A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

11 P.M., Williamson served a drink to an old friend, the parish constable, and told him that a man
in a brown jacket had been listening at the door, and that if the constable saw him, he should arrest
him.
A quarter of an hour later, the lodger had gone to his bed in the attic when he heard the front door
slam very hard, then Bridget Harrington’s voice shouting ‘We are all murdered.’ There were blows
and more cries. Turner crept downstairs - naked - and peered into the living room. He saw a man
bending over a body and rifling the pockets. Turner went back upstairs, made a rope out of sheets
tied together, and lowered himself out of the window. As he landed with a crash on the pavement -
the ‘rope’ was too short - he shouted breathlessly ‘Murder, murder!’ A crowd quickly formed, and
the parish constable prised open the metal flap that led into the cellar. At the bottom of some steps
lay the body of the landlord, his head beaten in by a crowbar that lay beside him. His throat had
been cut and his right leg fractured. In the room above lay the bodies of Mrs Williamson and
Bridget Harrington. Both their skulls had been shattered, and both had had their throats cut to the
bone. The murderer had escaped through a rear window.
Dozens of sailors and men in brown jackets were arrested on suspicion, among them a young sailor
named John Williams, who lodged at the Pear Tree public house in nearby Wapping. He was a
rather good-looking, slightly effeminate youth with a manner that sometimes caused him to be
mistaken for a ‘gentleman’. There was no evidence against him. But when handbills with pictures
of the maul were circulated, John Williams’s landlord, a Mr Vermilloe (who happened to be in
Newgate prison for debt) said that he recognised it as belonging to a Swedish sailor named John
Peterson. Peterson was now at sea, so had a watertight alibi, but had left his chest of tools behind,
in the care of Vermilloe.
John Williams was now suspect number one. He had been seen walking towards the King’s Arms
on the evening of the murders, and had returned to his lodgings in the early hours of the morning
with blood on his shirt - he claimed this was the result of a brawl. The stockings and shoes he had
worn had been carefully washed, but bloodstains were still visible on the stockings. Williams’s
room mates said he had no money on the night of the murders, but had a great deal on the following
day.
Williams cheated the executioner by hanging himself in prison on 28 December 1811. An inquest
declared that he was the sole murderer of the Marrs and the Williamsons - a verdict that may be
questioned in view of the two pairs of footprints that were found leaving the Marrs’ house. He was
given a suicide’s burial at a cross roads in East London, with a stake through his heart - the old
superstition being that suicides could become vampires.
The details of the Ratcliffe Highway murders are rather less interesting than the effect they
produced on the public. It was the first time in English history - probably in European history - that
a crime had created widespread panic. Why? Because it was generally accepted that they were
committed by one man. In fact, it is rather more probable that they were committed by two, or even
by a gang -one witness who lived near the Marrs said he heard several men running away. If that
had been believed, there would almost certainly have been no panic - gangs of thieves were still a
familiar hazard in 1811. It was this notion of a lone monster, a man who stalked the streets on his
own, lusting for blood, that terrified everybody. Jack the Ripper turned this nightmare into reality
seventy-seven years later. But in 1811, the ‘alienated’ criminal had still not made his appearance.
Three more cases would produce this same widespread, feverish public interest during the next two
decades. The first was the murder of a sportsman and gambler named William Weare by two more