East End Murders

by Neil Storey

  Handsome rewards were offered for the apprehension of the killers. The day after the crimes, by order of the churchwardens, overseers and trustees of the Parish of St George, John Clerk the vestry clerk rapidly published bills headed: ‘FIFTY POUNDS REWARD: HORRID MURDER!!’ Stating the circumstances of the murders and weapons used, they asked that, ‘Any person having lost such articles, or any dealer in old iron, who has lately sold or missed such are earnestly requested to give immediate information,’ offering the reward of £50 for the discovery and apprehension of the person or persons responsible – ‘to be paid on conviction.’

  On 9 December the magistrates of the Thames Police Office in Wapping repeated the offer of a reward on their bill, and appealed for information appertaining to three men seen loitering near Mr Marr’s shop for about half an hour on the night in question, one of them during that time looking in at the shop window. It gave the following description:

  One of them was dressed in a light coloured sort of Flushing coat, and was a tall lusty man; another was dressed in a blue jacket, the sleeves of which were much torn, and under which he appeared to have also flannel sleeves, and had a small rimmed hat on his head. Of the third no description has yet been obtained.

  Reward poster for the capture of the perpetrator of the Ratcliff Highway murders.

  The Thames Police added a further reward of £20 for the person responsible for the identification or apprehension and commitment of the murderers.

  The inquest into the murders was held on Tuesday 9 December before the coroner, William Unwin Esq., at the Jolly Sailor public house, which was situated nearly opposite the Marr’s house; a large crowd lingered outside until about 2 p.m., when the jury began to assemble, and watched with curious expectation as the coroner led the jury to the Marr’s house, where they inspected the scene of the crime and viewed the bodies of the victims.

  Mr Walter Salter, a surgeon in the Parish of St George, reported the findings of his examination:

  Timothy Marr, the younger: the left external collected artery divided, the left side of the mouth laid open, with a wound 3in in length [remember that this was inflicted on a 14-week-old baby, so it was hardly surprising the initial reports thought the baby’s throat was cut from ear to ear] and several marks of violence on the left side of the face. Celia Marr: the left side of the cranium fractured, the temporal bone totally destroyed, with a wound just above the articulation of the jaw 2in in length, then winding into the left ear, and a wound at the back of the ear. Timothy Marr, the elder: the nose broken, the occipital bone fractured, and a violent blow on the right eye. James Gowan [also spelt Gowen and Goen]: several contusions on the head and nose, with the occipital bones dreadfully shattered, and the brains protruding.

  The coroner gave a short address to the jury on the known facts of the case and after a short deliberation returned a verdict of ‘Wilful Murder against some person or persons unknown’ on each of the bodies.

  After the inquest the bodies of the Marr family were laid out on beds in their home and the public were allowed to go through the house and view them. Hundreds passed through the room and saw the corpses, displayed with their horrific wounds unsutured and their eyes left open. The Marr’s were finally buried on Sunday 15 December, mother and child in one coffin, Mr Marr in another; the mourners, more curious members of the public than grieving friends and family, lined both sides of the route – and were many rows deep – from 29 Ratcliffe Highway to the door of St George’s-in-the-East.

  Thames Police Office published another bill detailing a clue found on the maul – the letters I.P. (other accounts state an alternative of J.P.), ‘in dots on the crown, near the face, [which appear] to have been so marked with a coppering punch.’ More suspects were arrested: even Marr’s brother-in-law was questioned, but all to no avail as solid alibis were provided.

  The fear on the streets was palpable, and further rewards were offered on bills by private gentlemen and, significantly, by the Government: first £100, then £500 – a veritable fortune in 1811. But then the murderers struck again.

  Shortly after 11 p.m. on the night of Thursday 19 December, the neighbourhood of Old Gravel Lane, Ratcliffe Highway rang with the cries of ‘Murder!’ Crowds gathered as an almost nude man lowered himself from the window of a tall building at No. 81 – the King’s Arms public house – and dropped the last few feet into the arms of a passing watchman. The young man was John Turner, an apprentice who boarded at the pub, who cried out, ‘They are murdering the people in the house!’

  The landlord and his wife had run the pub for about fifteen years and were well liked in the area, so when people heard the cry of ‘Murder!’ they wanted to help, and set about hammering on the doors of the pub. Constable Hawse and some men from the crowd – including a butcher from Ashwell’s buildings named Ludgate – forced an entry through the cellar-flap and entered the building. At the same time another man, named Fox, cutlass in hand, managed an entrance through some wooden bars at the side of the house.

  In the cellar the body of Jack Williamson (56), the landlord, lay at the foot of the stairs, his legs on the stairs, his head down. A horrific blow had been inflicted on his head and his throat dreadfully cut. An iron crowbar lay by his side. The men made their way upstairs into the parlour where they found Jack’s wife, Mrs Elizabeth Williamson (60), and the servant girl, Bridget Harrington. Their skulls had been smashed in and their throats cut, blood still issuing from the wounds. As the men searched the house from room to room, they discovered Kitty Stillwell, the Williamson’s granddaughter, still in her bed, alive and untouched. Although the house had been completely surrounded almost from the moment the alarm was raised, the murderers had somehow managed to escape.

  John Turner’s escape from the window of the King’s Arms, taken from a contemporary booklet.

  At the subsequent inquiry before the Shadwell Police Officer Magistrates the escapee, John Turner, gave his account of events inside the pub on that fatal night:

  I went to bed about five minutes before eleven o’clock; I had not been in bed more than five or ten minutes before I heard the cry of ‘We shall all be murdered’, which I suppose was the cry of the woman servant. I went downstairs, and I saw one of the villains rifling Mrs Williamson’s pockets, and I immediately ran upstairs; I took up the sheets from my bed and fastened them together, and lashed them to bed-posts; I called to the watchman to give the alarm; I was hanging out of the front window by the sheets; the watchman received me in his arms, naked as I was.

  At the coroner’s inquest, held at the Black Horse tavern, just across the road from the King’s Arms, he enlarged on his account. Turner said he had entered the pub around 10.40 p.m. and gone to his room on an upper floor. He heard Mrs Williamson lock the door. Then he heard the front door bang open ‘hard’, and Bridget shout, ‘We shall all be murdered!’ Mr Williamson was then heard to say, ‘I am a dead man!’ The sound of several blows followed, and then the sound of someone walking about with shoes in which, he believed, there were no hobnails. After a few minutes, he arose and went to see what had occurred. He heard three drawn-out sighs. As he crept downstairs, Turner saw a door standing open with a light burning on the other side. Peering inside, he saw a tall man leaning over Mrs Williamson. Turner estimated him to be 6ft tall and believed he was wearing a Flushing coat. The man appeared to be going through Mrs Williamson’s pockets.

  Fearing for his own life, he turned and fled back up to his room, tied two sheets together and lowered himself out of the house. Next to nothing appeared to have been taken from the pub but Turner had noticed that Mr Williamson’s watch was missing. Turner also pointed out he had no recollection of an iron bar in the pub such as the one that was found beside Mr Williamson – it must have been brought there by the killer.

  On Monday 23 December an Irish sailor named Williams was apprehended on suspicion of being involved in the murders and brought before the magistrates. He was known to frequent the Williamson’s pub – in fact, he h
ad been there on the night in question. When he was arrested he was found to be in possession of £1 and a considerable amount of silver, even though a sailor who shared his lodgings at the Pear Tree recalled that Williams had complained he was short of money. Williams claimed he had obtained this money, which was a considerable sum in its day, from pawning some of his clothes. The most damning evidence, however, came from the silent witness – the maul which had been used to viciously batter the Marr household to death.

  Williams had lodged with Mr Vermilloe. A seaman at the same lodging, a ship’s carpenter by trade, had left some of his tools there for safekeeping, but upon inspection the maul was found to be missing. The seaman’s name was John Peterson, and all his tools were marked with his initials, ‘J.P.’ Comparison between the initials on the maul and the other tools proved a match. At the time of the hearing Mr Vermilloe was unfortunately imprisoned for debt, so the magistrates went with the maul to Newgate. Vermilloe immediately recognised the tool as the one which had been left with him by Peterson and even remembered how the maul’s end had broken when he was breaking up some firewood. At the hearing other witnesses, when they could stand a close examination of the gory exhibit, confirmed it was the one left by Petersen and that they had not seen it for about a month.

  On the second day of the hearing, held on Tuesday 24 December, John Turner was brought in as a witness. Although he had seen Williams in the pub on a number of occasions, he could not say on oath that Williams was the man he had seen rifling through Mrs Williamson’s pockets.

  Mrs Rice, the sister-in-law of Mr Vermilloe – who also worked as a washerwoman and was Williams landlady – stated she had washed for the prisoner for about three years, but, ‘on Friday last fortnight I washed a shirt of his which was very much torn about the neck and breast, and had a good deal of blood upon it, about the neck and arms.’ She had thought Williams had been fighting, and had washed his clothes in a similar state before. Williams said the blood and tears to the clothing had been caused during a scuffle with some Irish coal-heavers after a card game at the Royal Oak. Another witness, John Richter, who shared the lodging house with Williams, had noticed the accused had shaved off his sandy-coloured whiskers, which had once formed such a ‘striking feature’ of Williams’ appearance – an event also considered strange by Mrs Vermilloe.

  On Friday 27 December 1811 Williams was due to be examined before the Shadwell Police Court. The crowd, hoping for a glance of Williams, had been gradually growing in number outside the court since the early hours of the morning, the streets buzzing with opinions, theories and stories. The court was ready, and the bloodstained maul and ripping chisel were on a table ready to confront the prisoner, but the crowd was to be frustrated. The officers who had been despatched to collect Williams from Cold Bath Fields Prison and escort him to the hearing returned empty-handed: Williams had been found dead in his cell. As the Newgate Calendar explains, he had: ‘suspended himself by his neck handkerchief from a projecting piece of wood [some other accounts state an iron bar], which was introduced into the wall for the purpose of hanging his bedclothes on.’

  Because Williams was never tried, an air of mystery surrounds the case. It is possible more than one man was involved in the Ratcliffe Highway slayings, but no further suspects were brought to trial after the suicide of Williams; accounts from that time seem to be satisfied to state: ‘it was the general opinion, that he was the only person concerned in the murders.’ However, this conclusion is far too simple and neat for some – what, for example, of the three men (one presumably Williams) seen peering into the Marr’s shop? The ‘mystery’ was further fuelled as magistrates sought to incontrovertibly prove Williams was the killer. The wounds on the throats of the victims were thought, by the surgeons who examined the bodies, to have been inflicted by a razor, but police searching Williams room in January 1812 claimed to have found a sharp knife with bloodstains upon it. Was this the final proof of Williams’ guilt, or was it planted there by the police and conveniently ‘discovered’ to bring the matter to a close?

  Irrespective of whether his guilt could be proved, Williams’ cadaver faced the same treatment as any suicide. Until the 1850s people who committed suicide could not be buried in consecrated ground, but rather in a separate, distant area on the north side of the churchyard. If they were lucky, the grave would be dug in such a way that the body would face west. Many believed that the ghostly spirit of the suicide would walk abroad with malevolent intent towards those left behind in the land of the living; such a character as Williams stood no chance of being treated mercifully, particularly as the mob had been denied a good ‘swinging’ at Tyburn.

  Cold Bath Fields Prison, viewed from near Grays Inn Road, c. 1820. This is how John Williams would have known the prison for the short time he was held there before his suicide.

  Title page of the fourth edition of Fairburn’s account of the murders on the Ratcliff Highway, c. 1812.

  Shortly after 10 p.m. on Monday 30 December, Williams’ body was formally collected from Cold Bath Fields Prison by a party consisting of Mr Robinson, the High Constable of the Parish of St George; Robinson’s deputy, Constable Machin; and Mr Harrison, the man charged with the task of moving the body. Put into a hackney coach, the body was taken to the St George’s watch-house – known as ‘The Roundabout’ – at the bottom of Ship Alley on Ratcliffe Highway and deposited in ‘the black hole’ until the following morning.

  Soon after 9 a.m. the following morning, the High Constable arrived at the watch-house with attendants and a cart specially fitted with a high platform set at an angle on top to allow the ‘greatest possible degree of exposure’ of Williams’ body. The fatal maul was placed in a perpendicular posture on the left side of his head and the ripping chisel in the same manner on the opposite side; about his head was the iron crowbar found beside Mr Williamson. A stake sharpened at the extreme end and destined to be used on Williams was placed in the same direction between the head and the shoulders. The corpse, escorted by the High Constable, civic dignitaries and Mr Gale, Superintendent of Lascars in the East India Co.’s Service, mounted on horses (along with constables, headboroughs and the patrols of the parish with drawn cutlasses – and the Beadle of St George in his official dress), was driven to the Marrs’ house, before stopping for about ten minutes at the King’s Arms, where the Williamsons were murdered. The crowd were recorded as ‘issuing smothered groans’ as the macabre display passed along the route. Finally, the procession, corpse and all, arrived at a section of what was then New Road at St George’s Turnpike where Canon Street Road and Cable Street, in St George-in-the-East, crossed over each other. Here, two men mounted the cart, removed Williams’ body, ‘and unceremoniously hurled the remains of the monster into its last earthly receptacle, amidst the acclamations of the surrounding spectators.’ The grave was not quite long enough for Williams’ body to fully recline so it was ‘crammed down in rather a contracted position’ and subjected to the old crossroad burial ‘rite’ of ‘pinning’ in the form of a stake being driven through the heart (a practice only prohibited by an Act of Parliament in 1823). The event was made more piquant by the fact that the stake was hammered in by the same maul which had been used to kill the Marrs. A quantity of unslacked lime was then thrown into the hole and the rest filled in with earth. The paving stones were then restored to their original position.

  The body of John Williams on the cart specially fitted with a high platform set at an angle on top to allow the ‘greatest possible degree of exposure’ as it was escorted through the streets to the crossroads at St George’s Turnpike – where he was buried with a stake driven through his heart.

  But still the body of John Williams was not allowed to rest. When works were carried out for The Commercial Gas Co. in 1886, a trench was dug for pipe-laying, and, at a depth of 6ft, the skeletal remains of Williams were uncovered, ‘the stake still clearly evident’ between his ribs. His bones were then unceremoniously divided up between relic collectors and
souvenir hunters around the area. His skull was displayed at a nearby pub.

  2

  THE BUSINESSMAN,

  THE ACTRESS &

  THE DISMEMBERED

  MISTRESS

  Henry Wainwright, 1875

  And, long since then, of bloody men,

  Whose deeds tradition saves;

  Of lonely folks cut off unseen,

  And hid in sudden graves;

  Of horrid stabs, in groves forlorn,

  And murders done in caves.

  And how the sprites of injured men

  Shriek upward from the sod.

  Ay, how the ghostly hand will point

  To show the burial clod:

  And unknown facts of guilty acts

  Are seen in dreams from God!

  From The Dream of Eugene Aram by Thomas Hood (1799–1845)

  The East End of London is a place of many contrasts, perhaps none greater and more visible than the juxtaposition between rich and poor; the wealthy on Whitechapel Road living cheek-by-jowl with some of the poorest and most marginal people in the land. Henry Wainwright was one of the fortunate ones. He had grown up in an affluent family where his father, a respectable tradesman, was a pillar of society in business and public life and a church warden of the parish. When he died he left the handsome sum of £11,000 to be divided between his four sons and one daughter. Henry and his brother Thomas went into partnership running a brush-making business with a shop at No. 84 Whitechapel Road and a warehouse almost opposite at No. 215; they had contracts to supply the workhouse and even the Metropolitan Police. To all outward appearances Wainwright was a typical Victorian gentleman and lived with his wife and children in the smart Georgian Tredegar Square in the Mile End district of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Indeed, it was said of Wainwright that, ‘At the beginning of the year 1874 there was probably no more popular or respected individual among the principal inhabitants of that long and broad thoroughfare, the Whitechapel Road, than Mr Henry Wainwright.’ So wrote Henry Brodribb Irving in his introduction to Trial of the Wainwrights in the respected Notable British Trials series (1920). As ever, Irving summed the man up impeccably; to the society around him Wainwright was known for his generous bonhomie, his prominent work with the Christchurch Institute at St George’s-in-the-East, charity work, recitations at educational establishments, ardent support for the Conservative party, patronage of the theatre and social suppers. Indeed, he had a reputation for lavish entertaining, and for actors on very humble salaries it was a much-desired privilege to be asked out to supper with Mr Wainwright. The East-End tragedian J.B. Howe wrote of a chance encounter with Wainwright in his book A Cosmopolitan Actor; after being recognised by Wainwright, Howe was invited to his house, met his family and shared a drink, some entertaining stories and even a cab. As they jumped into the vehicle, Howe noted the affection with which Wainwright bade farewell to his family, kissing the children and his wife. Howe was to recall, ‘I thought I had never in my life encountered a nicer man.’ In the light of subsequent events it was somewhat ironic that Wainwright’s own favourite recitation after social suppers was Hood’s Dream of Eugene Aram (a notorious eighteenth-century case of deception and violent robbery which resulted in murder and the hiding of the corpse): those who saw the performances of this poem recalled Wainwright performing it ‘with force and vigour but without that peculiar sense of horror which makes its recitation so vivid in the hands of a great actor.’ Perhaps their opinions were far more perceptive than the audience realised: in fact, it was not his acting ability which lacked, but rather his own deep-seated callousness that revealed itself through his performance.