Capital Crimes: London Mysteries

by Martin Edwards

  The inspector at Temple station confirmed Miss Jones’s story as to her being put into the carriage.

  The ticket porter at Temple station swore positively that no one whatever got out of the train. He had watched the young lady helped into the first-class carriage by the inspector, and there was not a single person on the platform when the train went out, except the inspector. Nobody could possibly have got up the stairs while he was watching. He had snapped the ingress gate as the lady passed through, and had not opened the egress one.

  Dr Mortimer stated that he had examined the body, and was of the opinion that death had taken place not more than fifteen minutes, certainly not more than half an hour, before his examination. Cause of death was a bullet through the heart. It had entered the body level and straight, passed through the heart, causing instant death, and was found inside the ribs on the right side of the body. Bullet produced. It was of an unusually conical shape, and by impact with the ribs had been slightly flattened. In its natural shape it would be sharper, almost pointed. There were no signs of singeing or burning on deceased’s clothing. The bullet made a clean cut through coat and vest, and did its work. If, as he understood, deceased was sitting in the corner of the carriage facing slightly towards the corner which Miss Jones occupied, the shot must have been fired from the seat exactly opposite where deceased sat.

  ‘Or through the window?’ queried the coroner.

  ‘Or through the window,’ granted the doctor. ‘The exact spot from which the shot was fired would depend upon the angle at which deceased was sitting, but I understood the window was found closed.’

  ‘Could the wound have been self-inflicted?’

  ‘It could, of course, but not without singeing the clothing.’

  ‘Could deceased have shot himself, thrown the revolver out of the window, and raised the window?’

  ‘Absolutely impossible; death was instantaneous.’

  Miss Jones, recalled, stated that the window was up when she entered the carriage. She was quite certain of that. It was a close, muggy night, and she felt half-suffocated. The window nearest her was jammed, and she could not let it down. She had looked across at the other, and thought of trying to open it. Then she saw the cigarette smoking on the floor, and then she saw the blood, and then she remembered screaming.

  Detective-Sergeant Doane, of Scotland Yard, stated that the case had been placed in his hands; that he had taken possession of the carriage within a few minutes of the discovery of the body. It had been examined most minutely by himself and a colleague, both inside and out. Beyond the cigarette, trampled flat, probably in the removal of the body, and a few drops of blood on the floor, nothing whatever had been found. There was no weapon, no sign of a struggle. The contents of deceased’s pockets, including a valuable watch and chain, had not been touched. He had questioned the passengers in the next compartments, but no one had heard a shot, or any sound whatever, except the screams of Miss Jones. Further stated that if Miss Jones was correct in stating that the cigarette was still burning on the floor when she entered, and he had no reason to doubt it, he judged that the deed was committed in the tunnel between Mansion House and Blackfriars, and he arrived at it thus. A cigarette of that brand would burn on the floor for five minutes; the train took one and a half minutes to travel from Temple to Charing Cross, half a minute’s stoppage at Temple; two minutes from Blackfriars to Temple, half a minute’s stoppage at Blackfriars took them into the tunnel between Mansion House and Blackfriars, and there the shot must have been fired. That tunnel had been searched inch by inch, so had the others, but nothing whatever had been found. He had his own ideas on the subject, but declined at present to make them public. Deceased’s ticket was from Mansion House to Sloane Square.

  The jury returned a verdict of wilful murder against some person or persons unknown; and so one more was added to the long list of undiscovered crimes of the Metropolis.

  (From the Link, 12 November 1894)

  another murder on the underground

  the Link man on the spot, as usual

  At 9.21 exactly, last night, as the weary Link man, having finished his appointed tasks, was patiently travelling in an Underground train to his humble abode at Chelsea, a piece of great good fortune befell him. Great good fortune to one man generally means corresponding bad fortune to some other man, and so it was in this case. Without desiring to appear over-presumptuous, it does seem providential, that is, to the readers of the Link, that the Link man was right on the spot, and is therefore able to give an eye-witness’s account of the very strange occurrence which took place at St James’s Park station on the Underground railway last night.

  Our contemporaries have published more or less garbled versions of the matter. They have done their best. The Link, however, was the only paper actually represented, and able, therefore, to give an absolutely exact account of what happened.

  The Link man entered the train at Blackfriars, travelling third-class, as usual. He always travels third—not, as you might imagine, from necessity, but from choice. He thereby sees and feels, and, in every sense of the word, comes so much more in contact with his fellows, than is possible in the cold, refined, varnish-and-saddlebag atmosphere of the first-class. After standing patiently past three stations, the Link man had just managed to gently insinuate his person into the sixth place on a seat intended for five, and was jocularly remarking to his scowling neighbours, upon portions of whom he was sitting, that the tighter you sat the less you joggled, when a series of piercing screams from the next carriage forward rent the darkness of the tunnel, and heated all the Link man’s professional instincts to boiling point. He sprang to the door. Something was happening—something untoward and out of the common. Such screams—off the stage—were an outrage, or implied one.

  His first intention was to climb along the footboard till he arrived at the screams. But thoughts of Mrs Link-man and all the little Link men and women deterred him, and he decided not to risk his precious life, but to be first on the scene, all the same.

  The screams had ceased. The silence seemed even more pregnant. While the screams continued something was happening. With their cessation, it—whatever it was—had happened. As the train slowed up at St James’s Park, the Link man dashed forward to the next carriage—the rearmost first-class—and this is what he saw on opening the door—a lady lying apparently lifeless in the corner seat nearest the platform, and on the floor face downwards, the body of a man.

  A crowd rushed to the door almost as soon as the Link man, but his were the first eyes that witnessed the scene. The station inspector came up, and was for ordering the Link man away, but, upon the latter disclosing his identity, became the courteous official the Link man has always found him, except upon that one unfortunate occasion when he (the inspector) found him (the Link man) riding first with a third-class ticket, and only let him off imprisonment for life with a reprimand, which still tingles in the Link man’s ears, on the Link man’s proving to him by ocular demonstration that every third-class carriage was carrying thirty per cent more humanity than it had any right to do.

  The guard came up, too, and ex officio, the Link man was privileged to share the labours and cogitations of these officials.

  By virtue of her sex, the lady claimed their first attention. She was in a dead faint, and was carefully carried through a double line of curious faces by the Link man and the guard to one of the station seats.

  The Link man left the guard in charge, and hurried back to the carriage.

  The inspector was stooping over the prostrate man, and as the Link man stepped in, he looked up with scared face, and said, ‘It’s another murder!’

  ‘Good God!’ said the Link man, involuntarily, for this was getting exciting. Then he saw blood on the inspector’s hands.

  ‘Better block the line behind, and wire to Scotland Yard, hadn’t you?’ he suggested.

  ‘It blocks itself,
’ said the inspector; ‘but we’ll make doubly sure. Stop here in charge, will you, and I’ll wire Scotland Yard at same time.’ And he went off at a run, leaving the Link man in full charge.

  Notebook and pencil came out of their own accord, with the following results: ‘First-class carriage No. 32. London and North-Western train, St James’s Park; time 9.25 p.m. Body dressed in dark grey overcoat with velvet collar—dark trousers—black diagonal coat and vest—patent leather shoes—Lincoln and Bennet hat, bruised from a fall. Face, so far as visible, dark and pale—age about forty-five—four-coil snake ring, with ruby and diamond in head, on third finger of left hand. In vest, exactly over heart, small, clean-cut hole, no singeing or burning, no smell of powder—no signs of struggle—window furthest from platform closed. Note—Exactly a week, to the minute almost, since discovery of the murder at Charing Cross last week. Is this accident or horrible intention?’

  Link man acknowledges to creepy feeling. Door opens. Inspector returns, and a few minutes later, Scotland Yard, in the person of quiet, stern-faced Detective-Sergeant Doane, who has the previous case in hand, arrives with a colleague. They examine carriage minutely, inside and out, rear-side and off-side, under and over. They say little, but make many notes.

  Carriage is locked up, and train sent on. Link man notices that most carriages are about half as full as when train came in, as though many had conceived sudden distaste for underground travel—that no single travellers are to be seen—general mistrustful gregariousness observable. Link man feels himself that sooner than travel in a carriage alone, or with only one other person, he would stop on the platform all night, and sleep on Smith’s bookstall.

  Body is carried to ambulance. Lady, now reviving, is placed in cab, and all drive off to Scotland Yard.

  The unfortunate victim of this second outrage has since been identified as George Villars, commercial traveller, residing at West Kensington. The lady is Mrs Corbett, manageress of the ABC shop in Albert Street, Westminster.

  Her account is simply that she entered the train at Westminster, and had barely got seated when the gentleman opposite lurched forward in his seat, presumably with the shaking of the carriage, and then fell prone on the floor. She saw blood on the floor, and screamed, and then fainted.

  What may be the meaning of this exact repetition of the murder at Charing Cross exactly a week ago it is impossible to say. The time, the manner, the general conditions, are as nearly as possible identical.

  Are both murders the act of the same hand; or is Number Two but one more proof of the epidemic nature of abnormal crimes—the result, in fact, of the action of Crime Number One on some weak intellect, with a morbid craving for notoriety?

  One thing is certain: travel on the Underground is less attractive than of yore, and the homely ’bus is rising in public estimation.

  (From the Daily Telephone, 19 November 1894)

  a third murder on the underground

  The appalling discovery last night at Ealing Broadway station, on the District Railway, places beyond possibility of doubt the fact that a cold-blooded murderer is at large in our midst, and that travellers on that at all times depressing line are completely at his mercy. The police, we are willing to believe, are doing their best in the matter, but so far their efforts have apparently been fruitless. Every Tuesday night for the last three weeks, at, as near as can be told, exactly the same time to the minute, the mysterious death-dealer has chosen his victim, fired his fatal shot, and vanished. Whatever his motive and whatever his method, he has succeeded in instilling such a sense of dread into the public mind that the District Railway is beginning to be shunned by all persons of nervous temperament.

  This curious state of things recalls to mind a similar series of crimes perpetrated on the Ceinture Railway, in Paris, about seven years ago. There, too, the victims were smitten down by an undiscoverable hand, and it was only when the seventh had fallen that the slaughter stopped. If it had not, the traffic on that line would have ceased, for the excitement was indescribable, and travellers shunned the Ceinture Railway as they would a pesthouse.

  Much the same feeling is growing in the minds of travellers by the District Railway, and especially so on Tuesday nights, which is the time fixed by the mysterious one for his horrible work. Last Tuesday night the trains ran nearly empty. Numbers of people, so curious is the hankering of the morbid mind after sensation, gathered in the stations most likely to afford the chance of a thrill. The platforms at Charing Cross, Westminster, St James’s Park and Victoria were crowded with sensation-seekers, who had taken tickets which they had no intentions of using, but simply with the idea of being on the spot in case anything happened. And a very curious study those platforms were.

  Throngs of people, waiting silently, in a damp fog, peering into carriage after carriage as the almost empty trains rolled slowly, like processions of funeral cars, in and out of the stations. In one carriage a party of young roughs had ensconced themselves, and endeavoured to make things lively by chaffing and jeering the silent crowds on the platforms as they passed through. They met with no encouragement, however, and had things all their own way. We wonder how those lively youths feel now when they know that, beyond a doubt, the mysterious murderer looked in on them, and could, had he so chosen, have launched his deadly bullet into their midst. But, as usual, his fatal choice fell upon a solitary wayfarer occupying a corner seat in a carriage by himself, and within three compartments of one occupied by the rowdy gang referred to.

  Many of the crowd on the stations remarked on the temerity of the occupant of that corner seat. He might well sit so quiet. The fatal bullet was in his heart before he reached Victoria, at all events. But he journeyed peacefully on until he reached Ealing Broadway station, the terminus of the line. There, one of the principal duties of the porters is to arouse all the passengers who have succumbed to the monotony of the journey from the City and there John Small, the Ealing porter, tried in vain to arouse Carl Groeb, the occupant of the corner seat in the rear compartment of one of the first-class carriages, and found him dead—murdered, in the same way, and, beyond all doubt, by the same hand which struck down Conrad Grosheim, at, or about, 9.15 on the evening of Tuesday, the fourth inst., at Charing Cross, and which struck down George Villars, at 9.15 on the evening of Tuesday, the eleventh inst., at St James’s Park.

  The crowds at the stations up the line had dispersed with a sigh of disappointment, or let us take a charitable view, and say of relief. But the tragedy was there all the same, and the victim had passed beneath their eyes, though the public had to wait till Wednesday morning to get its thrill.

  It is a terrible fact, but one that has to be faced that, in the greatest city in the world, in this year of grace 1894, such an appalling series of crimes can be perpetrated with impunity.

  The police seem powerless. We give them credit for doing their utmost, but, up to now, nothing, so far as they let it be known, has resulted from their efforts.

  One thing is certain, if the criminal cannot be brought to justice the directors of the District Railway can close up their line. It would pay them to run the electric light through every tunnel, and to line the route and sprinkle the carriages with detectives, in the style of an Imperial progress in Russia. The matter is really too gruesome for a jest, but Punch certainly hit the case off admirably in Bernard Partidge’s clever sketch of the young City man attracting all the attentions of all the beauties in the drawing-room by the simple assertion that he had travelled from town by the District Railway, in a first-class carriage, all by himself, while the season’s lions scowl at him from a distance, and twirl their moustaches, and growl in their neglected corners.

  While, in another portion of the same journal, Mr Anstey’s ‘Voces Populi’, describing the scene at Victoria station on Tuesday night, while the crowds waited for what they feared, and made simple bets on the basis of murder or no murder, and more complicated ones as to the age and n
ationality of the expected victim, the station where the discovery would be made, and so on, is immensely clever, but grim in the extreme. It proves the identity of one of the crowd at all events, and it will afford matter for much wondering comment on the part of readers of this year’s Punch twenty years hence.

  To return to the facts which confront us, however. Murder, grim, cold, calculating, glides unchecked in our midst. No man’s life is safe. You yourself, reading this, may be the next victim—that is, if you are so unwise as to trust yourself alone in a carriage on the District Railway. And this in London, ad 1894! What a satire on our boasted civilisation!

  The official report of this latest crime is, with the necessary alterations of names, places, and dates, a mere duplication of the previous ones.

  Carl Groeb took ticket at Mansion House for Victoria on the evening of Tuesday, the twenty-fifth inst., at 9.20. Before he reached Victoria he was dead—shot through the heart, in identically the same manner as the previous victims, and not a trace of the murderer is discoverable.

  It is beyond belief, and yet it is horrible fact.

  (From the Daily Telephone, 23 November 1894)

  More light has been thrown on the dark corners of the Underground railway during the last few days than at any period of its existence, and yet the mystery remains unsolved. Travellers between 9 and 10.30 p.m. have been few and far between. Indeed, between those hours the service has been almost suspended, not more than one train in ten being run, and that running practically empty. But such hardy voyagers as have ventured, at risk of their lives, to run the passage from the City to Earl’s Court, have travelled through a torchlight procession. Every tunnel has been filled with men with flare-lights, and the grotesque effects of the continuous blaze and the weird gigantic shadows are things to be remembered for a lifetime.