Murder of the Black Museum 1875-1975: The Dark Secrets Behind a Hundred Years of the Most Notorious Crimes in England

by Honeycombe, Gordon

  The ten-month-old baby daughter of a barmaid probably arrived first: the mother, Elizabeth Goulding, paid Mrs Dyer £10. A nine-year-old boy, Willie Thornton, was next, followed by another baby and a girl aged four.

  In January 1896, the Palmers moved to London, renting two rooms in Willesden for seven shillings a week and taking with them an infant called Harold, another of Mrs Dyer’s charges. She herself moved from Piggott’s Road to her third address in Caversham, Kensington Road, and using yet another alias, Mrs Thomas, carried on as before. The children she now acquired were Ellen Oliver, aged ten; Helena Fry, who was fifteen months old; and two illegitimate babies of servant girls.

  On 30 March 1896, bargemen on the River Thames at Reading fished the body of a baby girl out of the water. She had been wrapped in a brown paper parcel and weighted with a brick. The infant (who was Helena Fry) had been strangled with a tape. On the brown paper was inscribed ‘Mrs Thomas, Piggott’s Road, Lower Caversham.’ The next day, in Cheltenham, Mrs Dyer was paid £10 by Evelina Marmon to take care of her illegitimate four-month-old daughter, Doris.

  Miss Marmon, aged 25, a farmer’s daughter and now a barmaid, who had given birth to a baby girl in her lodgings in January 1986, had seen a newspaper advertisement that said: ‘Married couple with no family would adopt healthy child, nice country home. Terms £10.’ Evelina wrote to the woman whose name appeared at the foot of the ad, Mrs Harding, who replied: ‘I should be glad to have a dear little baby girl. We are plain homely people … I don’t want a child for money’s sake, but for company at home and comfort … I have no child of my own. A child with me will have a good home and a mother’s love.’ Evelina Marmon wanted to make the payment in weekly instalments, but Mrs Harding insisted on the £10 being paid in full.

  The day after Doris Marmon was handed over to Mrs Dyer in Cheltenham, she and her daughter Polly were at Paddington Station in London, where they collected a baby boy, Harry Simmons, from a Mrs Sargeant, whose maid had given birth to him a year before and then disappeared. Mrs Sargeant was relieved no doubt to dispose of the baby to the kindly elderly woman whose advertisement in the Weekly Dispatch had caught her eye: ‘Couple having no child would like the care of one or would adopt one. Terms £10.’

  The following day, 2 April, the two babies, Doris and Harry, who had both been strangled with tape, were dumped in the Thames in a weighted carpet bag.

  Two days later, the police at last identified Mrs Thomas of Piggott’s Road as Mrs Dyer of Kensington Road. She was arrested on 4 April. At Reading police station she tried unsuccessfully to kill herself with a pair of scissors and then by choking herself with a bootlace. Her daughter Polly and her son-in-law, Arthur Palmer, were also arrested. ‘What’s Arthur here for?’ asked Mrs Dyer. ‘He’s done nothing.’ The two babies found in her house in Kensington Road were returned to their mothers and Willie Thornton and Ellen Oliver were eventually found other homes. A four-year-old boy who arrived after the arrests was sent away by Granny Smith.

  The River Thames was dragged for other bodies, and the decomposed corpse of a baby boy was recovered from the river on 8 April, as was that of another boy two days later. Neither was ever identified. Also on 10 April, the carpet bag containing Doris Marmon and Harry Simmons was retrieved from the river bed. Miss Goulding’s baby was dredged up on 23 April and another unidentified baby boy was discovered a week later. The total had now reached seven.

  Meanwhile in Reading Prison Mrs Dyer tried to ease her mind and save her daughter and son-in-law by writing a letter to the Superintendent of Police. ‘I feel my days are numbered,’ she wrote. ‘But I do feel it is an awful thing, drawing innocent people into trouble. I do know I shall have to answer before my Maker in Heaven for the awful crimes I have committed, but as God Almighty is my Judge in Heaven as on Earth, neither my daughter, Mary Ann Palmer, nor her husband, Arthur Ernest Palmer, I do most solemnly swear that neither of them had anything at all to do with it. They never knew I contemplated doing such a wicked thing until too late.’

  The matron at Reading Prison, Ellen Gibbs, said to Mrs Dyer: ‘By a letter like this, you plead guilty to everything.’ ‘I wish to,’ remarked the prisoner. ‘They cannot charge me with anything worse than I have done … Let it go.’ She never revealed how many children she had killed, merely saying later: ‘You’ll know all mine by the tape round their necks.’

  The charges against Palmer and his wife were never proved, and Polly Palmer became the chief witness for the prosecution, giving evidence against her mother at the magistrate’s hearing on 2 May and later at the Old Bailey trial. Mrs Palmer’s story was that on 31 March her mother turned up in Willesden carrying a ham and a carpet bag and holding a baby, Doris Marmon, temporarily ‘for a neighbour’. The baby must have been strangled, said Mrs Palmer, while she was out fetching some coal, for when she returned the baby had disappeared and Mrs Dyer was shoving the carpet bag under the sofa. Harry Simmons, she said, must have been killed (again in Willesden) the following night, before she, her mother and her husband went out to a music hall. At any rate, he had disappeared by the following morning – Mrs Dyer had slept on a sofa in the living room – although there was an odd parcel under the sofa beside the carpet bag. ‘What will the neighbours think if they saw you come in with a baby and go away without it?’ Polly asked, allegedly. To which her mother replied, allegedly: ‘You can very well think of some excuse.’ Later that day the Palmers accompanied Mrs Dyer to Paddington Station. While Mrs Dyer went to buy some cakes to eat on the Reading train, Palmer held the now bulging carpet bag.

  Mrs Amelia Dyer was charged with the murder of baby Doris Marmon and tried at the Old Bailey on 21 and 22 March 1896 before Mr Justice Hawkins. The trial began on the afternoon of the day on which Mr Justice Hawkins had sentenced to death Albert Milsom and Henry Fowler.

  The Crown’s case at Mrs Dyer’s trial was put by Mr AT Lawrence and Mr Horace Avory. Mr Kapadia, who defended her, accepted that she was guilty but tried to prove that she was insane. Dr Logan of Gloucester Asylum said that in 1894 she had been violent and had suffered from delusions: she heard voices and said birds talked to her. Dr Forbes Winslow, who saw her twice in Holloway Prison, said she was suffering from delusional insanity, depression and melancholia. He did not believe she was shamming insanity. Two other doctors appearing for the prosecution said that her insanity was feigned. One of them, Dr Scott, the medical officer of Holloway, who had seen her daily, said he had discovered nothing in her that was inconsistent with her being a sane person, beyond her own statements. The jury agreed, taking a mere five minutes to find her guilty, and not insane.

  Mrs Dyer, aged fifty-seven, a short, squat woman with thin white hair scraped into a bun behind her head, was hanged by James Billington at Newgate Prison on 10 June 1896. Before she died she made a long statement or confession, written in five exercise books, explaining some of her actions and thoroughly exonerating her daughter and son-in-law. When urged by the chaplain to confess, she indicated the exercise books and asked: ‘Isn’t this enough?’ Her statement ended: ‘What was done I did do myself. My only wonder is I did not murder all in the house when I have had these awful temptations on me. Poor girl [Polly], it seems such a dreadful thing to think she should suffer all this through me. I hope and trust you will believe what I say, for it is perfectly correct, and I know she herself will speak the truth, and what she says I feel sure you can believe.’

  The Reading baby farmer evidently had some feelings for her own and only surviving child.

  10

  RICHARD A PRINCE

  THE MURDER OF WILLIAM TERRISS, 1897

  Murderers often tend to play a part, to assume other names, achievements and emotions, to invent autobiographical details, to pose, pretend and lie. They would make, one imagines, good actors. On the other hand, only one actor in the UK is believed to have committed a murder. He was Richard Prince, whose ambitions were scorned, his affections spurned, and his whole existence mocked. He was more than neurotic and
just a little mad, and his victim was an actor like, but much better than, himself.

  His real name was Richard Millar Archer, though he also called himself William Archer and William Archer Flint. Short, dark, with a thin black moustache waxed at both ends, he was Scottish, having been born in 1858 on a farm on the Baldoran Estate just outside Dundee. His father was a ploughman. His mother, Margaret Archer, later attributed the fact that Richard was ‘soft in the head’ to the summer day when she left him as a baby out in a harvest field in the sun. He was educated in Dundee, and as a lad was employed in a minor capacity at the Dundee Theatre for two years. In 1875, when Richard was seventeen, the Archers came temporarily to London, and the fantasies of the stage-struck youth must have been set alight by the glamorous world of the gas-lit West End theatres, in which the idols of the stage – before films and television eclipsed their glory – declaimed and emoted to much effect and immense adulation. But before long, the Archers were back in bleak Dundee.

  Little is known of Prince’s movements over the next twelve years. Presumably, like many young aspiring actors, he was more out of work than in, finding employment where and however he could. His native accent may have limited his chances on the London stage, although he probably modified and disguised it as best he could. What he was unable to alter was an increasingly theatrical manner, a slight squint and a villainous appearance that meant he was invariably cast as a ‘heavy’. However, in 1887 he was in London, employed as a ‘super’ or extra at the Adelphi Theatre in the Strand, appearing in The Union Jack. He stayed with the play on its provincial tour, and is also said to have toured in Alone in London and The Harbour Lights (in 1889). This was a revival of the play written by George R Sims and Henry Pettit that in December 1885 had established the Adelphi as the home of popular melodrama. It had also established the romantic association of its two stars, Jessie Millward and William Terriss, which was also played out in private: she was his mistress.

  William Terriss (real name William Charles James Lewin) was one of the most popular actors at that time on the English stage. Popularly known as Breezy Bill, he was born in London on 20 February 1847, educated privately and also at Christ’s Hospital, and took up various occupations before he became a full-time actor. As a youth he joined the merchant navy for a few weeks (he liked the uniform), embarking as a cadet on a sailing ship at Gravesend and disembarking at Plymouth, having discovered a sailor’s life was not for him. He also tried his hand at silver-mining and horse-breeding in America and at sheep-farming in Australia and the Falkland Islands, where his daughter, Ellaline Terriss, a future Gaiety Girl and wife of Seymour Hicks, was born. Her mother was Isabel Lewis, who on holiday in Margate had been captivated by the athletic figure of young William Lewin sporting in the sea. They were married in 1868 when he was twenty-one. Before long the family left the Falklands and returned to England, and Terriss, who had dabbled in amateur theatricals, obtained his first notable professional engagement. In 1871, he was cast as Robin Hood in a Drury Lane extravaganza and appeared in Rebecca, which was based on Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. The Observer critic, Clement Scott, noted of his performance: ‘It is really pleasant to find anyone determined to speak as ordinary people speak on the boards of the theatre, whereon strange tones and emphases prevail.’

  Terriss’s face, figure and voice being his fortune, he soon became successful, establishing his reputation as an actor with Henry Irving’s company at the Lyceum Theatre. Aged thirty-one when he joined the company, Terriss gave several acclaimed performances: as a brother in The Corsican Brothers; as Squire Thornhill in Olivia, with Ellen Terry as Olivia and Irving as Dr Primrose; as Nemours in Louis XI; as the King in Henry VIII; and as Henry II, with Irving in the title role of Tennyson’s play, Becket, which was given a royal command performance in Windsor Castle in 1893 before Queen Victoria. In 1895, Irving was knighted, the first actor to be so honoured.

  Several years before this, in October 1882, Jessie Millward, then aged twenty-one, had appeared as Hero in the Lyceum’s production of Much Ado about Nothing; Terriss was Claudio. It was three years after this, in December 1885, that they made a name for themselves as a romantic team in The Harbour Lights, in which Terriss played Lieutenant David Kingsley and Jessie Millward the lovely Lina. One critic said of Terriss’s performance: ‘He does not act, he is the frank, handsome sailor whose joyous laugh, bright eye and sturdy ringing voice bring life and hope to the darkest hour. The fine presence, boyish, handsome face and free, fearless gestures suit the role to perfection.’

  From then on, Terriss and Jessie Millward often appeared in the same productions, touring Britain and America. In London in the 1890s he used to dally with her in her flat off Oxford Circus, while his wife (they were both Catholics) kept up appearances and the family home in Bedford Park, West London.

  It was in September 1894 that Terriss and Jessie Millward – he called her ‘Sis’ and she referred to him as ‘my comrade’ – embarked on the series of popular successes at the Adelphi that affirmed their national reputation, appearing in plays such as The Fatal Card, The Girl I Left Behind Me, One of the Best, Boys Together, and Black-eyed Susan. He invariably played gallant sailors or soldiers. In One of the Best (1895) he was court-martialled and falsely convicted of espionage. As the drums rolled, the marks of his rank, his collar and cuffs, were torn from his uniform, his face the while depicting the agony he suffered. But when his medals were seized he cried out: ‘Stay! You may take my name, my honour, my life! But you cannot take my Victoria Cross!’

  Capitalising on his manly mien and personality, Breezy Bill, now approaching fifty and wearing pince-nez in private, strode nightly about the stage, declaring his love for Queen, country and innocent womanhood, foiling the foe at every turn. The audience loved him. Admired and acclaimed, living up to his motto Carpe Diem, blessed with a wife, three children and a loving mistress, with good business sense and membership of the better London clubs, he seemed unassailably successful, without a care or enemy in the world.

  The year 1897 marked Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Terriss had turned fifty, though was said to be younger, and Jessie Millward was thirty-six. Richard Prince, who gave his age as thirty-two, was now thirty-nine and in a dangerous, desperate plight. Nothing is known about how Prince became acquainted with Terriss. It may have been during the run of The Union Jack in 1888. Perhaps Terriss gave the younger actor a walk-on job; it was not unusual for struggling actors to be encouraged or patronised by an established star. Perhaps there was some ground for the uncharitable rumours that were later circulated about some sexual association. What is known is that during the run of The Harbour Lights, Terriss caused Prince to be sacked after the swarthy Scot had made an offensive remark about him. Later on Terriss, out of generosity it is said, sent, or caused to be sent, small sums of money to Prince when he was out of work via the Actors’ Benevolent Fund, and he apparently used his influence to get the younger man on the provincial tours in which Prince occasionally appeared.

  But the managers of these touring companies found him increasingly unemployable. One of them, Ralph Croydon, a theatre manager in Newcastle, hired Prince towards the end of October 1897, at 25s a week, but soon sacked him, because in rehearsal he was ‘absolutely incapable … absurdly dramatic’ and unable to remember the lines of quite a small part. ‘Ah!’ exclaimed Prince on hearing of his dismissal, ‘I have two enemies now!’ He informed the manager that the other was Terriss – ‘the dirty dog’. ‘You’re mad!’ said Mr Croydon. ‘Yes!’ said Prince. ‘And the world will ring with my madness!’ Another manager received a letter from Prince that said: ‘You hell-hound! You Judas! You have got me out of my engagement by blackmailing me to get on yourself! You cur! I am not a woman, you hound! How dare you blackmail a Highlander!’

  Abject but useless apologies would follow such outbursts, which were also heard in theatre dressing rooms, where Prince was known as Mad Archer. He wearied company members with diatribes about the management and other
actors, who he claimed had impeded or prevented his advancement. Prince was just as rabid with his pen, sending effusive messages of congratulation and condolence to politicians and royal persons whenever the occasion, birthday or bereavement, arose. He also wrote poems and plays, one of which, Countess Otto, he sent to an up-and-coming young actor, Fred Terry. It was written in longhand in exercise books. Terry made no immediate acknowledgement or return of the script and soon received the following postcard – ‘Sir, please return play Countess Otto at once. If you are hard up for money will send it. Terriss, the Pope, and Scotland Yard. I will answer in a week – Richard A Prince.’

  Despite the consolation of Sunday services in Westminster Abbey, which he often attended, Prince’s professional and private life must have been miserable. When ‘resting’, he was employed in an ironworks in Dundee, where the workmen ‘used to torment him because he was soft’. He was ‘very strange in his ways’, according to a foreman, ‘and very jealous’. Once in 1895, when his wretchedness or sense of drama got the better of him, Prince jumped in the Regent’s Canal. His vanity probably kept him from killing himself. ‘I am a member of the handsomest family in Scotland!’ he is said to have exclaimed.

  But in November 1897, after being sacked by the Newcastle manager, his poverty was extreme. Existing on handouts from the Actors’ Benevolent Fund, which had been prompted by a letter from Terriss, Prince lived in a bed-sit near Victoria Station, in Buckingham Palace Road. The rent was 4s a week, which a sympathetic landlady, Mrs Darby, reduced to 3s. He had no luggage or possessions; his clothes, apart from those he wore, had been pawned. He fed on bread and milk. On 9 December he received what was to be his last payment (10s) from the Benevolent Fund.