The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer

by Kate Summerscale

  After Inspector Gilbert’s evidence, Nattie was called to the stand. He seemed very anxious, and unprepared for his role as a witness. As a defendant, he would not have been called on to testify at all.

  Nattie answered some simple questions from Stephenson, giving his address and the names of the schools he had attended. His last day at Cave Road school, Nattie said, was ‘on the Friday before this was done’.

  ‘You say “before this was done”,’ said Stephenson. ‘Now I want you to tell us all you know about it.’ Nattie spoke a few indistinct words and then started to sob. He took out a handkerchief.

  Baggallay intervened, and began to question the boy more gently, taking him step by step through the events surrounding the murder.

  ‘You went to school last on Friday?’ asked the magistrate.

  ‘Yes,’ said Nattie.

  ‘That was the day your father went to sea?’

  ‘I could not tell.’

  Nattie’s father had left home on the Thursday and had spent the night on board the France before sailing for New York on Friday.

  ‘Which room did you sleep in?’ tried Baggallay.

  ‘The other room.’

  ‘Was that the room at the back?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which room did Robert sleep in?’

  ‘He slept with mother.’

  ‘In the front room?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Baggallay indicated the knife. ‘Did you know he bought that knife?’

  ‘The next day after he showed it me.’

  ‘Which day did he show it you?’

  ‘The next day after he bought it.’

  Nattie said that Robert had been cleaning knives when he showed him the dagger, saying, ‘I’ve got a little one here.’

  ‘And what did he tell you about it?’

  ‘He said, “This is the knife I’ve got and intend to do it with.”’ At these words, the spectators gasped and murmured. Coupled with the testimony of the Brechts, it seemed the starkest proof of premeditation.

  ‘Did he say what he was going to do?’ asked Baggallay.

  ‘He said he was going to keep it.’

  ‘Did he say what for?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘When did you first know your mother was dead?’

  ‘The day it was done.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘He came and told me.’

  ‘Where were you when he came and told you?’

  ‘In bed.’

  ‘In the back room?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What morning was that?’

  ‘It was Monday.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Between 4 and 5.’

  ‘Was it daylight?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you remember what he said when he told you that?’

  ‘He said, “I done it”, and I said, “You ain’t done it”.’

  ‘Why did you say, “You ain’t done it”? Had he said anything about it? Had you said anything about it?’

  ‘Yes I had, and said, “Are you going to do it?”’

  ‘To do what? Had you talked to him about it?’

  Nattie did not reply. He covered his face with his hands.

  ‘Did you talk to him before?’ asked Baggallay. ‘When did you talk to him about it?’ The magistrate and the boy were circling round the murder – or ‘it’, as both referred to it – Nattie evasively, Baggallay so as neither to lead nor distress the child.

  ‘I think it was the week before.’

  ‘Was that before he bought the knife?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  At this point Nattie began to cry again.

  ‘Now, what did you say to him?’ continued the magistrate. ‘Did you ask him to do it?’

  ‘Please, sir. I said, “Are you going to do it?”’

  Here Stephenson, the prosecutor, interjected: ‘Was he the first to speak about doing it, or were you?’

  Nattie continued to avoid the question. ‘He said he had bought a knife, and was going home to do it. It was not this knife here. It was one like what we use for dinner. He said, “There is a knife just by the Barking Road that will do it.”’ It seemed that Robert had bought two knives: an ordinary kitchen knife, which he had told Nattie about when they were both out of the house one day; and then the dagger-like knife from Mrs Brecht’s shop, which he showed his brother back at Cave Road.

  None of the lawyers pressed Nattie on whether it was he who had urged Robert to kill their mother on the weekend of her death.

  Baggallay asked: ‘When your brother came in to the room, as you say, early in the morning and told you, what did you do after that?’

  ‘He said, “Come and look if you don’t believe me.”’ Again gasps of horror ran round the courtroom.

  ‘Did you go and look?’

  ‘Yes; but I never went close to the bed. I went into the room and looked and heard a groan, and then I went back to bed again.’

  If Nattie had heard his mother groaning in her bed, Dr Kennedy had been wrong to tell the coroner that Emily Coombes’s death was instantaneous.

  ‘Did you go at all after that and look at your mother?’

  ‘About twice.’

  ‘How many days afterwards?’

  ‘I think it was on the Wednesday and Thursday.’

  ‘On that morning did you two boys go out?’

  ‘Yes; we went to Lord’s Cricket Ground.’

  ‘Had you any money?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where did you get it from?’

  ‘She had some in her dress.’

  ‘Who had?’

  ‘My mother.’

  ‘Did you take it?’

  ‘No; Robert got it out. I saw him take it. He brought the dress into my room and there took the money out.’ This was the dress that Emily had taken off the previous night, before going to bed in her underclothes.

  ‘Did you see the money box? Who broke that open?’

  ‘That was broke open a long time ago.’ Nattie did not specify that it was he and Robert who had smashed it open, before running away to Liverpool together a year or two earlier.

  ‘When did John Fox come to the house?’

  ‘He came on the Wednesday afternoon.’

  ‘Now, when you went upstairs on the Wednesday and Thursday did you go alone?’

  ‘No, my brother went up with me.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘John Fox went up to make the bed.’

  ‘Did he go into the front room?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was anything said between you and Fox about your mother?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he ask about your mother?’

  ‘He asked my brother where she had gone, and he said she had gone to Liverpool.’

  ‘Did he ask any more questions?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  Stephenson asked Nattie when the unpleasant smell in the front bedroom had first become apparent.

  ‘There was a bad smell in the house when I opened the door. That was going on for a long time before my aunt came, but Fox did not say anything about it.’

  Baggallay asked Nattie if he had seen Robert write the letters to his father and to the Evening News. Nattie said that he had.

  Sharman then submitted questions on Fox’s behalf. These were put to Nattie by Baggallay, since he had established a rapport with the boy. In reply, Nattie confirmed that the two boys went together to fetch Fox and that they did not tell him that their mother was dead.

  Nattie was dismissed, and Guy Stephenson said that this closed his case.

  Sharman addressed the magistrate. ‘I submit that there is no evidence to show that Fox knew of the terrible crime that had been committed,’ he said. ‘To be convicted, it would be necessary that he should be proved to have full knowledge of the crime; but there is not a tittle of evidence that he did. On the contrary, the little lad said that nothing was said about it, and that Fox wa
s told the mother had gone to Liverpool. He was fetched for the purpose of minding them, and there the matter seems to rest, with the exception of the pawning of the goods. This was done at the instance of Robert, who said his mother gave him permission to do so.’ Sharman added that two of the three articles that Fox pawned had belonged to Robert rather than his parents. Fox could not have believed that there was anything illicit about pledging these.

  Baggallay pointed out that the visits to the pawnbrokers were not the only indication that Fox had colluded with the boys: he had also taken the letter to Hewson asking for money on 13 July. Sharman replied that it was by no means clear that Fox was aware of the contents of the letter.

  For the Crown, Stephenson argued that though many of Sharman’s remarks were pertinent, it would be better to address them to a jury. Fox and Robert, he insisted, should both be tried.

  ‘Yes,’ said Baggallay, ‘under the circumstances I do not see how I can do other than commit both for trial.’ Sharman asked for bail for Fox, and Baggallay said he would accept two sureties in £100 each pending trial at the next sessions of the Central Criminal Court.

  Nattie left the court in the care of his mother’s family. Robert was taken back to Holloway gaol. He was laughing as he got into the cab.

  Over the weekend, the national press reported on the case. The Illustrated Police Budget remarked that Robert Coombes was the embodiment of the ‘New Boy’. Like the New Woman, the paper said, the New Boy is ‘a terror – partly created by the School Board. He is bossy and cheeky, he smokes, drinks, and as a fact goes in for other vices as soon as possible.’ In 1895 the phenomenon of the New Woman – an assertive firebrand, smoking cigarettes and riding bicycles in her ‘rational’ dress of knickerbockers and stockings – was being picked over and parodied in the press. Here was a child to match, even to surpass, the subversive woman: a working-class upstart with so little respect for his elders that he thought nothing of killing them.

  The Daily Chronicle reported that the French neurologist Désiré-Magloire Bourneville was taking an interest in the Coombes case. Dr Bourneville was head of psychiatry at the Bicêtre Asylum, near Paris, where he specialised in treating delinquent and mentally deficient adolescents. Bourneville held the view that both Coombes boys were responsible for the murder, and had been motivated by an atavistic impulse. His interpretation was based on the theories of the Italian scientist Cesare Lombroso, a believer in racial degeneration who argued that criminals and lunatics were throwbacks to a lower stage of evolution. Bourneville said that he would like to have data by which he could trace the hereditary characteristics that had led to Robert and Nattie’s crime: ‘germs of perversity, alcoholic mischief, or other more delicate imprints’.

  And yet, Bourneville admitted to reporters, the premeditation of the ‘Plaistow boy-murderers’, their calm levity after the killing and their cunning explanation of their mother’s absence did not indicate primitive mental development. This was a peculiarly puzzling case, he said, likely to baffle every modern group of criminologists.

  The Evening News did its best to describe Robert’s physiognomy in terms that conformed to the stigmata of degeneration identified by scientists such as Lombroso and Bourneville. ‘The boy is large-headed,’ noted that paper’s reporter, ‘his skull projecting at the back, his ears big and noticeably standing out. His forehead is straight, but low, and his nose and mouth protuberant, the chin receding, the cheekbones high, and the line from eye to mouth disproportionately long. His eyes are dark, deep-set, and shifty, and the bumps behind his ears highly developed.’ The characteristics listed by Lombroso as traits of atavism included a low, sloping forehead, large and prominent ears, deep-set eyes and an insensitivity to pity or pain. Yet in the newspaper illustrators’ images Robert did not resemble the pale, buckled urban criminal of the criminologists’ textbooks: he looked robust, alert, a prime specimen of a boy. Perhaps his twisted, atavistic self was concealed from view, as the wicked Mr Hyde was concealed within the upright Dr Jekyll in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella of 1886.

  A group of doctors based in Nancy, in the north-east of France, were also said to be following the case. Instead of ascribing mental disturbance to hereditary impairments, the Nancy school, led by Hippolyte Bernheim, believed that the mind could be warped by disturbing experiences and cured by hypnotic suggestion. When Sigmund Freud studied briefly under Bernheim at Nancy in 1889, he gained ‘the profoundest impression of the possibility that there could be powerful mental processes which nevertheless remained hidden from the consciousness of man’.

  Nattie was taken to temporary accommodation in East London by his mother’s relatives, who had travelled down by boat from Liverpool. The ‘motherly woman’ on whom he had leant in the courtroom was probably his mother’s older sister Mary Macy, who lived in Toxteth Park with her widowed mother, Tryphena. Mary was forty-three and had five children, the eldest of them a man of twenty-three and the youngest a boy of Nattie’s age. She was also guardian to the ten-year-old son of her other sister, Isabella, who had died in 1888 at the age of twenty-five. Nattie knew his Aunt Mary well, since the whole family had lived near her in Toxteth a few years earlier.

  The family gave a reporter from the East London Advertiser permission to interview Nattie. The boy told the journalist that his brother had been passionately fond of penny dreadfuls, and it was through reading one of these that the idea became fixed in his mind of going to India in search of ‘romance and riches’.

  Of the identifiable penny dreadfuls in Robert’s collection, only one had an Indian component: Cockney Bob’s Big Bluff; or, the Thugs Terror features a trio of Indians caught up in a New York detective adventure. The villain is the Rajah Jaipur, who possesses a man-eating tiger; his enemy is Ongo Phal, a snake-charmer with a lethal python; and the heroine of the story is the beautiful Rana, who is first seen sleeping on a couch, clad in ‘loose garments which fell about her exquisite figure in a manner that betrayed its perfect contour’. Ongo warns Rana: ‘White men come! Lose not a jiff! Get out big hurry!’ Yet Rana falls in love with a white man called Harold, and when the Rajah attacks her beloved she feels Harold’s pain as if it were her own, their shared suffering tinged with eroticism: his every groan ‘cut her to the heart, like the sharp thrusts of a keen knife wielded by a strong hand’.

  Nattie said that in June, Robert had pleaded with his mother to be allowed to go to India, but she refused to countenance the idea and insisted that he stay at the ironworks. It was this dispute, said Nattie, that first put the idea into Robert’s head of murdering her: Robert hoped that if he killed her while his father was at sea, he would be able to help himself to her jewellery and the money that had been left for their upkeep.

  Emily Coombes was at all times devoted to her sons, Nattie claimed, and in fact spoilt them with her kindness. In this interview, conducted under the supervision of his murdered mother’s family, Nattie portrayed Emily Coombes as loving and generous. He did not explain why he had colluded with Robert’s plan to kill her, and nor did he acknowledge the act that prompted the murder: the thrashing that she had given her younger son.

  7

  CHRONICLES OF DISORDER

  The inquest into Emily Coombes’s death reopened at the Liverpool Arms on Monday 29 July. Mellish and Gilbert again watched on behalf of the police. Nattie, who was due to testify, was brought in by one of his uncles. He sat stolidly through the questioning of the other witnesses.

  Much of the evidence repeated that which had been heard before Baggallay on Thursday, but Charles Carne Lewis called a few extra witnesses and adopted a different line of questioning. Despite the fact that the magistrates’ court had discharged Nattie, Lewis was particularly probing about his role in the crime.

  First, Lewis had a few further questions for Robert and Nattie’s aunt Emily. She looked very worn, according to the Leytonstone Express, when she came in to the court. In answer to the coroner, she testified that she had never seen anything in either of the boys
to indicate that they ‘did not know what they were about’.

  ‘They were rude boys,’ she said. ‘I thought them impertinent.’

  ‘To you?’ asked the coroner.

  ‘No, sir, to their mother.’ In fact, said Aunt Emily, she believed that her sister-in-law had been generally ‘too fond of the children and too weak with them’.

  ‘You mean you think the mother spoilt them, being so fond of them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So as a sort of natural return they were very rude to her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Her sister-in-law, she said, had been ‘very proud and fond of Robert’.

  One of the jurymen asked if it was within the scope of the inquiry to ask what kind of reading the lads indulged in.

  ‘The last book Robert had to read while his mother was alive was The Last Shot,’ said Emily.

  Detective Inspector Mellish said that the books found in the house would be produced.

  Joseph Horlock, the foreman of the jury, asked Emily whether Nattie had overheard her exchange with Robert on the Monday before their mother’s body was discovered.

  She said that he had: ‘When I asked Robert where his mother was, Nathaniel must have heard what he said in reply.’ This confirmed, if confirmation were needed, that Nattie was privy to his brother’s lies about their mother’s whereabouts.

  Asked about Nattie’s reactions on the day that the body was found, she said: ‘Directly I remarked, “Your mother is in the house”, Nathaniel made a dash and jumped out of the window.’

  A jury member asked: ‘He was sensible enough to know that something was the matter?’

  ‘Yes,’ Aunt Emily replied.

  Mary Jane Burrage then gave evidence for the first time. A ‘pale and sedate-looking person of middle age’, as the Sun described her, she told the court that she was an intimate friend of Robert and Nattie’s mother, whom she had known for three years. She had last visited her on the Saturday evening before her death. The Coombes brothers were ‘very intelligent but also very rude boys’, she said. ‘They knew well what they were about.’ Mrs Burrage confirmed that Emily Coombes had taken pride in Robert’s academic achievements. She said that she had been very kind to her sons in every way and had been exasperated by their behaviour.