The Ripper of Waterloo Road

by Jan Bondeson

  Thus we have a cluster of five very similar ‘media murders’ of young and attractive women from 1828 until 1845, on either side of the Atlantic. Three of the victims were prostitutes, the other two ‘fallen’ women with a sexual ‘past’. In each and every case there was much newspaper publicity, handbills and pamphlets, as well as illustrated biographies of the five murdered heroines, often with fictional content. There was particular fascination with the murder victim’s initial ‘fall’ from chastity, and this event was viewed as the prelude to licentiousness, depravity and murder. There was also a very unwholesome tendency to contrast the good looks of the ‘beautiful female murder victim’ during life, with the violated but still perversely attractive corpse after the murder had been committed. In each of the five cases, there is a male predator, known to the murder victim, and the murder takes place in a setting of a sexual encounter gone wrong. William Corder was the only murderer to pay the ultimate penalty for his crime. The ‘stage villains’ in the Grimwood, Jewett and Bickford cases escaped scot-free, and in the Rogers case, no main suspect was ever identified. It is not immediately obvious what sociological event triggered this perverted cult of the ‘beautiful female murder victim’ that flourished from the 1820s until the 1840s. It may well have played a part that among respectable people of this period, prostitutes were no longer viewed as lewd and wicked women, but as ‘fallen women’ and victims of society. Once they had been chaste and virginal ‘ideal women’, before they were led astray by wicked men; this drawn-out process of female corruption, leading to promiscuity, perversion and violent premature death, fascinated many people at the time. The cult of the ‘beautiful female murder victim’ abated as abruptly as it had begun: the unsolved murders of three London prostitutes – Emma Jackson, Harriet Buswell and Annie Yates – in 1863, 1871 and 1884, were the topic of a good deal of newspaper interest, mostly realistic with regard to the circumstances and sordidity of the crimes, but without any unwholesome fascination with the private lives of the murder victims, or any voyeuristic interest in the appearance of their mangled bodies after the murderous events.20

  His biographers agree that Charles Dickens was not infrequently inspired by real-life crimes and criminals when inventing characters for his novels. The clearest example of this is the wicked governess Madame Hortense in Bleak House, who was clearly based on the aforementioned murderess Marie Manning. It is also obvious that the murder of the swindler Montague Tigg in Martin Chuzzlewit was influenced by the 1823 murder of the gambler William Weare by Thurtell and Hunt. There has been speculation that the finding of poison by Jonas Chuzzlewit was inspired by a similar incident in the case against suspected murderess Christina Gilmour. Julius Slinkton in Hunted Down has features of the poisoners William Palmer and Thomas Griffith Wainewright, and the villain of Little Dorrit, the Frenchman Rigaud, rather resembles the double murderer Pierre François Lacenaire, who was guillotined in 1836. The fraudster Mr Mardle in the same book may well have been partially based on James Sadleir, a Member of Parliament who defrauded a bank where he was a director.21

  A ruffian-looking actor playing the part of ‘Bill Sykes’, from an old postcard.

  Since he lived in London in 1838, and was a keen observer of true crime, Charles Dickens must have been well aware of the murder of Eliza Grimwood. Indeed, he several times alluded to her in his published writings. In an article in his magazine Household Words, he wrote that the father of ‘the King of the Bill-stickers’ was buried by the murdered Eliza Grimwood, in the Waterloo Road. Then again, as we know, he spoke to Inspector Field in 1850, and retold the story of the lavender-coloured gloves as the second of his Three Detective Anecdotes. For quite some time, there has been speculation among Dickensians whether one of the most powerful scenes in his fiction, the brutal murder of Nancy by her villainous paramour Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist, might have been influenced by the murder of Eliza Grimwood.22 Dickens was active writing this novel, in monthly instalments, for the periodical Bentley’s Miscellany, at the very time Eliza was murdered. As we know, the popular newspapers and prints represented Eliza as a downtrodden prostitute and Hubbard as a criminal bully, the very counterparts of Nancy and Sikes. There was also a tradition that a young man wanted to rescue Eliza from her life of vice, just like Maylie did Nancy, only to be thwarted by the murderous Hubbard (or by ‘Don Whiskerando’ in another version).

  Sikes murdering Nancy in Oliver Twist.

  Just as the newspapers debated the significance of the presence of bloodstains on Hubbard’s clothes, and his bloody shoes, Sikes took care to wash after the murder, and his dog’s feet were bloody. Every reader of Oliver Twist will remember how Sikes is pursued by the image of Nancy’s eyes and that he yells, ‘The eyes again,’ just before falling to his death. When Harriet Chaplin gave evidence, she untruthfully claimed that Eliza had still been alive when Hubbard had found her, and that he had seen her eyes move: ‘I tell you that her eyes were open; she looked at me, and I never shall forget the look she gave me!’

  There are also some key differences between the murder of Eliza Grimwood and the fictional murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist, however. Firstly, it is entirely wrong to claim that Dickens was ‘obsessed’ with the Grimwood murder, and that it sent him into an early grave; nor was Eliza half-dressed in bed when she was murdered, and there is nothing to suggest that she was forced to her knees, as claimed in an inaccurate newspaper article.23 It is questionable whether Hubbard should be described as a common pimp, since he had steady employment and lacked previous criminal convictions; he was definitely not a hardened robber of Sikes’ calibre, although the biased public prints represented him as such. Furthermore, Nancy was a poor and downtrodden prostitute, whereas Eliza was relatively wealthy and independent, and able to prostitute herself if and when she wanted to. There was a dog present at both murders, although there is a discrepancy between Eliza’s timid little spaniel, the dog that did not bark in the night, and Sikes’s ugly cur that he later attempts to destroy. With regard to the modus operandi of the murders, Eliza had her throat cut, and was stabbed and ‘ripped’, whereas Nancy was beaten to death with a pistol-butt and a cudgel. Nancy pleaded with Sikes, begging him to spare her; Eliza, overcome by the sudden murderous intent of the Ripper of Waterloo Road, uttered no such exhortations, but died swiftly and silently. Sikes fled in horror after his crime, whereas Hubbard remained at No. 12 Wellington Terrace, and calmly asserted his innocence throughout his ordeal. The situation would appear to be that although Dickens was inspired by the murder of Eliza Grimwood when he described the murderous end of the relationship between Sikes and Nancy, he made use of his novelist’s imagination to change many of the circumstances, and adapt them to the plot of Oliver Twist.

  16

  GOING TO SEE A MAN HANGED

  Young people, I pray give attention

  And to my tale of woe lend an ear

  Ah me! My sinful heart ‘tis breaking

  My God forgive thee, François Courvoisier!1

  After the shenanigans about his two confessions, François Benjamin Courvoisier lived quietly in the Newgate condemned cell, awaiting his execution, which had been fixed for 6 July. His cell was large and airy, and furnished with a bed and a table and chairs. Since the authorities were fearful that the prisoner might commit suicide, he was watched night and day by two turnkeys. Courvoisier slept soundly, but he seemed very depressed and despondent during the daytime. Once, he made a half-hearted attempt to destroy himself by cramming a towel down his throat, but the turnkeys swiftly pulled it out. Courvoisier suffered ill effects from his rash action.2

  Historical mysteries have a perpetual fascination: many of us are fond of reading new books about, for example, the identity of Jack the Ripper or the truth about the Man in the Iron Mask, in the vain hope of finding some vital clue that will finally solve the conundrum. The concept of a historical mystery is that of an important past event that has been disputed for some considerable period of time, but still remains unsolved. A chara
cteristic of many famous historical mysteries is that there are large quantities of contradictory evidence, giving rise to a multitude of theories, although it remains unlikely that a final, universally accepted solution will ever be found.3 One important type of historical mystery is that of disputed identity: either a mysterious foundling is discovered, or a claimant asserts his right to some high title or usurps the identity of some famous or wealthy person presumed to have been deceased. A second type, exemplified by the case of Eliza Grimwood, is the unsolved murder mystery; then there are sundry other mysteries, involving robbers and other criminals, political shenanigans, and various other matters outside the scope of this book.

  Courvoisier in the condemned cell, from the Sunday Times and People’s Police Gazette of 5 July 1840.

  In 1828, a mysterious boy came walking into Nuremberg: he appeared to be quite half-witted, but still had aspirations to join the local cavalry regiment as a trooper. He gave his name as Kaspar Hauser. Since he seemed entirely incapable of looking after himself, he was imprisoned in the Luginsland Tower, where he sat on the floor of his cell and played with a wooden horse. One day, Kaspar was able to tell his life story: he had spent his entire youth in a small dungeon, without knowledge that there were other people in the world. His jailer had then taught him to write his name and to speak a few words, before he was taught to walk and set on his way to Nuremberg. Many people believed this fantastic story, and Kaspar was well taken care of. There were dark rumours that he was the Crown Prince of Baden, stolen away by a wicked countess at the age of 2, with an ailing child substituted in the royal cot. After Kaspar died mysteriously in 1833, under circumstances suggestive of murder, the speculation about his true identity continued, and many books were written with various suggestions. In 1996, mitochondrial DNA from the bloodstain on Kaspar’s underpants was compared with samples from descendants of the House of Baden; they did not match. Thus the specific question ‘Was Kaspar Hauser the Crown Prince of Baden?’ can be answered in the negative, whereas the open question ‘Who was Kaspar Hauser?’ remains open for debate. Myself, I rather tend to believe that he was a poor simpleton taught to become a professional beggar through telling heart-rending stories about how he had been abandoned and mistreated.4

  DNA technology has been used, with considerable success, in many a contemporary case of murder, and an example of its successful use in an older murder mystery is provided by the so-called A6 Murder of 1962. James Hanratty was convicted of the murder of Michael Gregsten, sentenced to death and executed, but debate concerning his guilt continued until 2002, when DNA evidence conclusively proved that he was the guilty man. In that case, the specific question ‘Did Hanratty murder Michael Gregsten?’ could be answered in the affirmative. Attempts to make use of DNA technology to solve the mystery of Jack the Ripper have proven wholly unsuccessful, however, mainly due to the considerable amount of wishful thinking involved, and the dubious origins of the material tested. The attempt by Patricia Cornwell to make a case against Walter Sickert based on analysis of various letters sent to the police by Jack the Ripper was scuppered by the fact that the letters were most probably sent by hoaxers rather than the Whitechapel Murderer himself. The recent investigation by Russell Edwards and Jari Louhelainen, using analysis of stains on a very loosely authenticated shawl supposed by some to have belonged to the Ripper victim Catherine Eddowes to incriminate the established suspect Aaron Kosminski, also proved to be substantially flawed.5

  In the case of Eliza Grimwood, there is of course no option of making use of DNA analysis. This raises the question of whether it is at all possible to solve a murder mystery dating back to 1838 making use of deductive reasoning alone. When visiting London to put the finishing touches to this book, I went to the British Museum to reacquaint myself with the Rosetta Stone, the inscribed boulder with text in Greek, hieroglyphs and demotic Egyptian, found by the French at Rosetta near Alexandria in Egypt during Napoleon’s campaign in 1799. After the French defeat in Egypt, the stone became spoils of war, and it was taken to the British Museum in 1803. It was instrumental for the celebrated linguist Jean-François Champollion to decipher the hieroglyphs in 1822, through years of painstaking analysis. But can there be a Rosetta stone to translate the hieroglyphs of 1838 into plain English nearly 180 years after the event?

  I was brought up by honest Parents

  In Switzerland I first drew my breath

  And now, for the horrid crime of Murder

  I am deem’d to meet an ignominious death.

  Courvoisier’s honest parents back in Switzerland made no attempt to come and see their unhappy son in the condemned cell, nor did his sister who lived in Paris, but his uncle L. Courvoisier paid him several visits. The wretched convict was also regularly visited by the Swiss clergyman Baup and by the Rev. Mr Carver, the Newgate chaplain.6 In the days preceding his execution, Courvoisier frequently gave way to paroxysms of the utmost grief and despair. He barely slept at night, and ate next to nothing. In vain did the wretched convict scan the pages of the French Bible he had been given, in search of some much-needed spiritual succour, but he found no apocryphical prophet with aberrant views on the ultimate fate of murderers, no eccentric anchorite who made confused predictions about the afterlife of various criminal elements, no fallen angel in disguise who could present him with a post-apocalyptic free pardon: for him, there was no hope.

  The face of the Foreigner? A close-up view of Courvoisier’s death mask, reproduced by permission of Madame Tussauds Archives.

  A kind of old-fashioned novel readers

  Demanded ‘mysteries’ and had to be titillated

  With titles like:

  ‘The Mystery of Castleford’

  ‘The Nightingales Mystery’

  And others of that ilk.

  But why in such a hurry? Why so impatient?

  Just give yourselves time, and Time itself will obscure

  Even the simplest and most obvious actions!

  Never a day without an ambiguity!7

  Thus wrote the distinguished Swedish poet and philosopher, the late Professor Lars Gustafsson, and his meaning is clear: the investigation of historical mysteries is in vain, since the sheer passage of time creates its own mysteries:

  In the novels there was always a Detective,

  A man from London, in a checkered suit,

  And buttoned-up yellow boots

  With traces of clay from the bed of roses.

  He always first investigated ‘the motives’.

  But why in such a hurry! Why so impatient?

  Just give yourself time, and Time itself will create motives

  Even for the most marvellous actions.

  The motives breed themselves, as we well know!

  In Professor Gustafsson’s novel The Tennis Players, the same theme recurs.8 The novel’s narrator, a Swedish academic teaching literary history at a Texan university, and lecturing about Strindberg’s Inferno crisis, is challenged by a PhD student who has discovered the memoirs of a Polish anarchist, describing how a gang of foreign nihilists had tried to gas Strindberg with chloroform at the Hotel Orfila in Paris, to be able to steal his alchemical formula for making gold. They optimistically planned to make use of this recipe to dump the market with gold French francs, to make the world’s financial markets crash and start an international revolution. Thus Strindberg’s Inferno crisis was nothing but fact and actuality: he was really persecuted by a gang of mysterious strangers who lived in the room above his at the hotel, and who tried to bore holes in the roof to gas the tormented Swede. Teaming up with a computer expert from the US Air Force, the narrator makes plans to digitise both Strindberg’s own account and the memoirs of the Polish anarchist, using a powerful Air Force computer to construct the true and final account of the Inferno crisis. Initially they make good progress, but the computer expert is sacked from the US Air Force before he is able to combine the two books, leaving the silent underground supercomputer to ponder the insoluble mystery of Strindberg�
�s experiences at the Hotel Orfila, in perpetuity.

  For a whole week I planned the murder

  It engaged my mind by day and night

  I felt no remorse, but, like a demon

  It seemed to me a source of great delight

  On Sunday 6 July, the Rev. Mr Carver preached the condemned sermon to Courvoisier, in the chapel of Newgate. The sheriffs, who had received many applications for admission to the chapel, decided to open the gallery, which had been closed since the execution of the forger Henry Fauntleroy in 1824. Lord Adolphus Fitzclarence, Lord Coventry, Lord Alfred Paget, and others of rank and distinction purchased tickets to see the dejected Courvoisier escorted into the chapel by the turnkeys. He sat on a bench before the pulpit, and never once raised his eyes during the sermon. When he had been taken back to the condemned cell, there was a visit from the Swiss Consul, who handed him a letter from his mother. Courvoisier wept bitterly as his thoughts went to his disgraced parents back home in Switzerland, but he managed to regain his composure to write a few lines in reply.9