Dr Shields, a prison doctor, said of the accused: ‘I have frequently conversed with him, but I cannot believe anything he says.’ Asked by Dr Shields whether he had any standards of right and wrong, Deeming had replied that stealing, for example, was a matter of conscience. If a person in needy circumstances stole money from one who could well afford it, that was quite justifiable and proper. Murder, he said, was also permissible in certain circumstances – he had several times gone out with a revolver searching for the woman who had given him VD, intending to kill her. He believed in the extermination of such women. Mr Dick, Inspector-General of Lunatic Asylums in Victoria, examined the prisoner five times, testing his memory and inspecting his eyes, head and general appearance. He was unable to detect any signs of insanity and he concluded that Deeming was ‘an instinctive criminal’. During the trial no doctor, not even those who spoke for the defence, would unequivocally say or concede that Deeming was insane.
Towards the end of the trial, on Monday, 2 May, Deeming, with the judge’s permission, made a speech – ‘I wish to say a few words in my defence.’ He spoke for nearly an hour, rambling on without hesitation or nervousness, denying the accusations against him and making some of his own. He began: ‘I have not had a fair trial. It is not the law that is trying me, but the press. The case was prejudiced even before my arrival by the exhibition of photographs in shop-windows, and it was by means of these that I was identified … If I could believe that I committed the murder, I would plead guilty rather than submit to the gaze of the people in this court – the ugliest race of people I have ever seen …’ He ended: ‘I am as innocent as a man can be. That is my comfort.’ The Reuter’s correspondent in the court wrote: ‘While this extraordinary scene was being enacted, daylight faded into darkness. Gas and candles were lighted, and the whole scene was weird in the extreme. The judge then summed up.’
The all-male jury were out for just over an hour. To their verdict that Deeming was guilty they added a rider that he was not insane.
After sentence of death had been passed, Fred Deeming thanked the judge, smiled at the jury, waved at friends and with his hands in his pockets disappeared from view.
In the three weeks before his execution, Deeming wrote his autobiography, which was destroyed with all his papers after his death. His writings were said by the authorities to have been ‘a compound of ribaldry and folly’. In prison, Deeming, who was alternately angry and depressed and at times incoherent, upbraided his solicitor, Mr Lyle, bewailed his fate, declared his innocence and said he would kill himself if he could. He also made a will leaving the little he had to Mr Lyle and Miss Rounsevell, whom his mother’s spirit, he said, was nonetheless still urging him to kill.
A long and closely argued petition was prepared by Mr Lyle and sent to the Melbourne Executive, asking for further enquiries and medical examinations to be made as well as for a stay of execution. The petition was dismissed on 9 May. Another petition was then sent to the Privy Council in England in a last attempt to have the case reconsidered. It included evidence from Edward Deeming and his wife concerning the prisoner’s insanity. This petition was lodged at the Privy Council’s office in Downing Street on 18 May, and the matter was discussed the following day with the Lord Chancellor in the chair. On the morning of Friday, 20 May, the Lords of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council reported to Her Majesty that the petition for special leave to appeal should be dismissed.
On Monday, 23 May 1892, just before ten o’clock, Frederick Deeming walked to his execution smoking a cigar. A very large crowd of ticket-holding officials and pressmen were present, and in an attempt to remain incognito the hangman wore a false white beard while his assistant wore a false black one. Asked by the sheriff if he had anything to say, Deeming replied faintly: ‘May the Lord receive my spirit.’ The cap was put over his head and the entire burial service was read remorselessly by a chaplain before the lever was pulled.
While he was in prison Deeming claimed to be Jack the Ripper – an impossibility, as he had been in jail in South Africa at the time of the Whitechapel murders. Nonetheless, after his execution a plaster death mask was made of his head in case his claim was verified, and his brain and skull were studied by doctors interested in phrenology and the criminal mind. His body had also been examined to determine whether there was any evidence of degeneration, which would assist in identifying the ‘criminal type’.
The head, sent to Scotland Yard, soon found a home in the Black Museum, where it was actually displayed for some time as the death mask of Jack the Ripper – thus perpetuating yet another myth.
THE MURDER OF JOHN LEVY, 1896
Murder is often the outcome and fatal climax of a life of squalor, deprivation and crime. It as if the criminal involved becomes in time so indifferent to his fate, to other people and to life itself, so desperate and despairing, that he takes another person’s life to bring his own miserable, meaningless existence to an end. Seaman’s execution made history of a sort as he was one of three men hanged in the last triple execution carried out at Newgate Prison in 1896.
William Seaman was moved to commit a double murder by bitter feelings of hatred and revenge. He was said on his arrest to be a ‘stoutly built man of middle height’, with dark-brown whiskers, moustache and beard, and the appearance of ‘a Russian Pole’. Said also to be a lighterman and ‘diver’, he was a convicted felon, aged forty-six, calloused by years of base and brutal living, in prison and out. He allegedly told another convict during his latest incarceration: ‘There’s a bloody fence and his whore at Whitechapel that owe me £70 on a deal. I’m going to their place for the money when I get out, and if the old bugger squeals at paying, I’ll put his light out sure enough.’
That fence was a Jew, John Goodman Levy, aged seventy-five, who lived in a house on the corner of Turner Street and Varden Street, halfway between the sites of Jack the Ripper’s first and third murders, committed in 1888. The area, less than eight years after the Ripper murders and in the year before Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, was still a centre of seething criminal activity, of prostitution, pawn-broking, thievery and insalubrious pubs. Jews thrived locally with second-hand clothes and money-lending businesses, and as pawnbrokers and fences (receivers of stolen goods), though they conducted their lives and occupations, including crime, with more acumen than their neighbours, and with more profit and success. Such a one was old Levy, a retired umbrella-maker with crippled hands. ‘Especially the right,’ according to his stepson, Jacob Myers. ‘Owing to the use of shears in his business.’ Mr Myers, another umbrella-maker, who lived in Bow, also attested to the fact that Levy was ‘very deaf’ and ‘too good and kind’ for anyone to bear him any ill will. Myers and Levy had been in business together until December 1895, when the partnership was dissolved.
The last time Mr Myers saw his stepfather alive was in Levy’s home at 31 Turner Street on the afternoon of Thursday, 2 April 1896. The following night, Levy had a supper party in his house, which was attended by three women: Mrs Annie Gale, aged thirty-seven, who had been Levy’s housekeeper for about eleven years and lived on the premises; her sister, Mrs Alice Weiderman, the wife of a walking-stick carver, who lived in Battersea; and an elderly cousin of Mr Levy, Miss Martha Laughton, who was somewhat deaf and lived nearby, at 35 Turner Street. She and Mrs Weiderman both left the house about 9.45 pm that Friday night, after Miss Laughton