Elementary solution to the case Conan Doyle couldn’t crack
It was a case so perplexing that even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the world’s greatest sleuth, could not crack it. The mystery of the slain slum landlady thrilled and appalled Victorian London and fascinated the author, who went to his grave convinced that the wrong man had been hanged.
Now the puzzle may have been solved, and Conan Doyle appears to have been right.
On November 19, 1860, James Mullins, a plasterer and petty criminal from Ireland, was hanged in front of a baying crowd for the murder of Mary Emsley, an elderly and wealthy widow. The case caught the country’s imagination, and a hastily created waxwork of Mullins became a star attraction in Madame Tussaud’s chamber of horrors.
The condemned man, who was regularly employed by Emsley, went to the gallows protesting his innocence, and Conan Doyle became convinced that a miscarriage of justice had been committed. But unlike the conclusion to one of his Sherlock Holmes stories, the writer failed to solve the riddle.
More than a century later, Sinclair McKay, an author and journalist, is convinced that he has succeeded where his literary hero failed, and has apportioned the blame to a preacher who wanted to marry Emsley.
His book The Mile End Murder: The Case Conan Doyle Couldn’t Solve will be published next month.
‘‘It seemed to me that Sir Arthur had thrown down a challenge,’’ McKay said. ‘‘I’m convinced that the conclusion that I have come to is considerably more plausible than the one that Mullins was hanged for.’’
Emsley, who rented out dozens of dank properties in the East End, was found beaten to death in her handsome property, her skirts raised in an unseemly manner.
The finger of blame was initially pointed at Walter Emm, a shoemaker, who collected rent on her behalf. However, the police then arrested Emm’s accuser, Mullins, who had a conviction for theft.
It was suggested that Mullins had intended to pocket the £300 that had been put up as a reward.
A hammer of the sort typically used by plasterers, which police suggested was the murder weapon, was found at his home.
Following a trial at which crowds in the public gallery jeered Mullins’ every utterance, the jury unanimously found him guilty.
Conan Doyle, who was born a year before the murder, was moved sufficiently by the case to write an article entitled The Debatable Case of Mrs Emsley, published in 1901. He claimed that the judicial system had become the ‘‘giant murderer of England’’, adding: ‘‘If the Scotch verdict of ‘not proven’, which neither condemns nor acquits, had been permissible in England, it would have been the outcome.’’
McKay, who examined court transcripts, contemporary accounts and parish records, found that there was no sign of forced entry at Emsley’s home, that nothing of value was stolen, and that a witness had reported seeing a figure inside the property the morning after the murder was believed to have been committed.
‘‘Here was a killer who is not only crazy enough to kill an old lady in a kind of frenzy, but then stayed with her body all night long,’’ he said.
‘‘There was one man who would actually stay with her in the darkness after having killed her, to pray and see that her soul had been seen off properly. That was the Rev Joseph Biggs.’’
Biggs, a firebrand Presbyterian preacher, was the widow’s closest male companion, McKay said. ‘‘Practically every time they met, he would greet her by proposing marriage.
‘‘She was fantastically wealthy, and she teased him endlessly about what she might leave him in her will.
‘‘If anyone was going to descend into a frenzy, it’s not going to be the labourer who relies on her for work. It’s going to be the man who has been stingingly rebuffed one too many times by this extraordinarily sharp-tongued old lady.’’