Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane Read online

  While the doctors cleaned and dressed her wounds, Sergeant Haynes examined her clothing. They were the walking-out clothes of a servant girl. She had worn a barège (a silky fabric made of wool) dress the color of dark chocolate, pinned to which was a common-looking brooch. Under this she wore off-white petticoats, and over, a black woolen jacket with mohair trim and with lace around the neck—pretty lace, but cheap, an imitation of fine Maltese. On the sleeves of the jacket, midway between wrist and elbow, were two jagged tears obviously inflicted by her attacker’s weapon. In her small blue purse, Haynes found eleven shillings and fourpence, and two small keys to boxes or suitcases, and from her jacket pocket Haynes pulled out a handkerchief and a small silver locket, bound by a length of blue ribbon. Haynes snapped the locket open, but was disappointed to find it contained nothing—no tiny image of a loved one; no lock of hair. There was nothing there, and nothing on the woman’s clothing to offer a clue to her identity.

  Haynes gathered up all of the woman’s possessions and returned with them to the station at Eltham. While her smaller possessions remained there, her dress, jacket, and petticoats were quickly sent on to the chief station in the subdistrict, at neighboring Lee, and there displayed to anyone who might be able to identify her by them.

  It was late morning when Haynes returned to Eltham, and noon when he returned to examine Kidbrooke Lane. By that time word of the assault had spread. In Greenwich, the superintendent of R Division, James Griffin, had learned of the assault and had already come to Kidbrooke Lane to investigate the scene of the assault personally. Griffin was a twenty-five-year veteran of the Metropolitan Police who had begun his career in Greenwich Division before transferring to East London posts; he moved up relatively quickly through the ranks and had been appointed superintendent of Greenwich Division four years earlier. By all evidence he was well established, comfortable and effective in his post. But the case on which he was now embarking would challenge all of that.

  Although Griffin had taken personal command of the case, he’d done very little to impose any sort of discipline upon the investigation. The scene at Kidbrooke Lane was a free-for-all. Several officers from Eltham and surrounding stations—constables, sergeants, inspectors—gravitated to the lane to make personal searches for clues and to contribute their own footprints to the muddy ground. Although the forensic value of footprint evidence was well known by 1871, and techniques existed to preserve them—most commonly plaster of paris casts—no one bothered to preserve the footprints here, all concluding that their indistinctness in the sloppy mud rendered them useless for identification.

  At noon, then, when Sergeant Haynes returned, the footprint evidence had been marred. But it was not entirely obliterated. He, at least, realized that the footsteps told a story. He found a number of deep, large, and widely spaced prints leading away from the chaotic tangle of prints at the place that the woman had obviously struggled with her attacker, the strides of a man—most certainly a man—running, and Haynes thought, slipping, and dirtying himself in the mud. Haynes followed the steps north for a dozen or so yards, until they petered out on firmer ground. He walked north up the lane another three hundred yards, until he reached the point where little Kid Brook trickled across the lane. Haynes crossed the brook on a little plank, where he observed on the far bank a stone on which were three drops of blood. A yard farther away, he found another drop. The assailant, Haynes thought, had stopped on his flight northward—toward the metropolis—to wash his bloody hands, and, perhaps, his weapon and his clothing. Haynes thought this evidence important enough to remember, but not to preserve. He walked away, leaving the blood behind. No one besides him was known to have seen it.

  Another of the many officers milling about the scene did find more potential evidence in the mud. PC Edwin Ovens, one of the victim’s stretcher-bearers, had returned to the lane and was scrutinizing the ground fifteen yards north of where she had been found. He saw a glistening in the muck, reached down, and pulled from the ground a little metal whistle. He was not very impressed with the discovery. The whistle was cheap and very common. While audible to humans, this type of whistle was most commonly used for training dogs.*1 Kidbrooke Lane seemed a choice spot to train dogs, and thus this whistle likely had no connection with the attack. Nevertheless, Ovens passed the whistle on to his sergeant, who, upon returning to the station house at Eltham, handed it to the officer in charge, who, equally unimpressed, slipped the whistle into a cupboard without bothering to enter it into the evidence book.

  *

  Another piece of potential evidence made its way to Eltham station without police help.

  At eight o’clock that morning young Thomas Lazell was making his way home after spending the night in Greenwich. Lazell and his family were among the few residents of Kidbrooke Lane. They rented a cottage there and grew flowers in an adjacent market garden. Their cottage was about a third of a mile from the spot where the woman had been found. If Lazell had been at his cottage the night before, therefore, he might possibly have heard or seen something. But his family also had a home in Greenwich, and Lazell’s father, prostrate with gout, had needed his son’s assistance there yesterday evening—and there Thomas Lazell had slept.

  Lazell this morning had just turned off the footpath that connected Blackheath with Kidbrooke and onto another footpath, one that passed through a barnfield before meeting Kidbrooke Lane itself. There, he saw a man approaching excitedly, calling out to him. Lazell knew this man by sight, at least: he was a farm laborer—a haystack-maker—out of Eltham. But Lazell did not know his name. The farm laborer reached Lazell and held out to him a ragged piece of cloth. It was, the farm laborer claimed, a bloody white handkerchief. Lazell looked at it. It wasn’t white; it was blue. And it wasn’t a handkerchief, but a cloth irregularly torn into something like a square—a dusting rag, Lazell thought. But Lazell agreed: the cloth was stained with what looked to him like blood.

  As the assault had been discovered four hours before, Lazell had almost certainly not heard anything about it, until this farm laborer excitedly proclaimed the importance of this stained cloth. And in telling Lazell what he knew about the crime, he almost certainly stated what everyone thought at the time—that the attack had taken place during the dead of night, when Lazell was miles away in Greenwich. And therefore Lazell could have had no personal connection with the crime.

  Or so he thought.

  The farm laborer told Lazell that he had found the cloth off of the lane, on Kidbrooke Green, half a mile or so north from the spot where the woman had been found. He was sure this cloth was evidence crucial to the case, and he planned to deliver it in person to Eltham station that evening, right after he finished work.

  Lazell, too, thought the stained cloth important evidence—important enough to tell the police about himself. Later that morning, he made his way down the lane to where a knot of officers pored over the mud. There he identified himself to a sergeant: Sergeant Willis—coincidentally, the same officer to whom PC Ovens had entrusted the dog whistle. Willis was interested in Lazell’s story—interested enough to want to seek out the farm laborer immediately. But Lazell had no idea where he was to be found, and repeated the farm laborer’s promise that he would bring the cloth to the station; Willis would have to be satisfied with that. And the farm laborer was as good as his word: he brought the cloth to Eltham that evening. From there it was quickly sent to the station at Lee, where Sergeant Willis saw it the next morning. Willis and the police thought the cloth far less valuable as evidence than had Lazell or the farm laborer. It appeared to them to be a dirty rag, stained with something—but not, they thought, with blood. It was found off the lane, half a mile from the place of assault, near a place where gypsies often camped. It almost certainly had no connection at all with the assault.

  Nonetheless, the police kept the cloth, treating it much as they had treated the dog whistle. Someone stuffed it into a cupboard. And no one bothered to record it in the evidence book. It was, howeve
r, not forgotten.

  *

  The day after the police discovered the victim, they obtained the weapon. Thomas Brown, a gardener at Morden College, an institution adjacent to Kidbrooke, was working the grounds at two o’clock on Thursday afternoon when he spied it lying on a bed of leaves, shiny new and damp from that morning’s rain. It was a plasterer’s or a lathing hammer, a common enough tool, but one rendered sinister by the brutal circumstances of the attack. On one side of the cast-steel instrument was a hammerhead for driving nails; on the other, a sharp axehead for splitting laths or smashing through plaster or mortar. Its sixteen-inch handle had a hole drilled in the bottom through which a string was looped. Stamped onto the steel were the trade name “J Sorby” and a trademark immediately identifiable as the capped, grinning, hook-nosed head of Punch the puppet. Brown saw bits of rust and tiny pieces of hair on the axe blade, as well as splotches of blood on the handle, which the gardener thought had been smeared or washed.

  Morden College was not a college at all, but a magnificent almshouse built in 1695, to a design attributed to Christopher Wren, by a very wealthy merchant to house his aged, distressed, and bankrupt fellows. It still served that purpose in 1871. West of Morden College lay Blackheath; east lay Kidbrooke Lane. Only a public footpath fenced off from the edge of the college grounds connected the two. Brown found the hammer five yards from that footpath. If this hammer was indeed the instrument of assault—and no one doubted that it was—then the attacker who carried it was clearly familiar with the shortcuts and byways of the area. And if the woman’s attacker had thrown it here, he had held on to it for some time, running a mile and a half before jettisoning it at this point, a hundred yards before the footpath opened upon the busier precincts of Blackheath. He was obviously headed for the metropolis: for Blackheath, Greenwich, or Deptford—perhaps even across the Thames for London.

  Thomas Brown carefully took up the hammer and carried it to his neighbor, Thomas Hodge, a sergeant in R Division. Hodge, however, was sleeping and so Brown entrusted the hammer to his wife, who gave it to Hodge at nine that night. Hodge then rushed it to the station at Lee, where the inspector on duty passed it quickly up the chain of command.

  As of that Thursday morning, however, the chain of command had changed. Given the enormity and brutality of this crime, certain to become murder, and the public attention it attracted from the start, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Edmund Henderson had ordered Scotland Yard to get involved. And so Detective Superintendent Adolphus “Dolly” Williamson followed the usual protocol at the time, assigning two men—one inspector and one sergeant—to the case. Detective Inspector John Mulvany was therefore now in charge of the investigation. Mulvany, a forty-two-year-old native Londoner, the son of an Irish servant, had joined the force in 1848. He was appointed to Scotland Yard in 1864 and became an inspector in 1869. As a detective he had investigated burglaries, frauds, and mail thefts; he had helped break up a counterfeiting ring; he had chased Irish revolutionaries—Fenians—in Liverpool and Paris. But he had never been assigned to such a high-profile case as this one: Dolly Williamson was clearly offering him the opportunity to make a name for himself. Mulvany would have the full resources of R Division at his command. He and Superintendent Griffin, roughly the same age, and following similar trajectories in their Metropolitan Police careers, would quickly develop an effective working partnership with each other. Mulvany reported not to Griffin, however, but to Dolly Williamson at Scotland Yard, and through Williamson Mulvany answered to Commissioner Henderson. Assisting Mulvany was Detective Sergeant Edward Sayer.

  Mulvany had already been to Eltham that afternoon, to look over the site of the assault. He also visited Eltham police station to look over the evidence there. The woman’s keys he brought back with him to Scotland Yard. He deduced that they fit boxes holding her private possessions, and he wanted to see those possessions as soon as she was identified. And he also brought with him the dog whistle, obviously finding it much more interesting as evidence than the Eltham police had. Indeed he would, the next day, show it to his supervisor, Dolly Williamson. The rest of the evidence at Eltham—hat, gloves, purse, money, locket—he left behind. The evidence at Lee, which Mulvany must also have viewed before the plasterer’s hammer arrived—the dress, coat, petticoats, and the stained cloth—also remained at the station.

  The hammer, on the other hand, the inspector at Lee station wrapped up in paper, carried to Scotland Yard, and personally delivered into the hands of Inspector Mulvany. Until that moment, the investigation was largely limited to facilitating the viewing of the evidence and the woman’s battered and comatose body, and placarding the metropolis with descriptions of the crime and of the woman. Once Mulvany held the suspected weapon, the investigation broadened. For one thing, even though the hammer appeared not to have been used for construction, the fact that the weapon was a tool raised the possibility that the assailant was actually a plasterer who, perhaps, had come upon the woman while coming to or leaving work. As it happened, plasterers had been at work building cottages just a quarter mile from the place of assault. They would have to be questioned. Also, the hammer had quite likely been purchased someplace in or near R District. Officers quickly fanned out to inquire at every ironmonger’s shop in the area. At the same time, identifying marks on the hammer allowed for a more focused search: the person or persons who supplied London with J Sorby tools could be found, through them the ironmongers they supplied—and through those ironmongers, hopefully, the names of specific purchasers. It was now possible to track down the assailant even before the victim’s identity was known.

  *

  The outrage at Kidbrooke Lane quickly became national news, competing in the newspapers for public attention with the great story of early 1871—the rise, and now the fall, of the radical Commune in Paris, born in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, and the collapse of the Second Empire (and the exile, incidentally, of ex-Emperor Napoleon III to nearby Chislehurst). In that last week of April 1871 the days of the Commune were clearly numbered, and the London newspapers flooded the public with telegraphed, and thus astoundingly current, reports of the beginnings of the Commune’s death agony.

  Among these pages of reports appeared first paragraphs and then columns on the Kidbrooke assault. The first reports appeared the day after PC Gunn’s discovery; then and over the following days, reporters scrambled to make sense of the mystery and to identify the battered woman and her attacker or attackers.*2 In competing for the latest information, the newspapers couldn’t help but report rumors that suggested a solution to the mystery. Rumors were particularly rife that the comatose woman fluttered into enough consciousness to attempt to identify herself or her attacker. A report in the Daily News, two days after she was found, held that she had said with astounding coherence to PC Gunn “take hold of my hand; Lord help me; I have been murdered; Mary Smith knows about it.” Other reports had her flailing her arms in her hospital bed, as if fending off a phantom attacker, and crying out “Emily, don’t beat me so cruelly,” or “Oh, Emily—Oh, Ned, don’t,” or “Oh, Edward, don’t murder me!” or simply sighing “Emily” or “Sarah.” A number of newspapers claimed that when asked her identity, she weakly uttered “Mary Shru—.” (Michael Harris, house surgeon at Guy’s, who had placed a watch day and night on the woman, would later maintain on oath that the woman never rallied to speak while under his care.)

  Some of the earliest reports about the victim suggested her assault might somehow be connected with a nearby tragedy. The day after the victim was found, another young woman—another servant—was found dead in a little pond in Lee, less than a mile from Kidbrooke Lane. The earliest speculation held that this woman had died of poisoning, not drowning, and that she carried a number of letters from somebody named Emily—a name that the victim at Guy’s was rumored to have uttered. Any fears, however, that a serial killer was on the loose in Kent and preying on working women were scotched by a speedy and effective inquest on the woman
found in the pond. Her name was Ann Surridge; she had been a servant in Bromley, due south of Lee. Ann Surridge’s utter despondency over a romantic relationship that had soured had so alarmed Ann’s employer that she had written to the woman’s parents in Peckham, demanding they fetch their daughter home. Before they could do that, however, Ann herself had set off, apparently for home, and on the way there she had thrown herself into the pond and drowned. As for the letters, they were addressed to her family, which included a sister named Emily. The coroner’s jury mercifully removed the stigma of suicide by returning the verdict that Ann Surridge had killed herself while in a state of temporary insanity.

  Speculations and tales about mysterious happenings on Kidbrooke Lane on the night of April 25 abounded. Most of these focused upon soldiers, a fact not surprising given the presence of nearby Woolwich Arsenal—and the low sexual reputation of the military. And so police suspicion at first centered on Woolwich: several “special officers” were sent there to investigate, and one soldier there was soon arrested in connection with the crime, and just as quickly liberated. A rifleman from Woolwich, claimed another report, had been spotted early that Wednesday morning returning from the direction of Kidbrooke. One particularly elaborate rumor, reported and repeated as fact in a number of newspapers, held that a sergeant of a Scotch regiment entered an Eltham beer shop that Tuesday night with a young woman in a chocolate dress and a black bonnet embroidered with three roses. Waiting outside was another woman. The three soon left for Kidbrooke Lane—and there, at one in the morning, a laborer heard a woman cry out “Don’t murder me, Nelly. Don’t murder me, Ned.” (That unnamed laborer was never heard from, or heard about, again.)