Richard Partridge showed a fifty-pound note to the men who had come to sell him a body. It was necessary, he explained, to have it changed before he could pay them. Bishop proposed taking whatever money the surgeon had upon his person and returning on Monday for the remainder. Partridge refused. On that Saturday, November 5, 1831, within the walls of King’s College, his chief concern was to detain them: he had already sent for the police. A few minutes later, the demonstrator of anatomy returned accompanied by an inspector and several constables. The transaction would not take place.
It had all begun shortly before noon, when John Bishop and James May rang at the door of the dissecting room. William Hill, the porter, knew them well: they had previously supplied subjects to the college. They demanded twelve guineas for the body of a boy of about fourteen years. A negotiation ensued. Partridge was unwilling to go beyond nine guineas; May refused to accept anything under ten. Bishop then drew Hill aside and consented to the price. The men returned in the afternoon with Thomas Williams and James Shields, the latter bearing a hamper. Inside lay a sack. May turned it out, letting the body tumble roughly onto the flags.
Hill remarked upon its freshness and asked what the boy had died of. May retorted that this was none of their business. The porter summoned Partridge. The limbs were rigid, the eyes bloodshot; a mark was visible upon the forehead. The body bore every appearance of never having been laid in the earth. Bishop attributed the cut to the fall occasioned by May’s roughness. This explanation failed to satisfy the surgeon, who withdrew under the pretext of procuring money in order to alert the authorities. The fifty-pound note then served to gain the necessary time. All four men were carried away into custody, together with the body, the hamper, and the sack.
The surgeon Richard Partridge discovered an effusion of blood beneath the scalp and, among the muscles of the neck and near the spinal canal, unmistakable signs of internal violence. He deemed these injuries sufficient to have caused death, and entirely consistent with a heavy blow dealt to the back of the neck. The surface examination had disclosed no single external wound capable of producing such a result. Other medical practitioners concurred in his findings. The teeth had been extracted shortly after death, and a bradawl stained with blood was subsequently discovered at Bishop’s dwelling. These observations were submitted to the inquest as evidence of a violent death. The boy was no longer an anonymous “subject” offered for anatomical demonstration; it fell to the police to discover whence the body had been procured.
At their initial examination, the three men offered contradictory accounts. May asserted that he had merely accompanied Bishop to effect the sale; Bishop claimed to have conveyed the corpse from Guy’s Hospital; Williams maintained that he had come out of sheer curiosity. In a remark reported by Superintendent Thomas, Bishop was said to have described himself simply as a body-snatcher. The authorities had not yet established a name for the deceased. An Italian named Perrigalli believed he recognized Carlo Ferrari, an Italian boy who had exhibited white mice in the public thoroughfares. The prosecution, however, framed an alternative count: the murder of a male child whose name was unknown.
The coroner’s first inquest named no guilty party. The jury returned a verdict of willful murder against some person or persons unknown, while recording their strong conviction that Bishop, Williams, and May had participated in the deed. The police accordingly pursued their investigations. Witnesses recollected seeing the boy, clad in a brown cap and carrying his cage of white mice, in the vicinity of Nova Scotia Gardens. Others traced the movement of the corpse, carted from the cottage to Guy’s Hospital and thence offered to various anatomical schools. The passage of the hamper was pieced together like the recorded stages of some clandestine journey.
In Bishop’s garden, the officers unearthed male wearing apparel, which was identified as belonging to the lad seen with the mice. But a second discovery greatly enlarged the scope of the affair. Within the privy of the premises formerly occupied by Williams, women’s garments were discovered, heavily stained with blood. A relative, Mrs. Lowe, identified them as having belonged to her sister Frances Pigburn, who had vanished in October; a niece and a friend confirmed particular articles, notably a shawl and a pocket of unusual fashion. From a well, the police likewise brought up a shawl that Mrs. Lowe swore had been her sister’s. The magistrate regarded the identification as convincing. Yet this did not signify that the body of Pigburn had been recovered, nor that any court had been assembled to try that second death.
At the Old Bailey sessions in December, the Crown presented the case concerning the boy. The indictment contained two counts, the one naming Carlo Ferrari, the other describing a boy unknown. The witnesses retraced the movements of the accused, the attempts to hawk the body among several hospitals, the buried raiment, and the medical testimony. The three prisoners were called upon for their defense; their statements failed to agree. The learned judge reminded the jury that the indictment permitted equally a verdict concerning an unnamed boy or one relating to Ferrari; the civil identity of the deceased was therefore not the sole question to be determined. He directed them first to consider whether the death had arisen from natural causes, and next to determine what part each prisoner had borne in the transaction. As to May, in particular, proof of his presence at the conveyance and sale did not of itself resolve the question of his complicity in the murder. This distinction was fully set before them prior to their deliberation. The verdict affirmed their guilt in the murder charged, but it did not translate the suspicions regarding Pigburn or other missing persons into formal judicial convictions.
The jury found Bishop, Williams, and May guilty of murder. All three received the capital sentence; yet the Crown extended a respite to May, which was subsequently commuted to transportation for life. Bishop and Williams were left for execution on the fifth of December.
Prior to their death, the two condemned men delivered confessions wherein they took upon themselves the deaths of the boy, of Frances Pigburn, and of another child named Cunningham. They assigned to May a very limited role, which he himself denied. These statements, taken down together and published in the chronicle, constitute no additional legal verdicts. Pelham himself cautions that the men may well have concealed material facts; he points out discrepancies in their narratives and notes their initial refusal to admit the true identity of the boy. Rumor ascribed to their hands upwards of sixty victims, a report the chronicler deemed destitute of proof. A strict distinction must therefore be maintained between the conviction pronounced for the murder of the boy, the identification of Pigburn’s effects by her kin, and the various crimes to which the convicts chose to confess.
Bishop and Williams suffered their sentence before an immense concourse of spectators. Their bodies were in turn surrendered for dissection, and their skeletons placed upon display in the anatomical schools. At the very origin of their apprehension, a college porter had asked of what sickness the boy had died whose body they were hawking. He had been told it was no concern of his. The subsequent inquiry forced that question back upon the sellers, and raised another in its train: what name belonged to this dead youth? The trial served to condemn his murderers, yet left that final uncertainty lingering in the record.