The Invention of Murder (48 page)

At his trial, Tawell was shown to have twice purchased prussic acid, and an ‘analytical chemist and lecturer on medical jurisprudence’ testified to his belief that prussic acid was the cause of death, although, as was so frequently the case at this time, he had never before seen the action of prussic acid on a human body – ‘my knowledge is theoretical only’. The defence claimed that small traces of prussic acid occurred naturally in apple pips, and Mrs Hart had been eating an apple before her death. (Small traces of cyanide do occur naturally in some fruit pips, but not enough even to cause illness.) The jury gave more weight to Tawell’s newly discovered money troubles, and to Mrs Hart’s threat to confront his wife, and found him guilty.

Tawell’s was one of those executions that did so much to promote the campaign against capital punishment.
Bell’s
simply noted that he came out, knelt, prayed, and was dead ‘in a short time’.
John Bull,
however, printed a more detailed report, which unfortunately is also therefore more likely to be true: the drop was miscalculated by the executioner, and spectators watched in horror as the elderly man in sober Quaker dress ‘struggled most violently. His whole frame was convulsed; he writhed horribly, and his limbs rose and fell again repeatedly, while he wrung his hands. and continued to wring his hands for several minutes. still clasped as though he had not left off praying. It was nearly ten minutes. before the contortions which indicated his extreme suffering ceased.’ It was, the paper said, ‘torture’.

Broadside-sellers did well with Tawell, enjoying his criminal past. Three patterers told Mayhew that they had written Tawell’s confession, in which he admitted to two earlier murders in Van Diemen’s Land (despite the fact that he had been transported to mainland Australia, and was not known ever to have set foot in Tasmania), as well as to robbing the captain of the ship on which he returned to England. The waxworks liked him for his clothes. At the penny end of the market, a stall on Clerkenwell Green in London showed Tawell just two days after his execution; the Saloon of Arts in Great Windmill Street, with an admission price of 1s., catered to a very different level of society, but it too had an effigy of Tawell, together with a ‘Centrifugal Railway’ (an early form of rollercoaster, most likely), Miss Gulliver, who was thirty-six inches tall, and Wilkison Kirk, ‘the American Spotted Wonder’ (no further explanation). According to
Punch,
Madame Tussaud’s had been extremely keen to get its hands on Tawell’s clothes, offering £25 for the Quaker coat, although its bid appears to have failed.

But it was the ‘telegraphic communication’ that people remembered. Some time after the execution, an ‘exceedingly respectable looking man’ stared out at the telegraph wires by the side of the track as his train approached Slough and ‘muttered aloud, “Them’s the cords that hung John Tawell!” ‘

Tawell had travelled by train, and had been caught by telegraph; the first murder
on
a train was not to occur for another two decades. At that time railway carriages had doors to the platform only; once the train was in motion each carriage was entirely cut off from the rest of the train. This created either a feeling of safety if one was alone in a carriage, or of danger if one was locked in with a dubious stranger.

In the 1850s a new reason to fear strangers emerged, a scare similar to the poison panic of the 1840s, but involving not murder but garrotting. Garrotting originally meant murder by strangulation; then it was modified to mean that the victim was merely caught about the throat and choked; by the late 1850s it simply meant any sort of mugging. In 1862 an MP was garrotted while walking down Pall Mall (this incident was used by Trollope in 1867 in his novel
Phineas Finn).
Newspapers fanned the hysteria: to set foot on the street was to court death, they warned. A chaplain of Newgate wrote in to suggest that garrotters were haunting the British Museum to learn thuggee skills from the sculptures dedicated to Kali. Contemporary police statistics did show an increase in arrests for street robbery, but only after the panic began. Fear caused arrests, and the rising statistics reflected the panic, they did not cause it.

The idea of stranger-murder, by violence, in public places, was therefore on people’s minds when
The Times
carried a headline in July 1864: ‘MURDER in a FIRST-CLASS CARRIAGE on the NORTH LONDON RAILWAY’. Now nowhere was safe, not even a first-class carriage (trust
The Times
to focus on class). Two clerks entered an empty compartment on the 9.50 from Fenchurch Street station to Chalk Farm to find a walking stick, bag and hat (a ‘gentleman’s hat’, said
The Times).
They called the guard, who further noticed that the seat cushions, the window and the door handle were covered in blood. Half an hour later, a driver returning to the depot saw something beside the line between Hackney Wick and Bow. He got out to have a look, and found a desperately injured man, who was carried to a nearby pub. There he was identified as Thomas Briggs, in his late sixties, the chief clerk of Roberts & Co. bank. He died the following day. His watch, chain and gold spectacles were missing, but the bag and stick in the train were identified as his; the hat, however, was not. This one was of beaver, not silk, and was presumed to belong to the murderer, who had perhaps knocked Briggs’ hat off in the attack, and grabbed the wrong one as he fled.

The government, the North London Railway and Briggs’ employers each offered £100 rewards for information. A jeweller named Death came forward. (The name is not as extraordinary as it appears: there are more than two hundred people named Death on the electoral register today, sometimes spelt De’Ath.) Two days after the murder, he said, a German had come into his shop in Cheapside and asked if he would exchange a gold chain for another less expensive one, together with a gold ring. A week later a cabman named Matthews approached the police, having just heard some other cabmen discussing the crime. (His wife later said that he would have seen the report in
Lloyd’s
on Sunday as usual, had they not had visitors; it went without saying in her explanation that working people had time to read the papers only on Sundays.) Matthews had recognized Death’s name, for a tailor named Franz Müller had recently given one of his children a box with that name on it to play with. Müller had been friendly with the cabman’s daughter, and had come to say goodbye to the family before he emigrated to America. Mayne’s force was now operating like clockwork: Matthews gave his information at his local station; he was immediately taken to a superintendent, who took him straight to Mayne himself, who sent him on to Inspector Tanner in Stepney. Matthews identified the hat from the train: he had bought it for Müller after Müller had admired his own. He also, and this was handy for the police, had a photograph of the German, which Death immediately identified.

The police went to Müller’s lodgings, only to find that he had sailed for New York the previous day. His landlady said he had been out on the night in question, and had later shown her his new gold chain. With this confirmation Inspector Tanner, a detective sergeant, with Death and Matthews in tow for identification purposes, headed for Liverpool and a government steamship to New York. (Müller was on a sailing ship; the pursuing party could expect to arrive at least two weeks, possibly more, in advance.) And so it played out. When Müller’s ship docked in New York, the police and witnesses boarded, Müller was identified, his box was searched and Briggs’ watch found, together with a silk hat that had been cut down to remove the maker’s label. The telegraphed news triumphantly announced that the first train murderer had been captured by the first steamship pursuit.

The prosecution had plenty of witnesses. As well as Death and Matthews, the hatter who had sold the hat to Matthews identified it: he had used the lining in the hat found on the train on only two or three occasions, as an experiment. Then Dr Letheby gave what scientific evidence was possible: Briggs had died from multiple head wounds, partly from a blunt instrument, possibly a walking stick, and partly from being thrown from the train. He was unable, however, to confirm that the blood on the walking stick was human, much less Briggs’ – tests to distinguish animal from human blood would have to wait until the twentieth century. He did his best, however, noting that the stains ‘contained also particles of brain matter’.

Müller was well represented, his legal fees being paid for by the German Legal Protection Society. His defence was that there was no evidence that Briggs had been wearing the hat that had been found in Müller’s box on the day in question; that there was no proof that the hat found on the train had ever been Müller’s; that Matthews’ testimony had been very obviously motivated by the £300 reward, and, given that Matthews had purchased the hat, it could just as easily have been him in the train, and his hat;
*
that Müller was a small, slight man, and Briggs, despite his age, a large, heavy one, but nonetheless Müller was supposed to have robbed, murdered and thrown him from the train, all in the three minutes between two stations; that a witness had given evidence that two men, not one, had been seen in Briggs’ compartment earlier; and, surely the clincher, that at the time the murder was taking place, Müller had three witnesses who put him in Camberwell, six miles away. The Solicitor-General, appearing for the prosecution, dismissed this last, seemingly unbreakable alibi, stressing that the three people were a woman ‘of the unfortunate class’ and her landlord and landlady – that is, a prostitute and brothel-keepers. No reliance, he was sure, could be placed on a clock found in such a location, nor an alibi provided by such people. The judge apparently agreed, summing up strongly against Müller. It took the jury only fifteen minutes to find him guilty.

There was much post-trial discussion of the correctness of the verdict, but it was agreed in the newspapers that science had triumphed. Müller refused to confess right up until the last minute, saying, ‘I should be a very bad fellow if I had done it.’ The German chaplain who attended him to the scaffold claimed that he had, at his insistent questioning, replied, ‘I HAVE DONE IT,’ just before the drop opened. Perhaps he did. The newspapers reported that his confession was ‘immediately’ forwarded to the Home Secretary and to Sir Richard Mayne, which suggests a level of doubt among both readers and the legal establishment.

Some were able to look at the case light-heartedly. A broadside claimed that ‘Thousands of pounds was betted … That he would be acquitted,’ while the
Glasgow Herald
reported a local shop offering ‘Hats Muller’d here’. The teenaged Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to his mother that when an elderly man behaved erratically in his train compartment, ‘At first I expected to be Mullered.’
*
And at a regatta in Northumberland, the
Franz Muller
came in second in the races for ballast keelboats. In the 1890s the London and South-Western Railway sponsored a charity bazaar that displayed a model of the compartment in which Briggs was murdered. New-style carriages, with corridors giving access to the rest of the train, appeared in the 1880s. Perhaps the subliminal message was that this type of murder could no longer happen.

At the time, however, the press reproduced the pervasive atmosphere of fear.
The Times
linked the murder of the day with the fear of the year by reporting that the ‘mysterious, dull sound’ that had been heard outside Newgate ‘all night’ before Müller’s execution was ‘the sound caused by knocking hats over the eyes’ of anyone who appeared prosperous, ‘and while so “bonneted” stripping them and robbing them of everything. None but those who looked down upon the awful crowd. will ever believe in the wholesale, open, broadcast manner in which garrotting and highway robbery was carried on.’

Forensic science was seen to take another great leap forward in 1875, with the trial following the discovery of human remains in a disused warehouse in Whitechapel Road in London. In September 1875 Henry Wainwright (not to be confused with Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, with an ‘e’),
†
thirty-eight years old, the bankrupted owner of a brushmaking business, was working for a corn merchant.Alfred Stokes, his former employee, worked with him, and Wainwright asked him to help move a couple of parcels from his old warehouse in Whitechapel Road. They carried them to the street, and Wainwright went to fetch a cab, leaving Stokes with the parcels. Stokes smelt something nasty in the parcels, and suspected Wainwright was stealing human hair, which was used in brushmaking. After Wainwright’s business failed, his stock had been sold, but it was still stored in the warehouse. Stokes lifted one of the waterproof coverings, saw not hair, but a hand, and ‘had the presence of mind to
kiver
it up again quick’. Admirably, he managed to maintain a calm façade when Wainwright returned with the cab. They loaded the parcels into it, and Wainwright drove off, with, unknown to him, Stokes following along behind on foot. Wainwright stopped briefly to collect a woman; Stokes heard him tell the driver, ‘As fast as you can over London Bridge to the Borough,’ and the procession of cab and runner set off again. At Leadenhall Street in the City Stokes saw two policemen, and tried to explain what was happening; they refused to take him seriously, and rather than lose the cab he set off again. On the south side of London Bridge he saw the cab stop and Wainwright go into a pub named the Hen and Chickens. He found another two policemen, who this time were interested in his story of body parts waiting in front of a pub these local men knew to be no longer in business.

The police asked Wainwright what he was doing: ‘Ask no questions and there’s £50 for each of you,’ he rashly offered. Instead, they suggested he open the parcels. He raised his offer to £200 to pretend that the last ten minutes had never happened. The police ignored this and opened the parcels and, finding a number of body parts, immediately arrested Wainwright, along with his companion, Alice Day, a dancer at the Pavilion Theatre, situated only doors away from the warehouse in Whitechapel Road. At the warehouse the police found what looked like an open grave filled with chloride of lime, and a hammer, a chopper and a spade nearby. Wainwright was charged with murder, his brother Thomas, the failed licensee of the Hen and Chickens, and Alice Day as accessories. (Miss Day was discharged after the inquest.) While the body could not immediately be identified, local rumour soon suggested it was that of Harriet Lane, who had been missing for a year.