The Italian Boy

by Sarah Wise

  Next, Joseph Paragalli explained that he was now able to recall that a boy called Carlo Ferrari had been living at 2 Charles Street eighteen months ago. He stated that when he had first seen the body, he had thought that it was Carlo, whom he had last seen alive standing outside the County Fire Office at the southern end of Regent Street (“the Quadrant”) in early October. It had been raining hard that day, and the child had looked cold and unhappy. Paragalli said that he had not noticed what the boy was wearing but he had seen that the mice were kept in a box that was divided in two; one half was a cage with a wheel for the mice to run round in; the other half was wooden and enclosed, and this was where the animals slept. Paragalli said he often visited Elliott’s house in Charles Street and had seen Carlo there on a number of occasions, and was even present when Brun had bound Carlo over to Charles Henoge. One week before seeing him in the Quadrant, Paragalli claimed, he had spoken to Carlo in Portland Place, just north of Oxford Circus.

  One sketch artist’s concept of Carlo Ferrari, named as the victim two weeks after the discovery of the corpse

  Proceedings in the magistrates court were about to finish for the day when Superintendent Thomas stepped forward and asked if he could—in his capacity as a public officer—make a further charge against Bishop and Williams only. May and Shields having been escorted from the dock, Thomas charged Bishop and Williams with “the murder of another boy, whose name for the present is unknown.” He expected to be able to present evidence in this second case before long. Minshull told Thomas that he had acted very properly in bringing the new charge. The case could not be in better hands, said the magistrate, deeply impressed.

  * * *

  On Superintendent Thomas’s orders, Sarah Bishop and Rhoda Head had been taken into custody on Wednesday, 11 November, and had been remanded. Thomas had told Minshull that he would soon prove that the women had known about the killing of the Italian boy. There was no suspicion that they had taken an active role, but Thomas was convinced that anyone living in a house as small as 3 Nova Scotia Gardens must have been aware of everything that had gone on there.

  Sarah and Rhoda had been arrested by Constable Higgins at the Fortune of War at four o’clock in the afternoon. Higgins went with them to Nova Scotia Gardens, accepting that Sarah had to make provision for her children—two boys, aged twelve and seven, and a two-year-old girl. While there, Higgins searched the cottage and took away with him what he believed to be significant objects: two chisel-like iron implements, each with one end bent into a hook; a brad awl with dried blood on it; a thick metal file; and a rope tied into a noose.

  Later, before the magistrates, Richard Partridge examined these tools and gave his opinion that one of the bent chisels could have been used to inflict the wound on the dead boy’s forehead and that the heavy file could have dealt the blow to the back of the neck. Partridge told Minshull that he and George Beaman were certain that death had been caused by a blow to the back of the neck, repeating the evidence they had given to the coroner’s court. The two surgeons differed, said Partridge, only in one respect: Beaman believed death had been caused by blood entering the spinal column as a result of the blow, while Partridge thought death had occurred as a result of concussion of the spinal marrow. George Douchez, another local surgeon who had been present at the postmortem, was called and gave his opinion that the boy had been stunned by a blow to the head and then killed by having his neck wrung “like a duck’s.” At this, a thrill of horror—gasps and murmurs—ran around the Bow Street courtroom.

  The Quadrant at the southern end of Regent Street, under construction in 1813; the County Fire Office is to the far right in the picture.

  Forensic medicine was a young discipline. While celebrated surgeon and anatomist William Hunter had written his Signs of Murder treatise in 1783, the first coroners’ guides were not published until thirty-five years later. The courtroom discussion of the Italian boy’s cause of death reflected the limits of knowledge. So Partridge confidently announced: “Blood never coagulates after death,” in reply to a query about whether the injury to the back of the neck would have had the same appearance if it had been inflicted after death. In fact, some of his contemporaries had begun to suspect the truth—that such congealing could in fact take place in a still-warm corpse.

  “Could the deceased have committed suicide?” wondered Minshull.

  “It is just barely possible that a person might inflict a blow on the back of his own neck which would cause death,” replied Partridge. “It is, however, exceedingly improbable and almost impossible.”

  And Beaman added, “There was nothing to show that he died of indigestion.”

  As to whether the blood-clotted brad awl could have been the murder weapon, James May didn’t wait for the medical men’s opinion, calling out to the magistrates, “I took the teeth out with that.”

  In fact, all the implements found at No. 3 were the paraphernalia used to haul bodies up out of graves. A resurrection man’s work required a wooden spade—wood making less noise than metal—to dig down to the head of the coffin; two large iron hooks attached to ropes were inserted under the lid of the coffin at the head to snap the upper part off, and the corpse was then pulled up through the hole.3 (It was not unlike fishing—which is the term Dickens’s fictional body snatcher Jerry Cruncher uses to describe his work in A Tale of Two Cities.) These were the very objects likely to be found in the home of a body snatcher, and Constable Higgins recognized them as such. (Higgins had challenged Sarah about the tools in the cottage, saying, “I know what these are for.” “I dare say you do,” she replied, “but do not speak before the children.” She then claimed that the brad awl was used by Bishop for mending shoes.) But Partridge and Beaman did not appear to realize the implements’ functions and decided that the collection had a more sinister purpose.

  Higgins had also found Sarah to be in possession of a document that read: “The humble petition of John Bishop, and three others, most humbly showeth that your petitioners have supplied many Subjects on various occasions to the several hospitals, and being now in custody, they are conscious in their own minds that they have done nothing more than they have been in the constant habit of doing as resurrectionists, but being unable to prove their innocence without professional assistance, they humbly crave the commiseration of gentlemen who may feel inclined to give some trifling assistance in order to afford them the opportunity of clearing away the imputation alleged against them. The most trifling sum will be gratefully acknowledged, and your petitioners, as in duty bound, will ever pray.…” It was unsigned.

  Petitions such as these were also part of a resurrectionist’s kit. They were a reasonably gentle form of blackmail, letting the surgeon(s) know that it might be in the interest of the good name of the medical profession to come up with bail money, to arrange and pay for the advice of an attorney, or perhaps—using connections, nods, winks—to get the misdemeanor charges dropped altogether. At worst, the resurrection man’s family could be given financial help until the breadwinner was out of jail. Surgeon Sir Astley Cooper, created a baronet in 1821 after removing a tumor from George IV’s scalp, spent hundreds of pounds in this way. His personal accounts for 1818 show that he paid £14 7s as bail for one of his main suppliers, a man called Vaughan; 6s to Vaughan’s wife; and £13 on “gaol comforts”—food, drink, and tobacco—for Vaughan when he was imprisoned.4 It is likely that Sarah and Rhoda were in the process of applying to the various surgeons supplied by Bishop for assistance of this kind when they were arrested at the Fortune of War.

  At Bow Street, Minshull advised Sarah that she was not legally obliged to say anything, but Sarah said that she was eager to defend herself. “I have nothing to fear, sir,” she said to Minshull, “for I have done nothing wrong.” She told Minshull that although she knew her husband had been a resurrectionist for several years and she had visited him in prison on a number of occasions, she had no knowledge of the crime of which he was now suspected. She pointed out that she h
ad always worked in her own right, for her own money, supplementing whatever cash Bishop brought home with the income she received from doing needlework and taking in washing. She said that Thomas Williams “had only been out three times” with her husband and that he was a “very respectably connected” person. She claimed she knew her husband had been out at work the night before he was arrested because he had washed his hands in a basin, leaving a great deal of mud or clay in the bottom of it.

  Rhoda also said that she knew nothing of any murder and that, while she was aware that her husband of seven weeks had been assisting Bishop with resurrection work, he was in fact a bricklayer by training, had also been a carpenter, and had worked in the glass trade, too. (Rhoda referred to Bishop as “my father”; he was, in fact, her half brother and stepfather.)

  Minshull told the women that it was his duty to remand them into custody while the case against them was investigated. He also issued an order for the Bishop children to be placed in the Bethnal Green workhouse for the time being. It was quite likely, Superintendent Thomas had told him, that they would be able to give the magistrate damning evidence against their parents. A parish officer of St. Matthew’s, Bethnal Green, needed John Bishop to swear to his place of settlement, in order that his children could be signed over to the care of the parish. Bishop signed the necessary papers, “with a very firm hand,” and, in an apparently sarcasm-free act of courtesy, thanked Superintendent Thomas for having made the arrangements for his family.5

  * * *

  On the same day that the boy’s corpse was disinterred—a full two weeks after the arrest of Bishop, Williams, May, and Shields—men from Division F undertook a thorough examination of 3 Nova Scotia Gardens, “it having been intimated to Mr Minshull that it would be advisable that the premises should be strictly searched,” as the Times put it.6 Today, such a delay would be unthinkable; in 1831, a detailed search of the home of a murder suspect, except to recover stolen goods, was not an obvious move. But somebody in the neighborhood had told Thomas that, before her arrest, one of the Bishop women had been seen scattering ashes in the garden—had they been burning incriminating items?

  Thomas, along with Constable Higgins, laborer and gardener James Waddy, James Corder, William Cribb (the coroner’s jury foreman, with no obvious official interest in the case), and a number of Division F officers went to the deserted cottage at noon on Saturday, 19 November. Thomas was very interested in that long back garden. He noticed that a pathway running its entire length, from the house to the privy, looked uneven, and in places the soil appeared to be loose; there was indeed a thin layer of ashes on the surface at one spot. Bishop’s eldest son stood by during the digging, and it is possible that Thomas had asked for him to be present in the hope that the lad might let slip something incriminating. Indeed, as Higgins started to prod the earth near the path with an iron bar, the boy told him to take care, since there was a cesspool lying immediately beneath. This warning made Thomas suspicious, and he told Higgins to explore exactly that spot. Here, five yards from the Bishops’ back door and one yard from the palings, Higgins’s bar came up against a spongy substance. Waddy dug and, about a foot down, unearthed a child’s jacket, trousers, and shirt. The jacket was of good-quality blue cloth with two rows of covered buttons and expertly sewn buttonholes; some gilt buttons also on the jacket had a star motif at their center. The black trousers looked as though they had been removed with force, since the buttonholes that connected them to their yellow calico braces were torn. A yard away, Waddy and Higgins dug up another set of clothes—a shabby blue coat of an unusual cut (later described in court as being like the sort worn by charity-school boys) with white buttons, a pair of coarse gray trousers with patched knees, an old shirt that was ripped down the middle, and a striped waistcoat that had bloodstains on the collar and shoulder and, in its pocket, a small piece of comb. The waistcoat had once been an adult’s but had been cut down and restitched to fit a boy. Thomas noted that this had been done in a slipshod way, using cheap, coarse yarn. When the waistcoat was shown to Minshull, the magistrate pointed out that it could prove significant, since it might bring forward the man to whom it had originally belonged.

  Police officers begin their search of Nova Scotia Gardens, in this curiously compressed version of Bishop’s and Williams’s cottages.

  In the privy at the bottom of the garden of Number 3 Thomas found a human scalp with long matted brown hair attached; down among the feces, the officers worked to disentangle chunks of human flesh. Thomas and his men—and, later, the magistrates—assumed that this find was evidence of Bishop and Williams’s resurrection work; there was a good trade in body parts if the entire corpse was not fresh, and the scalp had probably been removed for the sale of the hair to a wigmaker and discarded once it was known that the house might be searched.

  At four o’clock in the afternoon, with the garden dug to a depth of one foot and the privy thoroughly probed, the men went home. Two days later, Thomas returned and searched the inside of the house once more. The downstairs room (the parlor) contained scarcely any furniture—there was a fireplace and the remains of a small, rickety cupboard. In one corner lay a heap of old, soiled clothes, many of them children’s. Sarah Bishop worked as a washerwoman, taking in washing for locals; but the womenfolk of resurrectionists were known to make money from selling the clothing from pauper bodies stolen from mortuaries, hospitals, or workhouses. Superintendent Thomas was particularly interested in a woman’s bonnet and a brown, furry cap—the color of dark fox fur—that was lying near the top of the heap; on his first visit to the cottage he had seen it hanging on a nail in the parlor and had taken little notice of it. But now it intrigued him. He took it to show Margaret King and her family in Crabtree Row, and then to Covent Garden to see what Joseph Paragalli made of it. The Italian told Thomas that Carlo Ferrari had worn a cap very like it when he first came to London; he added that Carlo’s cap had been larger but that this one looked as though it had been taken in. The fur crown of the cap was English, Paragalli said, but its green visor had been made in France.

  Thomas seems to have found it hard to keep away from Nova Scotia Gardens. No. 3 was now officially in police hands, and the superintendent continued to scour it for anything that would forge links in the story he was piecing together. He had told Minshull that he found the Gardens “remarkable,” that there was not a street lamp within a quarter of a mile of the place, and that he considered No. 3 itself to be “in a ruinous condition,” its garden little more than waste ground.7 Thomas pointed out to Minshull that Bishop and Williams had access to around thirty other gardens, since they had only to step over the palings to reach the privies and grounds of their neighbors. Searching these would not be a problem, he said, since people were moving out swiftly, in horror and shame at the new notoriety of the Gardens. Minshull was pleased with the trophies the superintendent was bringing into his office and was agog at the news of his daily progress.

  On Tuesday, 22 November, Thomas decided to take a look at 2 Nova Scotia Gardens. It had lain empty after Williams went to live with the Bishops in the last week of September until William Woodcock, a brass worker, his wife, Hannah, and their twelve-year-old son, also called William, moved in on 17 October. Superintendent Thomas found nothing of significance in the house, but from the bottom of Woodcock’s privy he retrieved a bundle: unwrapped, it contained a woman’s black cloak that fastened to one side with black ribbon, a plaid dress that had been patched in places with printed cotton, a chemise, an old, ragged flannel petticoat, a pair of stays that had been patched with striped “jean” (a heavy, twilled cotton), and a pair of black worsted stockings, all of which appeared to have been violently torn or cut from their wearer. There was also a muslin handkerchief, a red pincushion, a blue “pocket” (a poor woman’s equivalent of a purse or small everyday bag), and a pair of women’s black, high-heeled, twilled-silk shoes. The dress and chemise had been ripped up the front, as had the petticoat, which also had two large patches of
blood on it. The stays had been cut off in a zigzag manner.

  Thomas decided to search the well in Bishop’s garden; it was covered over by planks of wood, onto which someone had scattered a pile of grass cuttings. From the bottom of the well he fished out a bundle that proved to be a shawl wrapped around a large stone.

  During Thomas’s inquiries at the anatomical schools of London he had been told by Guy’s Hospital that two bodies—one of them a young female—had been bought from Bishop in the first week of November; St. Bartholomew’s had told him that Bishop had offered them a boy and a woman within the month before his arrest; and George Pilcher and John Appleton—respectively, anatomy lecturer and porter at Grainger’s school in Webb Street—had told him that a tall, thin, middle-aged woman had been sold to Pilcher by Bishop early in October. Several women had lately been reported missing in Bethnal Green and Shoreditch; two sets of worried relatives had already contacted Thomas. A number of local children had not been seen for months. It was dawning on the superintendent that what had been going on at Nova Scotia Gardens was not the processing of disinterred corpses into saleable Subjects but systematic slaughter.

  SIX

  Houseless Wretches Again

  Urban poverty, so often a disgusting and harrowing sight to the respectable, could also be a source of wonder and intrigue. A beggar with a certain look or air or “act” could feed on city dwellers’ craving for novelty and display. Certain street people, moving around wealthy West End districts as well as the poorer locales, began to take on the status of peripatetic performers, with the slightly unreal aura of renowned theatrical or operatic artistes, standing out amid the rush and bustle, seeping into urban popular consciousness. Rarely mentioned in the newspaper columns or police reports of the day, they survived in the reminiscences of those who thought to note them down before their image faded forever. They were described as though they were apparitions, and they seem to haunt, rather than inhabit, the city, their connections to their environment mysterious and unfathomable.