CRIMES BY GASLIGHT – CHARLES PEACE - THE KILLER WITH A THOUSAND FACES
Murderer, rogue, thief, fanatic and skilled escapee, Charles Peace was the most infamous criminal of his generation. His curious ‘rubber-like’ physique and face, together with a twisted but highly intelligent mind, allowed him to mock the law with total impunity…!
The new prisoner was certainly an odd specimen. For a start, he could change the shape of his face as if it were putty.
John Ward, he called himself. “Complexion dark, clean-shaven, hair grey, eyes hazel, one darker than the other, large mouth, long scar on side of left leg and back of thigh, forefinger of left hand missing, address unknown.” That was how he had been described by the Duty Sergeant on the day he had been arrested.
Any description would have fitted equally well. The man had a thousand faces. He even played a little game with the warders. “Hey, young fellow!” he would call to one of the officers, sticking his head through the grille of his cell door. “Take a good look!” His head would pop back in like a tortoise, then reappear with every feature twisted out of recognition; his jaw misshapen, his eyebrows hidden in the folds of his forehead, his mouth champing like a monkey.
Pious moralizing
It was a grotesque sight. “Now then, officer,” he would cackle. “Could you describe me to a judge now? As an honest man. could you?”
There was another strange thing about Mr. Ward’s appearance. At first, his complexion had been unusually dark - “African”, one policeman had described it. Now it was becoming lighter.
Everything about the mysterious Mr. Ward was a contradiction. When he wasn’t contorting his face into hideous grimaces, he looked like a frail and doddery old man, with white hair, bowed shoulders and a faltering step. Yet. undressed, he had the physique of a man 20 years younger, lithe, muscular and agile.
His arrest after shooting and wounding a policeman had shocked everyone who knew him. though they were puzzled why the upright citizen they knew as John Thompson should have called himself John Ward. Mr. Thompson was respected by all his neighbours as a sober and Godfearing man, devoted equally to pious moralizing and amateur home-music making. The residents of Peckham, a sedate and suffocatingly respectable suburb of south-east London, were sure there had been a mistake. But Police-constable R202 Edward Robinson had a shattered arm to prove his story.
The riddle was, if the “india-rubber man” had been leading a double life and was neither John Ward nor John Thompson, then who was he?
One by one, police chiefs from all over London filed past Ward's cell in Newgate Jail, hoping to recognize him. The man was highly indignant. “You’ve never set eyes on me!” he said. “I’ve never been in a place like this before!”
Mr. Ward was still protesting angrily when a woman called Mrs. Sue Thompson called at the jail and asked to see the two
officers in charge of the case. She seemed nervous and distraught. “I understand there’s a possibility of a reward.” she said hesitantly. “I mean, for the man you have here who calls himself John Ward. We’ve been living together under the name of Thompson . . .”
The officers smiled patiently. "There must be a mistake,” said one. “There’s no reward for anyone called either Ward or Thompson.”
Gaslit streets
“You don’t understand,” said Mrs. Thompson. “His real name is Peace. Charles Peace.”
The smiles faded from the officers’ faces. “Good God!” exclaimed Inspector John Bonney. “We’ve got Charlie Peace!”
The name screamed from "WANTED” posters all over Britain. Murderer, thief, burglar, pickpocket, Charlie Peace had been a one-man crime wave for nearly 30 years. His exploits had become a living legend. He was the man who boasted that no detective was clever enough to catch him, who had slipped through the fingers of the Law a thousand times, whose adventures were followed by the public as if he were some modern Robin Hood.
The greatest criminal who ever haunted the foggy and gaslit streets of Britain had been behind bars for three weeks, and they hadn’t even realized it. All they had to do now was hang on to him. Elated
though they were by their accidental success, Inspector Bonney and Inspector Philips were only too aware that their problems had only just started, for Charlie Peace had one other headline-making ability. He was a virtuoso escape artist, who could squeeze through a space six inches wide, pad across rooftops like a cat, somersault over a brick wall, and who claimed, “I’m more than a match for any three men.’’
Charlie Peace was really half-a-dozen men rolled into one. He could have made a living, and occasionally did, as a violinist, an entertainer, an acrobat, an actor, a carpenter or an antique-dealer. But some perverse streak in his nature, hardened by the social conditions of the time, led him to crime.
Tiny footprints
He was ugly, yet he had a strange power over women. He was violent, yet loved animals and children. He was merciless to those who crossed him, yet he could pray for hours on end and talk theology to a Bishop. He was outstandingly quick witted and intelligent, yet there were those who called him insane.
Whether Charlie Peace was crippled in mind, nobody will ever know. He was certainly crippled in body. With the inhumanity that lurked beneath the self- righteous patina of Victorian society, Charlie Peace had been sent to work in a steel mill at 13, tending machines that were lethally dangerous. One day, a length of white-hot steel shot out of his machine and went right through his leg, just above the kneebone. The machine had to be put into reverse before the rod could be removed, and he was maimed for life. His career of crime started the day he left hospital on crutches, branded as incurable and thrown onto a labour market that had no room for cripples.
With bravery and determination, helped by an incredibly tough physique, Charlie Peace overcame his disability to such an extent that he could perform as an acrobat and tumbler. His strength was known and feared throughout his home town of Sheffield. He once picked up a ferocious bulldog by its lower jaw and beat it into insensibility with his other hand.
But there was another, more sensitive side to his character. He learned the violin and had such an instinctive feeling for the instrument that he was able to tour the countryside, playing at fairs and dances. He joined a troupe of actors, performing sketches and excerpts from Shakespeare. Walking home one night, still in his theatrical make-up, he realized that nobody could recognize him. This discovery inspired a series of disguises which were to fool the police and earn him the title of “The man with the india-rubber face”. For he had already started on the road that would lead to the gallows.
High above the damp and dimly lit streets, Charlie Peace went to work each night with his violin-case. It contained no instrument, but a complete set of housebreaking tools. The “fiddler on the roof” was a cat-burglar. He was so deft and agile that he could ransack six houses in one night, moving swiftly and silently from roof to roof in stockinged feet. In the morning the only clues were a series of tiny, indistinct footprints on the tiles, so small that for a long time it was thought Charlie Peace was a child.
He used every skill he possessed. His father had been an animal-trainer, and Charlie Peace had inherited his understanding of animals. Only now he applied it to watchdogs. The most homicidal mas-tiffs ended up licking his fingers and accepting the drugged meat he always carried. Time and again the extraordinary suppleness of his acrobat’s body saved him from capture. Surprised one night by a householder, he wound himself clear of the ground round the leg of a single leg dining-table, hidden from view by an overhanging tablecloth. The man looked around, shrugged his shoulders and went back to bed. Peace screwed up the doors of the room to prevent being disturbed again and continued sorting out the loot.
Things didn’t always go smoothly and silently. By 1872 he had been jailed four times and spent more than 15 years behind bars, but each time he emerged more cunning and desperate than before. He had learned to alter his features at will, so that every identification photograph seemed to show a different man. He darkened his face with walnut juice. He also started carrying a revolver, strapped to his wrist. Experimenting with various types of cartridges one day, he blew off his left forefinger. Even then, he put the injury to good use. He invented a false arm with a hook at the end, which both concealed his telltale hand and provided a useful disguise.
This theatrical skill frequently got him out of trouble. The headmaster of an exclusive boys’ school was delighted when a dignified-looking old man called and offered to entertain the pupils for a few hours with songs, recitations and scenes from Shakespeare. The performance was a resounding success. The Gravedigger’s Scene from Hamlet brought the house down, and even the masters were entranced by the man’s ability to play tunes on a one-string fiddle made out of an ordinary walking stick. The “all-round entertainer” didn’t leave until darkness fell and it was safe to step outside. It was Charlie Peace. What the headmaster didn’t know was that he had been on the run from the police, and the school was the safest place to hide out.
The sparse and slow-moving police force, Britain had only just progressed from centuries of night-watchmen and “voluntary constables”— was no match for Charlie Peace. He once stopped at one of his own “Wanted” posters and asked a policeman, “Have they found that scoundrel Peace yet?” When police searched a train, acting on a tip-off that Peace was among the passengers, they were reinforced by an excitable old man with white hair, who ran up and down the carriages babbling, “Come out, you rascal! You can’t escape!” It was Charlie Peace again.
Lunatic obsession
In 1875, Peace moved to the village of Darnall with his long-suffering wife, Hannah, and stepson, Willie. Unfortunately for Peace a new vicar moved in the same week. It was the Rev. J. H. Littlewood, Peace’s former chaplain at Wakefield Jail. The two men met face to face in the High Street. Peace forced his features into a deferential smile and raised his hat. That evening, Peace called on the vicar and pleaded with him not to give away his identity. “Have mercy on me and my family.” he begged. “I’ve completely reformed. I’m going straight and trying to build a new life.” The parson agreed to keep 'Peace’s secret, provided he went to church every Sunday and behaved like an honest and pious citizen.
Nobody could outdo Charlie Peace when it came to praising the Lord, and he fully lived up to the parson’s confidence. He was on his knees faster and delivered his “Amens” more fervently than any other member of the congregation. Soon he was conducting the children’s Bible classes. As a token of his esteem, he presented Mr. Littlewood with an ingenious mechanical singing bird, forgetting to add the fact that it had been stolen from a wealthy collector in another county.
It was “The Case of the Sunday School Clock” that eventually caused the vicar to fall out with his plausible new parishioner. Mr. Littlewood noticed it was missing and immediately suspected Peace. Peace hotly denied the accusations, but things were never the same again. Many years later, the trivial, parish-pump affair was to have an extraordinary sequel.
But now Peace had a bigger problem on his mind; a problem fated to spiral into a lunatic obsession which was to rob him of all sense of caution. He had fallen in love with his next-door neighbour, Mrs. Katherine Dyson, who lived with her husband, Arthur, a 6 ft. 5 ins. but docile railroad engineer. Peace wormed his way into the Dysons’ home, and, at first, Mrs. Dyson responded to his advances, meeting him secretly in the attic which linked the two houses.
Then she made her fatal mistake. She told Peace she was tired of him and didn’t wish to see him anymore. Peace refused to take no for an answer. He bombarded Mrs. Dyson with calls and letters, and gradually his infatuation with Mrs. Dyson soured and twisted into a form of persecution. He peered through the couple’s windows at night, shouted abuse at them in the street, followed them round the village muttering threats. It was too much even for the quiet and retiring Mr. Dyson, a gentle giant of a man. In a stiff and futile gesture, he threw his visiting card into Peace’s garden, bearing the message, “Charles Peace is requested not to interfere with my family.”
The action only inflamed Peace further. He became almost demented. “He had a way of creeping and crawling about and coming upon you suddenly unawares,” recalled Mrs. Dyson. “I cannot describe to you how he seemed to wriggle himself inside a door, or the terrible expression on his face. He seemed more like an evil spirit than a man. I used to be especially afraid of him at nights because he had a habit of continually prowling about the house and turning up suddenly. He would, too, assume all sorts of disguises. He used to boast how effectively he could disguise himself. He once said, I am never beaten when I have made up my mind. If I make up my mind to a thing, I am bound to have it, even if it costs me my life’.” In the end it did just that.
On the evening of July 1, 1875, Mrs. Dyson was gossiping with some neighbours outside her house. Without a sound, Peace emerged from the shadows and walked up to her. His eyes were wild and his manner agitated. He pulled a revolver from his pockets pointed it at her head and threatened, “I’ll blow your bloody brains out and your bloody husband’s, too.” The threat misfired. Far from terrorizing the Dysons, it made up their minds. They took him to court.
An appearance before a magistrate, where awkward questions might be asked, was a risk Peace couldn’t take. He failed to answer the summons, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. The Dysons heaved a sigh of relief. Their tormentor had gone. . . or so they thought. The only reminder of the unpleasant incident was a few letters in the post, some abusive, others pleading for Mrs. Dyson to withdraw the summons.
Just before midnight, exactly one month later, 20-year-old Police-constable Nicholas Cock left a police-station in Manchester to patrol his regular beat. He seemed disturbed. “I’ve got a feeling something dreadful is going to happen tonight,” he told his friends.
Paroxysm of hate
About 30 minutes later he noticed a suspicious figure lurking round a large, detached house in Seymour Grove. While P.C. Beanland, who had been patrolling nearby, crept up the drive, P.C. Cock positioned himself behind a rear wall to catch the intruder if he tried to escape through the back. As P.C. Beanland’s bullseye lantern flickered over the front of the house, a figure detached itself from the bushes and sped down the garden, vaulting the wall in one leap. He landed almost in P.C. Cock’s arms.
“Stand back, or I’ll shoot,” said the man, producing a revolver from his sleeve. Courageously, P.C. Cock reached for his truncheon and moved forward. The man fired one shot wide, but the constable kept on coming. The next shot hit him full in the chest. He fell, groaning, “Oh, murder, murder, I’m shot, I’m shot.” P.C. Beanland raced to his aid, but the young policeman was already dying. “Who shot you?” asked P.C. Beanland urgently. “I don’t know,” gasped P.C. Cock. They were his last words.
He was right. In the darkness, few people could have recognized the wild and distorted face of Charlie Peace. Either way, it made little difference, for the police already had a suspect. A few days earlier, three young Irishmen, the Habron brothers, had threatened to shoot P.C. Cock. That night, Police-Superintendent William Bent led a raid on the shack the three brothers used as a home.
The men were hauled from their beds and charged with the murder of P.C. Cock. The circumstantial evidence against them constituted a formidable case. There was the threat overheard by several witnesses. There had been mud on their boots. Their alibi that they had been in bed two hours before the murder was not substantiated by a local publican, who remembered them drinking until 11 p.m.
On November 27, 23-year-old John Habron and his 18-year-old brother, William, stood trial at Manchester Assizes, both knowing they were completely innocent. The jury took 2i hours to consider its verdict. John was found Not Guilty. William was Guilty, and condemned to death.
In the public gallery, one man seemed particularly satisfied with the verdict. It was Charlie Peace, who had slipped into the court to see injustice done. But William Habron did not hang; just before the date set for his execution, the Home Secretary issued a reprieve, and his sentence was commuted to 20 years’ penal servitude in Portland Prison.
Peace had ducked out of one noose, only to place his head in another. For the day after Habron had been sentenced to death for the crime he had committed, Peace murdered the inoffensive Mr. Dyson.
Peace had caught up with the Dysons again on the afternoon they moved house to a different part of Sheffield. He followed the furniture van and got to the house before them. When they arrived, they found him sitting in one of their own chairs, grinning evilly. “You see,” he leered, “I’m here to annoy you, wherever you go. You’ll never escape me.”
The day after the Habron trial, Peace visited a pub in Sheffield and started drinking heavily. Urged on by the mob, he improvized a musical instrument from a tautened length of string and, using a stick as a bow, began playing with increasing frenzy. Within a few hours, he had worked himself into a paroxysm of hate. Suddenly throwing down his stick, he stumbled out of the pub in the direction of the Dysons’ new home.
At about 9 p.m. Mrs. Dyson left her kitchen and walked down the back garden to the outside lavatory. She was horrified to find Peace hiding inside. As he made a grab for her, she screamed. Her husband heard the cry and ran to her aid, knowing instinctively who Was at the bottom of the dark garden. Peace was trapped. He fired once, but Mr. Dyson, as brave as the ill-fated P.C. Cock, bore down on him. Peace fired once more, and this time the bullet smashed into Mr. Dyson’s left temple. He died nearly two hours later.
Narrow escape
A nationwide manhunt was launched for Peace. Posters announcing “WANTED FOR MURDER, £100 REWARD” appeared all over Britain. Now Peace needed every one of his thousand faces.
By a combination of cunning, skill and sheer effrontery, he kept one step ahead of the police. He got out of his brother’s house in Hull, where he had called to collect some clothes, only 30 minutes before the police arrived. He was actually having breakfast with his wife when the police swooped on her shop, but he managed to get away over the rooftops. He even found time to pick up a mistress, Sue Bailey.
He was in bed with her in lodgings in Nottingham when police broke into the room. It was part of a routine check on receivers of stolen property. Peace pretended to be a travelling salesman, and while Sue kept the policeman talking, he went downstairs under the pretext of fetching up his samples. Still in his socks, he squeezed through the narrow bars of a downstairs window and made off. Half an hour later, after the fuss had died down, he sent a neighbour back into the house to fetch his boots.
After that narrow escape, Peace felt he deserved a holiday. Posing as “Mr. and Mrs. Thompson”, Peace and Sue Bailey stayed for two months in the home of a police-sergeant in Aubury Road, Hull. He was regarded as an ideal lodger, particularly as he seemed to show a genuine interest in the policeman’s work.
As far as Peace was concerned, the house made an ideal “cover” for burgling expeditions. He cut a swathe through Hull, breaking into as many as seven houses in one night. In one house, he was surprised when the occupants returned early from a dinner. He stood on the stairs and fired a shot into the ceiling. As the occupants scattered for cover, he dived out of a window and escaped over the garden wall. He also fired at an unarmed policeman who stopped him as he left another house. Sensibly, the policeman let him go.
At the end of his “working holiday” Peace decided that Hull was becoming too dangerous, despite the unwitting protection afforded by his policeman landlord. He packed his housebreaking tools in his violin-case and took a train to London.
On the way, he was joined by a taciturn middle-aged man who resisted all Peace’s efforts to strike up a conversation. Gradually, however, Peace started to draw him out. He was startled to discover that the man was William Marwood, the official executioner. It was a bizarre confrontation. As Marwood left. Peace shook him by the hand and said, “If you ever have to do the job for me, be sure you grease the rope well to let me slip.” Marwood looked at the decrepit old man with the white hair, whiskers and nut-brown face and laughed at such a remote possibility. Two years later the two men were to meet again, under rather more strained circumstances.
Read the rest of the story - and more - in Murder and Mayhem Volume #2 available on Amazon Kindle. Click on the image below:
