William Seaman, East End killer
In the days when murder meant the death penalty, some killers went to the scaffold in hysterics, some in calm acceptance of meeting their maker, and some making angry assertions of their innocence.
But William Seaman went to the rope with a wry joke – observing that it was the first time in his life he’d ever managed to act as a peacemaker.
One day in 1896, the stabbed and beaten bodies of John Goodman Levy and his housekeeper Sarah Gale were discovered at Goodman’s home at 31 Turner Street, which runs between Commercial Road and Whitechapel Road.
Take a walk down Turner Street today and you’ll see that number 31, on the corner with Varden Street, has been converted into a clothing factory – one of a handful of garment works in a street that mixes
the rag trade, modern housing and derelict Victorian homes, all nestling behind the London Hospital.
But look across the road at 33 Turner Street and you will get a picture of what the
murder site looked like, before bombs and redevelopment redrew the geography of this East End thoroughfare.
The crime was discovered when a neighbour saw what she thought was a prowler nipping over the backyard wall in Varden Street as darkness fell one night.
Hideous
She called the police, but before the constables had arrived, an excited crowd had already gathered round the front step, alerted by the gruesome sight of blood seeping out from under the door.
The arriving policemen broke down the door to encounter a hideous sight. Levy lay stabbed just inside the hallway. They then ran upstairs to find Sarah Gale, also knifed, in one of the
bedrooms.
The motive for the crime seemed obvious. The 77-year-old Levy was notorious in the district as a fence, and rumour had it he had a huge stash of ill-gotten money secreted in number 31.
The rooms showed signs of being ransacked – the unfortunate Mrs Gale, 35,
had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The puzzled constables could not see the protagonist anywhere. It was left to Detective Sergeant Wensley – later to rise to be the first Assistant Commissioner of
the Met – to spot the villain.
It was a piece
of detection that brought him widespread fame in the tabloids of the day. But Wensley drily remarked that it hadn’t taken a very astute piece of sleuthing. There was a huge hole in the ceiling, and when the young policeman climbed on a chair to see what was occurring he spotted a figure disappearing through another hole onto the roof of the house.
Wensley and his constables pursued the intruder onto the roof. There, Seaman – for it was he – realised he could not escape, and risked a 40-foot jump to the pavement, reckoning that the gathered crowd of ghouls would soften his fall. Cursing the watchers as Jews, he flung himself down, slightly injuring a number and breaking both his legs in the process.
Amateurish
Meanwhile, in Bath, Albert Millsom and Henry Fowler had been arrested after their amateurish attempts to cover up the murder of Henry Smith, in Muswell Hill. They were sentenced to hang for the crime, but Millsom, believing that his accomplice intended
to turn Queen’s Evidence, repeatedly tried to attack him in court.
Such was Millsom’s venom, that the authorities feared – rather ironically – for Fowler’s wellbeing. And so, when the pair were hanged, the pro-
tagonist of the Turner Street Murders was executed between them. It was the
first time in his life, Seaman jokingly noted, that he’d ever been a peacemaker.