Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (32 page)

11

Killers

Harrison’s Vermin Killer

Poisoning was becoming so common in the 1850s that Charles Dickens warned his readers that the country was in the grip of an arsenic epidemic. Arsenic, the poison that cut a swathe through Victorian Britain, was popular with murderers because it was so difficult to detect. Symptoms mimicked those of Asiatic cholera, which periodically decimated Victorian towns and cities. Countless murders certainly went undetected.

But arsenic was not the sole problem. Many other poisons were also readily available. In the 540 recorded cases of poisoning between 1750 and the beginning of the Great War in 1914, murderers used fifty different substances.

Poisons had many legitimate uses – from controlling vermin to curing horses of parasites. Chemists sold strychnine, for instance, as a rat poison and stocked poisons on the same shelves as medicines. Strychnine’s great disadvantage, however, was that its effects were so extreme that any competent physician could correctly attribute them. The telltale signs were excruciating stomach cramps followed by convulsions.

Consequently arsenic was far more popular. Besides, more than any other poison it had a range of legitimate uses. For centuries women used it to treat skin problems. Several medicines marketed as cancer cures contained it and many men took it in small doses as a tonic. It was a major constituent of treatments for anaemia, malaria and cardiac pain. But its major use was in the control of vermin – rats, mice, beetles, fleas, lice and bed bugs – against which the Victorian housewife waged a relentless struggle. Arsenic was therefore readily available in every town and city in the country.

It was also cheap. In March 1837 a penny bought one ounce of white arsenic – enough to literally kill a horse. Three grains – as much as will lie on the tip of a knife – is sufficient to kill most adults. Odourless and tasteless, it is easy to conceal in food. In almost half of the recorded poisonings during this period, arsenic was the murderer’s poison of choice.

One of the most notorious cases of this era sent sisters Catherine Flanagan, aged fifty-five, and Margaret Higgins, forty-one, to the scaffold. The women lived in the Skirving Street area, one of Liverpool’s most deprived areas. In the early 1880s the Liverpool duo poisoned with arsenic nine people, though recent research suggests they may have been responsible for the murder of as many as seventeen. In 1884 Liverpool Assizes finally convicted them of the murder of Margaret’s husband, Thomas, and they hanged together at Kirkdale Prison. The motive in each case was greed as each victim yielded a small sum in insurance money.

A few years later Amelia Winters and her daughter, Elizabeth Frost, became even more infamous than the Liverpool poisoners. Indicted for three murders, the police discovered they had insured over twenty people, five of whom had died in suspicious circumstances between 1886 and 1889. Like the Liverpool sisters, they exploited the lax procedures of life insurance companies in order to benefit from their victims’ deaths.

The new burial clubs and insurance societies gave parents a financial incentive to dispose of children they saw as a burden. During the mid-Victorian period, children under the age of five made up sixty-one per cent of all homicide victims. The high death rate among children gave murderers reasonable grounds for believing they would get away with it. The Bolton housewife Betty Eccles, however, surpassed all other child murderers. Before she went to the gallows in May 1843, she poisoned her three daughters, to make herself more attractive to a suitor. As soon as she married, she killed one of her new husband’s children, a teenage boy, and her own remaining child in order to get the fifty shillings life insurance. By her own admission she was about to poison her remaining stepchildren. She also confessed to poisoning a baby boy she was nursing in order to defraud his father of seven shillings.

The case of Mary Ann Britland is in many respects typical of the poisoning epidemic that swept the country at this time. Britland moved to her new home in Ashton-under-Lyne in 1885 and quickly became popular with her new neighbours. Her husband Thomas and their daughters, Elizabeth, nineteen, and Suzannah, eighteen, were industrious, polite and extremely respectable. The family were happy in their new home. There was only one problem: mice overran the house. They ate the food, ravaged clothing and gnawed skirting boards. Britland complained bitterly to her landlord but he was dismissive.

Fortunately for Britland there was a vast array of patent vermin killers on the market and she resolved to put them to the test. One, Harrison’s Vermin Killer, was such a lethal cocktail of strychnine and arsenic that she had to sign the chemist’s poisons book when she bought three packets. That night her daughter Elizabeth woke with violent stomach cramps. The doctor diagnosed an upset stomach and the girl seemed to recover. Britland, however, still preoccupied with the problem of vermin, bought another packet of Harrison’s Vermin Killer. Later that evening Elizabeth suddenly took a turn for the worse and began shaking and twitching uncontrollably. Then she started to fit. By 9pm she was dead. The next day Britland visited her ‘club man’, the agent for the Prudential Insurance Society. She collected the £10 due on her daughter. Though bemused by Elizabeth’s death, the doctor had no reason to suspect foul play. His death certificate cited bilious vomiting, convulsions and spasms of the heart as the causes.

Approximately seven weeks later, Britland called on the agent again. Though the 1s 8d premium on her husband’s policy was not due, she insisted on paying it in advance.

‘Better safe than sorry,’ she said.

Three days later she visited the chemist’s again. The mice were worse than ever. That night her husband, Thomas, took ill. At first he rallied. His condition stabilised. Mrs Britland, relentless in her battle against vermin, again visited the chemist. The same evening Thomas died. The doctor who attended Thomas was not the one who treated Elizabeth. Thomas, according to his death certificate, died of epilepsy. The same day Mrs Britland collected £11 7s 0d from the Prudential agent and £8 from the Independent Order of Goodfellows. Thomas, in joining the Order, had shown himself as prescient as his wife.

Throughout this typhoon of misfortune, which swept away her husband and daughter, the support of her neighbours, the Dixons, was unwavering. Now alone in her house – her daughter, Suzannah, was in service in Oldham – with only the mice for company, the Dixons again displayed their kindness.

‘Move in with us,’ they said, their arms open, their eyes bright with compassion.

This arrangement, however, excited comment from the neighbours, already buzzing with rumours that something was going on between Britland and Mr Dixon. Before long, Mrs Dixon became ill and died of what the death certificate described as ‘abdominal spasms’. Her husband collected £19 17s 6d from the Union Friendly Insurance Society and neither the police nor doctors saw anything amiss.

Presumably the matter would have rested there but for the indignation of a neighbour who wrote anonymously to the police. Early in their investigation, it became clear that Mr Dixon was guilty of nothing more than being extremely obtuse. The post mortem on Mrs Dixon showed her body contained lethal doses of arsenic and strychnine. The exhumed bodies of Elizabeth and Thomas were also laced with poison.

Before Monday 9 August 1886, when Britland became the first woman hanged at Strangeways, the whole story came out. She confessed her guilt to her mother and remaining daughter. What we will never know is how many Mrs Britlands went undetected. But for the indignation of Mrs Dixon’s neighbours even a murderer so lacking in subtlety would have escaped. It is clear that doctors routinely wrote out death certificates entirely on information from the deceased’s next of kin.

The ‘club man’ lifted the dread of a pauper’s grave from many a respectable house. But how many did he induce to commit murder?

The Ultimate Transgression

Of all crimes, murder is the most enthralling. The murderer violates the most fundamental rule of society, desecrates the sanctity of life and usurps a power that belongs only to the state and ultimately to God. More than the cruelty or the evil, it is this monstrous arrogance of the murderer that divides him from lesser criminals. What sort of person is so arrogant as to decide if another human being should live or die? Most criminals, no matter how hardened, refuse to cross this line.

What adds to the subject’s fascination is that most murderers are criminal novices. Most lead blameless lives up to the moment they commit the ultimate transgression.

Because of this they seldom take the precautions necessary to give themselves even the remotest chance of escaping the consequences of their actions. For every one like Charlie Peace – a professional criminal, who murdered a policeman without leaving anything to link him to the crime – there are ten like John Simpson, who cut the throat of his lover in a public bar and sat stolidly beside her as she bled to death. It follows that those who suffer the ultimate punishment are seldom professional criminals or part of the underworld. Habitual criminals and those who live off crime usually act in their own interests – and murder is seldom beneficial.

There are exceptions. Like Charlie Peace, John Jackson and William Chadwick were both criminals who murdered in the course of crime, while Emmanuel Hamer, though not a professional criminal, murdered to conceal his crime. In 1868, Hamer, a thirty-three-year-old house painter, was working in Salford. He noticed an old lady living alone next door and entered her house, presumably to rob her. When she confronted him he bludgeoned her to death with a lump of coal from her own scuttle. Hair, skin and blood stuck to the murder weapon.

Though Hamer murdered while committing a crime he was not a criminal. He was gainfully employed and had no previous convictions. Yet no account of the Manchester underworld would be complete without some mention of the murders of the period. Murder is a lens that reveals much about the society in which it occurs. The gangland murders of 1920s Chicago, the political murders of Ulster in the 1970s and the drug-related gun crime of present-day Manchester all highlight key features of the society that spawned them. It was as recently as 1868 that the Capital Punishment Act elevated murder to the unique position it occupied for a century as the only crime that carried the death penalty. After the Act a few unfortunates suffered the ultimate penalty for treason but the vast majority of those who ended their days at the end of a rope were murderers.

Unlike today, murder in Manchester in the second half of the nineteenth century was rare. In a typical year, such as 1868, Manchester coroners found two cases of murder and ten of manslaughter. They recorded 266 accidental deaths, twenty-six due to intoxication and twenty-eight to suicide. The number of murders is remarkably few given the general level of violence. The scuttlers of the period routinely used knives and heavy belts and their activities daily put people in hospital. Yet murder was sufficiently uncommon in Manchester for the press to make much of it. The public had an insatiable appetite for every aspect of a murder case. Local papers ran detailed, often verbatim, accounts of the court proceedings and reported any snippet of information relating to those involved, often with no attempt to verify it.

Yet an overview of the Manchester murders of this period reveals a striking similarity between many of the murderers. Very few were from the respectable working class. Instead, they were men who hovered on the periphery of the underworld. Most were unskilled labourers in precarious employment or unemployed. A great number were not married but in what was then a scandalous relationship with a woman – the sort of relationship that respectable working class people spurned. In a quarter of the cases the murderer was drunk. In almost half the cases where a man killed his wife, drink was a significant factor.

The case of 58-year-old Michael Kennedy is in many ways typical. He and his wife of thirty-six years had a volatile relationship and when, on 8 October 1872, Kennedy returned home from a day’s drinking to find she had not made his dinner, he was indignant. Later, somewhat mollified, he asked her for a kiss and when she refused he shot her. The only unusual aspect of Kennedy’s case is that he bought the gun some days before he shot his wife. This suggested a degree of premeditation sufficient to convict him of murder rather than manslaughter.

The case of William Flanagan is a paradigm of murder in Manchester at this time. Flanagan was a lay-about drifter sacked because, in the words of his employer, ‘he was insane’. On the evening of 8 September 1876 he and his common-law wife, Margaret Dockery, returned to their lodging house from the pub and continued drinking with other lodgers. The next morning, after an argument in which Flanagan accused her of stealing from him, he cut her throat. Flanagan pleaded insanity. Investigations revealed he had made numerous suicide attempts. This defence, however, did not save him from the gallows.

James McGowan, a Salford bleach worker hanged in 1878, was much like Flanagan. While in a drunken rage he cut his wife’s throat with a penknife. He then reported his crime to the Manchester police.

William Cassidy, another wife murderer, was unusual only because of the excruciating pain he inflicted on her. He told his drinking mates that he was going to kill her, went home, doused her bed in paraffin and set her alight. The case aroused fierce hatred of Cassidy. Whether maliciously or not, William Marwood, the executioner, gave Cassidy a drop of ten feet which almost tore his head from his body.