Eat Thy Neighbour Read online

  For more than a decade and a half, Lovett and Todd grew rich in their unspeakable enterprise, throughout which they were apparently also lovers. Amazingly, there is no record of the two of them ever being seen together in public. The answer may lie in the tunnels and crypts beneath their respective shops. To keep their connection a secret, Todd only visited Lovett clandestinely; slopping his way through the bloody mud to her pie shop where they would retire to her lavishly appointed upstairs apartment and make love.

  Their scheme began to unravel during the summer of 1800 when an unspeakable stench started to permeate the sanctuary of St Dunstan’s church next door to Todd’s barber’s shop. Failing to find the source of the smell, the vicar, the Revd Joseph Stillingport, and the sexton called in the local beadle, Mr Otton. Although Otton was as mystified by the smell as the vicar and the sexton, he duly reported the incident to his superior, Sir Richard Blunt, head of the Bow Street Runners. In his report, Otton said the smell reminded him of rotting corpses, but the vicar had assured him that none of the crypts beneath the church had been used in decades. Blunt, however, decided to investigate for himself.

  Accompanied by Otton, Blunt descended into the crypts beneath St Dunstan’s. Although the crypt doors were sealed and intact, and there was no evidence that the sewers had backed up into the vaults, the rotten smell was so overpowering that the men had to cover their noses and mouths with cloths soaked in vinegar to keep from retching. Blunt retired from St Dunstan’s none the wiser than when he had entered.

  A few weeks later Blunt heard a strange report from another of his men who told him that a number of customers had been reported as having gone into a barber’s shop at 186 Fleet Street and apparently failed to reappear. When Blunt located Todd’s shop on a city map, he saw immediately that it was next to St Dunstan’s church. What connection, if any, there might be between the stench in St Dunstan’s and the supposed disappearance of Todd’s customers, Blunt could not imagine – but he decided to post a team of constables in an upstairs room opposite Todd’s shop to keep an eye on the place. Over the next three months at least three customers who went into the shop failed to reappear on the street. With this evidence – and a mounting pile of dark suspicions – in hand, Blunt decided to take another team of men and re-examine the vaults beneath St Dunstan’s.

  Prising open the long-sealed doors of one crypt after another, Blunt and his men were confronted by scenes of unimaginable horror. Piled around and on top of one coffin after another were mountains of bones, skulls and decaying entrails. Some had obviously been there for years while others still had relatively fresh flesh clinging to them. By the light of their candles, Blunt and his men followed a blood-soaked path from the crypt and found that it led in two directions. To the right, it came out beneath Todd’s shop and to the left it wound its way beneath Chancery Lane and into the basement bakehouse of Margery Lovett’s pie shop. The horrible, unthinkable truth dawned on Blunt and his men: Sweeney Todd was murdering his clients and sending their bodies to Mrs Lovett to be made into pies.

  If further proof were needed, Blunt assigned one of his men to break into Todd’s house when the barber was away and see what he could find, but cautioned him not to remove anything that might be used as evidence. When the constable reported back several days later, he read the names of a number of missing persons whose names he had taken from the inside of watch cases and the sweatbands of hats found stashed in Todd’s closets. A furious Blunt immediately prepared to close in on Todd and Lovett.

  A group of constables was rushed to Bell Yard with a warrant for the arrest of Mrs Margery Lovett and the seizure of the contents of her pie shop as evidence. When the men burst into the shop and read the warrant, customers at the counter, as well as a few curious passers-by who were drawn by the commotion, were first stunned beyond words and then thrown into confusion that quickly turned to rage. As the crowd grew, constables were afraid the swelling mob would grab Lovett and string her up to the nearest lamp post. Hustling their suspect out of the back door, they hailed a passing coach and sped her off to Newgate prison.

  Inside the coach, wedged between two guards, Lovett broke down and began mumbling a nearly incoherent confession. Once safely inside Newgate, she asked to see the governor and said she wanted to make a statement. In the presence of the governor, a recording clerk and witnesses, she claimed that the real criminal was Sweeney Todd and that she was only his accomplice and had no intention of hanging alone. Although the original confession has been lost, a creditable version was later printed in the London Chronicle and runs, in part, as follows:

  Believing that I am on the edge of the grave, I Margery Lovett, make this statement.

  Sweeney Todd first conceived the idea of that mutual guilt which we have both since carried out. He bought the house in Bell Yard . . . and . . . excavated an underground connection between the two, mining right under St Dunstan’s Church, and through the vault of that building.

  When he had completed all his arrangements he came to me and made his offer . . . I was willing.

  The plan he proposed was that the pie-shop should be opened for the sole purpose of getting rid of the bodies of people whom he might think proper to murder in his shop . . . He murdered many. The business went on and prospered and we both grew rich. This is how we fell to our present state.

  The only question she posed to the governor was to ask if her confession could be used as evidence against Todd himself. The governor assured her that it could, and would, be so used.

  While the distraught Mrs Lovett was stumbling through her confession, Sir Richard Blunt and his Bow Street Runners were preparing for their raid on Todd’s barber’s shop. Covering both the main and rear doors, Blunt and several constables burst into the shop and read out the warrant for Todd’s arrest. Although he tried to bluff his way out of the mess, Todd was arrested, shackled and hustled into a coach, which was waiting to bear him to Newgate prison.

  The frenzy that gripped London after the pair’s arrest threw the city into turmoil and virtually destroyed the meat pie market for months to come. Sensationalised newspaper accounts – dubbing Todd ‘The Demon Barber of Fleet Street’ and inventing ‘facts’ where none had been released – made an already horrific situation even worse. Meanwhile, Blunt and his men stolidly began building a watertight case against the felonious pair. Although Blunt pressed for as early a trial as possible, his efforts in bringing the cannibal-pie-maker to justice would prove to be a case of too little, too late. A few days before Christmas 1801, Sir Richard was brought the news that despite her stated desire to turn King’s Evidence against Todd, Margery Lovett had committed suicide in her cell.

  How she obtained the poison with which she ended her life is not known, but it is likely that she had sent word to one of her servants to bring her a change of clothes, or some other necessity, and secreted among them was a small vial of poison. When the guards brought her breakfast at eight o’clock the following morning they found her dead. Not only had she escaped justice, but also left unanswered the nagging question of why she had agreed to be a part of the monstrous scheme in the first place.

  In spite of the loss of one of his prime suspects, and the most creditable witness against Todd, Blunt forged ahead with the case. A full search of the barber’s shop and the crypts below yielded up sufficient clothing, jewellery and skeletal remains to account for somewhere in the neighbourhood of 160 victims. Although nearly everyone in the city was well aware of the general facts in the case long before Todd’s trial began, the recounting of the mountain of physical evidence brought repeated gasps and ‘Ohhhs’ from visitors and jury alike. It seems that at the height of his murderous rampage, Todd was committing an average of one murder a month, and may have worked at this frenetic pace for as long as five years. When all the evidence was in, and the time came for the jury to deliberate, it took them scarcely more than five minutes to find Sweeney Todd guilty of murder.

  On 25 January 1802, only days after the verdi
ct was handed down, Sweeney Todd, the 46-year-old ‘Demon Barber of Fleet Street’ was taken to the gallows at Newgate prison where, according to newspaper accounts, he ‘died hard’ – kicking and choking away his last moments of life.

  After his execution, according to common practice of the day, Todd’s body was handed over to the Royal College of Surgeons where it would be dissected by medical students. In the end, Todd himself wound up in the same dismembered condition as had so many dozens of his victims. Today, more than two centuries after their demise, Sweeney Todd still holds claim to being the greatest mass murderer in English history and, together with his cannibalistic cohort, Margery Lovett, inspired one of the most successful musical plays of all time.

  Seven

  A Hunger for Adventure: Alfred Packer (1874)

  In the nineteenth century most of the American West was inhospitable at the best of times. In addition to its endemic lawlessness and the threat of attack from angry Indians and white outlaws, it was blessed by a climate that ranged from blistering heat and drought to freezing cold. It was the kind of place that brought out the best, and worst, in those brave enough to challenge its perils, often turning otherwise ordinary men and women into legendary figures. One of those apparently ordinary people whose story turned out more grotesque than most was Alfred Packer.

  Like most of the individuals who populated the Old West, Alfred Packer was born in the eastern USA, in his case Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, in January 1842. As a teenager he was apprenticed to a shoemaker but, as with most young men, Alf was too full of energy to be tied to one job for long. He wanted to go to important places and see big things.

  In 1862, with the American Civil War at its height, the twenty-year-old Packer joined the Union Army where he served for only nine months before being discharged because of a mild case of epilepsy. Six months later he tried to re-enlist, but again he was discharged on the same medical grounds. So far as we know, the only notable event during his time in the military was the evening when he, along with some of his buddies, decided to get a tattoo. The tattoo artist, either because he was only semi-literate, or drunk, or both, misspelled his client’s name. There, for all time, was the word ‘Alferd’ etched into the boy’s flesh. Making light of the sloppy mistake, throughout his life Packer joked about the misspelling, often referring to himself as ‘Alferd’ Packer.

  Discouraged by two discharges in less than eighteen months, Packer returned to shoemaking until 1871 (or 1872 depending upon the source material) when the itch to travel became too much for him to bear. He headed west to the gold fields of Utah and Colorado where he alternated between prospecting and returning to the cobbler’s last long enough to grubstake himself for another turn at the sluice box. If nothing else, Alf Packer certainly looked the part of a rugged westerner; he was above average in height, had piercing, deep-set grey eyes, a massive head of flowing, dark wavy hair, a large moustache and a goatee. All in all, Alf cut an imposing figure.

  The summer of 1873 found Packer in Provo, Utah, again prospecting for gold. As the weather turned cold, he drifted towards Bingham where he fell into conversation with a group of men who were anxious to find a guide to lead them south to the new goldfields at Breckenridge, Colorado. With no immediate prospects in sight, Packer told them he knew the territory well, even claiming that he had driven an ore-wagon in several mining camps in the general area of Colorado Territory. Whether this was true or not remains uncertain, but the men believed him and within a few days a group of twenty-one prospectors had agreed to share the expense of hiring ‘Alferd’ as their guide. By now it was mid-November and any sane man knows that the dead of winter is not the time to trek across the Rocky Mountains – but this fact never seemed to dawn on anyone in the group, including Packer.

  For three months the expedition trudged through ever-deepening snow and gale-force winds. With their food supply already running low, when they lost several crates of supplies while crossing a half-frozen river on a raft, the situation became desperate. But for the moment, luck seemed to be with them. On 21 January 1874 the half-frozen, starving crew stumbled into a camp of Ute Indians near present-day Montrose, Colorado. Shaking his head at the stupidity of the white men, the chief, Ouray, took the men in, fed them and urged them to remain with his people until springtime. Sixteen of the party took Ouray’s advice, thanked the chief for his hospitality, and settled in for the winter. Packer himself was more than happy to stay where he was, but five of the men were determined to press on and offered to pay Packer a hefty bonus if he would guide them over the treacherous, wintry heights of the mountains and on to Breckenridge.

  The men, Israel Swan, Shannon Bell, George Noon, Frank ‘the Butcher’ Miller and James Humphrey, wheedled and cajoled until, exasperated and anxious for the extra money, Alf agreed. On 9 February, during the harshest days of winter, the six men left Chief Ouray’s camp and set out into the mountains. Only days later the worst blizzard of the year descended on the Rockies, trapping Packer and the others on a trail somewhere near the site of what is today Lake City, Colorado.

  Nine weeks later, on 6 April, Alfred Packer stumbled into the Los Pintos Indian Reservation near Gunnison, babbling incoherently about how he and the others had been trapped in the storm, and while he tried to set up a camp, the others went off in search of firewood and food. He didn’t know if Bell, Swan, Noon, Miller and Humphrey had deserted him, or become lost in the blizzard and died. All he knew was that he was alone and had survived two months of lonely hell out there in the wilderness. Among those who heard Packer’s tale of woe was Chief Ouray, who had brought his people to Los Pintos with the spring thaw. He, along with the others, listened to the tragic tale with awe and wonder. As Packer turned to leave the office of local Indian Agent General Charles Adams, Ouray is reported to have muttered, ‘You too damn fat’. Whether the chief actually said this is almost irrelevant. The fact was that other than suffering from prolonged exposure to the cold, Packer was as sleek as a beaver.

  After a few days spent getting warm, Packer left Los Pintos for the nearby town of Saguache, where he seemed to have an excess of cash to throw around in the local saloon. While whooping it up one evening, Packer was confronted by several men who had been among the original party that had elected to remain at the Ute camp for the winter. Packer told the same story to them as he had told on his arrival at Los Pintos, but some of the men noticed he was carrying the skinning knife and rifle of other members of the tiny group that had disappeared into the wilderness.

  The men voiced their suspicions to General Adams, who subsequently called Packer into the Los Pintos Agency to make a formal statement. In this, the first of two confessions, Packer abruptly changed his story. On 5 May 1874, he made the following statement:

  Old man Swan died first and was eaten by the other five persons, about ten days out from camp; four or five days afterwards Humphrey died and was also eaten; he had about a hundred and thirty dollars [on him]. I found the pocket-book and took the money. Some time afterwards while I was carrying wood, the Butcher was killed, as the other two told me, accidentally, and he was eaten. Bell shot ‘California’ [Noon] with Swan’s gun, and I killed Bell; shot him – covered up the remains. Bell wanted to kill me, struck at me with his rifle, struck a tree and broke his gun. I took a large piece of meat along. Then I travelled fourteen days into the ‘Agency’.

  The confession was sworn to and witnessed by the local Justice of the Peace, James Downer.

  Packer was arrested and taken back to Saguache where he was jailed, pending formal charges. There he languished until 8 August. That day, the remains of the all-too-dead Packer party were found in a valley known as Slumgullion Pass. The discovery was made by John Randolph, a writer for Harper’s Weekly, and his Indian guide. As a journalist, Randolph was already familiar with the story as well as Packer’s conflicting claims. The grisly campsite was almost exactly where Packer claimed it would be, but contrary to Packer’s statement, the carcasses were not scattered out a
long miles of trail. They were clustered together at a single site – and there was evidence of terrible violence. Most of the men’s heads had been split open with a hatchet and large chunks of flesh had been carved from the bodies, particularly in the upper chest and thigh areas.

  That same evening, before word of the discovery was brought back to Saguache, Packer managed to escape from his cell. He made it all the way to Arkansas where, for the next nine years, he lived under the name of John Schwartze. His movements and activity during this time remain clouded in mystery but it is certain that by March 1883 he was staying in Wyoming. Here again, exactly where in Wyoming seems to be in dispute. Some sources say Douglas, others insist it was Fort Fetterman and still others claim Cheyenne. What is not in dispute is what happened to him while he was drinking in the local saloon on the evening of 11 March.

  By yet another odd twist of fate, Frenchy Carbazon, a member of the original party of twenty-one miners, happened to be in the same watering hole and recognised Packer’s laugh. Hours later, Packer was arrested and hauled to Denver where he was confronted by General Adams for a third time. Again, Packer made a confession and, again, it conflicted with his previous statements. The only details that seemed to remain the same were the claims that whatever he had done was in self-defence and that he had taken money and a rifle from the dead men’s bodies.

  The new confession, dated 16 March 1883, runs, in part, as follows:

  When we left Ouray’s camp we had about seven days of food for [each] man . . .

  When I came back to camp after being gone nearly all day I found the redheaded man [Bell], who [had] acted crazy in the morning, sitting near the fire roasting a piece of meat which he had cut out of the leg of the German butcher [Miller], the latter’s body was lying the furthest off from the fire, down the stream, his skull was crushed in with the hatchet. The other three men were lying near the fire, they were cut in the forehead with the hatchet, some had two, some three cuts – I came within a rod of the fire, when the man [Bell] saw me, he got up with his hatchet [came] towards me when I shot him sideways through the belly, he fell on his face, the hatchet fell forwards. I grabbed it and hit him in the top of the head . . .