The Italian Boy (24 page)

One of the assistants to architect John Soane came to take a detailed sketch of No. 3 in order to create a scale model for use at the Old Bailey trial, while celebrated solicitor James Harmer (who had offered his services as prosecution lawyer to the impoverished parish of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, for free) undertook a full survey of the cottage.
²
The sketch and the written survey were intended to show that all the inhabitants of No. 3 must have been aware of any killings that were taking place within; Sarah and Rhoda were not yet in the clear. Indeed, they never would be, in the minds of locals. In the streets of Bethnal Green, Shoreditch, and Hoxton, a number of women had been jeered at and jostled by people who mistook them for Sarah or Rhoda. On Monday, 28 November, the real Sarah and Rhoda made an ill-advised visit to the neighborhood and were spotted and chased by a crowd. A Shoreditch publican hustled them into the garden at the back of his premises and helped them escape over the back wall.

Sightseers at Nova Scotia Gardens. This drawing shows a third variant impression of Bishop’s House of Murder. The Gardens differed as much as the faces of the accused in the various visual representations of the day.

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Reports of attempted burkings
on the streets of the metropolis after dark began to fill the news pages of the national papers; but it is likely that panic and paranoia were contributing to making perfectly ordinary robberies and attempted sexual assaults appear bungled efforts to supply the surgeons. William Burke had been hanged in January 1829, and in that year the
Times
carried thirteen stories of attempted or alleged burkings, ten of them in January and February; throughout 1830, however, just one such story appeared in the paper, though there had been no diminution in anatomists’ need for Subjects. After the Italian Boy arrests, five supposed attempted burkings were recorded by the
Times
within four weeks. Typical is this account, from the edition of 24 November 1831: “On Tuesday evening between eight and nine o’clock, Charles White, a young lad about thirteen years of age, was returning from Messrs Fowlers manufactory in the Belvedere Road, near Waterloo Bridge, to his own home at 8 James Street, Lambeth, when he was seized by two men in a place called Sutton Street, leading into the York Road. One of the ruffians held him while the other clapped a large plaster over his face and endeavoured to stifle him. The poor lad struggled violently, got one of his hands loose and took the plaster from his mouth. The boy screamed for help and the villains, finding that they could not accomplish their diabolical purpose, and again clap the plaster on his face, became alarmed. The cries of the lad were fortunately heard when one of the villains, with a ruffian’s grasp, seized him by the neck and threw him over a paling into an unused plot of ground and then ran away. A number of persons came to his assistance, and he was conveyed to the station house in Waterloo Road.… A description of one of the men, who was dressed in a smock frock, was taken down and the constables placed on alert.”
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The smock-frock reference is interesting; it had been widely reported that May and Bishop had been arrested wearing this common item of rural laborer’s clothing, which was coming to be associated, in the London mind, with resurrection and burking. Also, at the time of the attack on White, no modus operandi had been suggested for the murder of the Italian boy; but no one had forgotten the iconic woodcut images in various broadsheets of Burke and Hare suffocating their victims by placing adhesive bandages over the mouth and nose—a mythical method of killing, since by their own admission, Burke and Hare had simply pinched shut the noses and clamped closed the jaws of their victims.

There were a number of other reported attacks on south London youngsters while the Italian Boy hearings were in progress. Henry Edward, fourteen, of Felix Street, Westminster Bridge Road, was assaulted in Waterloo Road; Henry Morgan, eighteen, was being attacked in Fore Street, a street running alongside the Thames, in Lambeth, when the police arrived and scared away his assailant; Martha Allenby, sixteen, of Bronti Place, off Walworth Road, thwarted an attempt to place a pitch plaster across her mouth; Elizabeth Turner, eight, of Waterloo Road, was lured from her doorstep by a man offering her sweets, then tied with a rope and beaten before being rescued by passersby.
⁴
All these assaults were reported as attempted burkings.

The man who swept the crossing at the Stamford Street junction with Waterloo Road suddenly stopped turning up for work, though those who knew him said he was someone of regular habits. The
Sunday Times
of 27 November stated that “little doubt is entertained that he has been murdered.” Meanwhile in the East End, a boy who had claimed that he was the victim of an attempted burking on open ground opposite the Salmon and Ball pub in Bethnal Green Road later admitted that he had lied, concocting the story as an excuse to his family for having stayed out late.
⁵

On the evening of the Monday after the Italian Boy arrests, residents of Chalton Street, Somers Town, heard the screams of a local girl named Eliza Campbell as she ran from the pathway that led north through the fields to Camden Town, north London. She told those who came to help her that on the unlit path two men had thrown her to the ground, stuffed something into her mouth, and placed a noose around her neck. She fought hard and screamed so loudly that the two ran off across the fields. “We again caution the public to be on their guard,” warned the
Morning Advertiser,
in its report of the incident, stressing that there were thousands of hardened villains in London who were likely to be tempted to commit murder by the high price of bodies (in fact, prices were down to eight to twelve guineas a corpse, from an earlier high of fifteen to twenty guineas). “It is impossible to find any excuse for persons thus imprudently placing themselves in the way of danger,” admonished the
Advertiser
. “It is to be hoped that the publicity of this transaction, the narrow, nay miraculous, escape of this young woman, will be a warning to both sexes to avoid at night the lonely paths of the suburbs of this town.”

At twenty to ten on the night of Saturday, 3 December, Mary Cane went to the public three-seater privy that served the tenements of Hartshorn Court, in the poor, rundown parish of St. Luke’s, Old Street. Opening the latch with a method known only to those familiar with its faulty mechanism, Cane stumbled in the dark upon a small body lying just inside the door. Her screams alerted a twelve-year-old neighbor, William Newton, who took a candle and opened the privy door. A man and a woman rushed out, knocking hard against Newton and blowing out his candle; the man was wearing a long black coat, Newton later said, and the woman a light shawl and pale-colored bonnet. Other neighbors gathered and, when they entered the privy, found the body of a five-year-old girl, lying on her back, with her frock pulled above her knees and her stockings removed; one of her legs was drawn up. She had been strangled.

Half a mile away in Broad Arrow Court, near the Barbican, Mary Duffey was distraught; her five-year-old daughter, Margaret, had last been seen being led away by Duffey’s next-door neighbor, Bridget Culkin, a twenty-eight-year-old who had recently moved to Broad Arrow Court from Hartshorn Court—where she had lived opposite the privy. “If you come along with me, I’ll give you a penny,” Culkin was overheard saying to the child at around six o’clock in the evening. Culkin had often played with the child and was said to have always shown her kindness. When Mary Duffey’s older daughter asked Culkin, just before nine o’clock, what she had done with little Margaret, Culkin openly stated that she had left her in Hartshorn Court; Culkin then became aggressive and refused to give a good reason for abandoning the child. She was arrested half an hour before the body was discovered.

At her Old Bailey trial, Culkin was proved to have supplied two false alibis for the hours between six and nine o’clock on the third, and several witnesses—people who knew Culkin by sight—told the court that they had seen her that night, leading a crying, shoeless child up Whitecross Street and into Hartshorn Court. What looked even worse for Culkin was that she was the lover of one Robert Tighe (or Tye), who also went by the name of James Kettle (or Cattle), a known resurrectionist who worked with a gang that usually included William and John Shearing, William “Boney” Dunkley, and George Long. The landlord and landlady of the Fortune of War went to the authorities to denounce Bridget Culkin as an associate of snatchers; even more damningly, they claimed that she had often been seen in the pub with Bishop, Williams, and May and had been observed receiving money from them.
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It is quite possible that Culkin knew May and Bishop and other resurrectionists, and perhaps the payments were for information about where a body was likely to be found.

The publican of the Fortune of War appears to have been a poacher turned gamekeeper, and he may well have been retained as a police informer for the purpose of keeping an eye on the resurrection trade. The New Police were not supposed to behave in this way; but in trying to keep such a covert community as the snatchers under surveillance, doubtless they felt they had little choice but to cultivate certain publicans.

Culkin was found not guilty at her Old Bailey trial—though people were often hanged on the basis of far less compelling circumstantial evidence of involvement in murder—and no one else was ever tried for Margaret Duffey’s killing.

There is a curious feeling for the modern reader that the Culkin case may have been a sex crime. Though couched in euphemism, sexual assaults on children were reported in the newspapers of the day, even when they occurred within the family.
⁷
The point of a burking was to obtain a body, not to abandon it when interrupted, and the public nature of the scene of the killing—a privy in an overpopulated court—seems strange. If Margaret Duffey had been murdered to supply the surgeons, this was a peculiar choice of venue.

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Meanwhile, imaginations were running wild
in Bethnal Green. Superintendent Thomas repeated to the Bow Street magistrates tales of local women who had gone missing, of one John Bishop trying to tempt girls back to his house for a nip to drink. A police handbill had been circulated detailing the female clothing found in the privy of 2 Nova Scotia Gardens, and a number of people had come forward but failed to recognize the items, when, on Saturday, 26 November, the identity of the owner was established: Fanny Pighorn, or Pickbourne, or Pigburn—the latter being the choice eventually settled on by most reporters. The
Times
recorded the proceedings at Bow Street as follows:

Mr Thomas stated that the female dress found in the privy of No 2 Nova Scotia Gardens, next door to the residence of Bishop, had been identified by two females, Mrs Hitchcock and Mrs Low, who had called upon him in consequence of having seen an advertisement stating that such clothes had been found. It appeared that a poor woman called Fanny Pighorn, who used to obtain her living by washing, left the house of her sister, Mrs Low, one of the applicants, who resided in Chart Street East, City Road, about six weeks ago, at eight o’clock in the evening, and had never since been either seen or heard of. When she left her sister’s, she said she should not be long, as she was going as far only as Mr Campion’s in Church Street, Bethnal Green. It appeared that she had called there on the evening in question, and left the house at about nine o’clock for the purpose, it is supposed, of returning to her sister’s. Mrs Hitchcock, who had known the missing woman for 35 years, described the dress which she used to wear, which exactly corresponded with the clothes found in the privy. She spoke particularly to the shawl, which she said she herself had worn and afterwards gave it to Fanny Pighorn; and she also identified the blue cloth pocket found with the other articles, and the fellow of which she produced, saying that they had both belonged to a Mrs Bell, who on her death had bequeathed one of them to her, Mrs Hitchcock, and the other to Fanny Pighorn. The moment that the clothes were produced, they were identified by both women, and Mrs Low positively declared that they were the same which her unfortunate sister had on when she left her house to go to Church Street.

Thomas then asked the women to swear the truth of their statements before the magistrates, which they did, Mrs Low weeping.

Mrs Low said that her sister was about 45 years of age, that she was of a cheerful disposition, in the enjoyment of good health and of particularly sober habits. Mr Thomas said that the shawl which Mrs Hitchcock had so fully identified was not found with the rest of the clothes, but in a deep well in Bishop’s garden, where it had been sunk by means of a large stone, and he had ascertained that about the time spoken to by the applicants, Bishop had disposed of the body of a woman at one of the hospitals. He had also been informed that cries of “murder” were heard to proceed from the direction of Bishop’s cottage, late one night about six weeks ago.