The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer

by Kate Summerscale

  In reply to Grantham’s questions about Robert, Dr Walker noted that the violence applied to Robert’s skull when he was born would have exerted pressure on his brain.

  ‘There is a distinct scar on his right temple,’ Walker said, ‘and on a very careful examination I noticed also a faint scar in front of his left ear. Those scars might have been caused by instruments used at the time of birth. The brain is always compressed more or less when instruments are used, and it would occasionally affect the brain of a lad. I believe children have suffered from fits afterwards.’

  ‘I have noticed that the pupils of his eyes are at times unequal,’ the doctor continued. ‘The variability of the pupils showed that the mischief is not in the eye itself but is probably due to cerebral irritation.’

  Walker told the court what Robert had said about the voices in his head, and about his mother throwing knives at Nattie and threatening to kill him. He reported that Robert had said that he had ‘an irresistible impulse’ to kill his mother.

  Grantham asked if those had been Robert’s exact words.

  ‘I took down these words,’ said Walker.

  Walker said that his conversation with Robert the previous Tuesday – when the boy had shown excitement about the trial, then distress about his cats and mandolin – was indicative of cerebral irritation.

  ‘I believe your opinion is also based on some letters written by him?’ said Grantham.

  ‘Yes,’ said Walker. ‘I have had a very extraordinary letter handed to me from him. The letter is inconsistent with the action of a sane person. It was written on Saturday last.’ The Clerk of Arraigns read out Robert’s letter to the Reverend Francis Shaw, in which he expressed his desire to die and gave instructions for the disposal of his imaginary fortune.

  The letter carried two signatures, not only Robert’s but also that of Charlie Sharman. Apparently Robert’s father had hired Sharman to conduct his sons’ defence. The solicitor may have been instrumental in publicising Robert’s letter to the curate, since the document – and especially its threat of suicide – shored up the defence claim that the boy was insane. Equally, Dr Walker may have come across the letter in the course of his duties, since all the prisoners’ correspondence in Holloway was vetted. Either way, Sharman’s signature authenticated the document.

  ‘Does that letter strengthen your opinion as to the boy’s mental condition?’ Grantham asked Walker.

  ‘Yes,’ said the doctor. He explained that he believed that Robert had been suffering from ‘homicidal mania’. ‘There are two kinds of homicidal mania,’ said Walker. ‘Sometimes the crime is committed on the impulse of the moment; sometimes with great deliberation and cunning.’

  Grantham remarked: ‘The reading of pernicious literature would have a bad effect on such a mind.’

  Justice Kennedy intervened: ‘It would have a bad effect upon the mind of any boy I should think.’

  ‘But it would be worse for a boy suffering from mental affections?’ asked Grantham.

  ‘Yes,’ said Walker. ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Homicidal mania’ was a condition identified by the French psychiatrist Jean-Etienne Esquirol earlier in the century. A homicidal monomaniac, said Esquirol, became obsessed by the desire to kill, and after a murder achieved a sort of peace. ‘The act accomplished, it seems that the attack is over,’ he wrote, ‘and some homicidal monomaniacs seem to be relieved of a state of agitation and anguish, which was exceedingly painful to them. They are composed, and free from regret, remorse or fear. They contemplate their victim with indifference, and some even experience and manifest a kind of satisfaction. The greater part, far from flying, remain near the dead body.’ A maniac of this kind felt so lightened that he did not need to flee, his pain having been cast out and destroyed in the act of killing.

  Esquirol specified that children could be prey to homicidal mania. Evidence of delusion was usually required to support the diagnosis, though some doctors argued that the murder itself could be the sole marker of insanity. All such syndromes were defined only by their symptoms; medics tended to believe that their origin was physiological – that they were diseases of the brain rather than the mind – and that they were therefore innate and incurable.

  Under cross-examination by Charles Gill, Dr Walker acknowledged that in some of his conversations with Robert the boy had appeared sane. ‘I should say the conversations were held in a lucid interval. He appeared to talk to me quite rationally and showed no insanity when I first examined him – that was the day after he was received into prison. He answered my questions intelligently. He appears to be a boy of more than average intelligence. He is well educated, and able to take advantage of the opportunities given him at school.’

  So where, asked Gill, was the proof of delusion?

  ‘I only find trace of delusion from the boy’s own statement,’ said Walker. ‘Apart from the murder, I saw no delusion.’

  Gill questioned him about whether Robert had really used the words ‘irresistible impulse’ in their conversation. The idea of irresistible impulse was sometimes invoked by defence counsel as an alternative to the traditional ‘knowing right from wrong’ test of insanity. It was an improbably technical phrase for a boy to use. Gill was implying that Walker had put words into Robert’s mouth; or that, if Robert had indeed used the term, it might have been at the suggestion of his lawyer.

  ‘“Irresistible impulse” is what I have written,’ said Walker. ‘I would not swear those were the very words he used, but he said something to that effect, either “impulse” or “irresistible impulse”.’

  Charles Gill also expressed scepticism about Robert’s ‘excitability’, inquiring of Walker whether fits of passion could really be taken as evidence of insanity.

  ‘A boy may be very passionate and may be vicious without being insane,’ agreed Walker. ‘Some boys do give way to extraordinary violent fits of passion, especially if they are interfered with and not allowed to have their own way; but I do not speak of those fits of passion, but attacks of mental excitement, as the father described it to me. That is very different.’ He had himself witnessed the boy in a state of mental excitement, he said, and Robert’s father had told him that he experienced these attacks every two or three months. Walker was making a distinction between a temper tantrum and an episode of confused thinking.

  Gill asked whether Robert was in the throes of such an attack when he purchased the knife from Mrs Brecht’s shop.

  ‘He might have been under the influence of delusion when he bought the knife,’ said Walker. ‘I do not know that he was. He might have bought it while suffering from an attack of mania.’

  ‘Do you seriously mean,’ asked Gill, ‘that he would go to the shop, select the knife, bargain for it and buy it while under the influence of mania?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Walker. ‘Under the influence of homicidal mania these crimes are done with great deliberation.’

  Gill asked if Robert had described the murder to him.

  ‘The first time he told me he had no recollection of stabbing her,’ said Walker, ‘but remembered hitting her on the head with a truncheon. On another occasion he told me that he had stabbed her.’ This was the first time that the truncheon had been cited as a murder weapon. Perhaps this, rather than the knife or the pillow, had been the means by which Robert had finally dispatched his mother after Nattie heard her groan. The police doctor had not mentioned finding a head injury during the post mortem, but Mary Jane Burrage had referred to seeing a horrible wound on her friend’s temple.

  Grantham intervened to ask Walker if he could explain why Robert had claimed that he had hit her with a truncheon.

  ‘His different accounts of the crime showed loss of memory,’ said Walker.

  ‘Are you of opinion that he was not of sound mind?’ asked Grantham.

  The judge interrupted before Walker could reply. ‘That is a matter on which the jury must form their own conclusion,’ he said. Walker had frequently been permitted to give his
opinion on a defendant’s insanity in the Old Bailey courts, but Kennedy, implementing the most rigorous interpretation of the law, would not allow it.

  Gill asked Walker a last question about Robert: was it compatible with insanity that the boy took himself off to Lord’s on the day that he murdered his mother?

  ‘I could not conceive anyone going to Lord’s cricket ground and acting as the lad did after committing such a crime if he were sane,’ returned Walker.

  Walker’s reply went to the heart of the puzzle of the murder. Robert’s coolness before and after the killing could be read as evidence of culpability; and yet his very indifference might be the strongest sign that he was mad.

  Charles Gill asked Dr Walker for his assessment of John Fox.

  The doctor said that Fox had ‘a badly shaped head and a highly arched palate’. ‘He is slow in understanding what is said to him,’ he added, ‘and does not know common things you would expect an ordinary man to know. He is slow of apprehension. He has the peculiar hesitation in speech often noticed in weak minds.’

  Grantham’s next witness was John Joseph Griffin, medical attendant to the Coombes family since 1893. Dr Griffin was an Irish-born bachelor, aged forty, who lived and worked in a large terraced house in the Barking Road. He was the author of the sick note for Emily Coombes that Robert had altered in July.

  Griffin testified that Emily Coombes was a ‘hysterical’ woman, ‘very emotional, and subject at times to fits of crying and laughing. She used to laugh and cry with the least exciting cause. She was generally of a weak and nervous disposition.’ He agreed that ‘the nervous disposition and temperament of the mother sometimes affects the children’, but stopped short of saying that Robert had inherited her weakness.

  Griffin told the court how he had treated Robert for the ‘disordered nervous system’ and ‘attacks of mental excitement due to cerebral irritation’ that his predecessor, Dr Coward, had diagnosed. Robert’s father usually brought him to a consultation, Griffin said, though the boy sometimes came with his mother.

  ‘When the attacks were on him,’ said Griffin, ‘he had an irresistible impulse to run away without reason. I advised the father to take him to sea for a trip in consequence of those attacks.’ By echoing Walker’s use of the phrase ‘irresistible impulse’, Griffin supported the defence case that Robert had moments in which he could not control his actions. Yet the supposed symptom – the desire to run away ‘without reason’ – looked less like madness than misery. Griffin may even have perceived that Robert’s problems were related to his mother: after all, he prescribed a journey that would enable him to escape her influence.

  Justice Kennedy said that it seemed obvious that Robert was not suffering from mania.

  ‘I never saw him in any condition of mania,’ acknowledged Griffin. ‘What I know is from what the father stated to me. He said his boy used to get up in the morning and complain of severe headache, and was restless, fidgety and excitable, and twitching in his limbs. His father used to put him to bed. I gave him bromide of potassium to calm him.’ Bromide of potassium was a sedative and depressant used to treat disorders of the brain. This was the medication that Amelia England had fetched for Robert when he became agitated. Though recommended in the Dictionary of Psychological Medicine as a safe drug, prolonged use could cause a condition known as ‘bromism’: the symptoms included stupor, paranoid delusions, pupillary dilation, insomnia, restlessness and psychosis.

  Griffin said that he had seen Robert in Newgate the previous day, and that his condition seemed to have developed into mania. ‘He was in a condition of great mental excitement yesterday,’ said the doctor, ‘and not responsible for what he was doing.’

  The last witness for the defence was John Cossington, a West Ham attendance officer of thirty-six who lived in the Barking Road. Attendance officers were employed by the local authorities to ensure that children went to school. In the spring, the ‘Punishment Men’, as they were known, walked the streets of their district, compiling a register of all school-age children in houses rated at £28 or less. If a child did not turn up to at least seven of the ten school sessions a week, the officer would call at his or her house and issue a warning to the parents. If this was ignored, the parents were summoned to a magistrates’ court and, unless able to justify the child’s absence, could be fined five shillings.

  ‘I had reason to make inquiries in October 1893 as to the boy’s non-attendance at school,’ Cossington told the court. ‘I went to the mother.’ Emily Coombes told him that Robert was ‘sick through excitement’. ‘When I did see the boy,’ said Cossington, ‘he was in a very sullen mood, and would not answer me.’

  Emily succeeded in convincing Cossington of Robert’s unhappiness and his need to be moved, even to an already oversubscribed neighbouring institution. At her urging, Cossington said, he had paid a visit to Dr Griffin, who lived across the road from him. ‘In consequence of what I saw, read and heard from the doctor, and by request of the mother, that I would get him another school, I obtained a special order from the school committee for his removal from one school to another.’

  Cossington did not allude to the nature of Robert’s difficulties at Grange Road school. Nor did the defence press him on this, being keen to emphasise Robert’s mental instability rather than the fact that he might have been mistreated by a teacher or bullied by other boys.

  When cross-examined by Gill as to why Robert had left Grange Road, Cossington said only: ‘The boy did not want to go back to the same school. He had stayed away from that school.’

  Grantham did not call any further witnesses. As the defence was pleading insanity, any evidence of Robert’s good character – such as the Reverend Shaw might have offered – would have done the boy no favours.

  In his address to the jury Grantham said that this was one of the saddest cases ever to come before a court. He asked them to accept that Robert Coombes was insane, reminding them of the absence of motive in the case and the fact that the boy had not tried to escape. He began to expound the law on insanity but the judge stopped him, saying that the jury must take the law from him alone. Robert’s counsel sat down.

  Frederick Sherwood next urged the jury to acquit Fox. He insisted that the evidence showed that Fox knew nothing of the murder. The smell in the house, he said, ‘only became acute on the opening of the door and disturbance of the corpse, and there is no reason for supposing that it was sufficiently present in the house as to induce Fox, a man of dull intellect, much given to smoking and used from his dock calling to unpleasant smells, to make inquiry as to its origin or investigate its cause’. Even if the jury believed that Fox knew of the murder, said Sherwood, ‘he has not done a single act with the view of defeating the ends of justice or concealing the crime’.

  Sherwood further submitted that if Robert Coombes were found insane, Fox must be acquitted: he contended that it was impossible in law to find Fox guilty of being accessory to an insane act. This was the same argument that Kennedy had dismissed when it was proposed by Gill at the outset of the trial. But now the judge said that he agreed. Bizarrely, he even complimented Sherwood upon his discovery of the point. The argument was in fact wrong, as several legal journals subsequently explained. Since 1882 the law had stipulated that the insane could be found guilty of committing crimes, even if they were deemed not to have been culpable, and others could therefore be found guilty of abetting such crimes.

  Gill summed up for the Crown, submitting that Robert’s insanity had not been proven. On the contrary, he said, the boy’s actions showed him to be a lad of exceptional capacity. He conceded that Dr Walker’s evidence was important, but, as the doctor had himself said, his diagnosis of insanity was based largely on the absence of motive for the murder.

  The Star remarked that Gill adopted a ‘studiously mild’ tone in his final speech. He was respectful of the defence’s medical evidence, and seemed to leave open the possibility that Robert was mad. ‘Had Robert Coombes been a full-grown man,’ sa
id Lloyd’s Weekly, ‘the counsel for the prosecution would have resisted the theory of insanity, and possibly with success; but with so young a prisoner there seemed to be a desire all round to take the most lenient view.’

  This leniency did not extend to Justice Kennedy. Though his role was supposed to be neutral, when he made his summing-up at 4.40 p.m. he set out the case against Robert far more strongly than Gill had done. The jury should not infer insanity, said Kennedy, because someone who had led an apparently blameless life suddenly committed a callous act. Nor should they jump to the conclusion that Robert was insane just because it was difficult to believe that a sane lad of thirteen could perpetrate such an atrocious crime. He had planned the death of his mother with skill and had displayed ‘the most masterly sagacity’ afterwards. The letter to Francis Shaw might be a sham, suggested the judge, written to simulate madness. Though Dr Walker had said that homicidal mania was often accompanied by cunning, Kennedy observed, ‘even Dr Walker can not have known before such a case as this where the cunning and the madness were mixed up with so much pleasure and enjoyment of life’. He described Nattie, who was sitting in the courtroom surrounded by female relatives and neighbours, as ‘a little slip of a boy wholly under the thumb of his elder brother’.

  The one relevant question, Kennedy told the jury, was whether Robert knew that what he was doing was wrong. Repeating Sherwood’s incorrect assertion, he added that if they did find Robert insane, they must also acquit Fox.