Shooting Victoria (19 page)

*
But it did not. An inquiry to the curator of the Museum by the author, listing specific descriptive details about the pistols Oxford used, resulted in the hasty removal of a pistol exhibited for decades as Oxford's, since that pistol clearly did not resemble either of Oxford's.

Part Two

THE GAUNTLET

eight

M
OST
D
ESPERATE
O
FFENDERS

W
ell over twenty thousand Londoners had gathered outside Newgate on Monday morning, 23 May 1842, again to see a man hanged. Eager to get a view, the crowd began forming on Sunday night; as usual, the best seats in the windows and rooftops surrounding houses had been snapped up by the wealthy: the
Times
reported one nobleman, a true connoisseur of hangings, who had attended the last four or five of them (including Courvoisier's) and who paid a high premium of £14 for a window seat this time. At six in the morning, this nobleman would have seen seething below him the largest crowd to gather outside of Newgate for decades—larger than the crowd that had seen Courvoisier die two years before—a solid mass stretching out of sight down the four streets that formed a cross, with the scaffold at the crux. Somewhere among that mass stood a swarthy, good-looking, twenty-year-old man by the name of John Francis.

The police, well aware that this hanging would attract crowds, were taking no chances: two hundred City and Metropolitan police were stationed between scaffold and spectators. If they were concerned that the audience might rush the scaffold out of sympathy with the condemned man, they need not have worried. Crowds at public executions could be fickle, capable of awe-stricken silence in the face of imminent death, as they were with Courvoisier, or, when they considered the death sentence unfair, hostile to the state—or to the state's most visible representative, the executioner. But John Francis and the suffocating mass all around him were of one mind about this monster: they were ready to welcome his death with howls of execration, or with grim satisfaction and genuine relief. For Daniel Good had, for the last six weeks, captivated and affronted them, both by committing one of the goriest murders of the nineteenth century, and by escaping for ten days the detection of an increasingly anxious metropolis and of an increasingly embarrassed Metropolitan Police force. Lord Chief Justice Denman anticipated the mood of this crowd when in sentencing Good to death, ten days before, he had told him “you will leave the world unrespected and unpitied by any one.” This crowd had come to see, in Denman's words, “a good deed done.”

It was a pair of trousers that had done Good in. He was a coachman when he wasn't engaging in his dual passions of larceny and bigamy. He worked at the southwestern edge of the metropolis, in Putney, near Richmond, out of the stables of the expansive estate of Queely (or Quelaz) Shiell, who had made his fortune as the largest slaveholder on the West Indian island of Montserrat. On the evening of a fine day, 6 April 1842, Good and his ten-year-old son, Daniel, were returning to Putney on Shiell's pony-chaise from Woolwich, where Good had been courting Susan Butcher, his latest romantic interest. An hour after sunset, father and son pulled up to Collingbourne's pawnshop on Wandsworth High Street. There, Good bought on credit a pair of breeches, and there, on exiting, according to vigilant shopboy Samuel Dagnall, Good snatched up
a pair of trousers, secreted them beneath the flaps of his greatcoat, hurried to the carriage, and slipped both breeches and trousers beneath the chaise-seat upon which his son sat. When Collingbourne, alerted to the theft, confronted Good, Good denied the charge indignantly and drove off. Collingbourne quickly fetched a local policeman, PC William Gardiner, who enlisted the aid of Dagnall and a boy from the shop next door, Robert Speed, and proceeded to Shiell's stables. There, they found Good more conciliatory; he was more than willing to return to Wandsworth to pay Collingbourne for the breeches—but the trousers, he would not admit to taking. Gardiner insisted upon searching the chaise. Good had no objection. Gardiner found nothing there, and extended his search to the chaise-house and its stables and harness room. When Gardiner moved to search another stable, Good planted his back against the door and refused entry: he would, he said, rather return to Wandsworth and settle the matter.

The commotion attracted Thomas Houghton, Shiell's bailiff and head gardener, who had an antipathy for Good (which Good heartily returned) and authority over him: Houghton agreed to the search. The six (Gardiner, Houghton, Dagnall, Speed, Good, and Good's son) entered the stables. Gardiner asked Speed to keep a close watch on Good, and asked Dagnall to hold a lantern while he scrutinized every stall, hayrick, and cornbin. Good's anxiety grew as the search continued, and he pleaded that they return to Wandsworth. As Gardiner searched a cornbin, he saw Good enter the fourth stall and begin to move hay. Snarling that he did not need Good's assistance, Gardiner shooed him away to the doorway of the stable and the scrutiny of Speed, while he, and Dagnall with the lantern, entered the stall. Gardiner moved two hay-bales and some loose straw underneath, when he saw what he thought was a plucked goose and cried out “My God, what's this?”

Speed, across the room, turned away from Good to see what Gardiner saw—and Daniel Good bolted, slamming the stable door to, locking it, throwing the key and a lantern into a hedge, and
lighting out across the fields, trapping Gardiner, Houghton, the shopboys, and his own son. Robert Speed picked up a two-pronged hayfork and attempted unsuccessfully to force the door. The group then went back to the fourth stable, to see exactly what they had found. It was flesh—a human being, Gardiner cried.

Robert Speed denied this, reached out, and turned the thing over. It was the trunk of a woman, head and limbs partially sliced and partially hacked off. It had been gutted—sliced in a ghastly cross vertically from sternum to pubes, and horizontally around the top of the pelvis, in a single cut from one side of the backbone around to the other. All of the lower organs were removed, including the uterus, which made it impossible for surgeons later examining the body to say for certain whether this woman had been pregnant—though they speculated that she had been, from the size and condition of her breasts.

With an energy redoubled by horror, the party made another attempt to force the door, and succeeded. Good was now fifteen minutes gone. Gardiner sent Samuel Dagnall to the station house in Wandsworth to fetch help, give a description of Good, and raise the alarm, sending him any policemen he met along the way. A policeman arrived in twenty minutes; Gardiner sent him to Putney to fetch more police. Another arrived in half an hour; Gardiner sent him, as well, to Wandsworth, to fetch the Superintendent of V Division, Thomas Bicknell. When Bicknell arrived to take command, it was past 11:30, the stable was filled with police, and Good was two and a half hours away from Putney Park Lane. The police made little attempt to pursue him beyond the neighborhood, focusing instead upon the crime scene. There, they found an abundance of evidence. One officer, Sergeant Palmer, opened the door to the adjoining harness room and was nearly knocked over by the overpowering stench: in the fireplace, beneath an abundance of coal and wood set to create an intense fire, he and others after him found a number of charred, and recognizably human, bone fragments. Others found a bloody
knife and axe, and two bloody fragments of a woman's petticoat, “violently torn asunder.”

In a very short time, the police had all the evidence they needed to convict Good. Within two days, they had identified the victim. They had connected Good—and only Good—to the murder. They had recovered the woman's many belongings—including the clothing she had been wearing on the day she disappeared—and were able to trace all of it to Good. They had a solid case—but they had let their man slip away.

What the police did not realize this night is that they had with them on Shiell's estate the key to apprehending Good quickly. Ten-year-old Daniel Good had been with his father for the last three days, and before that had lived for over two years with Jane Jones—known to all as Jane Good—in a basement kitchen on South Street, Manchester Square, in Marylebone. At his father's wishes—and from genuine affection—the boy faithfully called this woman “mother,” while his father referred to the woman as the boy's aunt. The Sunday before, on Good's orders, an anxious Jane Jones had left the boy to sleep with a neighbor while she went to visit Good in Putney. She never returned. The next day, Good fetched the boy out of his school and told him that his aunt had found employment in the country—the boy wouldn't see her for another six months. He then took the boy to Putney, and gave him over to the supervision of others while he disappeared for long hours, night and day. On the day of the discovery in the stables, the boy had traveled with his father in Shiell's chaise across the south of London to Woolwich, where he met the woman his father had recently proposed to, Susan Butcher. He saw his father make a gift to the young woman: a gown, a shawl, a fur tippet, a pair of gloves, a pair of boots, and, in a hatbox, a blue bonnet. The boy recognized the clothing: it was what “mother” had been wearing on the day she disappeared. The Goods then took Susan Butcher for a ride in the chaise through Greenwich to a public house in New Cross: at his father's request, Butcher wore mother's bonnet. Aunt was gone, his father told him at that time.
He was now to call Susan Butcher “mother.” The boy waited outside the pub while father and Susan drank gin and water. Leaving Susan Butcher to catch a train, father and son and drove across southern London in the growing darkness to the pawnshop on Wandsworth High Street. From there they returned to Shiell's stables, and to the search for the trousers—which were never found, and which the boy swore his father never took. Young Daniel Good then witnessed his father's flight, and the discovery of the trunk—which he first thought was the body of a pig. Knowing all that he knew, young Daniel Good's confusion must have been short-lived—he must have come, before anyone else, to the horrifying conclusion that this body was mother's. Moreover, he knew the address where his father was most likely to be found.

Young Daniel apparently disclosed that address to one of the policemen investigating the stables. And the police discovered that Good was headed in the direction of the city: Sergeant Palmer, investigating the fields around the stable, found a broken paling on a fence, and beyond this, footsteps headed northeast. The Metropolitan Police were adept, through an established system of “route-papers,” at communicating information about breaking crimes and fleeing criminals to all metropolitan station houses and to all active officers in a matter of hours. And Superintendent Bicknell indeed ordered a description of Good sent to every division: “V division, April 6,1842.—Absconded, about half-past 9 o'clock, from Mr. Shiell's, Putney-park-lane, Daniel Good, the coachman, an Irishman, about 40 years of age, 5 feet 6 inches high, very dark complexion, dressed in a dark frock-coat, drab breeches and gaiters, and a black hat. He is suspected of having murdered a female, the body having been found in the stable.” If Bicknell had heard of the South Street address from young Daniel Good, he did not think it fit to include it.

If Bicknell had broadcasted Jane Jones's address, Good would certainly have been caught, for it was indeed to 18 South Street that the murderer fled that night, dashing through the toll gate at
Putney Bridge (according to local legend, he tossed the gatekeeper his coachman's coat as he flew by), running most of the seven miles before taking a cab to Marylebone, arriving around midnight without a key, breaking into the room with a screwdriver he borrowed from a nearby pub. He remained there, unbothered by the police until morning, not sleeping but bundling up all of Jane Jones's possessions. In the meantime, at 3
A.M.,
Inspector Bicknell's route paper had arrived at the station house of D Division, which covered Manchester Square. There, the officer on duty, Inspector Tedman—the very same John Tedman who had observed Edward Oxford so carefully at the Shepherd and Flock three years before—erred greatly by neglecting to convey Good's description to patrolling officers until the next patrol arrived for duty at 6
A.M.
Had he conveyed Bicknell's information earlier, a policeman who had at 5
A.M.
witnessed Good hailing a cab, filling it with bundles and a box, and clapping a bed onto the roof, would certainly have arrested him on the spot. (Tedman was suspended from the force for several weeks because of this mistake.) Good escaped and made his way east to Spitalfields, where he sought out his actual wife, Molly Good, whom he had abandoned a good two decades before. God had directed him back to her, he told the delighted woman. Together, Daniel and Molly pawned and sold most of Jane Jones's worldly goods.

The police, and the press, were able to trace Good's movements to this point. But they were always a step behind him, and the trail went cold at Spitalfields. The newspapers soon excoriated the police for their lack of diligence in catching the murderer. After Good disappeared, the
Times
reported the public sense of “unmitigated indignation” against the police, and thundered “Nine days have now elapsed since the discovery of the above most inhuman murder, and the perpetrator of the horrid deed is still, we regret to state, at large. Surely the public had a right to expect better things from the metropolitan police—a force so great in numerical strength, and maintained at so heavy a cost to the country.” The
problem was a systemic one: “The conduct of the metropolitan police in the present case … is marked with a looseness and want of decision which proves that unless a decided change is made in the present system, it is idle to expect that it can be an efficient detective police, and that the most desperate offender may escape with impunity.” Without a detective branch—in other words, without a set of officers trained and experienced in the ways of the criminal mind, in an intimate knowledge of the criminal underworld, and with the authority to coordinate action across divisional lines in order to
investigate
crimes, rather than simply prevent them—the police would continue to suffer embarrassments. Typical of the problem was Inspector Tedman, as well as Inspector M'Gill of the Holborn division. M'Gill successfully tracked Good to Spitalfields, and rather than enlist the local police in apprehending Good, he confronted Molly directly, broadcasting to the neighborhood that Good was wanted. Believing Molly's lie that she hadn't seen Good, M'Gill returned to Holborn to write up his report. “Thus,” the
Times
blasted, “the circumstance soon got circulation through the neighbourhood, and thus the chances of detection were considerably lessened, as there are unfortunately in that particular locality a class of persons who would do their utmost to protect an offender, no matter what the enormity of his crime may be, and prevent his being brought to justice.”