After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - 1811 Ratcliffe Highway Murders: Birth of True Crime

Episode Date: April 29, 2024

Horror struck the East End of London twice in December 1811. Two brutal sets of murders within a few days of each other. It became ground zero for True Crime as for the first time ever the press helped turn this murder case into a nationwide sensation. The whole country was hysterical and hooked, who was the killer? Would they strike again?Maddy tells Anthony the story this week.Written by Maddy Pelling. Edited by Tom Delargy. Produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code AFTERDARK sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hello, and welcome to After Dark. Now, this is one of the OG true crime cases, but be prepared that it does contain some details of violence, murder, and suicide. It's the 7th of December, 1811, and London is frozen to the bone. Each cobble outside glints with frost. It's almost midnight, and in the east end of the city, silk merchant Timothy Marr is busily shutting up his fine shop. He works behind the counter, adding up the day's takings ready for tomorrow. Beside him, his apprentice, young James Gowan, helps his master.

Above stairs, the mistress of the house, Celia Marr, is feeding her baby, little Timothy, named after his father. He's chortling away, delighted with his mother as she sings softly to him, telling him all the delights of Christmas he'll experience this year for the first time. Margaret Jewell, the Mar's serving girl, is finishing her tasks for the day when she's summoned downstairs. Mar has a job for her. She's to go out to buy oysters, a popular snack for Londoners living close to the river. She's happy enough to do it. As a maid, she spends most of her time indoors and so steps out into the dark, cold night.

She's gone about 30 minutes, and has no luck. The oyster cellars have all packed up, but when she returns to the Mars shop at 29 Ratcliffe Highway, the shutters are down and all the lights are out. She knocks. No reply. She tries again, banging a little louder. She shouts up to the window, but no one answers. By now, Margaret has drawn the attention of a passing night watchman and, with his help, she bangs again, even louder this time. A neighbour, Mr Murray, the pawnbroker, sticks his head out of the next door window, wondering what the trouble is. Finally, he comes down in a state of semi-undress, clearly irritated by all the fuss. Together, the two men force the door of the Mars home, and Murray enters. It's dark inside. He calls out, but there's no response. Fumbling, he finds a candle and lights

it. What he sees next will chill his bones far more effectively than the weather outside. far more effectively than the weather outside. First, he finds the apprentice, James. He's on the floor, motionless, in a pool of dark red blood. His brain's Murray Notes, his stomach turning, are splattered up the wall. Upstairs, Celia Marr is in a similar state, dead, though the blood from her wounds is still gushing.

In the bedchamber, little Timothy is in his crib, his throat slit. Marr himself is behind the counter, also dead, his head bashed in like that of his apprentice. Murray rushes back out onto the street gasping for air. Soon all of London will be we have one of the most requested, again, episodes on After Dark. This one was suggested by a listener, George, so thank you for this suggestion. And it is, as Maddie has set up, the Ratcliffe Highway Murders. Do you know what I want to say love about this episode? That's probably the wrong word. It is a particularly brutal case. But what I do feel drawn to in this case is that it happens at night. We're getting back to our roots. We are after dark. We are particularly interested in histories that take

place at nighttime and crimes in particular. This has just that. That setting that you just read for us there about Murray lighting a candle, going through this tight Warren-y type house, and then this candlelight shining on this scene of brutality. It is the most gothic. It is the most early true crime. The setting is, well, it's horrendous. It's the stuff of nightmares. It's setting is, well, it's horrendous. It's the stuff of nightmares. It's so interesting that you say Gothic because, of course, we're in 1811 here. And this is really the height of Gothic, of Romanticism.

We've got William Blake. We've got the poets in the Lake District, you know, Wordsworth, Southey, Thomas de Quincy. Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift. Let's give a little bit of context. So we're in 1811, as we say, Britain is at war with France, Napoleon is stomping all over the world. And in Britain, we've got the beginning of the Regency where George III, as we all know, incapacitated through mental health issues, some physical health issues as well. And his son, the Prince Regent at

this point, but who goes on to be George IV, is really quite a divisive figure, I think it's fair to say. And he's sort of the party prince. He's known as being gluttonous in every sense of the word, morally, physically, lives a life of excess. And there's a real worry because of the war, because of the state of the monarchy, that Britain is heading for disaster. There's a real atmosphere at this point, I think it's fair to say. And of course, this is when Jane Austen published her Sense and Sensibility, right? It is her first novel. It's the same time period. So we've talked about these big histories. Tell me a little bit more

about the Mars then. So this is the family that has been found by Murray once he lights that candle. Who are these people? What are they doing? Obviously, they have a shop in this area. So what's their story? Well, it's interesting that you mentioned Jane Austen there because I think the Mars are of a class that we don't see in novels of that time necessarily, and that we don't see on screen in the adaptations of the Regency period. We think of it as this very glamorous, polite world. Think about your Bridgerton, CJ Nosson adaptations. And the Mars exists in a completely different world to that.

So Timothy Marr is a silk merchant on the Ratcliffe Highway in London. So he has a shop at the front, and it sort of spills into a domestic space. And I think that's really interesting, this merging of the mercantile with the domestic. They're respectable, but they're not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination. We hear there about Murray, the next door neighbour who finds the crime scene, is a pawnbroker. So it gives you a sense of what that high street might have looked like. There's lots of businesses. There's these different units that people are living in.

There's Celia Marr, his wife. She's a young mother herself. Their baby, Timothy, is three months old when he's tragically killed, as we've heard at the beginning of this. There's also James Gowan, who's the apprentice. So he's, I couldn't find his age, but I'm imagining him to be sort of 14, 15. He could even be a little bit younger than that. But he's obviously in the household. Apprentices at this time probably would do six or seven years of an apprenticeship,

during which time they would live with the family that they were learning from. He's a sort of adopted member of the family. Yeah, essentially. And they would refer to you as a member of the family. Family didn't mean what we take it to mean today. So this is a family member for all intents and purposes at this moment in time. Yeah, and someone who is living and working with Timothy, the father, alongside Celia, the mother, and the little baby. So they're all there together. And then, of course, there's Margaret Jewell, who is the maid who is sent out for oysters.

30 minutes later, she comes back. Everything has changed. Everything has changed. Her entire world has changed. And it's so hard to imagine being in her shoes. What she goes on to do next, it's really hard to know. I'd love to do some more research on her. She's lost her position, the family she works for,

the space she works in. So that's the setup. Those are the people that we have. And of course, we've got the nameless, faceless killer or killers who have, in the 30 minutes Margaret's been out of the building, which suggests they're maybe watching the building in some way, potentially, or that she's just had a really lucky escape, that by chance she's stepped out, or that she's involved, of course. I mean, let's not rule that out. The interesting thing about it is, although this society at this particular time is becoming increasingly less violent in England, this particular part of the violence is really

noteworthy because it encroaches on family, it encroaches on the workplace, it wipes out an entire family, as we're saying, it's genderless. It feels like any type of violence is a demonstration of a lack of rules, but this feels like the rules have just gone out the window. This is chaos. Boundaries have been transgressed. It is the worst of the worst. I mean, this is brutal. You know, we talked about there are brains splattered up the walls.

This is a serious, grim crime scene. There's the murder of the young apprentice and Timothy himself. But there's also, yeah, the murder of a young mother and her child in its own crib. I mean, what are the motives here? What does the killer want to do? And they're killed in very different ways, not to dwell too much on this, but little Timothy has his throat cut, but the other victims are bashed to death, basically. We spoke as well at the beginning about the watchman who sees Margaret bashing on the door trying to get in. And it's the watchman who helps Murray into the property. Now, I find this fascinating because we're not really, I mean, we are technically in the 19th century here, but I mean, we're not.

We're in the long 18th century. You know, this is the Regency. This isn't the Victorian era. We associate the police force with, you know, Robert Peel in the 19th century, the mid-19th century. This is the Regency. This isn't the Victorian era. We associate the police force with Robert Peel in the 19th century, the mid-19th century. Of course, in the 18th century, you do get the Bow Street Runners and fielding and all of that. There are pockets of police adjacent forces, I think it's maybe fair to say, within the city. And the watchman who happens to come across this scene, and poor him for having stumbled across this, he's only passing by chance. He's part of what was known as the Marine Police

Force or the Thames River Police. And I think that tells us so much about what this city looked and felt like in 1811 at night, that there is a specific police force that is operating down the river. And of course, you've got people trading there, but you've also got maybe nefarious dealings going on. You've got likely the sex trade, you've got other kinds of illegal to-ings and fro-ings going on. And the police in this setting, I think it's fair to say, are really reactionary. They're not actively preventing any crime. They don't really investigate things as we're going to find out. You know, that's a challenge for them. So they carry a cutlass on them, a kind of sword, knife, and they have handcuffs to detain people. Yeah. You mentioned there, there's not that much of an investigation going on. I wouldn't expect that much.

So what happens from here? So we have the scene. How is it investigated? When the watchman, James Horton, first stepped into the crime scene on the Ratcliffe Highway, he was immediately out of his depth. So far, his job with the river police had involved breaking up minor skirmishes, moving on beggars, and occasionally taking a punch or two to the face. The carnage that met him when he arrived at the Mars home was something quite new and altogether shocking. As he looked around

blindly, hoping to uncover any clues he could as to the killer's identity or motive, he thought very little about the preservation of the crime scene or the dignity of its victims. And indeed, within hours, all would be contaminated. News of the killings spread quickly, first by word of mouth and then by broadsheet. Thousands of newspapers printed and read aloud in coffeehouses, homes and on the streets. Soon, hundreds of Londoners with curious minds and iron stomachs were traipsing through the Mars home, poking around in their possessions and joking with each other as they opened cupboards that the killer might still be lurking there. The bodies of Timothy, Celia, Timothy Jr. and James

had not been removed and lay stiffening on the beds as the city gawped at them. So the first question I have here is what's the time period that's lapsed? Are we talking about hours? We're not talking about days. We're talking hours. Hours, yeah. Literally hours.

So really as soon as Murray and the watchman, who we now know is called James Horton, as soon as they break into the house, you know, there's already been a fuss in the street. They come out obviously shocked. Margaret's horrified. Maybe she's screaming. People are drawn to the scene immediately. And of course, over the next couple of days, the broadsheets start to be printed and they start to be dispersed. And certainly within a day or two, literally hundreds of people are coming to look at a crime scene that is still in place.

These bodies, okay, they've been moved up off the floor, but poor little James, the apprentice, his brains are still splattered up the wall and ceiling. It's unfathomable to think of. The bodies are in the house two days later. The scene is essentially after this. You said the bodies have been moved off the floor. So where, do you know where they are now? So they're laid out on the beds that are available whether they're the beds they slept in in life yeah yeah unclear maybe they're just all laid out together i don't know yes but they're laid to give them seems laughable to us now but to give them some dignity to literally get them up off the floor but they are laid out for everyone to see and people are rifling through their things are theorizing you

know walking around saying, oh, look, I can see some brain there and some blood there and that must have happened there and the killer's done this here, you know, and it's just so hard to process and to think, you know, we think about true crime now and sort of reconstructions of scenes. And we've talked before about in 1888 in the Jack the Ripper murders, you know, the waxworks that were created to recreate the crime scenes and the bodies of the victims. But this is visceral, this is real, and this is hours, if not minutes, after the crime has taken place. Don't forget, Margaret the maid only steps out for 30 minutes, and that's a window in which they're

killed. Within a few minutes, there's a crowd and people want to see. These people have not been dead for very long. It's so interesting because we talk about true crime then and now, and we criticise an awful lot today people who are involving themselves in true crime. I'm thinking of the case recently where a woman tragically slipped into the river and TikTok detectives descended upon the area, were interfering with the crime scene, were putting allegations here, there and everywhere online. There was this idea, there is this idea, well, that could never happen in any other time,

but our time because of social media. And often, you know, social media has its ills and its goods, but often social media gets landed with these problems. But it's happening right here and there's no social media. It's happening in 1811. The only difference is that, thinking of that case that you just mentioned and the sort and the TikTok detectives, as you dubbed them, is that the police issued a statement to say, can you please stop doing this? Go away from the crime scene, leave us to investigate. In 1811, the police don't really have a precedent for investigation. Now, James Horton, he does find a crucial clue in the house. And I think to be fair, it's not hard to miss it, but he realizes that he's probably found the murder weapon, which is a huge axe, sometimes called a splitting maul, which is

traditionally, this is not right, used by ship's carpenters to split vast pieces of wood. So you can get the impression of the damage that something like this would have done. And he finds it in the house, covered in the blood of the victims. And it's been oddly discarded and lent neatly against a chair, which there's something in the killer's motion of doing that as well. Just want to prop that there for a second. Yeah, but neat. It's odd. And why does he or she, I mean, let's be honest, it's a problem. But, you know, why is that murder weapon not

taken away? It's so strange. So Horton has this one clue, but of course, every other clue has been destroyed by the thousands, well, hundreds certainly of tourists that have come into this space since. I think some of the reporting is really interesting when we think about the role of the media in this period. And this is very early on in terms of that true crime genre that we see really flourish in the 19th century. In terms of the media influencing people's interest, hamming it up, making it theatrical, narrativising it in a way that it's not been adding elements to the story. For example, the Sussex Advertiser. So again, think of the story as expanding beyond the bounds of the city itself now,

a few days later on the 16th of December, runs the headline, Horrid Murders with three exclamation marks. And that gives you such a sense of, you know, this is almost like a playbill for the theatre. It's like, oh, there's a performance. And indeed, you can go and look at it. It's an attraction. there's a performance and indeed you can go and you'll be going you can go and look at it it's an attraction the story travels so far that the romantic poet robert southey is who's living in the lake district in grassmere great spot yeah gorgeous uh the wordsworth cottage there

well worth a visit he reads about the murders and he's so horrified he says something about one of his neighbors an elderly woman living in grassere, is so terrified by what she's read. Because, of course, this is a new phenomenon, really, in terms of being reported, at least, in widespread news, of a family seemingly innocent being killed by a killer with no motive in their own home, in their own beds at night. The woman he lives nearby in Grasmere talks about how she's locked every door in the house between her bedroom and the front door because she's so terrified she's going to be killed. They're not going to Grasmere. But still, it's made an impact. It shows. Absolutely. It's made a real impact for people. Yeah. And he actually writes quite significantly

about the murders and how they've made him feel. He says, we in the country here are thinking and talking of nothing but the dreadful murders. I never had so mingled a feeling of horror and indignation and astonishment with a sense of insecurity too. Indignation's interesting. I mean, of course it makes sense, but it speaks again to this idea of transgressing boundaries. Somebody has cheated the system here. And the reaction is, amongst other things, indignation at how dare you break the rules. Yeah, not how dare all the hundreds of people go and traipse through the house and go up at the dead bodies, but how dare someone have, as you say, transgressed that domestic space and murdered a young aspirational family who are living respectably, they're contributing.

This is a time period when Britain is described as a nation of shopkeepers. These people are the backbone of Britishness in this period. Mercantile, you can think about the British Empire at this period. Timothy Marr, one of the victims, is a merchant in silk. He's tied to the fate of the nation. And for his head to be bashed in so violently, it is shocking. And it does create indignation in people hundreds of miles away reading about it. And it's so interesting that as we say, Robert Southey says, he feels this sense of insecurity. Nobody is safe in their home because nobody can work out who the killer was, they're still at large, and what the motive was. So why wouldn't you fear that someone was going to come and sneak in your

front door or your window? They could be on the run and be in the Lake District. Absolutely. So what is happening with the investigation then? So we have an idea of what the reaction is across Britain, but what's actually happening on the ground? Is anybody doing anything? No. Oh, good. That's the end of this episode. That is the end. Thanks for listening. No, there's a reward that the amount that it's for increases as people become more and more desperate. In and around the Ratcliffe Highway itself, the community there is getting increasingly frustrated. Again, because the killer is on the loose, they might strike again.

There is palpable fear. So there's an increasing reward offered. Now, the other thing that happens is the bodies that have been left on the beds are finally buried. the bodies that have been left on the beds are finally buried. And it's a real moment in the local community, in the sort of catharsis, the process of understanding the killings that have happened and sort of coming to terms with them a little bit. So the Marr family, and I assume James Gowan as well is included in this family, their bodies are processed through the streets. There's a procession and they go to the church really touchingly and tragically. They have their funeral and are buried at the same church

that two months earlier they'd christened their baby at. And I think that just says so much about the poignancy of this. I think that's a timeless thing. We can understand how tragic the killing of this family is. But for the people in that community at the time, it really was a sense that their lives had been cut short. Yeah, I think that's so key, the community element, right? And it's, again, it's an affront. There's probably plenty of indignation right there in that particular community, because if it happens on that doorstep, they are right to be afraid,

because that person or people is probably still generally in the area. Was it just ad hoc? Are they just looking for money? Is the pawnbroker next door going to be the next victim? But that gets set aside for this funeral and the community comes together in a kind of more collaborative mourning acknowledgement of what has happened here. Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, Catherine Parr. Six wives, six lives. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, I'm joined by a host of experts to tell the stories of the six queens of Henry VIII, who shaped and changed England forever. Subscribe to and follow Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. We're still at a place where there's now been a burial.

You could say there's a conclusion or a bit of closure. It's a moment of peace. Yeah, there's a full stop on that part of the story, but that is not the end of the story. No, we are unfortunately going to see this killer again. Twelve days after the murders at Ratcliffe Highway, the killer would strike again. As before, night had fallen over the East End, though the peace it brought would be short-lived. At the King's Arms in New Gravel Lane, an alarming scene was unfolding.

Climbing, naked, out of an upstairs window, was the publican's lodger. Blurring himself, panicked, to street level, using bedsheets, he was screaming, murder, murder. A crowd had gathered below, all looking up at him in confusion and fear. They forced their way inside the tavern, where they met with a horrifying vision. The brutalised bodies of the aged publican John Williamson, his wife Elizabeth, and servant Bridget Harrington had all been hacked apart, beaten, and left in pools of their own blood. Bridget's feet faced the hearth as though she had been struck down by her attacker while tending the fire. Elizabeth's throat had

been cut through to the bone. Upstairs, miraculously, the Williamson's granddaughter, Catherine, just 14, was still asleep, having apparently slept through the entire ordeal. Perhaps the killer had been spooked by the lodger before he could complete his bloody work. Mayhem reigned on the streets that night. Bells rang out, drums were beaten, and weapons raised high in glinting torchlight as the local community came together to flush out this terrible, elusive murderer. They forced their way into homes and onto boats moored along the bankside. London Bridge was temporarily shut off so no one could escape across the river and local magistrates ordered anyone suspicious-looking

be taken into custody immediately. Soon the city, its streets buzzing with fear and its prison cells groaning with new additions, was on tenterhooks. Anger, now aimed at the apparently incompetent authorities, as well as the killer himself, was mounting. Right, so we have this second set of murders, very similar to the first in many ways,

taking place in a domestic slash commercial property. So we have that similarity. We have people whose throats have been cut. We have people whose heads have been bashed in again, as they were in the first. But the differences hereroats have been cut. We have people whose heads have been bashed in again, as they were in the first. But the differences here are we have two survivors. We do. So we've got the lodger who is luring himself naked out of a window.

I'm guessing he's having a bath, getting dressed, ready for bed. Yeah, sure. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt. Sure, that's what he was doing. Yeah, a little bit weird. And then we have Catherine, the granddaughter who is asleep and she very luckily survived. Luckily, I mean, her entire family have been brutally murdered, but she's alive. So there's that. What really interests me is about this incident, which happens very nearby the Ratcliffe Highway. So this is the

same community, you know, and the second those screams of murder go up in the air, you can imagine people rushing out onto the street to see what's going on is that we have these survivors so we've got in the first instance we've got the maid margaret jewel who steps out for the oysters yeah comes back the mars are all dead and now we've got the lodger why are these not being suspected of the killings especially the lodger has he killed them and then taken his clothes off because they're covered in blood i mean none are found i'm just speculating but yeah it's that's just interesting to me that these people aren't the spotlight doesn't fall on them i guess is

there a world in which both himself and katherine are on a different floor potentially and he in this case at least and the fact that he basically jumps out the window to escape a killer. Maybe he spooks him. Maybe he interrupts him in his work. Maybe he sees the killer. It's hard to know. But it's just fascinating to me because we've got this scene afterwards of people taking to the streets with bells and drums. Yeah, that's really striking.

Musical instruments and weapons to create this absolute furor. Frenzy. It's a frenzy, absolutely. And it's just fascinating to me that the crowd don't turn on the lodger straight away, but they don't, they don't. And there must be something in that as well, because we all know, especially at this period,

how quickly a crowd could turn and not always correctly. So there may have been something that was very obvious to them, which excluded the lodger specifically from this. I mean, the other thing that I'm really aware of in both cases is how is this happening? Because to bludgeon somebody to death, I'm imagining having never done it, thankfully, is not an easy task. Like you're going to have to go a few times. In the interim, how has somebody not come to this person and like held them down? And it's the same in the other place. I'm like, there is enough

adults in both of those houses to surely wrestle with somebody and hold them down. I don't know, how has this happened? I suppose when you think about the Mars crime scene, the bodies are in different places in the building. So Timothy Marr, the merchant, is behind his counter and the apprentice, James, is nearby to him. So maybe they're attacked at the same moment. And you think with the axe in that situation, that's just- James is not going to be doing anything there. He's a kid. Exactly. And then obviously, poor little Timothy is murdered in his little crib. Sure, yeah.

But Celia is found on the landing. So has she come out to meet the killer as he's going up? Is she trying to protect her baby? Is she running away once her... We just don't know what the situation is. One thing to say here is, of course, the murder weapon that was left at the Mars clearly could not have been used again. Yes. Because it's in the custody of the police. And that object is about to yield a clue that helps potentially crack the case. Okay, go on. What happens?

So remember we've got James Horton, the watchman, the Riverside constable who- Let's hundreds of people into the house. Let's hundreds of people, destroys the crime scene, finds this murder weapon, and it takes him all this time later. So we're like two, three weeks later. He notices all of a sudden, apparently, on the axe that there are a pair of initials carved into it take your time i mean why would you not have looked at that so the initials are jp and they're carved into the axe handle and this information is put out into the media

into the press and a woman comes forward and she says, I know who that is. Because don't forget, we know that it is a sailor or a ship's carpenter. So it's someone associated with the maritime industry. Someone who has the initials JP and works in something adjacent to ship carpentry. So this woman comes forward and she says, I know a John Peterson, who is a sailor. He has access to these tools. He is arrested. It turns out he's from Hamburg. Also turns out he was at sea on the night of the Mars killing. So it's not him. However, there is then a second suspect called John Williams. He's 27. He's a seaman. Not a P though. Not a P, but he is, and this is a little bit murky. It's really hard to find in the records that exist exactly what his relationship is to Peterson, the guy

who's initially arrested. But there is a link. So there is a link. And it turns out that John Williams had access to the same tools. He had the same opportunity to take the axe. Okay. Seems a bit ropey to me. I mean. I'll buy us for now. Sure. So he's arrested and he's taken into custody. Now, the police at this point, obviously they're not really, even the police as we would recognize them today, they're completely incompetent at this point. They're not really great at the investigations.

They don't have much of a process. They take this John Williams, this young man who they think has some connection to the acts at least, they take him into custody. There's enormous pressure on them to deliver some kind of result. And they really hope that the trial will give the people of this part of London the catharsis they need, the sort of way of processing this. Because don't forget, there's huge anger that the Mars has been killed. We've had this very sombre funeral procession. Now there's a second set of killings. The frustration against the police and the anger at the killer is rising.

All that is stripped from the police's control because when in custody, John Williams hangs himself in the prison cell. And this is seen by the police, or it's put out anyway, as being an admission of guilt with very little evidence yeah who knows maybe he felt there was no way out got for a crime he didn't do and he knew he'd hang for it maybe he did do it we don't know but he is dead is the bottom line yeah he's now dead and the crowd outside is so angry the media is whipping up this frenzy, as we've said. And so the police take this remarkable decision that says so much about mob mentality and the power of the crowd, of public opinion, in influencing the policing of crime. They take the body of John Williams,

they put it onto a cart, and in an act that's quite similar to the funeral of the Mars, cart. And in an act that's quite similar to the funeral of the Mars, they parade him through the street before burying him in a shallow grave. And before we talk a little bit about what this procession involved, because it's fascinating in terms of the public involvement in it and how the body's treated. Before we get to that, I want to show you the image that was created of this occasion. So this is a print. Obviously, we'll put it you the image that was created of this occasion. So this is a print. Obviously, we'll put it up on our socials for everyone to see. Tell us what you can see in this, Anthony. What's going on here? I haven't seen an image like this before. Not in this way, I don't think. It's really remarkable. It's labelled the Procession to Internment of John

William, the Wretched Suicide. Basically, it goes on to give a little bit more detail about the case. It seems to be a cobbled street in London, a very busy cobbled street in London. The buildings in the background are both domestic and commercial. I'm seeing the old King's Arms there. The King's Arms, of course, being the second site of the murder where the lodgers jumped out of the window. I'm seeing people in windows of three, four-storey buildings looking down onto the street. This is all in the background.

London, very kind of stereotypical early 18th century, maybe even the century prior buildings. And that's reminding me of execution time as well, where people would take their places in windows. So it has a bit of a feel of public execution. But at the centre of the picture is a man relatively neatly dressed. His shirt is rolled up on his arms and he has got something around his neck, probably indicating that he has died at his own hand. He is stretched out on the back of a cart, which is being drawn by horses. Ponies. A pony, yeah, yeah.

But again, it's very much, this isn't a grand funeral procession. This is a way of humiliating and devaluing the killer, I think. And then around him are military type men and gentlemen, very well dressed on horses, which is actually showing the difference between the pony that's dragging the cart and top hats. I'm seeing what looked like bayonets potentially, or some kind of stick.

Yes, a sort of stick or a truncheon almost, presumably police officers. Yes, yes, it's interesting. So he is displayed on this cart, and as I say, it's really, really striking. And obviously somebody has coloured it themselves by hand afterwards, and that's striking in itself as well. I always like that. But I mean, I'm aware, as I was describing it, that this man may not have done these things.

He may have had, but he may not. How did this unfold? What was the procession? So the procession goes past, as we can see in this print, the King's Arms, so the site of the second murders. And it ends at his shallow grave when he's interned at the ground. But in between those two sites, we go to the Mars house and someone from the crowd leaps up onto the cart

and turns the head of the dead John Williams and peels his eyes open, forcing him to look at the crime scene and to sort of face. It's almost like the trial, like a trial for him that he's being presented with what he's done. Now, he is buried, not in a graveyard, but at a crossroads. Because he killed himself. Yes, because he took his own life. And a stake is driven through his heart. Now, this is something that I think I've said before on this podcast, but I actually know this from a Lucy Worsley documentary.

So shout out Lucy Worsley. That this was traditional. I knew about the crossroads, but I didn't know about the stake through the heart. To basically pin the spirit of the suicide in place so that they wouldn't wander around in the community. And of course, the crossroads is meant to confuse the spirit so they can't find their way home. Now, two decades later into the Victorian era, just about, gasworks are being laid across that crossroads. And the body of John Williams is actually dug back up. The local pub, which is called the Crown and Dolphin,

it's still there, I believe. His skull is taken by the public and put on display in the pub for Londoners to see. And that tells you so much again about true crime, about sort of dark tourism of the 19th century, the fascination with the bodies of murderers in particular. And also about the fascination and legislation surrounding bodies of the dead, particularly people that are associated with crime and criminality, not necessarily the criminals

themselves, because in this case, even the victims are treated as display items for a certain period of time. So it's just interesting to see more display happening with this. They want to display parts of this case, even 20 years later when these gas pipes are being... And it tells you what a big case this was as well, that it's still very much alive in the memories of people in that area. And what is the impact in that? Are people talking about this for a while afterwards? We know it's making the headlines? I think we can say pretty safely that this case has a huge legacy. It has a huge impact in terms of how crime is reported. It's a very early example of that kind of true crime storytelling that we come to be familiar with.

It's one of the first times I would say that broadsheets, that is literally the cheapest newspapers, the sort of one sheets that were pinned to the walls or traded in the street really cheaply and read aloud to people who were illiterate in pubs and coffee houses. It's the first time that broadsheet sellers, editors, printers, realize that murder does sell and it sells thousands of copies. So in that regard, this ignites a whole industry, really. This is one of the first moments that that happens. The other interesting thing to say is we spoke about the romantics up in the Lake District and Robert Southey's fascination with the case. Now, another one of the romantics who was up there at this time is Thomas de Quincey, with the case. Now, another one of the romantics who was up there at this time is Thomas de Quincy,

famous for his Confessions of an Opium Eater. And that man spent a lot of time taking a lot of opiates and drinking at Laudanum and all of that as a way of accessing this higher plane of artistry. He writes in the aftermath of this, a really famous work called On Murder. And it's a kind of slightly satirical, hammed up Gothic look at murder as an art form. He talks about how the murderer or murderers generally aestheticise the crime scene, the killing, how they treat the bodies, but also how we love a bit of murder. We can't help but look away, even at its most gruesome. And he writes extensively about the Ratcliffe Highway killings. And it's really worth a read if people haven't read it. It's absolutely fascinating. He says of the killer in this case that the connoisseur in murder, very fastidious

in his taste and dissatisfied with anything that has been done since. So he's saying that people, the highest form of murder, the highest class of murderer, will look to the Ratcliffe Highways as a perfect example of what to do. And on that chilling note, we have reached the end of another episode of After Dark. That one is fascinating. I mean, they're all fascinating, right? But there's something about that in particular that leads into what we're doing right now in terms of looking at the history of true crime, looking at the history of murder, looking at the history of dark subject matters. It feels like a pivotal moment in that history, definitely.

And it's such a dynamic case. We've got these dynamic crime scenes. We've got these two processions that are sort of a mirror image of each other. One, this sombre affair for the dignity of the victims. The other one, this kind of macabre circus-esque performance of a trial of a dead man. Yeah, it is perfect After Dark material. And thank you, George, who is one of the listeners who wrote in with this suggestion. If you would like to get in touch with any details for cases or items that we might cover on After Dark, then you can contact us at

afterdarkathistoryhit.com. Until next time, thank you for listening and we'll see you again soon. Well, thank you for listening to this episode of After Dark. Please follow this show wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. Don't forget, you can listen to all these podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. And as a special gift, now don't say we never give you anything, you can also get your first three months for one pound a month when you use the code AFTERDARK at checkout.