by P. D. James
But the story makes no sense. Why should Williams attempt to break into Mrs Orr’s house? He was known to her; she liked him. He had only to knock on the door and she would invite him in. This, in fact, is precisely what happened. She might not have welcomed even the agreeable and insinuating Mr Williams if he had come brandishing a chisel, but concealing the weapon was hardly an insurmountable problem. It could be hidden fairly easily in a sleeve or under his coat while he slipped through the door. With the door firmly closed and he and his victim alone there would be no further need of concealment. And if she were not alone? In that case, it would surely be more dangerous to attempt to break in and alarm the company than to knock at the door as if on a casual visit. He could, after all, always make an excuse for not joining the company if in strength or in numbers they presented a threat to his enterprise.
And if he came to Mrs Orr’s house as a murderer why didn’t he kill? He had gained access to her house. He and his victim were alone together. And, if no handy weapon presented itself and he yearned for the comfortable feel and strong assurance of the one he had selected for the job, was that such a problem? He could have made an excuse to leave her – perhaps offering to fetch beer for them both – retrieved the ripping chisel and knocked again for admittance. But he made no offer to fetch beer. In fact, somewhat ungallantly, he insisted that his victim should do so, thus risking a chance that she herself would find the chisel. He could hardly have sent her out to give himself an opportunity for robbery. Mrs Orr never alleged that any of her possessions were missing.
It is significant that the Watch entertained no suspicions of Williams at the time, since the chisel was handed to Mrs Orr and the Watch then left her and Williams together to enjoy each other’s company. Williams now had both his victim and his weapon conveniently to hand. Why didn’t he kill? The only reasonable explanation is that the Watch could have testified to his presence in the house and could have identified the weapon. That at least is plausible. What is impossible to credit is the explanation of one writer on the crimes who would have us believe that Williams sat in impotent fury chatting to his victim because she had possession of the weapon and was so disobliging as to refuse to hand it over to him.
Mrs Orr was probably right in testifying that they talked about her house and its environment, but she may well have misinterpreted the significance of what could have been no more than casual chat. For why should Williams need to ask these incriminating questions? He had lived periodically at the Pear Tree for three years. He returned to this neighbourhood after all his voyages. The Pear Tree was literally at the bottom of Mrs Orr’s yard. He had only to look out of the window of his lodgings to see exactly how the land lay. He had been in Mrs Orr’s house before; it was not strange to him. Nor was it different from the many humble houses in the district with which he must have been familiar. It was thought suspicious that he resented the arrival of the Watch, but this was natural enough. He had no reason to love watchmen. Was it not one – and probably the same man – who had stopped his sport at the Pear Tree when he had been dancing with his friends so that he had had to resort to a public house to treat his musicians there?
But if we look at the facts closely an explanation presents itself. Mrs Orr heard a noise as if someone were breaking in. Later, after some conversation Williams came in. It is at least possible that the chisel was deliberately left by the window by someone who had seen Williams enter the house and that it was found by the watchman because someone intended him to find it.
But the most surprising incident in the story is the description of the finding of the French knife. Nothing about this remarkable discovery rings true. Harrison claimed that he first knew of the knife when Williams invited him to search his coat pocket for a borrowed handkerchief. This story of the borrowed handkerchief echoes most suspiciously the earlier allegation of the borrowed stockings which Williams is said to have washed out after the Williamson murders. For a fastidious young man living in a common lodging house, Williams seems to have been surprisingly prone to acquiring his fellow lodgers’ linen. But even if the story of the handkerchief is true, it is odd that he should have invited Harrison, who was certainly no friend, to rummage in one of his pockets, particularly if it held a knife recently bought for the purpose of committing murder. The knife might have been a mere casual and innocent purchase. Williams may have opened it and displayed its beauty to Harrison. One of them must have opened it. A clasp knife with a six-inch blade, strong and sharp enough to cut through three stout necks to the bone, could hardly have been kept safely open in a coat pocket. It would have cut the lining to rags and sliced off Harrison’s intruding fingers. So Williams must have displayed the blade to Harrison when telling him about its purchase. It was an elegant knife with its handle of ivory, a suitable embellishment for a dandy. Probably Williams was rather proud of it. It is strange that no one else at the Pear Tree was favoured with a sight of this enviable acquisition.
But if this part of the story is odd, Harrison’s claim that he had not mentioned the knife before during his examination because it had not occurred to him to do so is incomprehensible. This is the man who, from the start, had his suspicions of Williams, the man who crept to his side during the night in the hope of catching some incriminatory murmur from his lips as Williams turned and tossed restlessly in his sleep or sang his snatches of tipsy song; the lodger who went scurrying to Mrs Vermilloe – but not direct to the police – with every fresh piece of evidence. He could not have missed the significance of the knife; indeed he admits as much. He claimed that he made a search for it in Williams’s sea chest and in every corner of the Pear Tree, but he somehow forgot to mention it to the magistrates, despite the amount of less significant material which he thought fit to bring to their attention. He somehow failed to find it despite the diligence of his search, and the fact that he lived at the Pear Tree and could spend all his free moments looking around. The number of possible hiding places cannot have been large. How strange that so assiduous a seeker should have missed that closet with the tell-tale hole!
So the knife was found. It would be interesting to know who exactly directed the search, and what part if any Harrison played in it. The knife was found, and it was predictably covered in blood. But was it the weapon? The Times certainly had no doubt that it was, and its account displays the standard of deduction and logic which is typical of the whole conduct of the case: ‘It is now pretty clear that these sanguinary deeds were perpetrated with the knife in question, especially when it is known that Williams never had a razor of his own and always applied to the barber to be shaved and, moreover, that no razor had been missing from the house where he lodged.’
But William Salter, the surgeon who examined the bodies, was specific that the weapon must have been a razor. Nothing less sharp could have cut through to the bone in one stroke without bruising the tissues. But Williams had no razor and he did own a knife; therefore the surgeon was wrong.
De Quincey, too, had no doubt that the French knife was the weapon. His account is so inaccurate that one can only endorse the opinion quoted by W. Roughhead that De Quincey ‘was happily immune from a pettifogging intimacy with dates, names and trifling matters of fact, a tiresome and frivolous accuracy of memory’:
It was now remembered that Williams had recently borrowed a large French knife of peculiar construction; and accordingly, from a heap of old lumber and rags, there was soon extricated a waistcoat, which the whole house could swear to as recently worn by Williams. In this waistcoat, and glued by gore to the lining of its pocket, was found the French knife. Next, it was matter of notoriety to everybody in the inn, that Williams ordinarily wore at present a pair of creaking shoes, and a brown surtout lined with silk. Many other presumptions seemed scarcely called for. Williams was immediately apprehended, and briefly examined. This was on Friday. On the Saturday morning (viz., fourteen days from the Marr murders), he was again brought up. The circumstantial evidence was overwhelming; Williams watched
its course, but said very little. At the close, he was fully committed for trial at the next sessions; and it is needless to say that, on his road to prison, he was pursued by mobs so fierce, that, under ordinary circumstances, there would have been small hope of escaping summary vengeance. But upon this occasion a powerful escort had been provided; so that he was safely lodged in jail.
And, if the French knife were the weapon, when, are we to suppose, was it hidden in that convenient hole at the back of the closet? Was it deposited there after the murder of the Marrs, still wet with the blood of the child, to be recovered later, its efficiency proved, when Williams required it for the throats of the Williamsons? But a bloodstained knife left uncleaned for twelve days would hardly have sliced so efficiently through the Williamsons’ stout throats. So was it perhaps a different knife that was used on the first occasion, and if so, what happened to it? If Williams threw it into the Thames why did he not dispose of the second knife similarly? Is it reasonable that Williams, bloody as he would have been, should have crept about the dark house after midnight in search of a hiding place? He couldn’t be certain that the landlady or some other inmate of the house wouldn’t watch his progress to bed. And why should the knife be so bloody? The instinctive action would be to wipe the blade clean, probably on the clothes of his victims, and when time and opportunity were right, to examine the knife for any incriminating traces of blood and wash them away. There was no shortage of water; the Thames flowed within a few yards of the Pear Tree. The murderer would either throw his weapon into the river, disposing once and for all of such incriminating evidence, or if he valued it too highly to bear to see it go, or had it in mind for further murderous use, at least he could ensure that it was clean. It was to be nearly 100 years before forensic scientists would be able conclusively to detect minute traces of human blood in the hinges of the knife. A quick swish in the river would have rendered the knife safe. Williams’s shoes were produced in court. There is no record that the shoes were nailed, so they did not link Williams with the footprint at the back of the King’s Arms. They had, however, been washed; and this fact was obviously regarded as suspicious. Would a murderer who took the trouble to wash blood from his shoes, have left the weapon itself still so incriminatingly stained? To secrete it uncleaned and clotted with his victims’ blood in a house which was swarming with lodgers and visitors, where few movements can have gone undetected, and where he himself lived, would have been the act of a madman.
The description in The Times of the finding of the French knife immediately strikes the modern reader as suspicious. It struck a contemporary reader similarly. It would have been surprising had Aaron Graham accepted this story at its face value; and there is a brief but significant paragraph in The Times of 20 January:
An officer belonging to Shadwell Public Office who found the knife and jacket of the late Williams underwent a private investigation on Saturday before Mr Graham. The landlord of the Duke of Kent Public House also gave evidence upon the subject.
Someone, then, had been talking. There is no reason why the publican should have been questioned unless he had overheard some incriminating talk in his bar. Someone with money to spend on drink had been indiscreet. Perhaps the officer from Shadwell was able to convince Graham that this was just one more case of a rogue boasting wildly in his cups. There had been so many of them. But, if the talk were true, the inference was frightening, perhaps too frightening to contemplate. We hear no more of Aaron Graham’s suspicions.
The sail-maker John Harrison’s part in the mystery is difficult to assess. On the face of it, he was the murderer’s accomplice, entrusted with the task of fabricating evidence against Williams and of deflecting police inquiries from the real killer. Certainly he did his job well and one suspects that he found it congenial and that there was enmity and resentment between the exshipmates. But Harrison, too, may have been a dupe, a credulous but honest fool who scurried to the magistrates with evidence which had been carefully planted for him to find. Yet this is hard to believe. It supposes a degree of subtlety on the part of the murderer which is scarcely in keeping with the crude barbarity of the crimes. And there is another point. Harrison described the French knife before it was found, thus preparing the ground for the subsequent discovery. If one rejects the evidence of the French knife it is difficult to believe that Harrison was honest. What is possible is that he genuinely believed in William’s guilt and decided, or was persuaded, to fabricate the confirmatory evidence for which the magistrates were seeking, in the confident hope that they would pay handsomely for it. It is significant that following the discovery of the knife, The Times pressed for Harrison’s zeal to be suitably recognised, and that he subsequently received thirty pounds – one of the highest rewards paid out.
As mysterious as the finding of the jacket and the subsequent discovery of the French knife is the allegation of the congealed blood in the inside jacket pocket. This was not submitted to ‘a chemical gentleman’ for his opinion, but, even if the magistrates had shown their earlier degree of scepticism, it is unlikely that the examination would have revealed anything useful. The blood may have been that of an animal – there were plenty of slaughterhouses in Shadwell, and no shortage, one imagines, of stray dogs and cats – but it was not until the turn of the century that scientists were able to distinguish human blood from that of other species. The bloodstained pocket was immediately accepted as further proof of Williams’s guilt, despite the fact that the coat of a man engaged in such bloody murder would have been extensively bloodstained, particularly on the front and cuffs. Yet the front and cuffs of the blue jacket were apparently unstained, while the one inside pocket was stiff with congealed blood. The sleeves and front of the jacket could only have been preserved if the murderer had also been wearing an enveloping coat. The discovery recalled to mind – as it was no doubt meant to do – Turner’s evidence of the murderer robbing Mrs Williamson, then thrusting his hand into an inner pocket. But the tall man in the Flushing coat seen by Turner was not Williams. The ‘stout man with a very large great coat on’ seen lurking in the passage of the King’s Head by Williamson was not Williams. Both men knew him well and could not have failed to recognise him. The facts are inescapable. If there was only one murderer, he was not Williams. If the blue jacket was worn by the man seen by Turner robbing Mrs Williamson then it was not worn by Williams. If we reject Harrison’s evidence of the finding of the jacket, and also his identification of the French knife, as inherently improbable and designed to further incriminate a man already dead, then the implications are clear.
If neither of the murder weapons was ever identified with Williams or seen in his possession, the evidence of the other bloodstained clothes – of which there is a superfluity – is equally circumstantial and inconclusive. The murders were almost incredibly brutal and bloody; the assailant, particularly after the violent struggle which Williamson put up for his life, must have been extensively bloodstained. Yet only one garment belonging to Williams was proved to have been bloodstained, and that on the uncorroborated evidence of the washerwoman, who could possibly have mistaken one shirt for another. Mrs Rice testified that one torn and bloodstained shirt was washed by her after the Marr murder, but the shirt was merely spattered with blood ‘about the neck and breast’ and was certainly not sufficiently bloodstained to arouse her sus picions at the time. The stockings allegedly borrowed from Cuthperson had merely two bloody thumbmarks near the top. When challenged by Cuthperson about the ownership of the stockings Williams acted both reasonably and innocently; he washed them and returned them after ‘some little dispute’ as to their ownership. He would hardly have pressed his claim to bloodstained stockings which he had recently worn when committing murder. The stockings are of less importance, surely, than the damp and recently washed trousers discovered under the bed of that taciturn and reluctant witness Richter. The seaman’s white trousers found in the Pear Tree privy may or may not have been worn by one of the murderers. The fact that they were
stuffed down the privy certainly suggests that they were connected with some bloody crime. But Mrs Vermilloe was positive that the dandy-fied Williams would not have worn them, particularly in the house, and even Harrison made no attempt to refute her evidence. The heavily bloodstained garments discovered by Mr Penn and his Quaker friend in Ratcliffe Highway were never found or identified. One is left, therefore, with the evidence of one slightly stained shirt, and if that is taken as proof of Williams’s guilt, what becomes of the evidence of the blue jacket? That could hardly have remained unstained if the shirt worn beneath it was spattered with blood. Professor Simpson gives his opinion that ‘the assailant would be bound to have been bloodstained, mostly round the face, shoulders, arms and hands, from repeated blows. Blood and brain can be splashed for many feet by rehitting bleeding wounds.’ It is inconceivable that, had Williams or any person worn the blue jacket during the murders, only one inside pocket would have been stained.
