While France dominated the headlines, the papers of the time were filled as well with an unceasing succession of reports that documented London’s perpetual domestic chaos. Among the daily revelations of murder and attempted murder—an inordinate number of these, incidentally, involving hammers as the weapon of choice—and of assault, robbery, counterfeiting, fraud, and forgery, three cases besides Pook’s stood out. Two were criminal cases that were working their way to the Old Bailey, where they would be tried simultaneously with Pook’s case; the third was a civil case fought in Westminster—a case that would become a criminal one, and had already become the most sensational case of all in that age of sensation.
The defendant in the first criminal case, fifteen-year-old Agnes Norman, first entered public consciousness on April 13 when she shyly testified at an inquest in Newington Butts investigating the death of an infant, Jessie Beer. Agnes had been the sole servant to the Beer family; Jessie Beer had died when in her care. The girl calmly declared herself baffled by the infant’s death: she had always treated the child kindly, she told the coroner.
Norman was a young, quiet, polite, hardworking and low-paid South London servant: in all those respects, she was Jane Clouson’s double. But as the case proceeded from inquest and into police court, the growing mass of evidence suggested that Agnes Norman was actually Jane’s moral antithesis. Jane, of course, was the victim—and, according to the theory of the police, the victim of the predatory son of her employer. Clouson personified the exploitive power of her masters played out to its darkest extreme. Her experience embodied the nightmare of working-class parents who relinquished their daughters to the unpredictable and potentially dangerous power of middle-class employers. Agnes Norman, on the other hand, embodied the corresponding nightmare for middle-class parents who entrusted the lives of their children to unpredictable and potentially dangerous care of servants—generally young, and generally, in their quick comings and quick goings, little more than strangers among them. Jane Clouson found death in her service. But Agnes Norman, by all appearances, brought death to hers.
Having returned home to find one of his children dead in her bed, and another shrieking in horror, their father, John William Beer, was instantly suspicious of his newly engaged servant. He reported the death to the Lambeth police, and managed to convince them to assign one of their detectives, Sergeant Henry Mullard, to investigate Agnes Norman’s past. And what Mullard quickly pieced together about the young servant beggared belief. Either Norman was the victim of the cruelest coincidence imaginable or she was a cold-blooded and relentless killer.
Mullard revealed what he had learned at the inquest. But he had no specific evidence to prove that Norman had caused the death of Jessie Jane Beer. Neither did any of the several witnesses the Beers had brought to testify to Norman’s dark past: the coroner would not let any of them speak, for they had nothing relevant to say about Jessie Jane Beer. And the surgeon who had conducted the post-mortem on the infant could not conclude for certain that she had been murdered. Jessie Jane Beer’s death was ruled an accident, and Agnes Norman was free. John William Beer angrily vowed to pursue the case further. He was as good as his word; Scotland Yard was soon on the case. On April 28, as Jane Clouson lay comatose at Guy’s Hospital, a detective arrested Norman for Beer’s murder. There followed a month of examinations at Lambeth Police Court before Magistrate Cuthbert Ellison, one sensational revelation following another. By the second examination, the Treasury, and sleuth-hound Harry Poland, took charge of the case. At every appearance Agnes Norman stood absolutely indifferent, perhaps bored, certainly a bit confused.
Agnes Norman obtained her first place in Camberwell in January 1869, as nursemaid to Elizabeth and Ralph Milner’s four children: sixteen-month-old Tommy, two-and-a-half-year-old Minnie, six-year-old Arthur, and eight-year-old Ralph. Agnes was then herself a child—no more than twelve or thirteen, though her mother had claimed she was fifteen to get her the place. Mrs. Milner worked away from home while Agnes remained alone with the children. Less than a month after she had arrived, Agnes fetched a neighbor; something was wrong with the baby. The neighbor found Tommy Milner on a bed, undressed, dead—and cold. There was an inquest; the jury ruled Tommy Milner’s death natural. Two weeks later, Agnes fetched the same neighbor to see young Minnie—like Tommy, dead, on the same bed, in the same position. This time there was no inquest. After that Elizabeth Milner, with either superhuman trust or pathetic naïveté, continued to leave her two surviving children in Agnes Norman’s care. Ten days after Minnie’s death the Milners returned home to find their son Arthur insensible, but alive. When Arthur finally awoke the next day, he revealed to his mother what he knew about his younger sister’s death. Agnes, he said, had sent him away to buy a halfpenny sweet; while he was gone, Agnes crammed Minnie into an already stuffed wardrobe. Arthur returned to witness Agnes extricate the child: her eyes, he said, were fixed and she was incapable of sitting. Agnes put her to bed. After dinner, Arthur went with Agnes to look at the girl. Agnes felt her forehead. “Minnie is dead,” Agnes said to Arthur. And then she laughed. Learning of this, the Milners could not but suspect Norman of horrendous abuse, if not of outright murder. But they had little proof, nothing beyond the word of a six-year-old. And so Elizabeth Milner did all she thought she could do, under the circumstances: she lectured Agnes Norman sternly, warning her never to work with children again. And then she dismissed her—without a character reference.
A year later, in April 1870, Agnes Norman obtained—without a reference—a place in nearby Brixton, as a maid and nursemaid to Mrs. Euphemia Gardner and her fifteen-month-old son, James Alexander. Almost immediately, the Gardners’ considerable menagerie of pets began to die: two cats, a favorite dog, a parrot, six or eight other birds, a dozen goldfish. And then, ten days after she arrived, another child died in her care: not James Gardner, but an unlucky infant by the name of John Stuart Taylor, who had been left with the girl while his mother visited with Mrs. Gardner. Again, there was an inquest; again, the jury ruled the death natural.
Less than three weeks after that, Mrs. Gardner discovered her own son dead in his bed.
Although all life in her household but her own had been extinguished in less than a month, Euphemia Gardner harbored no suspicion whatever against Agnes Norman. Still, she was forced to let the girl go: death had rendered her place redundant. Mrs. Gardner did her best to ensure that Agnes Norman would quickly find another place by giving her a good reference, noting her “sobriety and civility.” By July Agnes had found a place as a maid-of-all-work for the Brown family in Newington. Again, the pets quickly began to die: the cat, the canary, the linnet, the goldfish. One parrot miraculously survived, though with injuries about the throat. The Browns apparently had no children, but a nephew, ten-year-old Charles Parfitt, had the misfortune to visit them on school holiday that August. One morning, the boy awoke to find Agnes Norman kneeling upon him, one of her hands clamped over his mouth and the other gripping his throat. He managed to make a noise; Norman hopped off of him and offered him a sweet if he didn’t cry—and if he didn’t tell. He told, and his aunt and uncle believed him. Despite their suspicions about the girl, however, Agnes remained with them for several days, until her resentment at the Browns’ distrust of her became intolerable and she ran away.
Eight months later, on April 4, 1871, again with no character reference, but with the recommendation of a neighbor’s servant-girl, the Beers engaged Norman for three shillings a week. Just three days later baby Jessie died. And before the inquest could take place, a cat and a canary followed. They would be the last creatures to die under her care: in the Beers Agnes Norman had finally come across a family who would not let her walk away, and who put their trust in the police and not the coroner.
Logically, the evidence against Agnes Norman was compelling. Even given the high rate of childhood mortality at the time, when nearly 30 percent of all English children never lived to see their tenth birthday, the astronomical death
toll in this case with only one obvious common factor—Agnes Norman’s presence—was simply too great to attribute to the workings of nature. Legally, however, the evidence against Agnes Norman was problematic, much of it quite probably inadmissible in court. Most of the deaths occurred without a witness. Only six-year-old Arthur Milner had seen Agnes—apparently—committing murder, and only ten-year-old Charles Parfitt witnessed her attempting to take a life (his own). And whether the evidence of one murder might be introduced to prove a completely different murder was, at best, an open question. The coroner at the inquest upon Jessie Jane Beer was adamant: it could not. When the infant’s father attempted to introduce witnesses to detail the girl’s corpse-strewn history, the coroner cut him off: “Have you witnesses to say she murdered your child?” he asked. Beer did not; none of his witnesses were allowed to testify. Magistrate Ellison, on the other hand, deemed the girl’s history fully admissible, against the vehement protest of her counsel. And what Ellison learned was more than enough for him to commit the girl for trial at the Old Bailey. And so, one day after Edmund Pook entered Newgate, the perpetually perplexed girl found herself further perplexed to be in that prison. A week later, when the recorder of London, Russell Gurney, presented the case to the grand jury, he made it clear that the girl’s history could not be admitted to prove a single instance of murder. “According to the laws of England,” he told the jury, “every charge must rest upon the specific evidence relating to it,” and further noted that very little specific evidence directly connected the girl with these deaths. The grand jury, obviously more impressed than the recorder by the transcripts of the girl’s examinations, ignored his argument altogether and returned five true bills against her: four for murder*6 and the fifth for the attempted murder of Charles Parfitt.
Agnes Norman’s trial, like Edmund Pook’s, was then delayed until the July sessions. And so for another month the girl waited, a cypher in Newgate. The public might have heard enough about her case to be at least deeply suspicious that the girl was a prolific killer, but why she killed remained an utter mystery. Whether she harbored a motiveless malignity against her employers, or whether she was lashing out against her inescapable life of drudgery, was a question the courts could not answer, and the eerily placid girl would not. She might early on have offered the very slightest clue to her motivation, however, to an anguished Elizabeth Milner. At the moment when, two of her children already dead, Milner discovered her son Arthur comatose, she had asked Agnes Norman whether she liked children.
“No, not much,” the girl calmly replied.
*
As the examinations of both Edmund Pook and Agnes Norman were nearing their close, another killing gripped public attention—this one not south of the Thames, but in the heart of the metropolis, and at the fringe of high society in a situation, according to the Times, “too well known to a large part of the London world, too little known to the rest.” Just before midnight on May 24 PC Charles Futerall was called by a doctor to 23 Newton Road, in Bayswater, where in the dining room he found the well-dressed corpse of Frederick Graves Moon lying faceup in a sea of blood. Moon had been stabbed in the side; a seven-inch poultry-carving knife lay beside him in a fireplace grate. Futerall asked the doctor beside him who had done this. “The person was in the house,” the doctor replied. In the next room Futerall found a woman on the sofa, wildly excited and sobbing, her hair and clothing disheveled, her jacket, shirt, and skirt sodden bloody. Futerall immediately told her to consider herself under arrest. The woman gave her name as Flora Davy. She was thirty-eight years old, tall, stout, and muscular. She had been alone in the dining room with Moon when he had been stabbed; she admitted to several witnesses that they had scuffled. More than once she had stated that she thought she had done it.
It was obvious from the start that Frederick Moon had died during an altercation with Flora Davy. Nonetheless, the newspapers agreed that the Bayswater affair was a mystery—a mystery that centered upon Davy’s intent at the moment of the stabbing. Was the killing outright murder, or manslaughter, or neither? Had Davy acted with cold premeditation; had Frederick Moon provoked her into a hot-blooded attack? Had she, rather, acted in self-defense—or had Moon possibly died as the result of a horrible accident? By the next morning, Flora Davy had procured the services of George Lewis, solicitor to many of London’s elite—including the Prince of Wales. A soft-spoken, genial man outside the courtroom, Lewis was a tenacious battler within, and a particularly powerful cross-examiner. He appeared at Marylebone Police Court in command of the case, and from the start promoted the theory about Moon’s death that best served his client: that Flora Davy had no reason to stab Frederick Moon—that indeed, she had every reason not to stab him—and that it was more than possible that he had died by accident, by managing somehow to fall upon the knife.
A man by the name of Captain Daniel Bishop Davy appeared in court that day and, with Lewis’s help, was able to post Mrs. Davy’s bail. Flora Davy returned to her home in Bayswater—the home, it turned out, that Captain Davy owned. The next day, however, at the command of the indignant magistrate, John Mansfield, the police rearrested her and hauled her back to his court. Mansfield declared he had been “grossly deceived”: he had learned that Captain Davy was not Mrs. Davy’s husband—that indeed, Mrs. Davy was not actually Mrs. Davy. Nor was she married to Frederick Moon. Her actual name was Hannah Newington; she had married a man named William Newington a dozen years before. Soon afterward he abandoned her and absconded to Australia. He had done so because of money problems, Davy later declared; actually, he had shunned her because she had become passionately attracted to Frederick Graves Moon, a wealthy gentleman-brewer and the son of a former Lord Mayor of London. Her husband gone, Hannah Newington came to an arrangement with Moon: he would keep and protect her as his mistress; she would retain the accoutrements of high society she had enjoyed with her marriage—while forever removing herself from that society. “I forfeited husband and character,” she lamented before the magistrate, “in trying to add to his happiness.” For a dozen years Flora Davy had held to this agreement with Frederick Moon; but at least three years before this she had placed herself under the protection of Captain Davy, as well, and since then she had served as the mistress to two masters, each supporting her generously. Apparently, neither man quite knew the extent of the involvement of the other in Flora Davy’s life.
The true fascination of the case, as it played itself out in newspaper reports of the inquest and the police examinations that May and June, lay less in Frederick Moon’s death and more in his life—or, to be more specific, in the luxurious but secret life of a metropolitan gentleman of pleasure and of the woman he kept; lives spent, as the Times put it, in “a sort of quicksand of social confusion and moral corruption.” By outward appearance a moderately wealthy lady, Flora Davy was, in a sense, a servant—but one occupying a different sphere altogether than Jane Clouson or Agnes Norman. Testimony revealed the fine trappings of her Bayswater villa: the billiard table, the fine cut-glass decanters holding finer wines and brandy; the cigars for the gentlemen callers; the carved sideboard and the overstuffed furniture. And there were the revelations of a life both privileged and degraded: the horses she kept and the afternoons at the local riding school; the several society doctors—the future royal physician William Gull among them—who treated her maladies; the journeys she made with her “Fred,” when, for a time, she could pretend to be “Mrs. Moon.” But also there were the aliases she adopted to keep up her various pretenses (the Countess, Miss De Morne, Madame De Morne, Mrs. Frances S. Canning). Also there was her dubious and constant companion, Mrs. Toynbee—long separated from Mr. Toynbee—who swore she served Davy as a friend and not a hireling, but who clearly profited as well from Mr. Moon’s largesse, and who swore before the magistrate, hesitantly, that she knew Mrs. Davy shared her bed with two men. And also there were the rather mysterious young ladies who were in her house to divert Mrs. Davy on the night Mr. Moon was stabbed, �
�found there no one knows how or why,” according to the Times. (Actually, they were the daughter and niece of a woman with whom Flora Davy had once lodged, the niece, incidentally and coincidentally, a Pook.) These young ladies, it became clear, kept up a not quite respectable flirtation with some of the gentlemen visitors to the house—those friends of Mr. Moon who were privy to his secret life.
That secret life followed a trajectory to disaster—the inevitable trajectory, to anyone steeped in Victorian morality. Flora Davy was volatile and imperious, according to her servants; a dipsomaniac, according to her doctors—one of whom prescribed her champagne to improve her temperance. Captain Davy, for whatever reason, began to spend less and less time at 23 Newton Road; Frederick Moon too, according to his friends, was tiring of his demanding “Countess” and had vowed to pay her off and have done with her. Flora Davy, more and more, chafed at the insults she endured from Moon; soon before he was killed she had made the mistake of referring to herself as Moon’s wife. “No, you are not,” Moon snapped at her, “and what is more, you never will be as long as I live.” In reply, she had threatened to kill him one day. And then erupted the final argument. The afternoon before the stabbing Flora Davy had ignored Moon’s request to dine with him, and that evening Moon came to the house in a dark mood. He and Flora ate alone while Mrs. Toynbee and the young women entertained themselves in the billiard room, and he became querulous. He baited her with a foul remark about Mrs. Davy’s mysterious and absent daughter, and when she protested, he took up a decanter and threatened to wallop her if she did not hold her tongue. She leapt up and grabbed the poultry knife—in self-defense, she claimed—and they rushed together. They scuffled and he fell, the knife having entered his side to the hilt. She screamed, desperately attempted to revive the man, sent the servants and the young ladies out to fetch doctors. The police arrived and arrested her. “He was my very all,” Flora Davy sobbed on June 15, at the end of her last examination, protesting her innocence. “Without him all is a blank to me.” But by then a coroner’s jury had already bound her over for trial, and the magistrate could only concur with them. Whether she should be tried for manslaughter or murder Mansfield left for the grand jury to decide. That evening Davy joined Edmund Pook and Agnes Norman at Newgate. The three would be tried simultaneously during the July sessions, in the three separate courtrooms of the Old Bailey.
Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane Page 12