“Ah, Watson,” said Sherlock Holmes, gazing absently out the window into the swirling fog. “I’ve been mulling over a case from before our time.”

Seated beside the fire, I turned to him. “I should be glad to hear of any case you find instructive,” I replied.

“Well,” said he, “It occurred in 1860, one your literary agent, Arthur Conan Doyle, later struggled with, as you may remember. It has since been called ‘The case Conan Doyle couldn’t solve!’”

“Yes, I recall something of the affair. I believe it was the murder of a rich old lady in the East End—bludgeoned, if memory serves me correctly. But wasn’t the murderer soon caught, tried, and hanged outside the walls of Newgate?”

“Very good, Watson! Friend Doyle was having misgivings about ‘circumstantial evidence’—a very tricky thing. As I have myself said, ‘It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different.’”¹

*    *    *

The Old Case

Having been a Sherlockian since I was a boy, it amused me to begin with the foregoing little pastiche. It does help set the stage for my own delving into the Emsley case and challenging a newly revisionist assessment by Sinclair McKay (2017).

We pick up the Emsley matter in the spring of 1901, some forty years after the murder. Arthur Conan Doyle was considering bringing his fabled detective back to life. Having tired of his creation, Doyle had killed Holmes off in a story in 1891 by a fatal plunge—locked in a death struggle with his arch enemy Moriarty—from a precipice of Switzerland’s Reichenbach Falls. (I too have climbed out on that identified ledge while my German skeptic friend Martin Mahner prepared to snap my picture. “Back just a little farther,” he said. “Easy for you to say, Martin!” I remarked.)

As Conan Doyle prepared for Holmes’s resurrection in The Strand magazine, he examined the old murder in an essay titled “The Debatable Case of Mrs. Emsley” (Doyle 1901). Yet the famous writer seemed to remain puzzled. States McKay (2017, 4):

Having raised his own doubts about the conviction, Conan Doyle left the story of this murder dangling without a final conclusion, leaving it to his many thousands of readers to make their own deductions. It was as if he was just as bewildered as the judge had been at the Old Bailey.

Shall we hope to do better?

Horror Revealed

A lady of seventy, Mary Emsley lived alone in Mile End Old Town in a terraced house at 9 Grove Road. Twice widowed, she was quite wealthy, and from her second-floor window could survey dozens upon dozens of houses belonging to her. She rented them out and, quite active, collected many of the rental payments herself.

On the morning of Tuesday, August 14, 1860, a teenage boy arrived at her door with a message from his father. The boy knocked and waited. When his knocks went unanswered, the lad left, assuming she might be out shopping or attending to business. The boy repeated the ritual on each of the next several days, telling his father on Friday he had never had a response. The father, one of Mrs. Emsley’s respected tradesmen Walter Emm, began to feel uneasy.

However, appreciating the customary lines of authority, he sought the old lady’s solicitor, William Rose. The two immediately went to the home, and Rose himself tried the door without success. Deciding to forego a forced entry, he instead went to summon police. He also alerted two of Mrs. Emsley’s stepsons, living close by. The four men, led by a Sergeant Dillon, went immediately to the house. The latter effected entry through an unfastened back door, and he and then the other four were soon inside. Oddly, the house’s inner doors were all opened wide. As the group proceeded on the ground floor, they encountered the unmistakably foul odor of death (McKay 2017, 5–17).

That nauseating smell (which I have experienced in my own investigative work) became steadily more pungent as the police-officer–led group “proceeded upstairs” (according to an inspector’s subsequent report) to “the front room.” There they encountered the first thing amiss: a bloody foot impression on the landing. As they turned to a “lumber room” (i.e., a storage room), they discovered the very definite source of the overwhelming stench (Hayes 1860).

Mrs. Emsley lay face down with an arm almost reaching to the door. Under her other arm were two rolls of wallpaper—many rolls of which filled the room. (She had recently purchased these for sale to her tenants.) Great splashes of blood radiated away from her white-haired head, which was “against the door-post.” The back of her head had been smashed in by two blows, and the brain was left exposed. Maggots writhed about the fatal wound. The nearby lower paneling bore an indentation; police interpreted it as the result of a first swing of some heavy instrument that missed. Higher up was the mark of a second blow (McKay 2017, 38).

No crime-scene photographs would be taken. Although now a mainstay of police investigation, in 1860 those would be some two decades in the future. One bizarre element that was therefore not documented—and was even omitted in the first police report—was the fact that the elderly victim’s long skirt and petticoat had been pulled back, exposing her bare legs and thighs. The clothes were hitched so as to partially cover her back, up to and including the lower half of her bloody head. Asks McKay (2017, 20), given such a brutal murder, “Who would then defile the body of an old lady in this fashion?”

As it happened, a coroner’s inquest yielded the solution to that minor mystery, which had nothing to do with obscenity but instead utter callousness of the one who committed so brutal a crime. The coroner, Dr. Lawrence Gill, explained that the clothing bore smears that indicated the killer had used it to wipe his bloody fingers!

Astonishing Discovery

The police had trouble making progress in their investigation, so during the second week after the murder they put out leaflets offering rewards of up to 300 pounds—100 pounds by Her Majesty’s Government and a further 200 pounds by another of her solicitors. The offer was for information leading to the conviction of the guilty person or persons, and for that time it was a grand amount. Meanwhile, police were searching for items known to have belonged to Mrs. Emsley that had gone missing—notably a rental check and her little book of rental postings (McKay 2017, 84–85, 244).

Then came a momentous break in the case. A man named James Mullins—a laborer who had worked for Mrs. Emsley for nearly a year—claimed he had been shadowing his own suspect: the old lady’s rent-collecting agent, whom we have already met, Walter Emm. Mullins told a Sergeant Tanner he had kept watch at Emm’s cottage. Early that morning, Mullins had observed Emm carrying a parcel to a rickety old shed about fifty yards away and then exiting about ten minutes later without the package. As Mullins told the sergeant, Emm acted suspiciously, looking around as if to make sure no one was watching.

“What do you suppose the parcel contained?,” the sergeant asked.

Mullins replied, “I do not know, but I will show you where the shed is.”

Sergeant Tanner was commendably cautious. He asked Mullins to meet him and an Inspector Thornton at Scotland Yard the next morning, from where the three of them would go to the shed that allegedly contained the mystery parcel. The next day was Sunday, and the policemen took Mullins on a journey by horse-drawn cab to the Emm site, a brickfield that had once belonged to Mrs. Emsley’s second husband. As they rode, Mullins told the officers how he had for days been suspicious of Emm as the murderer. “You know I am very clever in these matters,” boasted Mullins, who avowed he had “been working hard day and night to discover the murderer.”

At the brickfield, the two policemen, seeing Emm emerge from his cottage, left Mullins behind the board fence and approached the shed. They met up with another policeman, a Sergeant Thomas. The officers asked Emm if he had been at the shed at the time alleged the previous day, and he said he had not, having been ill. He insisted his wife would confirm that. Inspector Thornton immediately sent Tanner to the cottage to question Mrs. Emm, and he instructed Thomas to search the shed. He turned up nothing, but an angry Mullins came up to them, barged into the shed, and insisted Thomas pull at some bricks and a stone slab, thereby uncovering a parcel wrapped in paper and tied with string.

Emm was flabbergasted as he watched the parcel being opened. Its contents appeared to incriminate him. “Good God,” he stammered, “this is a foul plot!” Perhaps it was, Inspector Thornton thought. Recall that previously Mullins had only claimed to see Emm take a parcel into the shed and come out without it. He had not seen the actual hiding spot, having been, he said, watching from a distance. The inspector was beginning to focus increasingly on James Mullins over Walter Emm, but for good measure he asked both to accompany him to the nearest police station. Mullins was cooly annoyed; Emm was sobbing in terror (McKay 2017, 104–107).

Two Suspects …

Walter Thomas Emm was forty-five years old. He was a shoemaker as well as serving as a rent-collector for Mrs. Emsley. He rented his own cottage from her, but he was so trusted he did not have to pay weekly. Indeed, he had a special arrangement with the old widow that allowed him to pay annually. Thus, he had no petty motive to murder her for some small sum that might have been due. All in all, Emm was a successful businessman with a respectable family that included well-schooled children, and he had a fine reputation. It enabled him, although charged for “being concerned in the murder of Mrs. Emsley,” to achieve an uneasy liberty on bail (McKay 2017, 105, 111–122, 123).

Emm had an excellent alibi for the evening of the murder. He had gone to Stratford to collect rent for Mrs. Emsley, and four witnesses deposed that he was with them until almost midnight, whereupon he returned to his cottage and stayed there until the following morning. Moreover, on the morning that Mullins claimed he saw him deposit the parcel between eight and nine o’clock, Emm was still in the cottage at that time. He would eventually be completely exonerated of any wrongdoing (McKay 2017, 137–138, 194).

For his part, Mullins was lodged in a filthy prison at the edge of London to await trial. A deeper look into his background revealed that he had once been a policeman himself. By the early 1840s, he had been sent as an undercover agent to Ireland, but that went badly and eventually, working as a railway officer, he was convicted of theft and served six years at Dartmoor (McKay 2017, 153–179).

Some of the evidence that was produced against Mullins was at best doubtful, including a boot that might have made the crime-scene’s bloody footprint, except it apparently had no blood upon it, and a hammer that might have made the estimated two death blows but that likewise seemed absent of blood traces. Such evidence in the old case discouraged Arthur Conan Doyle who lamented: “The case was prejudged by the public before the prisoner had appeared in the dock, and the evidence which the police had prepared against him was not such as to cause them to change their opinion” (McKay 2017, 194–197; Doyle 1901).

On the other hand, Mullins had no alibi and indeed was seen at eight o’clock on the Monday night in question very near Mrs. Emsley’s house. Other witnesses testified to seeing him apparently going to that area on that fateful evening. One noted the next morning he had especially “bulky pockets.” He was connected to items belonging to Mrs. Emsley—including a silver pencil case his wife had been in possession of and of course the items in the parcel that evidence pointed to his having planted. That was obviously done to incriminate Emm so Mullins could get the rewards offered. His original motive for murder had apparently been to find substantial cash in Mrs. Emsley’s purse (McKay 2017, 194–195, 197, 233).

Let us pause here to reconsider the crime scene to put together a partial profile of the killer. For him to have been let into the house, he was surely someone the cautious Mary Emsley knew, and James Mullins was one of her employees. That she was found upstairs and had two rolls of newly purchased wallpaper under her arm, intended to be sold to tenants, indicated the pretext the killer probably used for entry. If he feigned an interest in making a purchase, he probably thought that might lead to a discussion of money. The killer had with him a weapon, and Mullins always carried a heavy, sharp-pointed plasterer’s hammer. Finally, on the floor of the deceased’s bedroom was found a distinctive key; it matched the key to Mullins’ lodgings, which had gone missing (McKay 2017, 108–109, 148).

James Mullins was tried at the Old Bailey where he sat in the dock on October 25, 1860, during a trial that lasted just two days. The prosecution was conducted by a Mr. Parry, and the defense by a Mr. Palmer and a Mr. J. Best. Parry opened by declaring the case “one of the most cruel and barbarous murders ever committed” and again a “most atrocious crime.” He acknowledged that such a crime is typically committed in secret, that is, without eyewitnesses. But he observed, in part, that the prosecution could “rely on a number of facts, each of greater or lesser importance, but all pointing in one direction and one alone.” “This,” he said, “is what is called circumstantial evidence.” Such a series of facts, he insisted, was quite enough for the jury to depend on.

The defense did the best it could against the evidence, trying to cast doubt here and there. But in the end, Mr. Parry carried the day. The judge, Lord Pollock, gave his own summary of the case, agreeing that the person who actually placed the telltale parcel in the shed was indeed the murderer. Clearly that was not Emm but Mullins, who was trying to frame Emm. The jury took slightly less than an hour to reach its guilty verdict. Mullins then asked to say “a few words” and gave an impassioned statement of his innocence, but he made no mention of the parcel or its contents.

On Monday, November 19, 1860, James Mullins climbed the scaffold outside the high wall of Newgate prison. The bolt drawn, the drop (trap door) fell, and he appeared to die with his body giving little more than a shrug. (The hanging was reported in the Evening Standard of November 20, 1860.)

Or Three?

A third suspect had briefly been a subject of interest. Mrs. Emsley’s across-the-road neighbor Caroline Barnes thought she had seen someone in the house on the day after the murder (Tuesday, August 14). Again, a James Stephenson said he saw a tall man coming from a garden, “apparently from number 9” (Mrs. Emsley’s), that Tuesday morning as well. Stephenson identified the man as a Mr. William Rowland. The two witnesses’ naming of another suspect was to trouble Arthur Conan Doyle as he studied the case four decades later (McKay 2017, 229; Doyle 1901).

In fact, however, nothing ever came of either witness’s supposed recall, and I think each had confused what had happened on a different (probably earlier) day with that of Tuesday the fourteenth. As to Conan Doyle, I would say that solving actual cases typically represents a more difficult challenge than creating storybook ones. The two processes are very different, as Conan Doyle himself should have known.

Certainly Doyle was wrong to broadly disparage circumstantial evidence. As prosecutor Parry explained to the Emsley jury, they could use an accretion of such evidence to make a very powerful case. This has sometimes been called the fagot argument—the idea that while a single stick may be easily broken, a bundle of sticks (a fagot) may resist breakage. In addition, there is what is termed corroborative evidence—that is, one or more facts that bolster or strengthen others. For example, evidence that Mullins was the culprit gained support from a witness (another of Mrs. Emsley’s tenants) who said Mullins once complained to her that the old lady was insufferably stingy and that “it was a pity such an old wretch should be allowed to live” (McKay 2017, 211).

Author Sinclair McKay, however, has managed to discover—or make out of whole cloth—yet one more suspect: indeed a man of the cloth, as it were. This individual, Joseph Biggs, described himself as “a minister of the [Catholic] Apostle Church” (McKay 2017, 93), and he paid calls on Mrs. Emsley, as she occasionally did him. Apparently, his visits had a romantic element; hers did not. The two were simply a widower and widow looking for companionship.

Biggs played only a very minor role in the Emsley case, but McKay—like other true-crime writers who wish to find a suspect other than the obvious one—is opportunistic. Soon he has elaborated on a detail that fascinated Conan Doyle: the testimony of the woman, Caroline Barnes, who believed she saw someone (was it Biggs?) in Mrs. Emsley’s house the morning after the brutal murder. And that is pretty much it—a failed exercise, in my opinion, but adding several pages of pure supposition (McKay 2017, 275–287).

For those who wanted more of James Mullins—if not a substitute murderer—there was a phrenology “expert” named C. Donovan who, after the hanging, had seized the opportunity to feel the bumpy contours of Mullins’s lifeless head. Supposedly, Donovan’s pseudoscientific analysis revealed:

The head of Mullins is of the lowest sneaking type. … He had a quick, acute intellect; was intellectually clever; morally, a dunce. … He was observant, smooth, specious, crafty in the highest degree. He had been through “sin’s long pilgrimage” and arrived, after many weary journeys, at the terminus where such sinners receive their due. (Donovan 1860)

Then, in just a few weeks, the likeness of James Mullins achieved further infamy by being exhibited in the longtime Chamber of Horrors of Madame Tussaud’s wax museum. To the chamber’s recreations of true-crime murder scenes—lit with colored gas lights—was added “a full-length portrait model of the murderer James Mullins with a plan of Emm’s house and shed where the parcel was found” (East London Observer 1861)—just the scene that haunted Arthur Conan Doyle’s thoughts forty years later and is once again handed down to us in our time.

*    *    *

“Case closed, I say, Watson. It really was quite elementary after all.”

Note

1. From “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” by Arthur Conan Doyle, short story collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892); republished in The Complete Sherlock Holmes, (Doyle [n.d.] 1930, 226–244).

References

Donovan, C. 1860. As appeared in Manchester Guardian, November 25; quoted in McKay 2017, 292–293.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. 1901. The debatable case of Mrs. Emsley. The Strand magazine (May).

———. (N.d.) 1930. The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Books.

East London Observer. 1861. Advertisement, January; quoted in McKay 2017, 293.

Hayes, Inspector. 1860. Police report, K Division, August 17; cited in McKay 2017, 16, 300.

McKay, Sinclair. 2017. The Mile End Murder: The Case Conan Doyle Couldn’t Solve. London: Aurum Press. (Except as otherwise noted, information in this article is taken from this source.)