by P. D. James
But if Williams were innocent, why should he kill himself? Three possible reasons can be put forward. He might have decided that, with the identification of the maul, the evidence against him was so strong, and the local prejudice so intense, that he had no hope of escaping the gallows, or a public lynching, and that it was now a choice between execution before a violent and hostile mob or a more merciful death by his own hand. He might have been cursed with a personality given to sudden and irrational fits of despair and in the lonely small hours of the night, fettered and friendless, felt an irresistible urge to put an end to an unsuccessful and now discredited life. He was obviously a volatile and emotional young man; he may also have been unstable. Lastly, he may have been involved, although innocently, with the murderers, perhaps by providing them with information for which they paid, and have been overcome by remorse.
None of these reasons appeals to common sense. It was too early for Williams to give up hope. He hadn’t even been committed for trial. There was still a good chance that he could convince a jury of his innocence, that someone would come forward who could confirm his alibi, or that the guilty would be arrested. The time for suicide is when all rational hope has faded. It is equally difficult to believe that he gave way to despair. He had seemed perfectly easy to the turnkey and to his fellow prisoners. At no time is he described as depressed or unhopeful. And it is equally difficult to see why he should kill himself out of remorse unless he were an active participant in the murders. If he had any suspicion who was responsible or had helped them, however unwittingly, he had only to turn King’s evidence and tell all he knew, and he would almost certainly go free.
It was vital to the murderer to ensure Williams’s death, whether or not he had been an accomplice, willing or unwilling. If Williams were guilty, it was highly unlikely that he would go to the gallows without making a confession implicating his accomplices. All the practised art of Dr Ford would have been directed to that end. The Ordinary would have held out the certainty of everlasting fire for the wilful and obdurate, and the hope of salvation for the penitent sinner. And how best to demonstrate penitence than by making a good and full confession? A man would have a strong motive for silence only if he were indeed innocent; were disposed to appear so, no matter what the risk to his immortal soul, if only to cheat the Ordinary of the satisfaction of a full confession; or had made up his mind to sacrifice his hope of salvation to protect his friends. It is unlikely that Williams was capable of the last sacrifice. He was a man who made no close friends, and these crimes, in their sordidness and brutality, had no tinge of nobility. We can be sure that if Williams were indeed guilty and were condemned, he would talk, and it would be vital to prevent him.
His death was equally important to the murderer if he were innocent. He hadn’t yet been tried and the evidence was circumstantial and ambiguous. At any moment some woman from the West End might appear to provide an alibi, some fresh discovery be made. Once Williams was dead and apparently by his own hand, the police activity would die down, the terrified mob would be satisfied and his guilt would be accepted as proved. A violent and ruthless man who had already killed seven people would be unlikely to hesitate over a final and necessary murder. The victim was accessible, fettered and defenceless. The gaoler was underpaid and could be bribed. The wage of a turnkey was one guinea a week and bribes were so common as to be almost regarded as a perquisite of the job. There must have been at least one man whose safety depended on Williams dying, and dying soon.
Williams’s suicide was so convenient for his accomplices, if any, and so unexpected, that it was bound to excite comment at the time. The magistrates and the mob might prefer to take it at its face value as evidence of guilt: but there is a passage in The Times of 30 December which, without overtly suggesting that Williams died other than by his own hand, nevertheless hints strongly that the suicide was more mysterious than it at first appeared:
The suicide of the wretched Williams is an event, which is, certainly, to be regretted. If he was the murderer, or one of the murderers, it is a matter of lamentation that this additional act of desperation should deprive public justice of the means of proving his crime and inflicting the punishment which the laws of the country award for such atrocious offenders. It is to be regretted in another point of view: it is possible, we hope barely possible, that by self-murder he has saved himself from public execution; and may, if other clues are not discovered, save for the present whatever accomplice or accomplices he may have had in his bloody deeds. No doubt every mode of enquiry will be pursued by the magistrates and the inhabitants of the quarter where these shocking crimes have been perpetrated to get the best information possible on the subject; but in the consternation natural upon such atrocities some important particulars may slip the thoughts of the most active. We hope the lodgings of every person in the slightest degree acquainted with the self-murderer, or any of those who are or who may be suspected, will be searched with a scrutinizing assiduity. Activity of this sort now becomes the more necessary; for surely it would be a species of affront to British police and British law if such atrocities were to pass without the detection of the guilty.
A great deal, we understand, has been said conveying direct or indirect reflections on Atkins, the keeper of Coldbath Fields Prison; but it does not appear that such reflections are well founded. With regard to him personally we before mentioned that his health was so bad that his medical advisers would not permit him to attend the Inquest. As to the treatment of the prisoner in the jail, the magistrates desired him to be kept by himself, and he was accordingly put into a solitary cell for reexamination. There were three others confined in the prison on charge of suspicion for the same offence. An iron bar crosses every cell in the jail and serves the prisoners to hang their clothes upon, and their beds too when the floors are cleaned. An unfounded report has gone out that he was refused pen and ink, and that thereby his confession was prevented. We understand that so far from this being the fact, he was told that he might come down to the office in the prison and write what he pleased. After the first day when he went to the prison he expressed no sort of wish for pen, ink or paper.
Why should the Keeper of the Prison be criticised? The presumption is because an important prisoner in his care was enabled to kill himself. This is a perfectly legitimate criticism and it is strange that The Times’ correspondent should attempt to exonerate the unfortunate Atkins. The inference is that the ‘direct or indirect reflections’ on the prison-keeper relate to something worse than his carelessness in not checking that his prisoner had no means of doing away with himself. There is a suggestion in the passage that there was something suspicious about Williams’s death, and that it was a cause of rumour and concern. The passage specifically refutes the rumour current at the time that Williams asked for pen and paper before he died. Williams asked for nothing. Is it reasonable to suppose that a man who was planning to kill himself and had made early preparation for the act by secreting away the half loop of iron, should not wish to explain his act? If he were guilty, and acting out of remorse, he would wish to clear his conscience. If he had been left to his fate by confederates, he would hardly die without naming them. If he were anxious to accept all the blame and to ensure the safety of his friends (which doesn’t sound like Williams) he would be likely to have left a note stating that he and he alone was responsible for the murders. But he left no word. He felt no remorse. He displayed no anxiety. He was perfectly comfortable the day before he died ‘because he knew that no ill could happen to him’. The fact that Williams had managed to procure the half loop of iron, if true, is proof of nothing except the natural desire of a fighting man in a perilous situation to avail himself of any weapon which came to hand. But Williams did not make use of the iron. He did not even make a half-hearted attempt at suicide by that means, although the hoop was ‘sufficiently sharp to wound him mortally’.
There are other suspicious circumstances surrounding that notorious suicide in Coldbath Fields
Prison. It was alleged that Williams hanged himself from an iron bar, six feet two inches from the ground. He himself was about five feet nine inches tall. Presumably then he stood on his bed to accomplish the deed. If he repented of his action as the handkerchief tightened about his neck and he began to experience the first horrors of strangulation, he could surely grasp the bar with his hands or feel with his feet for the edge of the bed. Neither of these actions would be possible if he died quickly, perhaps of vagal inhibition. But there is a suggestion that he did not die quickly. The Morning Post of 28 December states, ‘His eyes and mouth were open and the state of his body clearly demonstrated that he had struggled very hard’. This is the only reference in the contemporary reports to a death struggle, but if true it provides one of the strongest arguments against suicide. If Williams did indeed struggle very hard why was it not possible for him to save himself? Professor Simpson advises that it is not uncommon for a suicide to bear marks of injury, if, in the final convulsions which precede death, the body is dashed against a wall. But Williams is alleged to have hanged himself from a bar which ran across his cell. There is no suggestion that the evidence of a hard struggle arose from this type of injury.
And there is other evidence. A prisoner in an adjacent cell heard the violent shaking of chains about three o’clock in the morning. Was this Williams shaking his fetters in anger and frustration as prisoners sometimes did? Or was he struggling violently with someone stronger than himself, someone who held a hand over his mouth to stifle his cries while twisting a handkerchief around his neck? Or were there two men, one to silence and to throttle, the other to hold Williams’s arms with such force that the post mortem staining showed them as blue from the elbows down? One must be careful not to read too much into this last piece of evidence. After death by hanging the legs and arms commonly show such staining, and there is now no way of knowing whether pressure applied immediately before death was to any degree responsible. There is nothing in the scant forensic medical evidence available to support the theory that Williams was murdered; equally, as Professor Simpson agrees, there is nothing to refute it. If a turnkey had been bribed to admit the murderers he would subsequently have kept silent. It was so much easier, and for him so much safer, to believe that Williams had killed himself. But there may well have been rumours. Was Sylvester Driscoll’s frenzied panic at being lodged in the next cell no more than superstitious dread? Why did Graham think it necessary to order a man to sit up and watch over his prisoners Hart and Ablass, fettered as they were? Was it because Atkins, the prison-keeper, guessed that there was something very wrong about this particular suicide that he was too ill to attend the inquest?
No single feature of this mysterious case is stranger than the extraordinary abruptness with which the investigation ended. Few who had studied the evidence intelligently could possibly have believed that only one murderer was involved in both crimes, or could have found the case against John Williams either convincing or conclusive. The Prime Minister himself in the House of Commons expressed doubts as to whether Williams could have acted unaided. The exhibits were sent to Bow Street, and Aaron Graham was instructed by Ryder to continue his investigation. Two suspects, Ablass and Hart, were detained on suspicion; the Home Secretary defended his agent when Graham’s detention of Ablass was criticised in the House. The preliminary evidence against both men was certainly stronger than that brought against Williams. Yet neither was committed for trial. Both were quietly released without either explanation or excuse. The inference is plain. The investigation ended, not because the case was solved, but because someone willed that it should end.
It is not suggested that the Home Secretary or the magistrates were either corrupt or indifferent, or that they conspired to suppress evidence. But it is suggested that they lost interest so suddenly and so completely in the case as to suggest that they feared what further investigations might disclose. It would not be the first time that authority has subjugated private justice to the public good, and sometimes the victims have been living. But Williams was dead. No exertions of the magistrates, no public or private inquiry, no determination to seek out the truth in the interests of justice, could help him now. Any man of honour would hesitate to condemn and execute an innocent victim, however expedient it might be to satisfy the mob’s clamour for vengeance. But a dead victim, poor, friendless and with no known family, and one whose innocence was still only a matter of conjecture, of half-formed theories and unwelcome suspicions, could surely be left to rot in peace. It was as well not to give these theories and suspicions a name. The possibility that further inquiry might dredge up evidence that would cast doubt on Williams’s guilt, which might even exonerate him completely, must have terrified all those responsible for the conduct of the investigation. They had exposed Williams’s corpse to the ignominy reserved for convicted murderers and they had done so with the greatest possible publicity, and with the approval of the Home Secretary, who had subsequently been castigated for his compliance in the House of Commons. They were being criticised publicly and privately for incompetence; the whole future of the magistracy was in question. Their well-paid jobs were in jeopardy. The age was violent and it was imperative that there should be respect for law and for the guardians of order. Was this the time for the Home Secretary and magistrates to admit that the Ratcliffe Highway murders were still unsolved, to confess that Williams might even have been innocent, and that the suicide which was the strongest presumption of his guilt, might have been yet another murder, the murder of a fettered man in the custody of the law?
Probably no one expressed frankly either in writing or in speech what was in his mind, but there may well have been a consensus, a tacit agreement, that it was now expedient that the Ratcliffe Highway affair which had provided so much disturbance, had occupied so much public time and had jeopardised so many reputations, should be allowed to fade from the public mind. There was obviously no credit or glory to be gained in persevering with the inquiry. Aaron Graham must have long realised that this was no second Patch case. He was already being publicly rebuked in the House of Commons for holding Ablass without trial. His fellow magistrates must have been hinting that this unnecessary zeal was putting the whole judiciary in disrepute, and that the case, if obstinately pursued, could bring as much discredit to Graham as the Patch case had brought glory. And Graham was the agent of the Home Secretary. He must have entered the case at Ryder’s request; it would need only a hint from his master and the case would be dropped.
And there was another reason for closing the case. Harrison and Cuthperson were pressing for the payment of their reward monies so that they could go back to sea. The system for official rewards for information received was at that time crucial to criminal investigation, and depended – as indeed it does today – on the informant’s reliance that the promise would be honoured. If confidence broke down, the supply of information would dry up and the system of criminal investigation, already unorganised and inefficient, would collapse completely. And it was not only the sailors who were muttering about the delay. The Vermilloes must have been equally disgruntled. Soon, people in positions to make nuisances of themselves would begin to demand an explanation of this unusual reluctance on the part of the magistrates to reward their informants in a case of such importance. It was both easier and more judicious to pay out the money and let the local recipients go about their business and the sailors take their inconvenient knowledge back with them to sea.
Who then murdered the Marrs and Williamsons? There can be no doubt that both murders were the work of the same man, with or without an accomplice. Both displayed the same cruelty and ferocity, the same reckless disregard of danger. In both, one weapon was used which came from Peterson’s tool chest at the Pear Tree. In both cases a tall man was seen earlier in the evening loitering near the scene. In both, the weapon (other than the razor or knife) was abandoned at the scene. In both the murderer or murderers entered by the front door and locked it behind them. Both victims
were small but prosperous tradesmen. In both cases the killer or killers escaped through the back of the premises. In both cases the robbery, if that was the motive, was only partially completed, although no one could say with confidence what was stolen, as opposed to what was left, since no one remained alive in either household able to say how much cash had been in the house.
Despite the inadequacy of many of the records it is possible to deduce a great deal about the murderers, and to consider whom of the suspects best fits their descriptions. It is virtually certain that more than one man was involved in the murder of the Marrs. Two, possibly three, men were seen hanging about the shop earlier in the evening. There were two sets of footprints in the yard. The occupants of the house in Pennington Street adjoining that from which the murderers escaped, heard the sound of more than one pair of feet. Two weapons were used – the maul, and the sharp knife, or razor. In addition a ripping chisel was brought into the house and left unused on the counter of the shop, while the maul was abandoned in the upstairs bedroom. It is unlikely that only one person came armed with such an encumbering superfluity of weapons. The two sets of footprints were more suspect. It was winter, the yard would be muddy, and the searchers probably explored it in a crowd, keeping together for safety and comfort, and relying on the light of lanterns. The prints were never carefully scrutinised nor measured. Given the standard of police investigation at the time, it would have been highly unusual if they had been. But the evidence taken as a whole suggests that the murderer of the Marrs did not work single-handed.
It is less certain that the Williamsons’ murderer had an accomplice. Turner saw only one man, and he resembled the tall man in a long coat seen by Anderson and Phillips earlier in the evening to be hanging about the pub – the man whom Williamson went ‘to see about his business’. Turner was awake at the time of the crimes, he was close enough to the massacre to hear the cry of the servant girl and Williamson’s last despairing words, and he crept downstairs in time to see the murderer bending over one of his victims. But two weapons were used also in the Williamson murders, the chisel and the razor. The inference is that one man was the actual killer in both cases. On the first occasion he had an accomplice with him; on the second the accomplice, perhaps because he had lost his nerve, or had gained nothing from the first terrifying crime, had refused or had not been invited to take part. A pointer to the possibility that more than one man was concerned in the second crime is the evidence of Turner that he heard the creaking of the murderer’s shoes and that, in his opinion, they could not have had nails. The one set of prints in the yard were those of a nailed sole. But it seems unlikely that, if two men were concerned, they would have made their exits in opposite directions, particularly as this would have entailed one of them escaping into New Gravel Lane. It is equally unlikely that Turner would have failed to have sensed the presence of a second intruder. The man could not have ventured upstairs. He must, therefore, have been in the cellar with Williamson’s body, only a short flight from where Turner stood. It is unlikely that he moved so quietly that Turner could have been unaware of his presence, particularly in that small house and under circumstances so appalling that nerves and senses must have been highly tuned to every sound.