Crimescribe

Daniel Good is probably an unfamiliar name, hanged as he was back in 1842. But the result of his crime is still familiar the world over. Good’s crime was unexceptional, the brutal murder and partial dismemberment of a woman he’d been living with. Horrific, certainly, but unfortunately not unusual.

His crime, committed on April 7, 1842, was discovered by accident. A uniformed officer of London’s Metropolitan Police went to arrest Good after he was seen stealing a pair of trousers from a pawnbroker in Putney. While the officer was busy discovering the victim’s corpse (and probably stunned by its having been crudely dismembered) Good made his escape. A manhunt immediately began with nine divisions of officers joining the search.

With no plainclothes officers then in existence, the Met had a serious problem even with so many uniformed officers looking for him. Good, having committed a particularly brutal murder, was also facing a mandatory death sentence. If caught he would almost certainly hang. Uniformed officers being highly visible, Good easily spotted them and slipped the net. Having successfully escaped London itself, Good might have thought he was home free. As it turned out he couldn’t have been more wrong.

Having found work in Tonbridge as a labourer Good remained unaware that new colleague Thomas Rose was a  former Metropolitan Police officer. Now off the force Rose wasn’t in uniform and Good, looking for uniformed officers instead of anyone in plain clothes, was very much in harm’s way. Like many former police officers Rose retained a strong interest in crime and criminals. It wasn’t long before Rose recognised Good, alerting his chief pursuers Inspector Nicholas Pearce and Sergeant Stephen Thornton.

On April 25, 1842 Daniel Good was arrested. Once convicted he was condemned to die. On May 23, 1842, only a month after his arrest, he ascended the ‘New Drop’ outside London’s notorious Newgate Prison to keep his date with the hangman. Executioner WIlliam Calcraft performed his grim duties with (unusually for him) speed and efficiency.

After being left to hang for the traditional hour to ensure his death, Good was subjected to a rather creepy, but not unusual indignity; having his death mask made for him. This wasn’t unusual at the time and executed prisoners were often subjected to it. A mould was made of his face and a plaster bust made of his head. Good’s death mask now resides in Scotland Yard’s legendary ‘Black Museum,’ a place inspiring a 1950’s radio serial narrated by Orson Welles who famously called it a ‘mausoleum of murder.’

With Good safely in his grave the Metropolitan Police had to reconsider having only uniformed officers. Had some officers been working out of uniform, they reasoned, they might have caught him far sooner. With that in mind a permanent cadre of non-uniformed officers. the Detective Department, was set up in August of 1842. It later became the Criminal Investigation Department (CID).

The Detective Department were the beginnings of Scotland Yard’s now-legendary detectives. In time their reputation grew and their remit extended. Not only do they cover all crime within London they are still regularly called in by local forces to assist in especially difficult cases.

All local police forces today also have their own CID branches, following the Met’s example. Some of them (Frederick Wensley, Fred Cherrill, Jack Capstick, Robert Fabian, Leonard Burt, Ernest Millen, Jack Slipper and Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read among others) became celebrities, legendary in their own time and as famous as some of the criminals they pursued.

Daniel Good obviously wasn’t there to appreciate his unwilling place in criminal history. The Yard’s detectives having grown to achieve legendary status, many subsequent generations of incarcerated or executed criminals won’t have appreciated it much either. Ernest Millen was once told of a man he had arrested saying:

“If Ernie Millen gives evidence that hangs me I’ll come back and haunt him.”

Millen, never one to avoid the truth, responded with his customary bluntness:

“He’ll have to get in the queue…”