Mr Briggs' Hat: The True Story of a Victorian Railway Murder (39 page)

Although the accumulation of circumstantial evidence pointed to no one else, the trial still drew censure. Matthews’ innocence had always been assumed and there had been no attempt to conceal his identity until he could be placed in a line-up alongside Müller. Thomas Lee had been ignored as had new evidence in support of an alibi. The Blyths were not asked to identify the crushed hat and questions remained about how Müller had managed to enter a first-class carriage without remark or hindrance. Why, too, had Parry failed to ask any of the jury before the trial whether they had
already formed an opinion of Müller’s guilt?

The fact that Müller had been given the benefit of eminent legal counsel did not stop these questions being asked nor a festering uncertainty to linger even in those who, as one correspondent to the
Daily News
put it, had
entered into the chase after him
as eagerly as the rest
and … rejoiced as grimly as any when he was hunted down
. Concern also centred on the GLPS’s unswerving belief in his innocence. Was it not possible that Müller had been present in the railway carriage and that he – alone or with another – had bungled an attempted robbery? If so, it was possible that he was neither a murderer in cold blood nor an innocent. Briggs may have reacted arrogantly to a poor man
entering a first-class train compartment and may thus have been an involuntary agent in his own death. The argument ran that both the defence and the prosecution had failed to differentiate between murder and manslaughter, thereby possibly depriving Müller of the only defence that might have saved his life.

Several facts support the notion that Müller did not set out to murder. Thomas Briggs’ shirt was ruffled but his dress was not extremely disordered or bloodied. Müller’s crushed hat suggested that the German had received at least one blow during a struggle. It is possible that, faced with being robbed, Briggs had tried to make a voluntary and hasty escape from the carriage in the hope that he could move along the footboard and get into another compartment, but that he fell and was struck by the train, accounting for the blood found on its footboard and rear wheel.

There were those who believed, as one correspondent to the
Daily News
did,
that
[Müller]
had not done a wilful murder
… for I doubt whether he ever meant to kill Mr Briggs or that he did kill him. And this I take it is the meaning of his protest after the verdict was given. He felt he was innocent in one sense
. If the hypothesis were true, and if Müller did not – at the time – realise that the old man had died, it might account for his reckless disposal of Briggs’ chain at Death’s in Cheapside and his cavalier wearing of the dead man’s hat. It could explain his actions during the week after the murder as guileless rather than indifferent. It would also make sense of his statement that he had not been convicted on a
true statement of the facts
and would support Dr Cappel’s conviction that Briggs’ death was not the result of premeditated murder but rather the unhappy result of a sudden temptation to rob.

Denied the opportunity to speak in his own defence, Müller was properly protected from incriminating himself under cross-examination but he was allowed no public opportunity to explain himself. His enforced silence ensured that many crucial
questions were left unanswered. Had Müller been permitted to take the stand, he might have clarified his actions and proved that the actual cause of Briggs’ death was his fall from the train. It is possible that the ambiguous feelings surrounding the case were rooted in something true – that Müller was both a murderer and a victim, and that Thomas Briggs’ death was manslaughter rather than murder. If so, it would mean that a defence constructed on the supposition of Müller’s total innocence was, as Dr Cappel put it in his letter to
The Times
, a
frightful mistake
, since it allowed no real room for mitigating evidence to be presented.

If Müller’s intention had been only to rob, rather than murder, did this account for his last-minute confession? If – like the Blyths and the Matthews – he had been unaware of the furore over Briggs’ death during the six days before it hit the weekend penny newspapers, then he might have embarked for America genuinely unaware that he had killed a man. This would certainly account for his surprise when arrested and, even once the cold horror of the truth had sunk in, it might also explain his ability so righteously to maintain his own belief in his innocence to the very last moment.

Müller may thus have deluded himself into believing that his only crime was one of theft and his sangfroid may simply have been consistent with the fact that he had not killed Thomas Briggs in cold blood. Did Dr Cappel’s words on the scaffold spark a sudden, visceral fear of imminent godly retribution that allowed him, finally, to accept the truth of what he had done? Or was Müller’s apparently unfathomable silence about the events a cynical attempt to escape punishment for his crime?

Müller’s refusal to account for himself puzzled both the press and public and, for some, it compounded their belief that an injustice had been done. His earnest gentleness and dignity, so at odds with the audacity of the attack, was endlessly curious. Even Parry, in his evidence to the Capital Punishment Commission of 1866, said that Müller bore the disposition of being
one of the
most inoffensive and harmless persons possible
. Parry went on to say that in his experience
the great majority of murders are committed by persons who were never criminals before and … who undoubtedly have not been educated in crime.

There were, of course, those who were unshakeably convinced of Müller’s guilt, including contemporary exponents of phrenology. This ‘pseudo-science’ sought to prove that intellectual ability and moral character were revealed in the shape of the human skull. Frederick Bridges, a phrenologist in Liverpool, believed that the peculiar characteristics of murderers were
very remarkable and can at once be detected
by any novice in phrenology
. Examining the heads of more than three hundred murderers he found that all of them, for example, had their ears very low set.

Those who flocked to see the model of Müller in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors might have noticed that the German tailor’s ears were indeed set rather low. Using the death mask made by the famous phrenologist Cornelius Donovan, Frederick Bridges measured Müller’s skull and features and published his own findings. He considered that
Müller’s head was of
the true type of the murderer
and robber … Therefore if he had not confessed to the murder it would not have had the least weight with me
. The width of his head indicated
large destructiveness, combativeness … and secretiveness.
His
artful lying, cunning and double dealing are in keeping with the excessive development of the organ of secretiveness.
Donovan agreed: he believed that the shape of Müller’s head indicated
deep craftiness … also much covetousness of property.

The novelist Conan Doyle also found phrenology intriguing: in the opening chapter of
The Hound of the Baskervilles
(1901–2) Dr James Mortimer admits,
you interest me very much, Mr Holmes. I had hardly expected so dolichocephalic a skull or such well-marked supra-orbital development. Would you have any objection to my running my finger along your parietal fissure? A
cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum. It is not my intention to be fulsome, but
I confess that I covet your skull.
This fashion for a quack ‘science’ accounts partly, at least, for the obsessive reporting of Müller’s physical appearance. When the Liverpool phrenologist Dr Bridges reported that
the head of Müller is not of the lowest criminal class and had he been placed in favourable circumstances he might never have been tempted to commit such a crime
, desperate for anything that ‘explained’ the Müller conundrum
,
the public lapped it up.

*

When it learned of Müller’s arrest in New York,
The Times
had comforted its readers that the modern technologies of steam-power, photography and the electric cable had each played a triumphant part in the detection of crime. Countering fears that invention and progress were – as so many people feared – undermining civilisation, the paper suggested that – on the contrary – they made the world a safer place. No community could now feel itself to be isolated; the very speed of communication would conquer crime.

Over the ensuing decades, tests would be developed accurately to identify human blood (and, later, to ‘type’ it), fingerprints would point to the identity of criminals, and forensic pathologists would begin to piece together the truth from the microscopic clues found at crime scenes, from blood-spatter patterns, drug traces, footprints and the absolute angle of wounds. The wireless cable would ultimately halt the flight of the murderous Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen and his lover Ethel Neave in 1910 by allowing their ship’s captain to telegraph his suspicions about the couple to the detectives on dry land. Well before that, by the end of the 1860s the vogue for sensation novels would develop into a passion for literary detection. These professional sleuths would harness scientific advance to sharp cunning and
logical deduction, holding out the promise of solid ‘proof’ and observable, rigorous truth.

*

As to the reward, Jonathan Matthews’ creditors learned that he was likely to receive the entire three hundred pounds and contrived to have him confined to
Horsemonger Lane debtors’ gaol
. In the spring of 1865, after months of legal consideration by Treasury counsel, it was judged that John Death’s evidence was given before the reward was offered and that the Blyths had answered police questions rather than come forward voluntarily. As a result, Matthews did receive the full three hundred pounds reward but, as he had once publicly speculated, most of it was swallowed up by debts and he enjoyed only fifty pounds of it. In
an odd twist of fate
, it so happened that Matthews’ creditors were legally represented by Müller’s solicitor, Thomas Beard.

In 1865 Müller’s friend John Hoffa married Jane, a general servant in Threadneedle Street. He remained a tailor all his life.

Although it was said that Müller wrote to his father from Newgate and received replies from him, their contents were never made public and nothing more was ever discovered about the tailor’s family in Germany nor of their reaction to his conviction. In April 1865 Müller’s father was
still quietly petitioning
the Home Office for the return of the statement written by his son on the Saturday before his execution. The sister Müller claimed to have in New York never appeared and the woman in London who claimed to be a sister, Sophia Pearson, disappeared from record in the years following his execution. A man supposed to be a younger brother, Ferdinand, about whom nothing was heard at the time of the trial, died in March 1905: his body was found in the garden of his lodging house at 6 Park Terrace, East Finchley, London –
an address remarkably similar
and not so far away from where Franz once lodged with the Blyths. All in all,
the Müller family remained as unknown to the British public as the Briggs family in suburban Hackney.

Particular in his own dress, it might have appealed to Müller’s vanity that the low-crowned topper – also known as
the Müller cut-down
– became a popular style with young men throughout the 1870s, lasting well into the twentieth century. It was most notably favoured by the future Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.

*

The promising career of Inspector Richard Tanner, whose name after Müller’s arrest become a byword for a new breed of detective, was cut prematurely short. In 1866 he investigated the famous Duddlewick Murder, in which John Meredith was acquitted at trial of murdering his nephew Edward. It was Tanner’s last major case. Within three years, aged just thirty-seven, he was forced to retire from the Metropolitan Police with crippling rheumatism. He died of a stroke in 1873, not quite forty-two years old.

*

Does technological progress come at a price? How should a nation priding itself on its morality and civilisation deal with threats to the safety of its citizens? How can it best assimilate and behave towards foreign nationals drawn by the opportunities vested in its advanced wealth and liberal values? These were all questions loosed from the Pandora’s Box of the British psyche by the train murder of 1864 and they accounted, in part, for the overwhelming public reaction to the crime.

The problem with the murder of Thomas Briggs was that no one would ever know the truth about what happened between Briggs and Müller on the night of 9 July. The struggle between a poor German artisan and a silk-hatted English banker bound preconceptions about the poor to a fear of foreigners in an incendiary combination. More to the point, the crime burst out of the
usual backstreet or domestic loci to strike at all the middle classes held dear, temporarily, changing everything and everyone, trouncing peace of mind.

Though no further killing would occur on a British train until 27 June 1881, the bludgeoning of Thomas Briggs in his first-class train compartment appeared symptomatic of a world spinning out of control. It seemed to prove the ability of the disenchanted individual to wreak havoc on the national sense of security and to signify that danger was random. The fact that the attack occurred on a railway train emphasised a terrifying new reality: that technological cleverness had spawned progress and wealth, but at a cost. It suggested that the price to be paid for modernity was, even for the most privileged in society, vulnerability and death.