by Sarah Wise
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On 10 December the most controversial of the discrepancies came to light. In that day’s edition of the Times, a letter was published from Sir John Sewell, a magistrate at Marylebone police office. Sewell claimed that “one of his brother magistrates” had told him of a confession made by Bishop on the Sunday “which comprehended a catalogue of about 60 murders” until Dr. Cotton had intervened to put a stop to it. Now, the interruption of the conversation between Bishop and Rev. Theodore Williams in the chamber of Brown the turnkey had happened on the Saturday morning—all parties agreed to that. So had Sewell got his dates wrong, or had Cotton made other interruptions? And who had told Sewell in any case?
Sewell’s letter provoked a stern response from undersheriff Thomas Wood, friend and supporter of Cotton and cotranscriber of the official confessions: “I have in vain endeavoured to ascertain from Sir John Sewell what authority he had for his assertions, and am favoured with no other answer than that of an after-dinner conversation with some magistrate, whose name he withholds. From the inquiries made in other quarters, as well as from the circumstances of having been with the prisoners, on the Sunday alluded to, from 10 o’clock in the morning till about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, I believe the assertions contained in Sir John Sewell’s letter to be totally destitute of foundation. The confession was taken in detail from the prisoners, written down as they gave it, and published in the newspapers from the original documents, signed by them and authenticated by my colleague and myself, and I do not believe that during their imprisonment they ever gave a catalogue of 60 murders or of any other number committed by them than those contained in the statement before the public. I am also bound in justice to the Rev, the Ordinary, whom I attended on some of his visits to the culprits, to say, that so far from his having interfered to prevent or even to check a confession, he used every means in his power to induce them to make a full statement of their crimes, with an earnestness befitting his sacred office.”11
Sewell replied to Wood in a private letter of 13 December, refusing to name his source but saying that he heard the “sixty” story at a magistrates’ dinner on 8 December from “a Middlesex justice of the peace” and that the allegation was heard by at least four other magistrates present. In January 1832, during an official inquiry held into Cotton’s conduct, the Reverend Theodore Williams, who was also a Middlesex justice of the peace, owned up to being Sewell’s source. The vicar of Hendon claimed, however, that what he had said to Sewell at the magistrates’ dinner was “six,” not “sixty.”12 Six “cases” is how Williams put it, which is not six murders and could include the two failed druggings along with the actual killings of Fanny Pigburn, the black vagrant, Cunningham of Kent Street, and White the drover’s boy/Carlo Ferrari. Or it could have meant the killings of Pigburn, Cunningham, White, the black vagrant, the small verminous child, and an Italian boy.
Whatever the case, the damage had been done by Sewell’s letter and the ensuing furor: the notion that Bishop had been a mass burker easily gained a foothold in the popular imagination and was probably accepted as fact within poor communities, which were the most vulnerable to burkers. It was certainly accepted in the House of Lords. As late as 28 June 1832, the earl of Minto, speaking to promote the Second Anatomy Bill, would still be hammering home the notion that Bishop was a mass killer, claiming that he had been on the point of augmenting his official confession “when he was interrupted in his recital.”13 Radical journalist and reformer William Cobbett, meanwhile, made use of the higher estimate to attack surgeons (he called them the “cutters-up”) and to show that the poor were merely considered fodder for their scalpels, much as they were fodder for the capitalist and the industrialist. Cobbett claimed that sixty was likely a conservative estimate and that the true total of poor London citizens killed had been “probably hundreds.”14
No matter how many people really had been slaughtered at Nova Scotia Gardens, no peace of mind was obtainable. To make matters worse, many of the newspapers published a claim allegedly made by Bishop in Newgate that most London resurrectionists committed murder when graveyard or bone-house security tightened or when demand simply exceeded supply. A full-blown media panic had arrived.
A private letter from James Corder, vestry clerk of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, to Home Secretary Lord Melbourne stated that the crimes “engage to a considerable degree the public mind and I have reason to believe from the many communications which Mr Thomas and myself daily receive on the subject that the public do look for some answer to, or notice of, the Confessions, which have appeared in all the public journals.”15 The alarm and confusion were not helped by the floundering of the authorities on the identity of the dead child delivered to King’s College. Richard Partridge, James Corder, and Superintendent Thomas would vainly attempt to prove that the body had been Carlo Ferrari’s. First off the mark was Richard Partridge, who wrote to the Times on Sunday, 4 December (probably having read that morning’s “confessions”):
I received an anonymous note yesterday evening which contained some pertinent queries respecting the identity of Carlo Ferrari and the body taken to King’s College by Bishop and his companions. They were to the following effect: 1. Was Paragalli or Augustus Brin [sic] asked whether the ears of Carlo Ferrari were bored [pierced], and if so, what was their reply? 2. Were the ears bored of the body which was offered for sale at the King’s College? In reply to these inquiries, I beg to state that when the body was opened at the police station in Covent Garden, I particularly remarked that the ears were not bored. The circumstance struck me at the time as worthy of notice, and as Paragalli, who had recognised the body as that of an Italian boy, was standing at the other end of the room, in a situation where he could not see the head of the corpse, I asked him whether the boy he had known wore ear-rings—he replied, “No.” I next inquired if his ears were bored, to which he replied in the negative.
This morning I have put the questions separately to Brin and to Mrs Paragalli and their answers agree with those of Paragalli himself. Moreover, their description of the colour of Carlo Ferrari’s eyes and hair and of his general complexion corresponds in every particular with those of the body which was examined at the police station.
I regret that it did not occur to my mind at the Old Bailey to mention this fact, touching the ears, and I shall, therefore, feel much obliged if you will insert this statement of it now in the columns of the Times.
“A Lincolnshire boy! Where are his friends or relations?” an indignant James Corder wrote in the Times on 16 December. “It is now nearly six weeks since the murder, and no inquiries are made for him. On the contrary, where is Charles Ferrier? Why does he not appear?” The Paragallis and Andrew Colla had gone as a deputation to Bow Street on 8 December to refute before the magistrates Bishop and Williams’s claim that the body had not been Carlo’s, and Corder had promised them that he would put the record straight in the newspapers. As he pointed out, the doubt about the victim’s identity reflected badly on his parish and on the prosecution it had mounted. Corder’s letter stated that “several witnesses of unimpeachable character and integrity” had sworn that the body had been Carlo, having seen the corpse within three days of death. Corder claimed that one of them, Andrew Colla, had in fact made the cage in which Carlo carried about his white mice. Two of the Italians had seen him alive and well in the week of his death, and one had accurately described the trousers worn by the deceased without having seen the pair dug up in Bishop’s garden. In addition to this, wrote Corder, “we have it in evidence that an Italian boy with a cage and white mice was seen close to Bishop’s house on the day of the murder, wearing a cap similar to the one found on the premises, and which Bishop endeavoured in vain to account for. We then find the white mice and cage at Bishop’s house, in the possession of his children on Friday the 4th instant, the day after the murder, as proved by the very young witness, but who gave his evidence with all the simplicity characteristic of truth. And lastly, we find the clothes
of the deceased in Bishop’s garden; the lower buttons being cut off the jacket apparently to admit the revolution of his cage; the tapes also stitched to the lower part of the same garment for the passage of the strap or riband by which the cage was confined to his body. And against this body of evidence, what is set up? The unsupported assertion of the wretched culprits, who to the latest hour of existence evinced no penitent or religious feeling. Were there any appearances to indicate that the deceased was a Lincolnshire drover boy? None; his hands were smooth and soft, and no horny substance upon them as though he had been used to manual labour.”
As with Partridge, Corder here brings up matters that never came up during the coroner’s inquest, or the trial, or the weeks between. It is possible that these matters did arise, but it seems highly unlikely that they would so completely have escaped the attention of all the newspaper reporters and the official Old Bailey account. So this is the first we have heard of Carlo’s apparently specially adapted clothing—and that the jacket was damaged in this particular way; it’s the first time anyone has mentioned the skin quality of the corpse (apart from the question of Carlo’s warts, never resolved); and Colla had never before been referred to as the maker of the boy’s cage, nor was it ever reported that Colla had seen the body. There had never been any accurate description given of the boy’s clothing until after the garments were unearthed in Bishop’s garden, at which point many people began to recall with great clarity how the Italian boy had been dressed. And no reports indicate that Colla had described the boy’s clothing before the items were placed in front of him in the Old Bailey courtroom. Similarly, no cap was mentioned until one was found at No. 3; then, suddenly, many people could recall it in detail. Colla had told Minshull and Corder at Bow Street that Carlo Ferrier had always had a smiling face—he always looked as though he were about to burst into laughter—and the corpse had looked serene and happy, said Colla. Even Minshull himself, the Sun reported on 9 December, could now fondly remember many a time seeing a smiling Italian boy around Oxford Street; the magistrate had always wanted to give him a few halfpence but never did, since he worried about encouraging vagrancy, he said. Why had Minshull never mentioned this before?
But the oddest matter of all was that the Italian witnesses, who had known the boy “intimately” (Corder’s word), did not come up with a likely name for him until days after the arrests. No Italian of the many who had viewed the body had been able to put a name, or even a nickname, to the boy. In his letter, James Corder was either forgetting or willfully confusing the sequence of events in the case.
Corder also challenged Bishop’s statement on the cause of death. Where the killer claimed that the victims had been drowned, Corder noted peevishly that “it is for professional and other scientific men to judge whether the appearances described are compatible with the supposition of death having been produced by drowning, hanging, strangulation or any other mode of suffocation.” Corder had assembled from Partridge and George Beaman lengthy reiterations, printed in full by the Times, of their findings at the coroner’s inquest and again at the trial. But new matters had crept into these postmortem reports, with Partridge claiming to have noted down “general appearance that of a foreigner” and “palms of the hands quite soft.”
The icing on Corder’s cake came with the verdict of Frederick Tyrrell, lecturer in physiology at St. Thomas’s, to whom Corder had sent these post-postmortem reports: “It is my opinion,” wrote Tyrrell, “that the death of the boy could not have been caused by any mode of suffocation, as drowning, smothering, &c. I have no doubt that injury to the upper part of the spine, which created the effusion of blood into the spinal canal, was the immediate cause of death.” But Bishop and Williams had both stated that the injury to the back of the neck had happened when they had put the body into the trunk in the wash house and that this always happened when a corpse was “doubled up while it is warm.”16 As professional murderers, they had been in a position to observe phenomena the surgeons never saw. Indeed, on Christmas Eve 1831, an article by John Gordon Smith, a professor of medical jurisprudence, appeared in the Lancet attacking the official postmortem findings and backing up Bishop and Williams’s claim that the injury to the back of the boy’s neck had happened when the still-warm corpse was doubled up and placed in the trunk. Smith also found Beaman’s, Mayo’s, and Partridge’s claim that all four chambers of the boy’s heart had been “empty,” indicating a sudden death, “inconceivable.… I am fearless in calling upon every medical jurist in the world to corroborate the assertion that emptiness—even total emptiness of the heart—is a sign of a lingering death from disease, rather than indicative of sudden death from violence in the healthy state.”
The editorial writers quashed their own sense of unease about the mystery of the dead boy by plumping heavily and clumsily in favor of the view that Bishop and Williams had lied in their official confessions. Their reasoning was that, as criminals, the two had gone to their graves attempting to unsettle society, trying to undermine trust in lawyers, policemen, doctors, vicars. Such rogues knew no other way of behaving. But that explanation posited Bishop and Williams as men with an organized political purpose rather than as psychopathic opportunists with drinking problems and uncertain employment prospects.
The Times’s editorial of 16 December 1831 stated that “the last words with which Bishop and Williams went out of the world were false. There has nothing ever been heard of any Lincolnshire boy missing—it is most likely none such was murdered; but at all events it is certain, beyond doubt, that the murder for which the wretches suffered was that charged upon them at the trial, namely, the murder of the poor Italian boy.”
The Globe and Traveller claimed Bishop and Williams had merely been seeking a reprieve on the grounds of a legal quibble over the identity of the dead child. That was the sort of thing criminals did all the time, the newspaper said.17 However, the wording of the indictment had made provision for them to be found guilty and hanged for the killing of Boy Unknown. Bishop and Williams had nothing to gain for themselves by lying in their official confessions about the identity of the people they killed.
And in any case, the Globe and Traveller was overlooking a short report that had already appeared in its own pages: on 3 December the newspaper had reported that Carlo Ferrari was alive, residing in “a distant part of England.”
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Time has never revealed the extent of the killings at Nova Scotia Gardens or the identity of the dead boy delivered to King’s College. The story was a puzzle of sometimes garbled, often contradictory statements. But whoever really had been drowned in the well, this was the Italian Boy murder, an easy-to-recount tale, full of pathos, which sought a strange kind of comfort from giving a name and persona to its victim. The official version is that Carlo Ferrari, the Italian Boy, was killed by Bishop and Williams on Thursday, 3 November 1831, and that it was eventually discovered that at least two more destitute people, another boy and Fanny Pigburn, had also died at their hands. Within weeks of the Old Bailey trial, the series of killings had been contracted into one, with a stage version, The Italian Boy, playing at the Shakespeare, an unlicensed theater in Curtain Road, just behind Shoreditch High Street.
The constituent fragments of the London Burkers’ story can be arranged and rearranged to create a variety of plausible narratives, but some factors not explored at the time (not, at least, by anyone capable of committing them to print) can help suggest the more likely solutions to the puzzle.
One such factor is “blood money.” In 1826, Robert Peel, then home secretary, attempted to modernize the traditional “blood money” common-informer system by giving the courts the power to remunerate, at their own discretion, those who had “been active in the apprehension of certain offenders,” including murderers. These “conviction moneys” were paid by the prosecutor, who in turn claimed the money from the Treasury. The archives of the vestry of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, detail the sums that changed hands in the Bishop and William
s case. First off the mark was dentist Thomas Mills, who was impatient for his share of the conviction money. James Corder wrote to him on 5 December: “I beg to acquaint you that none of the witnesses in the late prosecution have yet been paid, nor was it thought so well to take any steps towards obtaining some allowance from the county for that purpose until after the day on which the solemn sentence of the law was carried into effect. I will mention your request relative to the teeth to Mr Thomas.”18 (Mills was also seeking the return of the set of teeth sold to him by May. The dentist did indeed get the grinders back, and they went on display in his shop window, with a label attached, reading “The teeth of Carlo Ferrier—the murdered Italian Boy.”)19 For his part, Joseph Paragalli wrote directly to the Home Office to ask for his share of the reward money on 6 January and was directed to apply instead to the solicitor to the Treasury.20
Although the original £200 reward offered by the home secretary went unpaid, since no individual was able to deliver the crucial proof of guilt, the forty-two witnesses for the prosecution were paid £45 12s and 6d, “and they have severally received at the Treasurer’s Office the amounts respectively awarded them by the order of the court,” wrote Corder to the Home Office on 9 February 1832, though the account book does not specify how much money individual witnesses received. “The sundry incidental expenses incurred in the course of the prosecution were innumerable—an exact account of which it was impossible to keep,” continued Corder. “These expenses, many of which were incurred in the course of inquiries made in the neighbourhood of the murder with a view to compleat and duftail the evidence, could only have been avoided by risking the attainment of Justice in the case.… There was no moral doubt of the guilt of the parties charged and the great object to be accomplished was to establish that guilt by legal evidence—and that evidence too of a circumstantial nature. Under these circumstances, more than ordinary exertion was necessary to be made—no fair or allowable exertion towards preventing a failure of justice was unmade—and I think it will not be said that one shilling in the enclosed account was improperly incurred.”21 Could sums have been offered to the Kings, Rebecca Baylis, and John Randall to change by a day, or by a week, or by a month, their sighting of an Italian boy close by Bishop’s cottage? The frustration of knowing that the right killers were in custody, but for a killing with an unidentified victim and no timetable, could have led to bribery. S. M. Phillips at the Home Office wrote to Corder on 20 February to say that the home secretary and G. Maule, treasury solicitor, had approved the accounts and the reimbursement to St. Paul’s, which totaled £112 10s (a sum that, the ledger states, included payments to witnesses). Melbourne considered the payments “fair and reasonable.” Did that sum include even more money paid to witnesses, on top of the £45 12s and 6d already, separately, specified for that purpose? The accounts do not provide clarification, but it is possible a great deal of money (for working people) was changing hands.
