Guilty Thing (36 page)

As more information was gathered it became possible for De Quincey to build up a picture of the crime scene. Marr was improving his shop and builders had recently replaced the front window. A Mr Pugh, supervising the work, had borrowed an iron chisel from a neighbour for the use of his carpenter, Cornelius Hart. By the time Hart had finished his job, three weeks previously, the chisel had been lost. Hart claimed to have last seen it on the premises, but Marr had painstakingly searched the house and found nothing. At twenty inches long, it was an easy enough object to spot. The next time the chisel was seen,
The Times
revealed, was the ‘morning of the fatal massacre when it was found lying by the side of Mr Marr's body', its head matted with hair and blood. After the inquest nine men were taken into custody, including Cornelius Hart himself and a drunk who had already incoherently confessed to all four murders.

On 13 December the
Morning Chronicle
ran a long report on Coleridge's
Romeo and Juliet
lecture and the adjacent column carried a brief update on the murder investigation. It transpired that the mother and sisters of Mrs Marr had come in from the country to visit the new baby on Sunday 8 December; it was only when they arrived for lunch that they heard the horrific news: ‘The effect which the intelligence had on them it would be vain to describe.' The suggestion now, from ‘the print of some feet in the yard', was that two men were involved. ‘The footsteps are marked with blood and sawdust, which is accounted for by there being some carpenters at work in the shop on the same day, and the sawdust mixing with the blood, it is supposed, stuck to the shoes of the murderers.' Three men had apparently been seen near Marr's drapery on the night of the murders, one of whom was observed looking through the new shop window. He was ‘a tall' and ‘lusty' man, dressed in a long coat. The other was smaller and scruffier, in a torn blue jacket and with a small-brimmed hat, while the third had no remarkable features at all.

The subject of Coleridge's lecture on the evening of Thursday 19 December was
A Midsummer Night's Dream
. That night, Mr and Mrs Williamson, who held the licence of the King's Arms at 81 New Gravel Lane, a narrow street which ran at a right angle to the Ratcliffe Highway in the direction of the docks, were closing the tavern. John Williamson was fifty-six, his wife, Elizabeth, was sixty; they shared their home with a lodger, John Turner, their granddaughter, Kitty Stillwell, aged fourteen, and their fifty-year-old servant, Bridget Harrington. One house in eight on New Gravel Lane was an inn, but the King's Arms was more respectable than the rest. The Williamsons had been the proprietors for fifteen years; they kept the noise down, shut before midnight, and served a regular and reputable clientele. At eleven o'clock, Mr Anderson, who lived next door but one, left the taproom with a pot of beer and Williamson put up the shutters; twenty minutes later, having finished his beer, Anderson returned for a quick second pot, but found the tavern in a state of commotion.

Hanging from a second-floor window on two torn sheets which had been knotted together, was the half-naked figure of John Turner. ‘Murder, Murder!' Turner cried, before dropping eight feet into the arms of the night watchman. A crowd had gathered around the scene; they knocked at the Williamsons' front door but there was no answer. Several men then began to beat down the entrance while others prised open the cellar window on the front pavement. It was on the cellar stairs that they found Williamson, his head crushed by an iron bar and his throat cut. Mrs Williamson and Bridget Harrington were both in the tap room, their skulls shattered and throats slashed to the neck bone. At the back of the house was an open window through which the murderer had made his escape onto the sloping clay wasteland which ran down to the docks.

John Turner, who had lodged with the Williamsons for eight months, gave his account to the coroners of what had taken place. He returned home that night, having eaten supper with his brother, at twenty to eleven. Mrs Williamson was at the front door, Mr Williamson was by the fire in his great chair, the servant was in the back room; Kitty Stillwell was asleep in bed. He joined his landlord, who was told by a customer that a stout man wearing a very large coat had been peering through the inner glass door in the passage. Williamson, a burly man himself, lifted the candlestick and went to look. He returned saying that ‘he could not see him, but if he did see him, he would send him where he ought or would not like to go'. Mr Anderson then went home with his first pot of beer and John Turner went upstairs to bed. Five minutes later, Turner

heard the front door being banged: very hard. Immediately afterwards I heard the servant exclaim ‘we are all murdered' or ‘shall be murdered' two or three times. . . I heard two or three blows, but with what weapon I cannot say. Shortly afterwards I heard Mr Williamson cry out, ‘I'm a dead man.' I was in bed still. After two minutes I got out of bed, and listened at the door, but could hear nothing. I went down to the first floor, and from below I heard the sound of three heavy sighs. I heard some person walk across the middle of the room on the ground very lightly. I was then half way down the last pair of stairs, and naked. I went to the bottom of the stairs, and the door stood a little on the jar. I passed through the opening, and by the light of a candle which was burning in the room, I saw a man, apparently near six feet in height, in a large rough Fleming coat, of a dark colour, which came down to his heels. He was standing with his back to me, apparently leaning over some person, as if in the act of rifling their pockets, as I heard some silver rattle, and saw him rise and open his coat with his left hand and put his right hand to his breast, as if to put something in his pocket. I did not see his face, and I only saw that one person.

Turner leapt back up the stairs in his bare feet. When he reached his bedroom he pushed the bed against the door, stripped off the sheets, tied them together and attached them to the bedpost. He then opened the window, threw out the sheets and lowered himself down. Tucked up in bed next door, young Kitty Stillwell lay fast asleep. In his haste, John Turner had forgotten all about her.

The murderer's second set of victims were another married couple and those who lived with them. Again, the target was not an individual but a household, the house had been both a home and a place of work and the intruder had apparently walked in through an open door and locked it behind him. Again, nothing of significance had been stolen and there was no clear motive for the killings; again, the exterminations had been achieved in a matter of moments and the killer, interrupted by a pounding on the front door, had escaped through the back of the building. Again there was a terrified survivor unrelated to the victims who could be seen on the immediate outside: Margaret Jewell on the outside of the door, John Turner suspended in mid-air from the bedroom window.

Christmas was coming and the killer was still at large; the Ratcliffe Highway and surrounding streets were being manned by a night beadle and a team of elderly night watchmen. The woeful inadequacy of the system of policing was creating a national outcry. Even in Grasmere, De Quincey later wrote, panic had set in. A widowed neighbour of his ‘
never rested
until she placed eighteen doors, each secured by ponderous bolts, and bars, and chains, between her own bedroom and any intruder of human build'. The occupants of smaller houses with fewer doors ‘more than once died upon the spot, from the shock attending some suspicious attempts at intrusion upon the part of vagrants'. While these reports are evidently fantasies, Southey told a friend that: ‘
No circumstances which did not concern me
ever disturbed me so much. I. . . never had mingled such a feeling of horror, indignation, and astonishment with a sense of insecurity too.' Also at Greta Hall that winter was Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had run away with his child bride, Fanny. For Southey and Shelley, the murders reflected the state of a nation which hovered on the edge of revolution; but for De Quincey they revealed the state of one man's soul.

Meanwhile the Wordsworths, no longer speaking to De Quincey, had not realised that Coleridge was no longer speaking to them. Wordsworth, aware of Montagu's indiscretion but not of its impact, had offered Coleridge neither an explanation for his comments nor an apology for the hurt caused. It is unlikely that De Quincey knew anything about the lull in the Coleridge–Wordsworth relations, but we can imagine him taking advantage of the lull in his own relations with the Wordsworths to increase his laudanum intake and follow the reports of the Williamson murders: shortly after the slaughters two men had been seen running up the lane towards the Ratcliffe Highway, the shorter of whom appeared to be lame.

Every man in Wapping, it seemed, was presumed guilty and forty false arrests had been made. Then on Sunday 22 December, a twenty-seven-year-old sailor called John Williams was apprehended in his lodgings, a public house called the Pear Tree, close to the river in Old Wapping. Described by
The Times
as ‘about 5 feet 9 inches in height' and ‘of an insinuating manner', John Williams was by all accounts over-familiar and intrusive; he had, for example, been seen to lean over the bar of a tavern and laughingly remove money from the till. Nothing was known about his family; on land he lived at the Pear Tree where he shared a room with two other men and drank away his wages. He belonged to Wapping's fluid community of wanderers.

The evidence against Williams was thin. He had been seen at the King's Head at seven o'clock on the night of the Williamson murders, and on his return to the Pear Tree – at around midnight – he had asked one of his fellow lodgers, a German sailor called John Frederick Richter, to put out the candle. Added to which his clothes were stained, and
he had in his pocket fourteen shillings
, a pound note and two pawn tickets. Further evidence, about to appear, was that the bloodstained maul had been traced back to the Pear Tree. It belonged to a ship's carpenter called John Peterson, currently at sea, who was storing his tools at the house. In his defence, John Williams explained that he was a friend of the Williamsons, that his pocketful of cash was due to having pawned his shoes, and that after leaving the King's Arms he had visited a doctor about a cure for his leg, which had been giving him problems as a result of an old wound (Williams walked with a limp). He had told Richter to put out the candle not because he didn't want to draw attention to the house, but to prevent a fire.

Witnesses described seeing a large figure in a long coat in the vicinity of both murders. A man of this description had been seen staring in through the front window of 29 Ratcliffe Highway on the night of 7 December, and through the glass inner door of the King's Head on the night of 19 December. A similar figure, accompanied by two other men, had been seen on the Ratcliffe Highway soon after the murders, and also on New Gravel Lane, with a companion who was lame. Turner had seen a large man in a long coat by the corpse of Mrs Williamson, pocketing some change. John Williams, of medium height and without an ankle-length coat, bore no relation to this ‘lusty fellow' but may have been one of his companions. In which case, where was his accomplice? From lodgers in the Pear Tree it transpired that the Marrs' carpenter, Cornelius Hart, was one of William's drinking friends. Hart at first denied knowing him, but then admitted to dispatching his wife to the Pear Tree to have it confirmed that Williams had indeed been arrested.

On Christmas Eve John Williams was taken to Coldbath Fields Prison, and on Boxing Day his body was found hanging in his cell – an apparent suicide. The court proceedings continued regardless and Londoners, frantic for justice, found the dead man guilty.

The body was removed from the prison and taken to a watchhouse at the London Docks. The following day, the last of the old year, it was dressed in blue trousers and an open-necked white, frilled shirt and placed in a cart on a specially raised and slanted platform with the maul and the ripping chisel displayed on either side of its broken neck. In an unprecedentedly bizarre piece of theatre, the cart was paraded through the parish led by a procession of grey horses on which rode, in hierarchical order, the constable, the Collector of King's Taxes, the baker, the coal merchant and the Superintendent of Lascars in the East India Company's service. They were followed by constables and beadles on foot. This ceremony was watched by 10,000 spectators who crowded the streets and leaned from the windows of the houses lining the route. It was, said the MP and playwright, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, ‘
an unseemly exhibition
' which ‘fed the worst appetites of the mob'.