Mr Briggs' Hat: The True Story of a Victorian Railway Murder (17 page)

The British murder story was manna for the fiercely competitive newspaper offices clustered along printing house row by The Park. With ten-cylinder power presses housed in gargantuan press rooms, their steam boilers and engines churning out news
sheets as broad as one’s arms could stretch, the
fifteen daily papers
in the city had a combined circulation of around 140,000 copies. The Briggs story provided a distraction from coverage of the battles between the north and south and from the
remorseless lists
of those killed in battle.

Leaving the Everett House Hotel on Saturday morning, 6 August, Inspector Tanner found New York stewing under hazy skies. The city was
en fête
as it celebrated Admiral Farragut’s audacious victory at Mobile Bay the previous morning, and the establishment of a blockade that isolated much of the Confederate fleet in the south. Tanner learned from the American owners of the
Victoria
that their ship was freighted with a cargo of iron and was making slow progress. Incredibly, she was not expected for at least another two weeks. He had time to put himself in touch with all the chief agencies in the city, beginning with the acting British consul
Pierrepont Edwards
, a thirty-one-year-old New Yorker born of British parents. Edwards would give him all the support in his power, beginning with an introduction to the man acting as the solicitor to the English government, Francis Marbury.

Marbury was crucial to their success. If their arrest of Müller was successful, then
Francis Marbury
would plead the British case for extradition. One of the best-known lawyers in the city and at the height of his career, he had built his reputation by pursuing some of the most famous railroad suits of the previous decade and he was not to be underestimated. He now advised Tanner that they must be careful to adhere strictly to the letter of the American law. Since Britain had no extradition treaty with the state of New York, the arrest must be made under national law by an officer deputed by the
United States Marshal.
Following that arrest, Tanner would have to obtain from the New York Commissioner a warrant to detain the prisoner and only when that had been granted could their plea for extradition be lodged. Marbury would be there at each stage to advise
Inspector Tanner on the legal requirements to bring off his task successfully.

Tanner’s next destination was in the lower reaches of the city, the
New York Police Headquarters
on the corner of Mulberry Street and Bleeker. Passing the two huge trees outside the entrance, mounting the grand steps and entering the raucous building, he was anxious to discover whether this department – already fighting fires on multiple fronts – would give him the assistance he needed. Though it had been established for sixteen years, with London’s Metropolitan force as its model, the NYPD faced a climate of aggression exacerbated both by immigration and the American Civil War – only a year earlier, frenzied mobs of immigrants had rioted for three days against being drafted into the Northern army. Organised gangs driven by the lure of money and political power were growing in strength and the city inhabitants increasingly viewed their police as both
inefficient and corrupt
. Tanner had no idea what to expect.

In the event, his task proved surprisingly easy. By the time he left the building, the Chief of the New York Metropolitan Police, Superintendent John Kennedy, along with Inspector Daniel Carpenter, had
proposed a plan
. One of their best officers, John Tieman, would be placed at Tanner’s disposal. Tieman spoke German and would be able to act as interpreter if Müller failed to understand their questions; he would also be authorised by Marshal Robert Murray to act on behalf of the federal authorities. It was suggested that this officer should station himself with Sergeant George Clarke about eight miles south on the eastern edge of Staten Island. Overlooking Lower New York Bay, they would wait with the medical officer whose duty it was to board every ship in order to impose quarantine restrictions when necessary. As soon as the
Victoria
was in sight, the police would accompany the medic on board,
arrest Müller and hold him
until he could be taken ashore.

On Sunday 7 August, two days after the arrival of Tanner on
the
Manchester
, Inspector Kerressey’s ship docked in New York. The city newspapers were already reporting Tanner’s meeting with the Police Department at Mulberry Street the day before and the English murder story that had seemed rather parochial only weeks before was escalating: readers were told that the
Victoria
with Franz Müller on board was so keenly anticipated that the harbour police boat had been
placed at the detective’s disposal
. As each transatlantic ship brought more recent British papers, details of the London investigation were repeated. The American press expressed incredulity at the German’s ostentatious exhibition of the prizes of his crime and derided him for failing so glaringly to cover his tracks. The transaction at John Death’s shop, the various pawnbroker deals, the gifting of the cardboard box and the ‘shallow’ story about the injury to his ankle were, to them, mere
proofs of his stupidity
.

Set against the visceral terrors of the Civil War, the murder was unlikely to provoke the shock it had caused in England and, to American reporters, Müller’s behaviour appeared to be dense rather than malevolent. Yet a notorious murderer was about to arrive on Manhattan’s shores. Shouted by the newsboys on street corners, the promise of a dramatic denouement on America’s doorstep rippled across the city.

CHAPTER 17

The Last Person in the World

A white glare bounced off the water in the harbour, blistered from the pavements and rebounded between the buildings. August in New York brought thick and heavy air and the heat leached energy.

The pain in Inspector Tanner’s back was easing under the care of a New York doctor with the bizarre name of
Quackembos
, but his general discomfort only grew in the unrelenting swelter. Kerressey had gone south to join Clarke and Tieman at Quarantine Landing on Staten Island. Unused to inactivity, there was little left for the restless Tanner to do but write reports for the Commissioner in London to be dispatched with each departing ship.

Tanner judged that the American authorities would offer little resistance to giving up the prisoner should they apprehend him, but he worried that American newspaper attention was beginning to complicate things.
In consequence of the publication in the papers of all my movements there is
a possibility of Müller escaping
, he wrote. He was concerned that a pilot boat might board the
Victoria
way out at sea and that indiscreet conversation or a recent newspaper taken on board might warn Müller of
their presence and precipitate his escape or suicide. Aiming to limit this possibility, Tanner had asked the British consul to communicate with the telegraph station out at Sandy Hook, a thin spit of land projecting into the Atlantic that all ships had to pass on their approach into New York Harbor. As soon as the
Victoria
came into view it was agreed that the station would telegraph the news to the officers on Staten Island. The consul also circulated a letter to all known pilots working the Sandy Hook waters, impressing on them the importance of discretion, advising them to take no newspapers on board the
Victoria
and desiring them to request of her captain the imprisonment of any passenger called Müller. Leaving nothing to chance, Tanner added his own offer of a
sixty-dollar – or five-pound – reward
.

Tanner was also preoccupied by the rumour that a German recruiting agent for the army called Essinhen had hatched
a plan to intercept the
Victoria
in open sea, persuade Müller to escape with him and then enrol him in the army in order to collect a thousand-dollar bounty. Reporting these fears to Richard Mayne in London, Tanner emphasised that he had made all practicable arrangements to defeat the plan, but admitted that it was an almost impossible task. Knowing that there was little possibility of Müller’s ship landing much earlier than 20 August, he still went to meet the arrival of every large ship, battling through the crowds to quiz their captains. Had they seen or spoken with the
Victoria
during their voyage?

A week passed. On Friday 12 August the capture of the
Adriatic
by the Confederate steamboat the
Tallahassee
reminded Tanner of the perils faced by all transatlantic shipping
.
Widely feared, this pirate boat patrolled the waters of the north, capturing fishing and pilot boats, barques and passenger ships and looting their coal, provisions and money. The
Adriatic
had left London a week after her sister-ship, the
Victoria.
Caught and raided en route to New York, her 163 passengers were cast ashore with their
cracked vases, bird cages
, cats, dogs and other
pets brought with them from the Old World
: then the ship was burned. If the slow-going
Victoria
were to suffer a similar fate, then Müller would evade them all. The
Tallahassee
had also hijacked
the
James Funk
, the pilot boat engaged by Tanner to attempt to intercept the
Victoria
. Try as he might to anticipate and stave off any possibility of the German’s escape, the detective was impotent against the threats posed by the machinery of the Civil War.

Another week went by. On 19 August, Inspector Tanner at his post in the city and Inspector Kerressey and Sergeant Clarke at Quarantine Landing kept a strict watch, expecting the ship hourly. Down at Castle Clinton, through the mighty black gates of the immigration station, Tanner waited in the shade of its stone walls, commanding a view of the entire harbour, eager for the wavering speck of a mast to appear on the horizon.

The consul, Pierrepont Edwards, had alerted him to the fact that a gentleman in Manhattan was purporting to be an agent of the German Legal Protection Society in London. This agent had told Edwards that he was instructed to engage representation for Müller and had asked to be present at any arrest in order to caution the prisoner about his rights. He said that Müller’s defence in England had been placed in the hands of the solicitor Thomas Beard who ran a thriving business in Basinghall Street in the City; he was clever, dedicated and, ironically, the man driven to such fear by a fellow passenger on a train a few weeks earlier. For four days Tanner had anticipated that the agent of the German Society would present himself at the Everett House Hotel, but he had not appeared.

*

In England, newspapers reporting the Vienna peace talks expressed growing alarm at the aggression of Prussia towards Denmark. In this hostile, anti-German climate, the German Legal Protection Society, or
Deutscher Rechtsschutz Verein
(based at
73
Moorgate Street in the City of London), provided free legal assistance to its nationals in Britain and was fixed on assisting their compatriot. Thomas Beard, the solicitor it had engaged, was noted for his thoroughness, but in the absence of his client there was little he could do but hope that someone would come forward.

On 9 August a paragraph appeared in
The Times
earnestly inviting
any person
who can furnish information as to the movements of the accused Franz Müller on the day of the alleged murder (the 9th inst) and the three subsequent days to communicate same to the undersigned the solicitor, Thos. Beard, 10 Basinghall Street, City
. The next day another appeared in the
Morning Advertiser.
They were seeking information from all available quarters, aiming to provide Müller with a plausible defence by proving that he was not on the railway at the time of the murder. These advertisements, along with reports of the ongoing proceedings of the inquest in Hackney, kept the story alive.

On Tuesday 23 August, as Tanner embarked on the eighteenth day of his New York vigil, the Home Office in London learned a little more about Müller from the Royal Police Directory in Munich.
The German authorities wrote
that he was from Langendernbach in the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, that he had arrived in their town in May 1859 as a journeyman tailor aged nineteen and had been employed by several successive businesses. His description fitted that supplied by London and it was known that he had left Munich in February 1861. Regarding his character, they announced that
nothing whatever has transpired to his disadvantage
– in fact, Müller had himself complained of being robbed by a fellow lodger while working in Munich. A second report from the President of Police at Cologne completed the picture. Müller had been registered there from July 1861:
he was an active, clever workman, however inconsiderate and not to be trusted, but endeavoured to make good … by a cheerful obliging behaviour
. They confirmed that Müller had obtained a visa
for London in March 1862 and that he had absconded from Cologne without repaying several small loans advanced by his colleagues.

*

The
Victoria
had been at sea for forty days. Through the interminable hours of Wednesday the 24th the southern horizon of the harbour remained clear. Only as the sun began to drop to the west did she appear off Sandy Hook and begin to make her way into the Lower Bay.