Great Unsolved Crimes

by Rodney Castleden

  Many enquiries, discussions and investigations followed, in the attempt to identify the criminals who carried out the two violent attacks. The Shadwell Police Office was very active in the investigation, as was Mr Graham of the Bow Street office.

  This second set of murders seemed like a replay of the first set, but with one crucial difference. This time there was a witness – John Turner. Anderson reported that a tall man in a long Flushing coat had been seen loitering outside the King’s Arms that evening. Turner saw a tall man dressed in just this way bending over Mrs Williamson’s body. He had stayed in the doorway just long enough to take in what was happening, before tiptoeing back upstairs to make his rope of sheets. Initially, Turner had been taken into custody as a suspect, but it became clear that the murderer or murderers had got out of a window at the back of the house; there were bloodstains on the sill. Outside was a high clay bank with a footprint on it. The murderers, who would have clay on their clothes, must have got away over the waste land of the London Dock. Someone recalled that there were several points in common here with the Marr murders. The savage wounds inflicted, the timing, the escape route across back land, the lack of theft. Once again, money that could have been taken was left in the house.

  Attempts were made to find links between the Williamsons and the Marrs, but there seemed to be none. Two men were spotted running away from the scene of the murder at the right time. One was tall. The other seemed slightly lame or exhausted by some exertion. The tall man had said something like, ‘Come along Mahoney (or Hughie), come along’.

  The law enforcers were under enormous pressure to find the perpetrators of these awful crimes. They needed to home in on a prime suspect. In situations like these, the wrong person has frequently been charged and condemned, and the unfortunate man the police settled on as the scapegoat for the Ratcliffe Highway murders was probably innocent. Of the many suspects interviewed, the one the authorities settled on was a man called John Williams. He was twenty-seven, five foot nine inches tall, slim, ‘of an insinuating manner and pleasing countenance’. He had connections with both Marr and Williamson, which the authorities seized upon; he had sailed with Marr on the Dover Castle, and he had been seen drinking in Williamson’s pub many times, including the fatal evening. They were slight enough connections, and they were not criminal connections either, but they seemed like a breakthrough. It was also to emerge later that Williams knew Jeremiah Fitzpatrick and Cornelius Hart, the carpenters at the Marrs’ house. John Williams had returned from the sea in October 1811 and resumed his old lodgings at the Pear Tree pub, where he returned after all of his voyages. He treated Mr and Mrs Vermilloe as if they were his parents, with trust and respect. He handed over his earnings to Mr Vermilloe as his banker and was a tidy, clean and courteous lodger. He was a cut above normal seamen in his fastidious dress and education. He was occasionally mistaken for a gentleman.

  But alongside these undoubted qualities, and in spite of his slightly weak and foppish appearance, Williams was extremely hot-tempered and easily got entangled in brawls. He was easily provoked and men found it entertaining to goad him. He not surprisingly had many female admirers, few male friends.

  He was arrested as one of the gang of murderers, though it is very clear from the published evidence that there was no more evidence against him than there was against a hundred other men. The only reason for suspecting him was that he was acquainted with people who had connections with both of the households, which was very tenuous and not at all sinister. It was in the nature of the East End, then and later, and in the nature of seafaring that everybody knew everybody else. Certainly there was not enough to justify a guilty verdict or the sentence of death which is what, in effect, he got. There was a piece about him in The Times of 24 December 1811 that suggested there was no case against him at all. The piece sarcastically listed points against him including that he was short with a lame leg, that he asked a foreign sailor to put out his candle for him, that previous to the murders he had been short of money, that he was Irish. Unfortunately, the tone of the newspaper piece was a little too witty and sly to be effective, given the terrifying national demand for a scapegoat. And irony is a very risky device in the hands of any writer. The juggernaut of Justice was rolling towards Williams and nobody was trying to rescue him. The evidence was being allowed to pile up against him but without proper critical analysis. If, for example, John Williams was the shorter of the two men seen running away from the Williamsons’ house, the lame man who had to be hurried up - why did the taller man call him Mahoney or Hughie? Neither of these names is anything like John or Williams.

  Aaron Graham was meanwhile more interested in an Irishman called Maloney – much closer to the reported ‘Mahoney’ – after he had a letter from Captain Taylor of the frigate Sparrow at Deptford. Taylor reported that Maloney answered the description of one of the murderers. Graham sent for Maloney and was not satisfied with Maloney’s account of himself. At Marlborough in Wiltshire the tall man was identified: he was a remarkably tall man with badly bloodstained clothing and it was alleged that there were letters connecting him with Maloney. He was named by the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister in Parliament as William Ablass, commonly known as Long Billy. He was a close friend of John Williams and had been to sea with him. The Times commented that Ablass looked remarkably like Williams, as if that were in itself a condemnation of the man. The torn and bloody shirt that had been noticed in Marlborough was explained by a pub brawl in Reading. Ablass in any case, for reasons not disclosed, had to be released.

  The missing piece in the jigsaw as far as the authorities were concerned was a connection between the suspect, John Williams, and the murder weapon, the maul. Mr Vermilloe, the landlord of the Pear Tree, provided the connection. He had himself been in Newgate Prison for a debt of twenty pounds for seven weeks at the time, so the lure of a reward that would pay off the debt was probably a major factor in his evidence. What he said was that he could identify the maul, which was shown to him in Newgate, as having belonged to a German sailor who had lodged at the Pear Tree Inn. The sailor’s name was John Peterson. Peterson had left his chest of tools with Vermilloe when he went to sea. Most of the tools were marked with Peterson’s initials. Vermilloe would not perjure himself totally by saying that this maul was definitely one of Peterson’s tools, but he had used one of the mauls for chopping wood and had himself broken the tip. The murder weapon had a broken tip. At a hearing in which the new ‘evidence’ about the maul was heard, John Williams tried to speak, but he was told by the magistrate to be silent. It is impossible to guess what he might have said; soon he would be silenced altogether.

  The authorities hoped that by holding Williams long enough they could get him to tell them the names of his accomplices, so that they could round up the whole dangerous gang. Cornelius Hart was getting himself implicated. He looked like the gang member responsible for stealing the ripping chisel that was left in Marr’s house, and he had secretly sent his wife to the Pear Tree to find out if Williams had been arrested, while denying that he was a friend of Williams.

  But the holding plan went wrong. When the gaoler at Coldbath Fields Prison went to collect John Williams to answer questions before the Shadwell police magistrates, he found him dead in his cell, hanging from a beam. The investigation proceeded as if Williams had admitted his own guilt, though of course he may have committed suicide for some other reason, such as despair at being wrongly charged, or he may have been murdered. The Coroner, Mr Unwin, addressed the jury in terms that were strongly biased, unforgivably referring to John Williams as a ‘miserable wretch’ and accusing him of seeking to escape justice by recourse to self-destruction; by killing himself, Williams had proved himself a murderer, and so on. On the last day of the year 1811, Williams’ body was moved, late at night, from the cell where he died to a watch-house near the London Docks, ready for burial.

  The magistrate, Mr Capper, met the Home Secretary to discuss the possibility of departing from the
usual custom of burying suicides at the nearest crossroads. They decided that something nastier and more barbaric was appropriate to satisfy public feeling – a public exhibition of the body through the neighbourhood where the crimes had been committed.

  In line with this extraordinary decision, a procession led from the watch-house at half past ten in the morning, It consisted of several hundred constables carrying staves to clear the way, the newly formed patrol carrying drawn cutlasses, more constables, the parish officers of the three parishes concerned (St George’s, St Paul’s and Shadwell), peace officers on horseback, yet more constables, and then the High Constable of Middlesex on horseback.

  Then, climatically, came the body of the ‘miserable wretch’, John Williams, stretched full length on a sloping board on the back of a cart, to give the best possible view of the murderer’s body. Williams was dressed in blue trousers and a blue-and-white striped waistcoat, but no coat, just as he was found in his cell. On the left side of the murderer’s head was displayed the maul, and on the right side the ripping chisel or crow bar; these were believed to be the murder weapons. The face of John Williams was awful to look at, and the condition of the corpse as a whole was too horrible for observers to describe in any further detail. Yet more constables brought up the rear.

  This almost-medieval procession made its way slowly up Ratcliffe Highway, accompanied and followed by a huge crowd of people, all eager to get a good look at John Williams’s body. When the cart reached Mr Marr’s house, it was halted there for a quarter of an hour. Then the procession moved off towards Old Gravel Lane, Wapping, New Crane Lane and into New Gravel Lane. At Mr Williamson’s house the procession again came to a halt for a while. Then it moved off into Ratcliffe Highway again, Cannon Street and St George’s Turnpike, to the point where the road was intersected by Cannon Street. There, at the crossroads, a six-foot deep grave had been prepared. At about midday John Williams’ body was untied from its platform and stuffed into the grave. A stake was driven through Williams’ heart with the bloodstained maul, then the grave was filled and the paving stones replaced.

  The authorities managed for a short time to sell the public the idea that John Williams was a lone killer, but it was obvious from many of the witness statements that at least two and possibly as many as twelve men were involved. Whether John Williams really was one of the murderers remains uncertain. And who were the others who were with him? There was a mystery surrounding the crowbar used as the second murder weapon. Mr Pugh was the clerk of works who had overseen the modernization of the shop for Marr. His carpenter had asked for a crowbar (or ripping chisel, as it was called) which Mr Pugh did not have, but borrowed one from a neighbour. When the carpentry job had been done the carpenter had been laid off, but he went without returning the chisel. Pugh asked the carpenter about it and the carpenter replied that he had left it in the shop, though Pugh could not find it. Some days later, Timothy Marr told Pugh that he had searched his house thoroughly and was sure the chisel wasn’t there. On the day of Marr’s murder the chisel was still missing from Marr’s shop, only reappearing on the discovery of the bodies of Marr and Gowen, when it was seen lying on the counter. It is reasonable to suspect the carpenter of being one of the murderers. It was not immediately seen as a significant object because it was not covered in blood, but its return during the raid on the Marrs’ house was a significant clue.

  One peculiar aspect of the evidence is that The Times studiously avoided naming the carpenter. It would later emerge that there were three carpenters, Cornelius Hart and two joiners called Towler (or Trotter) and Jeremiah Fitzpatrick. Of the three, Cornelius Hart is the likeliest. Was he one of the murderers?

  The motive seems not to have been simple robbery. There was cash to the value of £150 in the house, a considerable sum in those days, yet it was not taken. A score from Timothy Marr’s seafaring days seems possible. It is also possible that there was some family rivalry. A man called Thomas Taylor said that he knew that Marr’s brother had employed six or seven men to commit the murders. He also said he knew one of the men involved, who had been unable to cut the child’s throat. Unfortunately, Taylor later said he had no memory of saying any of this and that he had been wounded in the head while serving in the forces; he admitted that he was sometimes so deranged, especially when drunk, that he did not know what he was saying. The magistrates agreed with him that he was insane and decided to let him go without taking any notice of his testimony. There were, even so, other witnesses who said Marr’s brother hated him. There had been a lawsuit which Timothy Marr had won; the two men had not spoken to each other for years.

  There were other leads, too. A week or two after the murders, when the bloodstained maul had been in the possession of John Harriott at the River Thames Police Office for some time, someone took a look at it with a magnifying glass. A detail had been overlooked. The caked blood and hair were carefully scraped back to reveal the initials I. P. punched in dots. Presumably these were the initials of the maul’s owner. The description published at the time wrongly gave the initials as ‘J. P.’ and, thanks to that useful misprint, Mr Vermilloe’s identification of the maul as belonging to John Peterson is seen to be a piece of pure perjury. (The Vermilloes got their £60 reward in due course.)

  The other murder weapon, the knife or razor, was invisible through most of the enquiries. So also was the supposition that John Williams was the sort of man who cut people’s throats. After his death, discreet investigations into his past revealed no violence with knives whatever. He may, through impulsiveness, have got involved in occasional fist-fights, but he was not a knife man.

  The strange errand of Margaret Jewell may hold one of the keys to the mystery. She would certainly have been murdered if she had been in the house when the gang arrived; her life was saved by her fruitless search for oysters. But was she in fact sent out by Marr as she said? In one statement, she said it was Mrs Marr who had sent her out. The inconsistency suggests that perhaps neither of them sent her out, that it was her own idea to go out on a fruitless midnight shopping expedition. This may mean that she set it up, or had been bribed to go out, leaving the front door open. Her spectacular swoon at the inquest was seen at the time as quite consistent with guilt. She may have colluded with Marr’s brother, assuming that some lesser crime was to be committed, maybe theft or some minor assault; finding out later that she had connived at the murder of the whole household might well have made her feel faint.

  On the face of it, it looks like a remarkable coincidence that Margaret Jewell went out of the house for a short time, leaving the door unlocked, and in that short time the murderers entered, killed and left again. We shall come across exactly this kind of suspicious coincidental absence again, in the case of Billie-Jo Jenkins.

  One of the investigators, Aaron Graham, followed the line of thought that Margaret Jewell was an accomplice, that she was somehow persuaded or bribed to go out and leave the door open, perhaps not realizing that mass murder was planned. Working on this hypothesis, Graham interrogated Marr’s brother for two days. Marr had no interest in Margaret Jewell, had never even known her. Nor had there been a murderous family feud. Marr’s brother also had an alibi. If he had planned the murder so meticulously, he would have an alibi; and there was nothing to stop him hiring others to do the job for him. But Aaron Graham’s questioning was unable to get past Marr’s alibi.

  This whole line of enquiry began to disintegrate when the Williamson household was murdered. After John Williams’s suicide, the investigators lost their way, having decided too soon that he was one of the murderers. What, in the end, did the most serious contemporary investigator make of it? In February 1812, Aaron Graham wrote his report. He concluded that two people had committed the Williamson murders, that Ablass was not one of them. He was sure that Cornelius Hart was involved in the Marr murders, but doubted if the case could ever be made to hold up in court; he had proved that Hart’s statements contained lies. But it is a profoundly unsatisfactory repor
t. He had to release his prime suspect, Ablass, yet he did not say why. He also missed the obvious point that John Turner, who saw the tall man, did not recognize him as Williams, whom he knew well and had seen earlier that evening. If the (relatively) tall man was not Ablass and, as Graham says, Williams’s accomplice was shorter than Williams, then Williams must have been the ‘tall’ man seen at the King’s Arms, and he does not really fit the description of the tall man either. The only conclusion can be that Williams was not there at all – indeed not involved in either of these horrible cases.

  It is also possible that Williams himself was murdered. It would be obvious to the real murderers that if Williams came to trial and was acquitted, the man hunt would resume and they would still be in danger. If he appeared to commit suicide, his guilt would be taken for granted - as indeed it was. So it was simply a matter of bribing a turnkey in a prison with virtually no supervision to hang an already fettered prisoner. The state of Williams’s body showed that he had ‘struggled very hard’ for life, yet when he was found his hands were free, his bed was close by and the iron beam was only five inches higher from the ground than he was; he could have reached up and held onto the beam while he found the bed with his feet. In view of the circumstances, it is very unlikely that he died voluntarily.

  The two murders gripped the attention of the whole of England. The poet Robert Southey, avidly reading about them in the Lake District, declared that it was a rare case of ‘a private event which rose to the dignity of a national event’. The Marrs were given a tall tombstone bearing a long inscription, relating how they were ‘most inhumanely murdered in their dweling house, No 28 Ratcliffe Highway, 8 December, 1811.