From True Crime Object to Macabre Souvenir: the Suprising Journey of a Poker

In 1838 Joseph Millie, a clerk at the Savings Bank in Newcastle upon Tyne, was brutally beaten to death. At the crime scene the police discovered a bent and bloodied poker. Drawing upon Scott Lash and Celia Lury’s notion of ‘tracking and tracing’ (2007), our paper follows the poker as its function moves - from domestic item to murder weapon, to ‘true crime’ object, to criminal evidence at a murder trial, and then to possibly surprising, confronting and incongruous post-legal uses, as a keepsake and dinner party conversation piece. Its status moves from common fire iron with no inherent value, to something unique: its bent and deformed shape testifying to its turbulent history.
We explore the tensions and contradictions in these changes in direction, as the poker moves into fresh contexts. Lash and Lury considered objects ‘not as stationary but as networked and animated sets of relations in motion’. We explore this by following the ‘life-course’ of the poker as it travels through various states and functions. Building a full picture of its journey is a multidisciplinary endeavour, addressing trial and post-trial uses of criminal evidence in a historical context; differences between legal and non-legal users of criminal evidence in the approach to, a ‘true crime object’; the cultural dimensions of crime, in visual, social and material contexts; questions of ‘authenticity’ of ‘true crime objects’; and the spaces in which and methods by which they are consumed.