The Supernatural Murders

by Jonathan Goodman

  Journalists, it may be noted, had long since dubbed the two ‘les amants maudits de Vendôme’. This introduced an error of fact into the popular conception of the matter. The murder of little Cathy had indeed been committed in Vendôme, but, apart from a very little at a seaside resort, the defendants, however accursed, damned or doomed they might be, had done all their love-making in Rennes or Paris.

  Spirited during the preliminary inquiry, especially when confronted with her lover, Denise Labbé, in a shabby two-piece tailor-made and white blouse, a handkerchief screwed up in her hand, made a poor, depressed showing in court, breaking down and sobbing at Algarron’s vicious interjections. He, on the other hand, though his articulation was indistinct, had an answer to every question. His manner was defiant to the point of insolence. It did him no good. M. Gay demanded sentences of death for her, of life imprisonment for him. After hearing what Maître Floriot, Maître Garçon and again, more briefly, Maître Floriot had to say, the jury awarded sentences of life imprisonment to Denise Labbé, twenty years to Jacques Algarron. In practice, it would probably turn out that his sentence was the longer.

  Among the books which, as it came out in court, Algarron had lent his mistress was Les Nourritures Terrestres by André Gide. During the past five years, François Mauriac had made it plain that he derived consolation from the thought of Gide roasting in hell. In his bloc-notes in Le Figaro Littéraire, he seemed nevertheless to regret that his youthful hero and later foe had been transferred to another jurisdiction.

  On the evidence of a single person, his mistress, contradicted by that of all the other women he knew, Algarron has been held responsible for a crime which he did not commit but which he may have inspired, without being impelled thereto by any discoverable motive. If such a verdict were to create a precedent, there would be no reason to stop there and not to charge the writer who may have inspired the young man.

  In the same paper, Jean Schlumberger considered that from no point of view could the mind be satisfied by such a verdict, while to André Breton it was hopeless to expect understanding from such down-to-earth jurors. A Catholic writer of no less orthodox piety than Mauriac, M. Stanislas Fumet, thought the verdict quite normal, there was nothing scandalous about it, and Jules Romains wrote:

  This verdict seems to me as rational as anybody could wish. I have tried to imagine what were the thoughts and reactions of the jury: mine would have been much the same…. It does seem beyond doubt that works of literature named in the course of the trial exercised an influence on one of the characters in this drama and, through him, on the other. But that raises the vast question of the freedom of literature and the arts.

  In another paper, the weekly Arts, Marcel Jouhandeau wrote:

  It remains for us to wonder what will take place tonight or tomorrow, after the sight of this catastrophe, between those of the same age as Denise and Jacques, who are in love with each other, as Jacques and Denise thought they were.

  How can they fail to cast a look of suspicion on each other, at the thought that some uncontrolled deed or word, though dictated by tenderness, may one day bring them into opposition and make them enemies eternally irreconcilable?….

  The Hand of God or Somebody

  JONATHAN GOODMAN

  A WEEK AFTER the death of the hangman, William Marwood, in September 1883, the following notice appeared in the national press:

  In consequence of the numerous applications which have been received at the Home Office for an appointment to the place of public executioner, we are requested to state it is neither the right nor the duty of the Secretary of State to make any such appointments. There is no such office as that of public executioner appointed by the Government. The person charged with the execution of capital sentences is the Sheriff. It is the right and the duty of the Sheriff to employ and to pay a fitting person to carry out the sentence of the law.

  Among the wrongly addressed applications were these:

  I, H– R–, of Trindley Colliery, County of Durham, 6 feet 1 inch in my stocking feet, 14 stone weight, 35 years of age, would like the office of public executioner, in place of the late Marwood, deceased. I would hang either brothers or sisters, or anyone else related to me, without fear or favour.

  Signed H– R–

  (his mark)

  Dere Sir,

  I am waiting outside with a coil of rope, and should be glad to give you a personal proof of my method.

  Sir,

  … I have some knowledge of Anatomy, am an exceedingly strong man, and can command sang-froid under any circumstances. I have witnessed Executions among all nations; consequently, there is no fear of my getting sick at the right moment.

  Sir,

  … I beg to state that by trade I am a Barber, and that my age is 34, and also that helth and nerve is good. In my Line of Business as a Barber I have had some years of Great Experience in the Formation of the necks and windpipes of all kinds of people, and, therefore, I think that the Situation, if dear Sir, it will be your Pleasure to appoint Me, would be the means of my Fulfilling it to your full satisfaction. I can Refer you for my testimonials to several Manchester Gentlemen of High honer and Long Standing.

  Deer Sur,

  I am ankshus to be yure publick exechoner, and i hereby apply for the job. i am thurty yeres old, and am willing to hang one or two men for nothink, so as you will see how I handle the job. i am strong, brave, and fear no man, and i will hang anybody you like, to show how i can do it. i inclose photo.

  Sir,

  … I have at various times made some very successful experiments in the art of hanging (by means of life-size figures) with the view to making myself thoroughly proficient in the despatch of criminals, and I have no hesitation in saying that I believe my system would be the most expeditious, never failing, and most humane that has ever been adopted or that could possibly be used, as it has been my greatest study. My system of hanging is not a lingering death by strangulation, but instantaneous and painless, rendered so by a small appliance of my own for the instant severing of the spinal cord. I may say that I adopt a variety of drops, varying from 7ft 10½ins to 16ft 11 ins. I shall be glad to conduct a series of experiments under your personal inspection on the first batch of criminals for execution, that you may see for yourself the superiority of my system over that of all others.

  All of those letters, and the hundred or so others that also shouldn’t have been sent to the Home Office, were forwarded to the Guildhall, there to be added to the pile of a thousand or so correctly-addressed ones. The Sheriffs of London and Middlesex invited some thirty of the applicants to attend interviews, separately but all on the same morning, at the Old Bailey. Of those, seventeen turned up, making one of the strangest gatherings that the Old Bailey – a place often frequented by strange gatherings – had ever housed. Within two hours the seventeen hopefuls had been interviewed, three of them twice – which indicates that the least appealing of them shambled into the Sheriffs’ presence and were instantly ordered out of it.

  The short-listed three were James Berry, of Bradford, Yorkshire (who, straightway after his second interview, wrote home, saying that he had ‘virtually’ been offered the job and had ‘agreed upon the price’); Jeremy Taylor, of Lincoln, a builder who claimed to have been ‘very intimate with the late Mr Marwood’; and Bartholomew Binns, a coal-miner near his native-town of Gateshead.

  The Sheriffs chose Binns – and soon wished they hadn’t. Having bungled three of the first four jobs he was given, he turned up for the fifth too drunk to be allowed near the scaffold, and was fired. It was subsequently reported that ‘Binns, piqued at his dismissal, obtained a wax figure and a small gibbet, and appeared at fairs, etc, etc, exhibiting in a booth the manner in which he had carried out the executions during his short tenure of office. The police soon put a stop to his disgraceful exhibitions, and Mr Binns dropped out of the public sight.’

  In 1884, James Berry, so recently rejected, was instated. The long-standing executioner, William
Calcraft, had in his youth made shoes; Marwood throughout his life had mended them; and the footwear association was continued by Berry, who, having spent most of his twenties as a constable in the Bradford and West Riding police force, had become a seller of shoes in someone else’s shop – a job that he did not give up till he felt secure as an executioner. Berry was less poorly educated than his predecessors: his handwriting was legible, he read unstumblingly (demonstrating that ability while conducting Methodist services as a lay-preacher), and, as the following extract from his memoirs shows, he was quite – only quite – good at sums:

  I was slightly acquainted with Mr Marwood before his death, and I had gained some particulars of his method from conversation with him; so that when I undertook my first execution [on 31 March 1884], at Edinburgh, I naturally worked upon his lines. This first commission was to execute Robert Vickers and William Innes, two miners, who were condemned to death for the murder of two gamekeepers. The respective weights were 10 stone 4lb and 9 stone 6 lb, and I gave them drops of 8ft 6in and 10ft respectively. In both cases death was instantaneous, and the prison surgeon gave me a testimonial to the effect that the execution was satisfactory in every respect.

  Upon this experience I based a table of weights and drops. Taking a man of 14 stone as basis, and giving him a drop of 8ft, which is what is thought necessary, I calculated that every half-stone lighter weight would require a two inches longer drop, and the full table as I entered it in my books at the time, stood as follows:

  14 stone … … … … 8ft Oin

  13½ … … … … 8 2

  13 … … … … 8 4

  12½ … … … … 8 6

  12 … … … … 8 8

  11½ … … … … 8 10

  11 … … … … 9 0

  10½ … … … … 9 2

  10 … … … … 9 4

  9½ … … … … 9 6

  9 … … … … 9 8

  8½ … … … … 9 10

  8 … … … … 10 0

  This table I calculated for persons of what I might call ‘average’ build, but it could not by any means be rigidly adhered to with safety.

  That last comment of Berry’s was an understatement. By the start of 1886 his percentage of ‘mishaps’ – though slightly lower than Marwood’s, and nowhere near Binns’s seventy-five per cent – was considered by the Home Secretary to be high enough to warrant the appointment of a Departmental Committee, under the chairmanship of Lord Aberdare, its brief ‘to inquire into the existing practice as to carrying out of sentences of death, and the causes which in several recent cases have led either to failure or to unseemly occurrences; and to consider and report what arrangements may be adopted (without altering the existing law) to ensure that all executions may be carried out in a becoming manner without risk of failure or miscarriage in any respect’. The Committee recommended, inter alia, that all scaffolds should be much alike and that the ropes should be of standard thickness and length, and proposed a ‘scale of drops’ that differed in some respects from the one worked out by Berry.

  None of Berry’s ‘subjects’ was as famous beforehand as was one of them, John Lee, afterwards – his fame being chiefly due to the fact that he was able to savour it. Lee, having been found guilty of the stabbing to death of Emma Keyse, the sixty-eight-year-old spinster for whom he had worked domestically in the suburb of Torquay called Babbacombe, was scheduled to die in Exeter Prison at eight o’clock on the morning of Monday, 23 February 1885. But, depending upon which way one looks at it – from Lee’s point of view or from Berry’s – things went miraculously right or embarrassingly wrong. Berry gave his version of the non-event in a replying letter, dated 4 March, to the Under-Sheriff of Devon (who seems to have confused him, perhaps by allotting thirty days to February, into writing inst, then ult, rather than ult twice):

  Executioner’s Office,

  1 Bilton Place, City Road,

  Bradford, Yorks

  Re JOHN LEE

  Sir,

  In accordance with the request contained in your letter of the 30th inst, I beg to say that on the morning of Friday, the 20th ult, I travelled from Bradford to Bristol, and on the morning of Saturday, the 21st, from Bristol to Exeter, arriving at Exeter at 11.50 am, when I walked direct to the County Gaol, and signed my name in your Gaol Register Book at 12 o’clock exactly. I was shown to the Governor’s office, and arranged with him that I would go and dine and return to the Gaol at 2.0 pm. I accordingly left the Gaol, partook of dinner, and returned at 1.50 pm, when I was shown to the bedroom allotted to me, which was an officer’s room in the new Hospital Ward. Shortly afterwards I made an inspection of the place of Execution. The execution was to take place in a Coach-house in which the Prison Van was usually kept…. Two Trap-doors were placed in the floor of the Coach-house, which is flagged with stone, and these doors cover a pit about 2 yards by 1½ yards across, and about 11 feet deep. On inspecting these doors I found they were only about an inch thick, but to have been constructed properly should have been three or four inches thick. The ironwork of the doors was of a frail kind, and much too weak for the purpose. There was a lever to these doors, and it was placed near the top of them. I pulled the lever and the doors dropped, the catches acting all right. I had the doors raised, and tried the lever a second time, when the catch again acted all right. The Governor was watching me through the window of his office and saw me try the doors. After the examination I went to him, explained how I found the doors, and suggested to him that for future executions new trap-doors should be made about three times as thick as those then fixed. I also suggested that a spring should be fixed in the Wall to hold the doors back when they fell, so that no rebounding occurred, and that the ironwork of the doors should be stronger. The Governor said he would see to these matters in future. I retired to bed about 9.45 that night….

  On the Monday morning I arose at 6.30, and was conducted from the Bedroom by a Warder, at 7.30, to the place of execution. Everything appeared to be as I had left it on the Saturday afternoon. I fixed the rope in my ordinary manner, and placed everything in readiness. I did not try the Trap-doors as they appeared to be just as I had left them. It had rained heavily during the nights of Saturday and Sunday. About four minutes to eight o’clock, I was conducted by the Governor to the Condemned Cell and introduced to John Lee. I proceeded at once to pinion him, which was done in the usual manner, and then gave a signal to the Governor that I was ready.

  The procession was formed, headed by the Governor, the Chief Warder, and the Chaplain followed by Lee. I walked behind Lee and six or eight warders came after me. On reaching the place of execution I found you were there with the Prison Surgeon. Lee was at once placed upon the trapdoors. I pinioned his legs, pulled down the white cap, adjusted the Rope, stepped to one side, and drew the lever – but the trap-door did not fall. I had previously stood upon the doors and thought they would fall quite easily. I unloosed the strap from his legs, took the rope from his neck, removed the White Cap, and took Lee away into an adjoining room until I made an examination of the doors. I worked the lever after Lee had been taken off, drew it, and the doors fell easily. With the assistance of the warders the doors were pulled up, and the lever drawn a second time, when the doors again fell easily. Lee was then brought from the adjoining room, placed in position, the cap and rope adjusted, but when I again pulled the lever it did not act, and in trying to force it the lever was slightly strained. Lee was then taken off a second time and conducted to the adjoining room.

  It was suggested to me that the woodwork fitted too tightly in the centre of the doors, and one of the warders fetched an axe and another a plane. I again tried the lever but it did not act. A piece of wood was then sawn off one of the doors close to where the iron catches were, and by the aid of an iron crowbar the catches were knocked off, and the doors fell down. You then gave orders that the execution should not be proceeded with until you had communicated with the Home Secretary, and Lee was taken back to the Condemned C
ell. I am of opinion that the ironwork catches of the trap-doors were not strong enough for the purpose, that the woodwork of the doors should have been about three or four times as heavy, and with ironwork to correspond, so that when a man of Lee’s weight was placed upon the doors the iron catches would not have become locked, as I feel sure they did on this occasion, but would respond readily. So far as I am concerned, everything was performed in a careful manner, and had the iron and woodwork been sufficiently strong, the execution would have been satisfactorily accomplished.

  I am, Sir,

  Your obedient Servant,

  JAMES BERRY

  Henry M. James, Esq.,

  Under-Sheriff of Devon,

  The Close, Exeter

  As likely an explanation for the failure of the apparatus appears in a book entitled In the Light of the Law (London, 1931), the author of which, Ernest Bowen-Rowlands, quotes a letter from a ‘well-known person’ who claimed to have heard from someone that

  an old lag in the gaol confessed to him (I think when dying) that he was responsible for the failure of the drop to work in the execution of the Babbacombe murderer. It appears that in those days it was the practice to have the scaffold erected by some joiner or carpenter from among the prisoners. The man inserted a wedge which prevented the drop from working and when called in as an expert he removed the wedge and demonstrated the smooth working of the drop, only to re-insert it before Lee was again placed on the trap. This happened three times [only twice, according to Berry] and finally Lee was returned to his cell with doubtless a very stiff neck.