The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime

In 1792, in a preliminary attempt to rationalize this motley collection of responsibilities, the Middlesex Justice Bill was passed, creating seven metropolitan police offices, each to be staffed by three magistrates and six constables, with at least one magistrate in each of the offices having legal qualifications (previously magistrates had simply been men of a certain status and level of wealth). In 1798 a privately funded force was set up to police the river and docks, paid for by the local West Indies merchants. In 1800 this force was taken over by the magistrates, and named the Thames River Police, with its own magistrate, Patrick Colquhoun.

By the end of the eighteenth century, with the population of London approaching a million, crime prevention was the responsibility of fifty constables and eight Runners at Bow Street magistrates’ court and the seven police offices, plus a thousand additional constables and two night-time Bow Street patrols of 122 men. There were also 2,000 parish watchmen, who covered the 8,000 streets of London after dark. Some indication of the attitudes towards these two groups of men can be seen from their pay. The Bow Street patrols were paid between 17s.6d. and 28s. a week; by contrast, many watchmen received a beggarly 4s.11d. Colquhoun commented on the contempt that was shown these forces: ‘It is an honourable profession to repel by force the enemies of the state. Why should it not be equally so to resist and to conquer these domestic invaders of property, and destroyers of lives who are constantly in a state of criminal warfare?’

The answer was that this ‘honourable profession’ was shrouded in mystery, and what people did know of it, they despised, the prevailing mental image being not a law-enforcer, but more a law-breaker: the eighteenth-century thief-taker, the criminal turncoat. That was about to change, partly through the publication of the memoirs of the French detective Eugène Vidocq (1775–1857). Vidocq had started his career as a not terribly successful criminal. After a number of convictions, he became a police spy, or informer, working secretly for the government while still in prison. In 1811 he was one of four ex-convicts to be made a detective, and in 1812 he became the head of the newly created Brigade de Sûreté, with thirty men under his command. None of this would have been of more than passing interest in Britain, had it not been for his Mémoires, which in translation swiftly became a best-seller.

It is almost certain that Vidocq did not write his own Memoirs. Nor can they truly be called biography. The last two volumes borrow wildly from a variety of sources, including a short story previously published by one of his ghost writers, while entire passages are blatantly lifted from The Police of London, a work of policy reform by Patrick Colquhoun, with French place names substituted for Colquhoun’s original English ones. Nonetheless, the Memoirs were brilliant PR, with Vidocq transformed from an old-style thief-taker to a sympathetic outlaw, and then to a new thing altogether – both in literature and in life – a detective, although what he described barely resembled what was later to be known as detection (and it would be another twenty years before the word itself was invented). For the moment, Vidocq merely intensified the spy system of the Revolution, keeping extensive records on known criminals and paying informants. Mostly in the Memoirs he disguises himself and hangs about in low haunts in order to overhear criminals plotting, or just bribes someone to tell him about a planned crime, which he then foils.

Vidocq’s Memoirs found a ready audience, and, more importantly for popular recognition, in 1829 they were adapted in two theatrical versions: at the Coburg Theatre, as Vidocq, the French Police Spy, by J.B. Buckstone; and, just down the road from the Coburg, at the Surrey, in Douglas Jerrold’s rival version, with only an exclamation point’s difference: Vidocq! the French Police Spy. That year the words ‘police spy’ had particular resonance, as Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel finally managed to finesse through Parliament the Act that created the Metropolitan Police, replacing the old parish watch system and creating what has been called the first professional police force.*

Three decades earlier, Colquhoun had written, ‘Police in this country may be considered as a new science, the properties of which consist not in the Judicial Powers which lead to Punishment, and which belong to the magistrates alone, but in the Prevention and Detection of crimes.’ This, today so routine, was groundbreaking, in a single sentence setting policing on an entirely new track: that it was a professional job; that it and the legal system were two different arenas; and that it should be preventative, acting prior to the commission of criminal acts. John Fielding, a remarkable magistrate, had, it is true, begun to move towards detection when he set up a ‘Register of Robberies, Informations, Examinations, Convictions, suspicious Book [sic], and Newgate Calendars’ – that is, not a register of crimes only, but of potential criminals and potential crime. But for the most part, prosecution after the commission of a crime was all that was expected. This had been fairly efficient in rural communities and towns, where populations were small and people all knew each other. In rapidly urbanizing areas, however, crime detection was more difficult, and the number of cases that came before the magistrates put them under enormous pressure.

Frequently the system functioned well: there were six House of Commons select committee reports in the decade leading up to 1822, and many parish watch schemes were commended as ‘exemplary and meritorious’. But others were unimaginably venal and corrupt. When Sir John Fielding was on the bench, Bow Street magistrates’ court had been a model of what might be achieved under the old methods. For example, a Runner named John Clarke, previously a silversmith, used his knowledge of metalworking to track down counterfeiters, testifying at nearly half of the Old Bailey coining trials between 1771 and 1798. When he gave evidence, the conviction rate was 82 per cent; when he was absent, it dropped to 40 per cent. But by the time William Mainwaring took over in 1781 as Chairman of both the Middlesex and the Westminster Sessions, corruption was endemic. Mainwaring persuaded the government to pay him a secret extra salary, while institutionalizing cronyism and nepotism.

The lack of success following the Marr murders ensured that changes were swiftly made at local level. The watchmen in Shadwell were relieved of their duty and replaced by two companies of eighteen men patrolling nightly, each equipped with a rattle, a lantern, a cutlass and a pistol. At Wapping, sixteen extra men were drafted in, and the Thames Police Office arranged for further street policing over Christmas. Several neighbouring parishes also drew up volunteer patrols to augment the watch. Even so, a letter to the Home Office on 28 December 1811 warned that ‘the frequency of the late horrible Outrages must induce a Belief that the wicked Part of the Community is becoming too strong for the law’. The Morning Post concurred: ‘Either respectable householders must determine to be their own guardians, or we must have a regularly enlisted armed police under the orders of proper officers.’ Many frightened citizens wrote to the Home Secretary with their own ideas, nearly all of which involved increasing the size and frequency of rewards: in effect buying improved detection from criminals and their cohorts. Many believed that these cohorts included the watch themselves, who seemed to spend far too much time with criminals. William Smith harrumphed that ‘it was extremely scandalous that the Police Officers should be upon such terms of intimacy with the most notorious offenders’.

To deal with the crisis of confidence, a parliamentary select committee was set up to study the question, and it reported in March 1812. The effects of this report still matter today, because it advocated taking crime prevention away from the local authorities, and putting a single centralized authority in overall control of policing throughout London. Robert Southey, who would be named Poet Laureate the following year, and was now as ardent an opponent of political reform as he had once been a promoter of Thomas Paine and the French Revolution, agreed: ‘I have very long felt the necessity of an improved police, and these dreadful events, I hope and trust, will lead to the establishment of one as vigilant as that of Paris used to be. The police laws cannot be too rigorous; and the usual objection that a rigorous police is inconsistent with English liberty might easily be shown to be absurd.’ True, there was a dissident voice in the Earl of Dudley, who said that he ‘would rather half a dozen people’s throats should be cut in Ratcliffe Highway every three or four years than to be subject to domiciliary visits, spies, and all the rest of Fouché’s contrivances’.* But then, Dudley’s socio-economic position made him safer than most.

Thomas de Quincey might at first appear to have taken the affair more lightly, as he mockingly reported on his neighbour, who after the murders ‘never rested until she had placed eighteen doors. each secured by ponderous bolts, and bars, and chains, between her own bedroom and any intruder of human build. To reach her, even in her drawing room, was like going … into a beleaguered fortress.’ This seemed at first simply a comic coda, but de Quincey’s contribution was greater than anyone at the time could have imagined, as the Ratcliffe Highway murders spurred him to one of literature’s greatest flights of fancy, in the satirical essays referred to collectively under the title On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts. In the first essay, de Quincey’s narrator introduces himself and his subject at a meeting of connoisseurs of murder: ‘GENTLEMEN, – I have had the honour to be appointed by your committee to the trying task of reading the Williams’ Lecture on Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts’ – a task, he goes on to explain, which is increasingly difficult, as excellence in the field raises the bar for more aesthetic murders: ‘People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads. a knife – a purse – and a dark lane. Mr. Williams has exalted the ideal of murder to all of us. he has carried his art to a point of colossal sublimity.’ De Quincey is making a serious point: in Macbeth, we are interested not in the victim, Duncan, but in the thoughts of the murderer, Macbeth, just as we are more interested in murderers than we are in their victims. De Quincey’s narrator suggests that murder is an art, that murder is theatre, and that Williams was an artist who had written a sensational play that hundreds of thousands wanted to see.

De Quincey then takes the story of the Marr and Williamson murders and himself turns them into art. The main figures are given psychological depth, and a motive is imagined. Most importantly, Williams is turned, as one literary critic observes, into ‘a sort of Miltonic, ruined God’, with a glamorized physical description to match his inward corruption of spirit. A sandy, undistinguished-looking man in life, in art Williams has a ‘bloodless, ghastly pallor’, and hair of ‘the most extraordinary and vivid colour … something between an orange and a lemon colour’. His clothes, too, undergo a metamorphosis. He no longer wears the rough dress of a sailor. Instead de Quincey imagines a dandified being, dressing for an evening’s slaughter in black silk stockings and pumps and with a long blue coat of ‘the very finest cloth. richly lined in silk’. The murderer is now more vampire than cash-strapped sailor, more great actor than street thug.

In reality, there were few of de Quincey’s type of murderer. Yet, as his imaginary lecturer knows, ‘the world in general. are very bloody-minded; and all they want in a murder is a copious effusion of blood’. How this desire was transformed over the nineteenth century, and how it, in turn, transformed that century, is my subject.

* Even a decade later, after the arrival of some gas lighting, the streets were still darker and more confusing than can be imagined today. In 1822 Daniel Forrester, a detective for the City of London, became involved in a street fracas. It was only when he got the man who rescued him under a street lamp that he realized it was his own brother. With streets as dark as that, it is not surprising that ‘One gas light is as good as two policemen’ was a common maxim.

* The stages of prosecution for felonies and serious crimes were as follows: fi rst, the accused appeared before a justice of the peace or a magistrate, where it was decided whether there was a suffi ciently strong case; if so, the prisoner was committed for trial; a bill of indictment was drawn up, setting out the charge; a Grand Jury then considered the written depositions of the witnesses and, if they found a ‘true bill’ that there was a case to answer, the prisoner was tried by a jury. For murder cases, the early hearings often coincided with the inquest on the body, which was held separately. For concision’s sake I have omitted the repetition of evidence from one stage to the next.

* Perceval would himself be murdered four months later, the only British Prime Minister ever to be assassinated, but for some reason the crime barely captured the imagination of the public, and will feature no further in this book. Similarly, I will not be discussing the seven attempts to assassinate Queen Victoria.

* Colquhoun and the River Police were among the first to use the word ‘police’ in English. There had been a London Police Bill in 1785, and the magistrate John Fielding used the word that same year, but it was not yet common. In 1814 the Irish police (Sir Robert Peel’s first attempt to form a centralized force) were called the ‘Peace Preservation Force’ and manned by ‘constables’ not ‘policemen’.

* Joseph Fouché (1759–1820) was Napoleon’s Minister for Police. He had been an ardent Jacobin in the early part of the French Revolution, eventually being dubbed the ‘Executioner of Lyons’, as he oversaw so many executions that the victims’ blood blocked the city’s gutters. Under Napoleon, he exerted an iron grip on state security, and the British considered – rightly – that his police force consisted almost entirely of spies and agents provocateurs, hence Dudley’s comment.

TWO Trial by Newspaper

‘A copious effusion of blood’ was something that John Thurtell certainly provided. His crime has been said to have founded newspaper fortunes, for his was the first ‘trial by newspaper’, his actions read and judged by people across the country long before he was brought to trial. That it should have been Thurtell who caught the imagination of the public in this way is extraordinary, for his was a sordid, brutal and remarkably unsuccessful crime. John Thurtell, failed cloth merchant, failed publican and failed gambler, was also a failed murderer.

On 28 October 1823, one Charles Nicholls, of Aldenham in Hertfordshire, arrived in Watford, anxious to notify the magistrates of ‘some singular circumstances pointing to foul play’. He had been passing through Gill’s Hill Lane (then countryside, now in the small town of Radlett) when he saw some road-menders combing the bushes. They told him that that morning they had met a stranger searching the verge. He explained that his gig had overturned the previous night, and he was trying to find his missing penknife and handkerchief. After he left, the road-menders continued his search, hoping that valuables might also have fallen from the gig. Instead they found a knife and a pistol, both of which had dried, caked, brownish deposits on them, looking suspiciously like blood; the pistol, furthermore, had hair and what might even be brains sticking to its butt. Charles Nicholls consequently hot-footed it to Watford.

One of the magistrates immediately went to Gill’s Hill – with no police, magistrates did their own investigation. He learned enough there to lead him to arrest a man named William Probert, who rented a cottage nearby. Two men, John Thurtell and Joseph Hunt, were reported to have spent the night at Probert’s cottage, but they had returned to London that morning. The next day, therefore, the magistrate sent for the Bow Street Runners.

The Runners had no formal status, and were not linked to the metropolitan police offices, which were under the aegis of the Home Office. The Bow Street magistrates were, for historical reasons, paid from a secret-service account, while the Runners were in turn Bow Street’s own, privately paid detective force. The Runners’ salary was small, 25s. a week plus 14s. expenses, their main income coming from hiring themselves out to other police offices or to private individuals across the country. Now two Runners were hired to locate the suspicious Thurtell and Hunt. After a brief visit to Gill’s Hill the senior Runner, George Ruthven, returned to London, where:

I found [Thurtell] at the Coach and Horses, Conduit Street. I said: John, my boy, I want you. Thurtell had been anticipating serious proceedings against him for setting his house on fire in the city [see p. 24] … It was highly probable that he supposed that I wanted him on that charge. My horse and chaise were at the door. He got in and I handcuffed him to one side of the rail of my trap … On the road nothing could be more chatty and free than the conversation on the part of Thurtell. If he did suspect where I was going to take him, he played an innocent part very well, and artfully pretended total ignorance. I drove up to the inn, where Probert and Hunt were in charge of the local constables. Let us have some brandy and water, George, said Thurtell. I went out of the room to order it. Give us a song said Thurtell, and Hunt, who was a beautiful singer, struck up ‘Mary, list awake’. I paused with the door in my hand and said to myself – ‘Is it possible that these men are murderers?’

The newspapers had no such doubts, even though no charges had yet been laid and there was as yet no body. One week after the crime took place, six days after the weapons were found in the bushes, two days after the arrest of Thurtell, the Morning Chronicle ran its first piece on the ‘Most Horrible Murder Near Watford’.

Thurtell and his friends had the disadvantage of poor reputations. Thurtell himself had been born into relative gentility: his father was a prosperous Norwich merchant, later an alderman and in 1828 mayor. Thurtell had been commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Marines in 1809, when he was fifteen or sixteen. Despite the French wars, he saw action only once, and in 1814 he retired on half-pay and returned to Norwich. His father set up him as a bombazine (woollen cloth) manufacturer, but Thurtell became enamoured of ‘the fancy’, the world of Regency prize-fighters, gamblers and their followers.

This was his first downward step. Prize-fighting was illegal, and fights were held in fields, for preference near county boundaries, so that in case of trouble the crowds could disperse across more than one jurisdiction. Thurtell became what in modern parlance would be called a fight promoter, or manager, although the role was then much more informal. The first fight that we know he was involved in was between Ned ‘Flatnose’ Painter, a Norwich fighter, and Tom Oliver, in July 1820. This meeting was later immortalized by George Borrow, in Lavengro in 1851 (‘Lavengro’ is Romany for ‘philologist’, supposedly the name given to Borrow himself by the Rom he befriended). Much of Lavengro is fictionalized, but the description of Thurtell is based on reality:

a man somewhat under thirty, and nearly six feet in height … he wore neither whiskers nor moustaches, and appeared not to delight in hair, that of his head, which was of light brown, being closely cropped. the eyes were grey, with an expression in which there was sternness blended with something approaching to feline; his complexion was exceedingly pale, relieved, however, by certain pockmarks, which here and there studded his countenance; his form was athletic, but lean; his arms long. You might have supposed him a bruiser; his dress was that of one … something was wanting, however, in his manner – the quietness of the professional man; he rather looked like one performing the part – well – very well – but still performing the part.

Borrow recounted how one day Thurtell and Ned Painter called on a local landowner, asking for the use of a small field in which to stage a fight. They were refused, the man explaining that, as a magistrate, he could not become involved. ‘Magistrate!’ says Thurtell, ‘then fare ye well, for a green-coated buffer and a Harmanbeck.’* The magistrate was wiser than he knew, as Thurtell had a reputation for being ‘on the cross’ – involved in match-fixing. When in September 1820 Jack Martin, ‘the Master of the Rolls’ (he was a baker), fought Jack Randall, ‘the Nonpareil’, the match was thought by many to have been a cross arranged by a gambler named William Weare to allow Thurtell to recoup some of the money Weare had won off him. Thurtell, ultimately, would be the death of Weare – and vice-versa.

Borrow, although obviously impressed by Thurtell, had no illusions about him: ‘The terrible Thurtell was present. grim and pale as usual, with his bruisers around. He it was, indeed, who got up the fight, as he had previously done twenty others; it being his frequent boast that he had first introduced bruising and bloodshed amidst rural scenes and transformed a quiet slumbering town into a den of Jews and metropolitan thieves.’

Thurtell by now had a thorough knowledge of metropolitan thieves and Jews. (All moneylenders were regarded as Jewish, whether they were or not.) He had failed as a cloth merchant in Norwich, after defrauding his creditors by claiming to have been robbed of the money he owed them. Few believed in these convenient thieves, and Thurtell was declared bankrupt in February 1821. Shifting his base of operations to London, where his reputation might not have preceded him, he set up as the landlord of the Black Boy, in Long Acre, but the pub became a byword for illegal gambling, and soon lost its licence. Thurtell moved from job to job, from money-making scheme to money-making scheme. At the Army and Navy pub he met Joseph Hunt, briefly its manager, a gambler who had already been to prison once; he met William Weare and his friends at yet another pub. Weare claimed to be a solicitor, and lived at Lyon’s Inn, formerly an Inn of Chancery and now lodgings frequented by legal professionals. In fact he had been a waiter, then a billiard-marker, and had finally joined a gang ‘who lived by blind hooky [a card game], hazard [dice], billiards, and the promotion of crooked fights’. He was a legendary figure in the gambling underworld, and it was reported that he always carried his entire savings, said to be £2,000, with him.

Thurtell’s brother Thomas was the landlord of the Cock Tavern, in the Haymarket, and there they became acquainted with Probert, a spirit merchant who helped them to raise money on dubious lines of credit. Thurtell was operating once more as a cloth merchant, but just as his credit ran out, by an amazing coincidence his warehouse, insured to the hilt, was destroyed by fire. The insurance company refused to pay, and in 1823 Thurtell sued. Despite witnesses testifying that he had earlier discussed arson with them; despite information that he had bought fabric on credit and resold it for less than he had paid; despite evidence that he had blocked up the single window that would have permitted the nightwatchman to see the flames as they started – despite all this, the jury found for Thurtell, with £1,900 damages. *The insurers appealed, withholding the insurance money, while the money from the damages went to Thurtell’s creditors. The Thurtell brothers’ financial situation continued parlous.They were by now reduced to selling off the drink from the pub they managed in order to eat, while they couldn’t leave the building in case the insurance company had them arrested for conspiracy to defraud; they would have been unable to post bail.

Weare, meanwhile, was doing splendidly, alternating between trips to the races and days spent in billiard saloons. Then one day he said he was off to Hertfordshire for the weekend to go shooting with Thurtell. There would be shooting, it is true, but it was not Weare who held the gun.

On 24 October, two men who very strongly resembled Thurtell and Hunt bought a pair of pistols from a pawnbroker in Marylebone. The same day, Hunt hired a gig and horse, and asked at the stable where he could buy a rope and sack; at a public house in Conduit Street, he was overheard to ask Probert if he wanted to be ‘in it’. In the late afternoon, Thurtell drove Weare down to Probert’s cottage at Gill’s Hill in the gig, leaving Probert to follow on with Hunt. Their horse was a grey with unusual markings: a white face and white socks. Probert dropped Hunt at an inn near Gill’s Hill, to wait for Thurtell as arranged, and drove on to his cottage on his own. As he neared home, he found Thurtell in the lane. Thurtell asked him where Hunt was, and grumbled – or boasted – that he had ‘done the business without his help’. Probert returned to the inn to collect Hunt, and on his return Hunt and Thurtell reproached each other for missing the appointment. It didn’t matter, said Thurtell off-handedly, he had killed Weare on his own: the pistol had misfired, so he had bludgeoned him to death, ‘turning [the pistol] through his brains’, and then slitting his throat.

Hunt poured all of this out at the magistrates’ hearing. When more than one suspect was arrested for a crime, only one could be given immunity from prosecution by turning king’s evidence. This frequently produced an unseemly scramble to be the first person to ‘peach’. Hunt’s ‘natural pusillanimity’ encouraged his pragmatism, and he revealed all. After the three men met up at the cottage, he said, they ate the pork chops Hunt had brought with him for supper. (At the trial, Probert’s servant was asked, ‘Was the supper postponed?’ ‘No,’ she replied innocently, ‘it was pork.’)* Telling Mrs Probert that they had to visit a neighbour after supper, they collected Weare’s body from where Thurtell had stashed it, took what valuables he had on him, and put the corpse in a sack. Back at the cottage, Thurtell presented Mrs Probert with a gold chain. Mrs Probert, greatly wondering, later watched from a window as Thurtell and Hunt, who said they would sleep in the sitting room, instead took a horse from the stable. When they returned, having dumped Weare’s body in a nearby pond, she overheard them dividing the money they had found on Weare’s body, which was a wretched £15, instead of the legendary £2,000. The next day Thurtell and Hunt took the gig back to London, together with some of Weare’s clothing. They returned the following day, Hunt bringing a newly purchased spade. Probert was anxious about the proximity of the body to his cottage, so soon Weare was on the move once more, this time to a pond near Elstree.

As soon as the authorities located the body, Thurtell was committed for trial, with the other two remanded as accessories. Things were not looking good for them – some of Weare’s belongings had been found in Hunt’s lodgings, and a shirt marked ‘W’ in the stable near Probert’s cottage. The gig and the unusual horse were identified at various pubs along the route between Gill’s Hill and London, as were its passengers. At the inquest Hunt claimed that he had no connection with Thurtell and Probert, that he had only been hired to sing (he was a modestly successful tavern performer; his more famous brother sang at Covent Garden). He agreed that he had bought a sack and rope before he left London, but said they were for the game that Probert and Weare planned to shoot. Probert too tried to claim that Thurtell acted alone, but the jury found that Weare had been murdered by Thurtell, while Probert ‘counselled, procured, incited, and abetted the said John Thurtell the said murder and felony to do and commit’. Thomas Thurtell meanwhile was arrested for conspiracy to defraud the County Fire Office.

In November, Probert’s wife, sister-in-law and brother were all arrested. Mrs Probert’s brother Thomas Noyes had played cards with the men after the murder, and she herself had received what was now identified as Weare’s watch-chain. Noyes and his sister were soon released, but Mrs Probert remained under arrest, while the authorities approached Probert to turn king’s evidence. Hunt had proved an unreliable witness, clearly terrified, happy to agree with anything anyone suggested. The main reason to use Probert, however, was that if he were indicted, Mrs Probert’s evidence of what had passed at the cottage could not be heard – a wife could not testify against her husband.

In the run-up to the trial the newspapers whipped themselves into a frenzy. At the end of the French wars, a 4d. tax had been added to the price of a newspaper, ensuring a hefty cover price – at the time of Thurtell’s trial, the Morning Chronicle, The Times, the Morning Herald and the Observer each cost 7d. Yet their prosperous, middle-class readers were avid for crime stories.On a random day in the month of Weare’s murder, the four pages of The Times consisted of two pages of advertisements, two columns of news, a few letters, some birth and death announcements; and the rest of the paper was entirely given over to police, trial and magistrates’ court reports. The Morning Chronicle similarly gave the majority of its editorial space to crime on a regular basis, continuing a long tradition of prurient upper-middle-class love of crime: the Gentleman’s Magazine had, between 1731 and 1818, reported on 1,172 murders – over one a month for nearly a century.