In the heart of Stepney, behind rows of houses hastily thrown up to shelter the labouring classes, Mary Emsley kept her keys, her receipts, and her mistrust to herself. A widow and the owner of several tenements, she still trudged the streets to collect her rents, but would unbolt her door only after discerning the caller from her window or the area steps. On Monday, 13 August 1860, two neighbours saw her seated on her first floor. On the Friday, she was discovered dead in the upper chamber, amidst rolls of wallpaper. Between these two junctures, witnesses observed a bolted door, an unusual shutter, a man carrying paper, and presently a parcel buried beneath a stone slab. Each clue appeared to point toward someone; taken together, they never established the hour of death with complete certainty.
The trial of James Mullins opened at the Central Criminal Court on 22 October 1860, before Chief Baron Pollock. The Old Bailey transcript reproduced by Arthur Conan Doyle names the prisoner, fifty-two years of age, and records the verdict without circumlocution: “Guilty.—Death.” The sentence belongs to the court; the doubt belongs to the readers who came after. Doyle, who reopened the case decades later, erroneously dates the hearing to 25 October and questions the cogency of the evidence. His essay is not a contemporary testimony, yet it draws attention to discrepancies that the trial record permits one to verify.
On Friday, 17 August, Walter Thomas Emm, a shoemaker who occasionally assisted Mary in collecting rents, informed her solicitor that he could no longer gain admittance to the house. The street door was shut, though not bolted from within; the constables entered through the back garden. On the upper floor, they discovered the body in a room encumbered with rolls of wallpaper. Blood had stained the floorboards and the wall; a bloody imprint, pointing toward the landing, suggested that a man had walked out of the room. The surgeon Samuel Gill described several deep wounds to the head. In his view, they might have been inflicted with a plasterer’s hammer, yet he could not determine the moment of death to within a single day: Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday remained equally possible, according to the prevailing conditions.
This uncertainty was material. The neighbours Elizabeth Pashley and Elizabeth Muggeridge had seen Mary alive on Monday evening; they also noted the shutters remaining open later than was her custom. Yet, on Tuesday morning toward twenty minutes to ten, Caroline Barnes caught sight of an upper-floor window ajar, and someone who appeared to be moving rolls of wallpaper. She could not identify this person. She spoke of the scene only after the discovery of the murder, and specified before the jury that she did not know at the time whether Mary was in the room. The prosecution could maintain that this was the act of an assassin returning to efface his traces; the observation might just as well signify that someone was still alive within the dwelling. No witness enabled the court to decide the point.
Another encounter further complicated the chronology. The builder James Stevenson affirmed that on the following morning he met a man coming out of a garden with rolls of paper under his arm; he fancied he came from Mary’s premises, though he could not be positive. He subsequently recognized William Rowland, a paperhanger known to him, and recounted their conversation regarding the hanging of paper. Rowland denied having quitted the Emsley house on that day: he stated that he had worked in the adjoining house several days previously. He dismissed Stevenson as a man of confused impressions. The deposition did not resolve the matter; it merely multiplied the possible versions of a single encounter.
The investigators had at first directed their suspicions toward Emm. A cheque for ten pounds, discovered later in a parcel, had been handed to Mary on 13 August by John Joshua Carrier; the date of the 14th inscribed upon it was, he said, an error. The parcel also contained three spoons, two lenses, and other trifling articles. The family recognized certain items as having belonged to Mary, though several identifications remained guarded. In late August and early September, Mullins presented himself to the police to denounce Emm. He claimed to have watched him and seen him carry a parcel toward a dilapidated shed, then deposit a smaller bundle in an outhouse near his cottage. The police searched at first without finding anything. Mullins insisted, pointed to a flagstone; beneath it, the officers discovered the missing objects.
The parcel had two wrappers: a strip of coarse tape or webbing around the outer paper, and cobbler’s waxed thread within. At Mullins’s lodgings, the constables found a piece of tape resembling that on the parcel, thirty-three strands being counted in each piece. Cobbler’s wax was likewise seized in his room, and he wore waxed twine to tie his boot. Beside his tools lay a plasterer’s hammer; an old shoe, cast into a dust-bin, was matched to the bloody imprint by two nails and a cavity in the sole. This web of circumstantial proof appeared formidable, yet each comparison had its limits: the tape was not a unique signature, the hammer was not concealed, and the medical men could not establish that the hairs found in the shoe had come from Mary’s head.
A gilt pencil-case furnished another ground for suspicion. Two of Mary’s acquaintances believed they had previously seen it in her possession; Mullins had sold it to a barman through the agency of his wife. Mr. Gill, the surgeon, fancied he detected blood upon the edge of the case, but acknowledged he could not say whether it was human blood. Mary Mullins, the prisoner’s daughter, testified that the article had belonged to her brother James, a seaman, that she had seen it in his possession in June or July, and that he had gone to sea prior to the murder. She could not swear that the case produced at the trial was the very same. Thus the small object that might have linked the prisoner to the victim retained an uncertain provenance.
Two witnesses placed Mullins near the house or upon his way at times that the prosecution associated with the crime, though the hour of death was never established. John Raymond placed him toward eight o’clock in the evening before a urinal, some four hundred yards from the residence; he had not known the man and identified him only after reading the newspapers, amidst a group of a dozen or fifteen persons. The seaman John Mitchell stated that he met him toward five o’clock on Tuesday morning, about three-quarters of a mile from Grove Road, his pockets bulging and his manner hurried. He gave his description only after learning of the murder, and recognized the prisoner later in a house of detention where some thirty cells were opened to him. The former spoke of a black hat, the latter of a brown one. Conan Doyle noted this discrepancy; the transcript also reveals that their identifications were late and influenced by public accounts.
The alibis failed to dispel the confusion. Emm and his family stated that he had spent part of the evening of 13 August with his wife, a friend, and a carman, and had subsequently gone to Stratford. Toll-gate tickets and recollections of the journey were brought forward, but the witnesses faltered over their dates and as to who had reminded them of the precise day. Mullins’s sons likewise endeavoured to place him at home; their answers concerning the meal, the retiring to bed, and the nights spent in Barnsley Street contradicted one another under cross-examination. The defence did not, therefore, establish a robust alibi; rather, it exposed the frailties and the lapses of memory on both sides.
The jury found Mullins guilty of murder, and the Chief Baron passed sentence of death. Doyle relates that he was hanged on 19 November and that he left a written statement reaffirming his innocence; he also states that Mullins declared he believed Emm to be guiltless. These final words do not constitute a confession. They do not tell who placed the objects beneath the flagstone, nor why the prisoner had guided the constables to them. Major Arthur Griffiths, writing later on the police, turned this dramatic reversal—the informer transformed into the condemned—into a demonstration of the criminal sagacity of its author. The judicial record, for its part, reveals articles identified with reservations, shifting recollections, and a crime whose hour remains uncertain.
One cannot, for all that, efface the verdict returned by the jury. The parcel found beneath the flagstone, the connections with Mary, and Mullins’s own conduct formed a grave accusation; the court judged it sufficient. Yet neither the judgment nor the execution transformed late testimonies into absolute certainties. The window opened on the Tuesday, the moved papers, the cheque dated for the following day, and the two men encountered at irreconcilable hours compose less a solution than a file whose several pieces resist assembly. Such is the stern lesson of this case: the law succeeded in giving a name and a punishment to the condemned man it had chosen; it could not illuminate every minute, nor silence the questions that its own witnesses had left behind.