A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

Durrant was arrested. His friends and colleagues were simply unable to believe that he could be the
murderer; they insisted that he was a ‘good man’. But a reporter discovered that another young
lady, a Miss Annie Welming, had narrowly escaped becoming a rape victim. She had gone into the
church library with Durrant, who had left her alone. Then he walked in, naked, and the girl had
screamed and fled.
Many witnesses had seen both girls with Durrant just before they disappeared. His appeals lasted
for three years, but he was eventually hanged in 1898. The case caused a sensation all over
America, and was reported in European newspapers (an indication that sex crime was still a rarity).
Durrant’s case provides us with a great deal of insight into ‘Victorian’ sex crime. There is no
reason to suppose that his supporters, who regarded him as a ‘good man’, were mistaken. All the
indications suggest that he was genuinely religious. One close friend - and fellow student - testified
that Durrant had certainly been ‘pure’ up until two years before, since they had discussed the matter
at length. The story of Annie Welming suggests that he was an exhibitionist with a compulsive
desire to appear naked in front of women. (Miss Welming told a friend about her experience, and
there was some gossip; however, Durrant’s reputation stood so high that it soon died away.)
This in turn suggests that he knew precisely what he intended to do on the day he took Blanche to
the church. He had even established an alibi, asking a friend to answer his name in the roll-call at
the medical school. Blanche and he had been ‘keeping company’ for some time; at one point, she
had refused to speak to him for several weeks after he made some kind of advance. The evidence
suggests that he wanted her badly. She was prim and respectable and would allow no ‘liberties’. On
3 April 1895, he decided that the pleasure of throwing off all his sexual inhibitions and frustrations
was worth the risk. When he walked in naked, she probably screamed; he throttled and raped her.
Then he carried the body up to the belfry and undressed it. He spent a considerable time - at least
half an hour - alone with the body. He may have hinted to Minnie Williams that he had killed
Blanche - a witness testified that Minnie had said ‘she knew too much’ about Blanche’s
disappearance. It is even possible that Durrant lured Minnie to the church to silence her. If so, the
temptation of being alone in the church with a pretty girl was too great. The clothes Durrant was
seen wearing on the day of Minnie’s disappearance had no bloodstains, which suggests not only
that he took them off before stabbing her, but that he took them off in another room, since her
blood spurted so far. Marks on Minnie’s neck showed that she had been throttled unconscious
before the dress was thrust down her throat; at this point, she must still have been alive. After
raping her, Durrant was still in such a frenzy that he slashed and stabbed her until the knife broke
off in her breast. The medical examiner testified that there was evidence that Durrant then raped her
again - although this could have happened when he returned at midnight.
The Durrant case, then, is a textbook Victorian sex crime, and it makes us aware of the inhibitions
and frustrations that caused the element of explosive violence in so many cases of the period. Most
young men - and women - are biologically prepared for sexual intercourse from the age of thirteen
or so, and experience sexual curiosity many years earlier than that. In an age when even a glimpse
of a woman’s ankle was regarded as sexually provocative, the frustration of young men must have
been enormous. In My Life and Loves, Frank Harris describes how, as a child, he used to allow the
pencil to roll under the table so that he could crawl on all fours and look at the girls’ legs. But when
he mentions seeing ‘the legs up to the knees’, we realise that they wore long skirts; it was their
ankles and calves that caused Harris so much excitement.