The Invention of Murder (60 page)

Lipski did recover, although perhaps he later wished he had not. His story was that for his new business he had hired a boy, Richard Pitman, who had worked with him at the umbrella-maker’s, and two men whom he had met casually. One of these, Simon Rosenbloom, had come early, and Lipski had left him with Pitman in the attic while he went to buy extra tools for Isaac Schmuss, the second employee. The shop was still closed (it was not yet 8 a.m.), and he returned and went out a second time, telling Rosenbloom to fetch some brandy. On his return he saw Rosenbloom and Schmuss on the first-floor landing. They grabbed him and demanded money, forcing a piece of wood into his mouth. He told them he had just spent everything he had; even his watch was in pawn. They replied, ‘If you don’t give it to us you will be as dead as the woman.’ They forced a liquid down his throat, and before he lost consciousness he heard one say, ‘Don’t you think he is quite dead.’ The other replied, ‘He don’t want any more.’ And that was the last he knew.

Lipski’s statement met with incredulity, and the inquest found a verdict of wilful murder against him. At the trial, Rosenbloom said Schmuss had arrived, waited briefly and then left. Richard Pitman agreed that Schmuss had arrived and gone away in Lipski’s absence, but said that first Schmuss and Rosenbloom had spoken together ‘in their own language’ (Yiddish), after which Rosenbloom had told him he knew Schmuss. In cross-examination Rosenbloom denied this, saying he spoke no English and Pitman no Yiddish. Pitman said that Rosenbloom had communicated in a mixture of languages, and had definitely said he knew Schmuss. Schmuss told the court that he had arrived, waited fifteen minutes (Pitman said five), and then left. ‘I saw that I should not have a great chance of work there, so I did not go back,’ was all the reason he gave. This, then, was the prosecution’s case: that Lipski had gone to the Angels’ room, although whether to steal or to rape Mrs Angel was never made clear; he had either met with more resistance than he expected, or had been surprised by Mrs Angel, and therefore poisoned her with the nitric acid he had just purchased for his work, which he had in his pocket. To evade suspicion, he then took a small dose himself.

Unfortunately for Lipski, he had a perfectly terrible defence team, led by A.J. McIntyre, a Liberal MP and a barrister who had no experience in criminal trials. A great deal of evidence presented by the prosecution’s own witnesses should have been used by the defence. It became clear that the man who claimed to have sold nitric acid to Lipski, and who identified him in hospital, had in reality been guided to him by the police – a policeman was sitting by his bed when the chemist was brought to the ward. He was also only willing to say that ‘to the best of my belief’ Lipski was the man, adding cautiously that he had been serving half a dozen people at the relevant time. The prosecution’s case was that only Lipski could have murdered Mrs Angel, because her door had been locked from the inside. But a policeman testified that after the murder he had been to the Angels’ room over a dozen times, entering when they were absent without difficulty: the lock barely worked, he said, ‘only just to keep the wind off; if you just touched the door it came open’. Likewise the landlady said that she and two other women had broken the door down in ‘seconds’. The doctor’s assistant testified that the bottle of poison was ‘not exactly found’, but had been pointed out to the police by Rosenbloom, and that for at least ten minutes after he arrived, a number of people had been ‘milling around’ the room: he could not say how many, or what they had been doing. The judge, the same Sir James Fitzjames Stephen who had twenty years before said that infanticide was ‘less serious than other kinds of murder’, summed up dead against Lipski.
*
The jury had no trouble either. It took them eight minutes to produce a guilty verdict.

Initially the papers had shown little interest in the case.
The Times
had carried a few small paragraphs, the
Morning Chronicle
had no reports at all, the
Daily News
only two sentences. It was the
Pall Mall Gazette
that made Israel Lipski a matter of national discussion. This was superficially surprising. While the editor, W.T. Stead, had said he wanted his paper to be ‘the great tribune of the poor’, the immigrant poor of the East End were decidedly not the people he meant; he and his paper were more than usually anti-Semitic, even for the time. There were, however, a number of reasons for their campaign on behalf of Lipski. The Home Secretary, Henry Matthews, was Catholic, Unionist and Conservative – everything Stead detested. Stead had also had a run-in with Stephen, while the prosecuting counsel had been the prosecutor in a case brought against Stead in 1885.
*
Despite these ulterior motives, the case the paper made was a good one, and it was joined by Lipski’s solicitor, Jonathan Hayward, who was vehemently – almost unprofessionally, and touchingly – distraught at his client’s fate. He published a pamphlet outlining the defence more cogently than Lipski’s barrister had done in court, and added new details: he reminded his readers that Schmuss, who claimed to have been in great need, had not waited ten minutes for paying work; the amount of nitric acid swallowed and splashed about was far more than the chemist said he had sold; and boxes had been piled in front of Lipski under the bed, which he could not have dragged in after himself.

Stephen was sent a copy of the pamphlet, and was disturbed by its contents, admitting (said Hayward via Stead) that ‘I myself did not exactly hit the right point in summing up.’ The Home Secretary was firmly convinced of Lipski’s guilt. The police had supplied him with material not presented at the trial, and he refused to recommend that the sentence of death be commuted, or mercy shown. Two days before the date scheduled for the execution, therefore, Hayward placed advertisements in several newspapers, asking for the jurors to get in touch with him; he also organized and presented a petition, and mailed out his pamphlet without charge to anyone who requested one. Questions were raised in Parliament, and the
Pall Mall Gazette
ran a long article, headed ‘Hanging an Innocent Man: Conversion of Mr. Justice Stephen’, which reported the meeting between the judge and Hayward, although Stephen immediately denied that he had said most of what was attributed to him, and claimed that ‘the more I think over the matter, the more fully I am convinced that he did it’. The Home Secretary, in Parliament, brushed aside Stephen’s supposed anxiety – ‘altogether irrelevant’, he said.
*
Stephen then suggested that the execution be postponed for a week, giving him time to re-examine the case, although perhaps more as a public-relations ruse – ‘This would remove any impression of haste from public mind,’ he telegraphed the Home Secretary. He added, to his wife, ‘The worst of it is that everyone will say, I was bullied into it by that blackguard Stead.’

‘That blackguard Stead’ kept up the pressure, with headlines every day that week. All the other newspapers now piled in with their own views. The
Telegraph,
the
Methodist Times
and the
Lancet
pressed for commutation, on the grounds that the case was not proved beyond reasonable doubt. The papers that held out for execution seemed to be doing so not from conviction, but because they were anti-Stead and anti-Pall
Mall Gazette.
‘We have been exposing the miserable tactics of [the Gazette],’ wrote the
Evening News,
while
Lloyd’s
referred to the ‘screechings of one particular journal’.

Stephen re-examined the case, and came to the same conclusion as he had at the trial. Meanwhile Godfrey Lushington, the Permanent Under-Secretary of State, who had dealt with the case for Matthews, added a note to the file warning that the chemist’s new report on the nitric acid was disturbing and should be withheld from Lipski’s lawyer. The Home Office also withheld information from the defence. On the other side, seventy-eight MPs signed a petition for commutation (it was August, and only two hundred MPs were in town). All this went for nothing. On 21 August 1887, Lipski was told by Lushington that the execution would go ahead. And then he confessed.

How the confession was received pretty much depended on each person’s previous stance. The Home Office, the police and the papers that had been against Stead saw it as validation of their views. Stead was furious, and gave vent to his anti-Semitic views: ‘Lipski!!!! … could any human being not a Pole and also a Jew have played the
Pall Mall Gazette
so scandalous a trick. It was a bad fall.’ (Although, presumably, not as bad a fall as Lipski was about to take.) Others listened more closely to what the rabbi who had received Lipski’s confession said: Lipski had asked him what would happen if the sentence were commuted, and was told he would then be imprisoned for life. Aged twenty-two, he was apparently not prepared for this, and his confession followed. He had gone into the Angels’ room, he said to steal. Mrs Angel had woken up, and since ‘I had long been tired of my life, and had brought a pennyworth of aqua fortis [nitric acid] that morning for the purpose of putting an end to myself’, he poisoned her with it, taking the remainder himself. This was so at odds with the evidence that at this distance in time it is beyond belief. If Miriam Angel had been wakened by Lipski, he must have entered the room before eight o’clock – she normally reached her mother-in-law by 8.30. But he was seen after 8.30 by the landlady. If he had not gone to the room until closer to eleven, why was Mrs Angel still asleep? And on the same morning that he set up his own business, having decided to commit suicide, he went out, purchased the means to do so, and then stopped off for a spot of burglary?

None of this was dealt with by the
Pall Mall Gazette,
which retreated, infuriated, while the other newspapers, grateful they had not been left similarly exposed, concentrated on the journalistic débâcle rather than the potential miscarriage of justice. Stead, said the
Evening News,
had in the past ‘done more to degrade the Press than any man living’, but even for him, this was a ‘low-water mark’. The
Spectator
thought it was ‘a deep disgrace to English journalism’. The
Evening News
simply noted that on the day of Lipski’s execution, up to 6,000 people stood outside Newgate, ‘the largest gathering ever known since capital punishment has been performed in private’, as though the size of the crowd validated the correctness of the verdict.

‘The Whitechapel Tragedy’, a surviving ballad sheet, was conventional in form, lamenting ‘that cruel deed that I have been relating,/ Heavy on his conscience it does lie’, and ending with a warning to others to learn from ‘Lipsky’s [sic] awful fate’. Meanwhile the
Pall Mall Gazette
reprinted a leaflet that was on sale outside Newgate on the morning of the execution. One verse ran,

In style this is similar to the older broadsides, in that the verses don’t scan, and their quality is poor, but the stress on the innocence of the murderer is unusual, if not unique. It may be that this was the
Pall Mall Gazette
‘s own parting – and anonymous – contribution.

While broadsides and ballads were now virtually antiques, the detective story was thriving, and the shadow of the Lipski case was discernible in the details of East End journalist Israel Zangwill’s ‘The Big Bow Mystery’, published in the
Star
in 1891. The story is important in the development of crime fiction: while earlier tales had used locked rooms as part of the plot, this was one of the first to enjoy the puzzle for its own sake. More topically, it pits George Grodman, a retired detective, against his Scotland Yard successor, Inspector Wimp, who ‘was at his greatest in collecting circumstantial evidence; in putting two and two together to make five’.
*
Grodman’s neighbour finds a dead lodger in her house, and asks him for help. As with Lipski, after the discovery of the body, ‘The tongues of the press were loosened, and the leader-writers revelled in recapitulating the circumstances … though they could contribute nothing but adjectives to the solution. The papers teemed with letters.’ including one in the not-very-disguised
‘Pell Mell Press’.
Ultimately, Grodman himself is revealed to be the murderer. He has been so clever that the police do not discover this, and it is only when an innocent man is convicted that he confesses. The innocent man, unlike Lipski, is reprieved, and when Grodman hears this, he kills himself.

Before Grodman committed suicide in the pages of the
Star,
before Lipski decided to commit suicide on the day he set up in business, another suicide took place, before the eyes of thousands, nightly. In 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson had followed up his successful novel
Treasure Island
with the even more successful novella
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Dr Jekyll discovers a drug which allows him to become physically a second person, a person who manifests all his own suppressed evil impulses. As the repellent Mr Hyde, he roams the town, indulging the worst elements of his character, trampling a small child and murdering Sir Danvers Carew, an ‘aged and beautiful gentleman’, by clubbing him to death with his stick. The doctor eventually finds that he is no longer in control: Hyde appears involuntarily. As the police and his friends are on the brink of unmasking his double existence, Dr Jekyll commits suicide. This good/evil doubling had been used regularly, from Poe’s ‘William Wilson’ to Dickens’ Bradley Headstone and (probably) Jasper in
Edwin Drood.
The difference is that this was now an intentional split on the part of the good character, and it was given a modern twist by the scientific approach of the doctor.

Jekyll and Hyde
was a phenomenon. By February 1886
Punch
already had a parody version, in which ‘Mr. Hidanseek’ ‘thought how pleasant it would be’ to become ‘a creature with an acquired taste for … hacking to death (with an umbrella) midnight barons who had lost their way’. By July, nearly 40,000 copies had been sold, and vicars were using the novella as a text for their sermons. In the spring of 1887 an adaptation by T.R. Sullivan, with Stevenson’s approval, was staged in Boston and New York, soon moving to London. Not everyone was enthusiastic. The
Pall Mall Gazette
thought ‘Nothing more horrible has ever been seen on a stage … Scratch John Bull and you find the ancient Briton who revels in blood, who loves to dip deep into a murder, and devours the details of a hanging.’