by Sarah Wise
He went by at least four different though similar names: his own, Thomas Williams, William Jones, and John Head—the name of a younger brother of his, born in 1805, who died in 1807. He also tampered with his date of birth, perhaps to take advantage of looking younger than his years in order to receive more lenient treatment from magistrates and constables. He gave his age as twenty in 1827—shaving off four years.31 It was a well-known ruse for those who were under arrest or in prison to adopt combinations of common Christian and surnames; one lawyer counted fifteen prisoners at Newgate who were using the same combination of aliases. In this way, it was harder for police, magistrates, and judges to identify “known criminals” with any certainty, and a case could be lost if a jury felt that the accused had not been securely identified.32
Head/Williams was in and out of court from an early age. His luck finally ran out in February 1827, when he was found guilty at the Old Bailey court of the theft of a twenty-shilling copper bathtub from the kitchen of his parents’ landlord. He had attempted to sell the vessel at Pontifex’s copper and brass foundry in Shoe Lane and was convicted on the eyewitness evidence of a chimney sweep (who saw him leaving the house at the time of the theft) and of Henry Pontifex. He was sentenced to seven years’ transportation to Australia, though in the event he served four years in Millbank Penitentiary—the controversial “Panopticon” prison on the banks of the Thames.33
Head passed through Newgate on his way to Millbank, and the ledger book noting the physical description, “character,” and conviction of each prisoner shows that, as prisoner 489, he again gave his age as twenty, as he had at the Old Bailey. His trade was noted as bricklayer, his religion Church of England, and he was found to have two intertwined love hearts shot through with arrows tattooed on his right forearm and the characters T.H.N.A on his left forearm—“N.A.” presumably being his sweetheart. He was five feet four inches tall, had hazel eyes, was in good health (“stoutish” with a “fresh” complexion), and had a “good” character—which in prison parlance tended to mean tractable.34
Received at Millbank in the same month was one Thomas Williams of Eaton in Buckinghamshire, a twenty-two-year-old who had been sentenced to seven years for the theft of a looking glass. It is possible that Head borrowed the name and date of birth of this fellow convict, but Thomas Williams was also the name of a prolific East End body snatcher—he lived just off the Commercial Road—and in choosing to give this name upon his arrest at King’s College, Head may have been trying to fool the authorities into thinking that he was nothing more sinister than a regular resurrectionist.
Millbank Penitentiary had opened in 1816 but soon closed down and did not reopen until 1824: not only had its buildings proved substandard, sinking into the marshy site, but in 1823 there had been outbreaks of scurvy and dysentery that had affected almost every inmate. The rehabilitation of the prisoner was to be paramount at Millbank. It was intended that both male and female inmates would be taught a skill (this may be where Williams learned the glass trade) and subjected to an aggressively proselytizing form of religious instruction. There was also a new emphasis on seclusion, in order to bring the prisoner to a closer relationship with God and to minimize the chances of moral “contamination” from other villains; under “the separate system,” Millbank prisoners were allowed no contact with one another—a treatment that was said to result in soaring rates of insanity. Millbank pioneered the use of surveillance, and the building (the Panopticon comprised six pentagons abutting a central hexagon containing a chapel) was designed so that prisoners would be visible at all times. This failed to prevent outbreaks of rioting in 1826 and 1827 by a group of inmates who called themselves the Friends of the Oppressed. In March 1827, they hanged a warder’s pet cat as part of their campaign to get themselves transferred to the “hulks”—decommissioned warships moored in British waters as floating prisons and normally the most dreaded of all penal institutions—which may reflect how appalling conditions were felt to be at Millbank.35
In 1831, upon his early release from Millbank, Williams rented No. 2 Nova Scotia Gardens, which had a large fireplace that he intended to adapt as a furnace, in order to manufacture glass. But his new start lasted just a month. Williams failed to register his trade with Customs and Excise (under an act of 1825, glass manufacture required an annual license, costing twenty pounds; there had been a recent clampdown on unlicensed traders), who raided his home on 6 August, confiscated his equipment and large quantities of glass, cullet, and iron, and mounted a prosecution, which was still unheard at the time of his arrest for murder. Williams had walked in and found the confiscation in progress and called the excise officer “an opprobrious name.”36 Now without an income, he began to join his next-door neighbor, John Bishop, in supplying Subjects to the private anatomy schools. The new term was about to start at the hospital medical schools, and Bishop seems to have been happy to take on an apprentice. If Bishop had indeed been attached to the Spitalfields Gang, who were infamous for their feuds and fallings out, it could be that he had suddenly found himself without a partner; if there really had been some sort of crackdown on snatchers, many potential accomplices may have been in prison. Perhaps Bishop felt he could trust this new neighbor who was so down on his luck yet so enterprising, with new ideas on how to obtain bodies; perhaps the friendship was helped along by their both having grown up in Highgate. Whatever the case, Williams had so smitten Rhoda, Bishop’s seventeen-year-old half sister/stepdaughter, that on 26 September Williams married her at St. Leonard’s Church, Shoreditch.37 After the service, celebratory beers were drunk at the Birdcage pub, then there was a small family celebration in the back garden of No. 2, and Williams moved into No. 3 with his bride, John and Sarah Bishop, and their children. No. 2 would remain empty for three more weeks.
Millbank Penitentiary sketched in 1828 and photographed shortly before demolition in 1903. Thomas Williams served four years here for theft.
* * *
James May was also a married man, and a father too, though he never let that stop him. He shared lodgings at 4 Dorset Street with Mary Ann Hall (“We do not live together exactly, but I think he is more with me than with anybody else”)—a woman so devoted she once stayed up until three in the morning trying to dry his soaking-wet jacket as he slept.38
Like both Bishop and Williams, May had tried and found wanting more than one trade before becoming a resurrectionist. He was the illegitimate son of a barrister at New Inn—one of London’s smaller inns of court, just north of Fleet Street—and the inn’s laundress. May’s mother doted on her only child, to the extent that he was known locally as something of a mama’s boy. He was educated at a boarding school, had fine handwriting, and his father found him a position as a lawyer’s clerk at New Inn. But he quickly became bored, preferring to work as a butcher’s assistant in Clare Market, the tiny seventeenth-century market square that was just around the corner from the inn.39 But before long he was finding this dull too, and, despite the concerns of his parents and friends, he began to mix with thieves and resurrectionists and bought himself a horse and cart with which he helped them transport corpses. Then he became a grave robber himself.
May took lodgings in Clement’s Lane, just south of Clare Market, overlooking the burial ground of St. Clement Danes Church. This cemetery, known as the Green Ground, was also the graveyard of the local workhouse in Portugal Street and was notoriously overcrowded, with new burials often lying just a foot beneath the surface. The walls of the Clement’s Lane houses backing on the Green Ground ran with stinking slime, and the stench from the graveyard was so bad that windows were kept shut year-round. The children who attended Sunday school just across the lane in the Enon Chapel learned their lessons as “body bugs” (mayflies) buzzed around them, while during services parishioners often passed out because of the smell emanating from the chapel’s crypt, where some twelve thousand bodies lay packed one on top of the other (the coffins having been broken up for firewood) in a space just sixty feet b
y twenty-nine by six.40 From his Clement’s Lane room, May kept watch for imminent and recent interments in the Green Ground: at last he had found a trade to which he could stick, although when asked by the authorities he would continue to give his trade as “butcher.” But he couldn’t keep quiet about the excitement and high earnings of his new job and would brag around the streets of Clare Market. He soon found himself shunned in the district in which he had grown up, so he moved south of the Thames, to Elephant and Castle.
He was accustomed to the attention of the police, having been arrested on a number of occasions for being in possession of an illegally disinterred body. In April 1825, he and fellow snatcher John Jerrome were caught by two watchmen, accompanied by a number of local residents, in the graveyard of St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, with a body in a sack, a spade, and a pickaxe close to a newly refilled—and empty—grave. In court, May and Jerrome’s attorney attempted the audacious defense that the pair had simply been two among the concerned crowd of locals trying to apprehend those who had robbed the grave and fled. This defense caused much laughter in court, but astonishingly, the jury acquitted May and Jerrome.
So despite putting the arresting officers to great trouble on the afternoon of 5 November 1831, May was not taking this latest run-in very seriously. He felt sure the New Police’s mistake would soon be cleared up.
THREE
The Thickest Part
On Friday, 18 November, eight days after the verdict of the coroner’s jury, Bishop, Williams, May, and Shields were brought to the bar at the Bow Street magistrates office for the first of a series of hearings. The office was packed with spectators; the bench where the magistrates sat facing the accused across the room was crowded with “gentlemen,” many of them London surgeons, whose presence suggested that they, too, had some authority over the prisoners and were on the side of right. George Rowland Minshull, magistrate, was in charge of the proceedings; James Corder would present the evidence against the prisoners, which had been collected by Superintendent Joseph Sadler Thomas.
It was a small room, formerly the parlor of what had once been a private house, and Charles Dickens was shortly to describe it thus: “The room smelt close and unwholesome; the walls were dirt discoloured; and the ceiling blackened.… [There was] a thick greasy scum on every inanimate object.”1 Minshull himself had written to the commissioners of the New Police protesting that the cesspools in the adjoining lockup rooms were in urgent need of emptying, since the “soil” was oozing through the cell walls.2 Moreover, wrote Minshull, “The water closet is so situated as to open immediately upon the entry appropriated to the whole public, including prisoners and paupers, and we can only reach it by passing through the crowd. This has always been a source of inconvenience and discomfort and in some respects endangers the health of the magistrates, and we are now more than ever desirous of having a water closet placed in an accessible and safe position.” He went on to point out that the magistrates were obliged to sit in front of the fireplace, a damp and gusty spot that “attracts the smell of the whole room.”3
Into this fetid environment walked witness Margaret King, heavily pregnant and described in reports of the hearings as “a decent-looking woman.” She told the court that at about one o’clock in the afternoon of “the Thursday before Guy Fawkes Night” she was walking with her children near Nova Scotia Gardens when she saw what she described to the magistrate as “an Italian boy” standing about thirty yards from her, with a small box or cage slung around his neck and resting on his chest.4 He had his back to her. King lived with her husband, son, and daughter at 3 Crabtree Row, near the Birdcage pub, and she claimed that she had often seen the boy in the area. On that day she had refused to let her children go across to him to see what was in his box. No, she had not seen his face. She went on to say that the following week, “I heard some gentlemen speaking about the awful murder that had been committed on the body of a poor Italian boy, and I immediately said, ‘Dear me! I saw a boy such as is described standing at the end of Nova Scotia Gardens a short time ago.’” On that day, she said, the boy had been standing with his back to her, but nevertheless she was sure it was “the poor Italian” she had seen so often. And she had not seen him since that Thursday.
Before Margaret King spoke, John Bishop had been smiling and James May appeared nonchalant; when King mentioned the cage, both sat up, leaned forward, stared, and began to listen carefully.
Mary Paragalli now repeated the evidence she had given to the coroner—that the dead boy was the Italian she used to see displaying a cage of white mice, that she had last seen him just after noon in Oxford Street, near Hanover Square, on Tuesday, 1 November, and that she had seen his corpse on Sunday the sixth at the watch house.
The Bow Street police office/magistrates court
From across the room, John Bishop asked her: “Are you quite certain that the boy you saw in Oxford Street was the same boy whose body lay at the station?”
“I have no doubt of it,” she replied, adding, “and at a distance, the cage might appear like a box,” as though to explain away Margaret King’s confusion about the contraption in which the boy had kept his mice. Quite how Mrs. King could have seen it at all when the boy had his back to her was a matter the magistrate did not pursue.
Minshull appears to have been generous in exercising his discretion to allow Bishop, Williams, May, and Shields to ask questions and call out contradictions. But Minshull’s courtesy in allowing them to speak so freely could also invite the men to incriminate themselves, and it is possible the magistrate was stretching the rules in order to pick up anything at all that would assist the inquiry.
James Corder announced to the court that its task—and the task of the New Police—was “to fill up the links in the chain of evidence already brought forward.”5 Corder had given his private opinion to Home Secretary Lord Melbourne that Shields and May were probably only accessories after the fact and might therefore be persuaded to turn king’s evidence.6 But none of the prisoners had offered to assist the prosecution in return for immunity. Turning king’s evidence had been the only way in which any sort of justice had been achieved in the Burke and Hare case; if Hare had not complied, it is quite possible that a jury would have acquitted both the Edinburgh killers or brought in the unique Scottish verdict “not proven.” It was at Hare’s lodging house that an aged Highlander, Donald, had died in his bed, owing three pounds in back rent; and it was Hare, who, like Burke, had never been a resurrectionist, who struck upon the idea of imitating the body snatchers. Donald was sold to Dr. Knox for seven pounds, ten shillings. When another old and feeble lodging-house inmate, a miller called Joseph, was taking too long to die of a fever, he was suffocated by Burke and Hare and sold to Knox for ten pounds. With the next murder, probably of elderly street peddler Abigail Simpson (the precise order of the killings is unknown), Burke and Hare perfected their modus operandi of holding shut the victim’s nose and mouth. This method was to be used on prostitutes Mary Paterson and Mary Haldane (and Mary Haldane’s retarded daughter); eighteen-year-old “Daft Jamie” Wilson; Burke’s cousin by (common-law) marriage Ann M’Dougal; an unnamed Englishman suffering from jaundice; and a number of beggars and peddlers whose names never came to light. Hare is also alleged to have dispatched at least one victim by himself. The killers were arrested on 1 November 1828, when guests at the lodging house discovered the body of beggar Mary Docherty in bedding straw. One month later, Hare betrayed Burke and escaped the gallows, laughing openly in court at finding himself a witness for the prosecution in the trial of his colleague.
Another representation of May, Williams, and Bishop, in the Bow Street dock
This was the sort of treachery that James Corder was hoping for from Bishop, Williams, May, or Shields. The investigation would be easier if somebody snitched: if they didn’t, establishing the order of events that converted an unidentified boy into the Subject that was tipped onto the floor at King’s College would require the tracking down and bringing
together of witnesses and physical evidence in order to create a plausible narrative for an Old Bailey jury to consider. But the concept of objects being able to tell tales and supply solutions to mysteries was in its infancy; observation, deduction, analysis, and “scientific” forensics were only on the verge of replacing traditional approaches to criminal cases. In the 1830s, guilt was still established by eyewitness accounts, being caught in the act, having a bad reputation, or simply looking and sounding the part of a criminal. But the eyes not just of the capital but of the whole nation were focused on these proceedings. Melbourne himself had told Superintendent Joseph Sadler Thomas “to employ his men without reserve as to labour or expense” and had offered a king’s pardon “under the usual limitations” to any accomplice, and a two-hundred-pound reward for anyone who came forward with evidence that would secure the conviction of the suspects in the case of the Poor Italian Boy—for even Whitehall had taken to referring to the victim in this way.7 This, Thomas’s first murder case, shows the fumbling beginnings of a methodical analysis of a crime scene and possible weapons, the checking of alibis and the testing of eyewitness evidence. As with any new science, the experiments, to later ages, can appear ludicrous.
William Burke and William Hare as they appeared in court in Edinburgh in December 1828
Item No. 1 was a tortoise. Following newspaper reports that the dead boy was being tentatively identified as an Italian beggar who exhibited white mice and/or a tortoise, an anonymous letter was received at Bow Street claiming a “similar-looking” tortoise was for sale in a shop in Middle Row, Holborn.8 Superintendent Thomas had wasted no time in going to the shop, where the owner’s wife had told him that her husband had purchased the creature in Leadenhall Market. Nevertheless, Thomas took the tortoise into custody, and when he shortly afterward showed it to Joseph Paragalli, the Italian claimed that, yes, it certainly looked like the dead boy’s tortoise.
