Dublin can arguably lay claim to one of the most foul and repulsive killings in the annals of murder. This happened in 1717 and a report on a chapbook printed in Edinburgh gives the details in the most explicit form:
There was lately a fellow in Dublin called Charles Lovegrive, apothecary from Germany, who, seeing his bedfellow the skipper of a small vessel receive some gold and money, killed him when he was asleep; and to conceal the murder, he cut off his head from his shoulders, and burned his skull in the fire, quartered and divided him into pieces, and at several times carried him to the waterside, and threw him in at Essex Quay… The like may warn people of all ranks to guard against bad fellowship…
Such grisly tales are the staple material of crime casebooks, and are common in all modern cities, but in Dublin we have some examples from the records that show with acute and powerful human experience both ends of the spectrum of crime. Two examples of this will make a fitting coda to this collection of stories.
The first is a tale of the two Bridgets: in March 1821, a young woman who was living in the home of a Captain Peck in Portland Place near Mountjoy Square was murdered. Apparently, a girl called out to her that the Captain had had an accident and that he wanted the girl to take his greatcoat to him. When the girl did so, she returned to find the house ransacked, and there had been no accident but her mistress had been killed. It took no time at all to find and arrest two Bridgets – Ennis and Butterly.
They had killed Miss Thompson, and there was a back-story to the case, as Bridget Ennis told people in gaol. The report states that she had had an intimacy with the Captain while employed by him. The Bridgets had then planned to run away to England and needed funds. Robbing the Captain’s house was to find some cash for that purpose, but the girls murdered Miss Thompson. Butterly testified: ‘I had dragged Miss Thompson two or three steps down before Ennis had left the house but had not given her a blow or other injury at that time; I pushed her down the stairs until I got her into the kitchen. I then seized a poker and began to beat her…’
It all led to the gallows. It was a case as common as drinking tea. The criminal law machine ground on, with the desperate underclass as the fodder, pushed to extreme savagery by their poverty and disenchantment and envy as they saw the very rich walk around in a world of the poverty of the masses.
On the other hand, just thirty years later we have the case of Vladimir Pecherin, working at the time for the Redemptorist mission in Dublin. By the side of the previous case, this is bizarre. In 1855, Pecherin was preaching in Kingstown (Dun Laoghaire). On 5 November he took part in the burning of some ‘immoral literature’. But it appears that a local Protestant clergyman ordered a boy to throw a Bible on the pyre and it was soon made known what Pecherin had done. He went to trial in Green Street (where Newgate had stood). The whole business was such a farce that at one point in the examinations we have this interchange:
Mr Curran: How do you know it was a testament you saw?
Witness: I saw the word ‘testament’ on the book.
Mr Curran: Was it a new or an old testament?
Witness: It was newly bound.
Pecherin was acquitted and the general populace of the city were very much on his side. His body was buried in Glasnevin but has since been exhumed and lies elsewhere, on the orders of the Redemptorists, according to writer Zonovy Zinik.
Such are the vagaries and ironies of the history of crime, and crime in Dublin has always given us stories of wonder, farce and sheer high level drama and sensation.