WHEN JOHN WILLIAMS was arrested and first taken to court in 1912, the detective in charge of the case, Scotland Yard’s Detective Chief Inspector Eli Bower, put a spotted apron over Williams’ head to avoid his face being publicised by press photographers waiting outside the court. This was the start of the tradition of giving an element of privacy to prisoners as they entered the courthouse, and may also have been motivated by a wish not to compromise any issues of formal identification of the defendant.
The arrival at the courthouse was the culmination of an investigation that contained many interesting aspects. The story started on Wednesday, 9 October 1912 when Countess Flora Sztaray of Southcliffe Avenue in Eastbourne was due to go out to dinner with friends. A one-horse brougham carriage arrived at the house at 7.20 p.m. to take the countess and her companion the short distance to their friend’s house, but the driver noticed a man lying on top of a flat canopy above the front door of the house. He reported this to the countess after they had left, and she, worried about her servant who was still at the house, returned home and telephoned the police. The message was passed to Inspector Arthur Walls who then went the ½ mile from the police station and challenged the man, but was shot dead. The culprit escaped. The Chief Constable of Eastbourne, Major Teale, telephoned Scotland Yard at 8.25 p.m. and Detective Chief Inspector Eli Bower was deputed to take up the inquiry, taking the first train to Eastbourne the following morning.
1912
John Williams at Lewes Assizes
There was no accurate description of the suspect from witnesses and no sign of fingerprints, but that evening, Dr Edgar Power from Finsbury Park went to the Eastbourne police and gave information that he believed the man responsible to be John Williams, who also used other names, including Frank Seymour. Williams had lived in Finsbury Park and had been treated by Dr Power for an injury caused whilst escaping from a burglary in Bournemouth. Power was due to take the train back to London with Florence Seymour, with whom Williams had been living. Power was adamant that his name was not to be used in the inquiry and would not make a written statement. This was very valuable information, but Eli Bower believed that Power was not being completely honest and concluded that Power wanted Williams out of the way because he had designs on the attractive Florence Seymour.
Back in London, Power told the police of an arrangement that he had to meet Williams in Moorgate at lunchtime on 11 October. This enabled Bower, Sergeant Hayman and other officers to arrest Williams, who was taken to Cannon Row police station but denied any involvement with the murder. Bower then intercepted Florence in Victoria Street and invited her to his office at Scotland Yard. She admitted being in Eastbourne with her ‘husband’ at the time, but said that he had been absent for a period whilst they had been walking near Southcliffe Avenue and that he had lost his hat there. Power was present during part of the interview and when Florence managed to throw a left-luggage ticket into a fire burning in the grate of the detectives’ office, Power gave the police sufficient details of the ticket to enable them to recover a gun holster. There was little doubt about the identity of the murderer, but there was still insufficient evidence to support the murder charge.
After discussing the case with Bower, Power then managed to persuade Florence to try to recover the murder weapon from its burial place on Eastbourne beach and travelled down to Eastbourne with her for this purpose, on 15 October. The police kept discreetly in the background. Officers on surveillance duty saw Florence linger at a certain point on the promenade, but she did not go on to the beach itself. Without modern equipment such as metal detectors, the investigators then undertook a search of the beach in the dark and eventually recovered parts of a gun.
It was before the advent of forensic science laboratories, so Eli Bower took the gun components and the bullet from the crime scene to Robert Churchill, a firearms expert who had previously assisted his uncle Edwin Churchill with ballistics evidence for the 1903 Moat Farm murder case that had also been investigated by Bower. Robert Churchill reassembled the gun using a new hammer and springs, and then test-fired the weapon. Churchill had assembled a comprehensive index of guns and their characteristics, including the rifling patterns inside their barrels that made bullets spin and therefore fly straighter. Using this knowledge, Churchill concluded that the bullet that had killed Inspector Walls was a .25 automatic pistol of the same make and type as that found on Eastbourne beach. There had been no substantive evidence against Williams, but the discovery of this gun and the link with Florence did complete a chain of evidence linking Williams to the murder. Florence and Williams also had a number of items in their possession that were traced back to burglaries on the south coast.
The differences in the number, direction and degree of twists in rifling grooves of various makes of gun barrel were demonstrated to the jury by creating impressions from dental wax and withdrawing them from the gun barrels. William McBride, a pioneer police photographer, then took close-up photographs. It was the first time in Britain that evidence of this type had been introduced to show that a bullet from a crime scene had been fired from a particular make of gun, and is an excellent example of early close-up photography. William McBride had spent a long time rotating the cast of the gun barrel grooves to demonstrate that it matched the bullet, and he was able to bring a fresh approach to demonstrating technical evidence to a jury.
John Williams had enlisted into the Royal Scots Regiment under the name of George McKay on 9 October 1899 and had deserted in October 1901. He was convicted of the murder and executed in January 1913. As for Dr Edgar Power, whose information and collaboration with the police was crucial for solving the case, he did not make romantic progress with Florence Seymour, possibly because she realised that he had betrayed her as well as John Williams. The police paid him a generous reward, but, worried that he would spend the money too quickly, he asked for the payment to be delayed until immediately before he left the country for America.
There had been notable ballistics cases before this date. In 1794, John Toms was traced as the killer of Edward Culshaw, in Lancashire, after wadding made from broadsheet newspaper used for his muzzle-loading gun was matched to the remainder of the document found in his possession. This method of examining improvised wadding also solved an 1860 case, when newspaper used as wadding in the undischarged barrel of a double-barrelled shotgun used by Thomas Richardson was found to fit another piece, torn from the same page of a newspaper, that had been used as wadding for the shot that killed PC Alexander McBrian in Lincolnshire.
In 1835, Henry Goddard, a Bow Street officer, was called down to Southampton to investigate armed burglars who had raided a house, where the butler, Joseph Randall, had supposedly fired his gun to defend the property. Goddard found an identical pimple in the bullets apparently fired by the intruders and the same feature in the butler’s own home-made ammunition, upon which Randall confessed that the story was concocted so that he would find favour with his mistress for his bravery.
The first recorded ballistics case investigated by the Metropolitan Police was the murder of PC George Cole, who, on a foggy night on 1 December 1882, caught a young thief trying to break in to a Baptist chapel in Ashwin Street, Dalston, but his prisoner escaped and shot the officer dead. Inquiries were made by N Division police, but these grounded to a halt, the only clue being a chisel that had been left behind at the scene. Scratched into the chisel were the letters ‘R. O. C. K.’, the meaning of which was unclear. Eventually, Inspector Thomas Glass received information that Thomas Orrock may have been the murderer. This suddenly made sense of the letters, and pioneering photographic techniques did indeed then reveal Orrock’s full name scratched on to the chisel. Using the ruse of a self-compiled anonymous letter to extract information from Orrock’s wife, Inspector Glass identified Orrock’s burglary accomplices from the fateful night, one of whom showed Sergeant Cobb a tree on Tottenham marshes where Orrock had been involved in target practice. Cobb then recovered a bullet from the tree that was of the same type and weight as those recovered from Cole’s body and from his truncheon case (a long leather pouch used in Victorian times before truncheons were concealed in a trouser pocket). The truncheon case, a black felt wide-awake hat discarded by the gunman, and a wedge used for burglary also found their way into the museum.
James Squire, a gunmaker from Whitechapel, confirmed the similarity of the bullets and that they were all of a type fired from the pin-fire cartridges used by the gun that had been bought from his shop (and later thrown away) by Orrock who was in due course convicted of George Cole’s murder and executed in October 1884.
The Moat Farm case concerned the murder of Camille Holland, who had bought a farm in Essex on behalf of Samuel Dougal, in April 1899. Camille Holland then disappeared, but cheques drawn from her London bank account after her disappearance gave rise to suspicion against Dougal, who in turn also disappeared. A search of the farm in 1903 revealed Holland’s dead body with a bullet in her head. The distance from which the gun had been fired was a crucial factor in Dougal’s trial, but, four years after her death, there was no evidence of powder burns to indicate a close-range shot. Edwin Churchill, the uncle of Robert and original owner of a gun shop in Agar Street, Strand, in central London, experimented with shooting bullets into a sheep’s skull, and, with Robert’s assistance, concluded that the shot must have been fired from a range of 6–12in. This contradicted the defence’s assertion that the shot was accidental.
Dougal was executed at Chelmsford prison on 14 July 1903. A stone with his initials was let into the wall of the prison to mark his grave. The gravestones were transferred elsewhere in 1923 when Chelmsford prison was emptied. Gilbert Harris, the governor of Wandsworth prison, donated Dougal’s tombstone to the museum in May 1939.
A more modern ballistics exhibit of international interest in the museum is the test bullet used to make a comparison for the murder of John Lennon by Mark Chapman in New York in 1980.
1927
Pigskin marked into 6in squares to test bullet impacts