The Invention of Murder (59 page)
Read The Invention of Murder Online
Authors: Judith Flanders
While
Lloyd’s
readers were enjoying their quasi-proximity to notoriety, the more middle-class newspapers were worrying again about women’s interest in crime. Four years before, at the trial of Adelaide Bartlett, the
Evening Standard
had complained that the courtroom had been ‘filled with well-dressed women and girls armed with … sherry, sandwiches and eye-glasses’. This trio of accoutrements was symbolic of a certain type of woman, and at the trial of Eleanor Pearcey they reappeared: ‘Hour after hour did these ghoulish women, armed with opera glasses, sherry-flasks, and sandwich boxes, hang with eager curiosity upon every movement and look of their miserable sister. ‘ Now however this kind of aspersion was no longer permitted to pass without comment, and the
Women’s Penny Paper
responded tartly: ‘an eye-witness has seen fit to write to the daily press objecting to the presence of women in the court. Is it not time that men learned. that where women cannot go unharmed is no right place for themselves, and since a
woman
is in the dock it is not women but men who ought to be excluded?’
Male or female, middle-or working-class, all were gripped, and Madame Tussaud’s was ready. Only ‘hours’ after the verdict was delivered, ‘Hey Presto!’ wrote
Lloyd’s,
Mrs Pearcey’s model was on display in the Chamber of Horrors. This was a slight exaggeration, but it was no exaggeration to say that Madame Tussaud’s knew a commercial opportunity when it saw one. It had earlier discovered that, as well as waxwork models of the participants, more theatrically staged settings were popular. In 1878, Madame Tussaud’s had purchased the gallows from Hertford Gaol when it was demolished. Now it bought up all Mrs Pearcey’s belongings – clothes, furniture, ornaments. It was stated that it paid £200 (some reports said £500), which went towards her defence. Hogg sold Madame Tussaud’s the baby’s pram (for a reported £25) and the clothes his wife and child had been wearing when they were killed. He also, at least according to the newspapers, sold them his beard and moustache for 25
s.
In its catalogue, the waxworks proudly boasted:
THE HAMPSTEAD TRAGEDY.
Mrs PEARCEY. A MODEL OF THE KITCHEN, containing the identical Furniture and Fixtures from No. 2, Priory Street, where Mrs. HOGG and her BABY were murdered.
LIST OF FURNITURE, &c., TABLE, CHAIRS, OILCLOTH, COOKING UTENSILS, CROCKERY, FIREPLACE, GRATE, WINDOW AND FLOORING. THE TABLE against which Mrs. Hogg was supposed to have been leaning when the blows were struck. THE WINDOW supposed to have been smashed by Mrs.
HOGG in her death struggles.
All the articles contained in the Kitchen have been removed from No. 2, Priory Street, and are placed in exact relative position as found by the Police when they entered the premises.
Mrs. PEARCEY’S SITTING ROOM, with her identical Furniture, Couch, Chairs, Table, Mirror, Carpet, Piano, Ornaments, Curtains, Blinds, &c.
The Piano is the one on which Mrs. Pearcey played whilst the Police were searching her house.
Mrs. PEARCEY’S BEDSTEAD AND FURNITURE.
THE PERAMBULATOR in which the Bodies were carried.
CASTS OF THE HEADS OF Mrs. HOGG AND HER BABY, taken from Nature after death.
THE CLOTHES worn by Mrs. Hogg and Baby when murdered.
Mrs. PEARCEY’S RECEIPT in her own handwriting.
THE TOFFEE found in the Perambulator.
The exhibition opened just before Christmas, and on Boxing Day 31,000 people queued to see this one exhibit; 75,000 were admitted in the first three days.
Punch
mocked Pearcey fever, satirically claiming to have overheard ‘A Strict Old Lady’ at Louis Tussaud’s rival establishment in Regent Street who refused to look at models of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry: ‘No – I don’t care to … that’s play-actin’, that is – and I don’t ‘old with it nohow!’ In front of Cardinals Manning and Newman, she was even firmer: ‘Come along, and don’t encourage Popery by looking at such figures.’ But: ‘I
did
‘ear as they’d got Mrs. PEARCEY and the prambilator somewheres. I
should
like to see that, now.’
It was probably easier to find entertainment in a female murderer, simply because they were so rare. In 1841 the ratio of husbands to wives as spouse-killers was 5:1; by 1900 it was 14:1. The entertainment world reflected a different view: in 1889, Madame Tussaud’s had four male killers for every female, and fictionally women were even more lethal. Half of the Sherlock Holmes stories have domestic suspects (the rest involve either professional criminals, such as burglars, or spies), and of these sixteen involve women as criminal or in some way deviant. Against this monstrous regiment of criminal women there are only two stories of men in similar domesticity who go rogue.
Most people knew that this was not reality, and women murderers were rare enough to be a source of comedy: ‘A cynical friend. on hearing a sympathetic acquaintance express commiseration for that wretched man, Hogg, hotly retorted, “Pity
him,
indeed! He’s to be congratulated; loses his wife, his lady love, and his kid all at one fell swoop.” ‘
This startlingly modern voice breaks through a century of more covert pleasure in blood. Perhaps the events of two years previously had changed attitudes to murder more than first appeared.
*
This compares to a figure of nearly 59 per cent for men, useful to bear in mind when reading of female vs male killers. Women attracted far more vitriol in print, but were less often treated to the full majesty of the law.
*
Although see p.171 for a connection to Maria Manning.
†
The village’s name is now spelt Rode, and the county boundary has since been redrawn.
*
The force’s submission to the factory inspector reflected social reality. West Country police were paid badly even compared to police in the rest of the country: the superintendent of the Wiltshire County Constabulary earned less than £80 per annum.
*
Dickens was one of many who believed in the theory of the nursemaid and her lover, and he put a name to the man, writing in October 1860 to Wilkie Collins: ‘Mr. Kent, intriguing with the nursemaid, poor little child wakes in Crib, and sits up, contemplating blissful proceedings. Nursemaid strangles him then and there. Mr. Kent gashes body, to mystify discoverers, and disposes of same.’ Many agreed, noting that the present Mrs Kent had once been the older Kent children’s nursemaid, and assuming that what had happened once could happen again.
*
These sentences were cut in later editions (and do not appear in many modern ones), perhaps because the narrator says that the secret ‘never will be revealed until the Day of Judgment’, instead of, as it turned out, merely 1865.
*
Little is known of John Harwood. He published some novels in the sensation style in the 1860s; one scholar suggests that in fact he may have been a woman.
*
This story was republished as a pamphlet after Constance Kent’s confession, now retitled The Road Murder. Analysis of this Persistent Mystery, with the name J. Redding Ware on the title page. Ware (c.1832-1909), sometimes suggested as a contributor to the Boy’s Own Paper, was a modestly prolific playwright, and in 1880 he published Before the Bench. Sketches of Police Court Life. This combination of interests, together with the appearance of his name on what had originally been an Andrew Forrester story, leads me to suggest that the pseudonymous ‘Andrew Forrester’, until now unidentified, was in fact J. Redding Ware.
*
And as Sherlock Holmes briefly, and most unconvincingly, becomes in ‘The Naval Treaty’ (1893), where he interrupts a recital of the details of a crime to exclaim, Cuff-like, ‘What a lovely thing a rose is …’
*
Tom Taylor (1817-80) was one of those multi-faceted Victorians who must never have slept: as well as writing seventy-four plays, he was a Professor of English at the University of London, a barrister, the editor of Punch, Secretary to the Board of Health and an art critic for The Times.
*
This scene became the template of stage detection, so much so that a decade later a touring version of
The Red Barn
stopped the action two pages before the denouement so that the detective could appear disguised as a street singer in a tea garden, merging two of the three roles in this emblematic scene.
†
Twenty years later, these disguises were still common enough for Jerome K. Jerome to satirize them: ‘A married man, on the stage, knows his wife, because he knows she wears a blue ulster and a red bonnet … She puts on a yellow cloak and a green hat, and, coming in at another door, says she is a lady from the country … She puzzles him … There is something about her that strangely reminds him of his darling Nell …’ He added, in a nod to
The Ticket-of-Leave Man’s
endless productions, that by pulling his hat over his eyes and ‘speaking in a squeaky voice’ the detective fools the villains, who ‘go into a public tea-garden, and recount their crimes to one another in a loud tone of voice’.
*
And real life fed back into fiction: Provis was the name assumed by the convict Magwitch in Dickens’ Great Expectations, published in 1862.
*
The newspapers, it must be remembered, claimed that Mrs Cotton had taught at Sunday school. The Wesleyans were generally very well educated: the newspapers appear to have stuck to their own brand of truth.
*
In a Victorian display of propriety, while this skull – whether a horse’s or a person’s – was openly passed around in court to show where the shots entered, the guns that Monson and Hambrough had carried were brought into the courtroom decently covered in black crêpe – the fabric used for mourning dress.
†
The importance of the telegraph to the press was indicated by its special rates. A private telegram cost sixpence per dozen words; but for the press, it was a shilling for seventy-five words, or a hundred words at night.
*
Auguste Vaillant, a French anarchist, had thrown a bomb from the gallery of the Chamber of Deputies in 1893.
*
Truly it was a harsher world. The police had not cleaned the corpse before it was viewed by members of the public hoping to identify friends or family.
†
Later newspaper reports turned this whistling into playing the piano and singing throughout the search, but it was not only the papers that were unreliable. When Melville MacNaghten, the head of the CID at the time, came to write his memoirs in 1914, this scene was elaborated into Mrs Pearcey ‘strumm[ing] away at popular tunes’; ‘When the musical hostess was asked for an explanation [of the blood] … she chanted a reply, “Killing mice, killing mice, killing mice,” and went on with her piano-playing.’ The police inspector who actually performed the search, however, testified at her trial that ‘she was not whistling tunes, she was whistling to herself’. Twenty years after the event MacNaghten also remembered that her home had been searched ‘from garret to basement’, quite a feat as she lived in three small rooms. And he thought the baby had been found in its pram on Hampstead Heath; the pram had been found in St John’s Wood, the baby two miles away from the Heath.
*
It is never stated precisely how the child died: some reports imply it was of exposure, others suffocation. I don’t know if the reports are unclear because the cause of death was uncertain, or if it was simply an oversight in the reporting. Mrs Pearcey was charged only with the murder of Mrs Hogg, and therefore no discussion of the cause of the infant’s death appears in the trial transcript.
Modernity
Mary Ann Cotton was found guilty of murder, and popular opinion laid twenty-odd deaths at her door. Yet while she fits into the pattern of the poison panics of mid-century, no panic ensued. And while she was accepted as being the most prolific murderer since Burke and Hare, hers was not the name that people remembered when the most notorious murderer of the century appeared on the scene in 1888. Jack the Ripper brought with him a new kind of crime, and a new kind of fear. Mary Ann Cotton looked backward.
The murderer who was popularly described as being the precursor to Jack the Ripper had only one victim. Israel Lipski was convicted of murdering Miriam Angel in their lodgings off Commercial Street, in London’s East End, just twelve months before Martha Tabram, the woman some named as Jack the Ripper’s first victim, was found dead a few hundred yards away. A Polish-Jewish immigrant, Lipski had fled conscription into the Russian army and found his way to London in about 1885. Ambitious and industrious, he worked for an umbrella manufacturer until, in 1887, he took his savings, borrowed £2.5s. from his fiancée’s mother and pawned his watch in order to set up a workshop of his own in his attic room in Batty Street. The day of the murder was to be his first day in business.
The lodging house was crowded, with fourteen people living in five rooms. The landlord (also named Lipski, but no relation), his wife and seven children lived in one room on the ground floor; his mother shared a room on the first floor with a Mrs Levy, and next to them was a couple who had moved in six weeks earlier: Isaac Angel, a Polish-Jewish boot-riveter, and his pregnant wife Miriam. On the morning of 28 June 1887, Isaac Angel went to work at 6 a.m. as usual. Miriam was in the habit of going to her mother-in-law’s for breakfast, and when she failed to arrive, Mrs Angel came looking for her. The door to her room was locked, but through a window on the staircase she could be seen lying on the bed. Afraid the pregnant woman had been taken ill, the landlady, Mrs Angel and Mrs Levy broke the door down. Miriam Angel was found unmoving, with yellow foam on her lips. One of the women ran for a doctor, while the house’s occupants all spilled out of their rooms to see what the noise was. The doctor pronounced Miriam dead, noting the marks of a corrosive poison on both her lips and her hands. It was only when he asked the others to look for a bottle that might have held the poison that anyone realized she had not been alone in the room. Under the bed was the body of Israel Lipski, semi-conscious, and with the same marks of corrosive poison around his mouth. The police, reported
The Times,
‘have been unable to obtain any satisfactory solution of the affair’, although they hoped that if Lipski recovered, he would be able to give them information. To this end they had an interpreter at the hospital, as Lipski spoke no English.
