The Invention of Murder (21 page)

There were, however, limitations to this preventative role, and the eruption of Daniel Good into the national consciousness highlighted the one-sided nature of Peel’s force. The police were paid to prevent violent crime. What happened afterwards, if prevention failed?

Daniel Good was a coachman employed by a Mr Quelaz Shiell in the hamlet of Roehampton, south-west of London. He had been keeping company with Jane Jones, a laundress who lived in Manchester Square, who was known as ‘Mrs’ Jones, even though there was no Mr Jones and her eleven-year-old son called Daniel Good ‘Father’. But in 1842 Good met Susan Butcher, and Mrs Jones had come to hear of it. To soothe her, Good invited her out to Roehampton, while the boy was sent overnight to a friend. The next day, Monday, 6 April 1842, Good visited a pawnbroker in Wandsworth, where he bought a pair of black knee breeches. As he was leaving, however, the pawnbroker’s assistant saw him take a second pair of trousers. The pawnbroker went to the police in the Wandsworth, or V, Division to report the matter.

A constable was assigned this case of trouser-theft and two days later, accompanied by two stable boys (Good had a reputation for violence), he went out to talk to Good. He found him in the stables, and in an emollient frame of mind, immediately offering to return to the pawnshop with the constable to pay for the goods. The constable said that was not in his orders; he was there to search for the stolen trousers. He began in the harness room, where, moving a truss of hay, he saw what he thought was a dead goose. At that moment he heard the stable door slam, turned around and found that Good had fled, locking him and his companions inside. The constable now realized that the goose was actually a woman’s torso, without legs, arms or head, ‘the belly. cut open, and the bowels taken out’. He and the stable boys broke down the door, but once free, instead of pursuing Good, who at that point had been gone less than a quarter of an hour, the constable resumed his search of the barn, finding a bloodstained mattress. Only then did he send off for reinforcements, waiting for them at the stable. When they arrived, they too showed little desire for the chase, and instead everyone returned to Wandsworth police station for further orders.

When, nearly two hours later, more senior police arrived, they too thought their first task was to search the stable. Evidence of a horrible crime was readily found: an axe, saw and knife covered with blood, together with a fire that showed signs of having recently burnt fiercely – ‘there were pieces of wood, coal, and straw, a great quantity more than was necessary for any common fire’ – while in the ashes underneath were pieces of bone. Only now was Mrs Jones’s young son questioned, and the police heard that he had been sent away for a night. The gardener’s son added that he had seen Mrs Jones that same day at Roehampton, wearing a blue bonnet.

In the late 1830s Commissioner Richard Mayne had instituted a city-wide system of ‘route-papers’ for the dissemination of police information. Every morning, the superintendent of each division had to write a complete summary of all unsolved crimes that had occurred in his district over the previous twenty-four hours, with full details, including whatever information was available concerning the suspects. A copy of every route-paper was sent daily to all divisions, so that each superintendent had a list of every unsolved crime throughout London, plus information about wanted men, suspects and so on, information which was in turn passed to the constables on the beat.

No route-paper was written on the missing Daniel Good for twenty-four hours. And when it was, there being no overall detective organization, each division that held a piece of the jigsaw started work on its own. Nine divisions followed different leads, with no coordination. Putney police discovered that Good had been seen quarrelling with a woman at the Spotted Horse tavern in Roehampton. Meanwhile in Marylebone, D Division learned that Good had spent the night at Mrs Jones’s lodgings, but by the time they arrived at the house he was long gone, taking with him Mrs Jones’s bed, trunk, a box and a hatbox. The cab driver who had driven him away was identified, and he said he had driven his passenger to Whitcombe Street, near Pall Mall. As this was not in D Division’s area, Marylebone police took no further action. C Division covered Whitcombe Street, and they printed handbills describing Good, and posted placards throughout London and the suburbs detailing the crime and Good’s appearance. Witnesses reported that Good had gone from Whitcombe Street to the Spotted Dog pub in the Strand, before moving on to Spitalfields, in H Division. C Division therefore lost sight of him. It was only on yet another search of the stables that a letter from Mrs Butcher, from an address in Woolwich, was found. V Division forwarded this information to R Division at Greenwich, who questioned Mrs Butcher at her lodgings. On the day the murder was discovered Good had visited her, leaving behind some clothes he said had belonged to his dead wife. The items included a blue silk bonnet and a reticule, both of which had been described by the Manchester Square residents as belonging to Mrs Jones. The bonnet, furthermore, looked very much like the one the gardener’s son had seen Mrs Jones wearing. Good had also told Mrs Butcher about a mangle she might have, although she could not remember precisely where he had said it was. The police may not have been able to find Good, but here was confirmation that they were hunting the right man: the day before the discovery of the body, Good had been giving away Mrs Jones’s possessions. He, at least, appeared to think she would no longer want them. The police offered a £100 reward for information, to which on 12 April, four days after the discovery, the Putney magistrates added another £50.

After the discovery of what was presumed to be Mrs Jones’s body, the coroner for the district had initially requested that it be kept
in situ
at the stable, for identification purposes – the assumption was that Good would be rapidly captured, and that the inquest jury would visit the scene of the crime. Very shortly, however, her body was instead playing a part in the entertainment world, as it was displayed to the curious.
The Times
was eloquent on the subject. On 8 April it commended the viewings: ‘very properly’, the police were permitting entry only to ‘the principal inhabitants of the neighbourhood’. Four days later, however, ‘vehicles of every description, from the aristocratic carriage to the costermonger’s cart’ were permitted to enter, and with the arrival of these working-class spectators the display had now become a ‘disgusting exhibition’.

By 15 April the newspapers, while still revelling in every detail of the crime, began to concentrate on the failure of the police to put their hands on the wanted man.
The Times
continued its now traditional path of convicting the accused long before the trial. Good’s career, it asserted, had been one ‘continued course of crime’. He had stolen ‘coats, cloaks, muffs, boas, &c.’, he had once killed a horse, and had been ‘discharged from the service of a gentleman connected with the Deaf and Dumb Asylum for a felonious act’.
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Then the paper moved its sights from the still-on-the-run villain, to take aim at the police. There was, it said, ‘a feeling. of unmitigated indignation, against the police authorities for not using such diligence as must have had. the effect of placing a monster in custody’. Reports were pouring in from all over. A man at the Swan Tavern, London Bridge, had acted in a very suspicious manner by sighing when he asked about a steamer to Hull. Another report said Good was selling apples in Cornhill, disguised as a woman. He was also in Spitalfields. And in Gray Eagle Street. And Nottingham. And at Sheerness. He had been found drowned in the Thames. He had been in prison at Leeds, except that he had escaped. Luckily he was also in the County Gaol in Derby – and ‘his appearance in every particular answers the description given of him in the posting-bills’ – that is, he was precisely five feet six. By the sixteenth,
The Times
was foaming: ‘the public had a right to expect better’ of a police force ‘maintained at so heavy a cost to the country’.

While the newspapers were united in their views of the obligations of the police, the course of action they should take was, to the police themselves, much less clear. The commissioners were at loggerheads. Charles Rowan, a former army officer, thought that their job was to wait until Good was picked up: the force’s duty was prevention, not detection. The more expansionist Richard Mayne, sensing an opportunity, disagreed. Since the Bow Street Runners had been disbanded three years before, there had officially been no detective force in the capital. Unofficially, however, Mayne had been developing a proto-detective department. In 1840 he had signed an order allocating ‘an active, intelligent man in each division’ to trace stolen goods, nominally collecting information on past crimes in order to prevent the commission of future ones. Mayne also had another two men under his own supervision. All these men were, quietly, detectives. Now he recognized that the outcry over Good’s escape was the perfect opportunity to come into the open. He took his two secret detectives, plus an Inspector Pearce, whom he seconded to headquarters for special duties, and charged them with the task of tracing Good.

Pearce picked up Good’s trail at the Spotted Dog. Yet even now there was duplication: a local inspector from C Division traced the same route and located the cab driver who had taken Good to his next stop. Instead of reporting it, he went to Good’s destination in Spitalfields on his own initiative. There he found a woman named Molly Good, who claimed that she was Good’s wife, but that she had not seen him for years. Police initiative went only so far: he believed her, and dropped the lead. When Pearce also found Mrs Good, he was less credulous. Questioning the neighbours, he found that Good had been using Spitalfields as a safe haven, and that Mrs Good had even vouched for him to a local pawnbroker, where the inspector found more of Mrs Jones’s possessions.

Mrs Good was arrested, and Pearce was now on the right track: from Tooley Street, in the Borough, he traced a suspect to Deptford, and then to Bromley, in Kent. In the end, though, he was pipped at the post. A railway worker in Tonbridge, who had formerly been a constable in V Division, thought that a bricklayer’s labourer looked familiar, and his suspicions were strengthened by hearing the man speak in Irish. He notified the railway police, who took the man in for questioning. At his lodgings, bundled up with his clothes, was a copy of the issue of
Hue and Cry
that contained the original notice of the murder. Ten days after Jane Jones’s body was found under the straw, Daniel Good had, finally, been captured.

The trial was something of a foregone conclusion. Witnesses placed Mrs Jones with Good at the stables the day before she vanished, wearing the bonnet later given to Mrs Butcher. The gardener’s son, who slept over the harness room, had heard the crackling of a fire there as he came downstairs the morning after her disappearance; Mr Shiell’s cook added that that morning Good had been covered in soot, like ‘a sweep’. Medical evidence estimated a recent time of death – it was only possible to say it had taken place within days rather than weeks – and added that it looked as though Mrs Jones might have been pregnant. Much of the medical testimony was devoted to a discussion of whether the dismemberment had taken place before or after death, a matter of little consequence; almost no time was spent in discussing whether the bone fragments found in the fireplace were human, and if they were, whether they belonged to the torso that had been found.

Good had a lawyer, who pointed out that this was all circumstantial evidence. There was not even any evidence that Mrs Jones had been killed by violence, much less that the killing had been carried out by Good. He reminded the jury that Good had no reason to murder Mrs Jones: they weren’t married, she had no claim on him, and if he had wanted to leave her, he could have just gone. The jury found him guilty nonetheless, and then Good made a statement. He said Jane Jones had killed herself in the harness room, and that when, horrified, he had found her dead body, an itinerant match-seller had happened by, who offered to dispose of the body. (It was probably sensible of the defence not to present this argument.)

The crime was discussed by all strata of society. A broadside, ‘The Life, Trial and Execution of D. Good for the murder of Jane Jones’, printed a series of unconfirmable rumours: that Good had spent his childhood torturing dogs; that he had been sentenced to the hulks for robbery;
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that ‘he has been known to twist a whipcord round a horse’s tongue, and tear it out by the root’. The ‘Apprehension of D. Good at Tonbridge for the Murder of Jane Jones’ concentrated on snappy images: one, captioned, ‘Stop, is not your name Good? why, you are the murderer of Jane Jones!’ depicts two men in fashionable man-about-town outfits, even though Good had been dressed as a labourer when he was recognized, and his nemesis had been a railway worker. The
Illustrated London News,
founded shortly before Good’s arrest, and aiming itself resolutely at the domestic middle-class market, nonetheless thought it essential to include a portrait engraving of Good, although it felt it necessary simultaneously to issue a rather shame-faced apology: ‘It is not our intention to disfigure the pages of the “Illustrated News” with engravings, especially connected with crime and its consequences; we do not profess to be of the “raw head and bloody bones” school … but he [Good] has only a few hours to live.’

While Daniel Good was now safely arrested, tried and convicted, further crimes – a constable shot and killed in Highbury, north London, a second and third assassination attempt on Queen Victoria – kept the need for detection to the fore. Only two months after Good’s arrest, Mayne approached the Home Office with a plan for the establishment of a new division to concentrate on detection. The example of Good had altered governmental perception, and on 14 June 1842, the ‘Detective Department’, consisting of two superintendents and six sergeants, opened for business. (Scotland Yard, just off Whitehall Place, was the address of the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police; after 1842 it also became a shorthand reference to the Detective Department, renamed the Criminal Investigation Department, or CID, in 1878.) Officially, police work was now about both the prevention of future crimes and the detection of past ones.