'Dark as the mystery is,' he wrote, 'we are persuaded it turns on the nightgown and the knife.'
Within days of reaching London, Jack Whicher and Dolly Williamson were set to work on a fresh murder case, another domestic horror show that featured nightgowns and a knife. 'No sooner do we hear of one atrocious and cruel murder being committed,' observed the News of the World, 'and that it is not likely to be discovered, than we are startled at finding that the impunity is causing its usual result, and murder upon murder springs up in different directions, as though it were some fearful epidemic suddenly bursting forth.' An unsolved murder seemed to be infectious. By failing to catch one killer, a detective might unleash a host of them.
On Tuesday, 31 July, the police were called to a house in Walworth, a district of south London between Camberwell and the river. The landlord and a lodger had heard a scream and a thump soon after dawn. When the local police officers reached the house, they found a short, very pale young man in a nightshirt standing over the dead bodies of his mother, his two brothers (aged eleven and six) and a woman of twenty-seven. All were dressed for bed. 'This is my mother's doing,' said the man. 'She came to the bedside where my brother and I were sleeping. She killed him with a knife and made a stab at me. In my own defence I wrenched the knife from her hand and killed her, if she is dead.' The survivor of the massacre was William Youngman. When he was arrested on suspicion of murder, he said: 'Very well.'
Whicher and Williamson were assigned to assist Inspector Dann of the Lambeth division. Unlike Foley, Dann was an able officer, and he remained in charge of the investigation. The police soon established that Youngman had been engaged to marry the young woman, Mary Streeter, and had taken out a ?100 insurance policy on her life six days before she died. Whicher found that the banns to the couple's marriage had already been published at the parish church. It emerged that Youngman had purchased the murder weapon two weeks before the killings – he claimed he had bought it to cut his bread and cheese.
There were similarities between the murders at Road and at Walworth: the composure of the chief suspects, the extreme violence towards members of the immediate family, the intimations of madness. But The Times found the differences were greater. The London killing had a 'repulsive literality and distinctness', it argued, appearing to accept that Youngman's motive for slaughtering his family was purely financial. 'The public mind is neither harrowed by suspense nor excited by uncertainty.' The solution was too obvious, and the crime meant nothing beyond its own ugly horror. There was nothing missing. The Road case, by contrast, posed a tantalising riddle, and its solution seemed of urgent, personal concern to many middle-class families.
The News of the World concurred that there was something about the Road Hill murder that 'seems to set it altogether apart, in a class by itself'. Yet the newspaper saw a disturbing connection between the various vicious murders of 1860 – all were virtually motiveless: 'you are astonished, at once, by the brutality of the crime and the smallness of the motive'. Both the Road and the Walworth killers seemed almost, but not quite, insane: their ferocity seemed disproportionate to any possible gain, and yet they had carefully planned to commit and then conceal their crimes. The newspaper remarked of the Walworth murders, 'Either, then, this crime is an outbreak of insanity, or else it is the most horrible and appalling murder that has ever been committed by human hands.'
Just over a fortnight after the investigation began, Youngman was tried at the Old Bailey. He 'appeared perfectly unconcerned', reported The Times, 'exhibited the most extraordinary coolness and self-possession, and . . . did not evince the least emotion'. When the jury convicted him of murder, he said, 'I am not guilty,' turned around and 'walked with a firm step out of the dock'. The suggestions that he was insane were rejected, and he was sentenced to death. As soon as Youngman reached his cell he demanded supper. He ate it with gusto. While he waited in prison for his execution a lady sent him a religious tract, on which she had underlined the passages she thought applicable to his case. 'I wish she had sent me something to eat instead,' he remarked, 'as I could do a fowl and a piece of pickled pork.'
Whicher's part in the Walworth case went almost unnoted in the press, which continued to publish indignant criticisms of his investigation at Road Hill. As he scribbled his ripostes on the letters that arrived at Scotland Yard, he had to stay silent on the public discussion of his conduct.
On 15 August, the day before Youngman's trial, Whicher was denounced in Parliament. Sir George Bowyer, the leading Roman Catholic spokesman in the Commons, complained about the quality of Britain's police inspectors, using Whicher as his example. 'The recent investigation with regard to the Road murder afforded striking proof of the unfitness of some of the present officers,' he said. 'An inspector named Whicher was sent down to inquire into the matter. Upon the slightest possible grounds, merely because one of her nightgowns happened to be missing, that officer arrested a young lady who lived in the house where the murder was committed, and assured the magistrates that he would be prepared in a few days to produce evidence which would bring home the murder to her.' He accused Whicher of acting 'in a most objectionable manner. After all his boasting of the evidence he could produce, the young lady was discharged by the magistrates.' Sir George Cornewall Lewis, the Home Secretary, mildly defended the detective, arguing that 'the officer was justified in the course he adopted'.
The national mood, though, was with Bowyer. 'We can unhesitatingly state the public feeling,' claimed the Frome Times. 'An officer who can play at hap-hazard with such an awful charge as that of wilful murder, and can promise that which he must have known he could not perform, cannot expect to be looked on otherwise than with distrust.' 'The Whicher theory has failed to throw any light whatever upon the thick darkness of this horrible mystery,' said the Newcastle Daily Chronicle. 'A new clue must be discovered before justice can thread the mazes of the labyrinth of Road.' The Morning Star was dismissive of the 'frivolous, gossiping, and utterly vapid school-girl testimony' upon which Whicher had relied.
The Bath Chronicle criticised 'the slender speculations which were loosely strung together and adduced as evidence . . . the experiment made, has been a fearfully cruel one'. In an essay in the Cornhill Magazine, the distinguished lawyer Sir James Fitzjames Stephen argued that the cost of trying to solve a murder – the damage wrought by the exposure, the police intrusion – was sometimes too high: 'The circumstances of the Road murder are extremely curious, because they happen to afford an illustration of the amount of this price so exact that had it been committed on purpose it could hardly have been better arranged.' Since no other culprit could be found, Whicher was blamed for the muddle and mystery of Road. The 'Disciple of Edgar Allan Poe' played on the sinister associations of his name when he noted in his pamphlet that 'Constance is recognised as innocent, though metropolitan witchery once jeopardised her.'
One of the most damaging charges laid against Jack Whicher was that he was driven by greed. The early detectives were often presented as glamorous rogues, only a step away from the villains they sought. The French felon-turned-detective Eugene Vidocq, whose heavily fictionalised memoirs were translated into English in 1828 and dramatised for the London stage in 1852, had breezily swapped villainy for police work when it served his financial interests.
The rewards that detectives could earn were descendants of the eighteenth-century 'blood money' paid to thief-takers or informants. In August 1860 the Western Daily Press scornfully alluded to Whicher's 'zeal sharpened by the offer of a handsome reward'. A letter from 'Justice' in the Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette compared Whicher to Jack Ketch, a notoriously clumsy seventeenth-century hangman who inflicted great suffering on his victims: Whicher was 'utterly irresponsible', wrote 'Justice', 'tempted with the vision of ?200 reward, getting a young lady of 15 incarcerated in a common gaol for a week'. Like many correspondents, 'Justice' showed distaste for the working-class fellow who had meddled in middle-class affairs. The detectives were greedy and inept because they were not gentlemen. Perhaps Whicher was so vehemently
