A Very British Murder (4 page)

Far from being an expensive delicacy, oysters were still the ubiquitous cheap and cheerful street food of Regency London. But, this late at night, Margaret had trouble finding a shop that was
still open. She also had to pay a bill at the baker’s. When she got back, it seemed that everyone in the house had gone to sleep and she was locked out.

In his essay De Quincey now began to imagine the Gothic and horrific scene. Margaret (or Mary, as De Quincey called her) the maid, out on the midnight street, listened at the door, and heard … something.

What was it? On the stairs – not the stairs that led down to the kitchen, but the stairs that led upwards to the single storey of bedchambers above – was heard a creaking sound. Next was heard most distinctly a footfall: one, two, three, four, five stairs were slowly and distinctly descended. Then the dreadful footsteps were heard advancing along the little narrow passage to the door. The steps – oh heavens! whose steps? – have paused at the door. The very breathing can be heard … there is but a door between him and Mary.

The scene could come from any thriller written between 1811 and 2011. The sense of ‘stranger danger’, of the murderer having mysteriously got
inside
a secure, workaday, domestic setting, and the defenceless young girl listening in silent terror to his approach are just as fresh and horrifying today as they were to De Quincey’s readers.

Margaret banged on the door and the sound aroused the Marrs’ neighbour, a pawnbroker. He climbed over the wall between his own and the Marrs’ garden at the back, and found the shop’s back door open wide. The murderer (or murderers) had fled, but they had left their mark. Inside the narrow passage was ‘so floated with
gore that it was hardly possible to escape the pollution of blood in picking out a path to the front-door’. Father, mother, apprentice and baby had all been slain. The murder weapon was apparently the bloodied ship’s carpenter’s hammer – the pen maul – which was discovered in the kitchen.

From this point on, though, events became confused and, ultimately, mishandled. The Thames Police were called in, but these official visitors were accompanied by a whole swarm of unofficial sightseers who wished to see the murdered bodies laid out dead upon their beds. The crime scene was thoroughly contaminated. What forensic and material evidence there was they were not skilled in reading: it took 12 days before anyone noticed that the maul in the kitchen was marked with the initials JP. The Thames Police also struggled to handle a crime which had had no witnesses. And when information arrived in response to a proffered reward, it came – all too neatly – from a woman whose husband was in the debtors’ prison, and greatly in need of financial aid. She was the landlady of the nearby Pear Tree Tavern. She reported that she had a lodger named
John Petersen
, representing the initials found on the maul. Petersen was absent away at sea at the time of the murder, but he had left his tools behind him. However, John Williams, another of her lodgers, had had access to the tools, had mysteriously shaved himself clean the day after the crime and had been seen washing what were possibly bloodied stockings at the Pear Tree’s pump.

But the information came too late to prevent John Williams – if indeed he was the criminal – from striking again. Twelve days after the first killing, at another public house on what is now Garnet Street, a further massacre took place. This quiet and respectable
pub had closed at 11 p.m. Its landlord, John Williamson, his wife Elizabeth and their servant Bridget had all retired to bed. However, the street was disturbed when a near-naked man climbed out of an upstairs window via a knotted sheet.

This was Williamson’s lodger, John Turner. He had been in bed when he’d heard the front door banging and the maid calling out. Next, he heard his landlord moaning, and emitting the chilling words: ‘I am a dead man’. The lodger heard the sinister sound of somebody walking about below. Creeping down the stairs, Turner saw a tall man bent over the prone body of Mrs Williamson. The horrific sight caused him to rush back upstairs and escape through the window. Amazingly, the Williamsons’ little granddaughter, Kitty, just 14 years old, slept through the whole attack and survived.

This second slaughter, so soon after, and so near to the scene of the first, caused a tsunami of terror and panic. Londoners began to feel a new kind of fear. Barricaded behind locks and shutters in their homes, they felt the very modern anxiety that even these defences might not prove stout enough against an urban, predatory killer who struck out at random against law-abiding families, entering homes without warning or mercy. In the country communities that many of them had left behind, one knew one’s neighbours. Here in the docklands, with so many strangers about, and with dark, crowded, busy streets ill lit by night, a new kind of menace seemed to be abroad.

GIVEN THE CIRCUMSTANCES,
it seems natural that the authorities would want to wrap up the crime as quickly as they could. Indeed, in the opinion of the mistress of detective fiction, P. D.
James, they wrapped it up with unseemly haste, simply to placate public feeling. John Williams was taken into custody: after all, he’d had the opportunity of getting hold of the murder weapon used in the first crime and he had acted suspiciously the day after. There were also rumours that he and the first victim, Timothy Marr, had been former shipmates who had quarrelled. But these were very sketchy grounds. Fortunately for the magistrates, Williams appeared to admit his guilt: after a week in prison, he hanged himself.

The police were quick to announce that the killer had been caught. However, some people remained unsatisfied. There were rumours that Williams’s death had not been caused by his own hand. He’d seemed to be in good spirits immediately before it. The death was all too convenient for the authorities and their desire to reassure and restore order. It was to make a very clear statement that the panic was over that Williams’s body was publically paraded as the culprit, clearly and obviously dead.

The body of John Williams is paraded through the streets of Wapping on a cart before vast crowds. The maul, his supposed weapon, lies by his left shoulder.

Yet questions about Williams’s guilt, and the handling of the case, remained open and preyed upon the minds of the government. The capital’s system of policing had been shown by the Ratcliffe Highway killings to be inadequate. There would not be an immediate, overnight change to the way things were done, but this crime did contribute to the slow but inexorable build-up of the case for a single, coordinated police force.

At the same time, Londoners and indeed the British as a whole lapped up the specifics of the case. It became so widely reported that it has claims to be called the first great modern mass-media sensation. The thirst for information about this particular crime created a new genre of journalism: murder reporting, with all its inaccuracies, gory details and outright condemnation of everyone and everything seeming to stand in the way of a speedy conclusion.

In De Quincey’s hands, this very ordinary (and quite possibly unfairly accused) seaman was transformed into a suitably bizarre and charismatic figure. In a parody of the public’s image of the killer, he described Williams as having a ‘corpselike face’, a ‘sinister voice’ and an oily and snaky demeanour. He had a bloodless ghastly pallor, hair of ‘bright yellow, something between an orange and a lemon colour’, and ‘in his veins circulated not red life-blood, such as could kindle into the blush of shame, of wrath, of pity – but a green sap that welled from no human heart’.

He wore a fine coat of blue, ‘richly lined with silk’, and he was naturally so courteous that had he accidentally jostled anyone on
the crowded streets on his way to commit the crime, he would certainly ‘have stopped to offer the most gentlemanly apologies’. He bears little relationship to the person John Williams really was – a rough and ready tar of the docks. He sounds rather like Hannibal Lector.

From the few known facts of the case, combined with terror, speculation and imagination, the fully formed fictional murderer was born.

‘One of them would be writing novels, another studying politics, a third immersed in divinity, a fourth speculating on the girls that went by, a fifth gnawing his pen for an unfinished couplet and a sixth playing the fiddle.’

The Examiner
, 1811, reveals what London’s magistrates were really doing when they were meant to be catching criminals

WHERE WERE THE
police?

While Margaret, the Marrs’ maid, was knocking on the door of No. 29, Ratcliffe Highway, the local nightwatchman passed by. His name was George Olney, and every night, at half-hour intervals, his beat took him past the Marrs’ house. He helped Margaret to bang on the door, and to rouse the neighbour who eventually entered the house.

The first police officer to be summoned from the scene after the discovery of the bodies was Charles Horton, who worked for the Thames or Marine Police, the small, independent body responsible for catching criminals in the docks and on the river. The force’s
personnel records can still be seen at the Thames Police Museum in the police station at Wapping. They reveal that Horton joined up in 1806, and that he lodged with one Mrs Robinson, a baker. The register also shows that he was issued with a great coat – not really a uniform, but a useful garment for wearing on duty on the river – and he would also have been equipped with a cutlass for personal defence, and a set of handcuffs. (The early Thames Police were obviously not used to arresting many women, because my smallish hands could easily slip out of all the nineteenth-century cuffs I tried on in their museum.)

Horton’s actions included taking the bloodied maul away, back to his office (but not examining it closely, otherwise he would have discovered the initials). The Thames Police then offered a reward for information regarding the crime. This was half successful: it did lead to John Williams being identified, but of course it’s quite possible that the money itself motivated his impecunious landlady to shop him.

But this was the best that could be hoped for with the current state of policing. Smaller, earlier and simpler communities than Regency Wapping pretty much policed themselves. When a person was accused of a crime, his or her neighbours would appear before a magistrate to save or condemn, on the basis of his or her previous good (or bad) behaviour. An individual’s reputation and standing in the community was therefore more important than evidence.

Each parish appointed a single unarmed ‘constable’ – literally a
comes stabuli
, a ‘master of the horse’ – who served for one year. His job was to make sure that order was observed on the streets. The office was an ancient one – the word first appears in 1252 – and
he was one of four important parish officers, the others being the overseer of the poor, the surveyor of the highways and the warden of the church. His symbol of authority was his truncheon, often provided in a decorative form to act as a badge of office.

The constable usually worked with a group of specialists who looked after the streets after dark. Groups of citizens clubbed together to employ these ‘nightwatchmen’ to make regular patrols. Their regular calling out of the hour of the clock and a description of the weather punctuated the dreams of Georgian householders. These watchmen, carrying their dark lanterns, were often extremely old and not infrequently took money from criminals to turn a blind eye to their activities. In Covent Garden, central London, we hear that the appointment of aged watchmen was a deliberate practice: the employment of younger men had had to be abandoned ‘on account of the connection which subsisted between them and the Prostitutes, who withdrew them from their Duty while Depredations were committing’. (At the same time, though, we should note that the tradition of laughing at the uselessness of nightwatchmen dates from Shakespeare’s time – they provide interludes of light entertainment, for example, in
Macbeth
.)