The Italian Boy (42 page)

The papers vied with one another to provide motivations for the murderers. The
Times
of Tuesday, 6 December, stated that Williams had told his warder that he had never, until his marriage, been a resurrection man and had not even known that this was how Bishop made his living. Rhoda had told him on his wedding night and asked him to promise not to join the “snatchers.” But when Williams had had his glassmaking apparatus seized, Bishop had asked his neighbor to become a partner, and Williams had agreed. However (Williams is said to have told the warder), after just three graveyard forays, Williams had found it a difficult and dangerous job, so, thinking of the Edinburgh Horrors, he had proposed murder.

Williams was highly likely to have been aware of how his neighbor made a living before his wedding night of 26 September; in any case, Customs and Excise had made their raid on 6 August—seven weeks before Rhoda supposedly told Williams of Bishop’s profession. If this account of a conversation between Williams and his warder has been reported accurately, the most probable explanation for its contents is that Williams was attempting to depict Rhoda as a voice of innocence and reason, to try to save her from public hatred. By getting this version of events into the newspapers, Williams could die knowing that he had at least attempted to redeem Rhoda in the eyes of her fellow citizens.

The
Times
report continues with Williams telling the warder that the day after the murder of “the woman Pigburn,” he and Bishop had tried to burke a man whom they had lured to Nova Scotia Gardens. The laudanum failed, and the man was not completely unconscious, just dozing, and (in the manner of Lady Macbeth) Bishop froze as he was poised to attack because the sleeping man so resembled his father; the next morning, the man awoke and let himself out of No. 3. On the following Tuesday (presumably 11 October), claimed Williams, the laudanum failed again, and this intended victim also left the cottage none the wiser. These may or may not have been the two old workhouse paupers mentioned by Williams to his warder.

The
Globe and Traveller
and the
Morning Advertiser
added into their reports the story of Cotton’s interruption of the confessions, stating that it had happened just as Bishop was talking about a fourth murder, of a black vagrant, and appeared to be implicating other people in this crime. The
Globe and Traveller
and the
Observer
had put a name to the Lincolnshire drover’s boy—White—and reported a claim by Thomas Williams that William Woodcock could not possibly have heard anything in the early hours of Friday, 4 November, since the killers had taken their shoes off; and besides, by that time the drover’s boy was “as dead as a log.” The
Globe and Traveller
also included the information that Cunningham of Kent Street used to help out around Smithfield and had put up a fight on the night of his killing, surprising Bishop and Williams with his strength. The former had uttered “a horrible oath” as he held the boy’s legs upright in the well while Williams pushed his head below the surface of the water, waiting until he finally stopped struggling.

The
Sun
further claimed, “Among the murders which they have confessed to, we understand, is one of a little child, whom they found in a destitute condition in the street and covered with filth and vermin. This poor child they inveigled to Bishop’s house and destroyed in a similar manner to that of the other unfortunate victims.” Was this an inaccurate description of White or Cunningham (hardly “little” children)? Or was this the “large small” bought from Bishop by the anatomical school “near Golden Square” in the first week of November? Or was this the fate of Fanny Pigburn’s child, who had been sitting on her lap when Bishop and Williams found Fanny crying on a doorstep in Church Street, Shoreditch, but who disappears from the story soon afterward?

Many of the unofficial accounts of confessions contain internal evidence that they are not accurate eyewitness reports; in some instances, words are quite plainly being put into the killers’ mouths. The “I, John Bishop” confession, which runs to twenty-five hundred words, is a lucid, linear tale, told in plain but vivid language. Certain touches give it a compelling, phantasmagoric feel; all too real, mundane phenomena interweave with the nightmarish narrative of relentless, pitiless slaughter. It’s a tale of coffee stalls, child-sized chairs, gin, privies, pouring rain, mean-minded landlords, piles of dirty clothes. There are points at which a bizarre tenderness pokes its way into the act of killing: “I then took him in my arms, and let him slide from them headlong into the well”; “She … went off to sleep in about ten minutes. She was falling back; I caught her to save her fall”; “We gave him some warm beer, sweetened with sugar.… He … fell asleep in a little chair belonging to one of my children.” The insistent voice of Bishop, the cadence of his unreflective, phlegmatic outlook, is strikingly different from the add-on accounts in the newspapers, where a melodramatic note often appears. So, in the
Globe and Traveller
we have Bishop saying to Rev. Theodore Williams: “Surely, sir, there is a hope of mercy for a repentant sinner. Was not the thief on the cross pardoned?”
⁸
And we learn that “after having partaken of the Sacrament, Thomas Williams complained of thirst, and said his mouth was so parched that he was quite sure it was a foretaste of hell.” The version of this incident that appears in the
Sun
is even more florid: “‘I thirst, I thirst—I feel the burning drought of hell in my breast and I know it is ready for me.’”
⁹
The
Weekly Dispatch
of 11 December reported that on the morning of the execution, when the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was offered to them, Bishop said derisively that he had no understanding of it, but Thomas Williams is reported as clamoring to be taught to understand it and asking Whitworth Russell to explain the meaning of the ritual to him. And Cotton would write in his journal that Thomas Williams cried out to him that he hoped God “would hear his prayers and forgive him, notwithstanding he had been one of the greatest sinners in his time.”
¹⁰

There are clearly other hands writing their way into these final scenes. Bishop was an intelligent man; Williams’s attainments are harder to discern. Both were literate, at least. Bishop’s straightforward, fluent account and the fragments of his speech that have survived indicate some level of education. He may well have brought up the subject of the thief on the cross, and Williams may have mentioned the fires of hell; but the phrasing here is altogether too purple. Similarly, the letter addressed to Dr. Whitworth Russell by Thomas Williams on his final night sounds like the gist of an honestly felt response onto which has been grafted a sermon: “If you will be kind enough to let my brother prisoners know the awful death which I shall have suffered when you read this, it will,
through your expostulations, prevent them from increasing their crimes when they may be liberated;
and tell them bad company and drinking and blasphemy
is the foundation of all evil. Give my brotherly love to them, and tell them never to deviate from the paths of religion, and have a firm belief in the blessed Saviour
. Give my love to John Edwards, John Justin and John Dingle, and receive the prayers of the unfortunate and guilty Thomas Head.”

*   *   *

On 10 December
the most controversial of the discrepancies came to light. In that day’s edition of the
Times,
a letter was published from Sir John Sewell, a magistrate at Marylebone police office. Sewell claimed that “one of his brother magistrates” had told him of a confession made by Bishop on the Sunday “which comprehended a catalogue of about 60 murders” until Dr. Cotton had intervened to put a stop to it. Now, the interruption of the conversation between Bishop and Rev. Theodore Williams in the chamber of Brown the turnkey had happened on the Saturday morning—all parties agreed to that. So had Sewell got his dates wrong, or had Cotton made other interruptions? And who had told Sewell in any case?

Sewell’s letter provoked a stern response from undersheriff Thomas Wood, friend and supporter of Cotton and cotranscriber of the official confessions: “I have in vain endeavoured to ascertain from Sir John Sewell what authority he had for his assertions, and am favoured with no other answer than that of an after-dinner conversation with some magistrate, whose name he withholds. From the inquiries made in other quarters, as well as from the circumstances of having been with the prisoners, on the Sunday alluded to, from 10 o’clock in the morning till about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, I believe the assertions contained in Sir John Sewell’s letter to be totally destitute of foundation. The confession was taken in detail from the prisoners, written down as they gave it, and published in the newspapers from the original documents, signed by them and authenticated by my colleague and myself, and I do not believe that during their imprisonment they ever gave a catalogue of 60 murders or of any other number committed by them than those contained in the statement before the public. I am also bound in justice to the Rev, the Ordinary, whom I attended on some of his visits to the culprits, to say, that so far from his having interfered to prevent or even to check a confession, he used every means in his power to induce them to make a full statement of their crimes, with an earnestness befitting his sacred office.”
¹¹

Sewell replied to Wood in a private letter of 13 December, refusing to name his source but saying that he heard the “sixty” story at a magistrates’ dinner on 8 December from “a Middlesex justice of the peace” and that the allegation was heard by at least four other magistrates present. In January 1832, during an official inquiry held into Cotton’s conduct, the Reverend Theodore Williams, who was also a Middlesex justice of the peace, owned up to being Sewell’s source. The vicar of Hendon claimed, however, that what he had said to Sewell at the magistrates’ dinner was “six,” not “sixty.”
¹²
Six “cases” is how Williams put it, which is not six murders and could include the two failed druggings along with the actual killings of Fanny Pigburn, the black vagrant, Cunningham of Kent Street, and White the drover’s boy/Carlo Ferrari. Or it could have meant the killings of Pigburn, Cunningham, White, the black vagrant, the small verminous child, and an Italian boy.

Whatever the case, the damage had been done by Sewell’s letter and the ensuing furor: the notion that Bishop had been a mass burker easily gained a foothold in the popular imagination and was probably accepted as fact within poor communities, which were the most vulnerable to burkers. It was certainly accepted in the House of Lords. As late as 28 June 1832, the earl of Minto, speaking to promote the Second Anatomy Bill, would still be hammering home the notion that Bishop was a mass killer, claiming that he had been on the point of augmenting his official confession “when he was interrupted in his recital.”
¹³
Radical journalist and reformer William Cobbett, meanwhile, made use of the higher estimate to attack surgeons (he called them the “cutters-up”) and to show that the poor were merely considered fodder for their scalpels, much as they were fodder for the capitalist and the industrialist. Cobbett claimed that sixty was likely a conservative estimate and that the true total of poor London citizens killed had been “probably hundreds.”
¹⁴

No matter how many people really had been slaughtered at Nova Scotia Gardens, no peace of mind was obtainable. To make matters worse, many of the newspapers published a claim allegedly made by Bishop in Newgate that most London resurrectionists committed murder when graveyard or bone-house security tightened or when demand simply exceeded supply. A full-blown media panic had arrived.

A private letter from James Corder, vestry clerk of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, to Home Secretary Lord Melbourne stated that the crimes “engage to a considerable degree the public mind and I have reason to believe from the many communications which Mr Thomas and myself daily receive on the subject that the public do look for some answer to, or notice of, the Confessions, which have appeared in all the public journals.”
¹⁵
The alarm and confusion were not helped by the floundering of the authorities on the identity of the dead child delivered to King’s College. Richard Partridge, James Corder, and Superintendent Thomas would vainly attempt to prove that the body had been Carlo Ferrari’s. First off the mark was Richard Partridge, who wrote to the
Times
on Sunday, 4 December (probably having read that morning’s “confessions”):

I received an anonymous note yesterday evening which contained some pertinent queries respecting the identity of Carlo Ferrari and the body taken to King’s College by Bishop and his companions. They were to the following effect: 1. Was Paragalli or Augustus Brin [
sic
] asked whether the ears of Carlo Ferrari were bored [pierced], and if so, what was their reply? 2. Were the ears bored of the body which was offered for sale at the King’s College? In reply to these inquiries, I beg to state that when the body was opened at the police station in Covent Garden, I particularly remarked that the ears were not bored. The circumstance struck me at the time as worthy of notice, and as Paragalli, who had recognised the body as that of an Italian boy, was standing at the other end of the room, in a situation where he could not see the head of the corpse, I asked him whether the boy he had known wore ear-rings—he replied, “No.” I next inquired if his ears were bored, to which he replied in the negative.

This morning I have put the questions separately to Brin and to Mrs Paragalli and their answers agree with those of Paragalli himself. Moreover, their description of the colour of Carlo Ferrari’s eyes and hair and of his general complexion corresponds in every particular with those of the body which was examined at the police station.