Murder of the Black Museum 1875-1975: The Dark Secrets Behind a Hundred Years of the Most Notorious Crimes in England

by Honeycombe, Gordon

  Dr Shields, a prison doctor, said of the accused: ‘I have frequently conversed with him, but I cannot believe anything he says.’ Asked by Dr Shields whether he had any standards of right and wrong, Deeming had replied that stealing, for example, was a matter of conscience. If a person in needy circumstances stole money from one who could well afford it, that was quite justifiable and proper. Murder, he said, was also permissible in certain circumstances – he had several times gone out with a revolver searching for the woman who had given him VD, intending to kill her. He believed in the extermination of such women. Mr Dick, Inspector-General of Lunatic Asylums in Victoria, examined the prisoner five times, testing his memory and inspecting his eyes, head and general appearance. He was unable to detect any signs of insanity and he concluded that Deeming was ‘an instinctive criminal’. During the trial no doctor, not even those who spoke for the defence, would unequivocally say or concede that Deeming was insane.

  Towards the end of the trial, on Monday, 2 May, Deeming, with the judge’s permission, made a speech – ‘I wish to say a few words in my defence.’ He spoke for nearly an hour, rambling on without hesitation or nervousness, denying the accusations against him and making some of his own. He began: ‘I have not had a fair trial. It is not the law that is trying me, but the press. The case was prejudiced even before my arrival by the exhibition of photographs in shop-windows, and it was by means of these that I was identified … If I could believe that I committed the murder, I would plead guilty rather than submit to the gaze of the people in this court – the ugliest race of people I have ever seen …’ He ended: ‘I am as innocent as a man can be. That is my comfort.’ The Reuter’s correspondent in the court wrote: ‘While this extraordinary scene was being enacted, daylight faded into darkness. Gas and candles were lighted, and the whole scene was weird in the extreme. The judge then summed up.’

  The all-male jury were out for just over an hour. To their verdict that Deeming was guilty they added a rider that he was not insane.

  After sentence of death had been passed, Fred Deeming thanked the judge, smiled at the jury, waved at friends and with his hands in his pockets disappeared from view.

  In the three weeks before his execution, Deeming wrote his autobiography, which was destroyed with all his papers after his death. His writings were said by the authorities to have been ‘a compound of ribaldry and folly’. In prison, Deeming, who was alternately angry and depressed and at times incoherent, upbraided his solicitor, Mr Lyle, bewailed his fate, declared his innocence and said he would kill himself if he could. He also made a will leaving the little he had to Mr Lyle and Miss Rounsevell, whom his mother’s spirit, he said, was nonetheless still urging him to kill.

  A long and closely argued petition was prepared by Mr Lyle and sent to the Melbourne Executive, asking for further enquiries and medical examinations to be made as well as for a stay of execution. The petition was dismissed on 9 May. Another petition was then sent to the Privy Council in England in a last attempt to have the case reconsidered. It included evidence from Edward Deeming and his wife concerning the prisoner’s insanity. This petition was lodged at the Privy Council’s office in Downing Street on 18 May, and the matter was discussed the following day with the Lord Chancellor in the chair. On the morning of Friday, 20 May, the Lords of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council reported to Her Majesty that the petition for special leave to appeal should be dismissed.

  On Monday, 23 May 1892, just before ten o’clock, Frederick Deeming walked to his execution smoking a cigar. A very large crowd of ticket-holding officials and pressmen were present, and in an attempt to remain incognito the hangman wore a false white beard while his assistant wore a false black one. Asked by the sheriff if he had anything to say, Deeming replied faintly: ‘May the Lord receive my spirit.’ The cap was put over his head and the entire burial service was read remorselessly by a chaplain before the lever was pulled.

  While he was in prison Deeming claimed to be Jack the Ripper – an impossibility, as he had been in jail in South Africa at the time of the Whitechapel murders. Nonetheless, after his execution a plaster death mask was made of his head in case his claim was verified, and his brain and skull were studied by doctors interested in phrenology and the criminal mind. His body had also been examined to determine whether there was any evidence of degeneration, which would assist in identifying the ‘criminal type’.

  The head, sent to Scotland Yard, soon found a home in the Black Museum, where it was actually displayed for some time as the death mask of Jack the Ripper – thus perpetuating yet another myth.

  WILLIAM SEAMAN

  THE MURDER OF JOHN LEVY, 1896

  Murder is often the outcome and fatal climax of a life of squalor, deprivation and crime. It as if the criminal involved becomes in time so indifferent to his fate, to other people and to life itself, so desperate and despairing, that he takes another person’s life to bring his own miserable, meaningless existence to an end. Seaman’s execution made history of a sort as he was one of three men hanged in the last triple execution carried out at Newgate Prison in 1896.

  William Seaman was moved to commit a double murder by bitter feelings of hatred and revenge. He was said on his arrest to be a ‘stoutly built man of middle height’, with dark-brown whiskers, moustache and beard, and the appearance of ‘a Russian Pole’. Said also to be a lighterman and ‘diver’, he was a convicted felon, aged forty-six, calloused by years of base and brutal living, in prison and out. He allegedly told another convict during his latest incarceration: ‘There’s a bloody fence and his whore at Whitechapel that owe me £70 on a deal. I’m going to their place for the money when I get out, and if the old bugger squeals at paying, I’ll put his light out sure enough.’

  That fence was a Jew, John Goodman Levy, aged seventy-five, who lived in a house on the corner of Turner Street and Varden Street, halfway between the sites of Jack the Ripper’s first and third murders, committed in 1888. The area, less than eight years after the Ripper murders and in the year before Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, was still a centre of seething criminal activity, of prostitution, pawn-broking, thievery and insalubrious pubs. Jews thrived locally with second-hand clothes and money-lending businesses, and as pawnbrokers and fences (receivers of stolen goods), though they conducted their lives and occupations, including crime, with more acumen than their neighbours, and with more profit and success. Such a one was old Levy, a retired umbrella-maker with crippled hands. ‘Especially the right,’ according to his stepson, Jacob Myers. ‘Owing to the use of shears in his business.’ Mr Myers, another umbrella-maker, who lived in Bow, also attested to the fact that Levy was ‘very deaf’ and ‘too good and kind’ for anyone to bear him any ill will. Myers and Levy had been in business together until December 1895, when the partnership was dissolved.

  The last time Mr Myers saw his stepfather alive was in Levy’s home at 31 Turner Street on the afternoon of Thursday, 2 April 1896. The following night, Levy had a supper party in his house, which was attended by three women: Mrs Annie Gale, aged thirty-seven, who had been Levy’s housekeeper for about eleven years and lived on the premises; her sister, Mrs Alice Weiderman, the wife of a walking-stick carver, who lived in Battersea; and an elderly cousin of Mr Levy, Miss Martha Laughton, who was somewhat deaf and lived nearby, at 35 Turner Street. She and Mrs Weiderman both left the house about 9.45 pm that Friday night, after Miss Laughton had accepted Levy’s invitation to lunch with him the following day. It was the Easter Bank Holiday weekend and a time for visits by family and friends.

  On the morning of Saturday, 4 April, Mrs Annie Gale was seen opening the shutters of the ground-floor windows, and she talked to a dairyman, telling him not to forget about leaving some milk on the doorstep on the Bank Holiday Monday. Although it seems that Jacob Myers had until recently rented two rooms in the house, Mr Levy and his housekeeper were now the only occupants. And although Saturday was the Jewish Sabbath, it seems that Levy was not in the habit of attending
the local synagogue and stayed at home that morning.

  At 1 pm, Miss Laughton, following up Levy’s invitation to lunch that day, called at Number 31 and knocked at the door. There was no response. A small boy from nearby Sydney Street was hovering outside the house and when he approached her she spoke to him. He later told the coroner’s court what he presumably told Miss Laughton, that he had gone to the house earlier that morning (on an errand, it seems) received no reply to his knocking, noticed that there was no fire in the basement kitchen, and returned home to his mother, who had then sent him back to Levy’s house. After more knocking at the front door, Miss Laughton must have expressed some concern, even alarm, to the small boy at the lack of response within. Both of them continued to hover outside the house, unaware that an intruder had stood for a while on the other side of the front door, debating with himself whether or not to open the door and let the visitors in. ‘If I had,’ as he later said, ‘I would soon have floored them, so as they would not have walked out of that house again alive.’

  Some other people would later say that odd sounds from within the house could be heard above the rattle and rumpus of horse-drawn vehicles, carts and people passing up and down, and the clatter of trams in Commercial Road. No doubt some of these sounds were reported to the deaf and elderly spinster by the little boy who, possibly encouraged by her, went off to have a look at the back of the house from Varden Street. While there he saw a man wearing a cap peer at him over a garden wall.

  By 1.30 pm Miss Laughton was much perturbed and, going next door, communicated her worries to the couple who lived therein, Mr and Mrs Schafer. William Schafer, who was a tailor, determined to check the back of Number 31. He went into his back yard or garden and placed a ladder against the wall that separated Levy’s yard from his. He climbed up and saw a man inside Levy’s outhouse. Glimpsed by Schafer through a little outhouse window, the man, wearing a cap, was looking or bending down and, said Schafer later, ‘appeared to be doing something with his hands’. Schafer shouted: ‘What are you doing there?’ The man looked up, then ducked down out of sight. Schafer called out again, whereupon the man straightened up, left the outhouse and disappeared into the basement of Levy’s house.

  The alarm was raised. Schafer instructed his wife to keep an eye on the back of the house while he went outside, to the front of Number 31. There he told Miss Laughton to fetch the police. By this time a small crowd had begun to gather and the intruder was again spotted out in the yard. When PC Walter Atkinson and another constable, both in plain clothes, arrived, they were taken through the Schafers’ house to their yard, from where the constables gamely climbed over the dividing wall and entered the yard of Number 31.

  There was a scullery and a lavatory in the outhouse and there was blood on the scullery floor. Within the lavatory lay Mr Levy in a bloody, crumpled heap, face upwards, his clothing disarranged, his throat cut from ear to ear.

  PC Atkinson hurried through the house to the front door, where Miss Laughton was now dispatched to fetch a doctor and Mr Schafer admitted to identify the body. The two constables then began checking all the rooms in the house. Atkinson said later: ‘In the top-floor front bedroom I saw the body of Mrs Gale, who was lying on her back on the floor. The body was lying nearest the door, and I could see that her throat had been cut. There was a quantity of blood at the foot of the bed and some on the bed. The room was in great disorder and boxes had been pulled out.’

  Such was his agitation at finding the bodies, he apparently failed to register a ragged hole in the lathe and plaster ceiling, an old brown overcoat on the bed, both covered with fallen plaster, and an iron chisel and a long-bladed, bloodstained butcher’s knife, also on the bed. He rushed downstairs.

  Meanwhile, out in the street, someone in the swelling crowd spotted a man on the roof and shouted. At that moment PC Edward Richardson arrived at the scene with PC Wensley and seeing the man on the roof entered the house, leaving Wensley to observe the intruder from below. Pounding up the stairs, he came to the ransacked bedroom, in which Mrs Gale lay dead, saw the hole in the ceiling, got onto the bed, and intent on making an arrest pulled himself up through the hole in the ceiling, into the attic space below the roof. Once up there he stumbled about and slipped and one of his feet broke through the ceiling, making another hole.

  Daylight was flooding into the attic from a man-sized hole in the roof. Cautiously clambering out through the hole and on to the tiles, clutching his truncheon, PC Richardson saw a man about 15 yards away, edging along a gutter towards the outer parapet. As Richardson called out to Wensley down below in the street, shouting a warning, the man stepped onto the parapet and jumped. He fell about 40 ft.

  Below, the crowd shrieked and scattered as he fell. His fall was partly broken by a little girl, whom he struck and was said later to have slightly injured. Seriously injured himself and unconscious, he was seized by the police. PC Wensley said later: ‘With considerable difficulty the man was got inside the house, and not before his coat had been torn from his back by the excited crowd, who would have lynched the prisoner if it had not been for the police.’ After being examined inside Levy’s home by a doctor, who merely diagnosed a fractured arm, the man was taken in a horse-drawn ambulance to the London Hospital in Whitechapel Road, along with the little girl.

  A gold chain, a two shilling piece, a pair of eyeglasses and a gold seal had fallen from the man’s pockets as he was manhandled in the street. These items and some money, amounting to 1s 3d, were gathered up by helpful citizens and the police. Other items found in the man’s bloodstained clothing included brooches, earrings, a gold watch, a jewelled pin and 10s 9d in silver. The jewellery was Mrs Gale’s. A stolen wedding ring and a diamond ring had been worn by Mr Levy. It seems that the murderer was disturbed by Mr Schafer’s shout while he was in the outhouse rifling Mr Levy’s pockets, for a purse containing 9d in stamps, a silver snuff box and a diamond-and-sapphire necktie pin were found on Levy’s body.

  Some money and a purse were also found on the roof, as well as a broken hammer and a woman’s cap. The hammer’s shaft had snapped off near the head. The cap, with a hat-pin in it, was Mrs Gale’s. Jacob Myers would later say that she had worn it when she did her housework. Presumably the killer stole it because of the hatpin and then dropped or discarded it on the roof.

  The hammer had been used to stun both Mrs Gale and Mr Levy before their throats were cut. It had also been used to make the holes in the bedroom ceiling and the roof. The police discovered that another hole had been made in the roof, from the outside, and there was hole in the chimney breast in the attic. It seems that the killer had tried to effect his escape by breaking through the chimney wall into the Schafers’ house next door. About a dozen bricks had been removed. When this proved to be too difficult and when he was out on the roof, he then tried to break back into the house. But this attempt was foiled when the hammer broke. Weaponless, without chisel or knife and with the police at his heels, he jumped off the roof into the street. Why he never ventured to scale the garden wall and flee into the street or escape through another property is a mystery. Perhaps the agitation and activities of Mr Schafer, Miss Laughton and the little boy had attracted a crowd so quickly and so aroused the neighbourhood that he felt himself to be caught in a trap.

  Thousands of people visited the scene of the Whitechapel Murders, as they became known, over the Bank Holiday weekend, and on an overcast Easter Monday 31 Turner Street was added to other popular holiday attractions like the British Museum (6,000 visitors), the National Gallery (11,550), the South Kensington Museums (17,900), Hampstead Heath, Hampton Court Palace, and the Royal Gardens at Kew (50,000 went there that day).

  For several days after he regained consciousness, the prisoner refused to reveal who he was, and at the coroner’s inquest, on Tuesday, 7 April, the possibility that the injured man was Mrs Gale’s husband was investigated but dismissed. George Gale, a grocer’s assistant and currently a carman (a van driver or carrier), had separated fro
m his wife about ten years earlier; all their children were dead. So said Mary Clark, a baker’s widow living in Sidney Street and Annie Gale’s mother by adoption. She had viewed the accused man in hospital and was sure he was not George Gale.

  At the inquest, PCs Atkinson, Richardson and Wensley gave evidence, as did Jacob Myers, Alice Weiderman, Miss Laughton, Mr Schafer, the dairyman and the little boy (William Whittaker, aged seven). Doctors described the injuries of the two dead persons. Mr Levy’s body, when examined at the house, was still warm. He had died about half an hour before being discovered. Six of his ribs and his skull had been fractured and there were cuts on his head. The wound in his throat was eight inches in length, the ‘windpipe and gullet having been cut right through.’ Mrs Gale had been dead for about two hours. Her skull was fractured in several places and ‘the force used in inflicting the wound in the throat had been so great that the knife had actually cut into the vertebrae.’

  In the London Hospital, William Seaman’s identity was eventually revealed, and it was established that he lodged in Claude Street, Millwall, on the Isle of Dogs. He had lived there for some time, and claimed to be engaged in perfecting an invention that he was trying to sell. Two policemen guarded him daily in the hospital ward, occasionally making notes of what he said. These ‘voluntary’ statements were later read out in court. It is not known whether Seaman signed them. But perhaps the Millwall inventor and ex-convict, worn down by pain and weary of his guards’ questions, of his own wretched existence, became careless about what he said.