Murder by Candlelight

by Michael Knox Beran

Scott himself was never satisfied with his romances, and he sought a more substantial simulacrum of the Gothic in Abbotsford itself. To a friend, he called the house “a sort of romance in architecture” and quoted a line from Coleridge’s Christabel:

  A sight to dream of, not to tell!

  “I never saw anything handsomer,” he said, “than the grouping of towers, chimneys, etc. upon the roof, when seen at a proper distance.” And yet it did not signify; the skulls, the suits of armor, the oaken chairs, were they not, finally, so much Gothic gimcrackery? Still Scott did not give up: the master romancer persisted in his search for an authentic Gothicism. And curiously enough, he was soon to find it—in the low-witted deviltry of Jack Thurtell.

  On Tuesday, Mr. Nicholls of Battlers Green went to Watford to see the magistrates. He brought with him the knife and pistol John Harrington had found in Gill’s Hill Lane, and showed the officer what he had discovered when he put a long nail into the barrel of the pistol—something like brains. A short time later, the authorities took Probert into custody. He gave them the names of his weekend house guests, and on Wednesday morning, George Ruthven, one of the last of the Bow Street Runners, went over to Conduit Street.

  “Is that you, Jack?” he asked as he came into Thurtell’s room in the Coach and Horses. “John, my boy, I want you.”

  “What for, George?”

  “Never mind; I’ll tell you presently.”

  Thurtell was taken into custody without incident. Later in the day, Ruthven apprehended Joe Hunt in his lodgings in King Street, Golden Square.

  After undergoing examination in Bow Street, Thurtell and Hunt were conveyed to Watford. Hunt, in an effort to save himself, told the magistrates that he knew where the body of the murdered man lay, and led them to the brook near Hill Slough.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Last Days of Thurtell

  The guerdon of their murder they had got.

  —Keats

  In December, the General Session of Our Lord the King of Oyer and Terminer in and for the County of Hertford—better known as the Hertford Assizes—was convened in the town of Hertford. The judges were conducted by the High Sheriff to the courthouse, and the court was opened. Afterwards, the judges repaired to church to hear divine service. At noon the court met again, with Mr. Justice Park* presiding, and the grand jurors were sworn. The foreman was the Right Honorable William Lamb, Member of Parliament for Peterborough, who had ridden over that morning from his country seat, Brocket Hall (now a golf club). He was the husband of Lady Caroline, the pretty exhibitionist whom Byron had briefly loved or coveted: a decade hence, he would be Prime Minister. Like Mr. Lamb, the other jurors were, in the words of Mr. Justice Park, “gentlemen of the first dignity, rank, and respectability” in the county. Satisfied of the truth of the indictments preferred against the accused, the jurors found “a true bill,” and the three men were committed for trial.

  The trial took place in January. Probert, who had turned Crown’s evidence in exchange for a promise to be let off, testified against Thurtell and Hunt. Only once was the solemnity of the proceeding momentarily softened into humor. Susan the cook testified that, on the night the murder was committed, she had been ordered to prepare supper. Mr. Broderick, junior counsel for the Crown, asked her whether the supper was “postponed.”

  “I don’t know,” she replied, “it was pork.”

  Thurtell’s bearing and conduct, in his last extremity, won all hearts, even those of his jailers, and when he was called to speak in his own defense, his words—prepared, for the most part, by others, but committed by him to memory—very nearly persuaded the jury to acquit him. Dressed, a writer for The London Magazine observed, in a “plum-colored frock-coat, with a drab waistcoat and gilt buttons,” he cut an impressive figure “in frame, face, eye, and daring,” and in his peroration he “clung to every separate word with an earnestness which we cannot describe, as though every syllable had the power to buoy up his sinking life.” “Cut me not off,” he beseeched the jurors, “in the very summer of my life. . . . I stand before you as before my God, overwhelmed with misfortunes, but unconscious of crime; and while you decide on my future destiny, I earnestly entreat you to remember my last solemn declaration; I am innocent, so help me God!”

  The poet Keats’s friend, John Hamilton Reynolds, who was present in the courtroom, came away with the image of a “strong desperate man playing the hero of the tragic trial, as at a play.” But the actor’s performance, though stirring, was not convincing; and the jury, after deliberating for half an hour, found Thurtell guilty of having “feloniously, and with malice aforethought,” murdered Weare.

  It “cannot but give great compunction to every feeling mind,” Mr. Justice Park said from the bench, “that a person who, from his conduct this day, has shewn that he was born with capacity for better things” should nevertheless have been “guilty of so foul and detestable a crime.” He then put the black cap upon his head and addressed the prisoner at the bar. “The sentence of law which I have to pronounce upon you, John Thurtell, according to the statute, is this—that you, John Thurtell, be taken to the place from whence you came, and from thence that you be taken on Friday, the ninth instant, to a place of execution, and that you be hanged by the neck till you be dead. . . .”

  Far away, in Scotland, Sir Walter Scott was absorbed in the case of Thurtell. In “all Sir Walter’s many readings in murder literature,” Carlyle’s friend David Mather Masson wrote, he seems never “to have come upon any murder that more fascinated him.” He assiduously collected newspaper articles, pamphlets, and chapbooks relating to the crime, and had them bound together in a variorum volume. In moments of funk, he turned to the collection for relief; and after the collapse of his fortunes, when two publishing firms in which he was a silent partner failed for more than a quarter of a million pounds, the variorum became not only a diversion but a consolation. “Very unsatisfactory to-day,” he wrote in his journal in July 1826. “Sleepy, stupid, indolent—finished arranging the books, and after that was totally useless, unless it can be called study that I slumbered for three or four hours over a variorum edition of the Gill’s-Hill tragedy.† Admirable recipe for low spirits.”

  His fascination with a crime that revealed so much of the skull beneath the skin of human life did not abate, and in May 1828 he visited the scene of the crime. He marveled at the “strange intricate combination of narrow roads” he found in Hertfordshire, “winding and turning among oaks and other large timber, just like pathways cut through a forest. They wind and turn in so singular a manner, and resemble each other so much, that a stranger would have difficulty to make way amongst them.”

  Scott rode through the labyrinth of lanes to the cottage itself. “The dirt of the present habitation equaled its wretched desolation,” he wrote, “and a truculent-looking hag, who showed us the place, and received a half-crown, looked not unlike the natural intimate of such a mansion. She indicated as much herself, saying the landlord dismantled the place because no respectable person would live there.”

  The garden was overgrown, the pond a mere green swamp. Scott remembered Wordsworth’s lines:

  A merry spot, ’tis said, in days of yore,

  But something ails it now—the place is curs’d.

  “Indeed the whole history of the murder, and the scenes which ensued,” Scott concluded, “are strange pictures of desperate and short-sighted wickedness. The feasting—the singing—the murderer with his hands still bloody round the neck of one of the females—the watch-chain of the murdered man, argue the utmost apathy.”

  In his collection of the printed reports of the trial, Scott “took care always,” his son-in-law, John Gibson Lockhart, wrote, “to have the contemporary ballads and prints bound up with them. He admired particularly this verse of Mr. Hook’s broadside—

  They cut his throat from ear to ear,

  His brains they battered in;

  His name was Mr. William Weare.

  He dwelt in Lyon’s
Inn.

  Thurtell was hanged on January 9, 1824, on the gallows in front of Hertford Gaol, conducting himself to the end with manly firmness. It is said that his last words, spoken after he learned that the boxer Spring had won the fight against Langham, were “I am glad of it, for Spring is a good fellow.”

  Hunt, who had been found guilty of aiding and abetting his friend in the murder of Weare, was also sentenced to die upon the scaffold. But at the last moment, he was spared: his sentence was commuted on the advice of Mr. Peel, the Home Secretary, and he was transported to Botany Bay. In Australia he became a changed man and was made custodian of the assize court at Bathurst, New South Wales. He died in 1861, if not in the odor of sanctity, at least with the respect of his neighbors.

  Probert’s destiny was less happy. He was shunned as a treacherous wretch who had escaped a just retribution by peaching on his mates, and he was unable to obtain employment. In 1825 he was accused of stealing a horse. He was tried at the Old Bailey, found guilty, and sentenced to death. Addressing the court, he said that “since the calamitous event that took place at Hertford, I have been a lost man, and at times on the eve of self-destruction.” He was hanged on the gallows at Newgate in April 1825.

  It was the fate of Mrs. Probert to live out the remainder of her life as a “hempen widow,” whose husband had been hanged. She took to calling herself Mrs. Heath, and moved to Cheltenham. She was found drowned in the Chelt in the autumn of 1857, not far from Barrett’s Mill.

  * Sir James Alan Park. Born at Edinburgh in 1763; educated at Northampton Grammar School and Lincoln’s Inn; elevated to the bench as a judge of Common Pleas in 1816 and knighted in the same year; died in 1838.

  † The murder of Weare was variously referred to as the “Radlett Murder,” the “Elstree Murder,” and the “Gill’s Hill Tragedy.”

  PART TWO

  The Mystery of the Mutilated Corpse

  Torn limb from limb, he spreads his horrid feast. . . .

  —Pope

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Parcel in the Canterbury Villas

  While smooth Adonis from his native rock

  Ran purple to the sea, supposed with blood

  Of Thammuz yearly wounded . . .

  —Milton

  Toward the end of December 1836, a bricklayer was engaged in building a garden wall for the Canterbury Villas, a cluster of newly erected houses in the Edgware Road. About two o’clock, he observed something dark lying behind an as-yet-unlaid paving stone. On going over to it, he saw what appeared to be a sack of coarse canvas. He removed the stone and found the sack stiffly fixed in a pool of reddish ooze.

  The supervisor was summoned and the parcel removed from the gore. Wrapped in rags (a piece of twilled jean patched with nankeen, a scrap of huckaback toweling, and a cotton shawl) was the remnant of a human body. The head and legs were missing and appeared to have been sawn off; the arms and hands, however, remained. Together with the flesh and the bones, there was also, in the sack, a quantity of blood-stained mahogany shavings.

  The constable was called, and at his direction the remains were taken to the police station. The parish surgeon, Dr. Gilbert Finlay Girdwood, pronounced them to be those of a woman in the middle of life, and he conjectured that, up to the time of her death, she had been in good health. From the condition of her arms and hands, he supposed that she had for many years worked hard at some form of manual labor.

  The carving of a human being joint from joint has long occupied a special place in the cabinet of horror. The myths of Greece, Egypt, and Mesopotamia abound in extravagant mutilations, the flesh-carvings undergone by such colorful sufferers as Orpheus, Osiris, and Thammuz. The Christian martyrologies are not less copious of sliced and shredded flesh, and may even have excited a deeper revulsion, at least among those who believed that the butchery of one’s body was an obstacle to the salvation of one’s soul. For if one’s vile body was to be made “like to His glorious body” (so the popular superstition ran), it had to be buried whole, preferably with the feet pointing toward Jerusalem.

  It is true that, in the year of grace 1836, the fear inspired by Judgment Day was grown much fainter among the English than it had been of old. In the dawn of the steamship, the railway, and the first Reform Bill, England seemed to bask in the very sunshine of Reason and Progress. Yet some vestige of the old religious terror remained and perhaps accounts for the hysteria that colored London’s reaction to the gruesome discovery in the Edgware Road.* Clearly, new forms of fiendishness were incubating in Albion, in spite of the enlightened exertions of Lord Grey and Sir Robert Peel; there were even prophets abroad in the land, like Carlyle and De Quincey, who went so far as to suggest that Reason and Progress themselves were not all they were cracked up to be.

  * Six years earlier, the murder and dismemberment of Celia Holloway at Brighton had produced a similar sensation. James Catnach, the gutter poet and catchpenny printer, published a ballad, The Lamentation and Confession of John William Holloway, which purported to be the husband’s account of the killing:

  In Donkey Row I took a house, and there enticed my wife,

  ’Twas then by strangulation that I took away her life:

  Alas, a tender womb-snug babe I murdered in the strife,

  And cut the flesh to pieces with a freshly sharpened knife.

  I chopped her up and—Oh!—it was a most appalling sight:

  I wheeled her all the way to Preston under cover of the night.

  Her head and arms, her legs and thighs, were rudely sawèd off,

  And with the trunk two thighs I buried in the turf of Lover’s Walk.

  When, in the spring of 2009, pieces of the body of Jeffrey Howe, the victim in the “jigsaw” murder, were found north of London, the police kept the “harrowing details” of the dismemberment from the public “so as not to spread panic.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Gory Locks

  O heaven! that one might read the book of fate,

  And see how chances mock,

  And changes fill the cup of alteration

  With divers liquors! O, if this were seen,

  The happiest youth—viewing his progress through,

  What perils past, what crosses to ensue—

  Wouldst shut the book, and sit him down and die.

  —Shakespeare

  Ten days after the discovery of the remains in the Edgware Road, a barge in the Regent’s Canal was navigating the lock near Ben Johnson’s Fields, close by Stepney Green in east London. The floodgate would not close. “It’s a dead dog,” the lock-keeper said, “ease the gate.” He (or his assistant) thrust the hitcher, or grappling hook, into the water; but the impediment, when it was drawn out, proved to be not the carcass of a dog, but the head of a woman; her gory locks were remarkably long.

  The grisly object was brought to the bone-house of Stepney Churchyard, where a local surgeon, Dr. John Birtwhistle of Mile End Road, examined it. The jaw had been fractured during the lock-keeper’s attempts to close the floodgate, and one of the cheeks had been pierced by the grappling hook. But it seemed to Dr. Birtwhistle probable that the contusion about the right eye had been made while the woman was yet alive.

  “It was what I should call a tremendous black eye,” Dr. Birtwhistle said, and “was caused in my opinion before death.” The cervical vertebrae immediately below the skull, he observed, had been sawn clean through; and when, afterwards, he compared the saw marks to those of the remains from the Edgware Road, he found that they fitted together as neatly as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

  London was more alarmed than ever. Before the discovery of the severed head, it had been just possible to dismiss the mutilated flesh in the Edgware Road as merely the fragment of a cadaver carelessly disposed of by medical men, who in the 1830s were dissecting carcasses at a rapid clip. The Anatomy Act of 1832 had rescinded ancient taboos, and with its passage the anatomists had ceased to be dependent, in their search for susceptible corpses, on the remains of executed murderers, a
s they had been under older statutes.* They were now free to exercise their art upon a more plentiful class of bodies, those of the innocent but unclaimed dead—paupers, for the most part, whose loved ones could not afford the expense of burial, or who had died unloved. But with the fishing up of the head in the Regent’s Canal, it was only too evident that the poor dead woman had not been the object of a legitimate anatomical curiosity. She had met with foul play, and at the hands of someone who had attempted to conceal his crime by the partition of her corpse and the artful distribution of its parts.

  On February 2, a third discovery was made. A laborer near Coldharbour Lane, Camberwell, was cutting osiers (a kind of willow used in making baskets) when he saw a bundle lying partly submerged in a ditch. A toe protruded from it. When afterwards the bundle was opened, it was found to contain a pair of human legs. Dr. Girdwood, who examined them, was of the opinion that they had once formed a piece with the trunk from the Edgware Road and the head fished out of the Regent’s Canal.

  With each revelation the mystery deepened, and the consternation of the public grew. The Metropolitan Police, which as a result of Sir Robert Peel’s legislation had superseded “Mr. Fielding’s People,” the Bow Street Runners, diligently investigated. The new police officers, known as “Peelers” or “Bobbies,” went out into the murk of the London winter wrapped in oilskin capes and, threading their way through the slums and rookeries, sought clues to the identity of the killer. But their inquiries were in vain.

  * Before the passage of this legislation, a number of anatomists had conspired with grave robbers and even murderers in the quest for cadavers, practices which came to light after the murders committed by Messrs. Burke and Hare in 1828. An Edinburgh physician, Dr. Knox, was implicated in the traffic in corpses but was not prosecuted; his infamy, however, lived on in the couplet: “Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief, / Knox the boy who buys the beef.”