‘INNOCENT’ KILLER’S FATE WAS SEALED BY SHAPE OF HIS SKULL
WHEN THE group of men finally succeeded in opening the door to the cashier’s office, they were faced with more blood than they had ever seen in their lives.
Tucked away in the inner sanctum of the vast edifice of the Dublin Broadstone railway station’s staff offices, the throat of George Little – a devout, quiet, abstentious, unmarried man of 42 – had been slashed with such violence that his head was almost severed from his body.
On a desk nearby was hundreds of pounds in bank notes, plus piles of silver and gold coins.and mysteriously, the door to the office had been locked from the inside, presumably by Little himself.
“Dublin in 1856 was considered an extremely safe city,” says Thomas Morris, author of a new book, The Dublin Railway Murder. It dives deep into the Irish national archives to resurrect one of the most notorious crimes of Victorian Ireland and a “whodunnit” with a plot worthy of Patricia Highsmith or Edgar Allan Poe.
“It was a case that baffled everyone involved,” says Thomas.
“The best detectives Dublin had were put on this case, but they struggled from the start.
“Nobody could explain how somebody could have killed George at his desk when the door to his office was locked from the inside.”
The George Little case fascinated pressmen and the public alike on both sides of the Irish Sea.
Interest grew as the notorious Dublin ‘G’ squad of senior detectives made mistakes that not only look appallingly naive with 150 years of retrospect, but were clearly not up to the rudimentary standards of detective work in the 1850s.
“Superintendent Augustus Guy was supposed to be one of the best detectives in the country but he ended up in disgrace after this investigation,” says Thomas.
“He made a lot of mistakes and didn’t seem to have the most basic understanding of court laws of the time. He bungled the case badly and it’s evident from the archives that when it finally came to trial he wasn’t called to give evidence at all.”
In the days after he was butchered, the office of George Little was crawling with railway employees, policemen and pressmen, destroying any chance of finding fingerprints or other incriminating evidence.
And although at first it seemed like the murderer had left without helping himself to the loot, once the takings and accounts were totalled it soon transpired that £330 was missing – equivalent to a decade of wages for a Dublin labourer.
Convinced the missing cash (and the guilty man) were to be found among the station’s outer buildings, which included cottages inhabited by railway employees, Guy and his team embarked on a colossal and hugely expensive search of every inch of the station and surrounding area, including draining a section of the nearby canal.
Dredging the reeking remnants did unearth a vital clue – a hammer and a cut-throat razor, both almost certainly used to bludgeon Little’s skull and slash his throat. “They
‘Dublin’s best detectives
struggled from the start’
‘The verdict of the jury wasn’t matched by the
verdict of the people of Dublin’
had evidence but police couldn’t make anything stick,” says Thomas. “Dubliners were getting hugely frustrated and angry at the lack of progress. The police arrested then released five different men.
“Locals were afraid there was still a violent killer on the loose.”
Just as hope of ever catching Little’s killer was ebbing away, an extraordinary breakthrough came, seemingly from nowhere.
Mary Spollin told police her husband James, a workman at the station, had killed Little, taken the money, and she helped him hide it.
She took police straight to where much of the stash was located.
Some was buried under rubble between two walls on the edge of the Broadstone estate, and some was in a bucket of red lead hidden under a privy used by labourers.
SUPERINTENDENT Guy and his team were convinced they had found the killer, but how on earth did he get into the office when the door was locked from the inside? “This was never proved,” reveals Thomas. “But it’s likely Spollin hid inside the office while Little briefly went outside to use the lavatory.
“The reason that the door was locked is probably more mundane – that after the murder, Spollin left the office through the door, locked it behind him and took the key.”
However, another problem would prove to be insurmountable. “In the 1850s a wife couldn’t testify against her husband,” explains Thomas.
“Incredible as it sounds now, it was believed that a wife and husband were conjoined in a sacred way and one couldn’t testify against the other in court.
“This is where Supt Guy ruined the whole case. He could have left the hidden cash where it was, kept watch on it and waited to see who came to collect it. But he didn’t. He wanted Mary to testify against her husband and that was never going to be allowed to happen. This was domestic law 101 and Guy blew it.”
The prosecution were left with no option other than to ask three of Spollin’s children to testify against their own father.
Their poor memory was coupled with the fact it seemed plausible that they had been schooled by their mother to say more than they actually saw, including spurious claims that they had spotted their father clambering over the rooftops of the station to get away from the scene of the crime.
Their testimonies were no match for the defence barrister John Adye Curran, who tore the young witnesses apart on the stand. The jury, left with next to no choice, had to deliver a not guilty verdict.
After the verdict Spollin told the court: “I would like to retire to some silent colony for the rest of my life”.
He was a free man. But the verdict of the jury wasn’t matched by the verdict of the people of Dublin, almost all of whom were convinced Spollin was the killer. And it was the convictions of a physician in thrall to an already anachronistic “science” that sealed Spollin’s fate.
“Everyone thought Spollin killed George Little,” says Thomas.
“But Frederick Bridges believed he could prove it through science, without the need for any court or further police work.”
Bridges was a phrenologist – a burgeoning discipline in the early19th century but already considered to be outdated by the 1850s. It extolled the theory that a person’s skull could reveal, by the patterns of its bumps and ridges, a murderer from an innocent suspect.
Travelling around Britain to attend executions, Bridges made plaster casts of the skulls of the dead and declared that guilt or innocence could be revealed simply by measuring the angle between a person’s ear and their eyebrow. For most people this angle was around 25 degrees, but in murderers the angle was bigger – between 35 and 45 degrees.
Desperate to get hold of the reviled Spollin, now reduced to making public appearances in Liverpool pubs to beg for donations so he could emigrate, Bridges made a deal with the now destitute “innocent” man that he would pay for Spollin’s passage overseas if he could measure his skull.
A reluctant Spollin knew this was the only way he could get the money to get out of the country.
“The way Spollin was behaving at his ‘performances’ – everyone in Liverpool thought he was as guilty as Dubliners did,” reveals Thomas.
The measurements of Spollin’s skull revealed him to be, as far as Bridge’s theories were concerned, a murderer. The phrenologist immediately wrote to the Home Secretary: ‘‘The configuration of [Spollin’s] head is of a most dangerous type.
“It is not prudent to allow such a man to be at large in this country.”
His letter was ignored. Spollin and his eldest teenage son James (the only one of his children who refused to testify against him) left Liverpool by ship and there are no records stating where they sailed.
Spollin was never heard of again and any credibility for Bridge’s theories was soon to be extinguished.
Despite a research grant from Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, the ideas around phrenology were dismissed by the end of the decade.
“Technically, the killer of George Little was never found,” concludes Thomas. “But what’s so fascinating is what could have happened if anyone in authority had taken Bridges’s theories seriously.
“It’s terrible Spollin escaped justice, but the idea we could be living in a world where people are presumed guilty by the shape of their skull is much, much more terrifying.”
The Dublin Railway Murder, by Thomas Morris, published by Harwill Secker, is out now, priced £16.99