The door remained bolted when the Marrs’ maid returned without the oysters. She had left the house on Ratcliffe Highway half an hour earlier with a pound note intended for the baker and the purchase of supper: her mistress was nursing the three-month-old infant in the kitchen, her master was putting the shop in order, and the lad James Goen was labouring beside him. Upon her return, the girl rang; the night watchman assisted her in calling out to the family. No one answered. A neighbour, Murray the pawnbroker, climbed over the yard wall and gained entry from the rear. In the shop, he came upon Goen, dead, and then upon Mr Marr and his wife. He presently discovered the babe in its cradle, dead as well.
The watchman had spoken with Marr as he was shuttering his premises around midnight. Upon returning, he examined the shutters and observed a loose pin. He knocked at the door; a voice he found strange answered that all was well. Then the servant rang repeatedly, unable to enter. A considerable sum of money remained in the house, and no evident plunder appeared to have been carried off. Borrow surmises that a speedier return by the girl may have interrupted a robbery, yet the narrative does not say what the assailants would have done had she returned later.
Marr’s house was caught within a labyrinth of yards and passages. Neighbours caught sight of men hurrying away, without being able to distinguish their faces. The chronicle conjectures that they fled through a small yard, scaled a gate, and crossed through an empty house to reach Pennington Street. This course of flight offered a potential means of escape, but no identity for the men who took it. The slaughter remained without an established culprit.
Several days later, cries roused the quarter of New Gravel Lane. Above the King’s Arms, John Turner, a lodger, heard a woman calling for help: "We shall all be murdered!" He crept downstairs and caught sight of a man ransacking Mrs Williamson’s pockets. Turner slipped back upstairs for his bedsheets, knotted them to the foot of his bed, and lowered himself from the window. The watchman caught him in the street. Other residents forced an entrance through the cellar flap.
Williamson lay at the foot of the stairs, his throat severed, beside an iron bar. Upstairs, Mrs Williamson and their servant Bridget Harrington were likewise dead. For fifteen years, the family had kept the King’s Arms, a house known for lodging foreign wayfarers. Shortly before closing, Constable Anderson, a neighbour, had taken a beer in their parlour. Williamson had pointed out to him a man in a brown coat listening at the door and had asked him to keep an eye on him. Anderson was to return; instead, he heard the shrieks, came upon Turner in the street, and pressed inside with the crowd.
Turner could not identify the man he had seen. He gave an approximate stature and described a long, dark coat; later, he refused to swear that the suspect brought before him resembled that man. The narrative of his flight established that an intruder was in the room with Mrs Williamson, yet it did not connect that man to John Williams by any positive identification. The question turned to the traces that led the magistrates toward a thirty-year-old Irish former seaman, lodging at the Pear Tree.
Williams had served with Marr aboard the same East Indiaman: Marr as the captain’s servant, Williams as an able seaman. The chronicle contrasts their conduct and records that patrons had helped Marr set up his shop upon his return. Williams was also acquainted with Mr and Mrs Williamson; he occasionally visited the King’s Arms and claimed to be their friend. He stated that he had passed an evening with them shortly before the second murder, speaking with Mrs Williamson, whom he found in good spirits.
Several particulars aroused the suspicions of the examiners. A one-pound note and some silver were found on Williams; he maintained he had obtained them by pawning clothes. He was said to have returned to his lodgings near one in the morning on the night of the Marrs’ murder. Garments returned by a washerwoman had been torn and bloodied, but one bore stains from prior to the first murder, and the other from several days after. Williams affirmed that the former had been damaged during a taproom brawl, in which a man had torn his collar and cut his lip.
The tools lent a more tangible shape to the suspicions. A maul marked with the initials J. P. and a long ripping chisel were recovered from the Marr dwelling. According to witnesses, they belonged to a chest of tools entrusted to Williams’s landlord’s wife by a ship’s carpenter, John Peterson, prior to his departure for sea. The landlord, then confined in Newgate for debt, recognized the maul with reservations: he believed the chipped point matched an implement he remembered, yet he would not swear it was the selfsame one.
The landlady hesitated at first to identify the implements. It was her nephew, William Rice, a lad of about eleven, who maintained that he had often played with a broken maul in the yard, recognizing it when it was laid before him. The carpenter Peterson had sailed abroad; the tools were left unlocked, and other lodgers had access to them. Upon a second examination, on the Wednesday, the landlord nevertheless identified the long chisel found at Marr’s as Peterson’s tool, and his wife in turn pronounced upon the maul. These identifications tied the implements to the lodgings; they did not of themselves demonstrate who had wielded them during the murders.
Other witnesses reported equivocal signs. A room-fellow discovered his stockings covered in mud behind a sea-chest and later observed Williams washing them. Williams first disputed their ownership, then washed the stockings and returned them to his fellow. Mrs Orr related another incident, prior to the Marr murders. Williams had been at her house late at night when a watchman brought in a chisel found near her window. Williams seized the object with an exclamation, but she retained it. Following his arrest, she showed it to the landlady, who compared its markings with the tools in Peterson’s chest and recognized it as belonging to the house. Mrs Orr then surrendered this second chisel to the magistrates. Yet she recalled that Williams was wont to jest with her daughter and readily minded her child; both women believed him incapable of violence. The chronicle sets this domestic familiarity beside official suspicion without producing any direct testimony that placed him inside the Marrs’ home.
Williams was apprehended on 23 December. The magistrates were preparing to examine further witnesses when, on the Friday following his arrest, turnkey officers found him dead in his cell at Coldbath Fields, hanged by his neckerchief. He had neither stood trial nor answered the indictment before a jury. On Tuesday, 31 December, the chronicle describes a public procession: his body was set upon an open cart, together with the maul, the chisel, the iron instrument found at the Williamsons’, and a stake. The cortege passed before both houses before reaching a crossroads, where the body was committed to the earth and the stake driven through it. This ritual publicly punished a suspect who had died without a trial.
Borrow asserts that the evidence rendered his guilt near certain. Yet a chronicler’s certainty is no substitute for a verdict. Death in a cell brought the proceedings to an end before these tensions could be tested before a jury. The Marr and Williamson families were gone; as for the name of Williams, it remains tethered to both affairs by an accusation that the court never resolved.