JAMES GREENACRE’S CASE was recounted in a pamphlet that would have been printed in large numbers to meet the public’s thirst for knowledge about the murder of Hannah Brown. His death mask is held at the Crime Museum. Casts used to be taken of the heads of executed prisoners with the apparent aim of assisting research into crime in a period when phrenology (measuring skulls to ascertain details of parts of the mind) was fashionable.
PC Samuel Pegler was patrolling Edgware Road three days after Christmas in 1836, when he was called to a flagstone that had been covering a large sack, inside which was the nude torso of a woman, inclusive of arms, but without legs or a head. There were no detectives in the Metropolitan Police at that time, so Local Inspector George Feltham, who had once been in the Bow Street horse patrol, took over investigating.
Crime scene investigation was virtually non-existent in those days as the scientific developments had not yet been made. The police loaded the torso on to a wheelbarrow from a local building site and took it to Paddington Workhouse where the parish surgeon concluded that the victim was above average height, middle-aged and had no signs of disease. He also noted the mark of a wedding ring on one of her fingers and mentioned in his notes that the victim had an unusual malformation that would have left her incapable of having a child. Identification of the victim is always crucial to an investigation and, in the absence of a report of a missing person fitting the woman’s description, the inquiries were likely to be difficult.
Samuel Pegler noted that there had been no impacted snow under the sack, indicating that the body could have been left there, according to the weather pattern, perhaps on Christmas Eve, when he remembered seeing a cart near the scene. He recovered a cord, some cloth and bloodstained wood shavings that seemed to be connected to the sack.
Ten days later, a lock-keeper in Stepney found a human head blocking one of the sluice gates of Regent’s Canal, 7 miles away. It had apparently been sawn from its body and belonged to a woman aged 40–50 years. There was bruising over one eye and a torn earlobe, but finding this head did not answer the question of identity. It was before the age of photography, so her head was preserved in spirits and put on display for members of the public to attempt to identify her. This became a popular attraction, but aroused morbid curiosity rather than provide evidence as to her identity.
Two months later, an ostler (a man employed to look after horses) found a sack containing a pair of legs in a water-filled ditch in Camberwell, and they appeared to fit the trunk of the victim. So, the body was complete but still unidentified, until William Gay from Goodge Street became concerned that he had not heard anything from his sister, Hannah Brown. He was uncertain about identifying her from her head, but his sister had an ear injury from an earring being pulled out, and this was consistent with the head found by Pegler.
Brown had been due to marry James Greenacre, from Camberwell, the previous Christmas, but the wedding had been called off by Greenacre, who had accused Brown of misleading him by stating that she had savings. (At that time, a husband normally assumed rights over his wife’s property.)
The identification of the body was a breakthrough in the investigation. When Greenacre was traced and arrested, his new girlfriend, Sarah Gale, was found to be in possession of Brown’s earrings, whilst one of Gale’s children’s dresses was patched with material matching the cloth found in Edgware Road. The wood shavings helped to identify one of the sacks as coming from a local cabinetmaker known to James Greenacre and Sarah Gale. After initially denying knowing Hannah Brown at all, Greenacre then claimed to have killed her accidentally in an argument when they were both drunk. Medical evidence was used in the trial to show that the various parts of the body fitted together, and to rebut several aspects of Greenacre’s defence about where he had struck her on the head. The evidence confirmed that her throat had been cut before, and not after, death, and that her stomach had contained no alcohol. Greenacre was hanged at Newgate on 2 May 1837.
It was a complicated inquiry that was solved before the introduction of the Detective Branch in 1842 and without modern crime scene examination techniques. Examination of the body is always a crucial part of a murder inquiry and normally the starting point of the police investigation. So murderers sometimes try to conceal the body or dismember it to make it easier to transport and more difficult to identify. Undertaking this grisly task after the murder itself reflects the state of mind of the killer.
Trying to dispose of a murder victim’s body in this way may reflect a belief, widespread for many years, that it is impossible to be placed on trial for a murder without the body being found. This originated from the Campden Wonder case in the 1660s, when three men were hanged for murder of William Harrison from Gloucestershire, who later arrived back in the area alive and well, recounting a story of having been abducted abroad by pirates.