The Italian Boy (16 page)

As soon as the coffin lid came off at the St. Pancras workhouse, Brun was reported to have exclaimed,
“Mon pauvre garçon, pauvre Carlo, mon pauvre garçon.”
This seems odd: if Brun had spoken French, Paragalli would not have been the only person who could have acted as his translator. Even odder was Brun’s subsequent statement to the magistrates that he had been unable to identify the dead boy because of the extent to which the body had decomposed. The child was green, and the facial features were disfigured; the attentions of the surgeons at the postmortem had not helped matters either. Brun said he believed the hair color and stature of the dead boy were similar to Carlo’s. He added that Carlo had been a well-known figure in the squares of the West End of London and that his customary phrase—in French, though he was an Italian boy—was
“Donnez un louis, signor.”
(Short for
un louis d’or,
a gold coin with a value of twenty francs. Presumably the word was used figuratively—twenty gold sovereigns was a steep price to pay for a look at white mice.) Superintendent Joseph Sadler Thomas now revealed that the corpse had a number of warts on its left hand, and he asked Brun whether Carlo Ferrari had had such blemishes. Brun replied that the hand had been too green for him to tell if there were any warts on it—not the question he had been asked.

Vestry clerk James Corder, however, was quite satisfied with Brun’s evidence, telling the magistrates court that it was clear to him that Brun had identified the boy as his former charge, Carlo Ferrari, since Brun had been unable to stop crying since viewing the corpse—itself a rather extraordinary claim. Corder added that Margaret King had also been taken to see the exhumed corpse—a pointlessly distressing exercise, since King had admitted that she had not seen the boy’s face on the day he appeared in Nova Scotia Gardens; King, sure enough, was unable to identify the dead boy.

Next, Joseph Paragalli explained that he was now able to recall that a boy called Carlo Ferrari had been living at 2 Charles Street eighteen months ago. He stated that when he had first seen the body, he had thought that it was Carlo, whom he had last seen alive standing outside the County Fire Office at the southern end of Regent Street (“the Quadrant”) in early October. It had been raining hard that day, and the child had looked cold and unhappy. Paragalli said that he had not noticed what the boy was wearing but he had seen that the mice were kept in a box that was divided in two; one half was a cage with a wheel for the mice to run round in; the other half was wooden and enclosed, and this was where the animals slept. Paragalli said he often visited Elliott’s house in Charles Street and had seen Carlo there on a number of occasions, and was even present when Brun had bound Carlo over to Charles Henoge. One week before seeing him in the Quadrant, Paragalli claimed, he had spoken to Carlo in Portland Place, just north of Oxford Circus.

One sketch artist’s concept of Carlo Ferrari, named as the victim two weeks after the discovery of the corpse

Proceedings in the magistrates court were about to finish for the day when Superintendent Thomas stepped forward and asked if he could—in his capacity as a public officer—make a further charge against Bishop and Williams only. May and Shields having been escorted from the dock, Thomas charged Bishop and Williams with “the murder of another boy, whose name for the present is unknown.” He expected to be able to present evidence in this second case before long. Minshull told Thomas that he had acted very properly in bringing the new charge. The case could not be in better hands, said the magistrate, deeply impressed.

*   *   *

On Superintendent Thomas’s orders
, Sarah Bishop and Rhoda Head had been taken into custody on Wednesday, 11 November, and had been remanded. Thomas had told Minshull that he would soon prove that the women had known about the killing of the Italian boy. There was no suspicion that they had taken an active role, but Thomas was convinced that anyone living in a house as small as 3 Nova Scotia Gardens must have been aware of everything that had gone on there.

Sarah and Rhoda had been arrested by Constable Higgins at the Fortune of War at four o’clock in the afternoon. Higgins went with them to Nova Scotia Gardens, accepting that Sarah had to make provision for her children—two boys, aged twelve and seven, and a two-year-old girl. While there, Higgins searched the cottage and took away with him what he believed to be significant objects: two chisel-like iron implements, each with one end bent into a hook; a brad awl with dried blood on it; a thick metal file; and a rope tied into a noose.

Later, before the magistrates, Richard Partridge examined these tools and gave his opinion that one of the bent chisels could have been used to inflict the wound on the dead boy’s forehead and that the heavy file could have dealt the blow to the back of the neck. Partridge told Minshull that he and George Beaman were certain that death had been caused by a blow to the back of the neck, repeating the evidence they had given to the coroner’s court. The two surgeons differed, said Partridge, only in one respect: Beaman believed death had been caused by blood entering the spinal column as a result of the blow, while Partridge thought death had occurred as a result of concussion of the spinal marrow. George Douchez, another local surgeon who had been present at the postmortem, was called and gave his opinion that the boy had been stunned by a blow to the head and then killed by having his neck wrung “like a duck’s.” At this, a thrill of horror—gasps and murmurs—ran around the Bow Street courtroom.

The Quadrant at the southern end of Regent Street, under construction in 1813; the County Fire Office is to the far right in the picture.

Forensic medicine was a young discipline. While celebrated surgeon and anatomist William Hunter had written his
Signs of Murder
treatise in 1783, the first coroners’ guides were not published until thirty-five years later. The courtroom discussion of the Italian boy’s cause of death reflected the limits of knowledge. So Partridge confidently announced: “Blood never coagulates after death,” in reply to a query about whether the injury to the back of the neck would have had the same appearance if it had been inflicted after death. In fact, some of his contemporaries had begun to suspect the truth—that such congealing could in fact take place in a still-warm corpse.

“Could the deceased have committed suicide?” wondered Minshull.

“It is just barely possible that a person might inflict a blow on the back of his own neck which would cause death,” replied Partridge. “It is, however, exceedingly improbable and almost impossible.”

And Beaman added, “There was nothing to show that he died of indigestion.”

As to whether the blood-clotted brad awl could have been the murder weapon, James May didn’t wait for the medical men’s opinion, calling out to the magistrates, “I took the teeth out with that.”

In fact, all the implements found at No. 3 were the paraphernalia used to haul bodies up out of graves. A resurrection man’s work required a wooden spade—wood making less noise than metal—to dig down to the head of the coffin; two large iron hooks attached to ropes were inserted under the lid of the coffin at the head to snap the upper part off, and the corpse was then pulled up through the hole.
³
(It was not unlike fishing—which is the term Dickens’s fictional body snatcher Jerry Cruncher uses to describe his work in
A Tale of Two Cities
.) These were the very objects likely to be found in the home of a body snatcher, and Constable Higgins recognized them as such. (Higgins had challenged Sarah about the tools in the cottage, saying, “I know what these are for.” “I dare say you do,” she replied, “but do not speak before the children.” She then claimed that the brad awl was used by Bishop for mending shoes.) But Partridge and Beaman did not appear to realize the implements’ functions and decided that the collection had a more sinister purpose.

Higgins had also found Sarah to be in possession of a document that read: “The humble petition of John Bishop, and three others, most humbly showeth that your petitioners have supplied many Subjects on various occasions to the several hospitals, and being now in custody, they are conscious in their own minds that they have done nothing more than they have been in the constant habit of doing as resurrectionists, but being unable to prove their innocence without professional assistance, they humbly crave the commiseration of gentlemen who may feel inclined to give some trifling assistance in order to afford them the opportunity of clearing away the imputation alleged against them. The most trifling sum will be gratefully acknowledged, and your petitioners, as in duty bound, will ever pray.…” It was unsigned.

Petitions such as these were also part of a resurrectionist’s kit. They were a reasonably gentle form of blackmail, letting the surgeon(s) know that it might be in the interest of the good name of the medical profession to come up with bail money, to arrange and pay for the advice of an attorney, or perhaps—using connections, nods, winks—to get the misdemeanor charges dropped altogether. At worst, the resurrection man’s family could be given financial help until the breadwinner was out of jail. Surgeon Sir Astley Cooper, created a baronet in 1821 after removing a tumor from George IV’s scalp, spent hundreds of pounds in this way. His personal accounts for 1818 show that he paid £14 7s as bail for one of his main suppliers, a man called Vaughan; 6s to Vaughan’s wife; and £13 on “gaol comforts”—food, drink, and tobacco—for Vaughan when he was imprisoned.
⁴
It is likely that Sarah and Rhoda were in the process of applying to the various surgeons supplied by Bishop for assistance of this kind when they were arrested at the Fortune of War.

At Bow Street, Minshull advised Sarah that she was not legally obliged to say anything, but Sarah said that she was eager to defend herself. “I have nothing to fear, sir,” she said to Minshull, “for I have done nothing wrong.” She told Minshull that although she knew her husband had been a resurrectionist for several years and she had visited him in prison on a number of occasions, she had no knowledge of the crime of which he was now suspected. She pointed out that she had always worked in her own right, for her own money, supplementing whatever cash Bishop brought home with the income she received from doing needlework and taking in washing. She said that Thomas Williams “had only been out three times” with her husband and that he was a “very respectably connected” person. She claimed she knew her husband had been out at work the night before he was arrested because he had washed his hands in a basin, leaving a great deal of mud or clay in the bottom of it.

Rhoda also said that she knew nothing of any murder and that, while she was aware that her husband of seven weeks had been assisting Bishop with resurrection work, he was in fact a bricklayer by training, had also been a carpenter, and had worked in the glass trade, too. (Rhoda referred to Bishop as “my father”; he was, in fact, her half brother and stepfather.)

Minshull told the women that it was his duty to remand them into custody while the case against them was investigated. He also issued an order for the Bishop children to be placed in the Bethnal Green workhouse for the time being. It was quite likely, Superintendent Thomas had told him, that they would be able to give the magistrate damning evidence against their parents. A parish officer of St. Matthew’s, Bethnal Green, needed John Bishop to swear to his place of settlement, in order that his children could be signed over to the care of the parish. Bishop signed the necessary papers, “with a very firm hand,” and, in an apparently sarcasm-free act of courtesy, thanked Superintendent Thomas for having made the arrangements for his family.
⁵

*   *   *

On the same day
that the boy’s corpse was disinterred—a full two weeks after the arrest of Bishop, Williams, May, and Shields—men from Division F undertook a thorough examination of 3 Nova Scotia Gardens, “it having been intimated to Mr Minshull that it would be advisable that the premises should be strictly searched,” as the
Times
put it.
⁶
Today, such a delay would be unthinkable; in 1831, a detailed search of the home of a murder suspect, except to recover stolen goods, was not an obvious move. But somebody in the neighborhood had told Thomas that, before her arrest, one of the Bishop women had been seen scattering ashes in the garden—had they been burning incriminating items?