The Invention of Murder (24 page)

The press kept everyone up to date. The
Morning Chronicle
was both smug about its reporting – ‘the earliest information … was given in this paper exclusively’ – and peeved that its exclusive ‘was transferred to the columns of nearly all our contemporaries, and in no one instance was the source … acknowledged’.
Lloyd’s
meanwhile reported receiving information that a ‘clairvoyante’ had seen three cellars under the Mannings’ house, in one of which was to be found the pistol that had been used to kill O’Connor: ‘What makes this letter extraordinary,’ added
Lloyd’s,
‘is that there are three large cellars.’ Penny-dreadful gothic cellars were not in fact found under the small terraced house, and the newspaper moved on to a report that two pistols and a ‘bullet mould’ had been traced to a Bermondsey pawnshop, producing bullets that matched those which killed O’Connor. The newspapers, at least, felt there was ‘no doubt’ that these were the murder weapons, although they did not say how the pawnshop had been located.

Meanwhile Manning’s attempts to pin everything on his wife – the ‘Lady Macbeth on the Bermondsey Stage’, as
The Times
called her – were doomed to failure. At the inquest, evidence was heard from a constable who had collected the household goods Manning had sold. The coal shovel, he testified, still had ‘blood and ashes with human hair attached’. The Mannings were committed for trial.

The trial opened on 29 October 1849, and a procession of witnesses appeared. William Massey, a medical student who had lodged with the couple, said that Manning ‘asked me … what drug would produce stupefaction, or partial intoxication, so as to cause a person to put pen to paper. just before, or just after, he mentioned the name of O’Connor he said he should like to get O’Connor to sign a promissory-note for a considerable sum of money, 500l’. Two clerks from the stockbrokers’ offices that had dealt with O’Connor could not testify- both had been stricken with cholera, and one had died – but a woman identified Manning as the man who had bought a bushel of lime from her, saying it was to kill slugs. When she had asked him what kind of lime he wanted, he replied, ‘that which would burn the quickest’ – hardly a necessity for slugs. A porter gave evidence that when he delivered a crowbar Manning had ordered, Manning, meeting him in the street, complained that it had not been wrapped up, and he made the porter wait while he went into a shop and bought paper to cover it. The furniture-broker’s wife added that after they had bought the furniture, Manning had told her, ‘I would not sleep there [in the house] to-night for £20.’

The medical evidence to prove that the body was that of O’Connor, and that he had been murdered, was less strong. At the inquest the police surgeon had testified to the victim’s wounds, but although he had sent the viscera to Alfred Swaine Taylor, the lecturer on medical jurisprudence at Guy’s Hospital, Taylor had refused to carry out an analysis, as the Surrey and Middlesex coroners had previously failed to pay him for work he’d performed for them; the remains had been thrown away. Further testimony involved stains on Mrs Manning’s dress. William Olding identified himself as a ‘practical chemist’, and went on to explain that he was the son of the police surgeon, had studied chemistry for five years, and was now twenty years old. Although he had ‘arrived at the conclusion that the stains [on the dress] are blood’, he then went on, with no apparent sense of contradiction, ‘there is no direct chemical process which will identify blood stains … I cannot swear it was blood.’ The most he could say was that, when the fabric was soaked in water, it had given off ‘a smoky red colour, from which I afterwards obtained a precipitate indicating albumen, one of the constituents of the blood’. As the red discharge ‘was not any colouring matter with which I am acquainted’, and as it contained albumen, he therefore felt happy to swear it was blood.

Manning’s defence was that it was all Mrs Manning’s fault – she was the guilty party, he had known nothing beforehand, he had bought the lime and the crowbar on her instructions, and had only become aware of her plans when he saw O’Connor lying dead in the kitchen. Mrs Manning’s defence was just as weak. Her barrister first condemned Manning’s barrister for describing her relationship with O’Connor in terms he thought ‘coarse’, and then outlined what he said were the two possibilities in this case: either Maria was a woman of ‘abandoned character’, in which case she would have been kept by O’Connor, and didn’t need to kill him; or she was ‘a woman of kindly feelings and disposition’, and thus would not ‘lend herself to such a transaction’ (it is not clear if the ‘transaction’ was murder or adultery). The rest of the defence speech was pretty much the same as Manning’s: each blamed the other.

The jury considered for forty-five minutes before coming back with a guilty verdict. When asked if they had anything to say, Manning was silent, but Mrs Manning burst out: ‘There is no justice and no right for a foreign subject in this country. There is no law for me. I have had no protection – neither from the judges, nor from the prosecutors, nor from my husband.’ She then claimed that O’Connor had been her dearest friend in the world. When the judge began to sentence the pair, she burst out once more, shouting, ‘No, no; I won’t stand it. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. There is neither law nor justice here,’ before attempting to leave the dock. She was prevented, but probably they should have let her go, as she then cried, ‘Shameful’, and ‘Base England’, before snatching up the bunches of rue that were, by tradition, placed on the bench in front of the dock, and throwing them down in what was clearly meant to be a gesture of contempt towards the court.

This was as good as any melodrama, and the comparison did not escape contemporaries.
Punch
illustrator Richard Doyle together with Percival Leigh produced a mock Olde-English series on places of amusement – the zoo, the flower show, and so on. Then, ‘did take my Wife. to the Old Bailey, my Wife having a great Longing to fee a Prifoner tried, efpecially for Murder … the Place look[ed] as fine almoft as the Opera. But in Truth it was as good as a Play, if not better, to hear the Barrifters fpeak to the Jury, efpecially the Counfel for the Prifoners, making believe to be mightily concerned for their Clients … pleading their Caufe, as though they were injured Innocents, with fmiting of the Breaft, and turning up of the Eyes, more natural than I remember I did ever fee any Actor…’

The verdict surprised no one, although it must have gladdened the hearts of newspaper proprietors everywhere.
The Times
had carried more than seventy stories on the case between the discovery of the crime in August and the execution of the Mannings in November. It tacitly acknowledged this glut, saying demurely that ‘certain examples’ of crime took ‘a stronger hold than others’, creating a ‘more continuous interest’. So they did, and not only in the home market.
Household Words
noted advertisements from as far afield as Vienna, where ‘READERS OF ALL CLASSES’ were offered the opportunity to learn ‘THE DARK DEEDS OF CIVILISED MAN … “The Murder of Mr. O’Connor by the Mannings, Husband and Wife”, and “The Fourfold Murder by James Bloomfield [sic] Rush”.’ The
Illustrated London News,
so apologetic about printing a single portrait of Daniel Good in 1842, published twelve illustrated articles on the Mannings. The
Lady’s Newspaper,
specializing in ‘lively and serious poetry, the fashions, directions for making and working those nameless elegancies, in collars, cuffs, mantelets, purses’, featured the story regularly, while
Lloyd’s Weekly
sometimes devoted as much as half its editorial space to the murder.

By 1837, only murder, attempted murder, high treason, wrecking, rape, piracy, arson on inhabited premises and ‘unnatural offences’ continued to be punishable by death. And after that year, only three people in the entire century were hanged for anything other than murder or high treason in wartime. Even for murder, executions were uncommon. In the West Midlands between 1835 and 1860, for example, there were 14,686 guilty verdicts for all indictable offences. Of these, thirteen people were sentenced to death, and of those so sentenced, only four were executed – four hangings in twenty-five years.

If executions were a rarity, executions of women were even rarer, and double executions of husband and wife were unimaginably rare. Throughout the sixty-three years of Victoria’s reign, 26 per cent of convicted murderers were men who killed their wives, while only 1 per cent were women who killed their husbands. And eight out of every ten female homicide victims were killed by a husband, lover, or would-be husband or lover. Even for lesser crimes, women as a proportion of those tried, much less convicted, were in a tiny minority, and a minority growing smaller every year.

This rarity created a bonanza for broadside-sellers. It was claimed that 1.6 million broadsides had been sold for each of the cases of Corder, Greenacre and Good, but Rush and the Mannings were more popular still – the figure for them is 2.5 million broadsides each. In 1838 the legal requirement that executions take place within forty-eight hours of sentencing had been abolished, in order that appeals could be heard, and this gave broadside-sellers an extra window, and the ‘Sorrowful Lamentations’ of the criminal contemplating his doom flourished. ‘Before that. there wasn’t no time for a Lamentation; sentence o’ Friday, and scragging o’ Monday’ was no use to the patterer.

There was a definite class divide in how murder news was digested. One standing patterer, who had done ‘uncommonly well’ with the Mannings, noted that ‘Gentlefolks won’t have anything to do with murders sold in the street; they’ve got other ways of seeing all about it,’ while for those who bought broadsides, ‘we picture them in the highest colours we can’. One elderly man in 1923 recollected that as a schoolboy during the Manning trial he had watched ‘men carrying … rudely painted canvases on staffs on both sides of which were portraits and scenes and incidents of the murder, the bearers gathering a harvest of coppers by describing the crime in stentorian tones to crowds at street corners’. For really popular crimes, some patterers produced brightly coloured boards, with a series of boxed illustrations from the story: the murder itself, the discovery of the body, the trial and the execution, and any particular details that had captured the public imagination. One patterer described his board, with its image of Mrs Manning ‘dressed for dinner’ and firing a pistol at O’Connor, who was washing his hands before the meal: ‘The people said … “O, look at him a-washing hisself; he’s a doing it so nattral, and ain’t a-thinking he’s a-going to be murdered.” ‘

The detail on these boards was not replicated in the broadside illustrations themselves, which used generic images, many lifted from completely unconnected sources. Henry Mayhew reported one ‘likeness’ of O’Connor that was, judging by the fur collar on the sitter’s coat and the order and insignia on his breast, a portrait of William IV. Another broadside (overleaf) reproduced a standard, anonymous execution scene, with a single body hanging from a gallows; next to it, very obviously scratched onto the block at a later date, is a series of black blobs, indicating the second body. The text in many of the broadsides published before the trial was also generic. One that was headed ‘Apprehension of Mrs Manning’ had no information about her arrest at all – it dealt entirely with earlier events – but word of the arrest must have arrived as it was going to press, so that simple piece of up-to-the-minute news was added, in the same way newspapers later carried ‘Stop Press’ columns.

After the verdict the broadsides could be more expansive, pleasurably chewing over the details. Several stressed Mrs Manning’s foreignness (although quite a few claimed she was Swedish) and her brute villainy: ‘We beat him dreadfully upon the floor,/We washed our hands in his crimson gore.’ Others carried the usual manufactured confessions, including one almost anti-confession written as if by Mrs Manning (who never actually confessed, to many broadside-writers’ disgust)
*
in an imaginary letter to her husband, claiming that O’Connor was actually ‘shot by that young man from Guernsey, who was in the back parlour smoking’. For not bringing this mystery man forward at the trial she chides Manning in the tone of a put-upon wife whose husband has yet again forgotten to let out the cat. Other broadsides stuck more closely to Manning’s repeated assertions that his wife had shot O’Connor, and then threatened to shoot him too if he refused to help her bury the body. Many liked the ‘fact’ that the grave had been dug the previous May, and covered with a board in the interim: they shiveringly reported how O’Connor must frequently have walked over it going to and from the sink.

For those who could manage it, the place to be on 13 November 1849 was at the execution, outside Horsemonger Lane Gaol. Even in an age when popular hangings drew thousands, the interest in the Mannings was exceptional. Three days earlier the police had already cleared the streets, barricading the space in front of the gaol and blocking off the smaller streets. (The Surrey parish authorities later recorded that £180 had been spent on barricades – the amount a small tradesman could expect to earn in a year.) Local householders saw an opportunity for even greater commerce than at an ‘ordinary’ hanging, and many sold seats at their windows, and on their roofs, for up to two guineas each. The American novelist Herman Melville recorded in his diary that he and a companion had ‘Paid half a crown each for a stand on the roof of a house adjoining. Police by hundreds. Men & women fainting. – The man & wife were hung side by side – still unreconciled to each other – What a change from the time they stood up to be married, together! The mob was brutish. All in all, a most wonderful, horrible, & unspeakable scene.’ Extraordinary demand also saw ‘tickets’ issued (‘Admit the bearer to one front seat at Mr ’s, Number—Winter Terrace’). Many landlords whose buildings faced the gaol erected scaffolding to create even more viewing areas.
The Times
claimed that window seats commanded ‘a Californian price’ – a reference to the gold rush under way in the same year. (Similarly, the waiting crowd amused itself by breaking into choruses of ‘Oh, Mrs Manning, don’t you cry for me’ to the tune of ‘Oh Susannah’, the marching song of the Forty-Niners.)