Was John Gill a Copy-Cat Murder?

[Ausgirl]

I just found reference to the source of the "killed by a gang" story.. a mysterious man from Leeds:

THE BRADFORD MURDER.

Interest has been revived in the shocking murder of the body John Gill, at Mauningham, Bradford, in December last, by the receipt of a letter by the Rev. J. Whitaker, vicar of Cononley, from a man at Duston hill, Leeds. The Rev. gentleman and others have just had a long interview with the man, who alleges that the murder was committed by five boys, and the particulars were given to him by a man who could not rest because of the guilty knowledge of the facts. He refused to give exact particulars at present, and says he is tracing the murderers himself. The matter has been placed in the hands of a local solicitor.


Source: Lloyd's Weekly London Newspaper, November 3, 1889, Page 2

http://victorianripper.niceboard.org/t1032-murder-of-john-gill

Leeds being where in 1891 5 year old Barbara Waterhouse was found wrapped in a rags/ a shawl, her throat cut so severely she was almost decapitated, her body ripped "from one end to the other" and "horribly mutilated". There's more details in the article below, they're pretty horrible. A Walter Turner was convicted for this murder. after being turned in by his mother, who got life of penal servitude for her trouble.

http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=NEM18910911.2.23

How weird!

[John G]

I just found reference to the source of the "killed by a gang" story.. a mysterious man from Leeds:

THE BRADFORD MURDER.

Interest has been revived in the shocking murder of the body John Gill, at Mauningham, Bradford, in December last, by the receipt of a letter by the Rev. J. Whitaker, vicar of Cononley, from a man at Duston hill, Leeds. The Rev. gentleman and others have just had a long interview with the man, who alleges that the murder was committed by five boys, and the particulars were given to him by a man who could not rest because of the guilty knowledge of the facts. He refused to give exact particulars at present, and says he is tracing the murderers himself. The matter has been placed in the hands of a local solicitor.


Source: Lloyd's Weekly London Newspaper, November 3, 1889, Page 2

http://victorianripper.niceboard.org/t1032-murder-of-john-gill

Leeds being where in 1891 5 year old Barbara Waterhouse was found wrapped in a rags/ a shawl, her throat cut so severely she was almost decapitated, her body ripped "from one end to the other" and "horribly mutilated". There's more details in the article below, they're pretty horrible. A Walter Turner was convicted for this murder. after being turned in by his mother, who got life of penal servitude for her trouble.

http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=NEM18910911.2.23

How weird!

Walter Lewis Turner was executed for the Barbara Warehouse murder and his mother sentenced to life imprisonment. See:http://www.britishexecutions.co.uk/e...t.php?key=1398

[Ausgirl]

Good grief. The more I find, the weirder it gets.. in 1889, Turner tried to kill his wife, by slashing her throat, for which he got only 8 months gaol.

Heaps more info on the following threads:

http://jtrforums.com/showthread.php?t=16822&page=2

http://www.casebook.org/forum/messages/4920/9504.html

Sorry if this all old news to some here.. it's new news to me! This man could well have killed John Gill.

[Ausgirl]

Walter Lewis Turner was executed for the Barbara Warehouse murder and his mother sentenced to life imprisonment. See:http://www.britishexecutions.co.uk/e...t.php?key=1398

Another man named "Conway" (no first name given) was also executed - not sure if it was part of this case, or another? The article might just be confusingly worded:

http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=NEM18910911.2.23

It surely cannot be coincidence, the way little Barbara was mutilated and 'ripped' -- Turner insisted on his innocence to the end, claiming a man named "Jack" had drugged him and placed the body in his house...

I'm inclined to think he was a right nutter of a pedo, and might have been a real copycat killer, especially if he did kill John Gill as well. How many kiddie mutilators could there have been in a 10-mile radius?

Bit like "how many woman mutilators could there have been in a one-mile radius?" heh.. Answer is, probably very few, more probably only one. At least for the crimes where victims were actually mutilated.

[Rosella]

Walter Turner's mother's sentence was reduced to one year's imprisonment though, obviously because of her cooperation with the authorities. I agree, pretty gruesome and horrible story.

[Ausgirl]

Walter Turner's mother's sentence was reduced to one year's imprisonment though, obviously because of her cooperation with the authorities. I agree, pretty gruesome and horrible story.

She went from hanging to life sentence, to one year.. wow. Cheers, R.

So, Conway was the killer of the boy in Liverpool. Nicholas Martin, 9...whose legs, like John Gill's, had been hacked off.

http://www.old-merseytimes.co.uk/sackmurder1891.html

At least the sods were hanged.

[Mayerling]

She went from hanging to life sentence, to one year.. wow. Cheers, R.

So, Conway was the killer of the boy in Liverpool. Nicholas Martin, 9...whose legs, like John Gill's, had been hacked off.

http://www.old-merseytimes.co.uk/sackmurder1891.html

At least the sods were hanged.

Actually John Conway met a peculiarly horrid execution by James Berry in 1891 (which helped convince the executioner to give up his job). Conway (a union delegate to a meeting that occurred during a strike on the docks) had lured Nicholas Martin to his rented rooms and murdered him there - he was captured while disposing the remains. After his conviction, on the night before his execution, he tried to cut his throat with his razor. He suffered serious, but not life threatening injuries, and was "sown" up for the hanging.
Berry had problems in the past with some of his executions, most notoriously in 1884 when one Robin Goodale's head was ripped off his body while being executed (Berry had hung Goodale based on his calculations of size and amount of rope - but did not realize the muscles in Goodale's head were weaker than usual). When he hanged Conway, the body fell down the trap, but the sutures put into his neck came apart, and his head remained connected by a slender piece of flesh, while his body bled out in the pit.

Jeff

[Mayerling]

Thanks Jeff, and I very much agree with your last comment.

I actually read your posts on the West Ham crimes recently while working on another Reddit article, those were very useful and I was going to thank you for them at some point - so, thank you!

I found those crimes while looking for potential other victims of the John Gill murderer, but I don't think they're the same.. I also am currently thinking Gill's murderer probably had used a knife before, but this extent of mutilation was all about mimicking the Ripper. The ear, plus intestines, and the heart removal, pretty much have me convinced on that.

Though Stan's comment above, re him trying to "top" the Ripper, is interesting.

Hi Ausgirl,

You're welcome. Thanks for reading it.

Jeff

[Ausgirl]

Cheers, Jeff. I found this report regarding a Liverpool shopkeep who apparently keeled over dead after reading a newspaper account of the Conway debacle, which could not have helped the hangman's reputation at all...

http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=CHP18911007.2.36.2

I'm wondering now if these two being executed at the same time was coincidence, or some sort of judiciary statement.

Pondering these two criminals in the context of possible involvement in the Gill murder, given the (admittedly slender) range of facts at hand..

Conway chose a similar victim to John Gill, and hacked the boy's legs off, as happened in the Gill murder. He was from Liverpool, and there was a newspaper from Liverpool, 250 miles or so from Bradford, used to wrap John Gill's remains.

There is nothing I've yet found, though, to place Conway anywhere near Bradford at the time of John Gill's death. Also, dismemberment was at the time, and still is today, not an entirely unusual thing for child murderers to do, when disposing of victims. The Liverpool thing may be entirely coincidental. If I happen on anything placing him near Gill, I'll probably think him a more likely suspect.

Turner.. well, his crime was very Ripper-like in several ways (as was Gill's) and also echoes Tabram (with 45 stab wounds). In this way, it closely resembles John Gill's murder (which in some elements resembled Kelly's murder among other Ripper crimes).

Turner lived in Horsforth, just 8 miles from Bradford, and I read (in a post here by Paul Williams, 2003) that he was also found in an 1881 census to be living even closer at one point, in Shipley, just three miles away (and apparently was still there in August of 1889 when he tried to cut his wife's throat), so it's very possible he knew the area of Bradford quite well.

Other similarities between the two murders:

- Both John and Barbara were abducted from a public street, removed to the site of the murder/mutilation, with the blood-drained body then moved to a secondary location for disposal.
- Both victims were stabbed as well as slashed, with the majority of wounds being postmortem.
- Both victims had severed or nearly-severed limbs.
- Both had genital injuries but (as with the Ripper crimes) no sperm was found on them.
- Both bodies were wrapped in articles of clothing.
- Both bodies were left in places where they'd be easily discovered.

.. is what I came up with, off the top of my head. There might be more.

Of course there's differences too, but the above similarities in murders that occurred just a few miles apart (and with Turner living three miles from Bradford at the time of the Gill murder) is real reason to suspect Turner in the Gill murder, I think.

And *if* he did both murders, especially in light of his insistence that a man named "Jack" was responsible for Barbara's death, it would really make him seem even more a Ripper copycat.

[Mayerling]

Cheers, Jeff. I found this report regarding a Liverpool shopkeep who apparently keeled over dead after reading a newspaper account of the Conway debacle, which could not have helped the hangman's reputation at all...

http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=CHP18911007.2.36.2

You know, it may not be something traceable, but do you recall seeing the "Jack the Ripper" series on television back in the 1970s that Stafford Johns and his partner from a regular series appeared in? In one of the early episodes (which dealt with the canonical five murders) Johns mentioned in passing that an elderly woman, hearing about the murder of one of the victims, died of shock in a town miles from London. It was a different time, and perhaps the news was quite shocking, but this report of the death of Mr. Charles Myles of Liverpool (age 50) is the only other one I recall ever hearing about.

Also, Conway was from Liverpool - did Myles know Conway? Could the realization that an acquaintance (possibly a friend) was executed for a killing that was so horrible, and died horribly as well) may explain the sudden fatal heart attack.

Can anyone check the 1881 and 1891 censuses to see where Myles and Conway lived in Liverpool, and if they might be in proximity to each other?

Jeff

[Ausgirl]

You know, it may not be something traceable, but do you recall seeing the "Jack the Ripper" series on television back in the 1970s that Stafford Johns and his partner from a regular series appeared in? In one of the early episodes (which dealt with the canonical five murders) Johns mentioned in passing that an elderly woman, hearing about the murder of one of the victims, died of shock in a town miles from London. It was a different time, and perhaps the news was quite shocking, but this report of the death of Mr. Charles Myles of Liverpool (age 50) is the only other one I recall ever hearing about.

Also, Conway was from Liverpool - did Myles know Conway? Could the realization that an acquaintance (possibly a friend) was executed for a killing that was so horrible, and died horribly as well) may explain the sudden fatal heart attack.

Can anyone check the 1881 and 1891 censuses to see where Myles and Conway lived in Liverpool, and if they might be in proximity to each other?

Jeff

Oh, good call.

I've been meaning to hunt up that series for ages now, cheers for the reminder.

[Ausgirl]

this one is the right age (birth year is also given as 1841). I can't find anyone else that age in the area.

Name: Charles Myles
Spouse: Sarah Ann Myles
Birth: abt 1840 - Manchester, Lancashire, England
Residence: 1881 - Pendleton in Salford, Lancashire, England


The following day the union's representative in South Liverpool, former marine fireman John Conway, was arrested at a lodging house in Bridgewater Street.

And a bit about Conway from Berry's memoir:

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=Y4p1BAAAQBAJ&lpg=PT55&ots=kB6_85qglm&dq=%22John%20conway%22%20murder%20liverpool&pg=PT55#v=onepage&q=%22John%20conway%22%20murder%20liverpool&f=false

[Parker_Pyne79]

To kill a child is a horrific and awful thing to do. You would have to have something wrong with you to kill a child- it's not right if you're a fully grown adult.