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

by Honeycombe, Gordon

  On Monday, 13 December, he tried to get a complimentary seat for a show at the Vaudeville Theatre by showing his card at the box office. It read: ‘Richard Archer Prince, Adelphi Theatre’. Asked if he was employed there, he replied: ‘No, I’m not. But I was. I suppose I should have written “Late Adelphi Theatre”. But other people don’t, so why should I?’ No ticket was given him, and he became so abusive that he had to be removed from the theatre foyer. He said he would go to the Adelphi a few yards away and tell Mr Gatti how he had been treated. Mr Gatti owned both the Vaudeville and the Adelphi. Prince failed to see him, but at the stage door of the Adelphi he inquired as to when Mr Terriss arrived at the theatre and when he left.

  That night or the next, Miss Millward heard raised voices in Terriss’s dressing room; Prince was there. She asked Terriss later if anything was the matter; he was dismissive and said: ‘This man’s becoming a nuisance.’ On Wednesday, she again visited his dressing room, haunted by a feeling of impending ill – she had had a dreadful dream in which Terriss, dying, fell into her arms in some barren room. She asked for some remembrance of him. Amused, he gave her his watch and chain, with her picture in the lid. Another member of the Adelphi company who had a prophetic dream of death was Terriss’s understudy, Mr Lane. Meanwhile the show went on. It was called Secret Service. Written by William Gillette, it was a four-act drama set during the American Civil War.

  In another part of London, Mrs Darby asked her poor Scottish lodger when he would be able to pay his overdue rent. He told her she would be paid when he received a certain letter; he would then be ‘one way or the other’. Mrs Darby asked him what he meant. Prince replied: ‘That is best known to God and man.’

  That certain letter arrived on the morning of Thursday, 16 December. It informed him that the Benevolent Fund had terminated his grant. Penniless, starving and poorly clad under his slouch hat and cloak, he set off on foot towards the West End for the last time. In the Strand he happened to meet his step-sister and asked her for some money. She said she would rather see him dead in the gutter than give him anything. If she had, he said later, he would never have bent his steps towards the Adelphi Theatre. He waited outside its warmth and glamour with a crazy resolve to kill.

  Will Terriss spent the early part of that Thursday afternoon playing poker with Fred Terry in the Green Room Club. At four o’clock, he and a friend, Harry Greaves, a surveyor, dined in Jessie Millward’s flat in Princes Street, Hanover Square. The two men settled down to play chess after their meal, and at about seven o’clock Jessie Millward left them to finish their game while she went on ahead. ‘I must get down to the theatre,’ she said. ‘I hate being rushed.’ They followed soon afterwards, riding in a hansom cab to Maiden Lane, the narrow street that runs behind the Adelphi and the Vaudeville. They got out at the street-corner and walked the short distance towards the rear of the Adelphi. Its stage door was then in Bull Inn Court.

  There was another entrance, a pass door, which also served as the royal box entrance. This was in Maiden Lane. It now serves as an exit door of the present theatre, being marked, then and now, by the royal crest above the door; the present stage door is right beside it. Terriss used this pass door to avoid his fans, and Greaves accompanied him to the theatre, probably in case a particular person should prove again to be a nuisance. The door was kept locked. In the dank, gas-lit street Terriss fumbled in a pocket for his key.

  As he inserted it in the lock and opened the door, a dark figure that had been lurking near Rule’s Restaurant rushed across the street and with great force stuck a kitchen knife in Terriss’s back. Another blow slashed Terriss’s side as he turned. A third thrust penetrated his chest.

  The attack was carried out in silence. Jessie Millward, in her dressing room above the door, heard Terriss arrive and the door open – and then nothing. Suddenly apprehensive, she ran down the stairs with her maid, Lottie, and saw Terriss leaning against the wall by the open door. ‘Here are my keys, Lottie,’ he said, quite calmly. ‘Catch that man.’ The maid ran outside. ‘Sis,’ he whispered, gazing at Jessie. ‘Sis, I am stabbed.’ Although she tried to support him he collapsed, and they both fell on the bare boards of the hall at the foot of the stairs. ‘Mr Terriss has met with an accident!’ she cried. ‘Send for a doctor!’ She held him in her arms as shocked company members crowded around. Doctors from the nearby Charing Cross Hospital soon arrived, as well as the police.

  Out in Maiden Lane, Prince, who made no resistance, had been seized by Greaves and Lottie and was now handcuffed and in the charge of a uniformed constable. The knife was found in his pocket. He was reported to have said after the murder: ‘I did it for revenge. He had kept me out of employment for ten years, and I had either to die in the street or kill him.’ He was taken past Covent Garden to Bow Street police station, where five pawn tickets were found on him but no money. Meanwhile, Terriss still lay on the floor of the little hall, supported by Jessie Millward, whose control was such she did not, or could not cry. Nothing could be done for him; he was dying and barely conscious. Once or twice he murmured: ‘Sis … Sis …’ Five or six minutes before the curtain was due to rise, he died.

  The audience were already aware that something was amiss, as no orchestra had appeared, the footlights were not lit, and the sound of agitated voices could be heard behind the curtain. A minute or so before 8 pm the curtains parted and the shadowy figure of the assistant stage manager, Mr Budd, appeared. Lifting a hand for silence, he announced: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I am deeply grieved and pained to announce to you that our beloved friend, Mr Terriss, has met with a serious, nay terrible, accident, which will make the performance of Secret Service this evening quite impossible. I will ask you to be good enough to pass into the street as quietly as possible, and it is hardly necessary for me to add that your money will be returned on application at the pay boxes.’ Those who went to the stage door to inquire what had happened soon learned that William Terriss had been stabbed to death. Word quickly spread; crowds gathered, and within an hour special editions of the evening papers were on the streets with the news.

  At Bow Street police station Prince was charged with murder, and having admitted the charge said: ‘Can you give me something to eat?’

  The following morning Bow Street court, opposite the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, was crammed with theatre-goers, actors and actresses, who greeted Prince’s appearance in the dock with loud sounds of disapprobation. But the villain of the piece was suitably unmoved and smiled disdainfully. Indeed, he clearly relished his leading role in front of a full house, nodding, grimacing, smiling, stroking his moustache, twirling the ends, as he listened to the witnesses. Reporters described him as ‘Mephistophelian’. The audience’s loathing increased as the hearing proceeded, and when he was committed for trial – when he bowed and smiled – a torrent of shouts and yells accompanied his exit.

  The funeral of William Terriss took place at 1 pm on 21 December, a bitterly cold and windy day. The funeral procession was half a mile long and took an hour to make the journey from the Terriss family home in Bedford Park to Brompton Cemetery; many thousands of people lined the route. Sir Henry Irving was the most celebrated of the mourners; he had been asked by the Queen to convey her condolences to Terriss’s family. He also personally conveyed Jessie Millward to the funeral service; she had hardly slept or eaten since Terriss’s death. Mrs Terriss did not attend the service, the family being represented by Terriss’s two sons – his daughter, Ellaline, had just lost her first baby and was very ill in Eastbourne. It is said that ten thousand people gathered at the cemetery.

  The Adelphi Theatre remained closed for over a week, reopening on Monday, 27 December, with Mr Herbert Waring in place of Terriss and May Whitty taking over Jessie Millward’s role. For many months the stage door in Bull Inn Court became a place of pilgrimage for morbid and mistaken sensation-seekers and fans.

  Richard Prince was tried at the Old Bailey on 13 January 1898 before Mr Justice Channell. The prosecuto
r was Mr CF Gill, assisted by Mr Horace Avory; Mr WH Sands represented the accused, who was swathed in an Inverness cape. The gas-lit courtroom was packed.

  At the start Prince pleaded ‘Guilty with provocation’ and was advised to change this plea. He said: ‘I am guilty, but I have to ask a favour. I believe the law of England allows me a Queen’s counsel. I have a counsel, but I should like a Queen’s counsel to watch the case on my behalf. I have no friend, and my mother cannot help me with a penny for my defence.’ His request was refused, and he eventually accepted Mr Sands’s advice and changed his plea to ‘Not guilty’.

  Prince again behaved with much theatricality, but the audience was this time more subdued. The defence was insanity, and his family and several Scottish neighbours and associates were produced to vouch for his strangeness. Two doctors spoke of his ‘insane delusions’ and said he was ‘of unsound mind’. When his mother gave evidence, Prince was much amused and often laughed, loudly translating her Dundonian accent for the benefit of judge and jury. She said: ‘He was born mad, and he grew up wi’ passions that pit him wrang in his mind.’

  The trial lasted one day. The jury retired at 6.35 pm and after a thirty-minute deliberation found the accused ‘Guilty, but according to the medical evidence not responsible for his actions.’ The judge consigned Prince to the criminal lunatic asylum at Broadmoor, to the prisoner’s evident relief. He embarked on an oration of thanks, which was interrupted by the judge. Prince was removed from the court.

  In Broadmoor he was apparently happy, a leading light in the entertainments of the inmates. He conducted the prison orchestra, and declaimed Shakespeare in a garden courtyard, hanging his cloak on a tree. But was he really insane? Irving thought otherwise, and is reported to have said: ‘They will find some excuse to get him off – mad, or something. Terriss was an actor.’

  Secret Service ended its run at the Adelphi on 20 January, a week after the trial. The enterprising Gatti management transferred another play from Islington to the Adelphi. Preceded by a farce, BB, it opened at 8.30 pm on 21 January. The play was a drama about the assassination, by knife, of Jean Marat, and was called Charlotte Corday.

  Some months before this, Terriss’s wife, it is said, had happened to be reading the reviews of Charlotte Corday and had told her husband that she thought the part of Marat would suit him very well. ‘Ah, no,’ he replied. ‘Horrible! I couldn’t bear that scene with the knife!’

  11

  SAMUEL DOUGAL

  THE MURDER OF MISS HOLLAND, 1899

  The character of some murders is determined in part by the nature of society. As social conventions and inhibitions alter, so do kinds of murder, some vanishing, others developing. Murder in the course of a terrorist hijack or kidnapping has become a feature of recent times. A feature of the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras was the number of single and susceptible women with money who were courted by unscrupulous but charming rogues, whose sole aim was to deprive the ladies of their savings and sometimes of their lives. The circumstances surrounding the murder of Miss Holland and the social situation of those involved belong to a different age, when manners made a man and might unmake a maid.

  Miss Camille Cecile Holland was a little spinster lady of fifty-five in 1898 when she met Samuel Herbert Dougal, then aged fifty-two, either at the Earl’s Court Exhibition or through an advertisement in some journal dealing with persons seeking friendship and/or matrimony. Miss Holland, born in India, where her French mother had married a Liverpudlian merchant, was brought up largely in England by an aunt who ran a girls’ school. When Aunt Sarah retired, Miss Holland became her companion and finally her heiress in 1893. She inherited about £6,000 in investments – a great deal of money then – as well as all her aunt’s furniture and jewellery. Thus enriched and freed from family considerations – her only living relatives were two nephews and a niece – Miss Holland, then aged fifty, flowered, disguising the ravages of middle age by powdering her face, dying her hair red-gold and being most particular about her dress. She was not unattractive to gentlemen, who appreciated her very Victorian accomplishments: she played the piano, composed sentimental songs (both words and music), painted sentimental watercolours and, as a good Catholic, regularly went to church. But it seems she retained her virtue, left intact for many years after an early object of her affections, a young naval officer and the brother of a schoolfriend, drowned. In fond memory of him she always wore his cornelian ring.

  Yet something was missing from her life, something she needed so desperately that at the age of fifty-five she sacrificed her virtue and her Victorian propriety by going away with a most unsuitable middle-aged married man and living with him as his wife. It was not as if she were mindlessly besotted with him, although she romanticised their association to start with, referring to him as her ‘sweetheart’. Before long, she had realised just what a mercenary rogue he was – and yet she still went to live with him.

  Samuel Herbert Dougal was a ruthless, amoral and utterly engaging beast. He possessed an animal vitality and magnetism that helped him to deprive women of their virtue and both men and women of their money. With few scruples he used his attractions and abilities to exploit others. His aim, it seems, was always enjoyment, whether as Jekyll or Hyde, and he had humours to match. Born at Bow in the East End of London in May 1846, he was given a basic education and acquired a job as an apprentice in a civil engineering office. But this was far too humdrum for his extrovert, adventurous nature, and when his debts and dissipations and the strictures of his father became intolerable he joined the army, enlisting at Chatham in the Royal Engineers on 6 March 1866. He remained with the RE for twenty-one years, serving in Ireland, Wales, and Nova Scotia, where he lived for ten years. He worked as a surveyor and a clerk, ending his service on 22 March 1887 as the chief clerk for the RE at Aldershot, with the rank of quartermaster-sergeant. His conduct and character were described as ‘very good’ and he was commended as being ‘a very good clerk’.

  His domestic life was not so good. In 1869, when he was twenty-three, he married a Miss Griffiths. She had four children by him and much unhappiness; apparently he drank and ill-treated her. They put up with each other for sixteen years until, towards the end of his ten years in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she suddenly fell ill, dying in agony within twelve hours. This was in June 1885. Two months later, after a brief leave in England, he returned to Halifax with a second wife, who in October was also suddenly taken ill. Vomiting excessively, she died. Both wives were buried in Halifax within twenty-four hours of their deaths which, having occurred in military quarters, were not required to be entered in a civil register. When his regiment returned to England early in 1887, the year of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, he brought with him a young girl from Halifax, passing her off as his wife; he was now forty. Evidently she believed that his intentions were honourable and included marriage. She had a baby, but was so abused and beaten by him that she returned with her child to Halifax, posing as a widow.

  After leaving the army Dougal became in turn a salesman, storekeeper, the steward of two Conservative clubs, publican, surveyor and clerk, along the way acquiring as many women as jobs (if not more) to keep him company and in a manner to which he had not hitherto been accustomed – most notably a widow who bore him two children and absconded when his brutality became unbearable. For a time he ran a pub at Ware in Hertfordshire with the help of an elderly woman and her money. But not for long: both the pub and a house insured by Dougal caught fire. He applied for the insurance but was arrested instead and tried at St Albans in December 1889. On being acquitted through lack of evidence he moved to Ireland, to Dublin, where he met Sarah White, eventually marrying her on 7 August 1892. She was his third wife and bore him two children.

  Two years later he was back in London, wifeless but not a widower, seeking some other lady to support him. The unlucky woman this time was Miss Emily Booty, who met him as she emerged from a Camberwell bank. With her money they leased and furnished a house in Watli
ngton, Oxfordshire, and at his invitation the third Mrs Dougal, more enduring than his other wives or women, brought her children to England and moved into Miss Booty’s house. She suffered this and Dougal’s behaviour for a few months, during which the youngest Dougal died of convulsions. But when she began packing her boxes Dougal became so threatening that she fled and went to the police. They searched his boxes and found within them some of Miss Booty’s minor possessions: a linen-duster, two tea cloths and 4 yards of dimity. Arrested and charged with larceny, Dougal appeared at Oxford Quarter Sessions in April 1895, where he defended himself so impressively that the jury, also impressed it seems by his fine army record, found him not guilty.

  The jury at the Central Criminal Court in January 1896 were not so impressionable when he was charged with forging the signature of Lord Frankfort on a cheque in Dublin, and he was sentenced to twelve months’ hard labour. This he served in the Cane Hill Lunatic Asylum, where he was taken from Pentonville Prison suffering from acute melancholia after half-heartedly trying to hang himself in his cell.

  He was pronounced sane and discharged in December 1896. By then he was fifty, and having served a prison sentence and lost his army pension as a result he found it difficult to get work. He was saved by his brother, Henry, who provided him with some clerical work at Biggin Hill for over a year, during which time Mrs Dougal returned to him and then left again, retreating to Dublin with her surviving child, Olive, when her husband’s immoral and immoderate behaviour became too much for her. It also became too much for Henry, who sacked his brother and in so doing sent him back to London and into the arms of Miss Holland.