The Invention of Murder (3 page)

Crowds lined the route; more watched from windows and even the rooftops. Shops were shut, blinds drawn as a mark of respect to the Marrs and the Williamsons. The cart travelled first to the Ratcliffe Highway, where it stood for a quarter of an hour outside the Marrs’ house. An enraged member of the public climbed onto the cart and forcibly turned Williams’ head towards the house, to ensure that the murderer was brought face to face with the scene of his crime. Then the procession travelled on to New Gravel Lane, where again the cart rested outside the death site. Finally it processed to Cannon Street, on the edge of the City, and paused again. Then a stake was driven through Williams’ heart (some reports say hammered home by the fatal maul), and his body was tumbled into a grave – some sources say a large one, so he could be tossed in; others that it was purposely made too small and shallow. Either way, the intention was to show deliberate disrespect. The crowd, which had so far watched in almost total silence, howled to see the last of the man who had killed seven people – half as many as had been murdered in the entire previous year throughout England and Wales.

This was not the last the world was to see of John Williams. Bodily, he reappeared in 1886, when workmen laying a gas pipe in what was now the heart of the City dug up a skeleton with a stake through its heart. Rumour later had it that at some point Williams’ skull appeared in the keeping of the publican ‘at the corner of Cable Street and Cannon Street Road’. In 1886 the
Pall Mall Gazette
further reported that Madame Tussaud’s waxworks had a ‘beautifully executed’ portrait of Williams, drawn from life by Sir Thomas Lawrence. But when precisely had Lawrence seen Williams? In the two days between his arrest and suicide? Or perhaps in his final, cart-top appearance?

Williams was to cast a longer shadow on the mental attitudes to crime and crime prevention in the nineteenth century than his skeletal remains could do physically. His ghost made several appearances in Parliament in the months that followed his death. The government was slower than the public to embrace the solution of Williams as the sole murderer. In a debate, the radical MP William Smith simply assumed that the crimes had been committed by ‘a gang of villains, of whom few or no traces had yet been discovered’. The Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, agreed with him.
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The case ‘was still wrapped up in mystery. It undoubtedly seemed strange that a single individual could commit such accumulated violence.’

It was not the mystery that troubled the politicians; it was that policing throughout London was now seen to be completely inadequate. The city was still eighteen years away from establishing a centralized police force, and relied on a patchwork of overlapping organizations that had developed independently. By 1780 there were 800,000 inhabitants living in London’s two hundred parishes, which were responsible for the watch and policing, and also for lighting, waste disposal, street maintenance and care of the poor. But nothing was straightforward: Lambeth parish had nine trusts responsible for street lighting, St Pancras eighteen for paving; by 1800 there were fifty London trusts charged with maintaining the turnpike roads alone. In 1790, a thousand parish watchmen and constables were employed by seventy separate trusts. And even twenty years before that, in a city that was then much smaller, Sir John Fielding, the famous Bow Street magistrate, had warned Parliament that ‘the Watch. is in every Parish under the Direction of a separate Commission’, which left ‘the Frontiers of each Parish in a confused State, for that where one side of a street lies in one Parish, the Watchmen of one Side cannot lend any Assistance to [a] Person on the other Side, other than as a private Person, except in cases of Felony’.

In 1792, in a preliminary attempt to rationalize this motley collection of responsibilities, the Middlesex Justice Bill was passed, creating seven metropolitan police offices, each to be staffed by three magistrates and six constables, with at least one magistrate in each of the offices having legal qualifications (previously magistrates had simply been men of a certain status and level of wealth). In 1798 a privately funded force was set up to police the river and docks, paid for by the local West Indies merchants. In 1800 this force was taken over by the magistrates, and named the Thames River Police, with its own magistrate, Patrick Colquhoun.

By the end of the eighteenth century, with the population of London approaching a million, crime prevention was the responsibility of fifty constables and eight Runners at Bow Street magistrates’ court and the seven police offices, plus a thousand additional constables and two night-time Bow Street patrols of 122 men. There were also 2,000 parish watchmen, who covered the 8,000 streets of London after dark. Some indication of the attitudes towards these two groups of men can be seen from their pay. The Bow Street patrols were paid between 17s.6d. and 28s. a week; by contrast, many watchmen received a beggarly 4s.11d. Colquhoun commented on the contempt that was shown these forces: ‘It is an honourable profession to repel by force the enemies of the state. Why should it not be equally so to resist and to conquer these domestic invaders of property, and destroyers of lives who are constantly in a state of criminal warfare?’

The answer was that this ‘honourable profession’ was shrouded in mystery, and what people did know of it, they despised, the prevailing mental image being not a law-enforcer, but more a law-breaker: the eighteenth-century thief-taker, the criminal turncoat. That was about to change, partly through the publication of the memoirs of the French detective Eugène Vidocq (1775–1857). Vidocq had started his career as a not terribly successful criminal. After a number of convictions, he became a police spy, or informer, working secretly for the government while still in prison. In 1811 he was one of four ex-convicts to be made a detective, and in 1812 he became the head of the newly created Brigade de Sûreté, with thirty men under his command. None of this would have been of more than passing interest in Britain, had it not been for his
Mémoires,
which in translation swiftly became a best-seller.

It is almost certain that Vidocq did not write his own
Memoirs.
Nor can they truly be called biography. The last two volumes borrow wildly from a variety of sources, including a short story previously published by one of his ghost writers, while entire passages are blatantly lifted from
The Police of London,
a work of policy reform by Patrick Colquhoun, with French place names substituted for Colquhoun’s original English ones. Nonetheless, the
Memoirs
were brilliant PR, with Vidocq transformed from an old-style thief-taker to a sympathetic outlaw, and then to a new thing altogether – both in literature and in life – a detective, although what he described barely resembled what was later to be known as detection (and it would be another twenty years before the word itself was invented). For the moment, Vidocq merely intensified the spy system of the Revolution, keeping extensive records on known criminals and paying informants. Mostly in the
Memoirs he disguises himself and hangs about in low haunts in order to overhear criminals plotting, or just bribes someone to tell him about a planned crime, which he then foils.

Vidocq’s
Memoirs
found a ready audience, and, more importantly for popular recognition, in 1829 they were adapted in two theatrical versions: at the Coburg Theatre, as
Vidocq, the French Police Spy,
by J.B. Buckstone; and, just down the road from the Coburg, at the Surrey, in Douglas Jerrold’s rival version, with only an exclamation point’s difference:
Vidocq! the French Police Spy.
That year the words ‘police spy’ had particular resonance, as Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel finally managed to finesse through Parliament the Act that created the Metropolitan Police, replacing the old parish watch system and creating what has been called the first professional police force.
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Three decades earlier, Colquhoun had written, ‘Police in this country may be considered as a new science, the properties of which consist not in the Judicial Powers which lead to Punishment, and which belong to the magistrates alone, but in the Prevention and Detection of crimes.’ This, today so routine, was groundbreaking, in a single sentence setting policing on an entirely new track: that it was a professional job; that it and the legal system were two different arenas; and that it should be preventative, acting prior to the commission of criminal acts. John Fielding, a remarkable magistrate, had, it is true, begun to move towards detection when he set up a ‘Register of Robberies, Informations, Examinations, Convictions, suspicious Book [sic], and Newgate Calendars’ – that is, not a register of crimes only, but of potential criminals and potential crime. But for the most part, prosecution after the commission of a crime was all that was expected. This had been fairly efficient in rural communities and towns, where populations were small and people all knew each other. In rapidly urbanizing areas, however, crime detection was more difficult, and the number of cases that came before the magistrates put them under enormous pressure.

Frequently the system functioned well: there were six House of Commons select committee reports in the decade leading up to 1822, and many parish watch schemes were commended as ‘exemplary and meritorious’. But others were unimaginably venal and corrupt. When Sir John Fielding was on the bench, Bow Street magistrates’ court had been a model of what might be achieved under the old methods. For example, a Runner named John Clarke, previously a silversmith, used his knowledge of metalworking to track down counterfeiters, testifying at nearly half of the Old Bailey coining trials between 1771 and 1798. When he gave evidence, the conviction rate was 82 per cent; when he was absent, it dropped to 40 per cent. But by the time William Mainwaring took over in 1781 as Chairman of both the Middlesex and the Westminster Sessions, corruption was endemic. Mainwaring persuaded the government to pay him a secret extra salary, while institutionalizing cronyism and nepotism.

The lack of success following the Marr murders ensured that changes were swiftly made at local level. The watchmen in Shadwell were relieved of their duty and replaced by two companies of eighteen men patrolling nightly, each equipped with a rattle, a lantern, a cutlass and a pistol. At Wapping, sixteen extra men were drafted in, and the Thames Police Office arranged for further street policing over Christmas. Several neighbouring parishes also drew up volunteer patrols to augment the watch. Even so, a letter to the Home Office on 28 December 1811 warned that ‘the frequency of the late horrible Outrages must induce a Belief that the wicked Part of the Community is becoming too strong for the law’. The
Morning Post
concurred: ‘Either respectable householders must determine to be their own guardians, or we must have a regularly enlisted armed police under the orders of proper officers.’ Many frightened citizens wrote to the Home Secretary with their own ideas, nearly all of which involved increasing the size and frequency of rewards: in effect buying improved detection from criminals and their cohorts. Many believed that these cohorts included the watch themselves, who seemed to spend far too much time with criminals. William Smith harrumphed that ‘it was extremely scandalous that the Police Officers should be upon such terms of intimacy with the most notorious offenders’.

To deal with the crisis of confidence, a parliamentary select committee was set up to study the question, and it reported in March 1812. The effects of this report still matter today, because it advocated taking crime prevention away from the local authorities, and putting a single centralized authority in overall control of policing throughout London. Robert Southey, who would be named Poet Laureate the following year, and was now as ardent an opponent of political reform as he had once been a promoter of Thomas Paine and the French Revolution, agreed: ‘I have very long felt the necessity of an improved police, and these dreadful events, I hope and trust, will lead to the establishment of one as vigilant as that of Paris used to be. The police laws cannot be too rigorous; and the usual objection that a rigorous police is inconsistent with English liberty might easily be shown to be absurd.’ True, there was a dissident voice in the Earl of Dudley, who said that he ‘would rather half a dozen people’s throats should be cut in Ratcliffe Highway every three or four years than to be subject to domiciliary visits, spies, and all the rest of Fouché’s contrivances’.
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But then, Dudley’s socio-economic position made him safer than most.

Thomas de Quincey might at first appear to have taken the affair more lightly, as he mockingly reported on his neighbour, who after the murders ‘never rested until she had placed eighteen doors. each secured by ponderous bolts, and bars, and chains, between her own bedroom and any intruder of human build. To reach her, even in her drawing room, was like going … into a beleaguered fortress.’ This seemed at first simply a comic coda, but de Quincey’s contribution was greater than anyone at the time could have imagined, as the Ratcliffe Highway murders spurred him to one of literature’s greatest flights of fancy, in the satirical essays referred to collectively under the title
On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.
In the first essay, de Quincey’s narrator introduces himself and his subject at a meeting of connoisseurs of murder: ‘GENTLEMEN, – I have had the honour to be appointed by your committee to the trying task of reading the Williams’ Lecture on Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts’ – a task, he goes on to explain, which is increasingly difficult, as excellence in the field raises the bar for more aesthetic murders: ‘People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads. a knife – a purse – and a dark lane. Mr. Williams has exalted the ideal of murder to all of us. he has carried his art to a point of colossal sublimity.’ De Quincey is making a serious point: in
Macbeth,
we are interested not in the victim, Duncan, but in the thoughts of the murderer, Macbeth, just as we are more interested in murderers than we are in their victims. De Quincey’s narrator suggests that murder is an art, that murder is theatre, and that Williams was an artist who had written a sensational play that hundreds of thousands wanted to see.