The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (89 page)

This stepmother oppressed her like a spell.

The days open their cramped spaces into other cramped spaces and old furniture and never anything to look forward to, nothing.

When Old Borden dug in his pocket to shell out for Lizzie’s trip to Europe, the eye of God on the pyramid blinked to see daylight, but no extravagance is too excessive for the miser’s younger daughter who is the wild card in this house and, it seems, can have anything she wants, play ducks and drakes with her father’s silver dollars if it so pleases her. He pays all her dressmakers’ bills on the dot and how she loves to dress up fine! She is addicted to dandyism. He gives her each week in pin-money the same as the cook gets for wages and Lizzie gives that which she does not spend on personal adornment to the deserving poor.

He would give his Lizzie anything, anything in the world that lives under the green sign of the dollar.

She would like a pet, a kitten or a puppy, she loves small animals and birds, too, poor, helpless things. She piles high the bird-table all winter. She used to keep some white pouter pigeons in the disused stable, the kind that look like shuttlecocks and go “vroo croo”, soft as a cloud.

Surviving photographs of Lizzie Borden show a face it is difficult to look at as if you knew nothing about her; coming events cast their shadow across her face, or else you see the shadows these events have cast—something terrible, something ominous in this face with its jutting, rectangular jaw and those mad eyes of the New England saints, eyes that belong to a person who does not listen to you . . . fanatic’s eyes, you might say, if you knew nothing about her. If you were sorting through a box of old photographs in a junk shop and came across this particular, sepia, faded face above the choked collars of the 1890s, you might murmur when you saw her: “Oh, what big eyes you have!” as Red Riding Hood said to the wolf, but then you might not even pause to pick her out and look at her more closely, for hers is not, in itself, a striking face.

But as soon as the face has a name, once you recognize her, when you know who she is and what it was she did, the face becomes as if of one possessed, and now it haunts you, you look at it again and again, it secretes mystery.

This woman, with her jaw of a concentration-camp attendant, and such eyes . . .

In her old age, she wore pince-nez, and truly with the years the mad light has departed from those eyes or else is deflected by her glasses—if, indeed, it
was
a mad light, in the first place, for don’t we all conceal somewhere photographs of ourselves that make us look like crazed assassins? And, in those early photographs of her young womanhood, she herself does not look so much like a crazed assassin as somebody in extreme solitude, oblivious of that camera in whose direction she obscurely smiles, so that it would not surprise you to learn that she is blind.

There is a mirror on the dresser in which she sometimes looks at those times when time snaps in two and then she sees herself with blind, clairvoyant eyes, as though she were another person.

“Lizzie is not herself, today.”

At those times, those irremediable times, she could have raised her muzzle to some aching moon and howled.

At other times, she watches herself doing her hair and trying her clothes on. The distorting mirror reflects her with the queasy fidelity of water. She puts on dresses and then she takes them off. She looks at herself in her corset. She pats her hair. She measures herself with the tape-measure. She pulls the measure tight. She pats her hair. She tries on a hat, a little hat, a chic little straw toque. She punctures it with a hatpin. She pulls the veil down. She pulls it up. She takes the hat off. She drives the hatpin into it with a strength she did not know she possessed.

Time goes by and nothing happens.

She traces the outlines of her face with an uncertain hand as if she were thinking of unfastening the bandages on her soul but it isn’t time to do that, yet: she isn’t ready to be seen, yet.

She is a girl of Sargossa calm.

She used to keep her pigeons in the loft above the disused stable and feed them grain out of the palms of her cupped hands. She liked to feel the soft scratch of their beaks. They murmured “vroo croo” with infinite tenderness. She changed their water every day and cleaned up their leprous messes but Old Borden took a dislike to their cooing, it got on his nerves, who’d have thought he
had
any nerves but he invented some, they got on them, one afternoon he took out the hatchet from the woodpile in the cellar and chopped those pigeons’ heads right off, he did.

Abby fancied the slaughtered pigeons for a pie but Bridget the servant girl put her foot down, at that: what?!? Make a pie out of Miss Lizzie’s beloved turtledoves? Jesus, Mary and Joseph!!! she exclaimed with characteristic impetuousness, what can they be thinking of! Miss Lizzie so nervy with her funny turns and all! (The maid is the only one in the house with any sense and that’s the truth of it.) Lizzie came home from the Fruit and Flower Mission for whom she had been reading a tract to an old woman in a poorhouse: “God bless you, Miss Lizzie.” At home all was blood and feathers.

She doesn’t weep, this one, it isn’t her nature, she is still waters, but, when moved, she changes colour, her face flushes, it goes dark, angry, mottled red. The old man loves his daughter this side of idolatry and pays for everything she wants, but all the same he killed her pigeons when his wife wanted to gobble them up.

That is how she sees it. That is how she understands it. She cannot bear to watch her stepmother eat, now. Each bite the woman takes seems to go: “Vroo croo.”

Old Borden cleaned off the hatchet and put it back in the cellar, next to the woodpile. The red receding from her face, Lizzie went down to inspect the instrument of destruction. She picked it up and weighed it in her hand.

That was a few weeks before, at the beginning of the spring.

Her hands and feet twitch in her sleep; the nerves and muscles of this complicated mechanism won’t relax, just won’t relax, she is all twang, all tension, she is taut as the strings of a wind-harp from which random currents of the air pluck out tunes that are not our tunes.

At the first stroke of the City Hall clock, the first factory hooter blares, and then, on another note, another, and another, the Metacomet Mill, the American Mill, the Mechanics Mill . . . until every mill in the entire town sings out aloud in a common anthem of summoning and the hot alleys where the factory folk live blacken with the hurrying throng: hurry! scurry! to loom, to bobbin, to spindle, to dye-shop as to places of worship, men, and women, too, and children, the streets blacken, the sky darkens as the chimneys now belch forth, the clang, bang, clatter of the mills commences.

Bridget’s clock leaps and shudders on its chair, about to sound its own alarm. Their day, the Bordens’ fatal day, trembles on the brink of beginning.

Outside, above, in the already burning air, see! the angel of death roosts on the roof-tree.

(Robert Wood, 1907)

Nina Warner Hooke
and Gil Thomas

Sir Edward Marshall Hall rejoiced in the title The Great Defender. His full-blooded style was at its best in a case that touched his sympathies and emotions. The Camden Town murder case was one of these, but when he took it on, Marshall Hall’s career was in low water. The year before, in 1906, he’d been overwhelmed by a run of misfortune: his hopes of a political career had been dashed when he lost his seat in Parliament, and a series of clashes with various judges had temporarily shattered and almost destroyed his practice. He needed a big, high-profile case to restore his position at the Bar. In November 1907 it came. “This”, he exclaimed, hurrying into a colleague’s room and throwing a huge pile of documents on to his desk, “is the greatest case I’ve ever had in my life. If you have an idea, however remote or far-fetched, come in and tell me. The man’s innocent, and a chance idea may mean life or death to him.” The papers flung on to the desk were the depositions in the Camden Town murder case. The accused man was Robert Wood. “When the case was over,” reported one of Marshall Hall’s biographers, “the newspapers took the view that the result was a foregone conclusion, but this was far from being true. It was a great triumph for Marshall Hall and English justice.” Its low-life setting in the dingy hinterland of Euston station, a transient world of four-ale bars and seedy sex, offers a lurid, if slightly dog-eared, snapshot of Edwardian London.

Prostitution is a dangerous trade in most western countries and will continue to be so until man throws off the shackles forged by centuries of religious discipline. Christian dogma teaches him to equate sex with sin and eternal punishment. He is taught to be ashamed of his body, not to glory in its beauty and potency; to despise it as the gross expendable husk of a spirit body which will survive it on another plane of existence. His sacred literature makes it clear that human reproductive processes are repugnant to his God who spurned them when He came to earth Himself in man’s shape. It is further impressed on him that, partly by virtue of this attitude, Christian and civilized nations are superior to unenlightened and less fortunate peoples. It is only the heathen who may regard sexual desire as an appetite like hunger and thirst, the satisfaction of which is natural, simple and enjoyable. It is only heathens who may recognize the fact that a man’s virility outlasts a woman’s and make due allowance for it. By a curious and unfair coincidence it is only in such heathen countries that sex crimes are uncommon.

Civilized man’s distrust of the rational is only excelled by his fear of the pleasurable. He still lives in dread of hell fire. The flames have abated slightly but the embers are hot and the pit still yawns. Since he cannot eradicate the erotic impulses of his body and cannot gratify them extra-maritally without incurring moral censure, he drives them deep into hiding. Here, like healthy plants deprived of light, they wilt, become diseased and may mutate into monstrous forms.

The woman who caters for these secret lusts is the easy prey of the pervert, the sadist and the obsessionist who sees in her an amalgam of Eve, the original temptress and the serpent, the devil’s emissary. Driven by remorse and terror he destroys her and is revenged for his banishment from Eden.

The murder of Emily Dimmock, a Camden Town prostitute, in the autumn of 1907 is regarded by criminologists as a classic example of this type of sex crime. It had all the ingredients necessary to titillate a sensation-loving public—a woman killed in her sleep, the discovery of her dead body with its throat cut, the long search for a murderer who had slipped away through the garden, the grief of the woman’s lover who discovered the crime and the eventual arrest of a young artist named Robert Wood who was charged with the murder.

It is a curious feature of the case that widespread sympathy was extended to the accused young man and very little was felt for the victim of the crime. It could be argued that a girl who deliberately leads an immoral life, according to the tenets of our moral code, has abandoned any claim to sympathetic consideration. It is not generally accepted, at any rate in this country, that the prostitute fulfils a useful function without which the incidence of rape and violence towards women would be even worse than it is. Whatever view one takes of this trade no one but a fool would argue that its practitioners are all good or all bad. There are among them harpies in the true classical sense, both vicious and dishonest, who prey on the weakness of men and will cheat them if they can. Emily Dimmock was not one of these. In her own way she did at least give value for money.

Though her Christian names were Emily Elizabeth she was known in the area where she lived and worked as Phyllis. The dreary tenements of Walworth where she was born have produced a genius in the form of Charles Chaplin; but for one Chaplin there are ten thousand Emilys.

She was the youngest of a family of fifteen. When she was still a girl her father removed his brood to Northamptonshire where most of them, including Emily, went to work in a factory. This phase did not last long in her case. Returning to London she went into domestic service at East Finchley, but found the hours too long and the work too hard and before long had taken to the streets. Her new occupation had probably been described to her as offering an easy living. In fact it was not only strenuous but carried with it an occupational hazard which was to cost her her life at the age of twenty-three.

Readers of Patrick Hamilton’s trilogy of novels about the London underworld will recognize in the second volume an almost exact description of Emily and her feckless way of life.
⁴⁰
It is more than likely that her story formed the inspiration for the character of Jenny Maple. Emily, like Jenny, was neat, slim and attractive, dressed well and had pleasant manners.

She lived in two rooms in St Paul’s Road, Camden Town, an area which had passed through many vicissitudes. Even in the street guides of twenty-five years ago there was no mention either of St Paul’s Road or of near-by Liverpool Street. St Paul’s Road was a thoroughfare running parallel to the main railway line from St Pancras to the north. Within a short walking distance was the Caledonian Road and the old Caledonian Market. Emily was thus well situated for the transaction of her business. She could take a bus from Camden Road to the West End or she could find her clients in the numerous local public houses.

In 1907 the area around St Paul’s Road was a shabby-genteel backwater where rooms were cheap and no questions were asked as long as the rent was promptly paid. The lusty life of the Caledonian Market engulfed it on Tuesdays and Fridays but for most of the week only the clip-clop of horses’ hooves, the cries of children and street traders and the sound of passing trains disturbed the quiet. Prostitutes are not early risers and they prefer quiet neighbourhoods.