The Invention of Murder (49 page)

Harriet Lane had been a milliner working in the Whitechapel Road when she met Wainwright, then a prosperous merchant, in 1871. He was already married, but soon an advertisement appeared in the local newspaper announcing Mr and Mrs Percy King’s ‘marriage’, and the new Mrs King moved into lodgings. Mr King was understood to be a commercial traveller, and was therefore frequently absent, but the couple had two children; meanwhile Wainwright lived under his own name with his wife and five children, who were also under the impression that he travelled for work. He gave Mrs King £5 a week (£250 a year was a good middle-class income), and she invited a Miss Wilmore, a fellow milliner, to live with her and help with the children.

This double life was only sustainable while Wainwright remained prosperous. In 1874 his brother William dissolved their partnership: Wainwright owed him substantial sums, and he owed others even more.
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Wainwright became unable to maintain his second family, and Mrs King was forced to pawn her possessions, even her wedding ring. She also began to drink, turning up distraught at Whitechapel Road, threatening to go to Wainwright’s wife. Finally he gave her £15 to redeem her pawned possessions, pay her debts and – her landlady having tired of her drinking – move to new lodgings. On 10 September 1874 Mrs King told Miss Wilmore that she was going to Whitechapel Road. She never returned. That same day, Wainwright purchased half a hundredweight of chloride of lime, to be delivered to the warehouse. And at some point around that time – they were later unable to date the event precisely – three workmen near the warehouse heard gunshots.

Miss Wilmore, with two children not her own, and no money, approached Wainwright for advice. He told her that Mrs King had run off with an auctioneer named Teddy Frieake, and sure enough, Miss Wilmore soon received a letter from Mr Frieake, followed by a telegram from Mrs King, saying they were setting off for a new life abroad. Wainwright sent money for the children when he could, and there matters rested until his business finally failed and the mortgage on his warehouse fell in. Wainwright and his brother Thomas bought lengths of waterproof cloth, a chopper and a spade, and on 11 September Wainwright asked Stokes for help.

The combination of details – the length of time between the death and its discovery; the cast-off mistress; the double life; the epic run of Alfred Stokes – all went to make this crime a crowd-pleaser. ‘Harriet Lane’ became a slang phrase for tinned meat.
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Many newspapers leapt upon the report that Wainwright had been a great supporter of the Pavilion Theatre: at a benefit he had played, according to one story, an amateur Shylock, demanding his pound of flesh with vigour; even more widespread were the stories of his amateur performances of ‘The Dream of Eugene Aram’. This was possibly the most newsworthy crime since Palmer. The
Telegraph
devoted 125 columns to the case – that paper and
The Times
together, at 216 columns, gave more space to Wainwright than they would to Jack the Ripper thirteen years later. The weeklies loved it too –
Lloyd’s
gave the magistrates’ hearing three pages, while the first day of the trial took up nearly 50 per cent of the editorial space. They were only supplying what the crowd wanted: the
Daily News
reported that the morning arrival of the jury at the Old Bailey during the trial drew ‘numbers of people’ to watch these twelve ordinary men merely walk up the street.
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At the trial, Wainwright’s inability to support two families was demonstrated; witnesses identified ‘Teddy Frieake’, Mrs King’s caller,as Wainwright himself; and Frieake’s letter to Miss Wilmore was proved to be in his handwriting. But it was the forensic work that made the trial so important. The first thing was the identification of the year-old, decomposed and dismembered body. The prosecution was helped by the lime that had been used to mask the smell: it had done that efficiently, but it also delayed decomposition. The soil was sieved, and body parts, as well as buttons, pins, a ring and a piece of rope, were found. Harriet’s family described her as small, with brown hair, a decayed front tooth, pierced ears, and a scar on her right knee. She had been twenty-four when she died, and the wisdom teeth found were judged consistent with this. The face of the corpse was too decomposed to identify, but the single ear that remained was pierced; the hair had been damaged by the lime, but it was almost the same colour as that described, and more of the same colour hair was on the spade; the decayed tooth, too, was intact, and a scar was found on the body’s right knee. The remains measured approximately four feet eleven inches; the forensic team (as it might now properly be called) estimated from a photograph that Harriet had been just over five feet tall. Two bullets were found in the skull, and the throat had also been cut, although it was not possible to tell if this had occurred before or after death.

The defence had a hard time against this array of evidence. One line was to say that the prosecution had not proved the remains were Harriet Lane: the height was not quite right; the prosecution had claimed that the deceased had borne a child, but the defence said it was impossible to know; the body had a scar on both knees, casting doubt on Harriet’s father’s claim that her right knee was scarred; there was no mark on the left hand to show that she had habitually worn a wedding ring. A second line was that Harriet had committed suicide. The prosecution asked disdainfully if she had then slit her own throat, before burying herself, and a year later digging herself up and dismembering her own body. Doggedly, the defence claimed that Wainwright had panicked when he found her dead, had buried her, then dug her up when the warehouse was going to be sold. The judge summed up strongly against Henry Wainwright, but suggested that Thomas had been his brother’s dupe, and was therefore less culpable. The jury took less than an hour to find Henry Wainwright guilty; Thomas was found guilty as an accessory after the fact and sentenced to penal servitude for seven years.

Executions were no longer public events. Since 1868 they had been held in private inside the prison, but ‘private’ was a flexible word – a hundred journalists were admitted to watch Wainwright die, and they shared their experience with their readers. Public interest did not fade away with his death, either. Subscriptions were opened to support his wife and the children of his two families, all left in poverty. Six hundred
Times
readers alone sent contributions said to amount to £700, and in March another paper claimed that £1,232.18s.10d. had been raised. Alfred Stokes too was rewarded – the trial judge gave him £30, and after an outcry in the press at the discrepancy between his reward and the funds raised for Wainwright’s family, journalists raised more. Initially Stokes did not find life easy; Wainwright’s supporters physically threatened him, and a friend of his was attacked. It must have been a serious assault: the man was sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude, five years’ police supervision, and twenty-five lashes. Stokes, however, found a vicarious fame afterwards. In court he said he had opened the parcel because he thought Wainwright was stealing. By January 1876 he was assuring the world that he had opened it because a spectral voice had told him to; soon the spectre had even called to him the traditional three times.

The
Illustrated Police News
published a penny-pamphlet, ‘From the Footlights to the Prison Cell’, ostensibly by Alice Day, although probably by the authors of a similar pamphlet, ‘The Whitechapel Tragedy’, both of which went on sale within weeks of the execution. Theatre too dabbled in the story, although most of the productions appear to have been unlicensed, and probably did better at fairs than in more mainstream venues. The Royal Clarence Theatre, Dover, had
The Whitechapel Tragedy
running for a week. The following year a theatre in Market Harborough produced either the same play or a variant of it – its only trace is a newspaper report of the execution scene, which appears to have been played out in full onstage (another indication that it was unlicensed): the stool slipped and the actor-Wainwright nearly went the way of the real one.

While Wainwright was soon forgotten, the display of how science could be used to catch a murderer was not, and after the trial the ‘science’ in detective fiction became even more elaborate. In
Almack, the Detective,
an 1886 penny-work, Tom Rawdon’s sister is murdered by a tramp as she visits the poor. Rawdon has her body ‘frozen hard – my object being to examine it myself scientifically’. He finds ‘bright particles’ in the skull wound, which means that ‘The instrument that struck the blow must have been of steel.’ He also does a blood analysis which finds ‘an appearance which is unique in the human race, and never before observed’, deducing that this must be the murderer’s blood (although why the murderer was bleeding, the reader never discovers): ‘I am certain, that, could I obtain a single drop of her murderer’s blood, I could unhesitatingly prove him guilty of the crime.’ That was the year before Sherlock Holmes appeared in
A Study in Scarlet,
analysing the bruising of a body after death. Wainwright’s main legacy was to forensic science, fictional and real, and it became relevant two years later, with the case of Harriet Staunton.

In 1874, Louis Staunton, a twenty-three-year-old auctioneer with ambitions, began to court Harriet Richardson, the daughter of a deceased Church of England clergyman. She was ten years older than her suitor, plain, and, according to her mother, ‘simple’ and ‘of weak intellect’. She did, however, have some money of her own. Her mother, now married to another clergyman, named Butterfield, attempted to have her declared a ward in chancery to prevent the marriage, but she failed, and in June 1875 the couple married. In July Mrs Butterfield paid a brief formal call, but shortly afterwards she received a letter from her daughter severing relations. In March 1876 Mrs Staunton gave birth to a son, and some time later the couple moved, and Mrs Butterfield lost sight of her daughter’s whereabouts.

In February 1877 she saw Alice Rhodes at London Bridge railway station. Mrs Butterfield and Miss Rhodes were tenuously related: Miss Rhodes was the stepdaughter of Mrs Butterfield’s nephew, and her sister Elizabeth was married to Louis Staunton’s brother Patrick. Miss Rhodes told Mrs Butterfield that her daughter was in Brighton. The worried mother noticed that Miss Rhodes was wearing a brooch that belonged to Mrs Staunton, and when she commented on it, Miss Rhodes offered it to her; she refused, but was puzzled – the brooch had been one of Mrs Staunton’s favourites.

This preyed on her mind, and she set to work and traced her daughter to Halstead, near Cudham in Kent. She travelled down, and by chance met Patrick Staunton at the station as she set off. To her anxious queries he replied, ‘Damn your daughter, I know nothing about her,’ adding, for good measure, ‘If you come to my house I will blow your brains out.’ Nothing daunted, she went on to Halstead and found directions to Little Grays, the farm Louis Staunton was renting. Elizabeth Staunton opened the door, but was immediately joined by Louis, who called his mother-in-law an ‘old bitch’ and refused to allow her in. Mrs Butterfield begged: ‘If you will only let me hear her voice or see her hand on the banisters, I shall then go away content,’ but he threatened her, and she was forced to return to London. She continued to try to reach her daughter, applying to the magistrates both in London and in Kent, to no avail.

Two months later, in April, in a post office in the south London suburb of Penge, a man named Casabianca overheard a stranger enquiring where he should go to register the death of a woman named Staunton. This was an unfortunate coincidence for Louis Staunton, for Casabianca was married to Harriet Staunton’s sister, and he knew of Mrs Butterfield’s unsuccessful attempts to find her. He went to the local police, who initially followed up only as a matter of form. They found that a couple and another woman had taken lodgings the day before in preparation for the arrival of ‘an invalid lady’. They had asked for a local practitioner to visit her, and were referred to Dr Longrigg; the invalid, the doctor was told, was feeble-minded and partially paralysed. When he arrived she was unconscious, emaciated and dirty. He arranged for a nurse, but said there was no hope, and the patient died later that day. Based on the information given to him by the caring couple who called him in, he certified ‘cerebral disease and apoplexy’. After the police appeared, the doctor hastily revoked the certificate and notified the coroner.

At the inquest, a sinister picture emerged. Louis and Elizabeth Staunton were identified not as a married couple, but as the husband and sister-in-law of the deceased, while the role of Miss Rhodes appeared dubious. The post-mortem revealed that the dead woman,now named as Harriet Staunton, had been lice-ridden, and, despite being five feet five inches tall, had weighed only seventy-four pounds on her death. There was also some suggestion of an irritant poison. Louis Staunton claimed that he and his wife had separated because of her heavy drinking, but the post-mortem found no sign of liver disease, and no witnesses could be located who had ever seen Mrs Staunton drunk.

It was now disclosed that a week before Mrs Staunton’s death, Patrick and Elizabeth Staunton had appeared at Guy’s Hospital in London with a seriously ill child, saying the mother couldn’t care for it. Either that day or the next, the child died, and Louis arrived at the hospital the following day. He identified the boy as ‘Henry Stormton’, the son of a carpenter, who was ‘away’. He said he was there to arrange the funeral on Stormton’s behalf, and gave his own name as Harris. The funeral, he added, should be performed as cheaply as possible. This, it now appeared, was Harriet and Louis’ child. The shocked inquest jury found a verdict of death by starvation and neglect against the three Stauntons and Miss Rhodes.

The trial opened at the Old Bailey in September 1877. Edward Clarke was the barrister for Patrick Staunton, and he led the defence of all four of the accused. Mrs Butterfield was the first to testify for the prosecution. She told how her daughter was not ‘fit’ to marry and of her attempts to see her, which had been thwarted by the Stauntons. Then the court heard the medical evidence, of the post-mortem state of the corpse and the analysis which found no poison. The doctor in Kent said he had never been asked to treat Mrs Staunton; another doctor said that Miss Rhodes had given birth to a child while living with Louis Staunton. A solicitor testified that Louis had sold the reversionary interest of his wife’s inheritance, and had the money signed over to him.