The cabbie lifted the slumped passenger’s head, rubbing his ears to rouse him. Slurring his words Fletcher muttered, ‘Go away, and leave me alone’, so the cab driver shut the door, climbed into his seat and drove towards the city centre. At 7.45pm the cab arrived back at the cathedral, where the cabman enlisted the help of a police constable, who suggested he drive his drunken passenger to Albert Street Police Station. But as Fletcher was now unconscious, the driver decided to take him straight to the Royal Infirmary, where the house surgeon, Mr John Hampden Barker, certified that John Fletcher was dead.
The following morning, the inhabitants of Manchester woke to the disturbing news that a respectable businessman had been found dead inside a cab in questionable circumstances. Already horrified by the recent gruesome murders in London attributed to Jack the Ripper, the public would follow the news with morbid fascination as the ‘Manchester Cab Mystery’ unfolded. The stakes were high, as confirmed in the Daily Telegraph:
The knowledge that atrocious criminals – such as the perpetrator of the Whitechapel butcheries, for instance – have succeeded in evading discovery for many months and are still at liberty (in all probability rubbing shoulders with well-conducted and law-abiding persons), is heavily fraught with mortification to the people of a civilised country.
Confidence in the abilities of the police was then at an all-time low and the general public was in danger of becoming hysterical. A quick resolution of this case was vital, but it was not yet clear whether John Fletcher had really been murdered.
There were no marks of violence on his body and, as he was a habitual gin-drinker, the initial report of the hospital surgeon postulated that he had died of alcohol poisoning. However, John Fletcher had no money or valuables on his person when he arrived at the infirmary, just two empty spectacles cases and a chequebook for the Southport Branch of the Manchester and Salford Bank, which suggested that he had been robbed. This puzzling mystery was placed in the capable hands of Detective Chief Inspector Caminada. Without a crime scene, Caminada began his investigation with the clues and facts that he already possessed, in an attempt to piece together the events that had led up to Fletcher’s death. His logical starting point was with the victim.
John Fletcher, 50, was the senior partner in a firm of paper manufacturers whose offices were located in the centre of the city. A wealthy man, he was well-known in commercial circles and especially at the Exchange. By 1889 he had retired from active business leaving the firm under the management of his nephew. Fletcher was also a justice of the peace and had recently been elected a member of Lancashire County Council.
On 26 February, after having packed a case for a stay in Knutsford until the weekend, Fletcher had left his house in the seaside town of Southport to travel into Manchester, where he spent the morning at the company’s offices in New Brown Street. At 1pm he took his leave to attend a mill auction at the Mitre Hotel, near the cathedral, where he was seen by several friends and colleagues. They later testified that he had been ‘somewhat under the influence of drink’, but was ‘in full possession of his faculties’. Fletcher made an appointment to meet one of them later that evening at Sinclair’s, a popular shellfish restaurant in Victoria Market. He never turned up. At 6pm a police officer spotted Fletcher at a market stall, accompanied by a young man.
PC William Jakeman described Fletcher’s companion as about 22 years old, 5 feet 2 inches tall, with a fresh, clean-shaven complexion. He was wearing a dark brown suit and a chimney-pot hat. The officer added that Fletcher’s own clothes had been ‘slightly disarranged’. Shortly after this sighting, the two men flagged down the cab, in which the businessman would meet his death less than an hour later. The cabman, Henry Goulding, confirmed that he had taken Fletcher and his acquaintance to the Three Arrows Public House and then to the cathedral to avoid the procession. His description of the suspect concurred with that of the policeman: the young man was about 5 feet 3 inches tall, clean shaven with a fresh face and wearing a brown suit, a watch guard and a felt hat.
During his initial enquiries Caminada discovered that Fletcher had been wearing a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles and an expensive gold watch worth £120. He had also been carrying a purse containing gold sovereigns, all of which had disappeared by the time his body reached the hospital. All the signs indicated that he had been murdered during an attempted robbery and a picture of the possible killer was starting to emerge, but there was still no medical evidence to corroborate Caminada’s theory.
Meanwhile, the first inquest into Fletcher’s death took place at the coroner’s court on 1 March. The landlady of the Three Arrows attested that she had spoken to the deceased in the company of a young man at about a quarter to seven on the night in question, but she could not give a description of either of them or confirm that Fletcher had been wearing a gold watch. As none of the other witnesses had any substantial information to add, the deputy coroner adjourned the inquest until 4 March while the city analyst, Charles Estcourt, examined the contents of the victim’s stomach. It was still possible that John Fletcher had died of natural causes but, convinced that a murder had taken place, Detective Caminada redoubled his efforts to find the killer.
The day after the inquest, The Blackburn Standard reported that the investigation into the missing companion of John Fletcher was ‘not very promising’, and that the police had ‘made very slight progress’. But behind the scenes, Chief Inspector Caminada had been working hard and had already ruled out the address in Stretford Road, to which the cabman had been taking the two men: it was a lock-up shop belonging to a tailor, who had no knowledge of the victim. Next he found the passerby who had alerted the cab driver to his absconding passenger. The witness had been standing by Lipton’s shop and as the cab drove past he had seen a hand reach out of the window to open the carriage door. He then watched, as the man dropped off the step and ran down a footpath towards All Saints Church on Oxford Road.
With the fresh information Caminada visited the neighbourhood to see if his prime suspect had left a trail. Sure enough he learned that a young man fitting the witnesses’ description had been seen in a beerhouse called the York Minster, near High Chatham Street. The man, wearing a dark brown check waistcoat with a valuable gold watch and chain, had ordered a glass of soda water and milk and then asked the landlord, James Holden, for some change, pulling out a handful of gold and silver coins. Saying in passing that he was a stranger in town from London, when he had finished his drink, around 8.25pm, he hailed another cab outside the tavern.
Confident that he was on the right track, Caminada located the second cabman who had driven the suspect away from the York Minster to another public house, the Locomotive Inn, on the other side of the cathedral. The cabman, William Coleman, gave details of the watch and guard that the young man had been wearing, which corresponded to the one belonging to John Fletcher. He reported that the suspect had ridden on the box with him and even asked to drive the horse, but after a while he began to shiver with the cold and climbed inside the carriage. In spite of these promising developments, Caminada still could not prove that a crime had been committed and even if it had, he did not have a shred of concrete evidence. He would need the brilliant powers of deduction of Sherlock Holmes to solve this baffling mystery.
The Locomotive Inn was noted for pugilists, so Caminada deduced that his suspect might have had a connection with illegal fighting contests. Relying on his encyclopaedic knowledge of the pugilistic fraternity, he compared the description of his suspect with all likely candidates and the son of a fighter, Charlie Parton, instantly came to mind. His father, John Parton, nicknamed ‘Pig Jack’ because of his previous trade as an iron dealer, had run a beerhouse in Greengate, a run-down quarter of the neighbouring city of Salford. The tavern had been the haunt of fighters, racecourse thieves and other ne’er-do-wells.
Most importantly, it was rumoured that John Parton used to drug customers by adding a noxious substance to their beer, so that it was easier to rob them. H
e even drugged the water used for washing out the mouths of the opponents of the men he had backed in the prizefights. All Caminada’s instincts told him that he had at last found a positive lead: ‘The more I thought of the matter, the more I felt convinced that I was on the right track and at length I determined to arrest him’.
Eighteen-year-old Charles Parton was living with his parents not far from the Locomotive Inn. At 12.30am on 2 March, four days after John Fletcher’s death, the suspect was at home in his bed when the detective and his officers raided the house and arrested him. The next morning, several witnesses including the two cabmen and PC Jakeman, picked out Parton as the young companion of John Fletcher in an identity parade. In his defence Parton contended that he had been at a greyhound race in his home city of Liverpool at the time of the alleged crime; the case would hinge on this seemingly insignificant detail. Caminada charged him with having stolen the watch and a sum of money from the deceased businessman and Parton was brought before the stipendiary magistrate, who remanded him in custody pending further enquiries.
Prior to the death of John Fletcher, the Manchester Detective Office had received a communication from their colleagues in Liverpool about a young man wanted for the theft of a bottle of chloral hydrate. Caminada had a hunch that these two crimes were connected:
Then I was strongly impressed by the fact that the prisoner, Charles Parton, said that he had been at a coursing meeting in the neighbourhood of Liverpool, and should he be the offender, there would at once be an explanation of his possession of the poison.
Without further delay, the detective set off to Liverpool to interview the druggist from whom the chemical had been stolen.
On 19 February, a young man had entered Charles Bromley’s chemist shop and asked for 40 grains of chloral for his mother, who suffered from angina. When the chemist refused to give him the substance without a prescription, the customer had requested a smaller amount of 10 grains. Bromley had agreed and, as he was weighing the chloral hydrate, the man leaned over the counter, snatched the bottle, which contained about a pound of the substance, and ran out of the shop. The description of the thief confirmed to Caminada that his suspicion was correct.
Whilst Caminada was pursuing his own line of enquiry, two other matters came to light that would have a significant impact on the case. The first startling revelation was the statement of a grocer from Ancoats called Samuel Oldfield. On the evening of 8 January 1889, Oldfield had been out drinking with some friends in a beerhouse near the marketplace in Manchester. At 10.30pm they had left the tavern and met up with another acquaintance near Victoria Railway Station, who had persuaded them to join him and his companion in one last drink. The following morning Oldfield woke up in a police cell with no recollection of the night before. Even though the police had considered him to have been drunk, when Oldfield discovered that his watch and money were missing he suspected that he might have been drugged. Now, almost two months later, he came to the detective office and identified Parton as the ‘companion’ responsible for the robbery and attempted poisoning.
As interest in the case increased, more information came forth. A second incriminating incident had taken place on 28 December of the previous year when John Parkey, a railway porter from Ashton-under-Lyne, had undergone a similar experience to that of Oldfield the grocer. He had come to Manchester for a festive drink with a friend at the Wheatsheaf Hotel, near Smithfield Market. At the end of the evening they had been on their way to London Road Railway Station when they bumped into Parton and his brother coming out of the White Bear in Piccadilly. Parkey’s friend knew Parton’s brother and so all four went into a nearby public house for a drink. As the beer flowed Parkey and Parton began to quarrel about boxing and the latter asked the others if they could leave them alone to sort it out. When the other men returned they found Parkey in a state of stupor with Parton helping him into a cab. The next morning he discovered that he had been robbed of his watch and money. A pattern was forming with Charles Parton right at the centre, but Caminada knew that a successful conviction for murder would rely on conclusive proof of poisoning.
When the first official medical evidence was presented at the city police court on 8 March, every available seat in the lower gallery was taken and even the standing room in the upper gallery was full of spectators, who would have to remain on their feet for the next five and a half hours. At 11pm the prisoner, Charles Parton, entered the dock, where he sat down and gazed out at the spectators. Before the stipendiary magistrate, Mr F. J. Headlam, the charges were read out against Parton: the murder of John Fletcher; the theft from him of a gold watch and chain; the administering of chloral to the victim for the purpose of robbery; as well as the two counts of robbery in the earlier cases of Parkey and Oldfield. As the proceedings got under way Parton paid keen attention and conversed frequently with his solicitor.
The public listened with bated breath as the medical report was delivered. All the experts agreed that John Fletcher’s death was caused by ‘syncope’, or loss of consciousness, but the key issue was whether alcohol, chloral hydrate, or a combination of both, had caused his fatal collapse. That Fletcher was a habitual drinker was never in doubt: John Robert Fletcher testified that his uncle had suffered from heart disease and occasionally got intoxicated. When his body had arrived at the Royal Infirmary, the house surgeon had assumed that he had died of alcohol poisoning. This assessment was supported by the fact that during the post-mortem examination, Fletcher’s body parts had smelled strongly of alcohol. In addition the deceased’s liver was deemed to be a ‘gin drinker’s liver’, although this was at an early stage and was not considered to have contributed fully to his death.
Dr Ernest Septimus Reynolds, resident medical officer at the infirmary, who had assisted with the post-mortem examination, described Fletcher as: ‘a bullnecked man, who had undoubtedly consumed a vast amount of ardent spirits’. He added that if John Fletcher had taken chloral for insomnia for three to four months, then it could have contributed to his untimely death. As neither doctor could rule out the possibility that the victim had died of alcohol poisoning, his stomach and intestines had been sent to Charles Estcourt, the city analyst, to test for traces of chloral hydrate.
In the first ever case of a criminal prosecution for chloral hydrate poisoning in Britain, Mr Estcourt received three sealed jars from the deputy coroner, containing Fletcher’s body parts and, undertaking ‘a delicate test’, he found traces of chloral in two of them; it was difficult to detect any evidence of the substance in the stomach, as the chemical is soluble. The amount of chloral present in the body was also unclear. In recorded cases of accidental poisoning, 20 grains of chloral was the smallest dose known to kill a human being, yet 160 grains had also been ingested without resulting in death. However, chloral is far more dangerous when taken with alcohol. Although the medical evidence was inconclusive, Parton was committed for trial at the Liverpool Assizes on the charge of wilful murder. It was during this interval between the committal and the trial that Caminada would play his final card.
Between the court hearings, the detective learned from his network of informants that there had been another key witness in the Three Arrows on 26 February, who could prove without a shadow of a doubt that Parton had drugged John Fletcher. Although he was initially reluctant to get involved in the case, Caminada persuaded Edward Phillips, a bookkeeper in a local firm, to give a statement in which he revealed that he had seen the two men in conversation on that night. In another twist in this astonishing case, Phillips admitted that he had witnessed the prisoner pour a liquid from a small phial into the deceased’s beer. He justified his earlier silence by professing that he had presumed it was medicine and only after the extensive coverage in the press had he realised that he was an eyewitness to murder.
At 10.30am on Monday 18 March, almost exactly three weeks after the death of John Fletcher, the murder trial of Charles Parton began at St George’s Hall, Liverpool. Earlier that morning there had been s
o many people waiting on the steps of the Crown Court to watch the trial that the doors had been under threat of being pushed open. The press commented on the surprising number of ladies present in court.
After entering a plea of ‘Not guilty’, the prisoner maintained an air of calmness as the courtroom drama played out before him. All the details of the case were covered, including the testimony of the bookkeeper and the additional information that Parton’s father, ‘Pig Jack’, had been treated for angina, thus strengthening the link with the theft of chloral hydrate from the chemist. When the thorny question of the medical evidence was broached, Charles Estcourt confirmed that he had found traces of chloral hydrate in the deceased’s stomach and intestines. Professor of Pathology, Dr Julius Dreschfeld, gave evidence that he had examined the heart, kidneys and liver of the victim and had concluded that death was caused by the combined effect of alcohol and chloral.
Just after noon on the second day of the trial, Mr Justice Charles gave his summary and the jury retired to consider their verdict. Twenty minutes later, they returned to the courtroom with a unanimous verdict of ‘Guilty’ and a recommendation for mercy on account of the defendant’s youth. The ladies in the public gallery sobbed and Parton clutched the front rail of the dock, as the judge donned his black cap and passed the death sentence.
The Real Sherlock Holmes Page 12