John Williams was now suspect number one. He had been seen walking towards the King’s Arms on the evening of the murders, and had returned to his lodgings in the early hours of the morning with blood on his shirt – he claimed this was the result of a brawl. The stockings and shoes he had worn had been carefully washed, but bloodstains were still visible on the stockings. Williams’s room mates said he had no money on the night of the murders, but had a great deal on the following day.
Williams cheated the executioner by hanging himself in prison on 28 December 1811. An inquest declared that he was the sole murderer of the Marrs and the Williamsons – a verdict that may be questioned in view of the two pairs of footprints that were found leaving the Marrs’ house. He was given a suicide’s burial at a cross roads in East London, with a stake through his heart – the old superstition being that suicides could become vampires.
The details of the Ratcliffe Highway murders are rather less interesting than the effect they produced on the public. It was the first time in English history – probably in European history – that a crime had created widespread panic. Why? Because it was generally accepted that they were committed by one man. In fact, it is rather more probable that they were committed by two, or even by a gang -one witness who lived near the Marrs said he heard several men running away. If that had been believed, there would almost certainly have been no panic – gangs of thieves were still a familiar hazard in 1811. It was this notion of a lone monster, a man who stalked the streets on his own, lusting for blood, that terrified everybody. Jack the Ripper turned this nightmare into reality seventy-seven years later. But in 1811, the ‘alienated’ criminal had still not made his appearance.
Three more cases would produce this same widespread, feverish public interest during the next two decades. The first was the murder of a sportsman and gambler named William Weare by two more members of the sporting fraternity, John Thurtell and Joseph Hunt. Thurtell, a man of strong character and imposing physical presence, was familiar on the race courses and at barefist boxing matches. Weare had won from him a considerable sum of money at billiards, and Thurtell was convinced he had cheated. So Weare was invited for the weekend to a cottage belonging to a man called William Probert, near Elstree. The four set out from London in two horse-drawn gigs – two-wheeled carriages – and as they arrived, Thurtell shot Weare in the face; the bullet bounced off his cheekbone and Weare begged for his life. Thurtell threw him down, cut his throat with a penknife, then jammed the pistol against his head so hard that it went into the brain, filling the barrel with blood and tissue. The body was then dumped in a pond, and the three men went into the cottage and had supper with Probert’s wife and sister-in-law. The next morning, Thurtell and Hunt went to look for the pistol and penknife, without success; but as they left, two labourers found the weapons on top of a hedge. They reported the find to the Bow Street Runners, who soon discovered Weare’s body in another pond, into which it had been moved. Probert quickly turned king’s evidence, and so escaped. Thurtell was hanged, while Hunt was transported for life.
This commonplace murder aroused such widespread interest that it was quickly turned into a play that was performed before crowded houses. A popular ballad of the time – which was sold at the execution – had the well-known stanza:
They cut his throat from ear to ear
His head they battered in.
His name was Mr William Weare
He lived in Lyons Inn.
But why did it arouse such horrified fascination? It may have been partly because Thurtell was such a well-known character in the sporting world. But it was more probably the violence of the murder – the cut throat, the pistol filled with brains. Again, the crime touched a sense of nightmare: the ruthless criminal who ignores the laws of God and man. Yet the sensation it caused is also evidence that society was changing fast. In Defoe’s time, the murder of Weare would have been merely one more case to add to the Newgate Calendar. But things were different in 1823. Luke Owen Pike says:
England in the beginning of the year 1820, when George III died, was already the wealthiest and, in many respects, the most civilised country in Europe… Stage coaches now traversed all the main roads, which were at length beginning to deserve comparison with the great engineering works given to us by the Romans… Canals intersected the country… All these changes were, in the main, opposed to crime.
History of Crime in England, Vol. 2, p. 407.
In fact, crime was rising steadily – Major Arthur Griffiths estimates in Mysteries of the Police and Crime (Vol. 1, p. 84) that there was a ratio of one criminal to every 822 members of the population in 1828. But most of these crimes were the result of misery and poverty, of half-starved factory workers and out-of-work farm labourers. What shocked people about the crimes of John Williams and John Thurtell was that they were not the outcome of desperation. They were deliberately committed for personal gain, for self-satisfaction; in other words, they were acts of ego-assertion, like the crimes of Caligula or Gilles de Rais. The age of individual conscience, inaugurated by Bunyan and Wesley, was changing into the age of individual crime.
This was, in fact, something of an illusion. Williams – and possibly a companion – had merely committed murder in the course of robbery: a hundred similar cases could be cited from the previous century. Thurtell’s murder was a commonplace gangland execution; Weare was a scoundrel, and all four of them were gamblers and crooks. But the public wanted to believe that these were monsters; it stimulated some nerve of morbidity, in an age that was becoming increasingly prosperous and increasingly mechanised.
This also explains the excitement generated by the ‘Red Barn murder’ of 1827. William Corder, a farmer’s son who became a schoolmaster, allowed himself to be bullied into marrying Maria Marten, a mole-catcher’s daughter who was known in Polstead, Suffolk, as the local tart. She had lost her virginity to one gentleman (‘an unfortunate slip’ says the Newgate Calendar} and then bore a bastard child to another. She also became pregnant to William’s brother Thomas, but the child died soon after birth. After Thomas abandoned her, Maria had an affair with a ‘gentleman’ named Peter Matthews, who thereafter paid her an allowance of twenty pounds a year.
William seems to have been an oversensitive mother’s boy who was harshly treated by his father and made to work on the farm for a minimal wage. His response was to become something of a petty crook – on one occasion he borrowed money from a neighbour ‘for his father’ and spent it; on another, he secretly sold some of his father’s pigs. He was sent away to London in disgrace, but returned to the farm when his brother Thomas was accidentally drowned trying to cross a frozen pond. He soon became Maria’s lover, and they spent their evenings making love in the Red Barn on the farm. Maria’s quarterly five pound note disappeared mysteriously, probably into Corder’s pocket, indicating that he continued to look for the easy way out of his problems. Maria became pregnant again in 1827, and gave birth to a boy; but the child was sickly, and soon died. Maria’s father evidently felt that it was time she became an honest woman, and pressed Corder so hard that he agreed to be married. At which point, he seems to have experienced regrets, and looked, as usual, for the easy way out. He told Maria that they must be married in secret, and persuaded her to meet him in the Red Barn, dressed in a suit of his own clothes. On 18 May Maria kept her appointment in the Red Barn, and was never seen again. Corder returned home and told Maria’s family that he had placed her in lodgings in Ipswich for the time being. He told other stories to other enquirers. Then, tired of the gossip, Corder slipped away to London, where he advertised for a wife in a newspaper. The result was a meeting with a young woman called Mary Moore, whom he married. She had enough money to set up a girls’ school in Baling; Corder bought himself some spectacles and became headmaster.
Meanwhile, in Polstead, Maria’s mother had been having lurid dreams in which she saw Corder shoot Maria in the Red Barn and bury her there. Her husband recalled that Corder had been seen with a pick and shovel on the day his daughter disappeared, and went and dug at a spot where the earth had been disturbed; he soon unearthed his daughter’s body in a sack.
Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175