Thomas Morris: The Dublin Railway Murder

This week on Wicked Words, we’re traveling to 1856 Ireland for a locked-door mystery. A cashier for a Dublin railway station is found dead, savagely beaten. Nothing appears to have been stolen. Can an experienced detective crack this case? Author Thomas Morris tells us the story in his new book The Dublin Railway Murder: The Sensational True Story of a Victorian Murder Mystery. 

Support this podcast by shopping our latest sponsor deals and promotions at this link: https://bit.ly/4gF2K18 

See more information on my books: katewinklerdawson.com 

Follow me on social: @tenfoldmore (Twitter) / @wickedwordspod (Facebook) / @tenfoldmorewicked (Instagram) 

2025 All Rights Reserved 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised, so.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
He turns into a sort of horribly compelling character and
one who certainly behaved in the most appalling way.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,

(00:48):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. This week on Wicked Words,
we're traveling to eighteen fifty six, Ireland for a locked

(01:09):
door mystery. A cashier for a Dublin railway station is
found dead, savagely beaten. Nothing appears to be stolen. Can
an experienced detective crack this case. Author Thomas Morris tells
us the story in his new book The Dublin Railway Murder.
The sensational true story of a Victorian murder mystery. Tell

(01:33):
me how you came to write this book. Where did
you discover this story?

Speaker 2 (01:38):
Well, I came across this story in a slightly unusual
sideways fashion, which is that before I wrote this book,
I really had no intention of writing a true crime
book at all. But what I was writing about a
lot was the history of medicine. My first book was
History of Cardiac Surgery, and after that I wrote a
slightly more kind of frivolous book, which was based on
the lots of stories I'd come across during two or

(02:00):
three years research. And what I found was that when
I looked through medical journals for material I was using
for the heart surgery book, there were these strange little stories,
case studies, case histories of patients who got into strange
difficulties or been treated in unusual ways. And I collected

(02:20):
a lot of this material and it formed the basis
of my second book. So for quite a long period,
I was constantly looking into old medical journals between about
the dates of about sort of seventeen fifty nineteen hundred,
that sort of era, mainly the nineteenth century, and a
lot of this stuff I would just sort of squirrel
away for future use, and sometimes I thought it might

(02:41):
turn into a slightly bigger project. And one of the
stories I came across and didn't actually return to for
a good two years was a single page report in
an English medical journal about a court case that was
then going on in Ireland. It was a court report
which was only included in a medical journal because there
were some medical evidence that was submitted. It wasn't actually

(03:03):
very interesting as medical evidence goes, but when I read
the page, I thought, actually, this sounded quite an interesting story.
And the bit of it in particular that I was
interested in was the fact that this court report was
a murder trial. It was the murder of a clerk
in an Irish railway station in Dublin in eighteen fifty six,

(03:24):
and that day's evidence had discussed the ways in which
the murderer might have got in and out of the room,
whether the victim was killed, And just reading that one
paragraph about this discussion of how the murderer might have
got in and out of the room reminded me of
a Golden age detective story, one of those nineteen thirties
Agatha Christie's stories. One of her Great Contemporaries. I didn't

(03:46):
really think very much more of it until a couple
of years later when I found that the whole trial
had been transcribed, And when I read that, I found
that actually it was not just as good as I
had thought it might be, but actually quite a lot better.
It was a really fantastic murder mystery with a genuine
mystery at its heart, also elements of the sort of

(04:08):
locked room mystery going on. In particular, the one feature
I'd kind of single out as the reason I was
interested in writing about it as a non fiction book
was that it had all those elements that make detective
fiction of the early twentieth century so enjoyable, which is
to say, a distinctive setting, a cast of characters which
includes a relatively limited number of suspects that you can

(04:28):
choose between, and then a distinctive detective at the heart
of it all, even with a distinctive name, Augustus Guy.
So when I went back to it and read the
transcript of this trial, I thought, this has to be
a book.

Speaker 1 (04:42):
And you have some wacky science that goes along with
this too, that was real, and you know, people continue
to believe for a long time, and we'll talk about
phrenology in a little bit. But you have some elements
here that I think for me almost represent contemporary, you know,
issues that we talk about in true crime today, including
scientific racism, which is what phrenology really kind of evolved into,

(05:05):
predicting somebody's behavior in their character based on some physical attributes.

Speaker 2 (05:10):
Yes, I would sort of divide up this story into
three separate not chapters, but there are sort of three
almost acts to this story. There is the murder and
the investigation that followed it, which lasted many months. It
was not a crime that was easily solved at all.
And then there is the high drama of the court trial.
It was a four day trial, which at that time
was a very long court proceedings. They like to get

(05:32):
them done and dusted in a day if they could.
After the trial, there's this very extraordinary you could call
it a coder. There's like this strange afterlife of the
stories not done and dusted, and that involves at this
point this extraordinary character phrenologist, as you say, as somebody
who studied the shapes of people's skulls and based an

(05:54):
entire theory on the shape of skulls. He wanted to
prove that you could distinguish between a murge and a
non murderer based on the shape of somebody's skull. He
is a very extraordinary character who comes in and then
we have this rather unexpected I mean to me, it's
it's almost the it's the part of the story that
makes this such a distinctive tale that this phrenologist, a

(06:15):
man based in Liverpool called called Frederick Bridges, comes in
and then studies the skull or the person who has
turned out to be the chief suspect for the murder.

Speaker 1 (06:28):
One of the things that I think, obviously is a
contemporary theme that you've brought up in here too, is
the idea of junk science, and that falls into you know, phrenology.
You know, we can laugh at certain things, dogs sniffing
a suspect and you know, pointing them out and then
they end up in jail. Which has happened for that
that's the only evidence, And you know, there's certainly some

(06:50):
very questionable techniques out there, like I'll think about in US.
I'll say, there's no way anybody is going to believe
that this is the only piece of evidence needed to
convict someone. Into people believe them. And that's what was
sort of happening, you know, in this case and in
this time period before phrenology was discredited, was you could
have somebody feel you know, the skull of someone and

(07:12):
declare whether they had a criminal mind or not, like
you had said. Also, you know, sort of like an
eighteen fifty six minority report.

Speaker 2 (07:20):
Yes. One of the things about this story this era,
which I think is rather interesting from the point of
view of looking into a crime and investigating a crime,
is it really stands at the junction between two eras.
On the one hand, it sounds very much like a
police procedural from say London today, like an English or
Scottish police story today. That there was a detective force

(07:44):
in Dublin in eighteen fifty six. It was modeled on
the slightly older detective force that had been set up
in London, the Metropolitan Police. The Metro Police was found
in the eighteen twenties and their detectives came along about
ten years after that. Dublin institute its detective force a
little later, but it was modeled explicitly on the London

(08:05):
force when Dublin gained its first detective force. So you
have the structure of the police and the way they
operate is superficially very similar to the way that a
police investigation might even take place today. The ranks of
the officers are the same, the way they go about
it is sort of superficially similar, but at the same
time their investigation techniques are so primitive.

Speaker 1 (08:25):
Let's get to the main part of the story before
we dive too much into phrenology and the way that
you know the police force was structured. Where does it
make sense to you to start? Is it with the
victim George Little, or is it the scene on when
he's discovered.

Speaker 2 (08:41):
Yes, I think it is the victim George Little. He
was a man in his early forties who worked as
a clerk in the railway station in Dublin, the Midland's
Great Western Railway Company's terminus at Broadstone. His background was
slightly unfortunate in that he was one of four children
of a prosperous solicitor in middle class Dublin, and his

(09:04):
father had died when he was fifteen, very suddenly and unexpectedly,
leaving his mother. George Little's mother a widow with four
children to support, and they had very little money. They
ended up living in I would say some poverty, although
in quite a grand house in the southern suburbs of Dublin.
George Little ended up as the bread winner for the
entire household, for his mother, for his grandmother who lived

(09:27):
with them, and a widowed sister, and for one of
his siblings, a sister who lived with him. So there
are four people living in this house. He's the only
person earning a wage. And he was working as the
chief cashier in the station. One evening in November eighteen
fifty six, he told his sister that he was going
to be working a little late. There was a lot

(09:48):
of work to do, and his job consisted essentially of
taking all the cash that was taken on the entire
railway line from Dublin to the West coast of Ireland.
And when all the money came, all the money from
the entire length of the line, every ticket office came
to Dublin and it was his job to count it up,
account it and then send all the returns into the

(10:09):
accounting department of the railway company. And on this Thursday
evening there was a lot of money to be counted.
He had to stay late to his family surprise. He
didn't return home that night, and his sister went into
the station the following morning to find out what had
happened to him, and nobody had realized that he had
not left his office that night, and they found his
office locked and shut, and when they broke down the door,

(10:31):
there was this scene of absolute carnage within. He had
been bludgeoned to death with some heavy object, but his
throat had also been cut, so it was a fairly
terrifying scene, a huge pool of blood, and then this
really very disfigured body lying underneath his desk. I think
it's worth saying this in Dublin, which strangely had not

(10:52):
experienced any murder in probably over a decade.

Speaker 1 (10:55):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (10:56):
And we tend to think of Victorian cities, particularly in Britain,
has been terribly dangerous places, places where footpads and thieves
and robbers thought nothing of slitting your throat to take
your wallet. But in fact Dublin was perhaps the best
police city on the planet at this point. It had
an enormous police force and it was very very safe.

(11:17):
And in fact, the previous documented murder within the city
of Dublin that I could find any evidence about was
eighteen forty two. That's fourteen years without a single documented homicide,
which I think is just an extraordinary statistic.

Speaker 1 (11:31):
So when he is counting this money, how much money
are we talking about in Dublin eighteen fifty six and
you know what would that be the equivalent of today?
Is it hundreds of thousands of dollars or less?

Speaker 2 (11:43):
Well, I think I mean, off the top of my head,
the amount of money that he had in his office
that night was something of the order of one and
a half thousand pounds, which is an absolutely enormous amount
of money. I mean, it's multiples of what the average
worker in Dublin would be earning per year at that date.
It was an unusually large sum of money, even for

(12:04):
a railway company that was at that point very successful.
And the reason for that is twofold one is that
the money that came through his office wasn't just every
fare that was paid on the entire railway line. It
was also the Canal Company, which was also owned by
the railway company. Before the railways came along, the main

(12:24):
route of communication and of carrying large heavy loads from
the west coast of Ireland to Dublin was the canal network.
Every penny that was spent on the canals all the
railway ended up in George Little's office. But also that
particular week there had been a big fair at a
place called Mullinger, which is in the midlands of Ireland.
It was the main place where horses were traded at

(12:45):
that point in Ireland and even breeders and owners used
to come from England to buy and sell their horses
at Mullinger. So there was a huge amount of extra
footfall on the railways. Even animals, by the way, went
on this railway, so cows and horses would also have
been loaded as freight. So there was a huge amount
of traffic going up and down the railway line that week,

(13:06):
and as a result, he had this huge sum of
money on his desk in front of him at the
moment that he was killed.

Speaker 1 (13:11):
Is it determined pretty quickly whether or not these weapons
there's a heavy object you said that was used to
beat him viciously, and then a razor or something used
to cut his throat. Were those things that were present
in his office. I know that eventually we're going to
get to where they're found.

Speaker 2 (13:28):
One of the things that's quite interesting about this case,
comparing it with how murder investigations go today, is there
was very little heed paid to the importance of the
murder scene, the crime scene. There's no sense that you've
got to preserve evidence, that you've got to look for traces,
or that you've got to look for particular objects there.
So by the time the police actually a summoned to

(13:50):
investigate the scene, literally dozens of people have been even
people just wanting to go into the room to have
a look and see what it was like, what was
going on. People were taking souvenirs from the room even
before the police had had the chance to examine it.
So they didn't have a pristine scene by any means.
But objects they found there really probably immediately they could

(14:11):
see that there was no murder weapon on the scene.
They found a small pen knife which had evidently been
used as a sort of office work, maybe for sort
of cutting the strings on bundles of papers, that sort
of thing. There was nothing sharp enough to have caused
a wound that's described by one of the doctors who
examined the body as having almost entirely severed his neck.

(14:32):
The cuts of this blade had gone so deep that
he had almost exposed the spine from the front of
the neck. It was a really very extreme injury, and
similarly the skull had been very badly fractured in several places,
so it was of heavy object. There was absolutely nothing
suitable in the room for causing such severe injuries. There
was brief discussion at the inquest, which took place forty

(14:56):
eight hours later in the same building. There was brief
discussion of whether a poke which had been found next
to the fire might have been involved, but it was
a sort of slim, slender, cast iron object. There was
absolutely no way it could have caused those injuries. So
pretty quickly the police understood that they were also looking
for murder weapons as well as the murderer himself.

Speaker 1 (15:18):
The door locked on the inside. These are not the
kind of locks where we can do the little thumb
lock where you can lock it now on the inside
and shut the door and it'll be locked to anybody
on the outside. Did somebody have to have a key
to be able to do this?

Speaker 2 (15:31):
Well, I think it's worth describing the room where his
body was found first of all, so he was in
the cashier's office, which was on the first floor of
the building. And again it's worth saying that one of
the reasons I've found this quite an attractive story is
that the setting was not just a railway station, but
a railway station where there was a permanent residential staff.
So there is the station house where several people lived.

(15:53):
The station master lived in an apartment in the basement
with his family. There are a couple of other families
that lived there full time. There were always people in residence,
and George Little's office was on the first floor of
this building. There was a maid who came and went,
who would make the fire and then clean the rooms
after everybody had left, And there was more than one
way in and out of his room, the door which

(16:14):
was lockable, and then there are a couple of windows,
one of which overlooked the great roof that went over
the train shed itself. And when his body was found,
the door was locked. Initially it was thought that it
had been locked from the inside. That turned out not
to have been the case in fact. And then there
was also the window, And actually both of these routes
remained plausible entry and exit routes for the mergerer for

(16:37):
months afterwards. In fact, what was probably the cases they
established quite quickly was that the mergerer had probably gone
in through the door and exited through the window, and
there was a route that they established. It was possible
to get out of the window and then walk along
the roof and then down a ladder into one of
the restaurants one of the laboratories on the station platform.

(17:00):
So there was a sort of multiplicity of options that
possibilities that were open.

Speaker 1 (17:05):
Could this have been a crime of opportunity in that
someone saw his light on late one night and you
could see that visibly from wherever the public could access it.
Or was this a situation where somebody would have had
to know his schedule or was sort of observing him
knowing he was going to be alone and that this
would be a safe thing to do well.

Speaker 2 (17:25):
The honest answer is yes to both. But one of
the things the police really struggled with was to understand
the circumstances. There were reasons for thinking that it had
to be somebody who knew the station premises well, because
the station house itself was locked up after one of
the late trains had left in the early evening, and
at that point it was possible for a member of

(17:47):
the public to walk into the station house and find
his office, but you would have to know a quite
complicated route, which involved going downstairs to the basement and
then up a backset of stairs in order to get
to the office. At the same time, there was also
the possibility that it had been a crime of opportunity,
because the building was fundamentally open to anybody any member

(18:08):
of the public during the day, and there were numerous
hiding places where somebody could have hidden. The investigation, which
lasted weeks and then stretched out into months, lasted so
long partly because there were so many different possibilities, both
of the nature of the crime but also who had
committed it.

Speaker 1 (18:26):
Let's I guess start with what they think the motive is.
They see this man badly beaten. Is this what now?
I don't know if this is a UK term also,
but in America this would be called like an overkill,
like somebody really has beaten this person far more than
needed to just disable someone or quickly kill someone and

(18:47):
take money or take whatever they wanted and then leave.
This seemed personal.

Speaker 2 (18:52):
There was a ferocity to the nature of the attack
that really took people's breath away. That's worth saying. It's
one of the reasons that it absolutely gripped Dublin. When
this was first announced in the papers within forty eight
hours of his death, nobody could remember something quite as
appallingly violent as this, and in fact it led the

(19:13):
police to think at first that there might have been
some sort of motive like revenge involved, But when they
looked into his family background, they found that actually he
was an extremely quiet and reserved man. He was a
member of a Christian sect, the Plymouth Brethren, was absolutely pacifist,
did not believe in holding grudges. He was honest to

(19:33):
a fault. He had few close friends, but he was
universally well liked. There was no grounds for thinking that
this could have been a sort of personal motive, so
that left the idea that it was either robbery or
just a random attack. And at first it seemed that
nothing had been taken, because when they found his body

(19:54):
they discovered that his table his desk was piled high
with gold coins and banknotes hundreds and hundreds of pounds,
an absolute fortune to any normal Dubliner. So they thought, well,
this can't possibly have been robbery, and it was only
after the accounting department downstairs had gone through every pile

(20:14):
of money on his desk and compared the sums that
they counted up with what was in his books. That
a very substantial sum of money turned out to be missing,
and at that point they realized that the motive almost
certainly was financial.

Speaker 1 (20:28):
I still cannot believe when dealing with that amount of money,
I understand that Dublin was not high crime or any
violent crime. It's so hard to believe that there's not
at least another security guard or something somebody there when
you have that much money and you're there alone at night,
it is astonishing.

Speaker 2 (20:48):
Even more than that. George Little had only been the
chief cashier there for about six months, and when he
was appointed, one of the first things he did was
make representations to to his bosses that they needed to
install a screen, a physical barrier to prevent people walking
straight into his office. And they did eventually get somebody,

(21:11):
a carpenter, to come up and build a screen so
that it wasn't possible to walk in that you have
to go to a little window and talk to him
through the window. And in fact, he didn't even have
a lock on the door. And this isn't a city
that had really extraordinary poverty. Just within a few miles
of the front door of this station, it had received
thousands of I mean refugees is not too strong a word.

(21:34):
From the Great Famine of the previous decade, many many
Irish people had starved, others had emigrated, and many more
had left the countryside in search of food and accommodation
in Dublin. So there was a huge poverty problem. And
the idea that these hundreds of pounds would not be
a target for criminals is breathtaking. So yes, I agree,

(21:56):
But even that was heightened security arrangements. But so much
more would have been done to protect him in those circumstances.

Speaker 1 (22:02):
Tell me what was forensically available in eighteen fifty six,
I know, not fingerprinting, although I know we're not too
far away from fingerprinting, at least in Europe. But what
else is there? I mean, my memory, at least in
the United States dealing with a case from eighteen forty
three was you pretty much had to catch the person
red handed, I mean, in the middle of the act,

(22:25):
or have a really reliable witness. What could they even
use at this point?

Speaker 2 (22:29):
Very little. There are a couple of moments where actual
scientists are called upon. There was, for instance, on the
first examination of the station, the police found a red
stain on one of the door posts one of the
entrances to the station house, and a section of this
doorpost was cut out, physically cut out, and sent to

(22:51):
a professor of chemistry with a request that he tested
to see if it might be a blood stain. And
he tested it and said he wasn't sure. He had
no idea. Similarly, when a murder weapon was found, which
turned out to be a fitter's hammer, which is an
enormously heavy hammer, which was carried in a locomotive by

(23:11):
the driver and was used elsewhere in the station for
a variety of maintenance and building tasks. There was a
substance found on the head of this hammer which might
or might not have been human hair. Again, they attempt
to find out whether it is human hair. They think
it looks like it, but they absolutely can't prove it
in court, So there is no fingerprinting. The examination of
the crime scene is rudimentary and takes place far too late. Anyway,

(23:35):
the only evidence that you might say has a sort
of monoicum of modernity to it is that provided by
the doctors, you know these days it would be done
by a pathologist. But his body was examined by three doctors,
and in fact, when the murder weapon is found, the
hammer is discovered at the bottom of a canal, they
actually exhume his body to see if the head of

(23:56):
the hammer fits into the wounds on his skull, which
is a slightly horrifying idea now that you dig up
a body just to do that and in fact provide
evidence which is probably not all that conclusive. But that
was the only of course they had.

Speaker 1 (24:10):
Well, let me ask you a series of questions about
what you just said. So let's say they can't identify
that this is blood on this piece of wood, and
then let's say that we can say that this is
definitively hair, that is human hair. We're not at a
point where they can determine whose blood this is or
point to, you know, who the suspect could possibly be.

(24:31):
All they could say is a murder happened, which to
me seems of course very obvious. A murder happened here.
And then the same thing with the weapon. I suppose
maybe there's a clue within the weapon, like it's a
specific kind of hammer, that only one person at the
railway station would have owned. But other than that, what
good does it do to do these different things? Do
you think?

Speaker 2 (24:52):
Very little, I would suggest. But one has to also
bear in mind that the type of case that the
Crown is hoping to put to together, sorry of the
Crown being the prosecutors, that the type of case that
the prosecutors are trying to put together when it comes
to a court case, the sort of court case that
they end up with, is one that relies very heavily

(25:12):
on super In fact, sorry not very heavily, exclusively on
circumstantial evidence. And a detail like that about there being
some hair on the hammer may prove absolutely nothing, but
it's being seen by the prosecutors and the investigators as
a potential link in a very long chain of circumstantial evidence,
something which on its own means nothing, but when combined

(25:33):
with a lot of other apparently trivial findings, might actually
add up to something which to a jury looks like
a convincing line of argument.

Speaker 1 (25:40):
Or to a suspect, if there's more than one. You know,
I did a story on Burke and Hare out of Scotland,
and the only way that they could get one of
them was to get the other one to turn on him.
And so you know, when you think about that, if
you're accumulating all of the circumstantial evidence, which right might
arriors now be mean, but if you present that, if

(26:01):
you find there are two suspects who might have been
working together, and you present work. We have all this evidence,
and he doesn't know how not valuable some of this
might be. Maybe he's more willing to turn on the
other person, I suppose. I know that's not particularly the
case in this story, but I was thinking that, like, boy,
you gather enough stuff, even though it might not seem
like it's going to lead anywhere, at least it looks

(26:22):
to the public like you're moving forward.

Speaker 2 (26:24):
Yeah. Absolutely, and there is I mean, there is a
particularity to this case which is probably worth mentioning, which
is the identity of the man who eventually stood trial
for this and the nature of the evidence that the
prosecutors were able to offer against him. And they were
hugely inconvenience by the fact that the person who accused

(26:46):
him was none other than his wife. That was a
fact of great significance in English and Irish law in
the eighteen fifties, because at that point in legal history,
it was not possible for a wife to offer evidence
against her own husband. There's this peculiarity that at that
point a wife was still seen as the literally the

(27:07):
possession of a husband and part of him, which meant
that one person was essentially giving evidence against himself, which
is a sort of obvious logical absurdity, and it leads
this situation where somebody can come forward and say, my
husband has confessed this crime. I know what he did.
I can show you how he did it. I can

(27:29):
show you where he hid the money, I can show
you what he did with the murder weapon. But none
of that evidence, which would otherwise be damning, is admissible
in a court of law because a wife is simply
prohibited from giving that evidence to a judge. Now, that
is the reason that in this case the police were
absolutely compelled to put together the most convincing, circumstantial case

(27:51):
that they could.

Speaker 1 (27:52):
Well, before we get to the main suspect, tell me,
I think there is one extraordinary event involving and alluded
to it before. How they secured the two murder weapons?
Tell me, first of all, how did they decide on
where to look for these weapons.

Speaker 2 (28:11):
Well, this is the single biggest investigation in the history
of the Dublin Metropolitan Police up to this point. The
scale of it is kind of astonishing. The police at
this point had a single detective division and they were
pulling in officers from all the other neighboring forces that
weren't detectives as well, and they ended up scarring every
inch of the Broadstone Terminus three times. That's everything from

(28:35):
the roof right down to the sellers, every single room
in that building. They interviewed pretty much every employee who
worked there and just word saying something about the scale
of this as well. By the way they had there
were workshops where carriages and engines were built. There were
maintenance offices, there were the ticket offices. There were the housekeepers,

(28:56):
the station masters, there were stationed police officers who were there.
It was an extraordinarily large operation. Sixty people worked in
the station house alone, and as part of their search,
they drained the canal, which at that point it ended
in a basin right outside the station. So they drained
the canal and this army of workmen sifted through the

(29:20):
stinking mud at the bottom of the canal, and that's
where they found first the hammer and then subsequently not one,
but two raisers.

Speaker 1 (29:28):
Now this would be a hammer you said that would
have been found by anybody laying around in the railway station.
Is that right?

Speaker 2 (29:35):
Well, there were many. There were many hammers in the
station because they were used for a variety of tasks.
They would also have been found on a locomotive for
the use of the driver, if I suppose if something
broke down when they're on a journey. But the hammers
were actually made in the workshops at the station, and
so it was easy to identify it as a hammer
that must have been made there and therefore was used
by somebody who actually lived and lived or worked at

(29:56):
the station.

Speaker 1 (29:57):
So this would not have been a hammer that some
stranger could have come in and picked up and said, oh,
this would be a good murder weapon. This had to
be with somebody who had access to it.

Speaker 2 (30:06):
It strongly pointed to the suggestion that there was somebody
at the station who worked there who had done it.
It's not an object that a member of the public
would just kind of stumble across. You had to be
in one of the workshops or actually on board one
of the locomotives to have access to one. In fact,
there was. There's a storekeeper and mister Gunning, who is
quite heavily involved in the story and who at one

(30:26):
point becomes the police's favored suspect. He is interviewed about
how they keep the hammers in the store, and it's
behind a counter where he has to sign out the
hammers to whoever wants to use one, so that that
is seen as the obvious source of them of the
murder weapon.

Speaker 1 (30:42):
So I might be wrong here, but this doesn't seem
like a practical murder weapon to me. Didn't you say
it's very very heavy? Or is he lugging this around everywhere?

Speaker 2 (30:51):
It's heavy? But at the same time, the station is
absolutely full of very powerfully built laborers who were doing
extremely physical jobs. They were building locomotives, they were building
railway carriages. There were a lot of very physically strong
guys there.

Speaker 1 (31:06):
When we talk about a razor, you said they found
two razors. Is this like a straight razor like what
men would use to shave with.

Speaker 2 (31:13):
Yeah, it's what we would call here a cut threat raiser.
I don't know if that's the phrase that you use
as well.

Speaker 1 (31:17):
I don't think so.

Speaker 2 (31:20):
Yeah, they're known kind of cut threat raisers typically, but yes,
they're they're long, straight, very thin and kind of fearsomely
sharp blade that you would you'd sharpen on a wetstone.
They're kind of terrifying objects, but yes, and in fact
were sort of notorious as the weapon of choice for
a certain type of murder in this at this period
of the nineteenth century.

Speaker 1 (31:41):
Sweeney Todd raizor is what I'm picturing.

Speaker 2 (31:44):
Yeah, well exactly. I mean Sweeney Todd is probably the
best known example. But yes, yeah, you know, it's a
terrifying and probably the sharpest blade that would be available
on a day to day basis in a city at
this point.

Speaker 1 (31:56):
Now you've mentioned mister Gunning. They eventually dismiss as a suspect, right,
the store manager.

Speaker 2 (32:02):
Yes, But one of the interesting things about him is
the police were absolutely convinced of his guilt. There were
a number of slightly shady things about him, apparently, one
of which was that his furniture seemed to be worth
much more than he was earning. He also seemed to
have a track record of maybe doing some shady dealing
in his job as manager of the stores. He was

(32:24):
probably acquiring things to the stores that maybe he sold
on for his own profit, and he was a trusted
member of the company, so this probably wasn't being noticed
by the management. In addition to that, there were a
couple of little incidents where he gave what were subsequently
shown to be untruthful answers to the police when they
came to investigate him. I think it's worth saying this

(32:46):
that one of the reasons I know all this is that,
amazingly the police files for this case, which is, you know,
more than one hundred and seventy years old, now, the
police files have survived, and so I have seen notes
where police officers discussed the behavior of their suspects in private.
And there is even in the case of Bernard Gunning,
the record of surveillance that was placed on him for

(33:07):
a period of many months. I find this slightly jaw dropping. Now.
The paper trail shows that he was being followed by
plainclothes officers under conditions of secrecy for at least three
or four months in early eighteen fifty seven, and there
are documents where these officers write what he's doing in
his spare time late at night, going to hotels, meeting

(33:28):
unnamed women and going with them to another house in
the city. So they were absolutely convinced that Gunning was guilty,
but they didn't have any evidence to prove it, and
that's what they resorted to, these plainclothes officers tailing him
around town, reporting on his doings to senior officers.

Speaker 1 (33:45):
Well, we end up dismissing mister Gunning as a suspect.
How do we land on the man who would eventually
be the focus of the Dublin Metropolitan Police.

Speaker 2 (33:55):
Well, after an investigation which spanned about six to nine months.
It began in the eighteen fifty six and the last
written record of the initial investigation dates from about mid May,
it all goes quiet, and it's clear that the police
had despaired of catching the killer and the politicians were
too embarrassed to keep funding it. After that, it goes

(34:16):
quiet for about another month, and then out of the blue,
a woman walked into Well. She knocked on the door
of the chief prosecutor for that part of Ireland and
said that she knew who had committed the murder and
it was her husband. And later that same day she
led police to three separate sites on the estate where

(34:38):
they found caches of money, and she also showed them
where her husband had destroyed evidence, including the clothes he'd
been wearing, and provided other essentially proof, or so she claimed,
of his guilt. And that's where the sort of second
phase kicks in, where they arrest their man and they
prepare evidence to put him on trial. But as I
said earlier, they were hamstrung by the fact that they

(35:00):
simply couldn't use any of the absolutely brilliant evidence they'd
just been handed by his wife. Now they were able
to use the evidence of his children, and they interviewed
all the children, although the youngest was so young that
his answers really weren't of any value. But they ended
up putting two of these children on the stand in
the subsequent trial. The oldest child remained loyal to his

(35:22):
father and was therefore of no use to them and
was not required to give evidence. But this very interesting
family dynamic then emerges, which is that the father and
the oldest son remain allies. The father being on trial,
the other children which is two daughters and a younger son,
and the wife essentially never speak to him again.

Speaker 1 (35:43):
And the suspect is James Sprawlin. Is it how you
say his last name?

Speaker 2 (35:47):
Yes, Spollin, who's variously spelt, and he's Spolin but also
known as Spolin.

Speaker 1 (35:53):
So his wife, James's wife is not allowed to give
evidence because she's considered a possess of his, but the
children are not. That children can testify against him. That
doesn't make sense to me.

Speaker 2 (36:06):
Well, the key point is not so much that she
was a possession of him, but actually in law was
regarded as part of him. So husband and wife after
the union are I mean union is the crucial word.
They become one entity. Okay. There was only one exception
to that in law, which was that if a husband
assaulted his wife, it was felt that he had thereby

(36:27):
sort of dissolved the union, and then a wife was
able to give evidence against her own husband. But it
was only in that very specific offense of assault against
the spouse. In fact, that provision was not changed in
English law until I think eighteen ninety seven, so it
persisted for really quite a long time.

Speaker 1 (36:46):
Tell me about the dynamic from what you know between
James and his wife. Is this a man who's considered abusive?
Why would she turn on on the I presume to
be the breadwinner of her family.

Speaker 2 (36:58):
It seems to have been. Yes, I think coercive is
probably a good word for the nature of their relationship,
and he was probably abusive her account, which is all
we really have to go on. But it seems very
sort of credible. Is that essentially after the crime she
accuses him of, I think the relationship seems to have

(37:19):
broken down entirely. But there are several incidents that she documents.
One is that she was sick and he refused to
allow a doctrin in the house on grounds of cost.
But even though she was possibly quite seriously ill, he
refused to get any medical attention for her at all.
She also suspected him of trying to poison her, and

(37:42):
she was very clearly unhappy that she had been forced
to cover up his crime. She and her eldest son
had seen him returning in her account covered in blood
and carrying a bucket full of money, and when he
saw that she had seen this, he forced her to
promise that she would now tell a soul, and also
forced her to help him conceal the money and burn

(38:05):
the clothes he'd been wearing. Following his arrest, she wanted
never to have anything to do with him, and in
fact she ends up in a safe house under an
assumed name because she is never going to be safe
from him again. But he was actually quite keen to
resume the marriage as if nothing had.

Speaker 1 (38:22):
Happened, knowing how much acrimony there is between these two people,
particularly for the wife, who you know is suspicious of him,
and he doesn't seem like a very good person based
on everything she said and everything you've read. Is there
any doubt in your mind that James Sprawlin was the
one who committed this murder?

Speaker 2 (38:43):
Well, there are two aspects to this. One is was
the outcome of the trial the correct outcome? And the
other is was it him that did it? And there
is no doubt in my mind that the prosecutors were
in an impossible situation without the evidence that they might
have gained from his wife. They had the evidence of

(39:04):
his eldest daughter, but it became apparent during cross examination
that she had been probably quite severely coached, and also
was not really old enough to understand the nature of
the questions or to remember accurately what had happened on
one night nine months previously. And it's I think quite
a gripping court scene because her evidence is absolutely brutally

(39:26):
taken apart by the defense barrister. It's quite clear that
the nature of the contradictions that turn up in the
prosecution evidence in court make it absolutely impossible for a
jury in its right mind to convict the man who
was standing accused of the crime. On the other hand,
it seems quite clear to me that the man who
was accused of the crime did it. He never gets

(39:48):
quite to the point of confessing to it, but reading
between the lines, there are moments when he more or
less acknowledges what he's done. And one of the things
that I quite enjoyed about the story is that there's
this amazing period of about two weeks after he's acquitted,
and he's actually roaming free in Dublin, a free man.

(40:09):
But half of Dublin, or even two thirds of Dublin
thinks he's definitely the guilty man. And yet he decides
to go on stage in a Dublin theater and do
a one man show about why it couldn't possibly have
been him that killed George Little at the Broadstone railway station.
He was absolutely shameless and had no sense of there's

(40:30):
no delicacy there or any sense that the dead man's
family might be impossibly offended by his behavior. So he
turns into a sort of horribly compelling character, and one
who certainly lacks self awareness. Even if he were not guilty,
he certainly behaved in the most appalling way.

Speaker 1 (40:51):
Who would put him on stage, Thomas, I mean somebody
who owned a theater or whatever said, Okay, this seems
like a good idea. I mean this, doesn't this seem
beneath the people of Dublin.

Speaker 2 (41:02):
Well, all, it was all at his own instigation, so
he would have hired He would have hired the theater himself,
and the receipts were absolutely pitiful. I think he made
a loss that the number of attendees is actually recorded
in one of the newspaper accounts. And he had booked
this theater for two daily shows for a week's run initially,
and I think he was hoping to not only extend

(41:24):
the run but then go on tour around Ireland with
his show as well. And in the event he did
two shows. He did one matinee and one evening show,
and the first one things became a bit rarey on
the streets. But during a second show, there was a
full blown riot on the streets outside, people throwing rocks
and breaking windows, and inside the theater he was booed

(41:46):
off the stage. So it was a catastrophe for him personally.
And that was the moment at which it became apparent
that he could no longer stay in Dublin, and that's
the moment he decides to leave Ireland and find a
way of emigrating.

Speaker 1 (41:58):
I mean, I have never heard of, certainly in this
time period, in many time periods, of his socioeconomic background,
being so determined to salvage his public image that he's
doing something like this. It's a little shocking to me, it.

Speaker 2 (42:13):
Is, and he becomes like an almost it's a vaudeville act. Really.
There's an item that I really wish I had been
able to track down. I'm sure it was destroyed years
and years ago. But during the trial, and this was
very common for complex criminal cases in the days before photographs,
that it was important to give the jurious sense of
the crime scene and of the sort of wider setting

(42:34):
in which this action is taking place. So they commissioned
a very detailed wooden model of the station building. It
would be a wonderful thing to have now, and this
enormous it was several feet long. This model was displayed
in the middle of the courtroom and then the barristers,
the lawyers would point to bits of it to explain
what was going on in the examinations they were doing.

(42:56):
And after the trial, James Spollin, the man who stood
trial and being a quitted of a crime, manages to
take possession of this wooden model and takes it with
him to Liverpool where he ends up and puts it
on display. So not only is he doing a stage
show in a theater, he's also doing his exhibition where
he puts this magnificent wooden model of Broadstone railway station

(43:17):
in an exhibition hall in Liverpool, and he stands next
to it giving a sort of lecture explaining all the
bits of the station and where he was and where
George Little was when he was killed, and how it
couldn't possibly have been him that killed him.

Speaker 1 (43:31):
So you would think that the story was over, because
you know James Sprawlin has been acquitted. He walks away,
he tries his vaudeville act. It doesn't work. It is
an unsolved officially an unsolved case. I'm assuming the murder
of George Little. Where does this phrenologist, doctor Frederick Bridges
come in? Why is he coming in at all? At

(43:53):
this point?

Speaker 2 (43:54):
It's a fortunate quirk that he turns up because it
adds this extra whole dimension to the story. But he
he just happened by chance to be living in Liverpool.
And the reason that Spolin and his son, who, as
I said earlier, remains loyal to his father, James S.
Bollin and his son end up in Liverpool because they
are trying to find a way of emigrating to America

(44:15):
or somewhere else America's In fact, officially we don't know
where they went to. I suspect strongly it was New York,
but Liverpool is a place where Irish immigrants typically embark,
and so he's needing to find a way of raising
the fair and he is introduced to Frederick Bridges. Now,
Frederick Bridges was a phrenologist, It's worth saying I think

(44:37):
that he was. Even in the eighteen fifties, he was
seen as a bit of an odd ball in the
haydo of phrenology was between about the seventeen nineties and
the eighteen twenties. By the eighteen fifties, most scientists really
did think it was nonsense, but Bridges really stuck to
his guns, and he had this whole private theory which
involved a single angle that he measured involving the relationship

(45:00):
between a person's jawline and their ear and within a
particular range of angle. He said, essentially, psychopaths as we
would understand them today, and dangerous murderer types, their measurements
would be very characteristic, so you could tell them. And
he had spent years traveling around the country to executions,

(45:20):
public executions, and he would seek permission from the prison
governor of the prisons where these executions were taking place,
and he would take a plaster cast of the head
of the recently executed man, and then he would take
these plaster casts home and conduct his measurements. And he
claimed to approved beyond all doubts that all these murderers

(45:42):
had a very significant cranial features in common. And from
this he built up an entire theory relating to violent
men in the crimes they committed and the shapes of
their heads. And the reason he was interested in spollen
was although he had tested his theory repeatedly on dead
men who were proved to be murdered. He wanted to
show that his theory also had predictive power. So he

(46:04):
wanted to show that by measuring an accused murderer's head,
he could personally prove whether they had committed the crime,
which you can see how if this actually had any
truth to it would be an extremely valuable thing that
you would be able to tell people in advance whether
they were dangerous or not, and therefore remove them from

(46:25):
society if they showed a threat.

Speaker 1 (46:28):
So Sprawlin is interested in doing this because he needs
money to be able to get out of Doublin.

Speaker 2 (46:33):
Is that right, yes, Bridges hears that Spollin is in Liverpool,
is down on his luck and needs money. So he
hatches this plan, which is I'm going to get myself
introduced to James Spollin and I'm going to give him money,
and in return for that money, I want to measure
his head. It's one of the strangest faust impacts you'll
ever hear, but he wants to measure a guy's skull

(46:56):
in return for a check. Essentially, it takes quite a while,
but Spallin is a actually convinced, and the deal they
strike is that in return for making a plaster cast
of Spolin's head and taking a photograph of him, Bridges
will pay his fare to emigrate, and fortunately for us,
he also writes a little pamphlet about this encounter, from

(47:17):
which we understand that he spent several weeks essentially charming him,
befriending him. There's a first meeting in a ced pub
in Liverpool, and then he ends up inviting him to
meet his wife, and Spoonin and his son go for
dinner there several times, and eventually he is allowed to
make the plaster cast and take the photographs, which sadly

(47:39):
we don't have the original photographs, but there is a
drawing made from the photographs which gives us a good
likeness of Sponin, and then, having achieved that, he pays
for him to emigrate. And we don't know because the
condition of this one of the conditions of this deal
was that he was not to divulge ever where he went.
But we do know the date he left, or rather
the weekend, and from that it is possible to at

(48:01):
least rule out many of the many of the options,
and from what I've seen of I mean, you can
tell these days. The records are so complete you can
find out exactly what ships left Liverpool on a single
weekend in eighteen fifty seven, or in fact it was
January eighteen fifty eight by the time he embarked. So
I'm reasonably confident that I know that he did go

(48:22):
to New York. As I say, it's all shrouded rather
in mystery that the final days of his life in Liverpool.

Speaker 1 (48:28):
So is Bridges. Doctor Bridges convinced that a man got
away with murder. After he measures this angle, he.

Speaker 2 (48:37):
Was absolutely convinced to the extent that he wrote a
letter to the Home Secretary in London saying, this man
Spallen is so dangerous according to the measurements I have
taken of his skull, that he ought not to be
at liberty, and I strongly suggest that you take measures
to deprive him of his liberty. And this letter survives
brilliantly the text of it at least, and we also

(48:59):
know sadly that he didn't receive any response. But you
can only imagine the reaction of somebody in the Home
Office in London receiving this letter saying I've measured a
man's skull and I can tell you he's definitely a murderer.

Speaker 1 (49:10):
Well, I mean, you know, phrenology is fascinating. I interviewed
a neurologist who was teaching at the University of Edinburgh,
and he really dabbled in phrenology for fun, as like
a parlor trick, and he showed me a skull and
all the different sections. It was like you were at
certain amount of bumps. Here you were extraordinarily passionate, you

(49:31):
were violent. In another section you were incredibly intelligent or
a genius or I mean some of the phrases were
so interesting. So at least doctor Bridges homed in on
one little section and that's it. But what do you
think is the significance of that part kind of act
three of your story with phrenology? Because James Sprawlin's in

(49:52):
the wind, we have no idea, we think he's in
New York. Do you feel like this really could have
led to something, you know, because Bridges was really pushing
this idea.

Speaker 2 (50:02):
Well, what comes across from reading his account of their
meetings is two things. One, there is a rawness to
his descriptions of his encounters with Spollin, which lead me
to think that they are broadly speaking truthful. But at
the same time I came inescapably to the conclusion that
he was a terrific crank. And when he starts writing

(50:24):
about himself, his version of his life history is so
unbelievable that there can be no doubt that he was
to some degree a fantasist. He claims, for instance, that
at the age of nine, he swam the English Channel.
There's a brief essay about his own biography which sort
of prefaces his encounter with Spollin, and it's completely absurd
the number of things he claims to have taught himself.

(50:46):
He says he was I think one of twenty children
or something. He says he swam the channel. He has
a whole load of completely unlikely adventures, and then is
returned to his parents by a kindly merchant who terms
him a genius. So there's a lot of self aggrandizement
going on there. At the same time, although he was
obviously regarded with a lot of sort of pity and

(51:08):
amusement by some of his contemporaries, he had the ear
of some of the most senior people in government, The
Prime Minister Palmerston, who had previously been in office and
at this point in the eighteen fifties was out of
office again but would later go on to be Prime
Minister again, was very interested in phrenology and gave Bridges
an audience at which Bridges was permitted to feel his

(51:30):
skull and examine him, but also present his ideas about
the utility of phrenology for detecting criminals, and as a
result of that he was given a direct grant of
fifty pounds, which at the time was quite a considerable
sum of money in order to develop his work.

Speaker 1 (51:46):
I mean, this story to me is so interesting because
here you have this man, George Little. He's not married, right,
he doesn't have any kids, He's taking care of members
of his family, he's working hard. Late one night he's
murdered brutally and his killer, we're going to go ahead
and say the killer, right, James Sprawlin is set free

(52:09):
because of an antiquated law where his wife is not
allowed to give evidence. And then you know, we might
have had a massive contribution which would have been terrible
to investigations based on an antiquated and then a joke
junk science in phrenology, So sort of like like there's

(52:30):
several things that are rooted and inaccuracies that really pop
up in this story of yours.

Speaker 2 (52:37):
Yes, and this is an era before modern techniques of
criminal investigation, so you sort of can't blame them for
relying on what was standard at the time. I mean,
I think this is where actually a parallel with what
I was writing about before this book, which is the
history of medicine, is actually quite worthwhile. You can't really
blame doctors of the eighteenth century for relying on on

(53:00):
leeches and arsenic and drugs that we now know to
be harmful rather than helpful, in that they were rooted
in centuries of tradition and what they thought was good scholarship.
And the same is true for criminal investigation. Really they
could only rely on the techniques they knew, and of
course they used the laws that seemed to be just

(53:21):
to them. But you know, we have twenty twenty hindsight,
we can see how ludicrous some of these ideas and
laws look today, but living in their world and their
cultural familiar not so much.

Speaker 1 (53:32):
My second book, American Sherlock, was about a forensic scientist
who worked in the nineteen twenties, where it seems like
every forensic technique was developed or invented, at least in
the United States, development of fingerprinting, bloodstained pattern analysis, more
in depth ballistics, you know, the study of bugs, all
of these things. And the issue that I have found
even with the star of my book, the forensic scientist

(53:55):
Oskar Heinrich, was that he was so definitive. I mean
it was like, this is what my test says. It
is the truth. There is no other explanation when you're
at the nascent era of discovering all of these tools.
And so when that was for me the dangerous part
of learning about phrenology, where that is to say, Thomas Morris,

(54:17):
look at the angle between his ear and you know,
his mouth, there's along his jawline. Definitively, this is somebody
who is going to kill someone. And I still think
those kinds of statements are dangerous to sit on a
stand as an expert and say there is no other explanation,
when oftentimes there is you can exclude, but sometimes you

(54:38):
can't include.

Speaker 2 (54:38):
You know, that's true. Palmerston was a bit of an outlier,
luckily fortunately for us, Luckily, fortunately for criminal investigation. At
the time, nobody else really took him seriously, and in fact,
when he subsequently went back to Ireland on a speaking
to a thinking that people would be crowding to hear
crowding into the theaters to hear him talk about Spallen

(55:00):
and about how this wonderful theory meant that murderers like
him would in future be caught before they'd even committed
a crime. Nobody turned up. It was embarrassing. He had
his luggage full of copies of his book to sell
and nobody wanted one. And I think after his first
speaking engagement, the rest of his trip was canceled, so

(55:20):
he was sort of he was a man out of time.

Speaker 1 (55:22):
Really.

Speaker 2 (55:23):
I suspect if he had been promulgating these ideas forty
years earlier, or even thirty years earlier, he would have
had much more of an audience, But as it was,
his was one of half a dozen sort of crank
ideas that were indulged in the investigation. Also, at one
point used a medium. Sadly he or she is not named,
but they got somebody who claimed to have supernatural powers

(55:47):
to speak to the dead man to find out who
had murdered him.

Speaker 1 (55:51):
Well, we start with George Little, the victim, and I
think we end with George Little. This is a man,
as I said before, a family man, doing the best
he can for his family, and he ends up dead
and ultimately with no justice whatsoever. At the end of
the day, when you're done writing this book and you've
closed it up and you've sent it to your editor,

(56:12):
that's still must weigh on you. You're doing this story with
all of these interesting things, but ultimately the main person
at the center of the story doesn't get any justice.

Speaker 2 (56:22):
No, absolutely not, nor do his family. The reason I
finished the book by returning to his grave and transcribing
the headstone inscription on it. It's for his family. It's
a very sad story. At that point. There's very little
idea of sort of compensating the victims of crime and
their families. And the best that is done for him

(56:44):
is that the railway company decides to instigate a collection
basically a charitable collection, to raise enough money to ensure
that his mother, who is an elderly woman, has enough
to live on for the rest of her life. And
so this appeal goes out and actually they raise only
something like two thirds of the targeted amount. I think
they were trying to raise one hundred pounds, wh should

(57:05):
be enough to fund an annuity which would give her
an annual income for the rest of her life. And
they get only two thirds of the way to that target.
And a lot of care is taken through official channels
to make sure that James Spollin's wife, the woman who's
accused him, is all right, and that she has funds
to live with her children, and that she's given anonymity

(57:26):
in a new place to live. And there is absolutely
no record at all in the papers that I've seen
that anybody from government even once thought of George Little's family.
There's no record of a letter, of a visit or
anything of that nature. It seems that as soon as
George Little died, the official world just forgot them.

Speaker 1 (57:58):
If you love historical true crimes stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and Don't Forget. There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly Right Production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi.

(58:22):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by
Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff, and
Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at tenfold More
Wicked and on Facebook at Wicked Words Pod.