The Invention of Murder (58 page)

The next morning, Mary Eleanor Pearcey and Clara Hogg appeared at the police station. Miss Hogg feared that the dead woman might be her sister-in-law Phoebe Hogg, who was supposed to have gone to see her sick father, but had never arrived. Having read that morning’s newspaper report of the finding of an unidentified woman whose clothes were marked ‘P.H.’, her husband Frank had sent his sister to Mrs Pearcey, whom Mrs Hogg had been going to visit, and the two women had set out for the police station together. At the mortuary Mrs Pearcey immediately said that the body was not that of Mrs Hogg, and tried to drag her friend away. Miss Hogg was uncertain; she recognized the clothes. The police washed the blood off the woman’s face
*
and asked her to look again, and now Miss Hogg had no doubts. It was her sister-in-law. When the police heard that Mrs Hogg had set out the day before with her child, Miss Hogg and Mrs Pearcey were asked to go to another police station, where an abandoned bloodstained pram was being held; it had been found in St John’s Wood, over two and a half miles from Mrs Pearcey’s lodgings. Miss Hogg immediately identified the pram as that of her brother and sister-in-law’s eighteen-month-old child, also named Phoebe. They were asked to return to Hampstead police station, stopping en route to collect Frank Hogg. He was searched, and a key (later found to belong to Mrs Pearcey’s rooms) was found on him.

Mrs Pearcey’s behaviour at the mortuary had aroused suspicion, and she was escorted back to her lodgings. There the police found knives covered in blood, and blood splashes on the ceiling, the floor, the window and a rug. There was blood and hair on a poker, and blood splashes on the firewood, which suggested that all this blood had been recently produced. Two windows were cracked. A policeman ‘took the knives and poker into the parlour where [Mrs Pearcey] was sitting. She whistled and assumed an air of perfect indifference.’
†
Further searching found a card case belonging to Frank Hogg in her bonnet box. The police asked her when she had last seen Mrs Hogg. She said, ‘Mrs. Hogg did come here at six o’clock, and asked me to lend her two shillings and to mind the child. I told her I could not lend her the money as I had none, and I could not mind the child as I was going out. I told Clara Hogg about it, and she advised me to say nothing. it would be such a disgrace if people thought her husband kept her short of money.’ The blood, she explained, was owing to a recent nosebleed, while the scratches on her hands were from killing mice. The other lodgers in the house all said they had heard an altercation the previous night, and seen a pram in the hall. Eleanor Pearcey was arrested. Meanwhile, a baby’s body had been found by a hawker on some waste land just off the Finchley Road.
*

At the police court hearing and then at her trial, the evidence piled up. Mrs Pearcey’s mother testified that her daughter, née Mary Eleanor Wheeler, had left home in her teens, and had vanished for a year, coming back to say that she was working ‘in the fur line’ in Stepney, although later she said she was working abroad as a servant. She had married – that is, she had lived with and taken the name of – John Charles Pearcey, a carpenter, although he had left her when she had started seeing Frank Hogg. She was now supported by a Mr Creighton or Crighton, although Hogg continued to visit. Hogg, who worked for his brother in his furniture-removing business, had known Mrs Pearcey for about five years. Three years after the relationship started, he had married Phoebe, who was three months pregnant. Letters from Mrs Pearcey to Hogg were found: ‘Do not think of going away,’ she had written, ‘for my heart will break if you do. I would see you married fifty times over. I could bear that far better than parting with you He introduced Mrs Pearcey to his new wife as a friend of the family, and the two women had become friends – earlier that year,when Mrs Hogg had been ill, Mrs Pearcey had shared the nursing, staying with the couple for some weeks.

Contrary to Mrs Pearcey’s statement that Mrs Hogg had arrived to borrow money, testimony was heard that Mrs Pearcey had twice written to Mrs Hogg, asking her to visit with ‘our little darling’. The postmortem said that Mrs Hogg had been hit on the head, then her throat was slashed several times, one of the cuts being savage enough to sever the windpipe and the spinal cord. Her hands and wrists were marked, as though she had tried to ward off an assault. A neighbour had heard glass break, and a child scream; another ‘thought it best not to interfere. Mrs Pearcey was always very ladylike and kind-speaking.’ Two witnesses saw her that evening, pushing a pram piled high with what they thought was laundry. A police searcher from Kentish Town police station had given evidence at the magistrates’ court that when she was waiting to take Mrs Pearcey’s clothes to the Inspector, Mrs Pearcey had said, ‘As we were having tea Mrs. Hogg made a remark that I did not like. One word brought up another -’ Then she stopped herself: ‘Perhaps I had better say no more.’ At the trial, the defence belittled this statement, pointing out that the woman had failed to mention these suspicious words until just before the hearing. She had not known it was important, she responded. The defence reacted with incredulity: how could it not be important? Desperately, she continued, ‘I don’t know exactly the meaning of the word “important” – Yes, I do know … I was instructed not to repeat anything the prisoner said,’ she stumbled on. ‘Do you mean to say that after being a searcher for five years you believed that when you were told not to repeat anything … it meant you must not tell your inspector?’ ‘Yes.’

The prosecution had, however, put together a formidable forensic case: at Mrs Pearcey’s lodgings they found human hair matching Mrs Hogg’s on a broom and a bottle of paraffin (this, of course, was a visual match only). A button found in the ashes in the dustbin matched those on Mrs Hogg’s jacket, which was missing one; a pair of bloodstained curtains was soaking in the wash-house; the remains of a hat were found in the grate, while Mrs Hogg’s hat was missing; the cardigan that had been wrapped around Mrs Hogg’s head had been left behind by John Pearcey when he moved out; a brass nut, which fitted a screw in the pram, had been found near Mrs Hogg’s body. The police had even tested a duplicate pram to ensure that it would bear the weight of a woman and child, wheeling it along the passageway and into the kitchen to prove it could be done.

The defence called no witnesses at all. Before the trial, Mrs Pearcey’s mother was reported to have said that she would have to sell her daughter’s belongings to pay for a defence. There was, she said, ‘a great deal’ that could be done for her daughter, if only she had the money. It appears, from the trial transcript, that that money cannot have been forthcoming. The speech for the defence began: ‘there was nothing but circumstantial evidence against the prisoner’, at which point the judge interjected: ‘It was clearly shown Mrs. Pearcey was a party to a plan to destroy Mrs. Hogg, and the matter must not be cavilled with.’ A more prosperous accused would have been able to launch an appeal on that statement alone, but Mrs Pearcey’s counsel had to plough on. He examined the evidence that had been presented by the prosecution, noting that it was all entirely circumstantial: the two witnesses who had seen a woman pushing a pram had given two different descriptions of her; Mrs Hogg’s body bore signs that she had struggled violently with her attacker, but Mrs Pearcey showed no similar marks (she did, actually – the scratches she attributed to ‘killing mice’); Mrs Hogg’s wedding ring had vanished, but Mrs Pearcey was never shown to have had any ring but her own. There was no motive: her relationship with Hogg was continuing, so she had no particular reason to want his wife dead. Finally he pointed out that Mrs Pearcey was a slightly built woman, who was supposed to have severed her victim’s spinal cord, then to have had the strength to push a pram loaded with the victim and the victim’s child up a steep slope – nearly two miles to the point where Mrs Hogg was found, nearly three miles to where the pram was found, and then finally to have carried the baby, at night, in the dark, another quarter of a mile before walking the three miles back home.

The judge summed up firmly against Mrs Pearcey; he warned the jury not to heed the defence’s comments on the weakness of circumstantial evidence – if some elements of the chain of evidence had broken down, he stated blithely, the others could still indicate guilt. He added that if Mrs Pearcey had merely known of the murder, but had not committed it herself, she was as guilty as if she had been the murderer. The jury agreed: guilty.

Many newspapers assumed that Mrs Pearcey had not acted alone. Her size was one element (although the unreliable MacNaghten, from a distance of two decades, remembered that he had ‘rarely seen a woman of stronger physique than Mrs. Pearcey’).
Lloyd’s
reported that the police had ‘information’ that would soon implicate a second person; the
Liverpool Mercury
agreed that ‘There is now absolutely no doubt’ a second person was involved, although it nominated another woman as the second murderer. Most looked to Hogg.
The Times
said that ‘there will always be a doubt. as to how the woman can have done the deed alone’, and ‘indeed, it would seem from one or two expressions used by the Judge that he himself is not quite convinced … But the man HOGG had a complete alibi.’ The
Western Mail
went even further, suggesting that Mrs Hogg had been starved when Mrs Pearcey had nursed her, and that, ominously, ‘on one occasion she refused to touch a custard. fearing that some one had tampered with it’. The report ended, ‘The Central News learns on inquiry that Mr. Hogg is in even better health and spirits than usual. The statement that he has gone mad is entirely unfounded.’ This permitted the paper to suggest that he was a raving madman (who might therefore easily have committed a murder), and at the same time that he was a heartless beast, being in good ‘health and spirits’ after his wife and child had been brutally murdered. The public agreed that Hogg was culpable. As he followed the two coffins to the cemetery, ‘there was a furious outburst of yells and execrations that might have made the stoutest heart quail. So threatening and excited’ was the crowd that the police – 150 of them – had to form a cordon to stop it overturning the mourning coach. During the funeral itself, Hogg was jeered and hissed.

By the 1890s, women on trial at the Old Bailey represented less than 10 per cent of defendants. And as time progressed, those convicted could rely with more confidence on a reprieve. In 1849 there were six convictions for murder by a woman; five were executed. By 1880, when seven female murderers were convicted, none was executed. Between those two dates there was no year in which there was more than a 30 per cent chance of a woman murderer actually being executed if found guilty. Mrs Pearcey, however, was not one of the fortunate majority.

Even after her execution, the rumour-mill continued to grind every piece of chaff that came its way. One of the most persistent rumours was that she had been married secretly (and implicitly to someone in a higher station of life), and that she had requested her solicitor to place the following ‘in the Madrid papers: “M.E.C.P. Last wish of M.E.W. Have not betrayed”.’
Lloyd’s,
three months later, was still running with this story, claiming that it now had firm information that on the night of the murders Mrs Pearcey had met with Mrs Hogg and an unnamed gentleman, had knocked Mrs Hogg out with the poker, and then ‘ordered her male visitor to cut the wretched woman’s throat’. They dumped the bodies before the strangely obliging murderer vanished to Spain. Then, in a fine example of newspaper double-think, the report continued: ‘Inquiries of the police show that they attach no importance whatever to the above statement.’

Lloyd’s
had a proprietorial interest in the story. A ‘young artist’ had been passing when Mrs Hogg’s body was found, and that very night he approached
Lloyd’s
with a sketch and details of the discovery. Fortunately for him, the crime had occurred just before the weekly edition went to press, and the staff inserted his description, although his illustration had to wait until the following week. ‘This gave us a start that, followed up, helped to increase largely the demand for the paper.’ After the illustration of the discovery of the body, other pictures followed: the kitchen, the pram, the broken windows. By November, pictures of both the Hogg and the Pearcey lodgings appeared, showing groups of spectators staring up at the notorious premises. Soon it was advertising ‘CORRECT PORTRAITS’ of Mrs Pearcey and Mrs Hogg, ‘cabinet size, mounted together’. In the same issue Mrs Pearcey’s mother lamented that she would have to sell her daughter’s possessions, but ‘I would. be satisfied if I could only get that photograph of her in evening dress which appeared in
Lloyd’s Newspaper
.’ The reporter promised at once and in print to get her a copy. The ‘photograph’ was a middle-class flight of fantasy, for Mrs Pearcey of a certainty did not possess evening dress. When she made her first appearance at the police court hearing she was wearing a workhouse dress, because her own was still being examined for bloodstains. The inescapable conclusion is that Mrs Pearcey had only one dress, which was not unusual for a woman in her economic bracket.

Lloyd’s
inserted itself wherever possible into the story: it quoted the woman who did Mrs Pearcey’s mangling, who claimed to have seen her pushing the pram on the relevant night: ‘I was reading
Lloyd’s
newspaper. and saw that there had been a murder. I said to my mother, “Why, mother, I saw her just under the railway arch, going along with a bassinette very heavily loaded.”’ In November a reader excitedly wrote: ‘Sir, – As a reader of
Lloyd’s
… I wish to state for your information that it is reported here that Hogg brought the prisoner with a furniture van through the town some few days before the murder. – I am, sir, yours, A BEDFORDSHIRE READER’, and ‘a portrait they had since seen in
Lloyd’s Newspaper
enabled ‘shocked’ residents to identify ‘the alleged murderess’. Naturally, there was a reported incident of supernatural prescience: ‘When bedtime came the. young lady. who was to have occupied the other bed [in the room where Mrs Pearcey was sleeping]. felt convinced that there was something so seriously wrong with her that she was afraid to sleep in the same room.’