Stranger Than Fiction

January 2025

Arthur Conan Doyle and the Debatable Case
by Dean Jobb

Killer and victim: George Victor Townley and Elizabeth Caroline Goodwin. (Author Collection)

Mary Emsley was a familiar figure in the Stepney neighborhood of East London in 1860. She was seventy but one newspaper described her as “strong, robust, and, for her age, an exceedingly powerful woman.” Her clothes were shabby, despite the fact she had more than enough money to buy the finest fashions. A widow, she lived alone in an eight-room townhouse at 9 Grove Road, even though she had inherited a large number of houses in the area and could afford to hire live-in servants. The rents she collected—a task she preferred to undertake in person each week—made her incredibly wealthy, as well as feared and detested. She was hard-nosed and ruthless when it came to money. Many of her tenants were poor and lived in squalid, overcrowded buildings. Those who fell behind in their payments were swiftly hauled into court or evicted.

Emsley did her weekly rounds on August 13, a Monday, recording amounts collected from each tenant in a book and stashing the money in a covered basket she carried. There was a change, however, in her routine; the forty pounds she collected was not deposited at her bank. She did not answer her door in the days that followed. Neighbors saw no one enter or leave that week and the house remained dark all night. It was midday Friday before Emsley’s solicitor alerted the police and an officer from the nearby Bow Road station entered and discovered her body lying on the floor of an upstairs room.

Blood was spattered on the walls and furniture and had pooled around the corpse. The stench confirmed she had been dead for several days, likely since the previous Monday. An autopsy revealed that the back of her skull had been bashed in from blows with a heavy, blunt weapon. The officers of K Division of the Metropolitan Police fanned out to question neighbors, relatives, and business associates and to trace her movements before her death.

Four decades later, one of the most famous crime writers in the world would take a fresh look at the evidence these investigators collected. In 1901, not long before he rescinded the death sentence meted out to Sherlock Holmes at Reichenbach Falls and sent his supersleuth on the scent of the Baskerville hound, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote nonfiction accounts of three notorious British murders for The Strand Magazine. The crimes he chose for these “Strange Studies of Life,” as the magazine labeled them, had occurred in the 1860s. One of the trio was the murder of Mary Emsley.

Goodwin’s murder and Townley’s trial made headlines throughout England. (Derby Mercury, August 26, 1863)

The article was headlined “The Debatable Case of Mrs. Emsley,” reflecting Conan Doyle’s doubts that justice had been done. He waded into the Emsley affair years before he tackled two famous miscarriages of justice—the cases of George Edalji, a solicitor imprisoned for the bizarre mutilations of livestock, and Oscar Slater, a Glasgow man wrongly convicted of murder.

James Mullins, a plasterer who had done work on Emsley’s rental properties, was convicted of the murder and hanged. The prosecution’s case rested on circumstantial evidence that was damning but, to the author’s mind, far from definitive. “Circumstantial evidence, even when it all points one way and there is nothing to be urged upon the other side,” he wrote, “cannot be received with too great caution, for it is nearly always possible to twist it to some other meaning.”

Not surprisingly, Sherlock Holmes shared his creator’s concerns about the shape-shifting nature of circumstantial evidence. “A very tricky thing,” was how the consulting detective described it to his sidekick Dr. John Watson in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” one of the earliest Holmes mysteries. “It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different.”

Did the circumstantial evidence that implicated Mullins point to a killer, Conan Doyle asked, or had it been twisted in the wrong direction, condemning an innocent man to die on the gallows?

“Atrocious Murder and Robbery at Stepney,” proclaimed a headline in the London Observer, which described the crime as one that “frighted the isle from its propriety.” Robbery appeared to be the motive. Emsley had inherited her stable of rental properties when her second husband died in 1856 and the Observer estimated she earned as much as £4,000 a year in rental income. It was a staggering sum, equivalent to half a million pounds today. But the house had not been ransacked and all that was missing was the rent money she had collected that week, some silver spoons and a few other small items.

Police officers checked the doors and windows and found none had been forced open. The front door was locked and the back door could only be accessed through houses surrounding the garden, suggesting Emsley had invited her killer inside. It must have been someone she knew and trusted. “It was with reluctance that she ever opened her door,” Conan Doyle noted, “and each visitor who approached her was reconnoitred from the window.” The only clue was a bloody boot print found near the body.

The offer of a £300 reward soon produced a suspect. James Mullins, the plasterer, went to the police and implicated Walter Thomas Emm, a cobbler and handyman who did work for Emsley and helped out as a rent collector. Conan Doyle described Mullins as a “respectable-looking” man in his fifties, “with the straight back of a man who has at some period been well drilled.” His bearing was evidence of his police training—he had been a London policeman and had served in K Division, which policed Stepney—but his respectability was long gone. In 1853, after he left the force and became a railway security guard, he had been convicted of stealing freight and had served six years in prison.

Townley’s mother on the witness stand at his trial, as depicted by Sidney Paget in an illustration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s feature on the case. (The Strand Magazine, April 1901)

Mullins told the police he suspected Emm was the killer and he had been keeping him under surveillance, as if he were still on the force. He boasted of being “clever in these matters” and claimed he had seen Emm carrying a package to an outbuilding near his cottage. “Very likely,” he said, “he is concealing some of the plunder which he has stolen.” Officers searched Emm’s home and the shed, which was crammed with lumber and other building materials, but found nothing. Mullins insisted they try again. He led them back to the shed and urged them to lift a stone slab. Under it was a package containing spoons and other articles taken from Emsley’s home.

For the inspector in charge of the investigation, the discovery was too contrived and too convenient. Mullins could only have known where to find the package if he had entered the shed and hidden it there himself. Both men were placed under arrest but only Mullins was prosecuted for murder.

A search of his residence produced a hammer, a tool of the plasterer’s trade, which resembled the shape of some of Emsley’s wounds. Mullins also possessed a roll of ribbon that matched the ribbon tied around the package found in Emm’s shed. A spoon like those stolen from Emsley was found in his home. His wife had recently sold a silver pencil case identical to one the murdered woman had owned. And the soles of Mullins’s boots resembled the bloody print found at the scene. A jury deliberated three hours before finding him guilty.

Despite the evidence arrayed against Mullins, Conan Doyle was not convinced of his guilt. The jury, he feared, had not afforded him the benefit of reasonable doubt, as was his entitlement under the law. “In the fierce popular indignation which is excited by a sanguinary crime,” he warned, “there is a tendency, in which judges and juries share, to brush aside or to treat as irrelevant those doubts the benefit of which is supposed to be one of the privileges of the accused.” And without the shield of reasonable doubt to protect against injustice, he warned, the criminal law threatened to become “the giant murderer of England.”

He favored the approach taken under Scottish law, where a verdict of “not proven”—not guilty but not exactly innocent, either—was possible. The Emsley jury, he suspected, would have jumped at the chance to impose a compromise verdict, one that neither absolved Mullins of the crime nor condemned him to death.

“After reading the evidence one is left with an irresistible impression that, though Mullins was very likely guilty, the police were never able to establish the details of the crime, and that there was a risk of a miscarriage of justice when the death sentence was carried out.”

But was Mullins’s execution a miscarriage of justice? The evidence against him was indeed circumstantial—no one witnessed the crime or saw him enter or leave Emsley’s house on the day of the murder—but there was plenty of it. His clumsy attempt to implicate Emm alone screamed he was guilty.

“None of us,” Conan Doyle noted after studying the Townley case, “is capable of saying how he might act if his affections and his self-respect were suddenly and cruelly outraged.” (Author Collection)

Conan Doyle’s reassessment of the case was almost as clumsy. He deliberately omitted a crucial fact: Mullins’s previous conviction for theft. His Strand article made only a vague reference to the former policeman having “undergone many other curious experiences before he had settled down as a plasterer.”

And he failed to grasp that Mullins’s surveillance of Emm was a classic example of how circumstantial evidence could “twist,” as he put it, “to some other meaning.” If Mullins had been watching Emm’s home, as he claimed, he had the opportunity to plant the evidence found in the shed.

Conan Doyle was right, however, about the injustice of the outcome. While the circumstantial case against Mullins might have been enough to support a murder conviction, the death sentence should have been commuted and his life spared. And it’s possible he was innocent. In the 2017 book The Mile End Murder, the writer Sinclair McKay revisited the crime—he termed it “the case Conan Doyle couldn’t solve”—and made a convincing case that another man Emsley knew was the culprit.

A phrenologist named Frederick Bridges, on the other hand, was certain that Mullins was the killer. After the condemned man was hanged in November 1860, he went public with his evidence and there was nothing debatable about it. “His head,” Bridges assured the Liverpool Daily Post, was “the true thief and murderer’s type.”