Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane Read online

  PRETTY JANE AND THE VIPER OF KIDBROOKE LANE

  Paul Thomas Murphy

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  About Pretty Jane and the Viper Of Kidbrooke Lane

  In April 1871, a police constable walking a remote beat near Greenwich stumbled upon a brutalized girl. Her face was cruelly slashed, her right eye destroyed, and her brain protruded from her ruined cranium. She died, mercifully, just days later. The girl was Jane Maria Clouson, maid to the Pook family. And she was two months pregnant. When the police interviewed twenty-year-old Edmund Pook, they found blood on his trousers, shirt and hat. The case seemed open and shut.

  But a remarkable legal odyssey ensued, the police struggling to build a solid case against Pook. In a trial at the Old Bailey, the prosecution case fell apart and Edmund Pook walked free. Public opinion, inflamed by the press, was outraged. When a private investigator wrote a pamphlet naming Edmund Pook as the murderer, the family sued him. Pook withered under ferocious questioning in the libel trial that followed, but again escaped the law’s clutches.

  Paul Thomas Murphy thrillingly recreates the drama of an extraordinary Victorian murder case. Reviewing the evidence in the light of twenty-first-century forensic science, he conclusively identifies the killer’s true identity.

  For Tory, of course

  Contents

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  About Pretty Jane and the Viper Of Kidbrooke Lane

  Dedication

  Map: Greenwich and south-east London, 1871

  Preface

  Chapter 1: Let Me Die

  Chapter 2: Jane

  Chapter 3: Tittle-Tattle

  Chapter 4: Social Confusion and Moral Corruption

  Chapter 5: Tally-Ho

  Chapter 6: Rough Music

  Chapter 7: Viper of Kidbrooke Lane

  Plate Section

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Works Cited

  Index

  Preview

  About Paul Thomas Murphy

  Also by Paul Thomas Murphy

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  Map: Greenwich and South-East London, 1871

  Preface

  Jane Maria Clouson, the subject of this book, lived her short life in the middle of the long reign of Queen Victoria, the subject of my last book. A greater separation between the obscurity of the first and the renown of the second—in their day and in ours—could hardly be imagined. Queen Victoria during her lifetime was the world’s most recognized human being; since her death, no woman has been the subject of more biographies. Jane, on the other hand, lived in utter obscurity: a Deptford working-class child who spent most of the last third of her unassuming life performing the unceasing and lonely duties of a maid-of-all-work. Nothing that she did, nothing that happened to her brought her any public attention whatsoever: nothing, that is, until April 26, 1871, when she was found attacked and horribly disfigured on a quiet country lane outside of Greenwich. From the moment of that discovery to the moment of her death a week later, and for months afterward, with the investigation into her death and the trial of her alleged killer, the British public was enthralled with Jane Clouson. But after that, she was quickly forgotten.

  Or, rather, she was almost forgotten.

  I first heard about Jane Maria Clouson four years ago, as I was making a tour of the major archives about London—Kew, Colindale, Windsor—for some final fact-checking for my last book, Shooting Victoria, the story of Victoria’s bedevilment by seven would-be assassins. I was at the point, in other words, where I was beginning to look past that project and to consider subjects for a new one. To celebrate Shooting Victoria’s near-completion, I had met with a few friends in a Greenwich brewpub, the Old Brewery—located, coincidentally, a very short walk away from the site of the home where Jane Clouson had worked until shortly before she died. Among this group was an old college friend of mine, Michael Guilfoyle, a gifted local historian who lives in Lewisham and who often conducts guided walks of nearby Brockley and Ladywell Cemeteries. (He has also, incidentally, served as a magistrate at the soon-to-be-closed Greenwich Magistrates’ Court—formerly Greenwich Police Court—the site of much of the action in this book.) Hungry for possibilities, I took advantage of the moment to pick Michael’s brain. “If you were to write a book about anyone buried at Brockley and Ladywell,” I asked him, “who would it be?”

  He answered instantly: “Jane Clouson.”

  I asked him to write the name down. He did, and immediately below that wrote “let me die”: the words found on Jane’s monument, and very likely her last words. Michael then told me what he knew of Jane, of her murder, and of her alleged killer. Jane’s story was captivating on its face—a tragic domestic drama laying bare all the small-scale but explosive gender, class, and sexual strains between Jane and those who employed her, the Pook family. I told Michael I’d look into the story further, to see, as I’m afraid I put it, if the story “had legs.”

  It did.

  In writing Shooting Victoria, I was guided by the principle that powerful historical insights can best be found in exploring episodes of cultural collision. In all the clashes between Queen Victoria and the seven malcontents who assailed her, that collision could hardly have been more obvious—or more dramatic. And as I dug deeper and deeper into the case of Jane Clouson, I discovered that her case offered many moments of cultural collision equally striking, and equally revealing. The crime became the subject of an exhaustive investigation by the Metropolitan Police and Scotland Yard, an investigation that exposes the strengths and weaknesses of policing at the dawn of the age of modern forensics. Pretty Jane is largely the story of this investigation and of the controversy that followed it.

  The examination led to an arrest for murder, and not to one trial but to several: Pretty Jane is as much courtroom drama as it is police procedural. The year-long search for justice, both for Jane and for her alleged murderer Edmund Pook, exposes the workings of the English legal system in the years before major legal reforms swept away many, but not all, customs and procedures that dated from the Middle Ages. That world is at once familiar—and utterly alien.

  In addition, Pretty Jane deals with cultural collision in the world outside the police station and the courtroom. The murder of Jane Clouson and the subsequent trial of Edmund Pook were among the most sensational events of the decade. Thousands flocked in pilgrimage to the site of Jane’s murder; thousands gathered to revile—and later to cheer—Edmund Pook during the many journeys he made to and from the courtroom; thousands on the verge of rioting gathered in the streets of Greenwich to protest the result of his trial. Pretty Jane, then, is a story of a vital, Dickensian world in upheaval, divided largely along class lines, clashing over different conceptions of justice and about different conceptions of respectability: different conceptions, in particular, of the respect due to a murdered working-class girl. Thousands participated in Jane Clouson’s funeral. The town of Deptford provided the plot. And the people, with their pennies, paid for her monument. But even her burial and her monument were sources of public confrontation. And in this confrontation, as in all the others, lies true insight into the community in which Jane lived and died.

  Jane was forgotten, while Queen Victoria remains unforgettable. But Jane’s story, like Victoria’s, reveals profoundly what it meant to live—and die—a Victorian. Jane Clouson’s story deserves to be told. I only hope I have done her justice.

  1

  Let
Me Die

  He stumbled upon her at 4:15 on Wednesday morning, April 26, 1871, half an hour before the sun rose, just as definition and color began to bleed into the amorphous black and gray. Donald Gunn, a police constable of R, or Greenwich Division of the London Metropolitan police, was at the extremity of his beat, which had taken him from Shooter’s Hill southwest through the smaller town of Eltham, and then northeast to this deserted road flanked by market gardens and bisected by the little rivulet—Kid Brook—that gave this road its name—Kidbrooke Lane. Kidbrooke Lane provided a direct route between the Kent countryside and the metropolis, but few carriages or wagons traveled that way, as it was muddy, rutted—nearly impassable. The lane’s adjoining footpath, however, was drier, and during the day the route was well frequented by pedestrians, particularly in the evenings: then, the area around Kidbrooke Lane became a well-known haven for lovers, the surrounding fields offering the perfect space apart for lovemaking, just minutes from the bustle of southeast London, but a world away from the relentless attentions of the city, and particularly from prying parental eyes. But the lovers had fled hours before, and PC Gunn usually trod this final part of his night beat in profound solitude; Kidbrooke Lane must have seemed to him far removed from the most populous city in the world—must have seemed in its quiet more like the place where he had grown up: distant Caithness, the northeastern tip of Scotland.

  Gunn had made his first circuit of Kidbrooke Lane two and a half hours before, approaching Kidbrooke by the footpath, separated from the road by high hedges, and returning by way of the road itself. If Jane had been lying there then, he must have walked right past her. The moon had set long before this, and although Gunn carried a bull’s-eye lantern with him—it was standard issue for all metropolitan police officers—he did not use it that night, instead making his way down the road guided by dim starlight and by rote memory.

  Now, as he made his second circuit up the footpath to the brook, and a hundred yards down the muddy lane, he made out a sodden black-and-brown jumble of clothing that slowly resolved itself into a human body: a woman, or a girl, rising from the mud and trampled grass on her hands and knees. She faced away from him, but he could see her head bobbing up and down as she moaned softly, “piteously.” He immediately concluded that she was drunk, literally dumped here in her inebriation by an ungallant lover to sleep it off alone.

  Gunn walked to her, towered over her, and asked sternly what she was doing there.

  “Oh, my poor head; oh, my poor head,” she moaned.

  He clutched her shoulder and gave her a shake. What was the matter, he asked her. How had she come by her injuries? He noticed then a smear of blood on her cheek.

  The woman lifted her left hand from the ground, stretched it toward him, and in a feeble voice, asked him to take hold of it.

  She slowly turned her face toward him.

  Gunn recoiled as he looked at her and saw a face no longer human—a battered and bloody mass. Several gashes were cloven into her skull. Her left cheek was slashed open and smashed in. Her right eye was destroyed, and above it a chunk of the temporal bone had been bashed out, leaving a hole from which her brain clearly protruded.

  He stared at her in horror for several seconds before finally reaching out his hand for hers. It was too late. The woman lost her balance and pitched face-first onto the ground.

  “Let me die,” she murmured, and then fell still.

  Gunn, for a moment helpless, let her lie there while he surveyed the area. Four feet from the woman, behind him and toward the middle of the road, he could see a small pool of blood, cold and clotted into the mud. Around this center was grouped a mass of footprints; this was where she must have been attacked, must have fallen. From here she had crawled to the side of the road. Two feet from the woman was a pair of women’s gloves, daintily placed one within the other, and two feet from them was a black bonnet, decorated with three embroidered red roses.

  Gunn looked up and down the road in the wild hope that the attacker might still be near. But he and the woman were alone.

  He lifted her, unconscious, from the mud and set her down gently on her back on the dry grass by the side of the road. And then he turned and ran—southeast down the lane, to the farm of the ancient manor of Well Hall: the hostler and stable boys there, he knew, would already be awake and working. But upon running into the farmyard, Gunn found better help than that: his sergeant, Frederick Haynes, happened to be there, pausing in his early-morning round of surprise inspections of his constables on their beats. Gunn hurriedly conferred with Haynes about the woman. The two men then dashed off in opposite directions: Haynes up Kidbrooke Lane to attend to the woman and Gunn to the police station at Eltham to assemble a stretcher party from the officers who would just then be returning from their night beats.

  Sergeant Haynes found the woman lying insensible where Gunn had left her. In his hurry Gunn had set her down with her skirts hiked up above her knees, and so Haynes, seeing her, jumped to the conclusion that she must have been assaulted sexually. Sergeant Haynes looked around him and saw the marks of a violent struggle, the trampled-down grass, and the chaotic, indistinct footsteps. He saw the hat, picked up the gloves. The attack, he realized, had been recent, but not all that recent: the pool of blood in the muddy road had clotted, as had the blood on the woman’s face and matted in her hair. The blood had ceased to flow from many of her wounds. She had obviously lain here for several hours—four or five, at least.

  He stood sentinel over the unconscious woman as the sun rose, until Constable Gunn returned with several others. Haynes took charge, supervising the lifting of the woman onto the stretcher, and then ordering Gunn to remain at the scene, both in the hope of waylaying anyone who might have witnessed the attack and to protect the crime scene from contamination by curious passersby—if not from fellow police. The others set out, double-time, for Eltham, Haynes taking the lead, with his ear by the woman’s head. She revived enough, he later claimed, to speak once more, moaning, “Oh, save me!” before passing out again.

  They bore her into Eltham and one of the larger houses on the High Street, where they pounded on the door to rouse Dr. David King. As police surgeon and medical officer of health for the district, he would seem the best man for miles around to treat the woman’s wounds. But with a glance King realized that her life was far beyond his—and likely anyone’s—power to save. He directed Haynes to send her on to Guy’s Hospital, nine miles to the northwest in Southwark. They could at least make her comfortable there.

  An officer quickly procured a cab. They laid the insensible woman in it, Haynes and a few others climbed in, and they set off away from the rising sun. Traveling through the dew-covered fields and the still-sleeping suburbs of Lee and New Cross, and skirting the stinking tanneries of Bermondsey, they plunged into the growing din and congestion of the metropolis, turning within sight of the Thames, and pulled up at the hospital. It was 7:15 in the morning.

  They were met by the hospital’s house surgeon and house physician, Michael Harris and Frederic Durham. As house doctors, Harris and Durham occupied the bottommost rung of Guy’s medical ladder: both were fresh out of Guy’s Hospital‘s medical school, and neither had encountered traumatic injuries quite like these. They had the police carry the woman into a ward. There, a nurse stripped off her clothing and passed each item to Sergeant Haynes to scrutinize. Meanwhile Harris and Durham treated the woman’s wounds as best they could, using forceps to remove the several chunks and fragments of bones smashed from her skull. As they probed and cleaned her, Dr. Harris made careful notes.

  She was completely unconscious and perceptibly cold from loss of blood. Most of her wounds were deep and cleanly cut, inflicted by a weapon both sharp and heavy. Most wounds were at the front of her head, but Harris observed as well several cuts on her arms and hands, particularly on the backs of her hands—clean cuts with no bruising. These wounds were obviously defensive: for some time, at least, this woman had fought her attacker face to face
. The incredible number of blows to the head, however—Harris counted at least a dozen of them—indicated that after she had fallen helplessly to the ground, her attacker continued to hack at her face. Simply killing her, it seemed, was not enough: whoever smashed and slashed at her repeatedly wanted to erase her physiognomy, to obliterate her identity.

  Three of the woman’s head wounds were particularly grievous. On her left side, over her ear, her temporal bone was bashed inward and hung fractured within the skull. Harris easily lifted this bone to find the brain lacerated underneath. A second wound—the wound that had startled PC Gunn so greatly—was a horizontal three-inch trench of smashed bone above the woman’s destroyed right eye, from which swollen brain bulged through. Another blow had sliced apart the woman’s upper lip and shattered her upper jawbone: Harris and Durham removed a chunk of that. The rest of the wounds to her head might have been less severe, but were distinct, telling the story of an attacker showering her head with blows: eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen times.

  The doctors found one further wound on the girl: a bruise on her right thigh. It was slight, but it was, like all of the other wounds, recently inflicted: within the last ten or twelve hours, at most. This was the only sign of trauma on her lower body. Despite Sergeant Haynes’s suspicions at the scene, the doctors found no signs whatsoever that she had been assaulted sexually.

  From the general condition of the woman’s body, Harris and Durham estimated that she was between twenty-three and twenty-five years old. Her occupation was obvious: the thick calluses on her hands and knees testified to years of hard labor as a servant. And she was dying; Harris and Durham were certain that they could do nothing to prevent that. There was, however, at least the hope that the woman might regain consciousness long enough to reveal her identity and name her attacker. For that reason Dr. Harris ordered that she be placed in a ward and be watched by attendants day and night.