Ratcliff Highway Murders - Police

Police

In 1811, Britain had no formal police force and only a crude system of making arrests. Parish constables, magistrates, and coroners dealt with local crimes. "Thief-takers," a primitive breed of bounty hunters, had been replaced in 1749 with the City-based Bow Street Runners, whose remit was confined to the West End. The Marine Police Force, now known as the Marine Support Unit, was founded in 1798 to protect ships and cargoes at anchor in the Pool of London and the lower reaches of the river. Based in Wapping High Street, the Marine Police Force station was only a few minutes walk from both crime scenes, but no one was trained in investigative procedures.

It would not be until 1829, almost two decades after the Ratcliffe Highway murders, that the Metropolitan Police Bill would be affirmed, giving London an organized, full time police force. And not until the 1840s would there be a separate organization of detectives.

Before modern approaches to crime detection had been developed, finding a culprit to account for a crime depended mostly on eyewitness accounts or character testimonies. Hence much factual information that could have excluded several suspects was ignored by the inexperienced decision-makers. In The Maul and The Pear Tree (1971), P.D.James and the late Dr. Thomas Critchley also noted that police services were not as yet professionalised and were highly fragmented in the early nineteenth century and the science of forensic pathology was yet to arise. Therefore, they argue that it is plausible that the Home Office, police and judiciary settled on the hapless Williams as a 'culprit' of convenience