The Ratcliff Highway Murders and the Aftermath

The Ratcliff Highway Murders.

In two incidents, between December 7th and 19th, 1811, seven people were murdered in what would become known as the Ratcliff Highway Murders. This was one of London's first major serial murder cases, which deeply shocked Victorian society. 

At midnight on Saturday December 7th, at 29 Ratcliff Highway (now The Highway), Mr Timothy Marr, a draper, sent his maid out for oysters before he and his apprentice, James Gowan, closed the drapery for the night. On her return the maid could not rouse them to gain entry and so summoned a watchman, who also failed to make entry.

29 Ratcliff Highway is now a block of flats.

A neighbour, John Murray, who finally managed to enter, found the draper and apprentice murdered in a blood-spattered room, downstairs, and Marr's wife Celia and their child Timothy dead, upstairs. The weapons, a chisel and a maul hammer, lay on the shop floor. Two pairs of footprints were found in the back of the shop.

The site of the second murders.

On Thursday December 19th, a nearly naked man escaped from a second-floor window of the King's Arms public house, at 81 New Gravel Lane (now Garnet Street), shouting, "They are murdering the people in the house!" The publican, John Williamson, his wife, Elizabeth, and their maid, Bridget Anna Harrington, were later found dead with fractured skulls and their throats cut. A crowbar was found beside John Williamson, but no knife or sharp implement was discovered.

After more than 40 false arrests, John Williams, a lodger at the Pear Tree Inn, on Cinnamon Street, was arrested. He protested his innocence, stating that he had been a family friend of the Williamson's. Much of the evidence against him was circumstantial and his alibis were never properly investigated.

John Williams was never brought to trial as, on the morning of Saturday December 28th, he was found dead in his cell, having hanged himself with his scarf from a bar. Suicide was considered a moral outrage and a crime, at the time, and the act was widely interpreted as an admission of guilt by the public and the magistrates. 

The final resting place of John Williams.

The Burial.

Sir Richard Ryder, the Home Secretary, sanctioned a public procession and burial to assure the terrified London public that justice had been served. 

So, on New Year's Eve, 1811, Williams' body was placed on an open cart, accompanied by the alleged murder weapons of a chisel, a maul hammer and a crowbar, and paraded through the streets of Wapping and Shadwell, before an estimated crowd of 180,000 people. 

The procession stopped at the scenes of the crimes, and, at one point, the coachman is reported to have whipped the corpse three times. The body was then taken to the intersection of Cable Street and Cannon Street Road, in front of the Crown & Dolphin public house, which were the nearest crossroads to the murder scenes.

A small, shallow grave was dug in the unconsecrated ground of the crossroads. The body was then put in the pit, and a wooden stake was driven through its heart, or ribcage area. Quicklime was then added, before the grave was covered over. This gruesome ritual, though without legal authority, was rooted in folklore and superstition. It was believed that the impaling of a body at a crossroads would prevent the murderer's ghost from returning to plague the living, as the spirit would be confused by the four directions and pinned in place.

The 1823 Burials Act allowed suicides to be buried in churchyards, but only at night and without a service. The 1882 Burials Act allowed daylight burials in churchyards. Suicide was finally decriminalised with the 1961 Suicide act. This makes John Williams one of the last people, in England, to be buried in this manner. The last person to have a crossroads burial, in London, was Abel Griffiths in 1823, who was buried at the crossroads of Lower Grosvenor Place and Grosvenor Place, which is now a bus station.

In 1902, workmen laying gas mains accidentally unearthed Williams' skeleton, with the stake still within its torso. The landlord of The Crown & Dolphin public house reportedly took the skull, displaying it in the bar for many years as a macabre souvenir. 

The current whereabouts of the skull are unknown. 

Aftermath.

As a result of the public outcry that ensued, all the watchmen at Shadwell were discharged, and new patrols, armed with cutlasses and pistols, were established. Voluntary associations of 'gentlemen and respectable inhabitants' were also formed for police duties. Demands for a professional police force in London, which had been called for since the Gordon Riots of 1790, were repeated.

In 1829, Peel's Metropolitan Police Act was passed.

The Ratcliff Highway murders served as a central case study and inspiration for Thomas De Quincey's literary work 'On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts'. 

This satirical trilogy of essays, begun in 1827, humorously and grotesquely frames murder as an artistic performance. De Quincey uses the Ratcliff Highway murders as the ultimate example of murder, which he considers to have been executed with an almost sublime level of audacity and brutality.

De Quincey focused less on the victims or the detective work, and more on the psychology and 'performance' of the killer, whom he believed to be John Williams. He was fascinated by the sheer terror and national panic the crimes caused, arguing they were 'masterpieces' in the annals of homicide. 

His detailed and dramatic accounts of the killings, particularly in the later Postscript' to the essay, are considered a foundational text in the true crime genre, influencing later writers like Edgar Allan Poe.