Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane

by Paul Thomas Murphy

  Letheby scraped a dusting of powder from one of the tiny spots onto a watch-glass, and to this added a single drop of water. The dust began to dissolve. That indicated to him that these stains, if blood, were relatively fresh; in his experience bloodstains more than two weeks old—and even less than two weeks old in the acidic atmosphere of London—would not dissolve in water. With a pipette Letheby transferred a tiny bit of this solution into a short length of glass barometer tubing. He sealed the tube at both ends and let it stand for a while so that any sediment dropped. Then he set it upon a microscope stand. The eyepiece of the microscope had been modified with a prism. Shining a bright light through the solution, Letheby adjusted a slit until he could see the rainbow-colored spectrum. Interspersed among the lines of color were a number of dark bands. These bands—absorption lines—signified, scientists had come to realize, the chemical composition of the substance through which the light passed. In this case, Letheby saw a thick band interrupting the red part of the spectrum and two more bands within the green. That suggested to him blood—blood exposed to air. But other substances could give off similar spectra. And so Letheby opened the little glass tube and added a tiny bit of ammonia to the solution. Now, the dark band in the red disappeared and the two bands in the green grew darker. Letheby then added a bit of citric acid to the solution: the dark bands in the green faded. Finally, he added a tiny crystal of protosulphate of iron to the solution and let that act upon the solution. Now, he saw a single dark band in the green. Thus ringing the changes with these chemical reagents, Letheby simulated blood in its various states: hemoglobin (cruorin, Letheby called it) both refreshed by and depleted of oxygen, and then, with the addition of iron, hematin. At each stage the solution changed color, from scarlet to purple to brown, each time revealing a distinct and recognizable spectrum. It was as if he had opened a safe with the correct combination: he was positive that these stains were blood.

  Letheby was able to draw a further distinction by examining under the microscope the blood on Edmund’s shirt and on his hat. That blood had coagulated where it had fallen, unlike the blood on Edmund’s trousers. That in itself led Letheby to conclude that someone had attempted to wash or wipe away the blood on the trousers. These intact cells on the shirt and hat clearly lacked a nucleus. He realized, therefore, that this blood was from a mammal, not a fish, bird, or reptile. That he could swear to—but no more.

  In both knowledge and technique, Henry Letheby was at the vanguard in forensic detection of blood in 1871. But in 1871 the separate human blood types O, A, B, and AB, as well as conclusive methods to distinguish between blood cells of different mammalian species, were still unknown; these things would not be discovered for another thirty years. As far as Henry Letheby could tell, the blood on Edmund’s clothing might be Jane Clouson’s blood. Then again, it might be Edmund Pook’s. Or it might be the blood of a dog, or even blood splashed on Edmund’s clothes from a rare cut of roast beef.

  Letheby examined the other items Mulvany had brought him. He found no blood on the boots, and was not surprised: if they had been polished with blacking during the past few days, any blood on them would have been destroyed. There was no blood on the coat, either, only stains of printer’s ink. Nor was there any discernible blood on the clothes brush. Letheby did, however, find blood on the hammer, both on the axe blade and on its handle. And he found more: at the hammerhead, under a layer of mud, five fragments of hair, all between a quarter and half an inch long. Letheby placed these between a thin circular glass slide and a thinner glass cover and compared them under the microscope to hairs cut from Jane Clouson’s head. They were identical in color and in structure. They might not all be Jane’s, but they could be. More than this, Letheby had discovered, while scrutinizing Edmund’s trousers, another hair, seven and a half inches long, matted into the fabric on the inside left leg between knee and crotch. Under the microscope that hair, too, matched Jane’s, both in color and in structure.

  *

  As Edmund Pook, handcuffed and under guard, made the journey from Maidstone to Greenwich Police Court on Saturday morning, May 6, he learned what it was like to be hated. At every railway station from Dartford on—Crayford, Bexley, Sidcup, Eltham, Lee, and New Cross—howling, hissing mobs assembled to taunt him. “Ah, now he is off to Calcraft,” a man at Crayford station shouted at Pook, predicting his demise at the hands of Newgate’s notorious executioner. In a letter he later wrote to his father that quickly found its way into the newspapers, Edmund admitted his terror at the ordeal. He was certain as well that the demonstrations were not spontaneous but concerted. “I am most certainly astonished at the people,” he wrote, “as they do not know a single thing about my defense, and believe all the tissue of lies the prosecution have brought forward as gospel truth.” They were being manipulated, he claimed, by the stationmasters and porters along the route, who were telegraphing the news of his journey up the line, and collecting mobs from nearby factories and neighborhoods to taunt him. Surprisingly, Edmund exempted the police, his usual enemies, from this conspiracy; indeed, he was thankful to them for protecting him. However, he wrote to his father, “I am not disposed to extend those thanks to Inspector Mulvany or to Mr. Superintendent Griffin.”

  After braving the howling mobs at each railway station and then plunging into the largest mob of all outside Greenwich police station, Edmund faced one more ordeal. His solicitor, Henry Pook, met him inside the police station and—ever mindful of the legal importance of a client’s good appearance in the courtroom—was about to order a hairdresser to the station to give his client a shave and haircut, when the officer guarding Edmund stopped him: that could not be done without Superintendent Griffin’s permission. And Superintendent Griffin was not at that moment at the station. Henry Pook instantly burst into a tirade, heaping obloquy upon Griffin and, for good measure, upon Inspector Mulvany. Word was sent to Griffin, who lived nearby, and he ordered that Edmund be locked in a cell. Henry Pook, to prevent this, lurched threateningly at the officer, and then relented.

  Henry Pook’s eruption later earned him his own appearance in court, charged with violent and indecent behavior.

  In the courtroom, Edmund Pook learned that he had been put through all of this turmoil for nothing, for no witnesses would appear that day. The government had agreed that this case deserved a public prosecutor. And so while Pulling and Willis continued to attend the examination on behalf of Jane’s family, they now ceded active prosecution to Harry Poland, acting on behalf of the Treasury. Poland was one of London’s best-known prosecutors. He had an unmatched knowledge of criminal law, and his reputation for doggedness and patience in the courtroom later earned him the epithet “the sleuth-hound of the Treasury.” But since he had just that morning taken on the case, he had no intention of rushing uninformed into his examination of witnesses as John Lenton Pulling had done. Instead, he asked the magistrate for an immediate remand.

  At this, Henry Pook again exploded. “Ignorant constables,” he fulminated, were stigmatizing Edmund Pook in jailing him for nothing—nothing besides their own suspicions and a mass of hearsay, “the tittle-tattle of one woman to another.” If Poland did not have witnesses to call, Henry Pook did—witnesses, Henry Pook claimed, who would not only establish Edmund Pook’s innocence, but would set the police on the track of the actual murderer.

  The magistrate disregarded his outburst. Refusing to hear defense witnesses until the prosecution had made its case, Daniel Maude remanded Pook to Maidstone for another week. Henry Pook begged Maude in that case to order Superintendent Griffin to “not be running about in other directions merely to fix the guilt on this young man” and instead to investigate the claim of a witness who had come to him with knowledge about the purchaser of the murder weapon. While Henry Pook did not elaborate upon this in court, he later shared with police his knowledge of a man named Ormond Yearsley, who had come to the solicitor claiming that he had been at the ironmonger’s shop on the evening of Friday, April 21, and ha
d seen the man who bought the hammer that evening. That man was older than Edmund, between twenty-six and thirty-four; he had light hair; he was dressed as a laborer. Henry Pook had taken Yearsley to see Edmund in custody; Yearsley was positive that Pook was not the man he had seen in the shop that night. Yearsley’s description of the man who purchased the hammer, Henry Pook was sure, would lead the police to Jane Clouson’s actual murderer.

  Harry Poland assured Henry Pook that the Treasury would pay careful attention to any information the solicitor could give them. And with that, Edmund Pook was removed from the courtroom to again endure the ordeal of transit to Maidstone.

  As the courtroom emptied, Henry Pook introduced to Superintendent Griffin a man named Henry Humphreys. Humphreys had worked as a compositor for Ebenezer Pook, but had left three months before. He knew all about the locket that Sergeant Haynes had removed from the comatose girl. With some embarrassment he confessed to Griffin that it was he, and not Edmund Pook, who had bought that locket from a local Greenwich silversmith, and he who had given the locket to Jane Clouson.

  Griffin could not but be surprised. Henry Humphreys was thirty years old and married; he hardly seemed the type to be proffering tokens of affection to a sixteen-year-old girl. Griffin immediately ordered Sergeant Haynes to accompany Humphreys to the silversmith’s shop. There, the daughter of the proprietor immediately recognized Humphreys as the one to whom she had sold the locket.

  This revelation about the little locket quickly made its way to the newspapers and amounted to a serious setback for the police theory and the prosecution’s case. It hinted at another possible suspect for Jane’s murder—although neither police nor prosecution nor defense seriously considered that Humphreys killed Jane Clouson. More than this, it raised serious questions about what Henry Pook had dismissed as “tittle-tattle”: all that witnesses professed Jane had told them. Charlotte had sworn that Jane had told her Edmund Pook had given her that locket. Either Charlotte had misunderstood what Jane had said to her or Jane had lied to her cousin. In either case, Henry Humphreys’s revelation laid bare the shortcomings of hearsay evidence. “Thus,” reported one newspaper, “one link of the supposed chain of evidence against the person now in custody appears to be broken.”

  As Henry Pook’s behavior at Blackheath Road police station demonstrated, hostility between him and the police had grown to a dangerous and debilitating intensity. To his credit, the solicitor attempted to diffuse that hostility, inviting Superintendent Griffin to come to Tudor House the next day to discuss the case. To his credit, James Griffin accepted. They met late at night, between ten and midnight—a time suggesting that their get-together was more social than professional, befitting the fact that the two men were neighbors and long-standing acquaintances, if not exactly friends. Henry Pook sat James Griffin down and offered him a glass of whiskey and water. The two conversed about the witnesses for the defense that Henry Pook had been prevented from introducing. Griffin had another whiskey and water and left Tudor House in a cab at two in the morning.

  If either man parted under the impression that the two had reached a new accord, he would be fully disabused of it the next day.

  *

  On Monday, May 8, at three o’clock and under black, threatening skies, the coffin holding Jane Clouson’s body was carried from the Trotts’ parlor to a horse-drawn hearse. Behind that hearse at least eight mourning coaches waited to carry Jane’s friends and family on the slow ride two miles south to the cemetery outside the village of Brockley. In its opulence this cortège was an unprecedented sight on run-down Old King Street, even by mid-Victorian standards, when magnificent funerals were the norm even among the working class, who, like everyone else at the time, believed that a respectable life demanded a visibly respectable final act. Even those of slight means managed to produce the pittance each week for “club” money for burial insurance—generally called “life insurance” at the time—to give them enough to support a decent ceremony. There is no record of the teenage Jane making such payments, and even if she had, any benefit she might have obtained in that way could hardly have supported the trappings now on display. That the family and friends filling up the eight mourning coaches could alone afford this expense is doubtful as well, and again suggests that Jane’s community supported her memory with their pennies as well as their pity.

  Thousands lined the route through Deptford, many of them practicing the workingman’s ritual of Saint Monday and skipping work altogether in order to see Jane buried. Behind them, many of the shops had been shuttered against the crowds; the others, with the exception of the public houses, did little business. Policemen took up positions at intervals to control the crowds, and four mounted offers led the cortège to ensure a clear passage. As the procession made its way to the end of the High Street, the rain began to fall in torrents. But the thousands remained in place.

  As they entered the cemetery, where thousands more waited chilled and dripping, the storm reached its thunderous climax. The fortunate—women and children, mostly—found shelter in the tiny and over-packed chapel, into which eight men bore Jane’s coffin with difficulty. Those organizing the funeral had planned a poignant and significant ceremony at this point: eight women—eight girls—were to bear Jane’s pall into and out of the chapel. Each was to wear a black hood and a black apron: each, in other words, was to present herself as a maid-of-all-work in mourning. Having peers of the deceased hold the pall was the custom for Victorian funerals. But having servants hold the pall of a fellow servant was a striking variation on that theme, one intended to pronounce forcefully that Jane Clouson’s life had had meaning and value not in spite of her humble status, but because of it.*6 The deluge, however, put an end to this plan. The plan had been well publicized and the multitude, anticipating the show, was disappointed; many of them fled the cemetery at this point to seek shelter.

  Jane had been a Baptist; a Baptist deacon performed a service “of an unusually solemn and impressive nature.” Then, the eight men carried the coffin and pall down a bouquet-strewn path to a grave site—donated by the authorities of Deptford—on the nonconformist side of the cemetery. Reportedly, it was near the graves of her mother and her elder sister, Sarah, and perhaps near that of a brother who had died as an infant. After a few more words from the deacon and many more bouquets heaped upon the coffin, the remnants of the crowd dispersed, many of them to local public houses, the newspapers reported. And Jane was buried.

  A good two hundred of these spectators regrouped later in the evening to enact a very different ceremony, one that provided an outlet for the rage against the man they were certain had killed Jane Clouson. They converged on London Street, outside the Pooks’ shop and home, and shouted obscene abuse at Edmund’s family. Ebenezer Pook, genuinely afraid for his family’s safety, sent off a note to Blackheath Road police station, begging for police protection. That plea, as far as he could tell, had no effect. And so he set out for the station himself, slipping past the crowd and stopping on the way at Tudor House, where he frantically told Henry Pook that he would “either go mad or do mischief to somebody.” Henry Pook hurried with Ebenezer to the station and there spoke with the sergeant on duty, Sergeant Lucas, whom they found to be maddeningly unruffled by the situation: he had already sent an officer to the scene, he told the two Pooks. Henry Pook again exploded. Raising his fist menacingly, he shouted that Lucas was a rogue, a liar, and—repeating a rumor he had heard—a police snitch and spy. A single officer? Henry Pook cried: Lucas should have sent half a dozen, at least! Lucas tried to conciliate the solicitor. He had sent two more men already, he told him; now he would send another four. Henry Pook, not assuaged, followed the sergeant into the yard, continued to abuse him, and then, fists clenched, rushed upon him. Ebenezer Pook stepped between the two, pulled the solicitor away, and shoved him into a cab.

  And for the second time in three days, Henry Pook was summoned to appear before a magistrate for his behavior.

  *

 
At Guy’s Hospital when the inquest resumed three days later, Deputy Coroner William John Payne considered himself greatly put upon and was disposed to vent his annoyance to his jury. He had two reasons for his frustration. Harry Poland and the Treasury, for one thing, had left him in the lurch, refusing or neglecting to show up at Guy’s Hospital to prosecute. “I understand,” Payne complained, “that the Treasury was about to take this case up, but they appear to have left us quite alone, to do the best we can.” For the last time, then, William Willis prosecuted on behalf of Jane’s family.

  More than this, the police had managed to render much of the evidence presented that day useless, in Payne’s opinion. The police had, since the inquest jury had last sat, found three witnesses who might be able to place Edmund Pook at Kidbrooke Lane on the night of the murder. The first, William Cronk, a gas fitter from Blackheath, had been walking home on Kidbrooke Lane before nine o’clock when, peering through a gap in the hedge not more than twenty yards from where Jane’s body was later found, he saw a young man and young woman, apparently in the midst of an argument. He had watched the two for some time—mostly seeing their backs. The woman, he claimed, said, “let me go, let me go” or perhaps “let us go, let us go,” and then the man thrust his arm about her and propelled her, “half consentingly,” south in the direction of Eltham. Then William Norton and Louisa Putman testified. Norton served as coachman to a Blackheath family, and Putman a maid-of-all-work in an Eltham public house. Though the two were barely acquainted, they were that evening walking out upon Kidbrooke’s lover’s lane. Between eight-thirty and nine, a few minutes after they had walked past a young couple, and about a hundred yards south of the brook, they heard a woman screaming. Minutes later, they saw through a gap in the hedge a man, out of breath and wearing a dark coat, running past them up the lane, in the direction of Morden College. Neither had a good look at the man’s face, although Norton described him as clean shaven and “of about my stamp.” And neither was particularly alarmed by the woman’s screams, thinking they were playful cries or perhaps exclamations of sexual pleasure. “I thought it was some young man that had got down with some young woman there,” William Norton stated. Louisa Putman elaborated: “You know that when you have got a young girl out with you she often screams.”