Equinox

Oxford University Herald and the Oxford Chronicle and Berks and Bucks Gazette were relative newcomers.

'Looks like you were wrong, Philip. Not one but three vulgar newspapers,' Laura noted.

'I stand corrected.'

'How do we access the archives?'

'Look in the library catalogue,' Philip replied. He moved the mouse to flick back to the file manager.

'The library has everything catalogued by decade. Then we'll have to search by newspapers and journals.'

A few more clicks and they had opened the file for 1850–1860. A couple more and they had the newspaper catalogue on the screen. 'Now we do a search by keywords. You don't have names, I suppose?'

Laura shook her head.

'OK. Well, that makes it harder. But we could try putting in 'murder', I guess, see what happens.' There were 1819 entries. Laura groaned.

'Don't be so impatient. Refine the search,' Philip said.

'Try 'serial killer'.'

'The expression didn't exist then.'

Laura was trying to recall what she had read two mornings earlier. 'The website I mentioned talked of three women being killed and mutilated during the summer of 1851'

'OK, let's refine the search with 'young woman'.'

Philip pressed 'enter' and a new screen appeared. 'Three hundred and forty-two entries containing the words 'murder' and 'young woman'. Better, but not good.'

'OK, refine the search again with 'mutilation'. That should definitely narrow things down,' Laura pulled her chair closer to the screen.

Philip tapped the keys and the list changed. This time there were seventeen entries that included the words 'murder', 'young woman' and 'mutilation'.

'Now we're getting somewhere,' Laura said.

The records were on microfiche. Philip noted the catalogue numbers and they joined the queue for the harassed librarian at the main desk. It took twenty minutes for them to find the films, learn how to use the machine and to feed the first roll of microfiche into the viewer.

The first reference was from Jackson's Oxford Journal and was dated 16 June 1851. It gave few details.

The next reference came from the Oxford Chronicle of 18 June. This reported the same story but with a little elaboration. In this article the woman had reportedly been found in a 'state of undress' in a barn in Headington, and she had died from unspecified knife wounds, her body 'horribly mutilated.'

The next three were reports from the trio of Oxford papers and all from the same day, 24 June. A second murder had been committed, and the killer had followed a slightly different MO. A young couple had been found dead in a field north of the city. They had been left naked, and the woman's body had, according to the Oxford University Herald , been 'cruelly disfigured'.

By the day after the third incident on 9 July, it had become the biggest story in Oxford for years; the reporting was now extensive and the innate gentlemanly restraint of the journalism had become tinged with what was, for the time, an unseemly overexcitement. An editorial in the Oxford Chronicle of 10 July read:

With the latest report yesterday of a further abhorrent murder, in this instance a young woman in the neighbourhood of Forest Hill on the road to London, considerable fears are growing that the Police Force are facing unprecedented difficulties in elucidating the factors behind the succession of vile murders that have plagued our city and its environs since the death of a young woman on 16^th June. Whilst commending the skill and dedication of the officers leading the investigation, we feel that it is our duty to highlight the natural anxieties of all the people of Oxford. The police have of course noted that all those murdered have been young people, the eldest being just twenty-one; and in one case the obscenity involved an unchaperoned couple meeting illicitly. It is also a matter of public knowledge that with this second incident the young man was a university student, that the man's body was unmolested after the murderer had dispatched him, but that the unfortunate young ladies, were, in each case, killed by knife, before being mutilated in the most foul manner.

Sources, which it is our duty and obligation to withhold, have divulged the fact that a suspect was apprehended at the scene of the latest atrocity and subsequently questioned. So there remains hope, and we all pray that this latest development may speed the police to an early resolution to this most horrendous series of crimes, thus removing inordinate fear from all who live within these city walls. In this cause, the Chronicle, and, I feel confident in believing, the great majority of our readers, will support the officers of the Police Force with wholehearted enthusiasm.

'Positively tabloid,' Philip said as he and Laura finished reading the piece.

For the next hour they ploughed through every report they had found from the catalogue.

Either through fear of offending their readership or because details were never revealed by the police, all three newspapers were short on explicit detail. Phrases like 'horrible mutilation', 'devilish disfigurement' and 'cruel abuse' littered the accounts. But what interested Laura and Philip most was the story of the suspect picked up at the scene of the Forest Hill murder.

Nathaniel Milliner was what the politically incorrect journalists of the time referred to as an

'imbecile'. He was fifteen but could speak only with a severe slur, he walked with a limp and his back was deformed. He was the son of a professor of medicine, John Milliner, who had steadfastly refused to put his son into an institution. After hours of interrogation the police had finally accepted the boy's claim that he had merely stumbled upon the dead bodies while he had been out near Forest Hill flying a kite. They had no evidence with which to convict Nathaniel and it seemed clear that Professor Milliner, who was one of the most important figures within the academic community, had protected his son during the investigation in the same way that he had for fifteen years protected him from the prejudices of Victorian society.

Two of the three Oxford papers had remained sceptical and it was clear from almost all the reports in the Chronicle and the Herald that the editors had wanted to see Nathaniel swing. Only Jackson's Oxford Journal reported the events in a balanced fashion and refused to come out against the boy. Then, suddenly, the whole pace of the story changed. A week after the Forest Hill murder, the police arrested a man named Patrick Fitzgerald, an Irish labourer who was working on the construction of a new canal in Oxford. Two witnesses came forward to say they had seen him at the first two murder scenes just before the bodies were found. Another, an anonymous workmate, told police that Fitzgerald had been 'stinking drunk' in a pub called the Ferret and Fox close to the canal excavation site, and that late on the night of the double murder he had, according to a report in the Chronicle , confessed to him: 'I have blood on my hands, so much blood.'

Fitzgerald's trial began on 9 August. After just two court appearances the jury was unanimous in finding him guilty. He was hanged on 12 August.

'Frustrating,' Laura said. 'The murders sound identical to the recent killings, but there are no details; without those it could all just be a coincidence.'

'But it must be significant that the murders stopped after the police caught this Fitzgerald character.'

'Yeah, but what evidence were they working on? What do you think about Nathaniel Milliner?' Laura asked.

'He could have been a complete innocent. The police obviously concluded he was and they hanged the labourer. But it all seems a bit too neat to me.'

'Why?'

'The witnesses suddenly coming out of the woodwork and claiming to have seen Fitzgerald near the scenes of the murders just before the bodies were found. The victims had probably been dead for hours before they were discovered; it proves nothing.'

'Yeah, but the guy had been at both the first two murder scenes, hadn't he?' 'So they claim.'

'And this workmate. People can say some pretty wild things when they're drunk. Means nothing.'

'We would certainly need a little more precise evidence to bring a conviction today,' Philip said.

'And have you noticed?' Laura asked. 'These reports say almost nothing about the killings. There're no details