Cruel Murder
And a poem about killing
Cruel Murder Committed by Robert Johnstone on the Body of Miss Jane Henderson, Near Rosevale Village on the Banks of the Humber, a Few Miles From Hull, on Saturday, 27th June, 1863
This little pamphlet claims to be the true account of a murder. Of a cruel murder, no less. It has dates and times and places. It has details — the mutilated body, the tell-tale note unburnt amid the lady’s clothing, the tearful confession of the killer — which would tend towards historical accuracy. But I don’t believe the event described here happened. At least not as written. And why? Because the pamphlet’s author, or compiler, decided to end their production with a poem, imaginatively reconstructing the event and giving the whole thing a moral.
Briefly, I’ll give you some of the supposed facts.
Jane Henderson had lost her father; and after the loss, her mother had moved the two of them to Humberside, where they lived. Miss Henderson was paid court by some men and eventually she and a man called Robert Johnstone ended up together. But they weren’t married. We are led to believe that Johnstone promised Miss Henderson marriage; but that when she became pregnant, however, he did not arrange their wedding at all. Instead, as her due date approached, Johnstone was somewhere else, with someone else. He was courting another, a woman of good family who had, the author claims, quite a lot of money — and who, though she is not named, we are assured knew nothing of Mr Johnstone’s ties to Miss Henderson.
Wanting to marry the new girl and to ditch the old, we’re told, Johnstone summoned Miss Henderson to a meeting on the bank of the Humber. She arrived to see him late in the evening on Saturday, June 27. There, of course, we do not know what happened — save that Miss Henderson disappeared. And when a body was discovered by some walkers (the body having been apparently thrown into the river for concealment), it was first determined to be a woman’s, then determined to be Miss Henderson; and then the means by which she was killed were determined to be a stab to the neck and other ‘desperate’ wounds to the abdomen.
Among Miss Henderson’s clothes, the pamphlet-writer says, was found a note from Johnstone, in which he did several profoundly suspicious things. First, he asked her to meet him there and then — past 9 p.m., on the day in question, on the banks of the river. And second, he told her to destroy the note — make sure to burn it, he said, because this letter is hurried; because your mother might read it; because she might not like its implication of late night lovers’ meetings.
Things begin to look very dark for Mr Johnstone. He is sent for. Authorities question him about Miss Henderson — about her disappearance. He does his best to deny it, to stonewall their questions. But then he is brought into the presence of her body, and he is very agitated (hardly a confession of guilt; most of us don’t like murder and wouldn’t like the murder of a friend, lover, and unborn child). And then he is presented with his own note, the note in which he asked Miss Henderson to meet him — the note he told her to burn — the note he wanted never to see again.
At this, we are informed by the eager beaver of a pamphleteer, Johnstone went white; he fell to the ground; he said all manner of histrionic things. He was clapped in fetters and detained until a coroner’s jury could be convened. While waiting for that jury, his parents dropped by. They had no doubt, it seems, of his guilt, and they sought his repentance and confession. While Johnstone wept and wailed and said, of the note, that he wrote it and, of his circumstances, that they would never have arisen if he had behaved as his parents said he ought, if he had been the good and moral boy he was brought up to be.
The coroner’s jury quite naturally decided that Miss Henderson was murdered, and referred the case — and Mr Johnstone — to the assizes. For the capital application of justice upon his unwilling head.
After which, as I have said, this chapbook concludes with a poem: a poem that imagines the thoughts of Henderson and Johnstone; imagines Miss Henderson’s last moments — all the things she probably cried out as the knife descended over and over again. And it imagines young Johnstone’s throwing her into the river, too, something no one writing before the trial could know for certain.
It imagines the swift and merciless justice that will soon come the way of Mr Johnstone. And admonishes young men especially, and by implication young women, that though love may stir strong passions, if the girl had not fallen pregnant none of these things would have happened. By implication it suggests that a few more cold showers would have averted the whole thing.
Does the poem alone prove that this story is made up? I think it does. But there have long been imaginative reinterpretations of real crimes. The first novel about the murders associated with Jack the Ripper, A Curse on Mitre Square, was written within weeks of the first few bodies being discovered in Whitechapel, before much of the later histrionics had so thoroughly taken hold.
No, what makes me sure this story is false is its convenience. Murderers are stupid, as a rule, but would they really write notes like that? Would a note like that survive long contact with a river? Would a story of such obvious moral dimensions — a demonstration story, a show-piece, a paradigm — actually happen as conveniently as described?