Murder & Crime in London
Page 4
The findings galvanised the police. Telegraphs were sent to all police stations and ports. Frederick Manning’s police description was not flattering: ‘Frederick G. Manning, 35 years old, 5ft 8 or 9 ins, stout, very fair and florid complexion, full bloated face, light hair, small sandy whiskers’. An unfortunate couple of the same name boarding a ship bound for New York were arrested and released. Detective Sergeant Shaw established that a Hackney cab driver had picked up Mrs Manning on 13 August near Weston Street: ‘a lady of very respectable exterior’ with three large boxes, two of which she left, tagged with ‘Mrs Smith, passenger to Paris, to be called for’, at Waterloo. She then asked to be driven to Euston Station.
Mrs Manning, despite her somewhat superior intelligence, was easy to find. Her clothes and her accent led to her capture. On 21 August Inspector John Haynes of Scotland Yard arrived at Waterloo Station, inspected the boxes left by Mrs Manning and found some of O’Connor’s belongings as well as his will dated 6 June 1848, leaving all to Marie. Haynes then went to Euston to discover that a woman answering Marie’s description, called Smith, had left Euston on the morning train to Edinburgh on Tuesday 14 August. He sent a telegraph to the Superintendent of the Edinburgh Police.
Marie arrived in Edinburgh on 15 August, booked into a lodging house in Haddington Place under the name of Smith and called in at a draper in Lawnmarket. According to the shop owner, a ‘woman of a somewhat elegant appearance speaking with a foreign accent’ asked to look at some material and, in passing, queried about a good stockbroker. Armed with the required information, Mrs Smith presented herself at Messrs Hughson and Dobson, members of the Edinburgh Stock Exchange, on Saturday. She asked if they could sell some railway certificates she had and possibly invest £400. They could. She left a £1 scrip certificate with them only to pick it up on Monday, saying that she needed to visit her ailing father before continuing.
On Tuesday 21 August the brokers received notification of the stolen railway certificates and contacted the Edinburgh Police about their suspicions over the Frenchwoman with the Scots father wanting to sell certificates. The police, accompanied by Mr Dobson, first visited the station then the lodging house, where Mr Dobson identified Mrs Smith. She had all the missing certificates, including £115 and seventy-three gold sovereigns! She was, according to the Edinburgh Courant, ‘attired in an elegant black satin dress and white crepe bonnet … we understand that her manner and accomplishments are most lady-like, and that she talks French with great fluency.’
The perfectly composed Mrs Manning was brought back down to London, taken to Southwark police station and charged with murder. The Times described her as wearing:
a white straw bonnet with a white lace veil … she also wore a black silk mantle with satin stripes with a gown of the same colour and fabric. She is rather above middle height and her figure is stout, without being clumsy. It would, however, be a mistake to call her either handsome or beautiful.
The Observer, a leading paper of conjecture and rumour, told its readers that the crime was long premeditated and that the intimacy between O’Connor and Mrs Manning was to be reviled. It portrayed Mrs Manning as both glamorous and repulsive: ‘an extremely fine woman, handsome and of almost masculine stature. Her manners at least to the society in which she latterly mixed, appeared those of an accomplished lady.’ The Observer also went on to report, quite erroneously, that she was a cousin of the Swiss valet François Courvoisier, hanged for the murder of his master, Lord William Russell, in 1840.
But what of Frederick Manning? He, despite being portrayed as less intelligent than his wife, had disappeared completely. An Inspector Perkins had located a cab driver who recalled taking a man fitting Manning’s description, along with two bags, from Bermondsey Square to Waterloo Station on 15 August. Many false trails led nowhere. That is until a message reported that a woman had recognised Manning on a Channel steamship heading for Jersey.
He had indeed gone to Jersey, making a nuisance of himself on the boat and in the different hostelries he occupied on the island. He was obnoxiously drunk most of the time and told people how wealthy he was. The Jersey Police were advised he might be there and a Sergeant Langley of Scotland Yard was sent to Jersey.
Manning was arrested on 21 August and returned to London, where he was placed in Horsemonger Lane Gaol along with his wife. He told the police that Marie followed O’Connor to the kitchen, hugged him and calmly shot him and that ‘I never liked him so I battered his head with a ripping chisel’.
The inquest of 18 August had established several conclusive facts. William Massey, a medical student who had lodged at the Mannings’ house and left a month before the murder, had been introduced to O’Connor several times. Manning had told him that he didn’t like O’Connor, and he had also been quizzed by Manning about stupefying drugs. An agent on The Cut established that Manning had purchased a brace of pistols. Manning had also bought a shovel. The Coroner also asked to what extent Mrs Manning could, as a wife, be charged as an active participant in the crime?
The Observer of 2 September had offered some guidance to the jury: ‘…its efforts must have a direct tendency to promote the ends of justice, by setting opinion on the right track I regard to the case at issue.’ The jury returned a verdict of murder by both Mannings.
The trial opened on 25 October 1849 before Chief Baron Pollock and Mr Justice Cresswell, the Attorney General. The papers waxed lyrical on the couple:
No one could help being struck by the contrast between the stamina and impassivity of Marie – who stood motionless and bolt upright in the dock – with the apparent weakness of her husband, who looked ill and had been allowed to remain seated for two days.
Another report described her with a ‘thick black veil over the bonnet concealing her features, though when she looked up she bore up with amazing coolness … her eye was bloodshot … and she bore marks of bodily fatigue or mental suffering.’ Other reports said that ‘Frederick Manning seemed to be some years older than the thirty years’.
The trial was treated like a gala premiere. Admission was by ticket. Count Colloredo, the Austrian Ambassador, his secretary Baron Koller, Prince Richard Metternich and Charles Dickens were among the celebrities who attended. Mrs Manning was determined to fight. She maintained that her husband was the instigator; he had killed through jealousy. The jury retired for three quarters of an hour and returned with a guilty verdict on both of them. Marie then made an appeal based on an ancient statute that a foreigner was entitled to a jury of six Englishmen and six foreigners. This was rejected because she had become a fully-fledged Englishwoman upon marrying Manning.
Chief Baron Pollock.
The Mannings and their solicitors.
The Observer said that this was the ‘most remarkable trial of the century – they both had joint charge of murder.’ The Morning Post concluded that it had always been premeditated, whilst The Times said that the ‘announcement was a foregone conclusion’. The Morning Chronicle accused Marie of being ‘a Lucrecia Borgia or Marquise de Brinvilliers’. The Manchester Guardian, however, made the most telling comment: ‘…there is a considerable possibility that judging from the determined and obdurate character of the female, the murder had been planned and to some extent perpetrated by Mrs Manning’.
The couple were hanged on the roof of the gatehouse of Horsemonger Lane Gaol on Tuesday, 13 November 1849. A huge crowd of about 50,000 assembled the night before, Charles Dickens among them. He paid £10 for a rooftop view. Manning admitted his guilt in the end but Marie refused. William Calcraft was the hangman, which was unfortunate as he preferred the short drop. The short drop did not kill the prisoner outright – it could take quite a while for the incumbent to die, up to twenty minutes. Marie’s end was magnificent according to one viewer – she was impeccably dressed, while Manning was ‘as filthy as a shapeless scarecrow’. Even their end was a show! Marie Manning was the last woman to be hanged in public in England.
Legend has it that the term ‘Blac
k Maria’, the transport used for felons, originated from the ‘black weeds’ worn by Mrs Manning. A more tangible origin, however, suggests that the first usage stems from the Boston Evening Traveler from 1847, which mentions them as a new type of wagon. Brewer’s Dictionary suggests the name came from Maria Lee, a large and fearsome black keeper of a sailors’ boarding house, who the police would call on for help with difficult prisoners.
The Mannings’ execution at Horsemonger Lane.
seven
BECAUSE YOU’RE WORTH IT
London, the hub of the greatest empire, attracted the world. Both great and small visited. To some it was the largest and dirtiest city in the world, to others it was the spur for greater riches … and to one in particular it was rich pickings for a lifestyle he had become accustomed to. London was also the setting for one of the most audacious robberies ever perpetrated.
She was beautiful, beguiling and men flocked to see her painting as they had done in her lifetime. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (1757-1806), had been an icon of her time. Born into wealth and married to the older Duke of Devonshire, Georgiana had captured the imagination of an age where a bright, intelligent, and glamorous woman could, and indeed, in her case did, make her mark.
Lionised by society, the bohemian Duchess abided by her rules – to have fun! This accomplished woman (a linguist amongst her other accomplishments) was considered the most flamboyant, the most shameless and wickedest woman in this Siècle des Lumières. She had a ménage à trois between her husband and his mistress, had a child by another man, and gambled heavily. She was a society hostess whose parties were legendary. She would also start the fashion for wigs high-topped with feathers and was the first woman to campaign for a candidate in an election in 1784. Her one and only novel, The Sylph, is still considered good!
It isn’t known exactly when Thomas Gainsborough painted her, but it was possibly in the late 1780s. Gainsborough, though, tried to capture that air of mischief and sensuality that she was known for, and capture it he did – she seductively poses in the hat she made fashionable, with come-hither eyes. He presented it to the Spencers (Georgiana’s family) and when she died in 1806 she and the painting faded from memory until it was rediscovered in 1841 and bought by the dealer, John Bentley, for a derisory sum from a retired schoolteacher.
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.
John Bentley, in turn, sold it on to the MP and collector Wynne Ellis in the 1860s, for £63. Ellis, the most successful silk manufacturer in Britain, also had one of the largest collections of ancient pictures. These he left to the nation on his death in 1875. The trustees of the National Gallery only selected fourteen of the 402 lots, the rest were auctioned off by Christie, Manson & Woods Ltd in five days’ sale in May, June and July 1876. The Times of 8 May said that ‘…anyone passing the neighbourhood of St James might well have supposed that some great lady was holding a reception’ – and this, in fact, was pretty much what was going on in the Gallery in King Street in the sale of 6 May. Thomas Agnew & Sons, fine art dealers of 39B Bond Street, put in the highest bid for Thomas Gainsborough’s portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, at £10,605! It was a great coup and the Agnews were justifiably proud of their acquisition!
The portrait, the most expensive ever purchased, was widely advertised and people came from far and wide to see it. Large posters framed the windows of their premises in Bond Street, heralding their acquisition and the possibility of viewing it, at a price!
Among the paying public streaming to Agnew’s Bond Street premises was a well-dressed, mustachioed man-about-town and his personal valet, a beast of a man. They joined the line that wended its way from the ground floor to the first floor, where the lady held court, flanked by the soft glow of two gas lights.
The gentleman’s eyes glazed then melted as he too fell under her spell.
On Saturday, 27 May 1876, The Times’ report on the painting shocked the world:
The picture sold for 10,000 guineas, the highest price ever paid for a portrait, has now been rendered even more so by having been stolen from the gallery in which it had only recently been placed for exhibition, known as the New British Institution, No. 89b Old Bond Street. The greatest excitement arose in the neighbourhood when it became known yesterday morning, soon after 7 o’clock, that this extraordinary and daring robbery had been committed … This room is not 10ft square, having only one window opening on to Bond Street, the other being blocked and covered … The one window was found opened about two feet, and on examining the lead outside there was a distinctly visible mark of a nailed shoe … all the doors were found fastened as they had been left.
It had been expertly cut from the frame, rolled up and passed through the window. Faint traces of grease on the floor, approximately the size of the painting, showed that the thief knew what he had been doing – he had spread a thin veneer of it on the canvas so as to keep it supple!
It had been an easily executed robbery. At least three men had been involved; one to act as lookout, another for a hoist up for the third, who jemmied the first floor window open, slid into the room and prised the canvas off the frame, passing it back down to his comrade below.
No amount of searching or questioning informants answered any questions. The mystery of the stolen Duchess would not be resolved until the end of the century. Scotland Yard, though, had their suspicions – Pinkerton Detective Agency had contacted them about the notorious thief Adam Worth, who, under the pseudonym Henry Judson Raymond, an affluent American, had come to England in 1875.
Thirty-five-year-old Henry J. Raymond arrived in London in 1875, fresh from a very successful venture in Paris, renting a spacious West End flat at 198 Piccadilly (now 198-202) and leasing the more spacious Western Lodge on Clapham Common, complete with coach house and large garden. Here he would entertain the great and the good.
It was at Western Lodge, exquisitely furnished with the finest antique furniture and paintings, where Henry J. Raymond, his mistress Kitty Flynn, and his close associate ‘Piano’ Charley Bullard, lived. It was also where, reputedly, a rolled up canvas of the ‘Lady’ remained hidden in the coach house for nearly a decade.
The grand house, with views on the Common, had its own specially appointed guards – Her Majesty’s police constables – patrolling its outer perimeter. They were there to keep a watch on Henry J. Raymond, but to no avail.
This quiet American kept a string of horses and a yacht, and had a reputed income of at least £30,000 per annum – he certainly spent £20,000 a year! He was also the most successful criminal of the nineteenth century, quite possibly of all time.
Adam Worth was not the debonair master criminal so loved of the classic detective genre, nor was he a cruel and evil-looking arch criminal. He was a cut above both. He did not drink, he did not fight, nor did he resort to violence. He made his career – for career it was – a profession, and chose his colleagues with care. He had fled the parental home at about the age of 10, moved to New York and was a protégé of the celebrated Marm Mandelbaum, from whom he learnt the art of delegating and organising gangs. He joined the Union army in the Civil War and made a tidy sum joining regiments under assumed names, being paid, and then deserting. It was then that Pinkerton’s started taking an active interest in him. He certainly spent some time behind bars but always managed to escape. His forte was forgery and supreme organisational skills. He established, in all the cities he made home, gangs of thieves who had no idea who the organiser behind their thefts was. He was a true ‘Napoleon of Crime’, whose very name prompted complete devotion from his followers, and fear in the police. His ‘work’ certainly influenced many detective writers; Conan-Doyle’s Professor Moriarty is certainly based on him, and perhaps Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin.
Western Lodge, Clapham.
Detective Inspector John Shore of Scotland Yard made it his life’s work to bring Worth to justice – with no effect. Worth had little or no time for the London Police. He found them disorganised.
Adam Worth, aka Henry J. Raymond.
The painting, a hot property, could not be sold – or would not be sold by its new owner. Worth decided that a break from London was needed. He went to South Africa to make some more money. His fortunes, however, declined. He also spent some seven years in a Belgian prison. Whilst in prison he was beaten up by confederates of an ex-partner in crime and returned to lick his wounds in America.
It wasn’t until 1897 when a dispirited Adam Worth approached William Pinkerton. He and Pinkerton had a high regard for each other’s professionalism. This turned into a friendship that was to last until Worth’s death. Worth agreed that he would sell the painting, with Pinkerton acting as intermediary, on condition that Worth was not prosecuted. The painting was sold for $25,000 in 1901. It was eventually resold to the Duke of Devonshire in 1992. Worth returned to England to be with his family, dying in 1902, and is buried in Highgate Cemetery.
eight
JACK THE RIPPER
London, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, was the largest and richest city in the world. The attractions of the West End contrasted starkly with those of the East End.
The East End, specifically Whitechapel, had been fields in the seventeenth century. By the end of the next century the industrial demands of the Port of London and ancillary industries had created the development of a rash of small buildings and a warren of streets, into which crammed poor immigrant workers living cheek-by-jowl next to the indigenous London poor. Nearly 90 per cent of its inhabitants were immigrants and prejudice was rife. The poorest people lived in grim slums or in common boarding houses.