by Jan Bondeson
The newspapers were now wholly critical of Inspector Aggs and his handling of the case. Nor were his superiors particularly bonhomous. When Aggs put in a bill for £10 13s 6½d for travel and subsistence for himself, Constable Pegler, and witnesses, the Commissioners of Police refused to pay it in full, since they deplored his bungling of the case. Yet Aggs kept his position within the police, and was several times employed on following up various loose leads in the Eliza Davies case. In 1841, the prisoner David Venables accused another criminal, Henry McCane, of the Frederick Street murder. He had asked Venables to sharpen a knife with a grinder, and then suddenly and motivelessly walked into the King’s Arms, seized hold of Eliza Davies and cut her throat. Venables had seen him exit the public house, still carrying the bloody knife. The police did not believe him, since the murder had been committed with a kitchen knife, which had been left behind on the bar.8 In April 1845, a young drunk named Walter Chambers actually confessed that he had cut the throat of Eliza Davies, threatening the barmaid at the King’s Arms that: ‘I’ll jump over the counter and serve you the same!’
When facing the Marylebone magistrates, Chambers had sobered up; it had all been a joke, and he had got into trouble due to his own foolishness. He certainly did not seem like a calculating murderer, and the ever-present Inspector Aggs added that he did not at all resemble the main suspect. Chambers was discharged. A great crowd had congregated, and they were all very keen to see the self-accused murderer as he was taken away.9
As late as 1848, there was further sensational news. A young man told Inspector John Tedman that at the time of the Frederick Street murder, he had been a servant in a house not far from the King’s Arms. A man named Holland, the brother of the housekeeper, was a frequent visitor to this house, and also a regular at the King’s Arms. After the murder, the servants thought his clothes so closely resembled those of the main suspect, that they had a collection to raise sufficient money to buy him a new pair of trousers! This was thought a very good lead, but as the police were out searching for the elusive Holland, better was to come. A man named Alfred Gee claimed to have seen a foreign-looking young man running out of the pub at 6 o’clock on the morning of the murder, pausing to wash the blood from his hands in the gutter. When asked why he had not informed the police of this vital sighting eleven years earlier, Gee responded that he had told his master at the time, and that this gentleman had informed the magistrate at the Marylebone Lane police office, but he had not been taken seriously. The now retired Inspector Aggs admitted that he had indeed heard this evidence before, but paid little attention to it, since the man had not worn a scruffy dark coat and fustian trousers! But Inspector Tedman tracked down Holland to Southampton and had Gee travel there to try to identify him. But Gee was not certain Holland was the man he had seen, and there the matter would rest, forever.10
The investigation of the murder of Eliza Davies makes for dismal reading. Inspector Aggs acted with great determination, but with little judgement. Led on by the foolish Mr Wadley, he made up his mind too soon about the scruffy foreigner in the pub, and once the description had been posted, there was no way back, except to travel all over London searching for this protean pseudo-suspect. It is particularly blameworthy that the police did not investigate Eliza Davies’s personal life properly. Surely, it is more likely that someone she knew grabbed her in the landing or stairs, than that some nameless intruder murdered her for no motive and no profit at all.
Agreeing with these deductions, crime writer Joan Lock proposed George Wadley himself as an obvious suspect. Might he have had an affair with the barmaid, or killed her on being rebuffed in his advances?11 But Mr Wadley was a respectable young man with no previous criminal conviction. He was popular in the neighbourhood and did much to aid the hunt for the murderer, posting a £50 reward himself. There was a Mrs Wadley sleeping in the same bed; how would her husband escape out of it and kill his paramour, and then return to the marital bed without the wife noticing anything untoward? George Wadley had a long and prosperous career as the landlord of various public houses in London and had at least seven children with his two wives; he was still alive in comfortable retirement as late as 1891. Instead, it would seem reasonable to suggest that the murder was most probably committed by a man who had been invited by Eliza to spend the night with her. This individual was most probably her boyfriend, the dapper-looking, French-speaking young foreigner who had been seen speaking with her in the pub skittle alley.
There are obvious similarities between the murders of Eliza Davies and Eliza Grimwood. Both women were killed by a strong man who cut her throat with a formidable and very sharp instrument. The killer was able to murder both victims without them making any noise, and in spite of the ferocity of the attacks, he avoided getting his clothes stained with blood. The reliable descriptions of the culprit have many similarities: young, well-dressed, foreign-looking, capable of speaking French and possibly also Italian, but also making use of English without a pronounced accent.
In June 1839, a year after Eliza Grimwood had been murdered, there was another high-profile murder case in London. Mr Robert Westwood was a successful watchmaker who had been in business at Princes Street, Soho Square, for several decades. He had invented a new kind of eight-day watch that became highly sought after; in consequence, Mr Westwood became very wealthy indeed. But it does not appear as if this accumulation of money made Mr Westwood’s life particularly happy. He had married a much older woman, for money it was alleged; there was no love lost between them and they were constantly at loggerheads.
Mr Westwood did not trust banks and kept all his money and property back home. This was known to the criminal fraternity, with the inevitable results. Once, three men broke into the house, knocked Mr Westwood down and tied him to the bedpost, before carrying off a number of valuable watches. In 1822, when Mr and Mrs Westwood were at church, burglars broke into his house and stole money and watches worth £2,000. A young man named William Reading had been observed loitering in the churchyard next to Mr Westwood’s shop; when arrested, he was found to carry six gold sovereigns, two of which the watchmaker identified as his property, since he had marked them with his special mark. Reading was urged to name his accomplices and tell where the stolen goods were kept, but he did neither. After Reading had been executed, some of the stolen property was recovered from various Jewish receivers of stolen goods; again, Mr Westwood’s habit of marking his sovereigns stood him in good stead.
The discovery of the murder of Mr Westwood, from the Illustrated Police News of 12 January 1889.
This surreptitious thieving and ill-treatment from his fellow humans seems to have permanently soured Mr Westwood’s character. He became increasingly morose, suspicious and paranoid. A scruffy, unkempt-looking old fellow, he always slept downstairs, next door to the room where his precious watches were kept, armed with a brace of loaded pistols. Mr Westwood beat and ill-treated his wife, bullied and shouted at his workmen, and annoyed his lodgers with his constant penny-pinching. This real-life Ebenezer Scrooge feuded with business rivals, quarrelled with his neighbours and mistreated his customers. One sea captain complained about a watch he had purchased and had it snatched out of his hand, thrown on the floor, and stamped upon. A young man who was also dissatisfied with his timepiece was evicted from the premises at pistol point.
Just after midnight on 3 June 1839, smoke was seen billowing out from Mr Westwood’s house. The police were quickly on the scene and extinguished the blaze, which originated in the downstairs room where Mr Westwood kept guard over his treasures. On the floor was Westwood’s mangled corpse: his throat had been cut with great force, and his clothes had been set on fire.12 Near the body was a heavy sash-weight with hairs stuck to it; this was probably the weapon used to knock Westwood down. The police also found a curious apron with large pockets, which no one in the house had seen before. Mr Westwood’s foreman counted the watches, finding that over eighty of them were missing. A young man had seen two foreign-looking
men emerging from the premises shortly after midnight; both were wearing dark frock coats, and one of them was younger and taller than the other. Not unreasonably, the police believed that these two were the murderers, particularly since it would have been difficult for just one man to murder Mr Westwood, set the house on fire and steal the watches.
Mr Owen sees the two murderers leaving Mr Westwood’s shop, from the Illustrated Police News of 20 February 1904.
Inspector Nicholas Pearce, who was put in charge of the Westwood murder investigation, had no shortage of suspects. There were no obvious signs of a burglary, so it seemed as if the murderers had either sneaked into the house unnoticed during the evening, quite possibly possessing a key to the premises, or that they had been let in by one of the inhabitants of the house. Mrs Westwood told the police that she suspected two former lodgers, William and Caroline Stevenson, who had been evicted from the house just ten days earlier. Mr Westwood had originally been quite pleased with the Stevensons, since the man was young and healthy and thus useful to defend the premises against burglars. But after Mrs Westwood had objected to the number and assortment of Mrs Stevenson’s male visitors, as well as to her ‘free and easy’ manner, the irascible watchmaker had evicted his lodgers, on the spot. There was an angry scene, in which Mrs Stevenson scratched her husband’s face when he refused to defend her honour. Mrs Westwood claimed that the lodgers had promised to ‘do for’ their former landlord when leaving the premises. But the two Stevensons turned out to have a reasonably solid alibi. A writer in The Times instead favoured Mrs Westwood herself as a suspect, or perhaps rather instigator of the murder, since she was more than 80 years old. Not long before the murder, she had appealed to the Marlborough Street magistrates to restrain her husband’s violence against her.
The discovery of the murder of Mr Westwood, from the Illustrated Police News of 13 February 1904.
Inspector Pearce built up a long list of all Mr Westwood’s enemies: business rivals, people he had annoyed or insulted, workmen he had sacked, or customers who had complained of faulty watches. Westwood had for some time been receiving anonymous threatening letters, but their sender was never traced. It had never been ascertained exactly how many watches had really been stolen; the police clearly mistrusted the allegation that over eighty timepieces had been taken by the murderers, but they had no means of proving otherwise. They approached a wide network of jewellers, watchmakers and pawnbrokers with a makeshift list of the stolen watches, but not a single one was recovered. This led the police to presume that the stolen watches had been taken abroad. Suspicion briefly fell on a watchmaker named William Campion, who had been sacked by Westwood four years earlier. Now, he had great difficulty getting another job and blamed Westwood for his downfall; he had been heard saying that ‘some day he’d be damned if he did not cut his bloody throat!’ But Campion had an alibi for the time of the murder.
Another worthwhile lead concerned the family and friends of William Reading, the young man who had been hanged on Westwood’s evidence for the 1822 burglary. Inspector Pearce and his men managed to track down some of Reading’s former associates. One of them, a certain George Redgrave, supposed to be a burglar, had been seen with new clothes after the murder. Reading’s brother was watched by constables for some time without anything suspicious coming to light.
A further clue concerned a paperhanger named Nicholas Carron, who had lived only two doors from the Westwoods in Princes Street. He was a foreign-looking cove, the son of a Swiss workman who had moved to London. Carron knew the watchmaker’s premises well, having decorated them not long before. After the murder, he shaved his whiskers and left London in disguise, leaving his wife and children behind. The police first thought he had left London to escape his many creditors, but an anonymous letter from America claimed that Carron had come to New York, that he was spending money freely and that he was sending for his family. When an ex-housekeeper of Carron’s, whom he had thrown out after she had become pregnant by him, was tracked down, she claimed to have seen the sash-weight and paperhanger’s apron found at the murder scene in Carron’s possession.
This same woman also claimed that Carron had ideas above his station in life. He spent money freely and was notoriously unfaithful to his wife. He had used to spend much time with a prostitute in Waterloo Road; in fact, she was one of the main reasons he was so severely out of pocket at the time. Inspector Pearce, who was quite impressed by this evidence against the absconded paperhanger, persuaded an ex-policeman named Cartwright to cross the Atlantic to try to find him. But the ending of this unconventional murder investigation was a farcical one. Cartwright, who was clearly an unscrupulous character, had had time to assess the situation, and to make plans accordingly. Clearly, the promise of a small reward from his former employers in London was nothing compared to what could be accomplished if he joined forces with the murderer. Cartwright told Carron all about Inspector Pearce’s plot, and it would appear as if the two divided the loot and lived happily ever after. The murder of Mr Westwood would remain unsolved.13
There were vague rumours already at the time that there was a link between the Grimwood and Westwood murders, mainly due to the obvious similarities in the crimes. In 1840, there was a claim by a man in Hull that he knew that Eliza Grimwood and Mr Westwood had been murdered by the same man, but nothing came of this.14 Crime writer Joan Lock rightly criticised this lack of imagination from the police, particularly since the modus operandi of the two murders were very similar, and since Carron had a link to a prostitute in Waterloo Road.15
At this stage of the book, I would suspect that most readers agree with me (and with Inspector Field) that the Foreigner was the guilty man. In an attempt to learn more about his identity, it is worthwhile to use a strategy well known to the ‘Ripperologists’ and have a look at some of the convicted killers of women of the time, to see if any promising leads might be forthcoming. As we have seen, we also have three unsolved London murders in the years 1837, 1838 and 1839, those of Eliza Davies, Eliza Grimwood and Robert Westwood, with vague rumours linking these three crimes. Was a serial killer at large in London in the late 1830s, and did he claim more victims than three?
One of the criminal sensations of 1839, nearly rivalling the murder of Mr Westwood, was the ‘Cadogan Place murder’.16 In the Chelsea house of the magistrate Henry Edgell, a young under-housemaid named Elizabeth Paynton was found dead on 17 May, with her throat dreadfully cut. Since the only person supposed to be with her in the house at the time of the murder, the young footman William Henry Marchant, was nowhere to be found, he immediately became the prime suspect. Two days later, Marchant gave himself up to a police inspector in Hounslow and confessed to the murder. He was in a dreadful state of anxiety, claiming that he could hear the ghost of the murdered girl pursuing him. When tried for the murder, Marchant pleaded guilty. The motive was supposed to be unrequited love, since the other servants said that, although Marchant had been very partial to the attractive Elizabeth Paynton, she had been disposed to laugh at him. Marchant was hanged on 8 July. To begin with, Marchant appears a reasonably good suspect. Partial to the ladies, he had killed one of the objects of his desire by cutting her throat, before absconding. None of the contemporary sources states that Marchant was a foreigner, but his name has a French sound to it and he may well have looked foreign.
The execution of William John Marchant, from a worn old handbill.
Importantly, one of the Strand Theatre witnesses thought that the Foreigner looked like a gentleman’s servant. But there are also some very strong arguments that seem to free Marchant from any suspicion of being a serial killer. Firstly, the execution of the murder, and the subsequent confession, suggests that Marchant had acted in a sudden rage rather than planning his crime. Secondly, he was only 18 years old when executed, and would thus have been only 17 at the time of the murder of Eliza Grimwood, and 16 at the time Eliza Davies was murdered. Although the witnesses seeing the Foreigner described him as young, none of th
em thought he seemed like a teenager. A newspaper reporter described Marchant as a ‘slight puny youth’ who cried incessantly and seemed to be ‘in a state of dreadful agitation’. According to one of the witnesses at the inquest on Elizabeth Paynton, Marchant did not use a razor since unlike the bewhiskered Foreigner, he did not need to shave. Clearly, there is no need to consider this suspect further.
A much more sinister and cunning London murderer was apprehended some years later. In April 1842, a Putney coachman named Daniel Good had been accused of stealing a pair of trousers from a pawnbroker. When a police constable named Gardiner came to search the stables of Granard Lodge in Putney Park Lane, where Good was at work, the coachman protested his innocence. When searching the premises, Gardiner found no trousers, but instead an object rather resembling a large, plucked goose. At the same instant, Good dashed out, locking the stable door behind him. After the angry constable had struggled to open the door, he returned to have a closer look at the ‘goose’. With considerable dismay, he found that it was a dismembered female torso. It soon became clear that this was part of the body of the washerwoman Jane Sparks, alias Jones, alias Good, who had been cohabiting with the absconded coachman. The motive was presumed to be that the amorous Good had wanted to marry the 16-year-old Susannah Butcher, something that ‘Jane Good’, as she called herself, of course would not tolerate, with ultimately fatal consequences. With considerable coolness and cunning, Good clandestinely murdered her, dismembered her body, and fed it into the stables fireplace. Had it not been for the unfortunate episode with the stolen trousers, he might well have been successful in destroying the body, and quite possibly getting away with murder.17
