Highway robbery proved just as easy to halt. All that was needed was the equivalent of the modern patrol car on the lonely roads around London – a heavily armed policeman on horseback. When the highwaymen and burglars knew they might be interrupted at any moment, they moved to remoter parts. Since England had never been policed before, the introduction of the patrols caused widespread alarm in the criminal fraternity and crime fell dramatically.
Naturally, this could not last. The old gangs were replaced by new ones who employed new methods and tried not to advertise their operations. This was the first major step towards the ‘alienation’ of the criminal. He had to employ more stealth and cunning, to develop the arts of a fox raiding a chicken farm. When Henry Fielding’s blind brother John took over his job at Bow Street, he had to do the work all over again – hang dozens of highwaymen and housebreakers, and send hundreds of pickpockets and petty thieves to prison. Fielding tried some famous cases, yet in few of these are the crimes themselves of any interest. A clergyman named Dr Dodd forged a bond for £4,200 and was hanged; another clergyman, the Rev. James Hackman, shot a woman he adored (the mistress of the Earl of Sandwich) in a fit of hysterical jealousy, and was hanged. And an unprepossessing and sadistic old woman named Sarah Metyard was charged with killing two girls who had been sent to her from the workhouse to learn to be seamstresses. It is not clear whether Sarah Metyard was merely evil-tempered, or whether she derived sexual pleasure from ill-treating the many girls who became her apprentices, but she beat one girl so badly, after an attempt to run away, that the child died; the other girls were told she had had a fit. The girl’s sister was suspicious, so she was murdered. Sarah Metyard cut up the bodies when they began to decay, and dumped them in a sewer, with the aid of her daughter. A coroner who saw the remains thought they were bodies from a churchyard that had been dissected by a surgeon. Then the daughter became the mistress of a man called Rooker, and Mrs Metyard began to cause disturbances at his house in Baling. The daughter told her lover about the murders, and he told the authorities, assuming that the daughter would not be indicted, since she was under age at the time. He was mistaken, and both women were hanged.
But the Fieldings died, and no magistrates of comparable energy took their place. The eighteenth-century crime wave continued unabated.
Things began to change as the industrial revolution at least provided jobs for anyone who wanted to work. As Luke Owen Pike has said in his History of Crime in England (Vol. 2,p. 406):’… there began to be drawn a broader line than had ever existed before between the criminal classes and the rest of the community.’ Roads were improved, and better communications meant that highwaymen had less chance of remaining uncaught; in 1805, the horse patrols were revived in the London area, with uniformed officers guarding the roads for ten miles around London from five in the evening until midnight. There was still no regular police force, because the English remained convinced that policemen were people who spied on you, searched your home and dragged you off to jail. So methods of detecting a crime after it had been committed were still hit-and-miss.
But then, the crimes themselves continued to be of a curiously commonplace nature, as we can see by studying the Newgate Calendar, a compilation of criminal cases from 1700 onward published in 1774 by J. Cooke. We read: ‘executed for sheep stealing’, ‘executed for forgery’, ‘executed for an unnatural crime’ (sodomy), ‘executed for housebreaking’, ‘executed for robbing a poor woman’, ‘executed for highway robbery’, and so on. There are, of course, dozens of cases of murder, most of them family murders – husbands murdering wives – and murders in the course of robbery, many involving smuggling. The language seems absurdly inappropriate to the crimes: ‘this atrocious monster’, ‘this abandoned wretch’, ‘this brutal villain’. Rape is relatively rare, and most of these cases concern upper-class males, such as Colonel Francis Charteris, ‘a terror to female innocence’, who made a habit of seducing his servant girls, and who ‘used violence’ against a girl called Anne Bond who declined his offer of a purse of gold to sleep with him. Charteris was hanged. We observe the incredible cruelty involved in many of the murders: a gang of smugglers who beat two customs men to death in 1749, crushing the testicles of one of them, and a smuggler called Mills who flogged a customs man to death in the same year. Elizabeth Brownrigg used to obtain servant girls from the parish workhouse, then strip them naked and flog them to death – often hanging from a hook in the ceiling. She was hanged in 1767, but her husband and son, who had been equally responsible for a number of deaths, were given six months each on the technicality that they were not the girls’ employers. But all this brutality was merely a reflection of the Age of Gin, when London’s gutters were full of drunks, and life was cheap. The Newgate Calendar gives the impression that ten times as many murderers escaped as found their way into Newgate prison.
In 1811, there was a case that made a sensation through the length and breadth of the country, and caused householders everywhere to bolt and bar their shutters. It took place in a house in the Ratcliffe Highway, in the East End of London. On the night of Saturday 7 December 1811, someone broke into the house of a hosier named Timothy Marr, and murdered Marr, his wife, their baby and an apprentice boy of thirteen. A servant girl who had been sent out to buy oysters discovered the bodies. The incredible violence of the murders shocked everyone; the family had been slaughtered with blows of a mallet that had shattered their skulls, then their throats had been cut. The killer was obviously a homicidal maniac, but the motive had probably been robbery – which had been interrupted by the girl’s return. In an upstairs room, a constable of the river police found the murder weapon – a ‘maul’, a kind of iron mallet with a point on one end of the head; they were used by ships’ carpenters. The head had the initials ‘I.P.’ punched into it. Two sets of footprints were found leading away from the house.
Twelve days later, there was a second mass murder at a public house called the King’s Arms, in Gravel Lane, close to the Ratcliffe Highway. The pub was run by a Mr Williamson and his wife, with help from their fourteen-year-old granddaughter, Kitty Stilwell, and a servant, Bridget Harrington. There was also a lodger, twenty-six-year-old John Turner. After the bar had closed at 11 P.M., Williamson served a drink to an old friend, the parish constable, and told him that a man in a brown jacket had been listening at the door, and that if the constable saw him, he should arrest him.
A quarter of an hour later, the lodger had gone to his bed in the attic when he heard the front door slam very hard, then Bridget Harrington’s voice shouting ‘We are all murdered.’ There were blows and more cries. Turner crept downstairs – naked – and peered into the living room. He saw a man bending over a body and rifling the pockets. Turner went back upstairs, made a rope out of sheets tied together, and lowered himself out of the window. As he landed with a crash on the pavement – the ‘rope’ was too short – he shouted breathlessly ‘Murder, murder!’ A crowd quickly formed, and the parish constable prised open the metal flap that led into the cellar. At the bottom of some steps lay the body of the landlord, his head beaten in by a crowbar that lay beside him. His throat had been cut and his right leg fractured. In the room above lay the bodies of Mrs Williamson and Bridget Harrington. Both their skulls had been shattered, and both had had their throats cut to the bone. The murderer had escaped through a rear window.
Dozens of sailors and men in brown jackets were arrested on suspicion, among them a young sailor named John Williams, who lodged at the Pear Tree public house in nearby Wapping. He was a rather good-looking, slightly effeminate youth with a manner that sometimes caused him to be mistaken for a ‘gentleman’. There was no evidence against him. But when handbills with pictures of the maul were circulated, John Williams’s landlord, a Mr Vermilloe (who happened to be in Newgate prison for debt) said that he recognised it as belonging to a Swedish sailor named John Peterson. Peterson was now at sea, so had a watertight alibi, but had left his chest of tools behind, in the care of Vermilloe.