Mr Briggs' Hat: The True Story of a Victorian Railway Murder (38 page)

The final columns in Müller’s entry in the great leather-bound Newgate register were completed:

Verdict: Guilty.

Sentence: Death.

How disposed of: 14th Nov. Executed.

Most of the papers that day, their reports filed and printed hours before the execution took place, held the view that the country should now allow its excitement to subside and – as the
Daily News
put it –
rest calmly in well-warranted confidence
in the established administration of justice
. By the early afternoon, though, the second editions were enlivened by unsubstantiated reports that Müller had, at the very last moment, confessed his guilt.

Minutes after the drop, they wrote, Dr Cappel had retired to the press room, where he reported to the undersheriffs the details of the urgent conversation he had shared with Müller before Calcraft threw the bolt. Speaking in German, Cappel had said,
Muller, in a few moments you will stand before God. I ask you again and for the last time, are you guilty or not guilty?

Not guilty.

You are not guilty?

Through his white hood, Müller replied,
God knows what I have done.

Does he also know that you have committed this crime?

As Calcraft descended towards the lever, Müller spoke his last words.

Ja. Ich habe es gethan
. Yes. I did it.

According to Cappel, the confession so fervently desired by a religious society who feared the damnation of eternity and who
hungered for truth had been made in the very last seconds of Müller’s life. With some satisfaction, the
sheriffs immediately relayed the news
to Sir George Grey in Whitehall, and to Sir Richard Mayne at Scotland Yard. Returning to Müller’s cell, they read through the papers he had left, expecting to find a written confession. All they found, though, were repetitions of the statements he had already made about his innocence and justifications for his possession of the watch, chain and hat. Confounded, they
decided to seal up the papers
and withhold their contents from the public.

Over the next few days Dr Cappel was asked repeatedly to confirm Müller’s scaffold confession and did so in
a letter sent to Dr Juch
– the editor of the German paper the
Hermann –
that was quickly reprinted in every newspaper. It astonished readers that Müller had been able to
fence with words
right up to the last and some remained unconvinced, writing impassioned letters to the Home Office for governmental confirmation of Müller’s exact statement.

Dr Cappel’s story appeared to confirm that the right man had been killed, weakening – Grey hoped – arguments for the abolition of capital punishment. The circus of the past four months had concluded in the satisfactory manner of the sensation novels, restoring order and promising, as
Lady Audley’s Secret
had done, to leave
the good people all happy
and at peace
.

Franz Müller’s execution certainly demonstrated that justice was guaranteed by the rule of law. The country had needed to believe that the authorities had acted swiftly and effectively in the wider interests of society. Yet when reports of the baying crowd were read to Parliament the following day, MPs angrily raised questions about the deterrent effect of hanging. Did not such devilish, barbarous scenes – such saturnalia – undermine the foundations of a tolerant and civilised society? Did execution deter, completing the inexorable cycle of crime and punishment? Did it, through violence,
turn violence into order?
Two men were
now dead: in this cold-blooded public strangulation MPs wondered whether the State was not setting an example of the very act it abhorred. Following their lead, the
Daily Telegraph
wrote of the
general
uneasiness
which arises from the necessity of taking a life for a life
.
The Times
anticipated a day when some other sentence might be substituted for the crime of murder. The
Daily News
thought it a lesson to philanthropists who felt tenderness for an assassin more keenly than the victim. Over the following weekend the penny press would divide sharply into those for and against capital punishment.

Unlike the neat endings of popular novels it was apparent that retribution would never quite cauterise the fear surrounding this crime. As the
Telegraph
had put it,
this
sudden and effectual attack
on what had been thought an almost inviolable security of life in the midst of bustle and public companionship
continued to poison tranquillity. It powerfully suggested that evil could filter into diurnal reality as unstoppably as the evening fogs.

AFTERWORD

Certainty

Müller’s trial and execution took place on the cusp of legal change. The freedom of papers to comment on pending cases continued to be bitterly resented, although, after 1865,
The Times
followed the example of the
Daily Telegraph
in making efforts to avoid pre-judgement. Judge Pollock’s controversial habit of
diminishing the standards of proof
in his advice to juries did not survive his retirement in 1866 and the manner in which judges could advise the jury became increasingly codified, ultimately proscribing the inclusion of personal opinion.

The furore surrounding the execution played out in the press and Parliament throughout the remainder of 1864. The Royal Commission inquiring into the issues surrounding capital punishment was still sitting and, giving evidence before it, even Sir George Grey admitted that there was a
growing feeling against public hanging.
Müller’s sentencing judge, Samuel Martin, held fervently that murder was a crime of the lower classes and he was convinced of the deterrent power of the scaffold. Müller’s barrister John Humffreys Parry, on the other hand, argued strongly that convicted murderers should be imprisoned for life with hard
labour and without hope of reprieve.
Parry believed emphatically
that this would strengthen both the State’s belief in the sacredness of human life and the operation of the law. Rejecting the idea that the prospect of execution exerted a silent influence over the minds of criminals, he was convinced that by removing the revulsion that sometimes led jurors to acquit, there would be greater certainty of conviction.

When the Royal Commission reported two years later they focused on the degrading spectacle of capital punishment. Newspaper reports of Müller’s execution in 1864 were re-read to Parliament along with the Commission’s majority recommendation to abolish public hanging. A bill was introduced but failed. The following year,
when Gathorne Hardy became Home Secretary
, it was reintroduced. J. S. Mill’s widely reported, scathing argument that the success of the bill would lead to
the feminisation of the mind of the country
assisted in its defeat, but detractors were losing ground. Twelve months later, having passed its third reading and been approved by the Lords, it was given Royal Assent on 29 May 1868. The last public hanging in Britain had taken place just days earlier: after being respited twice to afford his defence extra time to establish his alibi, Michael Barrett was hanged at Newgate on 26 May for the Fenian bombing at Clerkenwell in which seven people were killed. His hanging took place before
a wild, rough crowd
[yet]
not so numerous nor nearly so violent as that which thronged to see Müller die
.

The first hanging to take place behind prison walls was that of Thomas Wells later that same year. The executioner was Calcraft. Private execution endorsed the belief that the
convicts were individuals
rather than simply emblems of corruption and it had another advantage: it sanitised the mob, removing the opportunity for worryingly large, politically motivated crowds to congregate. But though
the
tide of ever-advancing civilisation
encouraged the total abolition of capital punishment in Portugal in 1867, Holland and Belgium in 1870, Italy in 1872, Finland
in 1874 (though the last Finnish execution had taken place in 1826) and Switzerland in 1874, British governments remained unmoved. Capital punishment was not abolished in Britain until 1964, one hundred years after Müller’s death.

Further legal changes following Müller’s trial included the introduction in 1865 of the first bill to grant defendants the right to testify under oath, though the principle remained unpopular in Parliament until the Criminal Evidence Act of 1898. The process of appeal for convicted prisoners was enshrined in the Criminal Appeal Act of 1907. A century would elapse before
the defence were given the last word
, summing up their case after the prosecution’s closing argument. After various debates during the twentieth century, the
duty of the Crown to disclose material
in their possession that might be helpful to the defence was not made law until 1981.

Had such disclosure been a legal duty in 1864, Beard and Parry might have made more of the various statements supporting Thomas Lee’s evidence that he saw two men in Briggs’ carriage on the night of 9 July. Had the men seen by Lee simply changed carriages before the train pulled away from Bow? Were the corroborating statements merely phantom sightings? Would Müller have shielded an accomplice when his own life was at stake? If someone else had been involved, would Müller have fled on his own to America? The two-man theory was never taken seriously by Inspector Tanner’s investigation but, because it was never satisfactorily explained, it continued to highlight the potential dangers of passengers being able to pass in and out of confined railway carriages without being noticed.

Thomas Briggs’ murder contained mysteries. Nothing had struck fellow travellers as out of place in the minutes either before or during the attack. The concept of the locked-room murder would emerge regularly in the detective fiction that developed during the following decade; public outrage at the dangerous isolation of the train compartment – what the American press called
those cramped-up boxes
which pass for railway carriages –
would continue to grow. Anger at government obfuscation also raged in reaction to the increasing numbers of railway accidents. Two years after the murder, in February 1866, a bill was finally presented
to compel the directors of Railway Companies to provide efficient means of communication
, but it was not until 1868 that the Regulation of Railways Act finally enforced the rule on all non-stop trains travelling more than twenty miles.

Train companies now installed a cord that ran along the outside of the train under the roof gutter, attached to a bell in the guard’s van. The ‘solution’ was both erratic and unstable. To operate it, the passenger had to open the window (which would probably stick) and grope about to find the cord while asking a fellow passenger to take hold of his legs to prevent him falling out. If he escaped decapitation by a bridge or passing train then the cord often broke or its signal went unheard above the noise of the engine. Some companies introduced small paned windows – quickly labelled ‘Müller’s Lights’ – into the bulkheads dividing separate carriages but they were removed just as fast when passengers quixotically complained at the lack of privacy. Not until the 1890s did the South Eastern Railway run the first corridor
train
of the American pattern
, an innovation quickly imitated on the Great Western line from Paddington to Birkenhead. Even then, as the railway historian Pendleton would note, passengers were locked within their own carriage
lest the third-class passenger should take a walking tour
to the first class carriage and recline on its morocco and broadcloth
. By 1899, over three decades after Thomas Briggs’ death,
internal wires which gradually applied the brake
were adopted on the majority of the country’s lines.

*

On the day of Müller’s execution, the
Telegraph
wrote that
respectability demanded not a victim but the victim
for this violation of its safety … We are bound therefore to be satisfied with
the awful scene of this morning … We must still think that with the brief agony of to-day a great crime was legally expiated.

But the murder of Thomas Briggs unleashed a fear that would not entirely evaporate. Müller’s confession only partly calmed public anxiety for, convicted on a balance of probability, too much remained unexplained. He had never been positively placed at the scene of crime. The murder weapon had neither been established nor tied to him (though, very oddly given that it had not formed a part of his evidence in court, the Briggs’ family doctor wrote to
The Times
in the days after the execution to suggest that he thought the injuries to his patient’s crown were caused by the handles of heavy tailors’ shears
held by the blades
[to]
become a very formidable weapon
).