After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The Railway Murder That Shook Victorian Britain

Episode Date: October 6, 2025

It's 1864 and the height of industrialisation. The thrill of railway travel is shattered with the first murder that takes place on it.Join Anthony and Maddy as they pick apart the murder of wealthy banker John Briggs, that takes them from a blood-stained first class carriage in London to a police chase to New York.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy, and produced by Stuart Beckwith. Research by Phoebe Joyce. The senior producer is Charlotte Long.You can now watch After Dark on Youtube! www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, we're your host's Anthony Delaney and Maddie Pelling. And if you would like After Dark myths, misdeeds and the paranormal, ad free and get early access, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to After Dark. Blood on the floor of a railway carriage, a battered banker found dying beside the tracks, and a city in shop.

It was July 1864, and the promise of the railway, the great marvel of the industrial age, suddenly looked like a death trap. Respectable passengers had believed themselves safe behind locked compartment doors, now, whispered Londoners, if Thomas Briggs could be attacked on his way home, who might be next?

The hunt for his killer would span oceans, leading Scotland Yard across the Atlantic, in one of the first great manhunts of the Victorian age. At its centre stood a young German tailor, Franz Muller, but was the case against him watertight, or did fear and prejudice tip the scales of justice? Over to Anthony to set the scene. On a balmy summer's evening, in 1864, passengers sit on cushioned seats as their train rattles eastward from London's Fentert Street.

Carriages rock, wheels clatter, and in one compartment voices murmur softly, lulled by the supposed safety of this marvel of travel. private boxes on steel rails carrying respectable men home from the city then there's a noise barely perceptible a dull thud a muffled commotion from the next carriage for a moment stomachs tighten but the sound is swallowed by the roar of the train and the rhythm smooths passengers back into passive compliance the railway was progress after all a promise of security and sophistication. But at Hackney, the illusion shatters. The door to the neighbouring first-class compartment is opened. Cushions are soaked in blood, the woodwork smeared dark. Its passenger, banker Thomas Briggs, is missing. This is after dark, and this is the first railway murder. Hello and Welcome to After Dark, I'm Maddie. And I'm Anthony.

And I feel like I am in an early detective novel. I am so excited for this episode. It's giving glamour. It's got excitement. It's got a... bloody crime. It's got mystery. We have a murder taking place on a first class train carriage heading to East London. It's a summer's evening. It's mid-July. What's not to laugh? The scene is set. Anthony, how are you feeling about telling the story? Well, it's set in summer. So that's not always

something that I enjoy doing. It's less than ideal. It's about to get quite grim. And that's something that I do usually find myself doing for fun here and after dark at least. So we're talking about it being the evening of the 9th of July, Maddie Pelling. It is 1864. And as we've just heard, a carriage, well, a train, pulls into the station at Hackney. And on inspection, one of those carriages is discovered to be blood stained and the seats blood soaked. And we have a lot of first-hand account of what's happening at this moment in time from Benjamin Ames himself. So he is the man who discovers this.

He's a guard for the North London Railway. And he says, I then examined the carriage. On the near side cushion, there were marks of blood. That is, the cushion nearest the engine. On the quarter light, on the near side, there was blood trickling down. So we have blood in this carriage. We have also discovered a squashed beaver hat, just a kind of a version of a top hat. This isn't a hat made from a beaver.

No, no, not in this particular case. This does not belong to Briggs, however. And so obviously this looks like it is a key piece of evidence into where Briggs has gone. But we do get an answer to that question very, very quickly because Briggs is very soon found bloody, beaten and unconscious by railway tracks near Hackney Wick. And he dies two days later. So now we've gone from a disappearance, a missing man, to a murder investigation. See, okay, let me just recap all of this already because we often, on a half, after dark, start right at the beginning of a tail. And there's not necessarily a crime scene

at the beginning. So we have Benjamin Ames, the guard of the North London Railway, goes into this first-class carriage. There's blood everywhere. There's a squashed hat, not made from a beaver. There is blood on the cushions. There's blood everywhere. There's blood trickling down the sides, but there's no body. And so it's a mystery of what's happened. A little while later, is this days later? Is this hours later? No, no. It's between, you know, minutes and an hour. It's very quick. Okay, so soon after. Very soon, yeah. This person who is not dead yet, but who is badly beaten and bleeding and unconscious is found next to the railway tracks. So presumably he's been thrown from the train, we have to assume. And he does not survive. He doesn't survive, no.

And the question very quickly turns to, how did this man get to those train tracks? What exactly happened to him that put him there? Because as we will discover, and we'll get into this in a little bit more detail, Briggs is a gentleman. He is of the polite classes. He shouldn't be being found on the side of a railroad. And the fact that he's even traveling in relative luxury for this period in time means that he is of some but we'll come to all of that. Let's just look a little bit at the time scale before we find

the body on the tracks. This feels to me like an Arthur Conan Doyle or something like that or later on an Agatha Christie, this detective fiction. We already have this shocking opening scene, this person who should not be involved in a violent crime like this, who is. He's been found in these unusual circumstances. There's already a mystery. And now you're going to tell me that we can walk backwards in time and reconstruct his day. And we have clues as to who he is, why he got there and why he was on the train and what happened to him. This feels ready made for the press of the moment. And what's so fascinating about it is, and do bear this in mind throughout this entire story, the railway is still relatively new. And this is the first time a murder has

occurred on the railway. So this is worlds colliding. This is, as you say, this is setting up a narrative here that is going to be absolutely fodder for the press. But in terms of Briggs's movements that day, we know that at 10 to 10, so 9.50pm, he boards the North London Railway train from Fenshirt Street going to Chalk Farm. Now, he doesn't make it that far because somewhere between Fenturch Street and Hackney Wick, Franz Muller enters Briggs's carriage, we think. And do we know anything about him at this stage? We don't know anything about him at this point. but we will discover more as we go on. It is believed that Franz Muller took Briggs's gold watch and his chain,

but left five pounds in his pockets, whether or not he knew that was there or what exactly the situation is, we're not sure, but he still had five pounds on him. He allegedly throws him from a compartment near bow. So this means that that's where Briggs is then ultimately found. He has been beaten, by the way, with a blunt object, so his skull is fractured.

So about 10 minutes after he has set off from Fenchurch Street at 10pm, the driver of a train traveling in the opposite direction spots this body, or what he thinks to be a body, a person, lying on the embankment next to the tracks between Old Bo and Victoria Park stations. And he describes it as follows. His foot was pointing towards London and his head towards Hackney at a spot about two-thirds of the distance, one mile, 414 yards between Bow and Howe and Howe. Hackney stations. So this is a gruesome discovery, really. Can you imagine the first time that anyone will ever have been encountering such a site? Yes, although I love the details that the driver of this train gives are not, you know, the injuries or the blood or anything of that. It's like the precise place that is along the line. I think that says so much about the railways are so fresh and new, as you say. The immense familiarity at these drivers have with their patch and

sort of pride that they take in it. So tell me a little bit then about the setting of this crime. Before we get into who Franz Mueller is and why he's thought to have done this attack at all, because the railways are new, they're fresh, they're exciting. It's not that long since people were incredibly nervous, terrified even, to set foot on a vehicle that was moving in the way that this did, you know, steam travel, allow people to travel at speeds that early Victorians believed would mean their heads would fly off or they would simply, die from how fast they were going. So what does it mean in the 1860s for someone to be murdered in this setting? I always think of Elizabeth Gaskill's Cranford where they're getting on the train

and they're afraid that because their eyes are going to be moving so fast their eyes are going to detach. So yeah, absolutely. There is this idea that... You love Cranford. Oh my God, I love it so much. It is my comfort thing. It's the only thing I can rewatch again and again and again. See, we always disagree on this because for me it's Larkrise to Candleford. I've never really seen it. I should. It was like the competition. They came out in the same years, didn't they? We'll swap one year and do a watch of each of them. I'm very open to watching Lark Rise, actually, because people love that too.

That's gorgeous. But this is 1860s. This is the height of industrialism. So you are getting, as you say, you're right on the cusp of people getting a little bit more used to the idea of the railway and what it can bring. But what it does bring for people is this booming sense of growth. Cities are growing. There's therefore increased crime rates.

People are traveling around with a little bit more easy. There's also a fear. I mean, again, I'll use Cranford because there is a lot about the railway in there where they say, oh, but now the Irish will come and then we'll lose everything essentially because, you know, the Irish will get around England. And we did. That's just the British motto for several hundred years. And what we get then is this idea that newspapers are picking up on this industrialisation.

They are growing themselves. They're printing more sensationalist crime stories. We have, of course, 20 years earlier in the 1840s, 1842, Scotland Yard, detective branches established. So this is, you know, still in the first generation of detective work. Photos are being used in police investigation. So what I'm trying to paint a picture of here, I suppose, is change, change, change. It is all happening at this time. And it's really shaping travel, crime, reporting, media.

And that in itself is changing how people feel about the end. areas they live in, the country they live in, and having this push back towards what they see as this infiltration of their cities, their towns, because of the railway. Yeah, I suppose because people can move around with new levels of ease. There's a, well, phenomenon, really, of having to come into contact with people you wouldn't otherwise come into contact with, right? Like, oh, the people over the hill in the next town, as my Yorkshire adoptive auntie would say, they're gone wrongans.

You know, they're not necessarily for us. And so, you know, in the 18th century, you might never. have seen them. You might never have ridden your horse and cart over that way. And now suddenly they're visiting your town. You can go to theirs. There's tension. There's new faces. There's strangers. There's anxiety. I think it's really easy to underestimate as well. When I read this in preparation for this episode, I questioned how accurate it was just because it seems so immensely huge. But at this time, we're having 253 million journeys across the UK in 1864. Train journeys. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't even fathom that. I mean, I'm sure it must be more now.

Can you imagine how many it is now? Oh, my God. Yeah, those are numbers that I just wouldn't have had imagined. 1863, we have the London Metropolitan Railway. That's the world's first underground. And we see this boom in class and commute and people using the train to take holidays or breaks. Can you imagine also what this does to the idea of the perception of distance at this time? Like, before Scotland is, weeks away, and then it's suddenly hours away. That's life-altering. That changes your impression of the world. In the early 18th century, you get travel accounts written about visiting far-off places like Scotland or Wales. Yeah, Cornwall, exactly.

And people have been like, oh, the people up there. Pretty weird, pretty outlandish. And now suddenly, yeah, you can get the train. I think as well, the important thing to remember and thinking about this murder taking place in a first-class carriage is that, you know, today, obviously we still have like first-class and, like, regular. train travel and you can upgrade your ticket to a first class if you want to sit in silence or in a slightly more comfortable chair, but it just still costs more money. But for the Victorian

world, the class system that exists in society is replicated in this really rigid way that does not compromise on the trains themselves. And so, yes, you're getting this kind of influx of new people, you're getting people kind of pushed together. You can picture a crowded Victorian platform with all manner of people. But the performance, you're getting the performance. of social distinction is still taking place. And I think it's the fact that this murder takes place in the first class carriage that makes it stand out, right? I wonder how infamous this would be

if it had been a robbery or a scrap taking place in the third class, for example. The first class carriage we're in, Briggs is there alone. Now, it can seat up to six to eight passengers, but it's one of those things when you get in and the tubes empty and you're like, oh, thank God. Or when you get like the four seats on a train to yourself

and it's just like, oh, my God, this journey's going to be okay. I love a table. A table journey is so good. I only love a table if it's going to be you and one other person or just you on your own. If it's going to be all four of you, I don't want to be there. No, no, no. I love it when it's just me. The second anyone else sits down, I loathe them.

I wish them nothing but harm. I'm like, you need, I hope a train hits you on your way home. Like, you are not welcome here. Why I think I have a right to those tables, I don't know. But no, there's nothing more romantic than having the table to yourself and looking out over, you know, nice rolling hills and countryside. And if it's raining, all the better. But what we have here is Briggs essentially isolated within this first class train carriage. There's nobody there. He has no way to communicate with the driver. This is comfort and privacy, yes. But it also means that

there is seclusion and isolation. So it does really build the exact ingredients that one might need to find oneself. Yeah, I hadn't really thought of the fact that we take those safety mechanisms for granted now the ability to talk to the driver we can pull the emergency stop you can see it sorted you know all of that stuff that none of that existed and actually if you are going to be murdered in your

luxurious first class carriage there's not a lot you can do about it really and that is what's going to happen like what is he going to do so let's talk a little bit about the people involved we've mentioned them already but let's give a little bit more detail we have Thomas Briggs so this is our victim he is 69 years old born in around

1795 we think I love an 18th century person who's just accidentally wandered into the 19th century. To me, that's a Georgian. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I love people, so this is such a sidebar, but I love people who are born, so my great-grandfather was born in like 18, 98 or something like that, and he died in 2001. Like, he lived in three centuries, that blows my mind,

and I love when you find people who just creep on at the end of one century. Beautiful, love it. So he's there, and he's a widower with two married daughters. And this gives you an impression of where he sits in society is. the Chief Clark at Bank of England senior. He's very well paid. He's a long-serving employee. And he's essentially nearing retirement. He could be retired if he wanted to. I'm sure at this particular moment at time. He's living in Hackney. And he is essentially, well, not essentially, he is an early commuter. But the term wasn't actually used at this time. But he is commuting

into town to do his job. He's respectable. He's a family man. He's quiet. He has an otherwise unremarkable life. We would not know his name. had this event not occurred. Okay, I thought it was exciting because he was born in the 18th century, and now he works in a bank and he commutes in from Hacking. Oh, God, the boredom. Okay, I'd push him off a train myself. I ever wondered what it feels like to be a train myself.

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Come on, Len, tell me a little bit about Franz Muller, the other person in the story, because something tells me from the way that you've been using the language around him, Anthony, that you're repeated use of the word allegedly in particular. Something tells me maybe he's not going to be the person we think he is, or there's going to be some ambiguity. So what are the facts that we have about him? I'll clarify this before we get into it. There was pushback around Franz Muller at the time, particularly from other immigrant communities. Some of the details that we will go through here seem very straightforward.

And then there are other accounts that make it not so straightforward. But there is some damning evidence too. So I tend to think he probably did do it. But it's just interesting to see the grey area that comes in later. But let's look at what we do know about him. He's born in the 1840s in Germany. He arrives in London in the early 1860s. He's looking for work. He is a tailor. He's struggling financially. We always have this idea that you come with a trade, you come with a skill,

and you're kind of going to be all right. But actually, we see again and again, for people in the cloth industry, for tailors, they will very often struggle like it's an oversubscribed skills that at this moment in time and has been for probably, you know, maybe the last 50, 60 years, actually. Yeah. And I suppose we have to think industrialization is barreling on at this point. And whilst people still did go to haberdashers, to tailors, to dressmakers, well throughout the 19th century, increasingly things are ready made to the point where you don't need to visit these services if you are of the lower classes. Like, that's not why you're going to be spending your money. So I guess there is, yeah, like you say, kind of an influx of immigrants with this

skill. And then not necessarily the market may be, I mean, maybe not in the 1860s, but it is going to start to dwindle as time goes on. Yeah. And so he's struggling to find work. He's struggling financially. He's living and moving an awful lot in lodging houses around London. But he keeps himself looking very neat. He has, he's very fashion conscious, apparently. And of course, I mean, it's interesting, isn't it? It says in my notes here that he's noted as speaking with a German accent, but of course he does because he's from Germany. And so it's like, that's how that would be. But the reason it's noted in my notes that way is because it was noted at the time. You know what I mean? Like, this is how people were saying, oh, he had a German accent. Yes, he was

German. I'm obsessed with accents in the past. I find them so interesting. You know, when you hear, you'll see like a bit of old BBC archive footage from, I don't know, maybe the 50s or 60s, and there'll be someone who's like 90 years old and they were a Victorian and they sound so different to people in the 20th century. And you think, what do people sound like going further back in time where we don't have recordings of their voice? And especially immigrants coming into Britain at this time. I had family who were German Jews and they came to, well, first to Glasgow, then Manchester, then London, over the course of a generation. What the hell was that accent by the time they got to the east end of London?

What did that sound like? Their children were born in Glasgow and Scotland, but then grew up in Manchester and then by the time they're in the East End, you know, they stay there for generations. So I would love to hear their voices. And I just think that's so interesting that his voice, his accent here in this story, Mueller's voice, is noted, obviously in terms of xenophobia, but I just, it's like a description of smell to me. Like, it brings that world rushing up to meet me. Yeah, yeah. I think that's a really good comparison, actually, because it's something a bit nebulous. You can't quite

touch it or see it. It's lost. It has to be experienced. Yeah, yeah, in that moment. Now there's inquiries into Mueller about his involvement in this morning. You say, well, why, why are they inquiring into him? They don't even know he exists at this point. But it's because a man called Jonathan Matthews comes forward. And Jonathan Matthews is a cab driver. And he identifies Muller. as having been acting suspiciously, having left the railway station, and says that he hailed his cab and then quickly changed his mind. But I have also read an account that says that he just knew him. Matthews happened to just know him, had bought something from him,

which he associated with the items that had been robbed. So this is where I've seen a couple of conflicting accounts as to how Mueller becomes the main suspect. It always involves the cab driver. It always involves that. But the details of that are sometimes changeable. So it's just something to bear in mind. I do find it interesting nonetheless. Okay, so hold on.

So Muller is implicated in this crime because when he gets off the train, the cab driver Matthews says he's behaving suspiciously. And there's a possibility of saying that he actually knew Mueller as a tailor and had purchased things from him. And what noticed when he was hailing a cab that he was wearing things from the crime scene? Well, see, this is worth confusing. Certainly that first thing is an option. Oh, he got into my cab.

And then he changed his mind and he was acting erratically. So now I'm reporting him. So that's probably the most straightforward option. There is another account that I read that said that Matthews purchased jewelry from Muller. And that jewelry happened to be turned out to be Briggs's jewelry. So potentially Mueller is getting off the train, getting out of the train station, hailing a carriage, a cab, and then selling some of the things to the cab driver. So disentangled both of those narratives.

because in the narrative where he's selling, he's not necessarily hailing that cab. Oh, this makes no sense. Okay, this is patchy. I think the most likely thing is the hailing of the cab. But as I say, just in my research for this, I have read another account where it doesn't comply with this and it says something else that's more confusing.

I think as soon as you introduce the confusion, everything starts to look a bit dodgy. Well, certain things start to look a bit dodgy. So anyway, it's because of Matthews that Mueller is identified and he is then the sole focus of this. entire investigation. And he is found because he has an unusual low-crowned silk hat. Basically, it's like a shorter top hat, which has been swapped for Briggs at the murder scene. Now, remember, there was a hat at the scene, at the murder scene in the carriage, made of a beaver,

that was not Briggs's. And now they think that they have found Briggs's hat with Muller, and that Muller's hat is in the carriage. I mean, that's quite a decision to take a hat. Again, to us today, that might not seem that distinctive, especially compared to the, if he's taken the gold chain and the pocket watch. Instead, that would potentially, you know, be something to identify the killer as having taken that from the scene. And Muller would know this as a tailor. This is a moment in which people's clothes are incredibly personalised to them.

Surely a hat has been made to Briggs's measurements. It's obviously a distinctive kind of hat, the fact it's silk, that it's low-crowned. This is a wild thing to take. even if your hat is crap and you want a hat, this seems odd. And whatever about taking his hat, leaving your own doesn't seem like the smartest move in the entire world. Even if it's made a beaver and you desperately want to get rid of it. Even if it's like, I really regret buying this hat.

But it is interesting. There are other accounts, listen, I'm just going to keep saying when I remember them from researching for this, there are other accounts that have said there is absolutely every world in which because of his trade and because of where the work he did do, that Muller would have had access to a hat like this, that, you know, he could have had one for himself. So it's there, but it's very, in the media coverage, it's very much said, this is Briggs's hat.

It couldn't be anybody else's. So, you know, that's what we're dealing with. So there's already a painting of Mueller as more lowly than he maybe is immediately in terms of, you know, he couldn't possibly have a hat like this. This is not for him, even though actually in his trade, you're saying there's every likelihood. He might dress like this. Yeah, there was a world in which he could have access to it.

it's not beyond the realms of possibility. I mentioned jewellery before. Again, there's this idea that jewelry is coming into it because there is another alternative option that on the 11th of July, Mueller visits a jeweler in Cheapside, whose name apparently is John Death. So that's good for narrative Little Flourish.

And he's there to sell jewelry. And of course, they're saying that this is Briggs's gold chain. So it's apparently because the police have circulated description of Briggs's stolen. property, and then death recognizes this when Mueller comes to him. And so this is how we are getting all of this picture of Mueller being the only person that is in the frame for this. Okay, so things are not looking good for Mueller. He's been identified as the potential perpetrator of the crime. He is being accused of having on his person and trying to sell

items that have come from the crime scene. Does he take this lying down or does he leg it It depends what way you look at it because he either legs it very intentionally, and that would make sense, or has nothing got to do with this crime and just so happens to be leaving England at that time. Either way, he certainly leaves England because on the 12th of July, Mueller buys a first class ticket on the SS Victoria, which sets sail on the 13th of July from Southampton to New York. And by the 17th then of July, we've seen this before in Hallie Rubin Hulls, the story of a murder. The police board a faster ship, the SS City of Manchester, particularly Detective Inspector Richard Tanner. He's on board the city of Manchester. And this ship is going to get there before Mueller's ship does.

They arrive three days later on the 20th of July. Again, thinking about that time of the world becoming such a smaller place. And it's not until five days after that, the 25th of July, that Mueller arrives. And because of the hat, they recognize him straight away. and he's arrested instantly. So you can see the parallels there between the Crippin case from story of a murder

and this particular case. It's really interesting. The thing that's standing up for me there that potentially points to Muller's guilt is the first class ticket. We know that he is not buying a first class ticket. Well, maybe he did buy a first class ticket on the train in order to get into the carriage.

But you don't necessarily spend that money, make it clear that you are going into the first class area and then bludgeon someone almost to death if you're doing it. And we know that he's not necessarily that wealthy as a struggling tailor. And suddenly he's buying a first-class ticket on a transatlantic voyage. I mean, we know from our Titanic episodes, which, you know, admittedly are several decades later, that these tickets are expensive, even if you're on, you know, not on the virgin voyage of one of the most luxurious vessels ever,

that's still going to cost you a lot of money. people save up for lifetimes in this period to send immigrant families who want to send a member of their family across the water if they can. In what world is he suddenly just doing that? Or had he saved up, had he planned this all along, he wasn't involved in the murder,

he simply, this was his moment when he was emigrating to America and he just got caught up in it. And the other thing to bear mind is that people at the time said with this £5 note that he could have taken from Briggs if it was him. He didn't, and he would have needed that money. So why, if he was desperate for money, would he have left five pounds? Would he not have searched the body? Anyway, look, we don't know.

These are questions that were being asked at the time, let alone still now. But what we do know is that he is extradited to the UK in August, on August the 25th, 1864. He's taken to Clerkenwell prison, and he awaits trial. So there is enough there for him to be taken back to Britain for trial. See, I just, I find this so interesting, so I think the case is quite flimsy. I am not saying that he didn't do it because there is a very clear possibility that he did. But thinking about the detective fiction of the 19th and early 20th centuries, one of the questions I would like the police to be asking is, do the victim and the killer know each other? Yeah. What is the connection between Muller and Briggs? Has he just gone out and thought, I'm going to walk into

the first class carer. I'll be someone rich there. I'll bludgeon them to death, chuck them off the train, and take their jewelry because that doesn't seem like the behaviour of a man who is then buying a first class ticket unless that because also

if you're running away from a murder you've done do you buy a first class ticket is that a good disguise or do you just go in steerage with all the other third class passengers and disappear into a crowd of anonymous poor people

who won't be necessarily taken notice of or is going in first class actually a very good disguise I just have a lot of questions here yeah same like you I'm not saying he didn't do it.

And there are certain things like if you really do trust one version is like, well, then this is very obviously him that did this. And there's something coming for me, which is, I'll tell you when we get there, but it's the one piece where I go, if that's true, then we have it. Like, then he did do it. But at the same time, there's even a question mark over that. But you would hope that some of that gets ironed out at his trial, which happens at the old Bailey on the 24th of October 1864.

that you could maybe get some detail that would help us to decide. Certainly, the jury do decide. This doesn't help him, I think, or it just catches him out if he is guilty. He says he was visiting a friend in Bethnal Green at the time of the attack, but he couldn't name the friend. So no one would verify that he wasn't there. That's like me, though. If people pressure me to come up with the name of someone who I've been with 10 minutes ago,

I'll be like, oh, Anthony is someone? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know, tallish, Irish, I don't know. Google him, I don't know. I don't know what's going to use that. I don't know. And also, he may have been like lying, but for, I don't know why I feel that I need to defend him because he probably, there's every chance that he did this.

But it just, I don't know, it's so circumstantial that it, I find it a little bit problematic. I think that's what it is. There's just so much hearsay, right? Like, this is just sort of little anecdotes from different people who don't seem connected. There doesn't seem to be a connection between the killer and the victim, as I say, unless it is just a, you know, a by chance. he was going to kill someone and it just happened to be Briggs. So, okay, here's my other question about the trial.

Obviously, Muller is an immigrant. He's German. He's foreign. We know that his accent has been emphasised in the press as being, you know, something other, something different. How does his immigration status play into this trial? I assume it comes into it somehow. It does.

The first thing to say is kind of maybe in a positive way because the German society in London pay for his legal fees. And they're suggesting that the trial is xenophobic. which is understandable from the German society in London's point of view, I suppose. They're saying, look, he's not getting a fair trial here, so we're going to pay for the legal fees. But also then we do have this idea that he has Briggs's possessions about his person or that he tried to sell them. But the jury, whether it's because of his Germanness or not, the jury are quite convinced and they find him guilty of willful murder on the 24th of October 1864.

So again, it escapes our definite inference as to whether or not the fact that he was German comes into this. But certainly it is a part of the trial because the German society are there and they're paying the legal fee. So it's not, we can't say it wasn't a factor. So we know that that Germanness, that issue of his German identity is taken forward into his execution. So he's obviously been found guilty of willful murder. The penalty is execution. And we are going to see him die. but his identity as a German immigrant continues to play a part, isn't it?

Yeah, I mean, we even have Wilhelm I'm the first of Prussia, who's soon to be the German emperor, trying to delay the execution because he sees it as a diplomatic concern. And because Mueller had huge support back in Germany, he felt like he needed to intervene. And they were concerned about how flimsy the case was and how circumstantial the case was. But here's where it gets, despite all of that, it gets a little fuzzy because, as you said, he is hanged on the 14th of November 1864 at Newgate Prison. But apparently, before he is hanged, he confesses to the murder to the German Luther and Dr. Louis Capel. And apparently he just says, I'm sorry, I don't speak German, but apparently it means I did it. Then question mark comes in here. Because then apparently he said, I alone committed the deal.

and no one else had anything to do with it. Oh, I beg you hard. I know, yeah. That's confusing to me. And nobody witnesses that confession apart from Louis Capel. So again, it's a question mark, but he hangs either way. But I just think it's fuzzy. I don't know.

It seems unreliable. The fact that when he's confessing, he confesses in German and then he's speaking English. And obviously, he would have been able to speak both languages. But there's something simple about saying, I did it in German, and then saying in English, I alone committed the deed and, like, first of all, was there a suggestion that there was anyone else? Because that's really interesting. And why has that disappeared from the narrative, if that's the case? And if it was never a suggestion that he didn't do it alone, why would he then say that? I know. I've never heard of anybody else. And as I said, I've looked at a few

different sources for this. And I've never seen anybody else implicated. So why is he saying, oh, there was nobody else. We're like, yeah, I know. We're not thinking about anyone else. I don't know. It just all feels very, we know how rare confessions are, particularly because he's denied this the whole way up, by the way. He's denied, denied, denied. He was not him, was not him, was not him. And then just at the, I know that would be the point at which I suppose you're like, all right, well, I'm about to die. But I don't know, confessions are very rare actually on the Gallows. Gallows confessions are not something that really happens. But either way he hangs.

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He does go to the gallows. We're only four years off public execution being banned in Britain. quite a turnout here. Yeah, 50,000 people. And we've seen this in the 18th century before. I mean, we've spoken about it where you see this disorder, this drunkenness, this brawling going on. So there's nothing necessarily unusual about that in terms of this part of the fact that we're seeing it in the 19th century and not just in the 18th. But as you say, that, yeah, public executions are outloaded four years later. So we see that this kind of rabble atmosphere takes over and starts to shape the day when you have public executions. What is fascinating about this, whether he did or he didn't do it. you know, you and I aren't going to solve that today. But whether he did or he didn't, it does prompt reform in train travel.

So we see things having to change because of this first murder. And we get like the installation of communication cords so that if there's a problem in your carriage, you can pull the cord and somebody will come. How many upper class women do you think pulled those cords to ask for a cup of tea or something? Or to be brought. So that would be me. I'd be like, excuse me. Pot of El Gray, please.

When is that trolley coming around at some point? Do you have any snacks? But they put guards on there too, so the guards are doing patrols of the carriages. This I love, okay? This I absolutely love. They put lamps in the carriages, which by the way, think about it before the lamps were put in the carriages. That would have been a pretty dim, dark little enclave that you've got for yourself. But they're called, in memory, I suppose, of Franz Muller.

They're called Muller Lights. Like the yogurt. Like the yogurt. I'm obsessed with that. I'm also obsessed with the fact that they didn't call them Briggs lights. They were like, let's name of them after the murderer, not the victim. Why do they go with Mueller lights? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's kind of fascinating. Yeah, I mean, I suppose this case highlights a lot of tensions in Victorian life, right? Class struggles and conflict, sort of modernity and technology and the danger that comes with that. And, you know, to be murdered in such a brutal way as well, to be clubbed to death around your head, there's something very sort of primal and basic about that. And for that to happen aboard this new piece of technology that's still so kind of fresh and exciting and complicated, seems like a very strange juxtaposition. So there is that as well. In terms of the xenophobia and British attitudes to immigration in this moment, which haven't changed a huge amount, what does the Mueller

case do for that in Britain? There is a huge surge in anti-immigrant sentiment. Can I just share this at this point as well? You know, because there is an idea that there was, you know, the arrival of the Irish as well at this point and how problematic that was and how the Irish are referred to as rats and the Irish. And the Irish are coming across because this is post-famine at this point? Well, yeah, it's a generation, kind of a generation after the famine, 20 years or so after the famine. So, you know, the next generation is. But I think a generation, like, desperately seeking opportunities that they just don't have a home.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But to fast forward to 2000, I don't know, 10, I can't remember what year it was exactly. I was not to be too stereotypical, but it did happen like this. I was in a black cab and the thing about immigration came up. This was, you know, 10 plus years ago now. And it's always a really difficult thing to have to kind of go, oh, God, we're going to have to have this. And I just said, well, I'm an immigrant. Like, you know, I'm Irish.

like I'm not from here and was told that I was the right kind of immigrant. Yeah. What a load of absolute shite. And also to extrapolate what the right kind and the wrong kind of immigrants are. I mean, where do you even start? I think you know exactly what he was saying, but yeah.

Shall we draw this episode to a conclusion? That is a really interesting case. I can see that as a period drama. I can see the opening scene. It does feel very Conan Doyle or very Agatha Christie. The setting, the fast-paced train. I'm sure it was going at like two miles an hour in 1860, but sure. You know, there's just so much kind of cinematic scene setting going on there.

But ultimately, as you say, it's a story that is incredibly woolly and hard to get to the bottom of. I am not convinced that he did it. There's definitely an easy way in which he did do it. He could very well have done. But there's not enough compelling it. If I was on that jury, I would be not happy. Like, you need to give me more, babe, this isn't enough. Yeah.

But then it's 1864, isn't it? But yes, I agree. There's not enough there for me. And I think there's very much a world in which you did it. I couldn't convict, as you say, if you're on the jury. But also, just this thing, Maddie, and this is what really sticks with me about this case, about the newness of rail travel and the excitement, but the fear that that also brings. And then for this to be the very first murder on the railway just brings to life those fears.

and means they're true. It means you should be afraid of this piece of technology and the speed at which we are hurtling towards modernity. It will kill you. That's what this case tells people. Last question before we go. What is your favourite train journey? Oh, God, none.

No. Zero train journeys. No, no, no, no. Okay. Anthony prefers a private jet. I want to go on one of those ye oldy train journeys. I do want to do that, like, you know, the kind of... Do you mean just a steam engine?

Well, yeah, maybe probably. They are done by steam. I think, but you know the way they're all like done out and they're all like they have the little lamps and you can have your little lunch and you can do all of that kind of thing. You want like a proper Agatha Christie, like Orient Express situation. But nobody would be allowed to talk to me apart from the person I was there with because I don't want to have to talk to people. Like that's one thing about trains. I'm like, don't talk to me, please. We are not sharing this experience. I'm in my own world. Shush. But I would like to do

all of that. And you can get like cabins that you can sleep in and that you can, they're really, really expensive though, because I have looked up the price. They're like thousands of thousands of pounds. But that's a train thing. I would like to do. Well, next episode, we're going to be sponsored by Yaldi, worldly trains. The Trans-Iverian Express. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, anything with snow would be good.

Yeah. For me, it is the train journey up the northeast coast of England. If you go from something like York to Edinburgh, and you see all the Northumbrian coast out of the window and pass the Farn Islands and Lenders Farn. Oh, perfection. On a sunny day, can't beat it. I mean, it doesn't sound bad. Yeah.

Yeah, as long as there's no murder on the way of course. Yes. Yes. If you've enjoyed this episode, you can listen. I was going to say you can listen to our back catalogue of train episodes, but I think this might very well be the first train episode we've ever done. I can't think of any other trains. I can't remember the last episode we did an hour ago, though, to be fair.

So, you know. That is very true. I thoroughly enjoyed this and I would like to do more train-related content. So if you have dark train stories, then hit me up. We're doing all the transport things, trains, ships, everything. Should we do a plane one? No, it's too modern. Oh, Jesus. Yeah, no, too modern for us.

us. Although I do want to do Amelia Earhart desperately. Oh, well, that's a good one. Let's do that one. Let's do that one. We can do Amelia Earhart. That makes sense. Okay. Producer Stu, we're doing Amelia Earhart. You can leave us a five-star review. Please and thank you wherever you get your podcast. It's not just nice to boost our ego, but it does help other people to find us and to see that the podcast is well loved and they might even give it a go and listen to it. So, please do that. If you have a suggestion for any topic, train-related, transport-related, I'm trying to think of other transport now. If you have...

Bicycle, unicycle. If you have a dark, historic bicycle, pogo stick story, or a parachute story, or a horse riding story, or a donkey and car story. We get it, Maddie. We get it. Don't keep saying or. Okay, we're going. Goodbye.