In a post on CrimeReads, Vanessa Riley offers advice on getting away with murder in the Regency Era.
Her first tip is simple: don’t do it. “There were far more effective ways of making someone pay,” she explains. “Tricking someone into staggering debts could land the victim in debtor’s prisons. Fleet, Faringdon, King’s Bench, Whitecross Street, and Marshalsea were rat-infested, disease-infested debtor prisons. Persons sent to places like these will legally suffer.”
Also: don’t confess. “Many convictions in the 1800s were based on admitted testimony or hearsay confessions borne of the weight of a guilty conscience,” Riley says. “Savvy killers during the Regency and Georgian times, who’d rather die than testify, had greater chances of getting away with their crimes if they chose not to admit it, not tell anyone what they did, nor involve any accomplice.”
Other tips include:
- Do crime at night. Outside London, street lighting was quite rare in early 19th century England.
- Wear gloves. Fingerprint technology wasn’t developed in the early 1800s, but it did exist.
- Wear smooth slippers. Footprints, including bare feet and patterns left by boot heels and soles, could exclude suspects or identify a likely culprit.
- Use poison other than arsenic. By 1773, a Swedish chemist developed a process to identify the presence of arsenic in a corpse. Anyone proven to have a connection to arsenic and the victim in the same day would be immediately suspect. Other toxins were less easily identifiable.
- Use a cart to move the victim. Dragging a body from your property to another leaves marks. A cart might leave a trail, but will more easily blend in with others. It’s also faster.
- Make friends with the coroner or magistrate. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. With no history of a policing or enforcement, detection often relied on reputation, instinct, and circumstantial evidence. Having a good reputation or being friendly with local officials would go a long way to keeping your name off a list of suspects.
- Be dispassionate about the victim. Avoid gossip and public threats. Be friendly towards your victim, but not overly invested.
- Make financial transactions disappear. As always, financial connections are often the root of crime. The fewer financial records left on the table, the less likely a villain would be traced back to the victim.
- Wait things out. Without modern techniques or forensic technology, time was on the side of the killer. Bodies were moved and washed, and crucial evidence was more easily lost or destroyed, partly because no one knew these things were important.
