armed police under the orders of proper officers.’ Many frightened citizens wrote to the Home Secretary with their own ideas, nearly all of which involved increasing the size and frequency of rewards: in effect buying improved detection from criminals and their cohorts. Many believed that these cohorts included the watch themselves, who seemed to spend far too much time with criminals. William Smith harrumphed that ‘it was extremely scandalous that the Police Officers should be upon such terms of intimacy with the most notorious offenders’.

To deal with the crisis of confidence, a parliamentary select committee was set up to study the question, and it reported in March 1812. The effects of this report still matter today, because it advocated taking crime prevention away from the local authorities, and putting a single centralized authority in overall control of policing throughout London. Robert Southey, who would be named Poet Laureate the following year, and was now as ardent an opponent of political reform as he had once been a promoter of Thomas Paine and the French Revolution, agreed: ‘I have very long felt the necessity of an improved police, and these dreadful events, I hope and trust, will lead to the establishment of one as vigilant as that of Paris used to be. The police laws cannot be too rigorous; and the usual objection that a rigorous police is inconsistent with English liberty might easily be shown to be absurd.’ True, there was a dissident voice in the Earl of Dudley, who said that he ‘would rather half a dozen people’s throats should be cut in Ratcliffe Highway every three or four years than to be subject to domiciliary visits, spies, and all the rest of Fouché’s contrivances’.* But then, Dudley’s socio-economic position made him safer than most.

Thomas de Quincey might at first appear to have taken the affair more lightly, as he mockingly reported on his neighbour, who after the murders ‘never rested until she had placed eighteen doors. each secured by ponderous bolts, and bars, and chains, between her own bedroom and any intruder of human build. To reach her, even in her drawing room, was like going … into a beleaguered fortress.’ This seemed at first simply a comic coda, but de Quincey’s contribution was greater than anyone at the time could have imagined, as the Ratcliffe Highway murders spurred him to one of literature’s greatest flights of fancy, in the satirical essays referred to collectively under the title On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts. In the first essay, de Quincey’s narrator introduces himself and his subject at a meeting of connoisseurs of murder: ‘GENTLEMEN, – I have had the honour to be appointed by your committee to the trying task of reading the Williams’ Lecture on Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts’ – a task, he goes on to explain, which is increasingly difficult, as excellence in the field raises the bar for more aesthetic murders: ‘People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads. a knife – a purse – and a dark lane. Mr. Williams has exalted the ideal of murder to all of us. he has carried his art to a point of colossal sublimity.’ De Quincey is making a serious point: in Macbeth, we are interested not in the victim, Duncan, but in the thoughts of the murderer, Macbeth, just as we are more interested in murderers than we are in their victims. De Quincey’s narrator suggests that murder is an art, that murder is theatre, and that Williams was an artist who had written a sensational play that hundreds of thousands wanted to see.

De Quincey then takes the story of the Marr and Williamson murders and himself turns them into art. The main figures are given psychological depth, and a motive is imagined. Most importantly, Williams is turned, as one literary critic observes, into ‘a sort of Miltonic, ruined God’, with a glamorized physical description to match his inward corruption of spirit. A sandy, undistinguished-looking man in life, in art Williams has a ‘bloodless, ghastly pallor’, and hair of ‘the most extraordinary and vivid colour … something between an orange and a lemon colour’. His clothes, too, undergo a metamorphosis. He no longer wears the rough dress of a sailor. Instead de Quincey imagines a dandified being, dressing for an evening’s slaughter in black silk stockings and pumps and with a long blue coat of ‘the very finest cloth. richly lined in silk’. The murderer is now more vampire than cash-strapped sailor, more great actor than street thug.

In reality, there were few of de Quincey’s type of murderer. Yet, as his imaginary lecturer knows, ‘the world in general. are very bloody-minded; and all they want in a murder is a copious effusion of blood’. How this desire was transformed over the nineteenth century, and how it, in turn, transformed that century, is my subject.

* Even a decade later, after the arrival of some gas lighting, the streets were still darker and more confusing than can be imagined today. In 1822 Daniel Forrester, a detective for the City of London, became involved in a street fracas. It was only when he got the man who rescued him under a street lamp that he realized it was his own brother. With streets as dark as that, it is not surprising that ‘One gas light is as good as two policemen’ was a common maxim.

* The stages of prosecution for felonies and serious crimes were as follows: fi rst, the accused appeared before a justice of the peace or a magistrate, where it was decided whether there was a suffi ciently strong case; if so, the prisoner was committed for trial; a bill of indictment was drawn up, setting out the charge; a Grand Jury then considered the written depositions of the witnesses and, if they found a ‘true bill’ that there was a case to answer, the prisoner was tried by a jury. For murder cases, the early hearings often coincided with the inquest on the body, which was held separately. For concision’s sake I have omitted the repetition of evidence from one stage to the next.

* Perceval would himself be murdered four months later, the only British Prime Minister ever to be assassinated, but for some reason the crime barely captured the imagination of the public, and will feature no further in this book. Similarly, I will not be discussing the seven attempts to assassinate Queen Victoria.

* Colquhoun and the River Police were among the first to use the word ‘police’ in English. There had been a London Police Bill in 1785, and the magistrate John Fielding used the word that same year, but it was not yet common. In 1814 the Irish police (Sir Robert Peel’s first attempt to form a centralized force) were called the ‘Peace Preservation Force’ and manned by ‘constables’ not ‘policemen’.

* Joseph Fouché (1759–1820) was Napoleon’s Minister for Police. He had been an ardent Jacobin in the early part of the French Revolution, eventually being dubbed the ‘Executioner of Lyons’, as he oversaw so many executions that the victims’ blood blocked the city’s gutters. Under Napoleon, he exerted an iron grip on state security, and the British considered – rightly – that his police force consisted almost entirely of spies and agents provocateurs, hence Dudley’s comment.

TWO Trial by Newspaper

‘A copious effusion of blood’ was something that John Thurtell certainly provided. His crime has been said to have founded newspaper fortunes, for his was the first ‘trial by newspaper’, his actions read and judged by people across the country long before he was brought to trial. That it should have been Thurtell who caught the imagination of the public in this way is extraordinary, for his was a sordid, brutal and remarkably unsuccessful crime. John Thurtell, failed cloth merchant, failed publican and failed gambler, was also a failed murderer.

On 28 October 1823, one Charles Nicholls, of Aldenham in Hertfordshire, arrived in Watford, anxious to notify the magistrates of ‘some singular circumstances pointing to foul play’. He had been passing through Gill’s Hill Lane (then countryside, now in the small town of Radlett) when he saw some road-menders combing the bushes. They told him that that morning they had met a stranger searching the verge. He explained that his gig had overturned the previous night, and he was trying to find his missing penknife and handkerchief. After he left, the road-menders continued his search, hoping that valuables might also have fallen from the gig. Instead they found a knife and a pistol, both of which had dried, caked, brownish deposits on them, looking suspiciously like blood; the pistol, furthermore, had hair and what might even be brains sticking to its butt. Charles Nicholls consequently hot-footed it to Watford.

One of the magistrates immediately went to Gill’s Hill – with no police, magistrates did their own investigation. He learned enough there to lead him to arrest a man named William Probert, who rented a cottage nearby. Two men, John Thurtell and Joseph Hunt, were reported to have spent the night at Probert’s cottage, but they had returned to London that morning. The next day, therefore, the magistrate sent for the Bow Street Runners.

The Runners had no formal status, and were not linked to the metropolitan police offices, which were under the aegis of the Home Office. The Bow Street magistrates were, for historical reasons, paid from a secret-service account, while the Runners were in turn Bow Street’s own, privately paid detective force. The Runners’ salary was small, 25s. a week plus 14s. expenses, their main income coming from hiring themselves out to other police offices or to private individuals across the country. Now two Runners were hired to locate the suspicious Thurtell and Hunt. After a brief visit to Gill’s Hill the senior Runner, George Ruthven, returned to London, where:

I found [Thurtell] at the Coach and Horses, Conduit Street. I said: John, my boy, I want you. Thurtell had been anticipating serious proceedings against him for setting his house on fire in the city [see p. 24] … It was highly probable that he supposed that I wanted him on that charge. My horse and chaise were at the door. He got in and I handcuffed him to one side of the rail of my trap … On the road nothing could be more chatty and free than the conversation on the part of Thurtell. If he did suspect where I was going to take him, he played an innocent part very well, and artfully pretended total ignorance. I drove up to the inn, where Probert and Hunt were in charge of the local constables. Let us have some brandy and water, George, said Thurtell. I went out of the room to order it. Give us a song said Thurtell, and Hunt, who was a beautiful singer, struck up ‘Mary, list awake’. I paused with the door in my hand and said to myself – ‘Is it possible that these men are murderers?’

The newspapers had no such doubts, even though no charges had yet been laid and there was as yet no body. One week after the crime took place, six days after the weapons were found in the bushes, two days after the arrest of Thurtell, the Morning Chronicle ran its first piece on the ‘Most Horrible Murder Near Watford’.