The Italian Boy (10 page)

Another representation of May, Williams, and Bishop, in the Bow Street dock

This was the sort of treachery that James Corder was hoping for from Bishop, Williams, May, or Shields. The investigation would be easier if somebody snitched: if they didn’t, establishing the order of events that converted an unidentified boy into the Subject that was tipped onto the floor at King’s College would require the tracking down and bringing together of witnesses and physical evidence in order to create a plausible narrative for an Old Bailey jury to consider. But the concept of objects being able to tell tales and supply solutions to mysteries was in its infancy; observation, deduction, analysis, and “scientific” forensics were only on the verge of replacing traditional approaches to criminal cases. In the 1830s, guilt was still established by eyewitness accounts, being caught in the act, having a bad reputation, or simply looking and sounding the part of a criminal. But the eyes not just of the capital but of the whole nation were focused on these proceedings. Melbourne himself had told Superintendent Joseph Sadler Thomas “to employ his men without reserve as to labour or expense” and had offered a king’s pardon “under the usual limitations” to any accomplice, and a two-hundred-pound reward for anyone who came forward with evidence that would secure the conviction of the suspects in the case of the Poor Italian Boy—for even Whitehall had taken to referring to the victim in this way.
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This, Thomas’s first murder case, shows the fumbling beginnings of a methodical analysis of a crime scene and possible weapons, the checking of alibis and the testing of eyewitness evidence. As with any new science, the experiments, to later ages, can appear ludicrous.

William Burke and William Hare as they appeared in court in Edinburgh in December 1828

Item No. 1 was a tortoise. Following newspaper reports that the dead boy was being tentatively identified as an Italian beggar who exhibited white mice and/or a tortoise, an anonymous letter was received at Bow Street claiming a “similar-looking” tortoise was for sale in a shop in Middle Row, Holborn.
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Superintendent Thomas had wasted no time in going to the shop, where the owner’s wife had told him that her husband had purchased the creature in Leadenhall Market. Nevertheless, Thomas took the tortoise into custody, and when he shortly afterward showed it to Joseph Paragalli, the Italian claimed that, yes, it certainly looked like the dead boy’s tortoise.

In court on Friday the eighteenth, Thomas flourished before Minshull the hamper and bloodstained sack that had been used to transport the body to King’s College and presented in a small box the teeth that May had sold to the dentist, Mills. At this point in the hearing, James May dropped his usual facetiousness; he was perhaps realizing how a jury might interpret the fact that he had told Mills that all the teeth had come from the same body and that the body had never been buried. The
Times
reporter noted that May now began to stare wildly, compressing his lips tightly as he took in every word the dentist said: “May appeared for the first time to lose that hardness of nerve that distinguished him.”
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Then May self-consciously attempted to compose his features and laughed a rather hollow laugh, before starting and staring again, muttering, “You bloody rascal,” at Mills.

May was also alarmed to learn that his lodgings had been searched by Thomas’s men and a number of items retrieved. The officers had found a waistcoat with marks of clay on it, some metal implements, and a pair of bloodstained trousers; there was also blood on the floor near where the trousers had lain. May protested, telling the court that after his arrest, a jackdaw had hopped onto his trousers after injuring its leg; he knew, because one of the other tenants had visited him in prison and told him so. Superintendent Thomas said that he was inclined to believe this story, since the search had taken place a full week after May’s arrest and the bloodstains were “entirely too fresh and glutinous” to have had any connection with the murder, though Constable Joseph Higgins pointed out that a rain shower that came down as the clothing was being carried back to the police station may have made the blood look fresh. In his evidence, Higgins made no mention of the jackdaw story, and May picked up on this attempt to implicate him, saying, “Now Mr Policeman, do you remember the jackdaw having hurt his leg? You did not state that to the worthy justice when you ought to have done.” The bloodied jackdaw was no bizarre invention; Charlotte Berry, one of the residents at the lodging house, admitted that she had been playing with the bird—which was kept as a pet by the landlady, Mrs. Carroll—on the first-floor landing at 4 Dorset Street and had accidentally injured it by pinching its foot in the door; the bird had then hopped into May’s room, which was next to Berry’s.

In investigating May’s alibi, the police had examined Rosina Carpenter, “a young woman with whom one of the prisoners had occasionally co-habited.” May claimed that he had spent the night of Thursday, 3 November, with Carpenter, from late in the afternoon. Carpenter was a childhood friend of May’s with whom he was now intimate; whatever she had told the authorities was withheld from the press, however, on the grounds that “it would be very imprudent to publish at present.”
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Superintendent Thomas’s energetic police work did not always achieve results. He had received an unsigned letter stating that John Appleton, the dissecting-room porter at Grainger’s medical school, had told a postman that the body offered to him by Bishop and May on Friday, 4 November, was still warm. But when Thomas brought Appleton before Minshull, the porter indignantly denied having said any such thing to anyone and insisted he had never even seen the body.

As interesting as the evidence brought to court is the evidence the authorities decided not to pursue. A Jewish clothes dealer who lived in Saffron Hill had come forward to claim that four men came into his shop in West Street, Smithfield, at half past two on the afternoon of Friday, 4 November, to exchange a pair of bloodstained corduroy breeches and a waistcoat for clean versions of the same and bought a smock frock with unusual stitching; two of the four men were already wearing smock frocks. The clothes dealer was escorted to see the prisoners in Clerkenwell New Prison, where they were being held on remand, on Saturday, 12 November, in an attempt to identify the four men he had served; he was able to pick out May and Bishop, though not Williams or Shields.
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If indeed two other men came to his shop, their identities would never be established: Bishop and May had made no mention of them in their statements about their movements that Friday. For reasons that are not clear, James Corder told Minshull that the prosecution did not intend to investigate further the clothes-exchanging episode, despite the identification that had been made. Perhaps Corder decided to abandon this promising line of inquiry in order to protect the clothes dealer from possible attacks from the accused if they were acquitted or from their associates in the event of their conviction. Or perhaps with two unknown men entering the story, the case was becoming too convoluted to be put convincingly before a jury. The plot was thickening, or as Minshull put it: “We are now in the thickest part of the horrid affair.” Yes, “the facts certainly thickened upon them,” replied Superintendent Thomas.
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With reference to the cause of death, Thomas announced to Minshull that he believed the cut on the forehead of the dead boy was probably the fatal blow; in saying this, he was contradicting the unanimous evidence of the anatomists who had studied the corpse. Thomas also saw significance in the fact that James May’s left hand was poulticed and bandaged, and he asked Richard Partridge to step across the court to examine the wound. This Partridge did, announcing that there was an injury to the top of the forefinger that had probably occurred just before the arrest. May said he had received the wound as he punched out the dead boy’s teeth with a brad awl at 3 Nova Scotia Gardens.

Clerkenwell New Prison, where Bishop, Williams, and May were detained during the police investigation

Every comment made by the accused was seized upon by Superintendent Thomas. Bishop had said shortly after his arrest that the body had come from Guy’s Hospital. (This wasn’t strictly a lie, since Bishop and May had collected it from there on the morning of Saturday the fifth.) Thomas immediately sent a message to Guy’s with a request to know whether any boy had died there lately. Guy’s sent back a slip of paper stating that since 28 October three people had died at the hospital—a woman and two males, aged thirty-three and thirty-seven.

Thomas was also proud to reveal that while the four men were waiting to be taken to the coroner’s hearing at the Unicorn pub, Bishop had leaned over Williams and muttered to May that it had been the blood dripping from the boy’s forehead injury that had given them away: “It was the blood that sold us,” Bishop said. The men were sitting beneath a police notice about the murder for which they were being held. Bishop stood up and read the notice, gave a forced laugh, and told his colleagues, “This states that there were ‘marks of violence.’ The marks of violence were only breakings-out on the skin.” He sat down smiling. These comments were overheard and written down by a plainclothes officer sitting nearby. Before Minshull, Bishop denied having made them, but his protestations carried little weight: things were not looking good for the accused.

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Minshull was profoundly impressed
by the energy and diligence with which Thomas was amassing clues and memorizing possibly telling exchanges. And it is striking how at every crucial point of the proceedings, Thomas pops up like a deus ex machina, revealing his latest “information received,” producing tantalizing physical evidence, conjuring up new witnesses. However, just in case his confidence was misplaced, Minshull also called on one of the oldest of the Bow Street Runners, Samuel Taunton, to make inquiries around Bethnal Green and Shoreditch, a move not calculated to please Thomas. London’s New Police were not supposed to be a detective force, after all: they had been created to prevent crime from happening. Such clearing up of mysteries that did take place was still the work of the Bow Street Runners—the small plainclothes force set up by Henry Fielding in 1749 that would work alongside the New Police until being disbanded in August 1839. The Runners received a retaining fee from the authorities but relied on rewards for their real earnings. While idolized by many, they depended heavily on informants to solve crimes and achieved their success by mixing with the very thieves, fences, and procurers they were supposed to be thwarting; pure analysis had little to do with it. Later in the century, Dickens would puncture their reputation, claiming they were “far too much in the habit of consorting with thieves and the like.… They never lost a public occasion of jobbing and trading in mystery and making the most of themselves.… As a detective police they were very loose in their operations.”
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The coexistence of the Runners and the New Police was an oddity peculiar to London. Before 1829, London was policed by a ramshackle medley of parish constables, the Bow Street Night Patrol, the Bow Street Day Patrol, the Horse Patrol (to protect the highways), the Thames River Police, and the Runners, as well as the much-mocked Charleys—widely reputed to be elderly men who dozed the night away in their sentry boxes while stealing and brawling went on all around.
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That there had been popular dissatisfaction with the officers of the Bow Street Day Patrol is suggested by a report of an angry meeting of the parishioners of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, in September 1828, who alleged that the patrol officers had been too drunk to be of any assistance when two houses fell down in Exeter Street, off the Strand, killing a woman and a child. According to those trying to free the injured from the debris, only the St. Paul’s parish constables—quite probably including Thomas—were sober and came immediately to help.
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