London Murders: In the Footsteps of the Capital's Killers

INTRODUCTION

People love a good murder. Graphically violent television dramas about killers have replaced public executions as popular entertainment, and the increasingly sophisticated science of forensics has gone a long way towards usurping traditional, old-fashioned sleuthing and inspired guesswork. But there is nothing new about our fascination with murderers – in the past racehorses, greyhounds and even a ship have been named after the most notorious – nor is there any sign that this is diminishing.

From the Ripper to Ronnie and Reggie Kray, we can always be relied upon to find the specific details shocking, and the fact that the victim is a complete stranger rarely does much to reduce our feelings of revulsion, fear or horror. There is also a definite, if macabre, thrill to be had from following the slow-motion unravelling of discovery, detection, confession and conviction – and a genuine frisson of excitement on passing an address made famous by its grisly past.

Murders happen all the time, of course, and only a minority of them have that special attribute needed to command our attention. When that happens, the media is skilled at playing its part in whipping up public interest and crime reporters have a long history of rearranging the facts where necessary in order to construct a more compelling narrative. As long ago as 1847, for example, several newspapers famously ran breathless accounts of the dignified courtroom composure of murderess Mary Ann Milner – despite her having been found hanging in her cell the previous day.

Even without this kind of encouragement, however, the urge to glimpse a killer in the flesh and see justice done has always been strong, and around this same time a German visitor planning a trip to London was told in all seriousness, ‘You wish to know where the people’s merry-makings are held? Go to Newgate on a hanging day … there you will find shouting, and joking, and junketting, from early dawn until the hangman has made his appearance and performed his office.’

On such occasions, great stands would be erected for spectators, and landlords of taverns fortunate enough to occupy sites overlooking the scaffold would charge a premium for their beer and brandy – well in excess of what Londoners would have stood for on an ordinary weekday – and spectators of both sexes, every age and literally all classes would have thronged the streets in the hope of witnessing an actual execution.

Today, we like to think we are more civilised than this, yet the attraction – enjoyment might not be too strong a word for it – has never really gone away. The decision to abandon public hangings was deeply unpopular; so too was the abolition of capital punishment in the 1960s, and lifelike waxworks of serial killers and other murderers have always numbered among Madame Tussaud’s most popular attractions.

Indeed, even now, many decades after their conviction and imprisonment or execution, London’s worst murderers find themselves as celebrated as any of the city’s more talented or public-spirited inhabitants. Names such as Crippen, Christie and Ellis are woven into the fabric of London’s cultural history alongside those of Whittington, Wren and Disraeli. Similarly, while most visitors to the capital still seek out the likes of St Paul’s, the Tower and Westminster Abbey, many others pore over books and maps looking to pinpoint such infamous addresses as 10 Rillington Place, 39 Hilldrop Crescent or Whitechapel’s notorious Blind Beggar.

1

EAST OF THE CITY

JOHN WILLIAMS

29 The Highway, E1 (1811)

Cannon Street Road/Cable Street crossroads, E1 (1811)

Cinnamon Street, E1 (1811)

The Ratcliffe Highway Murders

For years, convicted murderers were buried without ceremony beneath the prisons at which they died, and a total of 119 bodies – including those of Crippen and Christie – are believed to lie beneath the gardens at Pentonville, dating back to when London’s own Death Row moved there from Newgate in 1902. Occasionally, particular convicts are singled out for special treatment, although very rarely with the gruesome glee that seems to have attended the occasion in 1811 when the remains of John Williams were consigned to an especially bleak spot in East London.

Williams was widely believed to be the perpetrator of a series of bloody killings which came to be called the Ratcliffe Highway Murders. The first was committed at what is now No. 29 The Highway. The building itself is long gone, although a wealth of old warehouses and wharf buildings in the area still give some indication of how this area adjacent to the docks might have looked in the early nineteenth century.

In 1811, No. 29 was a hosiery business, the owner of which, 24-year-old Timothy Marr, lived on the premises with his wife and child. On the evening of 7 December, he asked the servant girl Margaret to go out for some oysters and on her return, she found the family dead. Together with an apprentice from the shop, all of them had had their throats cut and their heads staved in using a bloody ship’s hammer, or maul, which was recovered at the scene.

To avoid panic in the tight knot of the surrounding streets, the authorities quickly rustled up the offer of a £500 reward for the murderer’s capture – this at a time when the Governor of the Bank of England received just £400 annually. It was generous, but to no avail.

Exactly two weeks later at the King’s Arms Tavern, in what is now Glamis Road, the landlord John Williamson was similarly done to death, together with his wife, Elizabeth, and Bridget Harrington, who helped behind the bar. On this occasion, there was a witness – a lodger who managed to escape from a back bedroom by climbing down a sheet he had knotted to the window.

With the public clamouring for some affirmative action, the authorities were soon able to announce a number of arrests, though one of them – a seaman called John Williams, who was apprehended on 21 December in Cinnamon Street – aroused no particular interest. He had been seen drinking in the King’s Arms, and after being interviewed by magistrates at Shadwell, he was remanded in custody at Cold Bath Fields Prison in Clerkenwell. (The site is now occupied by the giant Mount Pleasant Sorting Office.)

The evidence against Williams was, to say the least, extremely slim, and 200 years later his guilt is by no means certain. He was found with a knife and was a fairly disreputable character, but neither of these would have marked him out from many residents in this part of London at this time in its history. He was also nothing like the description of the large man seen fleeing the scene by the Williamsons’ lodger, being of medium height, slight build and altogether rather less substantial.

The authorities were nevertheless content that they had caught their man, and were thus shocked to hear that Williams had been found hanging in his cell when he was due to answer some more questions on 27 December. Suicide was at this time an illegal act, and by taking matters into his own hands Williams had also denied the courts and the public the opportunity to see justice being done.

In the absence of a usefully cathartic trial, it was therefore decided to parade his corpse through Wapping and Shadwell, in part to reassure the local population that it had no more to fear, but also in some way to avenge the dead. A procession duly set off on New Year’s Eve, pausing for a few minutes at each crime scene and gradually attracting a crowd of more than 10,000 people who wished to enjoy the gruesome spectacle.

It had also been decided to give Williams a traditional suicide’s burial; that is, one outside consecrated ground with a stake driven through the heart and the body buried without ceremony at a crossroads. (This was done in order to prevent the spirit finding its way home to haunt any former associates.) The chosen spot for the interment was at the junction of Cannon Street Road and Cable Street – immediately adjacent, as it happens, to where, just a few weeks previously, the Marr family had been buried in the shadow of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s great church of St George’s in the East.

HENRY WAINWRIGHT

Vine Court, E1 (1875)

40 Tredegar Square, E1 (1875)

‘The Clearest and Most Convincing Evidence’

Living two lives simultaneously and at different addresses, 36-year-old Henry Wainwright was a successful commercial brush manufacturer, a respectable teetotal churchwarden living in tasteful comfort at No. 40 Tredegar Square and, by all accounts, a good father to his family. Unfortunately, had they but known it, Wainwright was also a serial philanderer who had fathered another two little girls who were living a mile and a half away and whose mother knew him as Percy King. He was not technically a bigamist, however, because although ‘Mrs King’ liked to be known as such, the two merely cohabited and she was in reality a hatmaker’s assistant called Harriet Lane.

On 11 September 1875, Miss Lane was pronounced dead. The precise nature of her injuries, though, was obscured for the time being by the fact that she had been cut up into ten sections and bundled into a couple of hastily wrapped parcels. A year earlier, these had been buried beneath what is now Vine Court, but at the time was the yard of Wainwright’s warehouse at No. 215 Whitechapel Road. Now renumbered No. 130, his business was conveniently located approximately halfway between his two otherwise unconnected lives, wives and families.

Wainwright’s extraordinary double life, and indeed Harriet’s murder, only came to light when a four-wheeled cab, or ‘growler’, called to carry the two parcels away from the warehouse the following year. Wainwright was having to move on, as financial troubles had forced him to surrender the lease on the premises. When the cabman arrived at the warehouse, one of the men working there was told to carry two foul-smelling parcels out to him. Poking around in one of them and finding what was clearly a human hand, the employee nevertheless did as he was told while deciding to follow the cab at a safe distance once his employer had climbed aboard.

Keeping out of sight, he followed the cab over London Bridge and all the way to an address near the Hop Exchange in Borough: only then was he able to alert a police constable to what he had found. Riding in the cab it was inevitable that the bearded, respectable and comfortably bourgeoise Wainwright should come under immediate suspicion, but his arrest must have proved profoundly shocking to his legitimate family and to those who moved in the same social, church and commercial circles.

It was soon revealed that the same money worries that had forced Wainwright’s move from the warehouse (without which the victim’s fate might still be unknown) had put pressure on his relationship with Harriet. Some months previously, he had moved her and the two girls into cheaper accommodation and reduced her allowance. Harriet took great exception to this and, being something of a drinker, when she voiced her objections rather too forcefully, ‘Percy’ had decided enough was enough.

After preparing a shallow grave behind the warehouse and procuring a gun, he had persuaded Harriet to visit the premises. On arrival she had been shot in the head, had her throat slit for good measure, and had been buried in the pit beneath a layer of disinfecting chloride of lime. With his brother’s help, Wainwright had then concocted a story to cover her sudden disappearance, making it look as though Harriet was planning a trip to Paris with a purely fictional ‘Mr Frieake’.

Incredibly, once in court, Wainwright had insisted that he had no idea what the parcels contained, and for a cash sum from a complete stranger he had simply agreed to store them for a while and later transport them across the river. The gun was shown to be his, however, and he had been caught in possession of the remains of his former lover. There was even a suggestion that he had attempted to bribe the policeman in Southwark rather than hand over the parcels. After being found guilty of the murder of Harriet Louisa Lane on what the judge called ‘the clearest and most convincing evidence’, Henry Wainwright was sentenced to be hanged on 21 December at Newgate Gaol.

The decision less than a decade earlier to stop executing criminals in public – the last in London had been that of the Fenian Michael Barrett on 26 May 1868 – might have led Wainwright to expect a dignified and private end. This was not to be, however, and the following day The Times was one of many newsapers to describe in detail the instrument of execution – ‘peculiar in construction and appearance; it being roofed over, lighted with lamps at each end, and having a deep pit, over which a chain and noose were suspended’ – as well as listing by name and rank the scores of city dignitaries who had shouldered their way into the yard at Newgate to see justice done by invitation of the Lord Mayor himself. Wainwright’s execution had become one of the sights of London.

JACK THE RIPPER

Durward Street, E1 (1888)

Mitre Square, EC3 (1888)

Gunthorpe Street, E1 (1888)

Jack’s Tracks Not so Easy to Follow

By far the most documented, yet still the most mysterious of capital killers, Jack was active for only a few months and his tally of five was awful but relatively modest. Yet no other serial killer has exercised quite such a hold on the British imagination nor garnered quite so many theories as to who was responsible, and how, precisely, he, she or they got away with it.

An internet search for the Ripper throws up literally millions of pages. New books, films, theories and even computer games on the subject are launched with metronomic regularity, and, nearly half a century after the last body was found, a successful wigmaker in Wardour Street was still advertising his business by claiming to have unwittingly provided Jack’s disguise all those years before.

Jack the Ripper walks take place every week of the year in the relevant quarter of East London. These guided walks are incredibly popular, despite the fact that while we know who the victims were – Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly – and may even have memorised the minutiae of their pitiful injuries, all the locations but one have disappeared in the process