WEBVTT - Thomas Morris: The Dublin Railway Murder 0:00:00.840 --> 0:00:13.320 This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised, so. 0:00:13.360 --> 0:00:17.000 He turns into a sort of horribly compelling character and 0:00:17.160 --> 0:00:21.320 one who certainly behaved in the most appalling way. 0:00:26.160 --> 0:00:30.040 I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor 0:00:30.080 --> 0:00:32.800 in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the 0:00:32.840 --> 0:00:36.680 podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career, 0:00:36.960 --> 0:00:40.680 research for my many audio and book projects has taken 0:00:40.760 --> 0:00:44.000 me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down 0:00:44.040 --> 0:00:48.720 with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers, 0:00:48.760 --> 0:00:53.200 and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true 0:00:53.200 --> 0:00:57.000 crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both 0:00:57.040 --> 0:01:00.040 good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the 0:01:00.120 --> 0:01:05.520 unpublished details behind their stories. This week on Wicked Words, 0:01:05.600 --> 0:01:09.440 we're traveling to eighteen fifty six, Ireland for a locked 0:01:09.560 --> 0:01:13.679 door mystery. A cashier for a Dublin railway station is 0:01:13.800 --> 0:01:17.720 found dead, savagely beaten. Nothing appears to be stolen. Can 0:01:17.760 --> 0:01:22.080 an experienced detective crack this case. Author Thomas Morris tells 0:01:22.160 --> 0:01:25.920 us the story in his new book The Dublin Railway Murder. 0:01:26.200 --> 0:01:33.640 The sensational true story of a Victorian murder mystery. Tell 0:01:33.640 --> 0:01:36.160 me how you came to write this book. Where did 0:01:36.160 --> 0:01:37.480 you discover this story? 0:01:38.040 --> 0:01:40.480 Well, I came across this story in a slightly unusual 0:01:40.600 --> 0:01:44.319 sideways fashion, which is that before I wrote this book, 0:01:44.360 --> 0:01:46.360 I really had no intention of writing a true crime 0:01:46.400 --> 0:01:48.880 book at all. But what I was writing about a 0:01:48.920 --> 0:01:51.400 lot was the history of medicine. My first book was 0:01:51.720 --> 0:01:54.840 History of Cardiac Surgery, and after that I wrote a 0:01:55.560 --> 0:01:58.000 slightly more kind of frivolous book, which was based on 0:01:58.040 --> 0:02:00.400 the lots of stories I'd come across during two or 0:02:00.400 --> 0:02:04.880 three years research. And what I found was that when 0:02:05.120 --> 0:02:08.440 I looked through medical journals for material I was using 0:02:08.520 --> 0:02:13.000 for the heart surgery book, there were these strange little stories, 0:02:13.120 --> 0:02:17.280 case studies, case histories of patients who got into strange 0:02:17.320 --> 0:02:20.600 difficulties or been treated in unusual ways. And I collected 0:02:20.600 --> 0:02:22.280 a lot of this material and it formed the basis 0:02:22.320 --> 0:02:25.480 of my second book. So for quite a long period, 0:02:25.600 --> 0:02:30.280 I was constantly looking into old medical journals between about 0:02:30.360 --> 0:02:33.400 the dates of about sort of seventeen fifty nineteen hundred, 0:02:33.480 --> 0:02:36.480 that sort of era, mainly the nineteenth century, and a 0:02:36.520 --> 0:02:38.880 lot of this stuff I would just sort of squirrel 0:02:38.919 --> 0:02:41.480 away for future use, and sometimes I thought it might 0:02:41.520 --> 0:02:43.680 turn into a slightly bigger project. And one of the 0:02:43.680 --> 0:02:46.920 stories I came across and didn't actually return to for 0:02:46.919 --> 0:02:51.520 a good two years was a single page report in 0:02:51.600 --> 0:02:54.480 an English medical journal about a court case that was 0:02:54.520 --> 0:02:57.600 then going on in Ireland. It was a court report 0:02:57.639 --> 0:02:59.880 which was only included in a medical journal because there 0:02:59.880 --> 0:03:03.800 were some medical evidence that was submitted. It wasn't actually 0:03:03.919 --> 0:03:07.280 very interesting as medical evidence goes, but when I read 0:03:07.280 --> 0:03:10.200 the page, I thought, actually, this sounded quite an interesting story. 0:03:10.560 --> 0:03:12.560 And the bit of it in particular that I was 0:03:12.600 --> 0:03:15.920 interested in was the fact that this court report was 0:03:16.280 --> 0:03:19.880 a murder trial. It was the murder of a clerk 0:03:20.120 --> 0:03:23.760 in an Irish railway station in Dublin in eighteen fifty six, 0:03:24.400 --> 0:03:28.079 and that day's evidence had discussed the ways in which 0:03:28.120 --> 0:03:30.440 the murderer might have got in and out of the room, 0:03:30.480 --> 0:03:33.519 whether the victim was killed, And just reading that one 0:03:33.600 --> 0:03:36.200 paragraph about this discussion of how the murderer might have 0:03:36.240 --> 0:03:39.080 got in and out of the room reminded me of 0:03:39.600 --> 0:03:42.800 a Golden age detective story, one of those nineteen thirties 0:03:42.840 --> 0:03:46.560 Agatha Christie's stories. One of her Great Contemporaries. I didn't 0:03:46.560 --> 0:03:48.960 really think very much more of it until a couple 0:03:48.960 --> 0:03:51.560 of years later when I found that the whole trial 0:03:51.680 --> 0:03:55.240 had been transcribed, And when I read that, I found 0:03:55.280 --> 0:03:58.080 that actually it was not just as good as I 0:03:58.160 --> 0:04:00.800 had thought it might be, but actually quite a lot better. 0:04:01.360 --> 0:04:05.240 It was a really fantastic murder mystery with a genuine 0:04:05.280 --> 0:04:08.160 mystery at its heart, also elements of the sort of 0:04:08.160 --> 0:04:11.480 locked room mystery going on. In particular, the one feature 0:04:11.480 --> 0:04:13.120 I'd kind of single out as the reason I was 0:04:13.120 --> 0:04:15.920 interested in writing about it as a non fiction book 0:04:16.200 --> 0:04:18.359 was that it had all those elements that make detective 0:04:18.400 --> 0:04:21.400 fiction of the early twentieth century so enjoyable, which is 0:04:21.440 --> 0:04:25.960 to say, a distinctive setting, a cast of characters which 0:04:26.000 --> 0:04:28.880 includes a relatively limited number of suspects that you can 0:04:28.960 --> 0:04:33.040 choose between, and then a distinctive detective at the heart 0:04:33.080 --> 0:04:35.880 of it all, even with a distinctive name, Augustus Guy. 0:04:36.160 --> 0:04:38.839 So when I went back to it and read the 0:04:38.880 --> 0:04:41.560 transcript of this trial, I thought, this has to be 0:04:41.600 --> 0:04:42.000 a book. 0:04:42.279 --> 0:04:45.280 And you have some wacky science that goes along with 0:04:45.360 --> 0:04:48.520 this too, that was real, and you know, people continue 0:04:48.520 --> 0:04:50.120 to believe for a long time, and we'll talk about 0:04:50.120 --> 0:04:53.320 phrenology in a little bit. But you have some elements 0:04:53.400 --> 0:04:58.000 here that I think for me almost represent contemporary, you know, 0:04:58.080 --> 0:05:00.640 issues that we talk about in true crime today, including 0:05:00.680 --> 0:05:05.000 scientific racism, which is what phrenology really kind of evolved into, 0:05:05.440 --> 0:05:09.920 predicting somebody's behavior in their character based on some physical attributes. 0:05:10.279 --> 0:05:13.039 Yes, I would sort of divide up this story into 0:05:13.440 --> 0:05:16.120 three separate not chapters, but there are sort of three 0:05:16.360 --> 0:05:19.240 almost acts to this story. There is the murder and 0:05:19.279 --> 0:05:22.080 the investigation that followed it, which lasted many months. It 0:05:22.120 --> 0:05:24.200 was not a crime that was easily solved at all. 0:05:24.400 --> 0:05:27.360 And then there is the high drama of the court trial. 0:05:27.600 --> 0:05:29.560 It was a four day trial, which at that time 0:05:29.680 --> 0:05:32.000 was a very long court proceedings. They like to get 0:05:32.040 --> 0:05:34.479 them done and dusted in a day if they could. 0:05:35.120 --> 0:05:38.120 After the trial, there's this very extraordinary you could call 0:05:38.160 --> 0:05:42.560 it a coder. There's like this strange afterlife of the 0:05:42.600 --> 0:05:45.880 stories not done and dusted, and that involves at this 0:05:45.960 --> 0:05:50.120 point this extraordinary character phrenologist, as you say, as somebody 0:05:50.160 --> 0:05:54.040 who studied the shapes of people's skulls and based an 0:05:54.240 --> 0:05:57.760 entire theory on the shape of skulls. He wanted to 0:05:57.839 --> 0:06:01.000 prove that you could distinguish between a murge and a 0:06:01.080 --> 0:06:04.560 non murderer based on the shape of somebody's skull. He 0:06:04.720 --> 0:06:07.560 is a very extraordinary character who comes in and then 0:06:07.560 --> 0:06:09.760 we have this rather unexpected I mean to me, it's 0:06:09.880 --> 0:06:12.000 it's almost the it's the part of the story that 0:06:12.080 --> 0:06:15.840 makes this such a distinctive tale that this phrenologist, a 0:06:15.839 --> 0:06:19.520 man based in Liverpool called called Frederick Bridges, comes in 0:06:19.760 --> 0:06:23.040 and then studies the skull or the person who has 0:06:23.080 --> 0:06:25.200 turned out to be the chief suspect for the murder. 0:06:28.480 --> 0:06:30.440 One of the things that I think, obviously is a 0:06:30.440 --> 0:06:33.040 contemporary theme that you've brought up in here too, is 0:06:33.520 --> 0:06:37.640 the idea of junk science, and that falls into you know, phrenology. 0:06:38.120 --> 0:06:40.960 You know, we can laugh at certain things, dogs sniffing 0:06:40.960 --> 0:06:43.440 a suspect and you know, pointing them out and then 0:06:43.480 --> 0:06:46.800 they end up in jail. Which has happened for that 0:06:46.800 --> 0:06:50.200 that's the only evidence, And you know, there's certainly some 0:06:50.520 --> 0:06:54.560 very questionable techniques out there, like I'll think about in US. 0:06:54.640 --> 0:06:56.599 I'll say, there's no way anybody is going to believe 0:06:56.640 --> 0:06:58.880 that this is the only piece of evidence needed to 0:06:58.920 --> 0:07:02.159 convict someone. Into people believe them. And that's what was 0:07:02.200 --> 0:07:04.440 sort of happening, you know, in this case and in 0:07:04.520 --> 0:07:09.159 this time period before phrenology was discredited, was you could 0:07:09.200 --> 0:07:12.760 have somebody feel you know, the skull of someone and 0:07:12.800 --> 0:07:15.720 declare whether they had a criminal mind or not, like 0:07:15.760 --> 0:07:17.840 you had said. Also, you know, sort of like an 0:07:17.880 --> 0:07:20.360 eighteen fifty six minority report. 0:07:20.800 --> 0:07:24.000 Yes. One of the things about this story this era, 0:07:24.080 --> 0:07:26.120 which I think is rather interesting from the point of 0:07:26.200 --> 0:07:28.640 view of looking into a crime and investigating a crime, 0:07:28.720 --> 0:07:32.800 is it really stands at the junction between two eras. 0:07:33.080 --> 0:07:35.520 On the one hand, it sounds very much like a 0:07:35.520 --> 0:07:39.400 police procedural from say London today, like an English or 0:07:39.600 --> 0:07:44.000 Scottish police story today. That there was a detective force 0:07:44.160 --> 0:07:46.840 in Dublin in eighteen fifty six. It was modeled on 0:07:47.080 --> 0:07:49.800 the slightly older detective force that had been set up 0:07:50.000 --> 0:07:54.000 in London, the Metropolitan Police. The Metro Police was found 0:07:54.080 --> 0:07:56.760 in the eighteen twenties and their detectives came along about 0:07:56.800 --> 0:08:01.720 ten years after that. Dublin institute its detective force a 0:08:01.720 --> 0:08:05.480 little later, but it was modeled explicitly on the London 0:08:05.560 --> 0:08:08.880 force when Dublin gained its first detective force. So you 0:08:09.000 --> 0:08:11.000 have the structure of the police and the way they 0:08:11.000 --> 0:08:13.800 operate is superficially very similar to the way that a 0:08:13.840 --> 0:08:17.720 police investigation might even take place today. The ranks of 0:08:17.760 --> 0:08:19.640 the officers are the same, the way they go about 0:08:19.640 --> 0:08:22.040 it is sort of superficially similar, but at the same 0:08:22.080 --> 0:08:24.880 time their investigation techniques are so primitive. 0:08:25.560 --> 0:08:28.160 Let's get to the main part of the story before 0:08:28.160 --> 0:08:31.720 we dive too much into phrenology and the way that 0:08:32.160 --> 0:08:34.440 you know the police force was structured. Where does it 0:08:34.520 --> 0:08:37.240 make sense to you to start? Is it with the 0:08:37.320 --> 0:08:40.440 victim George Little, or is it the scene on when 0:08:40.440 --> 0:08:41.239 he's discovered. 0:08:41.600 --> 0:08:44.120 Yes, I think it is the victim George Little. He 0:08:44.440 --> 0:08:48.920 was a man in his early forties who worked as 0:08:48.920 --> 0:08:53.600 a clerk in the railway station in Dublin, the Midland's 0:08:53.600 --> 0:08:57.599 Great Western Railway Company's terminus at Broadstone. His background was 0:08:57.600 --> 0:09:00.760 slightly unfortunate in that he was one of four children 0:09:00.920 --> 0:09:04.840 of a prosperous solicitor in middle class Dublin, and his 0:09:04.880 --> 0:09:08.040 father had died when he was fifteen, very suddenly and unexpectedly, 0:09:08.600 --> 0:09:12.760 leaving his mother. George Little's mother a widow with four 0:09:12.840 --> 0:09:15.160 children to support, and they had very little money. They 0:09:15.240 --> 0:09:17.760 ended up living in I would say some poverty, although 0:09:17.760 --> 0:09:20.760 in quite a grand house in the southern suburbs of Dublin. 0:09:20.960 --> 0:09:23.520 George Little ended up as the bread winner for the 0:09:23.640 --> 0:09:27.760 entire household, for his mother, for his grandmother who lived 0:09:27.760 --> 0:09:31.560 with them, and a widowed sister, and for one of 0:09:31.600 --> 0:09:33.760 his siblings, a sister who lived with him. So there 0:09:33.760 --> 0:09:35.560 are four people living in this house. He's the only 0:09:35.600 --> 0:09:39.240 person earning a wage. And he was working as the 0:09:39.320 --> 0:09:43.520 chief cashier in the station. One evening in November eighteen 0:09:43.600 --> 0:09:46.400 fifty six, he told his sister that he was going 0:09:46.440 --> 0:09:48.679 to be working a little late. There was a lot 0:09:48.720 --> 0:09:52.160 of work to do, and his job consisted essentially of 0:09:52.280 --> 0:09:54.280 taking all the cash that was taken on the entire 0:09:54.360 --> 0:09:57.439 railway line from Dublin to the West coast of Ireland. 0:09:58.080 --> 0:10:01.080 And when all the money came, all the money from 0:10:01.080 --> 0:10:03.480 the entire length of the line, every ticket office came 0:10:03.520 --> 0:10:05.640 to Dublin and it was his job to count it up, 0:10:05.960 --> 0:10:09.120 account it and then send all the returns into the 0:10:09.160 --> 0:10:13.280 accounting department of the railway company. And on this Thursday 0:10:13.320 --> 0:10:15.360 evening there was a lot of money to be counted. 0:10:15.400 --> 0:10:17.760 He had to stay late to his family surprise. He 0:10:17.760 --> 0:10:20.400 didn't return home that night, and his sister went into 0:10:20.440 --> 0:10:22.400 the station the following morning to find out what had 0:10:22.440 --> 0:10:25.719 happened to him, and nobody had realized that he had 0:10:25.720 --> 0:10:27.720 not left his office that night, and they found his 0:10:27.800 --> 0:10:30.679 office locked and shut, and when they broke down the door, 0:10:31.080 --> 0:10:33.840 there was this scene of absolute carnage within. He had 0:10:33.880 --> 0:10:38.040 been bludgeoned to death with some heavy object, but his 0:10:38.120 --> 0:10:41.199 throat had also been cut, so it was a fairly 0:10:41.400 --> 0:10:44.720 terrifying scene, a huge pool of blood, and then this 0:10:44.880 --> 0:10:48.600 really very disfigured body lying underneath his desk. I think 0:10:48.600 --> 0:10:52.360 it's worth saying this in Dublin, which strangely had not 0:10:52.440 --> 0:10:55.800 experienced any murder in probably over a decade. 0:10:55.920 --> 0:10:56.120 Wow. 0:10:56.360 --> 0:11:00.000 And we tend to think of Victorian cities, particularly in Britain, 0:11:00.280 --> 0:11:04.880 has been terribly dangerous places, places where footpads and thieves 0:11:04.920 --> 0:11:07.880 and robbers thought nothing of slitting your throat to take 0:11:07.880 --> 0:11:11.720 your wallet. But in fact Dublin was perhaps the best 0:11:11.720 --> 0:11:14.079 police city on the planet at this point. It had 0:11:14.080 --> 0:11:17.400 an enormous police force and it was very very safe. 0:11:17.440 --> 0:11:21.679 And in fact, the previous documented murder within the city 0:11:21.679 --> 0:11:23.959 of Dublin that I could find any evidence about was 0:11:24.000 --> 0:11:28.880 eighteen forty two. That's fourteen years without a single documented homicide, 0:11:28.920 --> 0:11:30.960 which I think is just an extraordinary statistic. 0:11:31.559 --> 0:11:34.880 So when he is counting this money, how much money 0:11:34.920 --> 0:11:38.439 are we talking about in Dublin eighteen fifty six and 0:11:38.760 --> 0:11:40.840 you know what would that be the equivalent of today? 0:11:40.880 --> 0:11:43.160 Is it hundreds of thousands of dollars or less? 0:11:43.800 --> 0:11:45.760 Well, I think I mean, off the top of my head, 0:11:45.800 --> 0:11:48.640 the amount of money that he had in his office 0:11:48.640 --> 0:11:50.720 that night was something of the order of one and 0:11:50.760 --> 0:11:54.200 a half thousand pounds, which is an absolutely enormous amount 0:11:54.200 --> 0:11:57.000 of money. I mean, it's multiples of what the average 0:11:57.000 --> 0:11:59.840 worker in Dublin would be earning per year at that date. 0:12:00.760 --> 0:12:04.400 It was an unusually large sum of money, even for 0:12:04.559 --> 0:12:07.520 a railway company that was at that point very successful. 0:12:07.960 --> 0:12:10.280 And the reason for that is twofold one is that 0:12:10.360 --> 0:12:13.280 the money that came through his office wasn't just every 0:12:13.400 --> 0:12:17.400 fare that was paid on the entire railway line. It 0:12:17.480 --> 0:12:20.880 was also the Canal Company, which was also owned by 0:12:20.920 --> 0:12:24.160 the railway company. Before the railways came along, the main 0:12:24.960 --> 0:12:28.840 route of communication and of carrying large heavy loads from 0:12:28.840 --> 0:12:31.760 the west coast of Ireland to Dublin was the canal network. 0:12:31.960 --> 0:12:34.319 Every penny that was spent on the canals all the 0:12:34.400 --> 0:12:37.440 railway ended up in George Little's office. But also that 0:12:37.520 --> 0:12:39.680 particular week there had been a big fair at a 0:12:39.679 --> 0:12:42.200 place called Mullinger, which is in the midlands of Ireland. 0:12:43.080 --> 0:12:45.680 It was the main place where horses were traded at 0:12:45.720 --> 0:12:48.600 that point in Ireland and even breeders and owners used 0:12:48.600 --> 0:12:51.760 to come from England to buy and sell their horses 0:12:52.040 --> 0:12:54.319 at Mullinger. So there was a huge amount of extra 0:12:54.360 --> 0:12:57.000 footfall on the railways. Even animals, by the way, went 0:12:57.040 --> 0:12:59.720 on this railway, so cows and horses would also have 0:12:59.760 --> 0:13:03.840 been loaded as freight. So there was a huge amount 0:13:04.040 --> 0:13:06.680 of traffic going up and down the railway line that week, 0:13:06.720 --> 0:13:08.480 and as a result, he had this huge sum of 0:13:08.520 --> 0:13:10.640 money on his desk in front of him at the 0:13:10.640 --> 0:13:11.559 moment that he was killed. 0:13:11.800 --> 0:13:14.960 Is it determined pretty quickly whether or not these weapons 0:13:15.000 --> 0:13:17.120 there's a heavy object you said that was used to 0:13:17.160 --> 0:13:21.400 beat him viciously, and then a razor or something used 0:13:21.400 --> 0:13:23.840 to cut his throat. Were those things that were present 0:13:24.120 --> 0:13:26.920 in his office. I know that eventually we're going to 0:13:26.920 --> 0:13:28.319 get to where they're found. 0:13:28.840 --> 0:13:31.040 One of the things that's quite interesting about this case, 0:13:31.160 --> 0:13:35.240 comparing it with how murder investigations go today, is there 0:13:35.320 --> 0:13:38.839 was very little heed paid to the importance of the 0:13:39.000 --> 0:13:41.480 murder scene, the crime scene. There's no sense that you've 0:13:41.480 --> 0:13:43.880 got to preserve evidence, that you've got to look for traces, 0:13:44.000 --> 0:13:46.640 or that you've got to look for particular objects there. 0:13:47.320 --> 0:13:50.400 So by the time the police actually a summoned to 0:13:50.440 --> 0:13:53.560 investigate the scene, literally dozens of people have been even 0:13:53.600 --> 0:13:55.560 people just wanting to go into the room to have 0:13:55.600 --> 0:13:57.160 a look and see what it was like, what was 0:13:57.200 --> 0:14:00.640 going on. People were taking souvenirs from the room even 0:14:00.679 --> 0:14:02.640 before the police had had the chance to examine it. 0:14:03.040 --> 0:14:06.480 So they didn't have a pristine scene by any means. 0:14:06.960 --> 0:14:11.920 But objects they found there really probably immediately they could 0:14:11.920 --> 0:14:14.040 see that there was no murder weapon on the scene. 0:14:14.040 --> 0:14:16.440 They found a small pen knife which had evidently been 0:14:16.520 --> 0:14:19.720 used as a sort of office work, maybe for sort 0:14:19.720 --> 0:14:22.600 of cutting the strings on bundles of papers, that sort 0:14:22.600 --> 0:14:25.720 of thing. There was nothing sharp enough to have caused 0:14:25.880 --> 0:14:28.280 a wound that's described by one of the doctors who 0:14:28.280 --> 0:14:32.160 examined the body as having almost entirely severed his neck. 0:14:32.600 --> 0:14:35.000 The cuts of this blade had gone so deep that 0:14:35.080 --> 0:14:37.280 he had almost exposed the spine from the front of 0:14:37.320 --> 0:14:40.760 the neck. It was a really very extreme injury, and 0:14:40.800 --> 0:14:45.440 similarly the skull had been very badly fractured in several places, 0:14:45.480 --> 0:14:48.480 so it was of heavy object. There was absolutely nothing 0:14:48.520 --> 0:14:52.240 suitable in the room for causing such severe injuries. There 0:14:52.320 --> 0:14:56.160 was brief discussion at the inquest, which took place forty 0:14:56.160 --> 0:14:58.640 eight hours later in the same building. There was brief 0:14:58.680 --> 0:15:01.120 discussion of whether a poke which had been found next 0:15:01.120 --> 0:15:03.280 to the fire might have been involved, but it was 0:15:03.320 --> 0:15:06.960 a sort of slim, slender, cast iron object. There was 0:15:06.960 --> 0:15:09.880 absolutely no way it could have caused those injuries. So 0:15:10.000 --> 0:15:13.080 pretty quickly the police understood that they were also looking 0:15:13.080 --> 0:15:15.560 for murder weapons as well as the murderer himself. 0:15:18.640 --> 0:15:20.880 The door locked on the inside. These are not the 0:15:20.960 --> 0:15:24.000 kind of locks where we can do the little thumb 0:15:24.000 --> 0:15:25.920 lock where you can lock it now on the inside 0:15:25.920 --> 0:15:27.840 and shut the door and it'll be locked to anybody 0:15:27.880 --> 0:15:29.800 on the outside. Did somebody have to have a key 0:15:29.880 --> 0:15:30.760 to be able to do this? 0:15:31.120 --> 0:15:33.240 Well, I think it's worth describing the room where his 0:15:33.280 --> 0:15:35.440 body was found first of all, so he was in 0:15:35.480 --> 0:15:37.880 the cashier's office, which was on the first floor of 0:15:37.880 --> 0:15:40.400 the building. And again it's worth saying that one of 0:15:40.480 --> 0:15:43.280 the reasons I've found this quite an attractive story is 0:15:43.320 --> 0:15:46.240 that the setting was not just a railway station, but 0:15:46.280 --> 0:15:50.080 a railway station where there was a permanent residential staff. 0:15:50.280 --> 0:15:53.200 So there is the station house where several people lived. 0:15:53.200 --> 0:15:56.640 The station master lived in an apartment in the basement 0:15:56.680 --> 0:15:58.960 with his family. There are a couple of other families 0:15:59.000 --> 0:16:01.320 that lived there full time. There were always people in residence, 0:16:01.600 --> 0:16:03.680 and George Little's office was on the first floor of 0:16:03.680 --> 0:16:06.320 this building. There was a maid who came and went, 0:16:06.440 --> 0:16:08.840 who would make the fire and then clean the rooms 0:16:08.880 --> 0:16:12.320 after everybody had left, And there was more than one 0:16:12.360 --> 0:16:14.600 way in and out of his room, the door which 0:16:14.640 --> 0:16:16.720 was lockable, and then there are a couple of windows, 0:16:16.760 --> 0:16:19.560 one of which overlooked the great roof that went over 0:16:19.600 --> 0:16:23.200 the train shed itself. And when his body was found, 0:16:23.360 --> 0:16:26.080 the door was locked. Initially it was thought that it 0:16:26.120 --> 0:16:28.360 had been locked from the inside. That turned out not 0:16:28.400 --> 0:16:30.240 to have been the case in fact. And then there 0:16:30.320 --> 0:16:33.000 was also the window, And actually both of these routes 0:16:33.200 --> 0:16:37.640 remained plausible entry and exit routes for the mergerer for 0:16:37.920 --> 0:16:41.520 months afterwards. In fact, what was probably the cases they 0:16:41.600 --> 0:16:44.040 established quite quickly was that the mergerer had probably gone 0:16:44.080 --> 0:16:46.520 in through the door and exited through the window, and 0:16:46.560 --> 0:16:49.320 there was a route that they established. It was possible 0:16:49.400 --> 0:16:52.440 to get out of the window and then walk along 0:16:52.720 --> 0:16:56.080 the roof and then down a ladder into one of 0:16:56.120 --> 0:17:00.000 the restaurants one of the laboratories on the station platform. 0:17:00.320 --> 0:17:03.080 So there was a sort of multiplicity of options that 0:17:03.440 --> 0:17:04.920 possibilities that were open. 0:17:05.200 --> 0:17:08.760 Could this have been a crime of opportunity in that 0:17:08.880 --> 0:17:12.800 someone saw his light on late one night and you 0:17:12.800 --> 0:17:15.840 could see that visibly from wherever the public could access it. 0:17:16.520 --> 0:17:18.840 Or was this a situation where somebody would have had 0:17:18.840 --> 0:17:21.640 to know his schedule or was sort of observing him 0:17:22.240 --> 0:17:23.919 knowing he was going to be alone and that this 0:17:23.960 --> 0:17:25.720 would be a safe thing to do well. 0:17:25.760 --> 0:17:28.600 The honest answer is yes to both. But one of 0:17:28.640 --> 0:17:31.720 the things the police really struggled with was to understand 0:17:31.960 --> 0:17:35.000 the circumstances. There were reasons for thinking that it had 0:17:35.000 --> 0:17:38.000 to be somebody who knew the station premises well, because 0:17:38.480 --> 0:17:41.760 the station house itself was locked up after one of 0:17:41.800 --> 0:17:44.840 the late trains had left in the early evening, and 0:17:44.880 --> 0:17:47.359 at that point it was possible for a member of 0:17:47.440 --> 0:17:49.680 the public to walk into the station house and find 0:17:49.680 --> 0:17:52.360 his office, but you would have to know a quite 0:17:52.440 --> 0:17:55.720 complicated route, which involved going downstairs to the basement and 0:17:55.760 --> 0:17:58.200 then up a backset of stairs in order to get 0:17:58.200 --> 0:18:00.480 to the office. At the same time, there was also 0:18:00.520 --> 0:18:04.040 the possibility that it had been a crime of opportunity, 0:18:04.320 --> 0:18:08.640 because the building was fundamentally open to anybody any member 0:18:08.640 --> 0:18:11.399 of the public during the day, and there were numerous 0:18:11.480 --> 0:18:15.000 hiding places where somebody could have hidden. The investigation, which 0:18:15.080 --> 0:18:18.600 lasted weeks and then stretched out into months, lasted so 0:18:18.680 --> 0:18:22.440 long partly because there were so many different possibilities, both 0:18:22.480 --> 0:18:25.080 of the nature of the crime but also who had 0:18:25.080 --> 0:18:25.720 committed it. 0:18:26.200 --> 0:18:29.480 Let's I guess start with what they think the motive is. 0:18:29.640 --> 0:18:33.080 They see this man badly beaten. Is this what now? 0:18:33.119 --> 0:18:35.000 I don't know if this is a UK term also, 0:18:35.119 --> 0:18:37.680 but in America this would be called like an overkill, 0:18:37.920 --> 0:18:42.960 like somebody really has beaten this person far more than 0:18:43.480 --> 0:18:47.600 needed to just disable someone or quickly kill someone and 0:18:47.840 --> 0:18:51.119 take money or take whatever they wanted and then leave. 0:18:51.359 --> 0:18:52.240 This seemed personal. 0:18:52.760 --> 0:18:55.879 There was a ferocity to the nature of the attack 0:18:56.000 --> 0:19:00.200 that really took people's breath away. That's worth saying. It's 0:19:00.240 --> 0:19:03.480 one of the reasons that it absolutely gripped Dublin. When 0:19:03.520 --> 0:19:07.400 this was first announced in the papers within forty eight 0:19:07.440 --> 0:19:10.640 hours of his death, nobody could remember something quite as 0:19:10.640 --> 0:19:13.399 appallingly violent as this, and in fact it led the 0:19:13.400 --> 0:19:15.560 police to think at first that there might have been 0:19:15.640 --> 0:19:18.840 some sort of motive like revenge involved, But when they 0:19:18.840 --> 0:19:21.879 looked into his family background, they found that actually he 0:19:21.960 --> 0:19:25.040 was an extremely quiet and reserved man. He was a 0:19:25.080 --> 0:19:30.640 member of a Christian sect, the Plymouth Brethren, was absolutely pacifist, 0:19:31.359 --> 0:19:33.800 did not believe in holding grudges. He was honest to 0:19:33.880 --> 0:19:36.920 a fault. He had few close friends, but he was 0:19:37.040 --> 0:19:39.800 universally well liked. There was no grounds for thinking that 0:19:39.920 --> 0:19:43.000 this could have been a sort of personal motive, so 0:19:43.320 --> 0:19:46.480 that left the idea that it was either robbery or 0:19:46.560 --> 0:19:50.239 just a random attack. And at first it seemed that 0:19:50.840 --> 0:19:53.959 nothing had been taken, because when they found his body 0:19:54.440 --> 0:19:58.960 they discovered that his table his desk was piled high 0:19:59.040 --> 0:20:02.399 with gold coins and banknotes hundreds and hundreds of pounds, 0:20:02.440 --> 0:20:07.160 an absolute fortune to any normal Dubliner. So they thought, well, 0:20:07.160 --> 0:20:10.280 this can't possibly have been robbery, and it was only 0:20:10.400 --> 0:20:14.920 after the accounting department downstairs had gone through every pile 0:20:14.960 --> 0:20:18.240 of money on his desk and compared the sums that 0:20:18.280 --> 0:20:20.520 they counted up with what was in his books. That 0:20:20.600 --> 0:20:23.679 a very substantial sum of money turned out to be missing, 0:20:23.760 --> 0:20:26.399 and at that point they realized that the motive almost 0:20:26.400 --> 0:20:27.840 certainly was financial. 0:20:28.280 --> 0:20:32.159 I still cannot believe when dealing with that amount of money, 0:20:32.240 --> 0:20:35.680 I understand that Dublin was not high crime or any 0:20:35.840 --> 0:20:39.080 violent crime. It's so hard to believe that there's not 0:20:39.200 --> 0:20:42.840 at least another security guard or something somebody there when 0:20:42.880 --> 0:20:46.360 you have that much money and you're there alone at night, 0:20:47.000 --> 0:20:47.920 it is astonishing. 0:20:48.280 --> 0:20:51.320 Even more than that. George Little had only been the 0:20:51.359 --> 0:20:55.560 chief cashier there for about six months, and when he 0:20:55.640 --> 0:20:58.119 was appointed, one of the first things he did was 0:20:58.160 --> 0:21:02.320 make representations to to his bosses that they needed to 0:21:02.359 --> 0:21:06.560 install a screen, a physical barrier to prevent people walking 0:21:06.600 --> 0:21:10.959 straight into his office. And they did eventually get somebody, 0:21:11.000 --> 0:21:13.920 a carpenter, to come up and build a screen so 0:21:13.960 --> 0:21:15.960 that it wasn't possible to walk in that you have 0:21:16.119 --> 0:21:18.119 to go to a little window and talk to him 0:21:18.160 --> 0:21:20.720