Murder on the Hackney Express: The first-class train killing that terrified Victorian Britain

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

Franz Muller, known as the first train murderer, was hanged for the killing of Thomas Briggs in 1864

 
The story gripped the nation: a well-to-banker bludgeoned to death in a first-class train carriage on his way home from work.

The suspect had fled abroad and, in what must be the slowest police chase in history, a Metropolitan Police detective chased him by boat across the Atlantic before making his arrest.
The interest in the murder of 70-year-old Thomas Briggs on the 9.45pm train from Fenchurch Street to Hackney Wick on 9 July 1864, even knocked the American Civil War off the front pages.

The first sign of the crime occurred when two young men walked into the empty carriage and discovered the seats and walls drenched in blood as they sat. There was a bloodied handprint on the window and ladies in the carriages beyond complained that tiny droplets of blood had come flying through the open window, flecking their dresses.

There was no sign of the victim.

Some hours later a man was found, barely alive, beside the tracks near Bow. Thomas Briggs was a respectable City banker and father of four, missing his left ear, his gold watch, and top hat, he soon died from his injuries. Briggs was the first person to be murdered on a train - and Victorian Britain was scandalised.

If such a murder - the subject of a new BBC documentary to be broadast next week - could happen in first-class, then anyone could 'be slain in our pew at church', raged one newspaper, also suggesting readers might now expect to be 'assassinated at our dinner table'.
Historian Kate Colquhoun, whose book Mr Briggs' Hat: A Sensational Account Of Britain's First Railway Murder, tells the story of the killing, says the effect of the murder on the nation was similar to that of the terrorist attacks in London and New York.

A Victorian drawing of banker Thomas Briggs and the hunt to find his killer after he was murdered on a train

'There was this great sense of "We thought we were safe", and everyone was stunned to realise that actually, they weren't,'...'Thomas Briggs was white, middle-class, respectable, and in a first-class carriage. If he could be murdered, there, then no-one was safe - any of us could be plunged into this new kind of hell.'
The British public, so proud of their newly-industrialised nation and its railways, became gripped by the mystery surrounding the killer.

In the carriage, police found a hat that Mr Briggs' family insisted was not his, and detective Richard Tanner decided that if he could find its owner, he would find the murderer.

 

Victorian Britain was horrified that a murder could happen aboard a train - particularly in a first class carriage

A reward of £300, equivalent to several years' wages, was offered for information, and a cabbie came forward to say he knew the hat belonged to a German immigrant tailor called Franz Muller.

Muller's landlady in the East End said she had seen him wearing a new watch that matched the victim's, and police followed the trail to London docks, where Muller had boarded a wooden sailing ship bound for New York within a week of the murder.

Detective Tanner took the train to Liverpool and got on a faster steamer bound for New York, arriving three weeks before his target.

 

He had kept his head down in America, where the Civil War was raging and Englishmen were not welcome. Ms Colquhoun said: 'People in New York knew that Tanner was waiting for Muller's ship, and they turned out to greet every ship arriving from London in case Muller was on it. ... 'It was not an easy place for Tanner to be.'

'With the American Civil War raging, New York in 1864 was not an easy place for an Englishman to be'

Author Kate Colquhoun

With a fevered British public back home waiting eagerly for news of an arrest, Tanner was determined to get his man. When finally Muller's ship came in, Tanner confronted him and found he had both Briggs' watch and a silk top matching the victim's.

The suspect's mild manner confused the detective.

Ms Colquhoun said: 'When he was arrested he seemed surprised, and the ship's captain remarked how he read Dickens appreciatively on the journey to America.'
A baying mob waited for Muller in London but at his trial at the Old Bailey, his manner continued to confound those expecting to see a brutal killer.

The short, young foreigner barely spoke in court, and blushed when he was offered a chair to sit on in the dock. No murder weapon was found, but Muller was found guilty and wept in court as the verdict was announced. Four months later, he was hanged at Newgate in front of a bloodthirsty crowd.

Ms Colquhoun said: 'The crowd at his hanging was enormous: there were 40,000 people packed into the small, narrow streets around Newgate and the Old Bailey.

'People were drunk, they were swearing - it was the biggest and noisiest crowd at a public hanging in living memory.'

Muller cut a dignified figure as he made his way to the scaffold, and - according to his priest and confessor - made a last-minute confession to him, saying 'Ich habe es getan' (I did it) moments before he perished.

Such was the size and behaviour of the crowd that it led directly to the banning of public hangings - a few years later, popular disgust at public hangings meant that they were moved behind prison walls.

Historian Ms Colquhoun said that despite the convicted killer being hanged, the Victorian public never felt they got the full story behind the bloody killing.
'My feeling is that Muller did it, but that he didn't set out to murder,' she said. 'Perhaps it was a robbery that went wrong, and he did not think that he had killed Thomas Briggs.

'That would account for his surprise when he was arrested. ... It was a prickly story for a hugely interested British public, and although they felt they had got their man, they never quite felt they got to the bottom of it.'