Speaker 1: This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised, so.
Speaker 2: He turns into a sort of horribly compelling character and
Speaker 2: one who certainly behaved in the most appalling way.
Speaker 1: I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
Speaker 1: in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
Speaker 1: podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
Speaker 1: research for my many audio and book projects has taken
Speaker 1: me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
Speaker 1: with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
Speaker 1: and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
Speaker 1: crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
Speaker 1: good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
Speaker 1: unpublished details behind their stories. This week on Wicked Words,
Speaker 1: we're traveling to eighteen fifty six, Ireland for a locked
Speaker 1: door mystery. A cashier for a Dublin railway station is
Speaker 1: found dead, savagely beaten. Nothing appears to be stolen. Can
Speaker 1: an experienced detective crack this case. Author Thomas Morris tells
Speaker 1: us the story in his new book The Dublin Railway Murder.
Speaker 1: The sensational true story of a Victorian murder mystery. Tell
Speaker 1: me how you came to write this book. Where did
Speaker 1: you discover this story?
Speaker 2: Well, I came across this story in a slightly unusual
Speaker 2: sideways fashion, which is that before I wrote this book,
Speaker 2: I really had no intention of writing a true crime
Speaker 2: book at all. But what I was writing about a
Speaker 2: lot was the history of medicine. My first book was
Speaker 2: History of Cardiac Surgery, and after that I wrote a
Speaker 2: slightly more kind of frivolous book, which was based on
Speaker 2: the lots of stories I'd come across during two or
Speaker 2: three years research. And what I found was that when
Speaker 2: I looked through medical journals for material I was using
Speaker 2: for the heart surgery book, there were these strange little stories,
Speaker 2: case studies, case histories of patients who got into strange
Speaker 2: difficulties or been treated in unusual ways. And I collected
Speaker 2: a lot of this material and it formed the basis
Speaker 2: of my second book. So for quite a long period,
Speaker 2: I was constantly looking into old medical journals between about
Speaker 2: the dates of about sort of seventeen fifty nineteen hundred,
Speaker 2: that sort of era, mainly the nineteenth century, and a
Speaker 2: lot of this stuff I would just sort of squirrel
Speaker 2: away for future use, and sometimes I thought it might
Speaker 2: turn into a slightly bigger project. And one of the
Speaker 2: stories I came across and didn't actually return to for
Speaker 2: a good two years was a single page report in
Speaker 2: an English medical journal about a court case that was
Speaker 2: then going on in Ireland. It was a court report
Speaker 2: which was only included in a medical journal because there
Speaker 2: were some medical evidence that was submitted. It wasn't actually
Speaker 2: very interesting as medical evidence goes, but when I read
Speaker 2: the page, I thought, actually, this sounded quite an interesting story.
Speaker 2: And the bit of it in particular that I was
Speaker 2: interested in was the fact that this court report was
Speaker 2: a murder trial. It was the murder of a clerk
Speaker 2: in an Irish railway station in Dublin in eighteen fifty six,
Speaker 2: and that day's evidence had discussed the ways in which
Speaker 2: the murderer might have got in and out of the room,
Speaker 2: whether the victim was killed, And just reading that one
Speaker 2: paragraph about this discussion of how the murderer might have
Speaker 2: got in and out of the room reminded me of
Speaker 2: a Golden age detective story, one of those nineteen thirties
Speaker 2: Agatha Christie's stories. One of her Great Contemporaries. I didn't
Speaker 2: really think very much more of it until a couple
Speaker 2: of years later when I found that the whole trial
Speaker 2: had been transcribed, And when I read that, I found
Speaker 2: that actually it was not just as good as I
Speaker 2: had thought it might be, but actually quite a lot better.
Speaker 2: It was a really fantastic murder mystery with a genuine
Speaker 2: mystery at its heart, also elements of the sort of
Speaker 2: locked room mystery going on. In particular, the one feature
Speaker 2: I'd kind of single out as the reason I was
Speaker 2: interested in writing about it as a non fiction book
Speaker 2: was that it had all those elements that make detective
Speaker 2: fiction of the early twentieth century so enjoyable, which is
Speaker 2: to say, a distinctive setting, a cast of characters which
Speaker 2: includes a relatively limited number of suspects that you can
Speaker 2: choose between, and then a distinctive detective at the heart
Speaker 2: of it all, even with a distinctive name, Augustus Guy.
Speaker 2: So when I went back to it and read the
Speaker 2: transcript of this trial, I thought, this has to be
Speaker 2: a book.
Speaker 1: And you have some wacky science that goes along with
Speaker 1: this too, that was real, and you know, people continue
Speaker 1: to believe for a long time, and we'll talk about
Speaker 1: phrenology in a little bit. But you have some elements
Speaker 1: here that I think for me almost represent contemporary, you know,
Speaker 1: issues that we talk about in true crime today, including
Speaker 1: scientific racism, which is what phrenology really kind of evolved into,
Speaker 1: predicting somebody's behavior in their character based on some physical attributes.
Speaker 2: Yes, I would sort of divide up this story into
Speaker 2: three separate not chapters, but there are sort of three
Speaker 2: almost acts to this story. There is the murder and
Speaker 2: the investigation that followed it, which lasted many months. It
Speaker 2: was not a crime that was easily solved at all.
Speaker 2: And then there is the high drama of the court trial.
Speaker 2: It was a four day trial, which at that time
Speaker 2: was a very long court proceedings. They like to get
Speaker 2: them done and dusted in a day if they could.
Speaker 2: After the trial, there's this very extraordinary you could call
Speaker 2: it a coder. There's like this strange afterlife of the
Speaker 2: stories not done and dusted, and that involves at this
Speaker 2: point this extraordinary character phrenologist, as you say, as somebody
Speaker 2: who studied the shapes of people's skulls and based an
Speaker 2: entire theory on the shape of skulls. He wanted to
Speaker 2: prove that you could distinguish between a murge and a
Speaker 2: non murderer based on the shape of somebody's skull. He
Speaker 2: is a very extraordinary character who comes in and then
Speaker 2: we have this rather unexpected I mean to me, it's
Speaker 2: it's almost the it's the part of the story that
Speaker 2: makes this such a distinctive tale that this phrenologist, a
Speaker 2: man based in Liverpool called called Frederick Bridges, comes in
Speaker 2: and then studies the skull or the person who has
Speaker 2: turned out to be the chief suspect for the murder.
Speaker 1: One of the things that I think, obviously is a
Speaker 1: contemporary theme that you've brought up in here too, is
Speaker 1: the idea of junk science, and that falls into you know, phrenology.
Speaker 1: You know, we can laugh at certain things, dogs sniffing
Speaker 1: a suspect and you know, pointing them out and then
Speaker 1: they end up in jail. Which has happened for that
Speaker 1: that's the only evidence, And you know, there's certainly some
Speaker 1: very questionable techniques out there, like I'll think about in US.
Speaker 1: I'll say, there's no way anybody is going to believe
Speaker 1: that this is the only piece of evidence needed to
Speaker 1: convict someone. Into people believe them. And that's what was
Speaker 1: sort of happening, you know, in this case and in
Speaker 1: this time period before phrenology was discredited, was you could
Speaker 1: have somebody feel you know, the skull of someone and
Speaker 1: declare whether they had a criminal mind or not, like
Speaker 1: you had said. Also, you know, sort of like an
Speaker 1: eighteen fifty six minority report.
Speaker 2: Yes. One of the things about this story this era,
Speaker 2: which I think is rather interesting from the point of
Speaker 2: view of looking into a crime and investigating a crime,
Speaker 2: is it really stands at the junction between two eras.
Speaker 2: On the one hand, it sounds very much like a
Speaker 2: police procedural from say London today, like an English or
Speaker 2: Scottish police story today. That there was a detective force
Speaker 2: in Dublin in eighteen fifty six. It was modeled on
Speaker 2: the slightly older detective force that had been set up
Speaker 2: in London, the Metropolitan Police. The Metro Police was found
Speaker 2: in the eighteen twenties and their detectives came along about
Speaker 2: ten years after that. Dublin institute its detective force a
Speaker 2: little later, but it was modeled explicitly on the London
Speaker 2: force when Dublin gained its first detective force. So you
Speaker 2: have the structure of the police and the way they
Speaker 2: operate is superficially very similar to the way that a
Speaker 2: police investigation might even take place today. The ranks of
Speaker 2: the officers are the same, the way they go about
Speaker 2: it is sort of superficially similar, but at the same
Speaker 2: time their investigation techniques are so primitive.
Speaker 1: Let's get to the main part of the story before
Speaker 1: we dive too much into phrenology and the way that
Speaker 1: you know the police force was structured. Where does it
Speaker 1: make sense to you to start? Is it with the
Speaker 1: victim George Little, or is it the scene on when
Speaker 1: he's discovered.
Speaker 2: Yes, I think it is the victim George Little. He
Speaker 2: was a man in his early forties who worked as
Speaker 2: a clerk in the railway station in Dublin, the Midland's
Speaker 2: Great Western Railway Company's terminus at Broadstone. His background was
Speaker 2: slightly unfortunate in that he was one of four children
Speaker 2: of a prosperous solicitor in middle class Dublin, and his
Speaker 2: father had died when he was fifteen, very suddenly and unexpectedly,
Speaker 2: leaving his mother. George Little's mother a widow with four
Speaker 2: children to support, and they had very little money. They
Speaker 2: ended up living in I would say some poverty, although
Speaker 2: in quite a grand house in the southern suburbs of Dublin.
Speaker 2: George Little ended up as the bread winner for the
Speaker 2: entire household, for his mother, for his grandmother who lived
Speaker 2: with them, and a widowed sister, and for one of
Speaker 2: his siblings, a sister who lived with him. So there
Speaker 2: are four people living in this house. He's the only
Speaker 2: person earning a wage. And he was working as the
Speaker 2: chief cashier in the station. One evening in November eighteen
Speaker 2: fifty six, he told his sister that he was going
Speaker 2: to be working a little late. There was a lot
Speaker 2: of work to do, and his job consisted essentially of
Speaker 2: taking all the cash that was taken on the entire
Speaker 2: railway line from Dublin to the West coast of Ireland.
Speaker 2: And when all the money came, all the money from
Speaker 2: the entire length of the line, every ticket office came
Speaker 2: to Dublin and it was his job to count it up,
Speaker 2: account it and then send all the returns into the
Speaker 2: accounting department of the railway company. And on this Thursday
Speaker 2: evening there was a lot of money to be counted.
Speaker 2: He had to stay late to his family surprise. He
Speaker 2: didn't return home that night, and his sister went into
Speaker 2: the station the following morning to find out what had
Speaker 2: happened to him, and nobody had realized that he had
Speaker 2: not left his office that night, and they found his
Speaker 2: office locked and shut, and when they broke down the door,
Speaker 2: there was this scene of absolute carnage within. He had
Speaker 2: been bludgeoned to death with some heavy object, but his
Speaker 2: throat had also been cut, so it was a fairly
Speaker 2: terrifying scene, a huge pool of blood, and then this
Speaker 2: really very disfigured body lying underneath his desk. I think
Speaker 2: it's worth saying this in Dublin, which strangely had not
Speaker 2: experienced any murder in probably over a decade.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And we tend to think of Victorian cities, particularly in Britain,
Speaker 2: has been terribly dangerous places, places where footpads and thieves
Speaker 2: and robbers thought nothing of slitting your throat to take
Speaker 2: your wallet. But in fact Dublin was perhaps the best
Speaker 2: police city on the planet at this point. It had
Speaker 2: an enormous police force and it was very very safe.
Speaker 2: And in fact, the previous documented murder within the city
Speaker 2: of Dublin that I could find any evidence about was
Speaker 2: eighteen forty two. That's fourteen years without a single documented homicide,
Speaker 2: which I think is just an extraordinary statistic.
Speaker 1: So when he is counting this money, how much money
Speaker 1: are we talking about in Dublin eighteen fifty six and
Speaker 1: you know what would that be the equivalent of today?
Speaker 1: Is it hundreds of thousands of dollars or less?
Speaker 2: Well, I think I mean, off the top of my head,
Speaker 2: the amount of money that he had in his office
Speaker 2: that night was something of the order of one and
Speaker 2: a half thousand pounds, which is an absolutely enormous amount
Speaker 2: of money. I mean, it's multiples of what the average
Speaker 2: worker in Dublin would be earning per year at that date.
Speaker 2: It was an unusually large sum of money, even for
Speaker 2: a railway company that was at that point very successful.
Speaker 2: And the reason for that is twofold one is that
Speaker 2: the money that came through his office wasn't just every
Speaker 2: fare that was paid on the entire railway line. It
Speaker 2: was also the Canal Company, which was also owned by
Speaker 2: the railway company. Before the railways came along, the main
Speaker 2: route of communication and of carrying large heavy loads from
Speaker 2: the west coast of Ireland to Dublin was the canal network.
Speaker 2: Every penny that was spent on the canals all the
Speaker 2: railway ended up in George Little's office. But also that
Speaker 2: particular week there had been a big fair at a
Speaker 2: place called Mullinger, which is in the midlands of Ireland.
Speaker 2: It was the main place where horses were traded at
Speaker 2: that point in Ireland and even breeders and owners used
Speaker 2: to come from England to buy and sell their horses
Speaker 2: at Mullinger. So there was a huge amount of extra
Speaker 2: footfall on the railways. Even animals, by the way, went
Speaker 2: on this railway, so cows and horses would also have
Speaker 2: been loaded as freight. So there was a huge amount
Speaker 2: of traffic going up and down the railway line that week,
Speaker 2: and as a result, he had this huge sum of
Speaker 2: money on his desk in front of him at the
Speaker 2: moment that he was killed.
Speaker 1: Is it determined pretty quickly whether or not these weapons
Speaker 1: there's a heavy object you said that was used to
Speaker 1: beat him viciously, and then a razor or something used
Speaker 1: to cut his throat. Were those things that were present
Speaker 1: in his office. I know that eventually we're going to
Speaker 1: get to where they're found.
Speaker 2: One of the things that's quite interesting about this case,
Speaker 2: comparing it with how murder investigations go today, is there
Speaker 2: was very little heed paid to the importance of the
Speaker 2: murder scene, the crime scene. There's no sense that you've
Speaker 2: got to preserve evidence, that you've got to look for traces,
Speaker 2: or that you've got to look for particular objects there.
Speaker 2: So by the time the police actually a summoned to
Speaker 2: investigate the scene, literally dozens of people have been even
Speaker 2: people just wanting to go into the room to have
Speaker 2: a look and see what it was like, what was
Speaker 2: going on. People were taking souvenirs from the room even
Speaker 2: before the police had had the chance to examine it.
Speaker 2: So they didn't have a pristine scene by any means.
Speaker 2: But objects they found there really probably immediately they could
Speaker 2: see that there was no murder weapon on the scene.
Speaker 2: They found a small pen knife which had evidently been
Speaker 2: used as a sort of office work, maybe for sort
Speaker 2: of cutting the strings on bundles of papers, that sort
Speaker 2: of thing. There was nothing sharp enough to have caused
Speaker 2: a wound that's described by one of the doctors who
Speaker 2: examined the body as having almost entirely severed his neck.
Speaker 2: The cuts of this blade had gone so deep that
Speaker 2: he had almost exposed the spine from the front of
Speaker 2: the neck. It was a really very extreme injury, and
Speaker 2: similarly the skull had been very badly fractured in several places,
Speaker 2: so it was of heavy object. There was absolutely nothing
Speaker 2: suitable in the room for causing such severe injuries. There
Speaker 2: was brief discussion at the inquest, which took place forty
Speaker 2: eight hours later in the same building. There was brief
Speaker 2: discussion of whether a poke which had been found next
Speaker 2: to the fire might have been involved, but it was
Speaker 2: a sort of slim, slender, cast iron object. There was
Speaker 2: absolutely no way it could have caused those injuries. So
Speaker 2: pretty quickly the police understood that they were also looking
Speaker 2: for murder weapons as well as the murderer himself.
Speaker 1: The door locked on the inside. These are not the
Speaker 1: kind of locks where we can do the little thumb
Speaker 1: lock where you can lock it now on the inside
Speaker 1: and shut the door and it'll be locked to anybody
Speaker 1: on the outside. Did somebody have to have a key
Speaker 1: to be able to do this?
Speaker 2: Well, I think it's worth describing the room where his
Speaker 2: body was found first of all, so he was in
Speaker 2: the cashier's office, which was on the first floor of
Speaker 2: the building. And again it's worth saying that one of
Speaker 2: the reasons I've found this quite an attractive story is
Speaker 2: that the setting was not just a railway station, but
Speaker 2: a railway station where there was a permanent residential staff.
Speaker 2: So there is the station house where several people lived.
Speaker 2: The station master lived in an apartment in the basement
Speaker 2: with his family. There are a couple of other families
Speaker 2: that lived there full time. There were always people in residence,
Speaker 2: and George Little's office was on the first floor of
Speaker 2: this building. There was a maid who came and went,
Speaker 2: who would make the fire and then clean the rooms
Speaker 2: after everybody had left, And there was more than one
Speaker 2: way in and out of his room, the door which
Speaker 2: was lockable, and then there are a couple of windows,
Speaker 2: one of which overlooked the great roof that went over
Speaker 2: the train shed itself. And when his body was found,
Speaker 2: the door was locked. Initially it was thought that it
Speaker 2: had been locked from the inside. That turned out not
Speaker 2: to have been the case in fact. And then there
Speaker 2: was also the window, And actually both of these routes
Speaker 2: remained plausible entry and exit routes for the mergerer for
Speaker 2: months afterwards. In fact, what was probably the cases they
Speaker 2: established quite quickly was that the mergerer had probably gone
Speaker 2: in through the door and exited through the window, and
Speaker 2: there was a route that they established. It was possible
Speaker 2: to get out of the window and then walk along
Speaker 2: the roof and then down a ladder into one of
Speaker 2: the restaurants one of the laboratories on the station platform.
Speaker 2: So there was a sort of multiplicity of options that
Speaker 2: possibilities that were open.
Speaker 1: Could this have been a crime of opportunity in that
Speaker 1: someone saw his light on late one night and you
Speaker 1: could see that visibly from wherever the public could access it.
Speaker 1: Or was this a situation where somebody would have had
Speaker 1: to know his schedule or was sort of observing him
Speaker 1: knowing he was going to be alone and that this
Speaker 1: would be a safe thing to do well.
Speaker 2: The honest answer is yes to both. But one of
Speaker 2: the things the police really struggled with was to understand
Speaker 2: the circumstances. There were reasons for thinking that it had
Speaker 2: to be somebody who knew the station premises well, because
Speaker 2: the station house itself was locked up after one of
Speaker 2: the late trains had left in the early evening, and
Speaker 2: at that point it was possible for a member of
Speaker 2: the public to walk into the station house and find
Speaker 2: his office, but you would have to know a quite
Speaker 2: complicated route, which involved going downstairs to the basement and
Speaker 2: then up a backset of stairs in order to get
Speaker 2: to the office. At the same time, there was also
Speaker 2: the possibility that it had been a crime of opportunity,
Speaker 2: because the building was fundamentally open to anybody any member
Speaker 2: of the public during the day, and there were numerous
Speaker 2: hiding places where somebody could have hidden. The investigation, which
Speaker 2: lasted weeks and then stretched out into months, lasted so
Speaker 2: long partly because there were so many different possibilities, both
Speaker 2: of the nature of the crime but also who had
Speaker 2: committed it.
Speaker 1: Let's I guess start with what they think the motive is.
Speaker 1: They see this man badly beaten. Is this what now?
Speaker 1: I don't know if this is a UK term also,
Speaker 1: but in America this would be called like an overkill,
Speaker 1: like somebody really has beaten this person far more than
Speaker 1: needed to just disable someone or quickly kill someone and
Speaker 1: take money or take whatever they wanted and then leave.
Speaker 1: This seemed personal.
Speaker 2: There was a ferocity to the nature of the attack
Speaker 2: that really took people's breath away. That's worth saying. It's
Speaker 2: one of the reasons that it absolutely gripped Dublin. When
Speaker 2: this was first announced in the papers within forty eight
Speaker 2: hours of his death, nobody could remember something quite as
Speaker 2: appallingly violent as this, and in fact it led the
Speaker 2: police to think at first that there might have been
Speaker 2: some sort of motive like revenge involved, But when they
Speaker 2: looked into his family background, they found that actually he
Speaker 2: was an extremely quiet and reserved man. He was a
Speaker 2: member of a Christian sect, the Plymouth Brethren, was absolutely pacifist,
Speaker 2: did not believe in holding grudges. He was honest to
Speaker 2: a fault. He had few close friends, but he was
Speaker 2: universally well liked. There was no grounds for thinking that
Speaker 2: this could have been a sort of personal motive, so
Speaker 2: that left the idea that it was either robbery or
Speaker 2: just a random attack. And at first it seemed that
Speaker 2: nothing had been taken, because when they found his body
Speaker 2: they discovered that his table his desk was piled high
Speaker 2: with gold coins and banknotes hundreds and hundreds of pounds,
Speaker 2: an absolute fortune to any normal Dubliner. So they thought, well,
Speaker 2: this can't possibly have been robbery, and it was only
Speaker 2: after the accounting department downstairs had gone through every pile
Speaker 2: of money on his desk and compared the sums that
Speaker 2: they counted up with what was in his books. That
Speaker 2: a very substantial sum of money turned out to be missing,
Speaker 2: and at that point they realized that the motive almost
Speaker 2: certainly was financial.
Speaker 1: I still cannot believe when dealing with that amount of money,
Speaker 1: I understand that Dublin was not high crime or any
Speaker 1: violent crime. It's so hard to believe that there's not
Speaker 1: at least another security guard or something somebody there when
Speaker 1: you have that much money and you're there alone at night,
Speaker 1: it is astonishing.
Speaker 2: Even more than that. George Little had only been the
Speaker 2: chief cashier there for about six months, and when he
Speaker 2: was appointed, one of the first things he did was
Speaker 2: make representations to to his bosses that they needed to
Speaker 2: install a screen, a physical barrier to prevent people walking
Speaker 2: straight into his office. And they did eventually get somebody,
Speaker 2: a carpenter, to come up and build a screen so
Speaker 2: that it wasn't possible to walk in that you have
Speaker 2: to go to a little window and talk to him
Speaker 2: through the window. And in fact, he didn't even have
Speaker 2: a lock on the door. And this isn't a city
Speaker 2: that had really extraordinary poverty. Just within a few miles
Speaker 2: of the front door of this station, it had received
Speaker 2: thousands of I mean refugees is not too strong a word.
Speaker 2: From the Great Famine of the previous decade, many many
Speaker 2: Irish people had starved, others had emigrated, and many more
Speaker 2: had left the countryside in search of food and accommodation
Speaker 2: in Dublin. So there was a huge poverty problem. And
Speaker 2: the idea that these hundreds of pounds would not be
Speaker 2: a target for criminals is breathtaking. So yes, I agree,
Speaker 2: But even that was heightened security arrangements. But so much
Speaker 2: more would have been done to protect him in those circumstances.
Speaker 1: Tell me what was forensically available in eighteen fifty six,
Speaker 1: I know, not fingerprinting, although I know we're not too
Speaker 1: far away from fingerprinting, at least in Europe. But what
Speaker 1: else is there? I mean, my memory, at least in
Speaker 1: the United States dealing with a case from eighteen forty
Speaker 1: three was you pretty much had to catch the person
Speaker 1: red handed, I mean, in the middle of the act,
Speaker 1: or have a really reliable witness. What could they even
Speaker 1: use at this point?
Speaker 2: Very little. There are a couple of moments where actual
Speaker 2: scientists are called upon. There was, for instance, on the
Speaker 2: first examination of the station, the police found a red
Speaker 2: stain on one of the door posts one of the
Speaker 2: entrances to the station house, and a section of this
Speaker 2: doorpost was cut out, physically cut out, and sent to
Speaker 2: a professor of chemistry with a request that he tested
Speaker 2: to see if it might be a blood stain. And
Speaker 2: he tested it and said he wasn't sure. He had
Speaker 2: no idea. Similarly, when a murder weapon was found, which
Speaker 2: turned out to be a fitter's hammer, which is an
Speaker 2: enormously heavy hammer, which was carried in a locomotive by
Speaker 2: the driver and was used elsewhere in the station for
Speaker 2: a variety of maintenance and building tasks. There was a
Speaker 2: substance found on the head of this hammer which might
Speaker 2: or might not have been human hair. Again, they attempt
Speaker 2: to find out whether it is human hair. They think
Speaker 2: it looks like it, but they absolutely can't prove it
Speaker 2: in court, So there is no fingerprinting. The examination of
Speaker 2: the crime scene is rudimentary and takes place far too late. Anyway,
Speaker 2: the only evidence that you might say has a sort
Speaker 2: of monoicum of modernity to it is that provided by
Speaker 2: the doctors, you know these days it would be done
Speaker 2: by a pathologist. But his body was examined by three doctors,
Speaker 2: and in fact, when the murder weapon is found, the
Speaker 2: hammer is discovered at the bottom of a canal, they
Speaker 2: actually exhume his body to see if the head of
Speaker 2: the hammer fits into the wounds on his skull, which
Speaker 2: is a slightly horrifying idea now that you dig up
Speaker 2: a body just to do that and in fact provide
Speaker 2: evidence which is probably not all that conclusive. But that
Speaker 2: was the only of course they had.
Speaker 1: Well, let me ask you a series of questions about
Speaker 1: what you just said. So let's say they can't identify
Speaker 1: that this is blood on this piece of wood, and
Speaker 1: then let's say that we can say that this is
Speaker 1: definitively hair, that is human hair. We're not at a
Speaker 1: point where they can determine whose blood this is or
Speaker 1: point to, you know, who the suspect could possibly be.
Speaker 1: All they could say is a murder happened, which to
Speaker 1: me seems of course very obvious. A murder happened here.
Speaker 1: And then the same thing with the weapon. I suppose
Speaker 1: maybe there's a clue within the weapon, like it's a
Speaker 1: specific kind of hammer, that only one person at the
Speaker 1: railway station would have owned. But other than that, what
Speaker 1: good does it do to do these different things? Do
Speaker 1: you think?
Speaker 2: Very little, I would suggest. But one has to also
Speaker 2: bear in mind that the type of case that the
Speaker 2: Crown is hoping to put to together, sorry of the
Speaker 2: Crown being the prosecutors, that the type of case that
Speaker 2: the prosecutors are trying to put together when it comes
Speaker 2: to a court case, the sort of court case that
Speaker 2: they end up with, is one that relies very heavily
Speaker 2: on super In fact, sorry not very heavily, exclusively on
Speaker 2: circumstantial evidence. And a detail like that about there being
Speaker 2: some hair on the hammer may prove absolutely nothing, but
Speaker 2: it's being seen by the prosecutors and the investigators as
Speaker 2: a potential link in a very long chain of circumstantial evidence,
Speaker 2: something which on its own means nothing, but when combined
Speaker 2: with a lot of other apparently trivial findings, might actually
Speaker 2: add up to something which to a jury looks like
Speaker 2: a convincing line of argument.
Speaker 1: Or to a suspect, if there's more than one. You know,
Speaker 1: I did a story on Burke and Hare out of Scotland,
Speaker 1: and the only way that they could get one of
Speaker 1: them was to get the other one to turn on him.
Speaker 1: And so you know, when you think about that, if
Speaker 1: you're accumulating all of the circumstantial evidence, which right might
Speaker 1: arriors now be mean, but if you present that, if
Speaker 1: you find there are two suspects who might have been
Speaker 1: working together, and you present work. We have all this evidence,
Speaker 1: and he doesn't know how not valuable some of this
Speaker 1: might be. Maybe he's more willing to turn on the
Speaker 1: other person, I suppose. I know that's not particularly the
Speaker 1: case in this story, but I was thinking that, like, boy,
Speaker 1: you gather enough stuff, even though it might not seem
Speaker 1: like it's going to lead anywhere, at least it looks
Speaker 1: to the public like you're moving forward.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, and there is I mean, there is a
Speaker 2: particularity to this case which is probably worth mentioning, which
Speaker 2: is the identity of the man who eventually stood trial
Speaker 2: for this and the nature of the evidence that the
Speaker 2: prosecutors were able to offer against him. And they were
Speaker 2: hugely inconvenience by the fact that the person who accused
Speaker 2: him was none other than his wife. That was a
Speaker 2: fact of great significance in English and Irish law in
Speaker 2: the eighteen fifties, because at that point in legal history,
Speaker 2: it was not possible for a wife to offer evidence
Speaker 2: against her own husband. There's this peculiarity that at that
Speaker 2: point a wife was still seen as the literally the
Speaker 2: possession of a husband and part of him, which meant
Speaker 2: that one person was essentially giving evidence against himself, which
Speaker 2: is a sort of obvious logical absurdity, and it leads
Speaker 2: this situation where somebody can come forward and say, my
Speaker 2: husband has confessed this crime. I know what he did.
Speaker 2: I can show you how he did it. I can
Speaker 2: show you where he hid the money, I can show
Speaker 2: you what he did with the murder weapon. But none
Speaker 2: of that evidence, which would otherwise be damning, is admissible
Speaker 2: in a court of law because a wife is simply
Speaker 2: prohibited from giving that evidence to a judge. Now, that
Speaker 2: is the reason that in this case the police were
Speaker 2: absolutely compelled to put together the most convincing, circumstantial case
Speaker 2: that they could.
Speaker 1: Well, before we get to the main suspect, tell me,
Speaker 1: I think there is one extraordinary event involving and alluded
Speaker 1: to it before. How they secured the two murder weapons?
Speaker 1: Tell me, first of all, how did they decide on
Speaker 1: where to look for these weapons.
Speaker 2: Well, this is the single biggest investigation in the history
Speaker 2: of the Dublin Metropolitan Police up to this point. The
Speaker 2: scale of it is kind of astonishing. The police at
Speaker 2: this point had a single detective division and they were
Speaker 2: pulling in officers from all the other neighboring forces that
Speaker 2: weren't detectives as well, and they ended up scarring every
Speaker 2: inch of the Broadstone Terminus three times. That's everything from
Speaker 2: the roof right down to the sellers, every single room
Speaker 2: in that building. They interviewed pretty much every employee who
Speaker 2: worked there and just word saying something about the scale
Speaker 2: of this as well. By the way they had there
Speaker 2: were workshops where carriages and engines were built. There were
Speaker 2: maintenance offices, there were the ticket offices. There were the housekeepers,
Speaker 2: the station masters, there were stationed police officers who were there.
Speaker 2: It was an extraordinarily large operation. Sixty people worked in
Speaker 2: the station house alone, and as part of their search,
Speaker 2: they drained the canal, which at that point it ended
Speaker 2: in a basin right outside the station. So they drained
Speaker 2: the canal and this army of workmen sifted through the
Speaker 2: stinking mud at the bottom of the canal, and that's
Speaker 2: where they found first the hammer and then subsequently not one,
Speaker 2: but two raisers.
Speaker 1: Now this would be a hammer you said that would
Speaker 1: have been found by anybody laying around in the railway station.
Speaker 1: Is that right?
Speaker 2: Well, there were many. There were many hammers in the
Speaker 2: station because they were used for a variety of tasks.
Speaker 2: They would also have been found on a locomotive for
Speaker 2: the use of the driver, if I suppose if something
Speaker 2: broke down when they're on a journey. But the hammers
Speaker 2: were actually made in the workshops at the station, and
Speaker 2: so it was easy to identify it as a hammer
Speaker 2: that must have been made there and therefore was used
Speaker 2: by somebody who actually lived and lived or worked at
Speaker 2: the station.
Speaker 1: So this would not have been a hammer that some
Speaker 1: stranger could have come in and picked up and said, oh,
Speaker 1: this would be a good murder weapon. This had to
Speaker 1: be with somebody who had access to it.
Speaker 2: It strongly pointed to the suggestion that there was somebody
Speaker 2: at the station who worked there who had done it.
Speaker 2: It's not an object that a member of the public
Speaker 2: would just kind of stumble across. You had to be
Speaker 2: in one of the workshops or actually on board one
Speaker 2: of the locomotives to have access to one. In fact,
Speaker 2: there was. There's a storekeeper and mister Gunning, who is
Speaker 2: quite heavily involved in the story and who at one
Speaker 2: point becomes the police's favored suspect. He is interviewed about
Speaker 2: how they keep the hammers in the store, and it's
Speaker 2: behind a counter where he has to sign out the
Speaker 2: hammers to whoever wants to use one, so that that
Speaker 2: is seen as the obvious source of them of the
Speaker 2: murder weapon.
Speaker 1: So I might be wrong here, but this doesn't seem
Speaker 1: like a practical murder weapon to me. Didn't you say
Speaker 1: it's very very heavy? Or is he lugging this around everywhere?
Speaker 2: It's heavy? But at the same time, the station is
Speaker 2: absolutely full of very powerfully built laborers who were doing
Speaker 2: extremely physical jobs. They were building locomotives, they were building
Speaker 2: railway carriages. There were a lot of very physically strong
Speaker 2: guys there.
Speaker 1: When we talk about a razor, you said they found
Speaker 1: two razors. Is this like a straight razor like what
Speaker 1: men would use to shave with.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's what we would call here a cut threat raiser.
Speaker 2: I don't know if that's the phrase that you use
Speaker 2: as well.
Speaker 1: I don't think so.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're known kind of cut threat raisers typically, but yes,
Speaker 2: they're they're long, straight, very thin and kind of fearsomely
Speaker 2: sharp blade that you would you'd sharpen on a wetstone.
Speaker 2: They're kind of terrifying objects, but yes, and in fact
Speaker 2: were sort of notorious as the weapon of choice for
Speaker 2: a certain type of murder in this at this period
Speaker 2: of the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: Sweeney Todd raizor is what I'm picturing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well exactly. I mean Sweeney Todd is probably the
Speaker 2: best known example. But yes, yeah, you know, it's a
Speaker 2: terrifying and probably the sharpest blade that would be available
Speaker 2: on a day to day basis in a city at
Speaker 2: this point.
Speaker 1: Now you've mentioned mister Gunning. They eventually dismiss as a suspect, right,
Speaker 1: the store manager.
Speaker 2: Yes, But one of the interesting things about him is
Speaker 2: the police were absolutely convinced of his guilt. There were
Speaker 2: a number of slightly shady things about him, apparently, one
Speaker 2: of which was that his furniture seemed to be worth
Speaker 2: much more than he was earning. He also seemed to
Speaker 2: have a track record of maybe doing some shady dealing
Speaker 2: in his job as manager of the stores. He was
Speaker 2: probably acquiring things to the stores that maybe he sold
Speaker 2: on for his own profit, and he was a trusted
Speaker 2: member of the company, so this probably wasn't being noticed
Speaker 2: by the management. In addition to that, there were a
Speaker 2: couple of little incidents where he gave what were subsequently
Speaker 2: shown to be untruthful answers to the police when they
Speaker 2: came to investigate him. I think it's worth saying this
Speaker 2: that one of the reasons I know all this is that,
Speaker 2: amazingly the police files for this case, which is, you know,
Speaker 2: more than one hundred and seventy years old, now, the
Speaker 2: police files have survived, and so I have seen notes
Speaker 2: where police officers discussed the behavior of their suspects in private.
Speaker 2: And there is even in the case of Bernard Gunning,
Speaker 2: the record of surveillance that was placed on him for
Speaker 2: a period of many months. I find this slightly jaw dropping. Now.
Speaker 2: The paper trail shows that he was being followed by
Speaker 2: plainclothes officers under conditions of secrecy for at least three
Speaker 2: or four months in early eighteen fifty seven, and there
Speaker 2: are documents where these officers write what he's doing in
Speaker 2: his spare time late at night, going to hotels, meeting
Speaker 2: unnamed women and going with them to another house in
Speaker 2: the city. So they were absolutely convinced that Gunning was guilty,
Speaker 2: but they didn't have any evidence to prove it, and
Speaker 2: that's what they resorted to, these plainclothes officers tailing him
Speaker 2: around town, reporting on his doings to senior officers.
Speaker 1: Well, we end up dismissing mister Gunning as a suspect.
Speaker 1: How do we land on the man who would eventually
Speaker 1: be the focus of the Dublin Metropolitan Police.
Speaker 2: Well, after an investigation which spanned about six to nine months.
Speaker 2: It began in the eighteen fifty six and the last
Speaker 2: written record of the initial investigation dates from about mid May,
Speaker 2: it all goes quiet, and it's clear that the police
Speaker 2: had despaired of catching the killer and the politicians were
Speaker 2: too embarrassed to keep funding it. After that, it goes
Speaker 2: quiet for about another month, and then out of the blue,
Speaker 2: a woman walked into Well. She knocked on the door
Speaker 2: of the chief prosecutor for that part of Ireland and
Speaker 2: said that she knew who had committed the murder and
Speaker 2: it was her husband. And later that same day she
Speaker 2: led police to three separate sites on the estate where
Speaker 2: they found caches of money, and she also showed them
Speaker 2: where her husband had destroyed evidence, including the clothes he'd
Speaker 2: been wearing, and provided other essentially proof, or so she claimed,
Speaker 2: of his guilt. And that's where the sort of second
Speaker 2: phase kicks in, where they arrest their man and they
Speaker 2: prepare evidence to put him on trial. But as I
Speaker 2: said earlier, they were hamstrung by the fact that they
Speaker 2: simply couldn't use any of the absolutely brilliant evidence they'd
Speaker 2: just been handed by his wife. Now they were able
Speaker 2: to use the evidence of his children, and they interviewed
Speaker 2: all the children, although the youngest was so young that
Speaker 2: his answers really weren't of any value. But they ended
Speaker 2: up putting two of these children on the stand in
Speaker 2: the subsequent trial. The oldest child remained loyal to his
Speaker 2: father and was therefore of no use to them and
Speaker 2: was not required to give evidence. But this very interesting
Speaker 2: family dynamic then emerges, which is that the father and
Speaker 2: the oldest son remain allies. The father being on trial,
Speaker 2: the other children which is two daughters and a younger son,
Speaker 2: and the wife essentially never speak to him again.
Speaker 1: And the suspect is James Sprawlin. Is it how you
Speaker 1: say his last name?
Speaker 2: Yes, Spollin, who's variously spelt, and he's Spolin but also
Speaker 2: known as Spolin.
Speaker 1: So his wife, James's wife is not allowed to give
Speaker 1: evidence because she's considered a possess of his, but the
Speaker 1: children are not. That children can testify against him. That
Speaker 1: doesn't make sense to me.
Speaker 2: Well, the key point is not so much that she
Speaker 2: was a possession of him, but actually in law was
Speaker 2: regarded as part of him. So husband and wife after
Speaker 2: the union are I mean union is the crucial word.
Speaker 2: They become one entity. Okay. There was only one exception
Speaker 2: to that in law, which was that if a husband
Speaker 2: assaulted his wife, it was felt that he had thereby
Speaker 2: sort of dissolved the union, and then a wife was
Speaker 2: able to give evidence against her own husband. But it
Speaker 2: was only in that very specific offense of assault against
Speaker 2: the spouse. In fact, that provision was not changed in
Speaker 2: English law until I think eighteen ninety seven, so it
Speaker 2: persisted for really quite a long time.
Speaker 1: Tell me about the dynamic from what you know between
Speaker 1: James and his wife. Is this a man who's considered abusive?
Speaker 1: Why would she turn on on the I presume to
Speaker 1: be the breadwinner of her family.
Speaker 2: It seems to have been. Yes, I think coercive is
Speaker 2: probably a good word for the nature of their relationship,
Speaker 2: and he was probably abusive her account, which is all
Speaker 2: we really have to go on. But it seems very
Speaker 2: sort of credible. Is that essentially after the crime she
Speaker 2: accuses him of, I think the relationship seems to have
Speaker 2: broken down entirely. But there are several incidents that she documents.
Speaker 2: One is that she was sick and he refused to
Speaker 2: allow a doctrin in the house on grounds of cost.
Speaker 2: But even though she was possibly quite seriously ill, he
Speaker 2: refused to get any medical attention for her at all.
Speaker 2: She also suspected him of trying to poison her, and
Speaker 2: she was very clearly unhappy that she had been forced
Speaker 2: to cover up his crime. She and her eldest son
Speaker 2: had seen him returning in her account covered in blood
Speaker 2: and carrying a bucket full of money, and when he
Speaker 2: saw that she had seen this, he forced her to
Speaker 2: promise that she would now tell a soul, and also
Speaker 2: forced her to help him conceal the money and burn
Speaker 2: the clothes he'd been wearing. Following his arrest, she wanted
Speaker 2: never to have anything to do with him, and in
Speaker 2: fact she ends up in a safe house under an
Speaker 2: assumed name because she is never going to be safe
Speaker 2: from him again. But he was actually quite keen to
Speaker 2: resume the marriage as if nothing had.
Speaker 1: Happened, knowing how much acrimony there is between these two people,
Speaker 1: particularly for the wife, who you know is suspicious of him,
Speaker 1: and he doesn't seem like a very good person based
Speaker 1: on everything she said and everything you've read. Is there
Speaker 1: any doubt in your mind that James Sprawlin was the
Speaker 1: one who committed this murder?
Speaker 2: Well, there are two aspects to this. One is was
Speaker 2: the outcome of the trial the correct outcome? And the
Speaker 2: other is was it him that did it? And there
Speaker 2: is no doubt in my mind that the prosecutors were
Speaker 2: in an impossible situation without the evidence that they might
Speaker 2: have gained from his wife. They had the evidence of
Speaker 2: his eldest daughter, but it became apparent during cross examination
Speaker 2: that she had been probably quite severely coached, and also
Speaker 2: was not really old enough to understand the nature of
Speaker 2: the questions or to remember accurately what had happened on
Speaker 2: one night nine months previously. And it's I think quite
Speaker 2: a gripping court scene because her evidence is absolutely brutally
Speaker 2: taken apart by the defense barrister. It's quite clear that
Speaker 2: the nature of the contradictions that turn up in the
Speaker 2: prosecution evidence in court make it absolutely impossible for a
Speaker 2: jury in its right mind to convict the man who
Speaker 2: was standing accused of the crime. On the other hand,
Speaker 2: it seems quite clear to me that the man who
Speaker 2: was accused of the crime did it. He never gets
Speaker 2: quite to the point of confessing to it, but reading
Speaker 2: between the lines, there are moments when he more or
Speaker 2: less acknowledges what he's done. And one of the things
Speaker 2: that I quite enjoyed about the story is that there's
Speaker 2: this amazing period of about two weeks after he's acquitted,
Speaker 2: and he's actually roaming free in Dublin, a free man.
Speaker 2: But half of Dublin, or even two thirds of Dublin
Speaker 2: thinks he's definitely the guilty man. And yet he decides
Speaker 2: to go on stage in a Dublin theater and do
Speaker 2: a one man show about why it couldn't possibly have
Speaker 2: been him that killed George Little at the Broadstone railway station.
Speaker 2: He was absolutely shameless and had no sense of there's
Speaker 2: no delicacy there or any sense that the dead man's
Speaker 2: family might be impossibly offended by his behavior. So he
Speaker 2: turns into a sort of horribly compelling character, and one
Speaker 2: who certainly lacks self awareness. Even if he were not guilty,
Speaker 2: he certainly behaved in the most appalling way.
Speaker 1: Who would put him on stage, Thomas, I mean somebody
Speaker 1: who owned a theater or whatever said, Okay, this seems
Speaker 1: like a good idea. I mean this, doesn't this seem
Speaker 1: beneath the people of Dublin.
Speaker 2: Well, all, it was all at his own instigation, so
Speaker 2: he would have hired He would have hired the theater himself,
Speaker 2: and the receipts were absolutely pitiful. I think he made
Speaker 2: a loss that the number of attendees is actually recorded
Speaker 2: in one of the newspaper accounts. And he had booked
Speaker 2: this theater for two daily shows for a week's run initially,
Speaker 2: and I think he was hoping to not only extend
Speaker 2: the run but then go on tour around Ireland with
Speaker 2: his show as well. And in the event he did
Speaker 2: two shows. He did one matinee and one evening show,
Speaker 2: and the first one things became a bit rarey on
Speaker 2: the streets. But during a second show, there was a
Speaker 2: full blown riot on the streets outside, people throwing rocks
Speaker 2: and breaking windows, and inside the theater he was booed
Speaker 2: off the stage. So it was a catastrophe for him personally.
Speaker 2: And that was the moment at which it became apparent
Speaker 2: that he could no longer stay in Dublin, and that's
Speaker 2: the moment he decides to leave Ireland and find a
Speaker 2: way of emigrating.
Speaker 1: I mean, I have never heard of, certainly in this
Speaker 1: time period, in many time periods, of his socioeconomic background,
Speaker 1: being so determined to salvage his public image that he's
Speaker 1: doing something like this. It's a little shocking to me, it.
Speaker 2: Is, and he becomes like an almost it's a vaudeville act. Really.
Speaker 2: There's an item that I really wish I had been
Speaker 2: able to track down. I'm sure it was destroyed years
Speaker 2: and years ago. But during the trial, and this was
Speaker 2: very common for complex criminal cases in the days before photographs,
Speaker 2: that it was important to give the jurious sense of
Speaker 2: the crime scene and of the sort of wider setting
Speaker 2: in which this action is taking place. So they commissioned
Speaker 2: a very detailed wooden model of the station building. It
Speaker 2: would be a wonderful thing to have now, and this
Speaker 2: enormous it was several feet long. This model was displayed
Speaker 2: in the middle of the courtroom and then the barristers,
Speaker 2: the lawyers would point to bits of it to explain
Speaker 2: what was going on in the examinations they were doing.
Speaker 2: And after the trial, James Spollin, the man who stood
Speaker 2: trial and being a quitted of a crime, manages to
Speaker 2: take possession of this wooden model and takes it with
Speaker 2: him to Liverpool where he ends up and puts it
Speaker 2: on display. So not only is he doing a stage
Speaker 2: show in a theater, he's also doing his exhibition where
Speaker 2: he puts this magnificent wooden model of Broadstone railway station
Speaker 2: in an exhibition hall in Liverpool, and he stands next
Speaker 2: to it giving a sort of lecture explaining all the
Speaker 2: bits of the station and where he was and where
Speaker 2: George Little was when he was killed, and how it
Speaker 2: couldn't possibly have been him that killed him.
Speaker 1: So you would think that the story was over, because
Speaker 1: you know James Sprawlin has been acquitted. He walks away,
Speaker 1: he tries his vaudeville act. It doesn't work. It is
Speaker 1: an unsolved officially an unsolved case. I'm assuming the murder
Speaker 1: of George Little. Where does this phrenologist, doctor Frederick Bridges
Speaker 1: come in? Why is he coming in at all? At
Speaker 1: this point?
Speaker 2: It's a fortunate quirk that he turns up because it
Speaker 2: adds this extra whole dimension to the story. But he
Speaker 2: he just happened by chance to be living in Liverpool.
Speaker 2: And the reason that Spolin and his son, who, as
Speaker 2: I said earlier, remains loyal to his father, James S.
Speaker 2: Bollin and his son end up in Liverpool because they
Speaker 2: are trying to find a way of emigrating to America
Speaker 2: or somewhere else America's In fact, officially we don't know
Speaker 2: where they went to. I suspect strongly it was New York,
Speaker 2: but Liverpool is a place where Irish immigrants typically embark,
Speaker 2: and so he's needing to find a way of raising
Speaker 2: the fair and he is introduced to Frederick Bridges. Now,
Speaker 2: Frederick Bridges was a phrenologist, It's worth saying I think
Speaker 2: that he was. Even in the eighteen fifties, he was
Speaker 2: seen as a bit of an odd ball in the
Speaker 2: haydo of phrenology was between about the seventeen nineties and
Speaker 2: the eighteen twenties. By the eighteen fifties, most scientists really
Speaker 2: did think it was nonsense, but Bridges really stuck to
Speaker 2: his guns, and he had this whole private theory which
Speaker 2: involved a single angle that he measured involving the relationship
Speaker 2: between a person's jawline and their ear and within a
Speaker 2: particular range of angle. He said, essentially, psychopaths as we
Speaker 2: would understand them today, and dangerous murderer types, their measurements
Speaker 2: would be very characteristic, so you could tell them. And
Speaker 2: he had spent years traveling around the country to executions,
Speaker 2: public executions, and he would seek permission from the prison
Speaker 2: governor of the prisons where these executions were taking place,
Speaker 2: and he would take a plaster cast of the head
Speaker 2: of the recently executed man, and then he would take
Speaker 2: these plaster casts home and conduct his measurements. And he
Speaker 2: claimed to approved beyond all doubts that all these murderers
Speaker 2: had a very significant cranial features in common. And from
Speaker 2: this he built up an entire theory relating to violent
Speaker 2: men in the crimes they committed and the shapes of
Speaker 2: their heads. And the reason he was interested in spollen
Speaker 2: was although he had tested his theory repeatedly on dead
Speaker 2: men who were proved to be murdered. He wanted to
Speaker 2: show that his theory also had predictive power. So he
Speaker 2: wanted to show that by measuring an accused murderer's head,
Speaker 2: he could personally prove whether they had committed the crime,
Speaker 2: which you can see how if this actually had any
Speaker 2: truth to it would be an extremely valuable thing that
Speaker 2: you would be able to tell people in advance whether
Speaker 2: they were dangerous or not, and therefore remove them from
Speaker 2: society if they showed a threat.
Speaker 1: So Sprawlin is interested in doing this because he needs
Speaker 1: money to be able to get out of Doublin.
Speaker 2: Is that right, yes, Bridges hears that Spollin is in Liverpool,
Speaker 2: is down on his luck and needs money. So he
Speaker 2: hatches this plan, which is I'm going to get myself
Speaker 2: introduced to James Spollin and I'm going to give him money,
Speaker 2: and in return for that money, I want to measure
Speaker 2: his head. It's one of the strangest faust impacts you'll
Speaker 2: ever hear, but he wants to measure a guy's skull
Speaker 2: in return for a check. Essentially, it takes quite a while,
Speaker 2: but Spallin is a actually convinced, and the deal they
Speaker 2: strike is that in return for making a plaster cast
Speaker 2: of Spolin's head and taking a photograph of him, Bridges
Speaker 2: will pay his fare to emigrate, and fortunately for us,
Speaker 2: he also writes a little pamphlet about this encounter, from
Speaker 2: which we understand that he spent several weeks essentially charming him,
Speaker 2: befriending him. There's a first meeting in a ced pub
Speaker 2: in Liverpool, and then he ends up inviting him to
Speaker 2: meet his wife, and Spoonin and his son go for
Speaker 2: dinner there several times, and eventually he is allowed to
Speaker 2: make the plaster cast and take the photographs, which sadly
Speaker 2: we don't have the original photographs, but there is a
Speaker 2: drawing made from the photographs which gives us a good
Speaker 2: likeness of Sponin, and then, having achieved that, he pays
Speaker 2: for him to emigrate. And we don't know because the
Speaker 2: condition of this one of the conditions of this deal
Speaker 2: was that he was not to divulge ever where he went.
Speaker 2: But we do know the date he left, or rather
Speaker 2: the weekend, and from that it is possible to at
Speaker 2: least rule out many of the many of the options,
Speaker 2: and from what I've seen of I mean, you can
Speaker 2: tell these days. The records are so complete you can
Speaker 2: find out exactly what ships left Liverpool on a single
Speaker 2: weekend in eighteen fifty seven, or in fact it was
Speaker 2: January eighteen fifty eight by the time he embarked. So
Speaker 2: I'm reasonably confident that I know that he did go
Speaker 2: to New York. As I say, it's all shrouded rather
Speaker 2: in mystery that the final days of his life in Liverpool.
Speaker 1: So is Bridges. Doctor Bridges convinced that a man got
Speaker 1: away with murder. After he measures this angle, he.
Speaker 2: Was absolutely convinced to the extent that he wrote a
Speaker 2: letter to the Home Secretary in London saying, this man
Speaker 2: Spallen is so dangerous according to the measurements I have
Speaker 2: taken of his skull, that he ought not to be
Speaker 2: at liberty, and I strongly suggest that you take measures
Speaker 2: to deprive him of his liberty. And this letter survives
Speaker 2: brilliantly the text of it at least, and we also
Speaker 2: know sadly that he didn't receive any response. But you
Speaker 2: can only imagine the reaction of somebody in the Home
Speaker 2: Office in London receiving this letter saying I've measured a
Speaker 2: man's skull and I can tell you he's definitely a murderer.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, you know, phrenology is fascinating. I interviewed
Speaker 1: a neurologist who was teaching at the University of Edinburgh,
Speaker 1: and he really dabbled in phrenology for fun, as like
Speaker 1: a parlor trick, and he showed me a skull and
Speaker 1: all the different sections. It was like you were at
Speaker 1: certain amount of bumps. Here you were extraordinarily passionate, you
Speaker 1: were violent. In another section you were incredibly intelligent or
Speaker 1: a genius or I mean some of the phrases were
Speaker 1: so interesting. So at least doctor Bridges homed in on
Speaker 1: one little section and that's it. But what do you
Speaker 1: think is the significance of that part kind of act
Speaker 1: three of your story with phrenology? Because James Sprawlin's in
Speaker 1: the wind, we have no idea, we think he's in
Speaker 1: New York. Do you feel like this really could have
Speaker 1: led to something, you know, because Bridges was really pushing
Speaker 1: this idea.
Speaker 2: Well, what comes across from reading his account of their
Speaker 2: meetings is two things. One, there is a rawness to
Speaker 2: his descriptions of his encounters with Spollin, which lead me
Speaker 2: to think that they are broadly speaking truthful. But at
Speaker 2: the same time I came inescapably to the conclusion that
Speaker 2: he was a terrific crank. And when he starts writing
Speaker 2: about himself, his version of his life history is so
Speaker 2: unbelievable that there can be no doubt that he was
Speaker 2: to some degree a fantasist. He claims, for instance, that
Speaker 2: at the age of nine, he swam the English Channel.
Speaker 2: There's a brief essay about his own biography which sort
Speaker 2: of prefaces his encounter with Spollin, and it's completely absurd
Speaker 2: the number of things he claims to have taught himself.
Speaker 2: He says he was I think one of twenty children
Speaker 2: or something. He says he swam the channel. He has
Speaker 2: a whole load of completely unlikely adventures, and then is
Speaker 2: returned to his parents by a kindly merchant who terms
Speaker 2: him a genius. So there's a lot of self aggrandizement
Speaker 2: going on there. At the same time, although he was
Speaker 2: obviously regarded with a lot of sort of pity and
Speaker 2: amusement by some of his contemporaries, he had the ear
Speaker 2: of some of the most senior people in government, The
Speaker 2: Prime Minister Palmerston, who had previously been in office and
Speaker 2: at this point in the eighteen fifties was out of
Speaker 2: office again but would later go on to be Prime
Speaker 2: Minister again, was very interested in phrenology and gave Bridges
Speaker 2: an audience at which Bridges was permitted to feel his
Speaker 2: skull and examine him, but also present his ideas about
Speaker 2: the utility of phrenology for detecting criminals, and as a
Speaker 2: result of that he was given a direct grant of
Speaker 2: fifty pounds, which at the time was quite a considerable
Speaker 2: sum of money in order to develop his work.
Speaker 1: I mean, this story to me is so interesting because
Speaker 1: here you have this man, George Little. He's not married, right,
Speaker 1: he doesn't have any kids, He's taking care of members
Speaker 1: of his family, he's working hard. Late one night he's
Speaker 1: murdered brutally and his killer, we're going to go ahead
Speaker 1: and say the killer, right, James Sprawlin is set free
Speaker 1: because of an antiquated law where his wife is not
Speaker 1: allowed to give evidence. And then you know, we might
Speaker 1: have had a massive contribution which would have been terrible
Speaker 1: to investigations based on an antiquated and then a joke
Speaker 1: junk science in phrenology, So sort of like like there's
Speaker 1: several things that are rooted and inaccuracies that really pop
Speaker 1: up in this story of yours.
Speaker 2: Yes, and this is an era before modern techniques of
Speaker 2: criminal investigation, so you sort of can't blame them for
Speaker 2: relying on what was standard at the time. I mean,
Speaker 2: I think this is where actually a parallel with what
Speaker 2: I was writing about before this book, which is the
Speaker 2: history of medicine, is actually quite worthwhile. You can't really
Speaker 2: blame doctors of the eighteenth century for relying on on
Speaker 2: leeches and arsenic and drugs that we now know to
Speaker 2: be harmful rather than helpful, in that they were rooted
Speaker 2: in centuries of tradition and what they thought was good scholarship.
Speaker 2: And the same is true for criminal investigation. Really they
Speaker 2: could only rely on the techniques they knew, and of
Speaker 2: course they used the laws that seemed to be just
Speaker 2: to them. But you know, we have twenty twenty hindsight,
Speaker 2: we can see how ludicrous some of these ideas and
Speaker 2: laws look today, but living in their world and their
Speaker 2: cultural familiar not so much.
Speaker 1: My second book, American Sherlock, was about a forensic scientist
Speaker 1: who worked in the nineteen twenties, where it seems like
Speaker 1: every forensic technique was developed or invented, at least in
Speaker 1: the United States, development of fingerprinting, bloodstained pattern analysis, more
Speaker 1: in depth ballistics, you know, the study of bugs, all
Speaker 1: of these things. And the issue that I have found
Speaker 1: even with the star of my book, the forensic scientist
Speaker 1: Oskar Heinrich, was that he was so definitive. I mean
Speaker 1: it was like, this is what my test says. It
Speaker 1: is the truth. There is no other explanation when you're
Speaker 1: at the nascent era of discovering all of these tools.
Speaker 1: And so when that was for me the dangerous part
Speaker 1: of learning about phrenology, where that is to say, Thomas Morris,
Speaker 1: look at the angle between his ear and you know,
Speaker 1: his mouth, there's along his jawline. Definitively, this is somebody
Speaker 1: who is going to kill someone. And I still think
Speaker 1: those kinds of statements are dangerous to sit on a
Speaker 1: stand as an expert and say there is no other explanation,
Speaker 1: when oftentimes there is you can exclude, but sometimes you
Speaker 1: can't include.
Speaker 2: You know, that's true. Palmerston was a bit of an outlier,
Speaker 2: luckily fortunately for us, Luckily, fortunately for criminal investigation. At
Speaker 2: the time, nobody else really took him seriously, and in fact,
Speaker 2: when he subsequently went back to Ireland on a speaking
Speaker 2: to a thinking that people would be crowding to hear
Speaker 2: crowding into the theaters to hear him talk about Spallen
Speaker 2: and about how this wonderful theory meant that murderers like
Speaker 2: him would in future be caught before they'd even committed
Speaker 2: a crime. Nobody turned up. It was embarrassing. He had
Speaker 2: his luggage full of copies of his book to sell
Speaker 2: and nobody wanted one. And I think after his first
Speaker 2: speaking engagement, the rest of his trip was canceled, so
Speaker 2: he was sort of he was a man out of time.
Speaker 1: Really.
Speaker 2: I suspect if he had been promulgating these ideas forty
Speaker 2: years earlier, or even thirty years earlier, he would have
Speaker 2: had much more of an audience, But as it was,
Speaker 2: his was one of half a dozen sort of crank
Speaker 2: ideas that were indulged in the investigation. Also, at one
Speaker 2: point used a medium. Sadly he or she is not named,
Speaker 2: but they got somebody who claimed to have supernatural powers
Speaker 2: to speak to the dead man to find out who
Speaker 2: had murdered him.
Speaker 1: Well, we start with George Little, the victim, and I
Speaker 1: think we end with George Little. This is a man,
Speaker 1: as I said before, a family man, doing the best
Speaker 1: he can for his family, and he ends up dead
Speaker 1: and ultimately with no justice whatsoever. At the end of
Speaker 1: the day, when you're done writing this book and you've
Speaker 1: closed it up and you've sent it to your editor,
Speaker 1: that's still must weigh on you. You're doing this story with
Speaker 1: all of these interesting things, but ultimately the main person
Speaker 1: at the center of the story doesn't get any justice.
Speaker 2: No, absolutely not, nor do his family. The reason I
Speaker 2: finished the book by returning to his grave and transcribing
Speaker 2: the headstone inscription on it. It's for his family. It's
Speaker 2: a very sad story. At that point. There's very little
Speaker 2: idea of sort of compensating the victims of crime and
Speaker 2: their families. And the best that is done for him
Speaker 2: is that the railway company decides to instigate a collection
Speaker 2: basically a charitable collection, to raise enough money to ensure
Speaker 2: that his mother, who is an elderly woman, has enough
Speaker 2: to live on for the rest of her life. And
Speaker 2: so this appeal goes out and actually they raise only
Speaker 2: something like two thirds of the targeted amount. I think
Speaker 2: they were trying to raise one hundred pounds, wh should
Speaker 2: be enough to fund an annuity which would give her
Speaker 2: an annual income for the rest of her life. And
Speaker 2: they get only two thirds of the way to that target.
Speaker 2: And a lot of care is taken through official channels
Speaker 2: to make sure that James Spollin's wife, the woman who's
Speaker 2: accused him, is all right, and that she has funds
Speaker 2: to live with her children, and that she's given anonymity
Speaker 2: in a new place to live. And there is absolutely
Speaker 2: no record at all in the papers that I've seen
Speaker 2: that anybody from government even once thought of George Little's family.
Speaker 2: There's no record of a letter, of a visit or
Speaker 2: anything of that nature. It seems that as soon as
Speaker 2: George Little died, the official world just forgot them.
Speaker 1: If you love historical true crimes stories, check out the
Speaker 1: audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Speaker 1: Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and Don't Forget. There are
Speaker 1: twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More
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Speaker 1: been an exactly Right Production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi.
Speaker 1: Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
Speaker 1: by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by
Speaker 1: Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff, and
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