A Soul Full of Darkness: The Twisted, Horrifying History of Serial Killers

[Trollheart]

Killer: John Williams (No, not that one!)
Epithet:
Type: ?
Nationality: Irish
Hunting ground(s): London
Years active: 1811
Weapon(s) used: Hammer (maul); possibly knife and/or chisel
Signature (if any):
Victims: 7
Survivors: 3
Caught by: London Police
Fate: Died in prison while awaiting trial (see below for the full story)


Slayer or Scapegoat? John Williams and the Ratcliff Highway Murders

One of the most infamous slayings in nineteenth century England, a full seventy years before the East End would be terrorised by a spectre whose name would reverberate down the centuries and even today strikes fear into the heart, the Ratcliff Highway Murders was London's first sensationalised murder. It was made the more newsworthy as there was a survivor, which surely the murderer had not counted upon. It took place in a suitably seedy and dilapidated area, referred to by Dickens in his novels and indicative of the slums of East London at the time. A den of vice, a nest of thieves, crumbling and stinking, crime running rampant and unchecked through the cold narrow streets, it was not a place you would choose to bring up your young family.

But that was exactly what Timothy Marr had chosen to do, or had been left no option but to take residence there. He had worked in his youth for the  East India Company, but those days were behind him and now in his mid-to-late twenties,  he had a wife and baby son to support, working as a draper and trader in linens.  On December 7 1811, he sent his servant Margaret out to buy oysters, but the shop was closed when she got there and instead she went to pay a bill at the butcher's before returning to the shop. When she did, she found to her surprise that the door appeared to be locked. That was odd, considering that the family knew she had gone out and would need to get back in. She rang the doorbell, but nobody came. She heard what she believed to be the cry of the fourteen-week old baby, Timothy, and footsteps, but they did not come close to the door; nobody was coming to let her in.

Getting frustrated now, she began banging the door knocker with such violence that the night watchman, George Olney, took notice and came to find out what was wrong. When she explained the situation to him he too knocked repeatedly at the door to no avail. The noise roused several neighbours, including pawnbroker John Murray, who volunteered to pop over his back wall and enter through the back door, which was open, with a light on. Climbing the stairs and calling softly to his neighbours, he received no reply and later remarked that the house was deathly quiet. As he came down the stairs into the shop he saw why.

The first sight that greeted him was the broken and twisted body of Marr's apprentice, James Gowan, lying at the bottom of the stairs near the front door. The boy's face had been smashed in with such force that his brain had splattered all over the walls and floor. Blood was thick like a river as Murray made his way towards the boy, and he almost tripped over the body of Mrs. Marr, similarly brutalised. With shaking hands he opened the front door and let Olney in to the scene of carnage, and together they began the grim search for the proprietor, whom they found behind the counter, battered to death. That left only the baby, and with sinking hearts they made their way to the living quarters, where their worst fears were realised. The baby was dead too, his throat slit with such savage force that his head was almost severed from his body, his crib dark with blood.

In 1811 there was no such thing as a real police force in England. It wouldn't be until 1829 that the "peelers" would be set up as an official London Metropolitan Police Force, and another twenty years after that before formal detectives came into being. For now, there were the Bow Street Runners, who were not in any way trained in gathering clues, evidence or any sort of investigative work, and who were few and far between. The constable who responded to the alert was most likely a parish one, probably young and almost certainly without much of an idea how to deal with such a heinous multiple murder. He did his best though, and successfully identified the murder weapon as a large hammer (considering it had blood and human hair adhering to it, probably not too difficult a conclusion to get to). But motive was another thing entirely.

Today detectives would probably say that the ferocity of the murders indicated rage, and probably pointed to a personal attack, that the killer must have had some issue with the family. But the only real motive what passed for the police could think of was robbery, and that was discounted as nothing had been taken. The idea of a murder for no reason, or just because someone liked to kill, was pretty alien to them (remember, Jack the Ripper had yet to come on the scene, changing the whole attitude of the police and the public towards murderers). Footprints in the blood seemed to point to two, or maybe, according to testimony, more than two killers.

Three sailors were arrested, but each had alibis and were let go. Other suspects were picked up, but the police were unable to tie them satisfactorily to the murders, and they had to be set free too. Efforts were made to trace the manufacturer of the mallet, which had a small chip in its head and which might distinguish it from the no doubt hundreds of other such tools sold to various craftsmen and workers in London. Meanwhile, as the victims were buried, fear and unease gripped London. With no real suspect and the idea that these men had walked in to a shop and calmly killed everyone inside, then left, evading the police, everyone feared for their own safety. No doubt locksmiths and whatever passed for security experts did well in these days in the wake of the murders.

On December 19 there was something of a breakthrough in the case, as it was discovered that when the blood was wiped away from the head of the mallet, the inscription of initials could be seen stamped into the metal. They were either I.P. or J.P., but either way certainly now offered a way to trace the maker of the hammer.

That very night, the killers struck again.

[Trollheart]

This time it was a tavern down the road where the publican, his wife and grand-daughter, their servant and a lodger all became the next victims. Although again there were five people and this was a place of business, to a profiler of today this murder would be baffling in terms of what we know as a serial killer's "type". John Williamson was much older than Timothy Marr, well into his fifties, his wife older and their grand-daughter was fourteen. The servant and lodger correspond roughly, you could say, to Margaret Jewel and the apprentice, but otherwise all the details are wrong. Whereas Mr and Mrs. Marr had stayed up late on the night of their deaths - until after midnight - the Williamsons went to bed early, despite running a public house.

There were survivors too. The lodger, John Turner, who raised the alarm with a blood-curdling cry of "Murder!" as he tried to descend from his room on knotted sheets, like a convict attempting a jailbreak, and the grand-daughter, who, miraculously, had slept through the whole thing! At the alarm, the lodger was helped down and the doors of the tavern broken down as people rushed in with whatever weapons they could find. John Williamson was dead, again at the foot of the stairs, his throat cut and one of his hands almost severed. His wife lay in the parlour, her throat so badly cut that, again, her head was almost off, while the luckless servant had not this time escaped and was also dead near the fire.

Suspicion quickly fell on Turner; had he escaped the carnage as a lucky survivor, or was he the killer, fleeing in the very act of murder? Turner claimed he shouted for help and this scared away the killer(s), which would explain how the grand-daughter was not killed.  Various sightings of suspicious men - one supposedly with a limp - started to filter in, and footprints were discovered in the mud of a clay-covered slope near the tavern, along which it was surmised the killer or killers had made his or their escape. The newspapers of the time of course greatly increased their circulation with lurid descriptions and artists' impressions of the murder scenes, and later John Turner was able to give a fuller account to the police (I'm just going to refer to them as such, since I don't know who "investigated", to use the term very generously, the crime - was it the Bow Street Runners, the Watch, or who?), which seemed to back up his story about being a potential victim. I suppose it's easy to say now, and what would we do in such a situation, but you have to wonder, if he knew the fourteen-year old girl was in the tavern and he had not seen her be killed (as he testified he had seen the killer loom over the two women in the parlour - though had not seen his face, just that he was a very tall man and wearing what was called a Flushing coat - and had heard Mr. Williamson cry out) why he didn't try to take her with him when he escaped?

To an extent then as now, the police cast around for someone, anyone they could blame and pin the crime on, and sailors were always good suspects. So John Williams, an Irish sailor who had been seen near the King's Arms and who was said to be known by the Williamsons, was taken in for questioning. Despite the lack of actual evidence against him - indeed, several points he made seem to indicate he could have been cleared of suspicion, but no checks were carried out - he was imprisoned and held with another suspect, while London's finest picked up yet a third man. But much of this was flailing around in the dark; even today, if to a lesser degree, we know the police will be under pressure to make an arrest, charge and convict someone, and as both the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four can tell us, as well as who knows how many other recipients of the miscarriage of justice, they're often not too picky about how they go about that. The important thing is to close the case, and if a man seems like he might be the one but there are inconvenient areas that might point to his innocence, well, they can always be lost in files, can't they?

Not that I'm saying the police in 1811 did this, or if they did, that they did it consciously or deliberately, but the evidence, such as it was, against Willliams seemed weak at best. When a search of the lodging house in which Williams had stayed turned up a trunk with a missing maul, and which belonged to a sailor currently out at sea whose name was John Peterson, the initials on the murder weapon, J.P., seemed to fit. Perhaps they had their man. Further weight was given to this theory when the landlord confirmed that Peterson's maul was indeed chipped; he had used it himself and caused the chip. Despite this, the case against John Williams went ahead. This somewhat flew in the face of the evidence, unless the police believed that Williams had taken the maul from Peterson's trunk and used it to commit the murders. I suppose Peterson being at sea (presumably he had been away during the murders) removed any suspicion from him.

John Turner knew Williams, but from previous and frequent visits the man had made to the King's Arms, and he could not identify him as the man he had seen standing over Mrs. Williamson. The woman who washed Williams' clothes did testify that she had washed blood out of one of his shirts two weeks earlier, which tied in with the dates of both murders; Willaims tried to explain that they had been the result of a fight he had got into, but the magistrate told him to be quiet and would not accept this excuse. Three days before he was due to come before the court again he was found hanged in his cell. His death was ruled as suicide, though there have been those who think the real murderer killed him to prevent his being found not guilty (unlikely, given how set the authorities were on convicting him) and looking for another suspect.

After his death though, more details began to emerge about Williams, as people who claimed they stayed silent in fear of him suddenly came forward. He was said to have had dirty and bloody socks the night of the murder, also to have been in possession of a chisel like the one found at the Marr murders. His body was then treated like that of a vampire, taken in procession by a crowd and buried in a too-small grave with a stake hammered through his heart. This is not some writer's fancy by the way, or embellishment passed on by word of mouth. The grave was exhumed accidentally by gas workers in 1886 and the stake could clearly be seen, six feet below street level.

Questions, of course, remain. While Williams was convicted for both sets of murders, he had been tried only for those which took place at the Kings Arms, and there seems to have been no evidence to place him at Timothy Marr's shop. The fact that Margaret Jewel heard voices (not one voice) in the house was glossed over, the footprints in blood were not examined (though fingerprinting was not a science at this time) and the accounts of two men, one very tall with a limp, the other short, to say nothing of the fact that there is no mention made of Williams having been found to own or possess a Flushing coat, all point to what could either be a serious miscarriage of justice, or at best, a rash rush to judgement, in the name both of public safety and reassurance and the obtaining of a quick conviction.

What was the motive? None was ever established. If it was robbery, and the arrival of Margaret Jewell at the first scene had interrupted the killer or killers and scared him or them off, then the same thing happened at the Kings Arms, possibly when John Turner raised the alarm, but it seems unlikely that all the killer(s) would get away with was Mr. Williamson's watch. Even running from the scene, he or they could have surely filled their pockets, considering they were in the parlour at the time. Also, what happened to the maul? The murders at the Marr shop, while they did include some slitting of throats, particularly that of the baby, all more or less involved crushed skulls courtesy of this hammer, while those at the Kings Arms seem to have all had their throats cut. Not the same M.O. at all, so why should it have been the same perpetrator? And what was the weapon used in the Kings Arms murders? An iron bar was found beside Mr. Williamson, believed to have been the weapon that stove his head in, but nothing was proven or produced to confirm what had been used to cut all the victims' throats.

What about Williams' shoes? Turner testified that the footsteps he heard seemed to have been made by boots "without nails in them" and yet the bootprint in the clay looked to the police as if it did have nails in it. Had Williams' shoes nails in them or not? Was this checked? Were his shoes examined for traces of clay? What evidence or eyewitness testimony places him at Marr's shop? Nothing is mentioned; in fact, what places him at the Kings Arms? Other than that he was a regular patron of the tavern, nothing. It could have been anyone. Yes, he was out that night and yes he - allegedly - came back with blood on his clothes, but this could have fit with the explanation he gave. In fact, if he had killed several people and had their blood on his clothing, firstly with such a savage and sustained attack, would he not have been covered in the stuff, rather than it just be, as the washer woman testified (after his apparent suicide) on the collar? Also, would he have risked giving such bloodstained clothing to her if he had anything to hide? Would he not have been more likely to have burned them, thrown them away or otherwise disposed of them? It seems to me highly unlikely that he would allow the evidence of his "crimes" to remain on his clothes and be passed to another.

Added to all of that, the so-called suicide. Many criminals, particularly murderers, have killed themselves while awaiting sentence, but in Williams' case sentence had not yet been pronounced, in fact, he hadn't even been found guilty (though the trial was tending that way). So if he killed himself - if - was it remorse or an attempt to escape the hangman's rope? Or was he, as intimated above, killed by the real murderer, or associates or agents of him or them? Is it even possible that the police, perhaps worried their case was about to collapse (although that does not seem to have been likely) actually staged the hanging themselves, to prevent their lack of evidence and their poor investigation leaking out? If Williams committed suicide, why did he not leave some sort of note behind confessing to his crimes? A man able to kill that brutally - including killing a baby - should have had no qualms about either glorying in his deeds or, if remorse suddenly set in, making a confession. To go like that, without any note left behind, seems to me to be at best suspicious, at worst indicative of his not expecting to die and being hanged by others, taken by surprise. Other prisoners and even a warden reported that Williams was, despite the so-called evidence mounting against him, in good spirits on the day he died, believing he would be exonerated and released. Doesn't sound like the mood of a man about to take his own life.

Is it pure coincidence, or is there some connection between the discovery of the initials on the maul and the second attack occurring that very night? I can't imagine what link there might be (apart from a really stupid one involving the suspect being one of the cops, which is just, well stupid, but might make a certain sort of sense) but it is strange that everything was quiet for two weeks and then, on the very day the police got a break in the case, another - and really, when examined, not that similar at all - murder should occur. Was someone trying to throw them off the scent? In total contrast to procedure today, the police lost no time in informing the public about their discovery, posting up hand bills all over the area, presumably in the hope that someone might recognise the initials. But if Williams was their man, and he, like everyone else, now knew what they knew, and also knew that this new clue could lead to him, why would he risk another attack?

Why, if he was guilty of the Marr murders, would Williams risk being caught by a) attacking another family b) waiting so long before doing so and most damningly c) making the attack at a tavern he was known to frequent, had been seen in and was more than likely to end up being questioned about? None of that, to me, makes sense.

It's possible John Williams did murder all seven people, but the case certainly was not proven beyond what we would today accept as a reasonable doubt. Possibly the fact that this was the end of the Ratcliff Highway Murders points to his guilt, but it could just as easily be that the real murderer decided further killings were too risky: should he kill again, it would be blindingly obvious, even to the somewhat blinkered police, that they had the wrong man, and a new case would have to be opened. I also find it odd, though it may have been standard practice at the time, that the trial went ahead after Williams' death. Considering he could no longer defend himself (or, one imagines, be defended) surely the whole thing should have been abandoned and a mistrial or adjournment called? If that happened today I feel sure the case would collapse. The accused might technically escape justice, but he or she would be dead, so if they had been guilty then a sort of justice would have been seen to have been done, and if they had been innocent, well, it would be too late to do anything about it at that point. Either way, I don't imagine the trial would have continued with the accused dead and unable to speak for themselves.

Other suspects

There were in fact at least two other men who fit the bell as well as, even better than John Williams. One had been working at Marr's shop, the other was a mate of Williams' whose physical description much better fitted that given by John Turner as the man he saw standing over Mrs. Williamson.

Cornelius Hart

Hart was a carpenter who had carried out work for Marr, and had been asking about the disappearance of a chisel, which he said he couldn't find. Timothy Marr had apparently conducted a search of the premises but was unable to locate the chisel, however when PC Horton arrived at the bloodstained scene of the Marrs' shop, he was able to easily find the chisel, which was sitting out in plain sight. Hart denied any connection to Williams, but other people said otherwise, and he seemed very interested in Williams' arrest when he heard about it.

William "Long Billy" Ablass

A sailor who had been on the same ship as Williams, he had certainly been drinking with him at the Kings Arms on the night of the second murders, and as I say above, his general build fit better the description John Turner had given. He was lame, so walked with a limp, had a history of violence, having been involved in an unsuccessful mutiny in which John Williams also took part, and was unable to provide a solid albii for the time of the murders. Nevertheless, he was not considered a suspect.

Conveniently, a later search (about a month later) magically turned up extra evidence against Williams, to wit: a pair of trousers with blood on them (or what was said to be blood; I don't think it was ever confirmed), a knife which one of the constables claimed he had found in Williams' pocket at his arrest (but which was not noted at the time) and then lost sight of (I'm sorry, what?) and the pocket  watch said to have been stolen from Mrs. Williamson. There's no way to be sure, but it seems plausible that all of this so-called evidence was planted and then "found" by the police in order to try to shore up their weak case and ensure nobody called it a miscarriage of justice.

An interesting if ancillary point speaks to the nature of, to use the term generously, police involvement in murders, and the difference a century makes. These days the police are anxious to turn people away from a crime scene, both for reasons of the dignity of the victims (and I guess to keep reporters and cameramen away) and of course in an attempt to preserve the crime scene so that vital evidence is not destroyed. But when the Ratcliff Highway Murders, at least the first one, was discovered, George Olney, the night watchman called out "Murder! Murder! Come see what murder is here!" essentially inviting what we would term today rubberneckers to come and have a goosy. Of course, back then there was no such thing as preserving a crime scene, and the prevailing wisdom held that once someone was dead their dignity went out the window, and they were just a corpse or corpses, ripe for viewing and macabre titillation. How times have changed.