The electric constable
The first murderer to be caught by telegraph
When Sarah Hart was murdered on New Year’s Day, the pursuit of the prime suspect became the first ever case in which the electric telegraph was used to capture a killer.
On 1 January 1845, Mary Ann Ashley of Bath Place, Salt Hill, a suburb of Slough, spotted a man visiting her next door neighbour, Sarah Hart. Two hours later, Mary Ann was sitting by the fire in her home when she heard a scream. Grabbing a candle, she made her way into the garden, and saw the man leaving again. She spoke to him as he struggled to open the gate, but he left without saying anything. Thinking she could hear moaning, Mary Ann entered her neighbour’s property and found Sarah Hart lying on the floor. Her clothes were dishevelled and she was foaming at the mouth. Despite Mary Ann’s efforts to revive her, Sarah died soon after.
The prime suspect
The man visiting Sarah that afternoon was her former employer and lover, John Tawell. Aged 61, he was a respectable merchant. A married man, John was a member of the Society of Friends. Sarah had been nursemaid to his children, after the death of his first wife, and they had entered into a relationship during which Sarah had had two children. When John married again, Sarah was dismissed – he continued to pay for his illegitimate family but he refused to rekindle their affair. The two young children, Frederick, aged 5 and Sarah, 4, were both in the house when their mother died. The post-mortem examination revealed that Sarah had been poisoned with prussic acid.
When John Tawell left the house in Bath Place on the evening of 1 January, he was seen by several other witnesses, including the post boy, who recognised the frequent visitor, and the local vicar. Tawell was particularly conspicuous as he was dressed in the typical garb of a Quaker, wearing a broad-brimmed hat, a white cravat and a loose brown great-coat. The vicar went straight to Slough railway station and informed the superintendent of his suspicions. However, John Tawell had already left on the 7.42 p.m. train to Paddington.
A desperate escape
The line from London Paddington, which had been extended to Slough two years previously, carried an electric telegraph system. Developed in the 1830s, the telegraph was first used on the railway between Euston and Camden in 1837. The following year, inventor William Fothergill Cooke and scientist Charles Wheatstone established the world’s first telegraph network on the Great Western Railway. Superintendent Howell used this groundbreaking innovation to his advantage.
Howell sent a message to his colleagues at Paddington Station, who were waiting for the prime suspect when he alighted the train. However, Tawell slipped the net and disappeared into the city. Two police constables managed to track him down and he was arrested the following day in one of his favourite haunts, the Jerusalem Coffee House near Cornhill.
John Tawell stood trial for the murder of Sarah Hart on 12 March 1845 in Aylesbury (Slough was then in Buckinghamshire). On the opening day, the Reading Mercury reported that ‘the scene…at the entrance to the court, was one of the most animated and eminently disorderly that could possibly be imagined.’ When the prisoner entered the dock, he ‘looked very pale’.
The trial lasted for three days, during which witnesses testified to having seen the accused leaving Sarah Hart’s house on the day of her murder. The surgeon who performed the post-mortem concluded that she had been poisoned by prussic acid. This was confirmed by a London chemist who had analysed the deceased’s stomach contents. Under cross-examination, both men admitted that it was the first time that they had investigated this type of case. And in fact, Tawell had claimed that Sarah had taken the poison on purpose. He had recounted to police how she continually pestered him for money and had even threatened to take her own life. On New Year’s Day, he had visited her to tell her that she would not receive any more cash, and she had taken a slug of porter and then fallen to the floor with convulsions.
The defence counsel claimed that the presence of prussic acid could have been accounted for by her consuming apples (for which he was ribbed for ever after) and in his summary, he said, ‘the real cause of death…might ever perhaps remain a mystery’. Despite the circumstantial nature of the evidence, John Tawell, whom it was revealed had been previously transported to Australia for forgery, was convicted of his former lover’s murder, and executed a fortnight later. The telegraphic system that facilitated his swift capture became known as ‘the electric constable’.
A revolutionary form of communication
Citing the Tawell case, an editorial in The Illustrated London News praised the efficiency of this new invention particularly in relation to offenders who fled the scene of a crime by train:
…detection is sure to dog the footsteps of crime – that the guilty wretch, flying on the wings of steam thirty miles an hour, is tracked by a swifter messenger – and that the lightning itself, by the wondrous agency of the electric telegraph, conveys to the remotest parts of the kingdom an account of his crime, a description of his person, and an incentive to the officers of justice, in the shape of a promised reward, for his capture and conviction.
The telegraph was slowly adopted by regional police forces throughout the 1850s and 60s, dogged by restrictions due to the potential cost. The initial use was by the fire brigade for emergenices (local fire services were managed by the police at the time), and the detectives used commercial telegraphic services to stay in touch with their superior officers, and to communicate with other constabularies during investigations. Eventually, telegraph machines were installed in detective offices. Despite this technological advance, a government inquiry into the identification of offenders in 1901 revealed that, by the end of the century, detective officers were still using written messages in preference to the telegraph – some respondents stated that they found it quicker and easier to send a note with a messenger than to return to the office to send a telegram. From the 1880s, the telegraph was replaced by the telephone.