The Italian Boy (44 page)

Payment and favors aside, a solution to the enigma of the official confessions may be found by entertaining the notion that a monster can be capable of kindness, loyalty, and love—that a killer’s final act could be altruistic. Commentators were wrong to assume that Bishop and Williams had anything to gain for themselves by misleading the authorities after their conviction; no privy council in the world would have mitigated their death sentences, even if they were to be hanged for the wrong killing. And, as mentioned before, these were not the sort of men to care about stirring up working-class distrust of policemen, magistrates, courts, and the government. Rather, it seems that what John Bishop was doing in his confession was adapting an essentially true story in order to present a strong impression that his wife and family had no knowledge of the murders committed within their small home. Bishop well knew that anyone tainted by association with the resurrection trade—let alone burking—could be subject to physical attack. So Sarah, Rhoda, and his children simply disappear from the narrative, forced off stage by often highly artificial means. Bishop states that having walked all the way from Smithfield on the night of Thursday, 3 November, Bishop and Williams told the boy to hide in the privy in the garden, since Sarah and Rhoda had not yet gone to bed: “Williams went in and told them to go to bed, and I stayed in the garden. Williams came out directly, and we both walked out of the garden a little way to give time for the family getting to bed … and listened outside at the window to ascertain whether the family were gone to bed.” The silence of the killing is also emphasized by Bishop (“We found him asleep as we had left him. We took him directly, asleep and insensible, into the garden”), as is the hiding of the corpse (“We immediately doubled the body up, and put it into a box, which we corded, so that nobody might open it to see what was in it”).

With the killing of Fanny Pigburn, again “we found the family abed.” “This was before our families were up,” Bishop says of her departure the next morning, suggesting the unlikely scenario that he got up at six to hustle her out of the house before the family awoke and discovered her asleep on the pile of dirty clothes in the parlor of No. 3 (when all along she could have slept in the empty No. 2).

The message from Bishop is clear: the wives and family saw and heard nothing. They had nothing to atone for.

Williams’s official confession is merely a short, uninformative corroboration of Bishop’s statement. The only other time Williams expressed himself at any length was in the story given to Wontner and Cotton on Saturday night in his cell and reprinted in the
Atlas
and the
Times
. Here, Williams appears to be telling the same story as Bishop about the events of Thursday, 3 November—the luring of a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boy from Smithfield. But there is one crucial deviation from the script: “They took the boy home to Nova Scotia Gardens, giving him some soup and potatoes by the way. When they got him there, they set him to play with Bishop’s children until near dusk.” (Potatoes, along with rum, were found in the boy’s stomach at the postmortem.) Bishop, though, claimed that they had arrived home with this boy “at about eleven o’clock” at night; similarly, Fanny and Cunningham were described as late-night/early-hours killings.

A possible timeline for Williams’s narrative could be: the killers start their workday in Smithfield at around 10
A.M.
; they lure the boy and set him on his journey east at around noon, reaching Nova Scotia Gardens at around one to two o’clock in the afternoon; the boy and Bishop’s children play together until around five (dusk set in at around a quarter past five). The boy would have been further put off his guard by this apparently friendly inclusion in the family, and after bedtime, the killing could have happened just as Bishop described it.

Margaret King and her children variously placed their Italian boy at Nova Scotia Gardens between ten o’clock in the morning and one o’clock in the afternoon of Thursday the third; Rebecca Baylis saw him a quarter of an hour before midday, then again slightly after noon; laborer John Randall, however, saw the boy “between nine and ten o’clock” in the morning. It is possible, though very unlikely, that Bishop and Williams got up, walked to Smithfield, executed the abduction, and walked back to Shoreditch (stopping on the way to eat) before ten in the morning. If these sightings of an Italian boy by the neighbors were truthful and accurate, the more likely explanation is that there was indeed an itinerant Italian beggar doing the rounds of Nova Scotia Gardens/Crabtree Row over a three- to four-hour period on Thursday, 3 November, but that this was not the boy lured from Smithfield. Margaret King told the magistrates that “she had often seen the same boy in the environs of Nova Scotia Gardens.” Her son John said: “He used to carry a doll with two heads in a glass case. I saw him about a month ago. He looked like the same boy.” Which raises the possibility that the neighbors had become confused about the date on which they saw the beggar boy. Or they could have been asked to become confused.

Alternatively, the neighbors’ tales could all have been true—and Bishop’s confession a complete fabrication. Perhaps there was no trip to Smithfield on Thursday the third; perhaps an Italian boy, Carlo Ferrari, had lingered too long near the Gardens, had been invited in by Bishop and Williams—with the wives and children present in or around the cottage—and been murdered late that night, just as the prosecution claimed. And Bishop had simply been distancing his family from the crime by claiming that the inveigling had happened in Smithfield. Interestingly, the only other discrepancy between Bishop’s official confession and Williams’s confession to Wontner and Cotton is the order of the Smithfield/Old Bailey pubs visited. According to Bishop, Williams picked the boy up in the Bell (an old coaching tavern) and brought him to the King of Denmark (the Old Bailey watering house, opposite Newgate); Bishop, meanwhile, was drinking in the Fortune of War, to where Williams came to collect Bishop and bring him to meet the boy, whom he had left standing outside the King of Denmark. But Williams presents a different sequence of pub visits, which is perhaps understandable if this abduction was one of two, or even one of many, and is even more understandable if the killers had been drinking all day. Williams says he “enticed” the boy from his cattle at Smithfield, took him to the Fortune of War, and sent for Bishop, who was waiting at another pub—presumably the King of Denmark. This confusion may be of little note, or it could indicate that the two men had failed to agree on the minor details in a jointly narrated fallacious story.

Perhaps their tale was intended not only to protect their families but also to preserve resurrection honor. Bishop and Williams never chose to turn king’s evidence and betray each other; nor did they implicate anyone else. The figures who hover in the background of this story (the stranger who accompanied Bishop and May to buy secondhand clothing in Field Lane on 4 November; the person who waved goodbye from the gallery of the Old Bailey; the six men on James May’s list of potential killers) may have had their necks saved by Bishop and Williams twisting the narrative of their crimes.

Epilogue

On Sunday, 18 December 1831, a man and a woman stood sobbing at the dockside in Woolwich. The estranged wife of James May had come, with their young daughter, to say goodbye—May was about to board the hulk
Justitia,
bound for Botany Bay, where he was to spend the rest of his life. But May never made it to Australia. Despite being described as “healthy” by the compiler of the hulk registers, he died aboard the prison hospital ship
Grampus,
moored off Greenwich, to which he was transferred from the
Justitia
on 20 January 1832 when his health on the outbound ship declined dramatically.
¹
No cause of death was given, but his fit at Newgate on hearing of his reprieve may well have been a contributing factor. The newspapers claimed that he had been roughly treated by other inmates on the
Justitia,
who were outraged at having to share a ship with a snatcher.

In the same week as the Mays’ farewell, Michael Shields turned up at Covent Garden market at ten o’clock one morning, hoping that one of the salesmen who had formerly employed him as a porter would hire him again. The salesman loudly, indignantly refused to have anything to do with Shields. A crowd gathered and began to jostle Shields, pushing him from one to another, chanting, “I don’t want him, I won’t have him.” Shields made a run for it, grabbing a wrench and brandishing it at those who came close. He fled up Bow Street, screaming for the police officers to help him, as the pursuing crowd yelled, “That’s Shields the Burker” and “There he goes, knock his brains out.” The officers hauled him into the police office and used their truncheons on any of the crowd who tried to reach the front door. “Turn him out!” they screamed. “Let us have him—we’ll dispose of him.” Inside, the officers who had known Shields could scarcely recognize him: he had lost so much weight he looked like an animated skeleton. Five hours later, believing it was safe, officers smuggled Shields out of the office, disguised in a voluminous great coat; they took him across the road to the Grapes public house and stayed with him until darkness fell, when they felt it was all right for him to leave the pub alone. Within yards he was spotted and a mob assembled; he ran down into the Strand, then into a small courtyard on the north side, opposite King’s College, and into the warren of alleys beyond, where we lose sight of him for good.

On the evening of Saturday, 17 December, Andrew Colla was walking home on Great Saffron Hill when three men surrounded him. One was masked, but Colla nevertheless recognized him as the person to whom Thomas Williams had waved goodbye at the Old Bailey. Though Colla did not know it, all three men had been on James May’s list of resurrectionists capable of burking: John Shearing, the masked man; his brother Thomas; and Robert Tighe/Tye, also called James Cattle/Kettle, lover of Bridget Culkin. Just two weeks earlier, Tighe had been released from custody on suspicion of having been Culkin’s accomplice in the supposed burking of five-year-old Margaret Duffey in Golden Lane. “This is the bloody bastard!” shouted John Shearing. “Let’s serve him out!” And all three set upon Colla, kicking him to the ground. Passersby rushed to help, and, outnumbered, the Shearings and Tighe fled. But when a police officer arrived, he refused to go after them, even though some in the crowd knew that the Shearings lived in nearby Rosoman Street; nor would the officer raise the alarm, claiming that as he himself had not witnessed the assault, there was nothing he could do to help.

The Grampus hospital hulk, moored off Greenwich

A month later, John Shearing, “a very powerful-looking young man,” according to the
Morning Advertiser,
was arrested and taken before the magistrates at Bow Street, accused of sending a threatening letter to Colla. Shearing admitted to the JPs, “I deal in the stiff line, but I’m no Burker,” and denied having written the note, which read, “You bloody murdering bugger, do you expect you’ll be suffered to live, after the evidence you gave at the Old Bailey? No, you bloody thief, you and Hill shall share the fate of those you have assisted in sending to the other world. Prepare yourself, for in a very short time you will be a dead one.” A former associate of Shearing’s, a snatcher called Stringall, claimed that the note was in Shearing’s handwriting. Shearing was remanded.

On Boxing Day, a letter was received, by two-penny post, by William Hill, dissecting-room porter at King’s College. It read: “You bloody murdering bugger, you think you are all right to get tip, but only loke out, for you will have your bloody guts out before many days his over, for blow my eyes if there shan’t be another tucked up for you, you gallus life-selling warmint. You think you’ve done the trick up, master Billy, but I will put a spoke in your weal, damn my eyes if I don’t, you noing kovy, Yours affectionately, The Gost of Bishop and Williams.”

Doubtless another Shearing effort.

Hill took the letter to George Rowland Minshull, telling the magistrate that Mrs. Hill was sick with worry about the family’s safety and asking if he could be licensed to carry a small pistol for protection. Best not, said Minshull, who told Hill that the threats were probably nothing to worry about—Superintendent Thomas and he himself would see that no harm came to Hill.

Within a year, Hill was sacked by King’s College, without character references. The rumor reported (or was it started?) by the
Lancet
was that the college anatomy department’s entire supply of corpses had ceased because the London resurrectionists refused to do business with the porter who had alerted the authorities to Bishop and Williams’s boy cadaver. The point that the
Lancet
writer was making was that, despite the passing of the Anatomy Act in the summer of 1832, the resurrection trade continued to thrive, since the machinery of the act had yet to bring about a large enough supply of friendless, unclaimed paupers, and arguments about unfair distribution between the medical schools rumbled on, with resurrectionists helping to make up the corpse shortfalls at many schools. Thus it was stated in the
Lancet
of 17 November 1832 that “practices which would disgrace a nation of cannibals” remained common in the capital a year after the Italian Boy case. (In fact, snatching was being referred to in official documents as late as 1838; in that year the Poor Law commissioners reported that two resurrectionists had died from fever caught from a putrid corpse disinterred in a Somers Town graveyard.)
²
An anonymous letter in the following week’s
Lancet
contradicted the earlier issue, claiming that King’s had used “secret and undue” influence to obtain a higher number of workhouse corpses than other London medical schools. According to the correspondent, King’s now had access to so many bodies it was burying them without bothering to dissect them first. Another rumor was that King’s was using its fine portland stone water gates to dispose of its unwanted corpses and body parts by flushing them into the Thames.