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TERRIBLE REVENGE OF THE SCORNED PTA PRESIDENT

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BEFRIEND AND KILL No Body How Could – But No A Mother Doubt Do This?

The Killing Of Shocking fate of Arlene Fraser

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February 2020

he authorities believed the trunks dripping blood at a Los Angeles T railway station contained illegal shipments of deer carcasses. In fact, as it was soon discovered, the cargo was much more sinister: the mutilated bodies of two women – both killed by Phoenix medical secretary Winnie Ruth Judd. Why had she done it? Turn to MD Forum: Why Ruth Chopped Up Her Friends, on page 26, for the full, fascinating story.

Scotland’s Classic Cases: No Body – But No Doubt, on page 36, features the notorious 1998 murder of devoted mother Arlene Fraser. The body of the 33-year-old from Elgin has never been found and her killer has maintained a stony silence on the subject ever since. As we report, pending Scottish legislation could ensure that, as a result, wife-killer Nat Fraser will remain behind bars for the rest of his life. th e re ad!

En joy

2 BEFRIEND AND KILL Retired teacher Peter Farquhar thought he’d found happiness with a young churchman. In fact, he’d met his killer...

M

AIDS MORETON. The name conjures up visions of Agatha Christie and mid-century village life – church and pub; butcher and baker; the doctor, the vet and the candlestick-maker – well, perhaps not the last.

Taking a walk through Maids Moreton today, much of that calm,

By Donald Carne respectable life still remains. Starting by the thatched-roof inn, The Wheatsheaf, you might amble down the laughingly-named Main Street, barely wide enough for a cart, into Church Street, lined on either side by majestic oaks, limes and solid stone-built walls.

The early gothic church of St. Edmund’s now stands before us, apparently endowed by two spinster ladies of the parish from the Pever family – hence the village name. It stands as a reminder to us all of the

4 PAUL DONNELLEY’S MURDER MONTH More Murder Months on pages 14, 18, 33 and 38 6 EUROPEAN CRIME REPORT “Terrible Revenge Of The Scorned PTA President”, “Most Wanted Man ‘Spotted’ In Glasgow”, “Bloodbath In A Paris Slum” 11 VIEWPOINT plus COMPETITION More of your letters and a chance to win a book 12 HOW COULD A MOTHER DO THIS? Was post-natal depression a factor in the shocking death of baby Sterling in rural Iowa?

16 THE HANGINGS OF ALBERT PIERREPOINT – PART NINE: BOMB-SITE KILLER CAUGHT BY A SCRAP OF PAPER The case that brought prostitute Rose Fairhurst’s killer to a date with Britain’s top executioner 20 DEAD MAN’S SHOES How astute police work solved a murder on a US Indian reservation 26 MD FORUM: WHY RUTH CHOPPED UP HER FRIENDS The extraordinary case of double-killer Winnie Ruth Judd 35 THIRTY YEARS AGO IN CRIME More headline-making material from MD’s crime archives 36 SCOTLAND’S CLASSIC CASES: NO BODY – BUT NO DOUBT Arlene Fraser disappeared after dropping her kids off at school – and her husband didn’t seem too bothered...

40 DENHAM: BRITAIN’S MURDER VILLAGE: PART TWO Six killings that took place in the infamous Thames Valley murder hot-spot 46 LAST DEATH SENTENCE AT THE “OLD” OLD BAILEY John Wyatt couldn’t bear the way his girlfriend Florence kissed him – and that would have deadly consequences Cover and contents of Master Detective produced by Magazine Design & Publishing Ltd. Printed and bound by Warners Midlands plc, Bourne, Lincolnshire, PE10 9PH, for the Proprietors and Publishers.

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sense of permanence endowed by the finely-chiselled stone of a master medieval mason.

Some might argue that the modern estates to the north of the village are a threat to its integrity but more likely, the steady expansion of Buckingham to the south, already tickling the southern fringe, is a more clear and present danger.

After a lifetime of academia as an English teacher in the public school system – first at Manchester Grammar School and later at Stowe – Edinburgh-born Peter A. Scott Farquhar, 69, set down roots in Maids Moreton. He turned his attention to his one unfulfilled ambition – the writing of the great English novel.

Whether he achieved this ambition is for others to say but he did produce three novels in quick succession – Between Boy and Man, A Bitter Heart and A Wide Wide Sea. An evangelical Christian, Peter worshipped and preached at Stowe Parish Church. In 2011, he met a shining bright energetic young man, Ben Field, 28, a student at the University of Buckingham, where Peter was an occasional lecturer. Field was a church warden and son of a Baptist minister and he set out to win Peter’s trust.

The older man was soon enraptured

by Field’s Svengali-like skills of

BEFRIEND AND KILL

Above, St. Edmund’s Church, Maids Moreton, Buckinghamshire. Insets above, left to right, murder victim Peter Farquhar with his killer Ben Field; a police photo of Field. Left, Peter in bed under the influence of drink or drugs

manipulation but the relationship was rocky. At Christmas 2012, Field presented Peter with a collection of “rap battle” poems that made fun of him. It was titled the Truest Jest collection. “I thought he would, perhaps, not actually like it, but see it as a bit of fun, a bit of sport,” Field said.

Peter was upset. He accused Field of being “deceptive and disloyal” and it took Field some time to win back his confidence. en Field moved in with Peter in B 2013, and in 2014 they were joined together in a betrothal ceremony at a Hampstead church. Peter changed his will to make Field a key beneficiary.

Field was unfaithful, Peter was naïve – but more importantly, Field was set upon a longer-term plan of his own. He had discovered “gaslighting.”

Most associate the term with the film Gaslight (1940). A sinister Anton Walbrook, husband of delicate Diana Wynyard, sets out to drive her insane.

Gaslighting might include hiding things, secluding the victim from friends and family, discounting their ideas, trivialising their concerns, mocking and abusing them.

Field supplemented his attack on Peter by encouraging him to drink more alcohol and by spiking his food and drink with psychotropic prescription

drugs. “What I did was completely unacceptable, despicable and wicked and in no way reflective of anything he had done to me,” Field said later.

Didn’t he consider it reckless?

“I thought he would like it. He did drink too much and too often. He had been prescribed Lorazepam (sleeping pills) for the best part of four decades.

It was a reckless thing but at the time I didn’t think it was a terribly reckless thing to do for him. I think it was much more dangerous now than I did at the time.”

Peter thought he was losing his mind.

A disturbing video of him rambling in bed shows him under the influence of something – alcohol or drugs – complaining bitterly over his loss of competence.

At a book launch, Peter slouched like a drunk. Field hinted to others that Peter was becoming an alcoholic or suffered from “undiagnosed dementia.”

“What I did was completely unacceptable, despicable and wicked and in no way reflective of anything he had done to me”

Believing it was something physical in his brain, Peter sought the help of a brain specialist. ield moved three doors down F from Peter to live with Ann Moore-Martin, 83, in the summer of 2015. Oliver Saxby QC told the jury of six men and six women sitting at Oxford Crown Court before Mr. Justice Sweeney in April 2019 that Field wooed Ann with love letters and poems.

Field entered into a sexual relationship with Ann. “I didn’t think I was going to inherit any time soon as I was making this decision,” he said.

“Peter was still 69 and I was sufficiently unhappy with the way I treated him and didn’t expect I would be inheriting any money soon.”

There may have been another reason.

“Early on I saw Ann as someone I could benefit from,” he told the court.

The former headmistress gave Field £4,400 for a new car and £27,000 for a kidney dialysis machine that Field said his brother needed, which was a lie.

Peter Farquhar was found dead on October 26th, 2015, by his cleaner, a half-drained bottle of whisky by his side. At first, his death was recorded as alcohol-related. Ben Field showed no emotion as he reported his mentor’s death.

Field’s relationship with Ann reached

MDCalculating And Ruthless Churchman Guilty Of Murder

Evil Church Warden’s Project

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Paul Donnelley’s

MURDER MONTH February arly release leads to another E murder...Simon Mellors was convicted on December 23rd, 1999, of the murder of his ex-girlfriend Pearl Black, 36. On May 6th that year he had battered her with an iron bar before strangling her with cable ties at her home in Bramcote, Nottingham, as her two children – one of whom was his – slept nearby.

The next morning, he took the handle off the bedroom door so the children could not get in, drove them to school, and then tried to kill himself with beer and slug pellets, but was found and arrested.

He was sentenced to a 14-year minimum sentence before being considered for release, which was cut to 12 years on appeal. He was released from prison in 2014.

In April 2017, he began a relationship with 51-year-old Janet Scott Two victims: who was separated from her fourth husband. She Simon was aware of Mellors’s Mellors previous conviction. When she returned to Mr. Scott before Christmas, Mellors refused to accept the situation. He threatened Mr. and Mrs. Scott and followed her to work at Lidl.

Mother-of-six Mrs. Scott complained to Mellors’s probation officer about his behaviour but nothing was done.

On January 29th, 2018, Mellors went to Mrs. Scott’s home in Nursery Road, Arnold, Nottinghamshire. They argued before he stabbed her in the chest. He then forced her to get into his Volkswagen and he drove them to Nottingham city centre.

As he slowed in traffic, Mrs. Scott saw community protection officer Fahad Ashfaq and jumped out of the car to ask for help. Mellors aimed the car and ran them both over – killing his ex-lover and injuring the policeman, who was thrown 15 yards into the air before landing unconscious.

Mellors, 56, appeared at Nottingham Magistrates’ Court on February 1st but entered no pleas. He faced charges of murder, attempted murder and a third count of maliciously wounding Mrs. Scott.

On February 25th, Mellors hanged himself while on remand at Strangeways prison in Manchester. Judge Gregory Dickinson QC said, “Had Simon Mellors been convicted of murder then he could have been liable to a whole-life sentence, imprisonment for life without any early release.”

He also recommended CPO Ashfaq for a High Sheriff ’s Commendation and award.

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Field with Peter – “His feelings for me went beyond the the platonic and I said they were reciprocated by me but they were not,” the killer said

a point where Ann changed her will in Field’s favour at Christmas 2016 – but her niece stepped in and the decision was reversed early the next year when the niece reported Field to Thames Valley Police.

Ann died of natural causes in May 2017. By then, officers had picked up on the link between Field and Peter.

The academic’s death was re-examined.

In November 2018, Field was charged with Peter’s murder, conspiracy to murder Ann and a number of other charges related to fraud. Two others were charged as associates but were later acquitted.

During his time with Ann, Field’s manipulation went into overdrive.

He preyed on her Catholic background and vulnerability by writing messages from “God” on her mirrors. “Pray for Ben – Ben loves you,” God wrote on the bathroom mirror in a very modern font.

Other messages encouraged Ann to leave her house to Ben and to consider suicide.

“The mirror writing was all fake, the relationship was all fake and done with gain in mind,” Field admitted. “I wasn’t thinking of sex as my plan but I was thinking of moving in and thinking that was one way of making it happen – purely for gain, a benefit to myself of accommodation.” ield was candid when he took the F stand at Oxford Crown Court. “I did not see any relationship between using language and truth, at all,” he admitted when discussing his relationships at that time – or, as we might say more prosaically, he told lies.

When his lawyer, David Jeremy QC, reminded Field he was on oath in

court, Field replied confusingly, “I am saying things that I believe. I do not really know that I am expected to say these things either. These are my true sentiments. Absolutely.”

How had he lied to Peter?

“The initial lie was that I loved Peter, beyond the established friendship that we had. His feelings for me went beyond the platonic and I said they were reciprocated by me but they were not.”

Why did he do it? “To inherit. To increase my status in his mind and his Village hub: Maids Moreton’s Wheatsheaf pub

life and thereby stand to inherit when he ultimately died.”

How did he feel about Peter?

“Mixed. I had a great deal of affection for him as a friend. We had a huge amount in common. We’d spent a lot of time together over the previous two years. I also found parts of him despicable. We had more in common than simply a love of literature – but parts of myself, like being secretive or grudge holding, he did too. I think because of how I felt about myself, I despised him for it.”

What form did the gaslighting take?

“Moving things. So that he wouldn’t find them. To irritate him. I did it vindictively and to confuse him.” The tricks he employed included placing a crystal in the fridge and persuading Peter he had done it; wiping all Peter’s contacts from his phone; checking

through Peter’s papers to glean information; plying him with alcohol and drugs.

The court was told Field had a list of 100 “clients” – they included his parents and grandparents – or potential targets. Field told officers this was only a list of people who might help him.

Oliver Saxby QC told the jury, “Peter was vulnerable. And this was something, from the very outset, Field decided to exploit.”

Several of Field’s emails were read aloud in court: “So I went over and was amusing and cheered the poor man up.

He retired early, to be a novelist, and his day to day existence was lonely.

“Later in our friendship I edited his second novel for him, and suggested that we collaborate on a book. This is, once again, my own ambition seeking to exploit both Peter’s vanity and his desire for companionship.

“Peter is a closeted, Christian, homosexual, English teaching pedant, with a seriously problematic attraction to teens, and who continues to privately tutor fourteen- and fifteen-year-old boys in his home. I do not suspect him of ever acting inappropriately in any way. This is because I know he is a virgin.

“At the end of term, I called Peter and invited myself over. The reasons for this are manifold, but centre on careerminded avarice – I wanted to work at the university (where he was a guest

Above, the homes of Peter Farquhar (left) and Ann Moore-Martin (right).

Field moved in with the retired teacher in the summer of 2015

“For Benjamin Field, this was a project: befriend a vulnerable individual, get them to change their will and then make sure they died” lecturer), or at Stowe school (where he had been head of English for 21 years).”

Mr. Saxby was damning in his view of Field. “For Benjamin Field, this was a project: befriend a vulnerable individual, get them to change their will and then make sure they died. It is a project he seems to have relished devising and managing and executing – and, to an extent, documenting – in various notes and diaries he made.

Indeed, piecing things together, it is clear that his project became his life’s work – a life’s work of which he was proud and for which he admired himself.”

The jury’s deliberation was halted by an excessive heat wave when temperatures reached 35 degrees, but when they reconvened, they were quick to find Field guilty of Peter’s murder.

Field was acquitted of the charge of conspiracy to murder in the case of Ann. A Crown Prosecution Service spokesman said Field was “cruel, calculating, manipulative, deceitful. I

don’t think evil is too strong a word for him.”

October 2019, Ben Field was Itonsentenced

by Mr. Justice Sweeney life with a minimum of 36 years. “I

have no doubt that you are a dangerous offender,” he said, adding that he was persuaded that Field had finished Peter by suffocation.

Outside the court, a relative of Peter’s said, “Listening to the trial and hearing Ben give his evidence about what he did to Peter has been extremely difficult. His actions have been unbelievably callous, and he has told lie after lie after lie in order to achieve his goals, deceiving everyone he met.”

A CPS spokesman went further: “I think torture is a word that can be used to describe Benjamin Field’s behaviour.

He is clearly a very calculating and ruthless man who spent a great deal of time planning what he was going to do.”

Field told the court he was in counselling to overcome his destructive past and deviousness.

“I am still in the process of transformation,” he said. Will the counselling prove successful? The court has given him 36 years to find out.

JOURNALIST FRIEND NEVER SUSPECTED A THING Broadcaster, author and journalist Michael Crick (below) spoke of his guilt about falling for the lies of Peter Farquhar’s killer, following the conviction of Ben Field.

Mr. Crick, who was taught English by Peter Farquhar at Manchester Grammar School in the 1970s and had remained friends ever since, admitted: “I was softened up, like many people. I just wish I’d spotted what he was up to, and that I’d done something.”

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph,

former Channel 4 political correspondent Mr. Crick revealed that he’d been contacted by a friend of Field’s over Peter’s drinking.

“He said that Peter was in a really bad way and that he had a drink problem. I spoke to Peter, and he said he would go to get tested for dementia.

“You have to wonder if it was part of the softening-up process.

“Obviously I found the whole story hard to believe and in particular the idea that Peter had an alcohol problem.

“But I didn’t suspect for a moment that he could have been murdered.”

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EUR PEAN CRIME REPORT

TERRIBLE REVENGE OF THE SCORNED PTA PRESIDENT When a husband gave up his amorous fling and returned to his wife, the “other woman” wasn’t letting go lightly. The stage was now set for a bizarre kidnapping – and a horror killing

MDJohn Sanders Reports

S

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TEFANIA CROTTI was in the act of unlocking the driver’s door of her Lancia in the factory car park when a voice called her name.

“Stefania!”

Astonished, she turned to see a man in his 50s whom she had never seen before – a complete stranger. Before she could speak, he said: “I have a message from someone who wants to give you a big surprise. And he wants you to come at once.”

He held out a single red rose and a note that said, “I love you.”

Stefania, momentarily taken aback, tried to work out who could possibly be behind this unexpected visit. But it was now half-past three, she had finished her job for the day at the plastic factory at Cenate Sotto, in northern Italy, and now she needed to pick up her daughter from school.

“I’m just the messenger,” the stranger said, half apologetically. “But to find out more, you will have to come with me.

And my instructions are that you must be blindfolded.”

Stefania hesitated. Follow a stranger, blindfolded? That sounded risky. But she was now guessing who was behind this absurd masquerade. It could only be her husband Stefano.

When they first met she fell in love at

Above, scorned Chiara Alessandri. Left, Stefania Crotti

first sight. The birth of their daughter Martina, now aged five, should have heightened their love. Instead, Stefano lost interest. He began spending the evenings in the bar with his pals, and coming home late.

Then he didn’t come home at all.

“I’m just the messenger. But to find out more, you will have to come with me.

And my instructions are that you must be blindfolded”

Instead he rented a flat in the next village, and Stefania and Martina were alone.

Later Stefania was made aware that the cause of her marriage break-up was a rival – Stefano was having an affair with Chiara Alessandri, president of the parent-teacher association at Martine’s school and the mother of three children.

Now, she was convinced she had lost Stefano forever.

But every cloud…

The affair had lasted just a couple of months when after some counselling Stefano sought a reconciliation with his wife. The romance was reborn. The happy couple had themselves tattooed in celebration of their reunion. Chiara Alessandri, president of the PTA, was a marriage wrecker now consigned to the

who picked up Stefania Crotti from her workplace yesterday.”

He went on: “An old friend phoned me. She told me she was preparing a big surprise party for a couple of friends who had just got together again after some marriage problem, and she asked me to pick up the wife, blindfold her, and drive her to a garage near her home.

“I carried out her instructions, thinking honestly that it was all about a surprise party. Then a little while ago I saw a notice with her photograph on it, saying she had been found dead. I came here immediately. Is there any way I can help?”

“What is your old friend’s name?” he

Above, police at the spot where Stefania’s charred remains were discovered. Right, a policeman at the garage where she was attacked

distant past.

Stefania, 42, smiled to herself. It was just like Stefano, always the joker, to seal over the problem with a surprise like this. Willingly she consented to be blindfolded, and climbed into the waiting lorry with the messenger.

As the vehicle turned from this road into that and back again, she tried to work out where they were going. She soon lost all sense of direction. Finally, after what seemed an age, she felt the lorry stop and engage reverse gear. An electric garage door whirred and then stopped. The lorry reversed and the messenger cut the motor.

He leaned forward and removed the blindfold. They were in a half-lit garage.

“Journey’s end,” the messenger said.

“This was as far as I was told to bring you.” He jumped out of the lorry and was gone before Stefania had climbed out of the passenger seat.

A wave of disbelief flooded over her.

She was alone, confused. Where was Stefano? A figure came through the opening of the garage door. A woman.

Chiara Alessandri, Stefano’s ex.

In her hand she carried a heavy hammer, and her face was contorted with rage. Cornered, Stefania backed away in terror. The hammer came down with a dull thud on her head and after that, oblivion.

Five or six miles away, husband Stefano was about to finish off for the day at his office when his phone rang. It was Martina’s schoolteacher.

“No one has come to collect Martina,” she said.

Stefano was nonplussed. “I’ll be right over,” he said. Before he left he called Stefania. No reply. He picked up Martina and took her home. The house, normally bustling with activity, was eerily deserted.

Stefano spent half that night on the phone, calling friends and relatives. No one had seen Stefania. Finally he went to the police.

The next morning the agony

continued. It wasn’t until the beginning of the afternoon that a resident of Cenate Sotto, driving along a narrow road beneath a hill, noticed a blackened bundle between two rows of vines. He stopped, alighted, and walked closer before recoiling in horror.

The blackened bundle was the remains of a carbonised human being.

Only the hands and feet, still only just intact, were evidence that this had once been a living person.

An hour later Stefano was called to the police station. The grim looks on the faces of the officers were enough to tell him that the news was bad.

A senior office handed him a ring,

was asked.

“Chiara Alessandri.”

That same evening Chiara Alessandri was arrested at her home and charged with murder.

What had happened in that half-dark garage where Stefania, terrified, was faced with the woman who was a rival for her husband’s affections, armed

The blackened bundle was the remains of a carbonised human.

Only the hands and feet were evidence that this had once been a living person Stefano and Stefania Crotti in happier times

“Do you recognise this?” he asked.

“It belongs to my wife. Look, it has our names engraved on the inside and the year we were married, 2012. Where did you find it?”

Gently they told him about the carbonised body found in the vineyard – all that was left of Stefania.

They took him into the next room, pulled back a sheet, and asked him to identify her remains. He could just make out the tattoo she had when they were reconciled.

“It’s my wife,” he whispered.

Four hours later a middle-aged man walked into police headquarters. “I’m Angelo Pezzota,” he said. “I’m the man

with a heavy hammer?

A police reconstruction of the crime surmised that a blow on the head rendered Stefania unconscious. She was then bundled into the boot of Chiara’s car and driven to the vineyard. There her body was saturated with petrol and set alight. A post-mortem revealed that she was still alive when she was set on fire.

CCTV pictures at the vineyard showed that before the murder Chiara had reconnoitred the place where Stefania was burned to death.

Satisfied that her love rival was dead, she drove to a service station to clean her car.

Today Chiara Alessandri is in jail, awaiting trial, with the prospect of a long stretch in prison in front of her.

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MOST WANTED MAN “SPOTTED” IN GLASGOW The search goes on for Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès, accused of killing his entire family T LOOKED for a moment as if the Icaught most wanted killer in France had been at last – in Glasgow, of all places.

It happened in November 2019 when the suspect was stopped at Glasgow airport on arrival from Paris. Police in Scotland conferred with French police – and then the trail went cold.

The killer, Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès, 50, has been top of France’s most wanted list for the past nine years after the bodies of his wife Agnès, 49, and her four children, aged 12 to 21, were found buried in concrete under the terrace of the family home in Nantes, together with the remains of their two labrador dogs.

The victims had each been shot twice in the head and cut up.

That was in April 2011, since when Dupont, a man of aristocratic origins who ran an online business, disappeared.

There have inevitably been dozens of “sightings” of Dupont in recent years, but police in Scotland really thought they had him when they were apparently acting on an anonymous tip-off. The suspect was travelling on a passport in the name of Guillaume Joao, but the tipster was convinced he was Dupont.

Although Mr. Joao was much older than Dupont and looked nothing like him, it was thought he had undergone plastic surgery.

French police, alerted from Glasgow, searched an address in Limay, 30 miles north of Paris, where the passport was registered. But there were doubts when a friend of Mr. Joao speaking on French

8 00

Above, fugitive killer Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès. Left, top to bottom, victim Agnès Dupont and the four murdered children, Arthur, Benoit, Anne and Thomas

radio said he was certain he was not Dupont. “Guillaume Joao has a wife in Scotland,” the friend said.

Even so, French police arrived in Glasgow and did a DNA test on Mr. Joao, which proved negative.

The search for the real Dupont looks like it will run forever. After killing his family, he drove the 550 miles from Nantes to Roquebrune-sur-Argens, in the Var department in the south of France.

Security camera footage showed him taking money from a cash machine in the village. Subsequent investigations showed that his business was struggling, he was having doubts about his Catholic faith, and had joined a gun club. He also had a mistress.

In January 2018 two dozen armed police called at a monastery in Roquebrune-sur-Argens, where he was said to have been seen praying.

In all probability Dupont is dead.

I lived for 10 years at Roquebrunesur-Argens. It is a medieval village in the garrigue – harsh, stony countryside where sangliers (wild boar) proliferate. It is the sort of place where a body can disappear without any trace – and if that has happened to Dupont he would not have been the first.

HE FRENCH department of T Seine-Saint-Denis, especially Bobigny, its préfecture or capital, in the north-east of Paris is not usually recommended by the tourist guidebooks as a “must-see” place to visit. It’s a tough area, filled with council blocks and laced with crime. Not to put too fine a point on it, it is a modern slum.

Most of the people who live in Bobigny would prefer to live somewhere else, but of course it’s all about affordability. That was the case with Crystelle and Amel, two single mothers in their 30s who had known each other, and each other’s hardships, since their schooldays.

But in July 2016 some sunbeams were scheduled to shine into the lives of these two tough, hard-working single mums, living on the 11th floor of a 12 -storey tower block a few metres away from each other.

By scrimping and saving, they had put together enough money to take a holiday with their kids to Spain. Ten days on the Costa Brava, with buckets and spades, with endless sand, ice cream and wall-to-wall sunshine!

As the big day for departure drew nearer Crystelle’s three kids and Amel’s little boy, who was seven years old, could hardly contain their excitement.

They couldn’t wait to get to Spain, and they couldn’t wait to get out of Bobigny.

But suddenly their bright future clouded over. It emerged on the afternoon before their departure, when Amel had moved into Crystelle’s flat with her son for the night, so that they could wake each other up for an early start the next day.

“You’re looking a bit down in the dumps,” Amel said to her friend as she completed her final packing. “What’s happened?”

“I don’t think I can go on this holiday,” Crystelle replied glumly.

“Solange had a chat with me last night.”

Solange, 10, was her eldest daughter.

“She told me that several months ago a man living in the block of flats in Rue Lamartine asked her to help him move some boxes from his underground storage space.

“When he took her into the cellar he began fondling her, kissing her and groping her in a sexual manner. When he’d finished he told her to tell no one about it. She’s been keeping all this a secret because she thought he would do something terrible to me if she told me.”

Amel stared back at her friend, horrified. “You must go to the police at once,” she said gently.

“I’ve already been,” Crystelle replied.

“I didn’t have my identity papers with me, so they told me they couldn’t register a complaint until I brought the documents with me. You know, there isn’t the time to go to and fro like that, with the kids to look after. So I’m going to see about this bloke myself.”

So saying, she marched purposefully to the door.

BLOODBATH IN A PARIS SLUM After killing two single mothers who remonstrated with him about his perverted sexual behaviour, the accused man asked the police: “Can I watch the match on television?”

Amel pulled her back, gently, but firmly, “You can’t take him on alone,” she said. “Hang on a moment, I’ll come with you.”

It was 6 p.m., Sunday July 10th, 2016 – a momentous time for France because this was a European Championships year and the national team were due to play Portugal that evening in the final. The two young mums set off grim-faced for the council flat of Anwar Goolfee in one of the depressing council blocks in the Rue Lamartine.

They climbed concrete stairs, daubed with graffiti, and knocked on the door of No. 11.

Goolfee, 50 and married, answered the knock. A neighbour heard a woman’s voice shouting, “What did you do to my little girl, you pervert?”

The neighbour heard a collection of strange noises, then continuous piercing screams. He and several others hurried on to the landing, where Goolfee, armed with long scissors, was chasing the two women around the common ways.

He brought down Crystelle and hacked at her relentlessly until her blood covered the landing.

Amel was trying desperately to summon help. “Call the police!” she screamed. But before anyone could move Goolfee was on her too, slashing at her with the scissors, her blood mingling with her friend’s.

The whole horrifying episode lasted a matter of minutes. At the end of it Crystelle and Amel lay dead on the bloodsoaked landing.

It didn’t take long for the police to arrive – there are always plenty of police around in Seine-Saint-Denis.

They took Goolfee to the commissariat and charged him with the doublemurder, before telling him that he would be locked up for the night to await a court appearance.

“OK,” he said. “Will I be able to watch the match?”

The match had long been consigned to football history when in November

Inset above, tragic mothers Crystelle (left) and Amel. Above, the Rue Lamartine council block where they were murdered. Left, killer Anwar Goolfee. Below right, the door of the killer’s apartment

2019 Anwar Goolfee was brought for trial at Bobigny Assizes.

Commissaire Nicolas Vinet told the court that when he arrived at the murder scene he saw the bloodied body of Crystelle lying by a door. Then paramedics could do nothing for her.

“A little farther away policemen were treating a boy of 12 who was in a state of shock,” the commissaire said.

“He lived in the block. He had just arrived when the victim came through a door screaming, pursued by Goolfee, brandishing his scissors. The boy witnessed the carnage that followed and fainted.”

The court heard that Goolfee had arrived in Paris from his home country of Mauritius. He had initially set his sights on migrating to England, but once he’d arrived in the UK, he left and returned to France.

A relative said of him: “I can’t believe the mother’s complaint about her 10-year-old daughter. He has a sweet disposition, and he does social work.

This just isn’t him at all.”

But according to French police, Goolfee already had a charge of sexually molesting a 12-year-old girl, a

relative, on his French record.

The prosecutor asked that Goolfee should be handed a sentence of 30 years. Instead, the court sentenced him to 20 years. The sentence of life for the four children of the two mums remains unchanged. It might never have happened, of course, if the police had shown Crystelle some compassion when she complained about Goolfee’s revolting behaviour.

Join us next month for further astonishing European cases

9

W!

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Fangs For A Rattling Read

I was hypnotised by the story of Raymond “Rattlesnake James” Lisenba (“Rattlesnakes For An Unwanted Wife,” January) and his failed attempt to kill his wife with two rattlers in a box.

It reminded me of Truman Capote’s brazen true crime follow-up to In Cold Blood (1965) – Handcarved Coffins.

The report forms the greater part of the anthology Music for Chameleons (1980).

With a lyrical mastery that others could only envy, Handcarved Coffins relates the history of a serial killer who dispatched his enemies in bizarre ways – one couple discover a nest of rattlers left in their car with inevitable results.

The fangs of Capote’s enemies soon emerged when it became clear that whilst there was a kernel of truth in each of the murders, they were disconnected.

There was no serial killer – Capote had crossed the line from true crime to crime fiction and he spoke with forked tongue.

Andrew Stephenson, Newhaven

Klaus O.: A Sick Monster

Your European Crime Report “21Dead At The Hands Of Germany’s Lunchtime Poisoner” (December 2019) chilled me to the bone. That there are some people out there who think they are God and have the power of life and death is shocking. Klaus O., a German family man who kept to himself, was one of them. This 52-year-old went to work each day and poisoned his fellow-workmates over a period of time, resulting in a possible 21 deaths.

When police checked his home they

MDviewpoint

Write to MD Viewpoint, PO Box 735, London SE26 5NQ, or email with full postal address to masterdetective@truecrimelibrary.com • £8 will be paid for every letter published!

found a lab in his cellar containing enough poisons to wipe out a multitude. Klaus, when sentenced to life imprisonment, gave no reason as to why he committed this utmost cowardly act.

Like Shipman, he undoubtedly thought that he controlled life and had the power to take it away. Sick evil monsters.

Michael Minihan, Limerick

Hangings At Hameln

I am writing in to say how much I am enjoying the Hangings Of Albert Pierrepoint series, and the latest update, “Hangings By The Hundred,” especially, being also interested in war-time crime.

I wonder if it may be of interest to other readers to know that in the current issue of After the Battle (No. 186), there is a section on the executions at Hameln prison, and it includes a list of all the persons executed.

Stephen Jenkins, Selsey MD will be running a listing of all Albert Pierrepoint’s hangings, including those in Germany and Austria, at the end of the series.

Let’s See MD’s First Case

I read in your September 2019 issue that Master Detective had celebrated its 90th anniversary. I didn’t realise it had been running that long. I thought crime

WIN SERIAL KILLERS: BUTCHERS AND CANNIBALS Some serial killers enjoy the mutilation of their victims’ bodies and sometimes also revert to cannibalism. The simple act of slaying would sicken most people. Yet that is not sufficient a thrill for those who find the excitement begins once their victims are dead. In Serial Killers: Butchers And Cannibals author Nigel Blundell examines the butchers who dismember for pleasure. They are monsters like Andrei Chikatilo, who tortured, murdered, chopped up and sometimes cannibalised as many as 50 victims. Or they can be quite unassuming perverts like Dennis Nilsen, whose London house of horrors so overflowed with body parts that they blocked the drains...

For a chance to win a hardback copy of Serial Killers: Butchers And Cannibals (published by Pen & Sword; ISBN 978-1-84563-132-1; £16.99) by Nigel Blundell, just answer this question: Serial killer Andrei Chikatilo was known as the Butcher of ........? n Rostov n Romford n Ramsgate n Redcar Send your answer, with your name and address, to MD February Competition, PO Box 735, London SE26 5NQ, or email masterdetective@truecrimelibrary.com, using the subject line “MD February comp.” The first correct entry out of the hat after the closing date of February 11th will win. The winner will be announced in the April issue. The winner of the MD December competition, with the correct answer Peasenhall, is Mrs. M. Whitaker of Prestatyn. Well done! Your prize of Britain’s Unsolved Murders by Kevin Turton will be with you soon.

FIND US ONLINE AT

www.truecrimelibrary.com

was a very taboo subject back then. I would be interested in seeing the very first story you ran.

E. White, Isle of Man Watch this space – we’ll dig it out some time soon!

A Different Clarence

What an amazing in-depth contemporary report by Jack D’Arcy (“‘In Cold Blood’ – The Truth About The Clutter Massacre,” December 2019).

I hate to nitpick but unless Truman Capote was wrong, the father of Susan Kidwell (Nancy Clutter’s closest friend) had deserted the family when she was a little girl. It was Clarence Ewalt, father of the other Nancy, who drove the two girls to the Clutter home so that they would accompany some of that family to church. How did those girls, from such sheltered backgrounds, deal with the horrific sight of their slaughtered friend, in later life?

When I saw the photograph of a Zyklon B container featured in the story “Hangings By The Hundred – The Hangings Of Albert Pierrepoint (December 2019) I was reminded of a visit I paid to a tiny Holocaust museum in Paris, tucked away in a corner of “Le Marais,” the Jewish quarter. No one else was there in that quiet, mournful place except a caretaker. I remember two exhibits – a pile of human hair taken from women camp inmates, used for mattress-stuffing, and, placed behind glass, tins of Zyklon B pellets.

No wonder Hermann Göring swallowed poison in preference to being executed.

His executioner would have made the process a long, painful, drawn-out one.

B. Waters, Inverness

Pornography Ruins Lives

Congratulations on your special report “The Perils Of Pornography” (January).

It used two very interesting cases to illustrate some of the many ways an addiction to online or video pornography can ruin lives – or indeed end lives, as happened in these two cases.

Apart from causing addicts to steal from their loved ones, as in the case of Grant Amato, such addiction also seems to alienate and dehumanise the addict, as seen in both cases – Frank Hill had a complete disregard for his wife’s wishes, while Amato saw his closest family members as merely an obstacle preventing him getting what he wanted.

It’s all rather reminiscent of another modern ill that afflicts our society, drug addiction. That’s a point well made in Francesca Morrison’s panel on addiction to cybersex. All in all, a very good report which perhaps ought to turn into an occasional series.

Jeff Heathcote, Tring

11

A

POCKET-SIZE town in rural Iowa, whose only claim to fame had been a historic barn, suddenly found itself in the international media spotlight after police were summoned there to investigate the heart-wrenching death of a tiny baby.

They received the emergency call at lunchtime on August 30th, 2017, from 29-year-old truck driver Zachary Koehn who told the operator: “It’s my little boy, Sterling. He’s not breathing. He was okay this morning, but he’s not moving.

I think something terrible must have happened.”

When postwoman Tina Shatek arrived with her sack of mail 10 minutes later, he was standing quietly outside the small apartment complex in Alta Vista with the baby’s mother, 20-year-old Cheyanne Harris, and their toddler daughter Nala.

Next on the scene, siren blaring and blue light flashing, was paramedic “first responder” Toni Friedrich who asked Tina for directions to apartment seven.

Tina showed her the way and followed Toni into the building. The door to the apartment was open.

MD“Sterling’s Death Was A Tragedy, Not A Crime”

Case recalled

by Mark Davis and Francesca Morrison

12

An overwhelming stench of urine and faeces drew the women to a small bedroom - dark, hot and airless. In one corner, facing a wall, a baby sat in a swing, swathed in layers of sodden clothes. He was bleeding from his mouth and nose, and the coverings were crusty with vomit and body fluids. His tiny fists were clenched, and he was emaciated and blotchy. The smell was so intense both women struggled not to retch.

After confirming that Sterling was dead, they turned to leave, and found Koehn and Harris standing in the bedroom doorway. They appeared blank and expressionless, and Harris said: “He seemed okay when I fed him last night.”

Few other words were spoken, and the couple made no move towards their dead infant.

Overcome with sadness and nausea, Tina threw up shortly after resuming her postal round, and Toni handed over to sheriff’s deputy Reed Palo who had just arrived from the other side of the county.

His examination of the baby revealed new horrors: “Everything was soaked and putrid with slurry,” he said.

“Despite the heat, he was loaded with clothes which were all tucked round him. I can’t describe in words how bad the smell was. It was acrid. Then when I lifted the blanket, gnats flew out, and I could see maggots and larvae on his clothing and skin. There was loose skin clinging to his diaper, and sludge everywhere. He had no flesh. Every rib was visible, and he had no buttocks. Just bone and raw skin.”

Sterling’s autopsy showed he’d died of sepsis, malnutrition and dehydration.

Maggots had bred on the dead skin sloughed off by infection, and from their various stages of development forensic entomologists could prove that he had not been moved from his swing, had a nappy change, or a bath, for 10-14 days. He weighed less than seven pounds and measured 14 inches – smaller and lighter than most newborns in the US, yet he was four months old.

The hospital reported that Sterling’s umbilical cord tested positive for methamphetamine, and voiced concerns about his welfare

Harris and Koehn had moved into the Alta Vista apartment in May 2017 shortly after he was born. Although the apartment was untidy, the fridge was well stocked, Nala had plenty of toys, DVDs and clothes, and there were stocks of nappies, wipes and baby milk in cupboards. The dog also seemed well catered for.

Temperatures in the living-room and master bedroom were around 77 degrees F, but Sterling’s room had no fan and they were in the mid-80s. A thick quilt covered the only window, making the room humid and oppressive.

It was stacked with spare furniture, boxes, a mattress, clothes, a car seat, and blankets. With extraordinary futility, Harris had laid scented candles under the baby’s soaking, putrid swing.

Twenty-month-old Nala slept in a playpen in her parents’ bedroom and was described as “cute” and “well cared for” by everyone involved in the case. Friends and neighbours knew the couple had a daughter, and Harris often

How Cou Mother Zachary Koehn and Cheyanne Harris. The couple’s relationship was at best on-off and described by Koehn as “wishy washy”

ion and d of sepsis, malnutrit Baby Sterling. He die up to for ing sw his ing lef t in nne dehydration, after be eya Ch r her and his mothe l two weeks by his fat tria r he g rin du urt in co Harris, pictured right

uld A Do This? cap

“It’s my little boy, Sterling. He’s not breathing.

He was okay this morning, but he’s not moving.

I think something terrible must have happened” posted pictures of her on social media.

But very few people seemed to know Sterling even existed.

He’d been born two weeks early and unexpectedly at a friend’s house. Harris thought her pains were constipation, but then realised the baby was coming and climbed into the bath to have a water birth. Koehn was with her and rang for emergency help, but there were complications. She haemorrhaged, and Sterling got water in his lungs, which left him with mild respiratory problems.

The hospital reported that Sterling’s umbilical cord tested positive for methamphetamine, and voiced concerns about his welfare. But these were never passed on to child protection services.

Harris’s mother, Brandi Harris, occasionally babysat Nala and Sterling, and although she later commented that

he was rather skinny and colicky, she said he seemed healthy enough and ate well. The last time she’d looked after him was on August 5th – three weeks before his death – when Harris and Koehn spent the day at a local town fair.

“He was beginning to smile,” she said.

From the start, Koehn made it clear that her role in their relationship was to look after him, the house, the children, and the dog

Spending time together was unusual for Koehn and Harris. He worked long hours hauling truckloads of chickens from Wisconsin to Iowa, and rarely got home till late at night. He was heavily in debt and had taken on extra shifts to try and pay some of it off. When he wasn’t working, he was often catching up on sleep or playing with Nala.

Koehn had grown up in a large family of adopted siblings and attended a Mennonite school until he was expelled at 14 for smoking and drinking. He got a job, moved in with a co-worker, and started using meth – an addiction that would last another 15 years.

He always claimed the drug helped him stay awake during long hours on the road, but by 2017 he was on a rehab programme that may have reduced his intake, but certainly failed to stop it.

13

MURDER MONTH February oney-lender murdered...

M Oliver Preston was an elderly money-lender who operated from an office at 150 Station Buildings, Keighley, Yorkshire. On July 25th, 1930, he was found in his office battered about the head. His left arm and leg were paralysed. He died from his injuries at 1.45 a.m. on July 28th, 1930.

On July 24th, he had cashed a cheque for £80 at the Yorkshire Penny Bank Limited and taken the money in £1 notes.

One of his regular customers was a trolleybus driver called Frederick Gill.

A man matching Gill’s description had been seen leaving the office around the time of the murder – there was blood on his clothes. Gill had also recently been in debt but was seen splashing the cash after the killing.

Gill had owed the money-lender £3 12s and was also in arrears with his rent which came to 9s 6d a week, and his girlfriend Frederick Gill (left) wanted a holiday. For and his victim driving his trolleybus Oliver Preston between 8 a.m. and 5.30 p.m. each day, Gill was paid 27s 6d a week.

On the day of the murder, Gill arrived home at 1 Providence Place, Keighley, which he shared with his brother and grandmother, at around 6.15 p.m. After a quick wash and a cup of tea, he was out of the door by 6.30. Ten minutes later, he was at his girlfriend’s.

At 7.15 they went out into town. They went to a number of shops, buying something in each one. On the way back, they stopped off at the railway station and bought tickets for Whitehaven. They bumped into the girlfriend’s sister and her friend and both women gave Gill £1 for the tickets. He gave them a shilling change.

They were back home at 8.30 p.m., looked through their purchases and ate their tea. At 9.20 they went to the fairground at Stockbridge where they stayed until 10.30 and got home about 11p.m. Gill stayed with his girlfriend for a while before returning home at 12.30 a.m. when he gave his grandmother £5 in £1 notes towards the rent arrears.

Gill, his girlfriend and five friends went to Scilly Bank, Whitehaven, and while he was there he was arrested. The police were dissatisfied with Gill’s explanation for the money he appeared to have accumulated and he was charged with murder.

He appeared at Leeds Assizes on December 10th before Mr. Justice Talbot. After a four-day trial, Gill was found guilty of murder and was hanged by Tom Pierrepoint on February 4th, 1931, at Leeds Prison.

14

Cheyanne Harris in court. Her life fell deeper into chaos after she became torn between conflicting needs, loyalties and responsibilities

His friend and supplier Jordan Clark was a frequent visitor at the Alta Vista apartment, selling meth to both Koehn and Harris. He remembers Nala as a lively tot who wore pretty dresses, but he had no idea the couple had another child as he never saw Sterling.

Koehn and Harris had moved several times before renting the Alta Vista apartment. A brief interlude with Brandi Harris shortly after Sterling’s birth was cut short when Brandi’s boyfriend refused to have Koehn in the house.

The couple’s relationship was at best on-off, and Koehn later described it as “wishy washy.” He was divorced and already had a seven-year-old daughter he rarely saw.

Cheyanne Harris was similarly troubled, and her growing-up had been marked by long periods of self-harming and drug-taking. She’d been prescribed medication for post-natal depression after Nala’s birth, but stopped taking it after a week or so because she said it made her feel sick. Neither she nor Koehn had any criminal record.

From the start, Koehn made it clear that her role in their relationship was to look after him, the house, the children, and the dog. Although he’d lapsed years ago, he reminded her that the Mennonite faith emphasises the importance of the man earning a living while the woman is caregiver. Torn between conflicting needs, loyalties and responsibilities, Cheyanne Harris fell ever deeper into a chaos that would cost Sterling weeks of torture – and his life.

Many people in the community wondered why it took so long to charge them with first-degree murder and child

endangerment, but by mid-October they were arrested and remained in custody until their trials two months later. The district attorney’s office said it had taken many weeks to carry out the complex medical, forensic and social aspects of the investigation.

In the meantime, the couple rarely behaved like grieving parents. Social worker Sheila Schroeder would later testify that Koehn laughed and quipped throughout an interview with her two days after Sterling died. He and

“Why were you, Cheyanne and Nala all healthy and well-fed while Sterling was left to literally rot in a sweltering room?”

Harris both posted upbeat photos and messages on Facebook about dinners out, new tattoos, and shopping trips for fashionable clothes. One of his posts read: “I’m enjoying the clean life without meth.”

As well as romantic pictures of her and Koehn, and photos of the dog, Harris signed herself “full time mom” and “mommy forever.” She also tried to elicit sympathy by writing: “They took our two-year-old the night Sterling died, and I never got to say goodbye. Last time she saw me, I was screaming and bawling my eyes out.” But there was

no sign that Harris was depressed or reaching out for help.

Later evidence showed that both Harris and Koehn had been taking meth regularly while Sterling was alive, though Koehn alleged he quit two weeks before his son died and went to Minnesota to trade leftover meth for baby supplies.

At his trial in November, Koehn pleaded not guilty and told jurors repeatedly that he’d put his “trust in the wrong person” by expecting Harris to take care of their son while he was away.

He also said that despite noticing a foul stench in Sterling’s bedroom two days before he died, he had no idea the smell was coming from his son.

“I removed a bag of dirty diapers and thought the remaining smell was a lingering odour from that,” he said. “I always made it clear to Cheyanne that I could never change diapers because the smell of faeces makes me feel sick.”

Koehn said Sterling was nearly always asleep when he got home from work

Cheyanne Harris (centre) with her defence team who argued that she had been suffering from severe post-natal depression

Arrest photos of Cheyanne Harris (left) and Zachary Koehn. They remained in custody until their trials for Sterling’s murder two months later

and Cheyanne told him not to disturb him because he had colic. He also claimed that coming off meth, which is a stimulant, had made him need extra sleep himself.

Evidence from the size of the maggots found on Sterling’s skin and clothes showed that no one had fed him, given him a drink, or picked him up and held him for 10-14 days. Koehn told the court that the light was off in the room and a quilt hung at the window because the baby seemed easily dazzled.

Although Koehn had doubted whether Sterling was his child, a DNA test later proved that he was. But his sense of disconnection and detachment from the baby was highlighted by the original 911 call he made when he said: “My girlfriend went to see the son.”

Most of his defence rested on the claim that Cheyanne had been suffering from severe post-natal depression which she’d kept hidden from him. Attorney Steven Drahozal said Koehn had never noticed any sign that she was ill, and that he found it difficult to cope with her demands for meth as she became angry if he refused.

“Sterling’s death was a tragedy, not a crime,” he said.

But prosecutor Denise Timmins hammered again and again that each time Koehn came home from work and did nothing to help his son, he engaged in a separate act of neglect.

“Why were you, Cheyanne and Nala all healthy and well-fed while Sterling was left to literally rot in a sweltering room?” she asked. “Would you agree you took better care of your dog than

your son? How long do you think Sterling cried for? You could hear every sound in that tiny apartment, but you chose to do nothing.”

Harris’s trial two months later also hinged on whether post-natal depression had prevented her from taking care of Sterling. Nichole Watts, defending, said: “The monster in this case is mental health, not Cheyanne Harris.”

But psychiatrist Dr. James Dennert testified: “I found nothing in my interviews with Cheyanne to show that she was so severely impaired she could, without knowing it, watch her infant son starve to death. Depression would have had a wider impact on her life and not been isolated to her interactions with Sterling. She was able to care well for Nala, herself and the family home.”

Psychologist Dr. Michael O’Hara conceded that Harris had told him she didn’t want to change Sterling’s nappies, that she was tired of hearing him cry, and that Nala became upset when she paid attention to the new baby. She blamed Sterling for “messing up” her relationship with Koehn.

She wept, however, when the prosecution showed jurors dozens of photographs of Sterling taken after his death, and the judge had to call a short recess.

Security in court was tight as jurors and Brandi Harris received a number of death threats from people determined to see the couple punished. A surge of child deaths in Iowa – 11 had died in 2016 from suspected abuse – had raised the temperature of public feeling, and a sense of justice done prevailed when Koehn and Harris were sentenced to life without parole. But both of them have already appealed, leaving the responsibility for little Sterling’s squalid death still uncertain.

15

THE HANGINGS OF ALBERT PIERREPOINT

BOMB-SITE

BY A SCR In the post-war years Britain’s top executioner had travelled to Germany and Austria to execute scores of war criminals.

But there were plenty of home-grown killers who required his services too

PART NINE

“I

T LOOKS like your parks have been turned into bedrooms with people lying all over the place,” said a famous American evangelist during a visit to London in the mid-1950s.

But some people were doing more than just “sprawling.” In Hyde Park there were reports of sexual acts taking place behind bushes in broad daylight.

Vice in London was no longer an

Case recalled by

MDHostel Ticket Was A Crucial Clue

Matthew Spicer

16

“underground” activity. Girls, some as young as 14, openly touted for business.

French and Belgian women had come to London as a result of the attempted suppression of prostitution in their own countries, and during the Parliamentary debate which led to the Street Offences Act (1956) it was stated that between 3,000 and 6,000 prostitutes were believed to be working in London’s West End. A few of them made small fortunes, but the majority were paid in shillings rather than pounds and had been forced into prostitution through their circumstances. One such was 28-year-old Mrs. Rose Elizabeth Fairhurst.

Her “patch” was not the lucrative West End, where many new girls had been forced out by their rivals’ pimps.

Rose’s territory was the bomb-sites of Southwark and Walworth where she tried to scratch a living among the rubble.

Her marriage had failed and she came to London seeking employment as a receptionist or typist. Her job-hunting was as unsuccessful as her marriage, so she answered a newspaper advertisement for female models. She

The naked body of strangled prostitute Rose Fairhurst as it was discovered by rag and bone men searching a London bomb-site

still had a good figure and found work modelling underwear. She enjoyed showing off her body, and in addition to the underwear modelling she did some nude and erotic posing.

In the evenings she worked in a Southwark pub, remembering the advice of friendly photographers.

“Whatever you do,” they’d told her, “don’t go on the game.” So whenever she was propositioned, she politely refused.

But one month she couldn’t pay her rent and she was obliged to say “yes.” She took the man back to her

room. The next month she entertained another five men. Then her landlord found out and she was evicted.

Her next home was a women’s hostel in Southwark where she had to live by the rules. After work she had to be back in the hostel by 9.30 and in bed an hour later.

Rose wanted more freedom and after

KILLER CAUGHT AP OF PAPER it over as quickly as possible. She wouldn’t remove any more clothing.

Clarke told her to lie on the mattress and pull down her knickers. Her response, he was later to claim, was to slap his face... wo rag-and-bone men T began scouring the bombed buildings the next morning. In one of them they were startled to find a woman’s body. The police were called and an officer went to the nearby women’s hostel where the dead woman’s identity was established. She was Rose Elizabeth Fairhurst.

She had been found almost naked, her bra and knickers ripped to pieces, her stockings shredded,

The murder scene in Loman Street. Inset, the victim’s face in death. Right, 1950s underwear models – Rose had also done nude and erotic modelling

a while at the hostel she was allowed to spend the odd night away.

Gradually she drifted back to prostitution, going to her clients’ rooms or having sex on the local bombed sites.

London was still busy rebuilding, with no shortage of work for builders’ labourers. Thirty-two-year-old Sidney Joseph Clarke was one of them.

In February 1955 he was working in Southwark and lodging at a London County Council hostel across the river from Southwark, in Kemble Street in the Aldwych.

On Febuary 9th he left his room at 1.30 p.m. for a drink, making for the Elephant and Castle south of the river. He was nearing the pub when a woman’s voice called, “Hello, darling!

Can you afford it?”

Clarke asked her price.

“Three shillings for a quick relief, ten

for the business,” she replied.

But first, said Rose Fairhurst, she wanted a drink.

Eager for sex, Clarke was happy to oblige, swiftly downing a pint of bitter and urging Rose to be quick with her short. She wanted to go back to his room, but he said that was out of the question, so she told him she knew a suitable bombed site in Loman Street.

The road still had a few ruined shells of houses. The one Rose selected was secluded from view and Clarke was pleased to see it contained a mattress.

Before they entered Rose asked for her money and he handed over his 10 shillings for straight sex. Embracing her, Clarke unbuttoned her blouse, pulled down her bra and tried to kiss her breasts. No, said Rose, she wanted

her frock and vest torn from top to bottom. Blood and bruises covered her face and torso and a post-mortem examination found that she had been strangled.

As Rose had been a prostitute the police feared her killer might never be caught. They recovered forensic evidence from the scene, but to whom could they match it?

Every item of rubbish, every cigarette packet on the bomb-site had been carefully collected. As the litter was

17

MURDER MONTH February

F

ireman killed for no reason...

On the evening of February 6th, 1891, a red light was placed near the tiny station of Alila, California. When he saw it the driver of a Southern Pacific passenger train travelling from San Francisco to Los Angeles stopped his train.

As soon as the locomotive had drawn to a halt, it was approached by two masked men firing shots into the air.

They boarded the train and dragged the fireman, George Radliff, out of the locomotive car. Pointing a gun at him, they ordered him to use his pickaxe to break open the door to the express car where large amounts of money were kept in a safe.

Then, although Radliff was no danger to them, one of the masked men allegedly shot the fireman in the head, killing him instantly. They then threw his body onto the ground by the tracks.

The expressman, who knew Law enforcement the safe combination and had a key, took the opportunity officers hold up the to leave the train and hid bodies of in some nearby greenery.

Bob and Grat Without the combination and the key, the bandits could not Emmett open the safe. Instead, they robbed the passengers of their valuables and made off into the darkness.

The robbery was almost certainly perpetrated by the Dalton Brothers – Bob and Emmett. Despite some people claiming he was nowhere near Alila on the night of the robbery, another brother, Grat Dalton, was also identified as one of the train robbers.

Grat strongly rejected all allegations that he’d had anything to do with the Southern Pacific holdup. He was found guilty of murder and sentenced to 20 years in jail. However, he was never to serve his time as on September 20th, 1891, Grat and two other men broke out of jail.

On October 5th, 1892, Grat and the brothers decided to rob Coffeyville, Kansas. They rode into town at 9 a.m. and, once there, donned disguises.

Nevertheless they were immediately recognised and, as they entered the bank they intended to rob, the townsfolk began gathering to take them down.

The locals began firing on the bandits. Grat was shot in the throat and Bob was hit as he and Emmett tried to get on their horses. Bob then staggered to where Grat had died and was shot down.

Emmett was already making good his escape when he realised Bob was not with him and turned his horse around. Making his way to the dying Bob, Emmett Dalton was captured and jailed for life.

18

A Met Police document listing Clarke’s previous convictions

sifted, a small scrap of paper was examined more closely. It bore the words “Bruce House Hostel, cubicle 281.”

At the hostel detectives learned that the occupant of cubicle 281 was Sidney Joseph Clarke. He had booked-in on February 4th.

Scotland Yard officers watched the hostel and at 7 p.m. that day Clarke returned.

Arrested on suspicion of murder, he at first denied any involvement in the death of Rose Fairhurst. So he was asked to produce his hostel ticket.

Fumbling in his pockets, he said he must have lost it. The detectives then produced it, telling him where they had found it. The game was up and Sidney Clarke confessed.

“I wanted to lie on an old mattress, but she would not and she smacked me across the chops. I lost my temper and went mad or something” He said, “I knew her as Blondie. I wanted to lie on an old mattress which was there, but she would not and she smacked me across the chops. I lost my temper and went mad or something.

“This sort of thing has happened to me before. I felt it coming on and I tried to fight it, but it has been getting worse.

“I remember when I left Blondie on the bombed site I took my ten shillings back. It was still in her hand. I put it in my top jacket pocket where I kept my bed ticket.

“I feel my brain is going. The pains over my eyes come and go. They are getting worse and I can’t control myself when they come on.”

To the detectives this was a familiar story. Confronted by overwhelming

evidence, a suspect confesses and claims he is mad.

Charged with Rose Fairhurst’s murder, Sidney Clarke pleaded not guilty on March 23rd when he appeared at the Old Bailey.

For the prosecution, Mr. Christmas Humphreys QC said that Clarke’s bed ticket had been almost as good as a visiting card. Furthermore, a witness had seen him at the Elephant and Castle with the victim. The couple had later been observed in Blackfriars Road, and earth found on Clarke’s shoes matched that at the bomb-site.

For the defence, Mr. Geoffrey Roberts QC sought a verdict of guilty but insane. Clarke was not responsible for his actions, the defence counsel claimed.

The court then heard from Dr. J.C.M. Matheson, the principal medical officer at Brixton Prison.

He said he had interviewed Clarke on three occasions and an EEG (electroencephalogram) examination of his brain had been carried out at the Maudsley Hospital. This had found “no abnormal potentials” and no sign of epilepsy. In his opinion, Dr. Matheson concluded, the prisoner was perfectly sane.

Rejecting Clarke’s claims of madness, the jury convicted him of Rose Fairhurst’s murder and he was sentenced to death.

In the condemned cell at Wandsworth Prison he was allowed 10 cigarettes and a bottle of beer each day. He declined to appeal, and he was hanged at the prison on Thursday, April 14th, 1955, by Albert Pierrepoint and Les Stewart.

It had been revealed that Sidney Joseph Clarke had three previous convictions for assaults on women.

But for that tell-tale hostel ticket he would doubtless have escaped justice. Its discovery at the crime scene probably saved other women from his attacks, and perhaps from sharing the same fate as Rose Fairhurst.

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DEAD MAN’S T

MDShoeprints A Clue To Solving Murder Mystery

HE OLD MAN’S body lay face-down in the red dirt of a dry gully. His hat and shoes were missing, his trouser pockets had been turned inside out. He had been shot in the back of the neck with a small-calibre rifle.

John Daw, veteran Navajo policeman, stared at the shoeprints in the loose soil around the corpse. Daw was 86 years old, but still one of the best Navajo trackers in Arizona.

He followed the trail down the gully where the body had been dragged and back onto the road where a pool of baked blood showed the spot where the shooting occurred.

He climbed down into the gully again, stopped under a juniper tree and looked up to where the old man’s hat and “bindle” roll – a khaki sleeping-bag wrapped round a few meagre cooking

20

“It isn’t like a Navajo to take a dead man’s shoes,” the tracker said. “They would be useless to him.

A Navajo would never wear them. But I will recognise their marks if I ever see them again” utensils – were lodged in a forked branch.

Daw found a few bronze-coloured bits of metal in the sleeping-bag pocket, along with a book of paper matches from Ely, Nevada, and a small Psalm book belonging to “D. E. Pugh from nowhere.”

A few days before the murder I received a report about a robbery at the Nocki Dance – an all-night Navajo tribal ceremony – where a .22-calibre bolt-action rifle had been stolen. My hunch was that in some way this missing rifle was connected to the killing. But the autopsy seemed to prove me wrong. Doctors placed the time of death at 5 p.m. on November 22nd, 1937, nearly two days before the rifle had been stolen at Tuba City 20 miles away across the desert.

After a minute examination of the crime scene, Daw climbed out of the gully and turned his attention to the Tonalea/Kaibetoh road. This “road” crosses the desert and is a mere thread of a trail, just passable for cars.

Above, the “bad man” of the reservation whose temper left a trail of terror behind him.

Although many people had knowledge of his ruthless deeds none shared their information with the police until the wife of Eli Shorty (left) was persuaded to talk...

Because Navajo have a profound and intuitive understanding of the landscape of their ancient homeland, trackers like Daw are able to build up a complex and often multi-layered picture of events from mere marks and signs on the ground. Using skills refined over a lifetime, he concluded there had been six cars and three horses over the road on the afternoon of the murder.

It is difficult to read the hard red clay for signs, but Daw and I managed to retrace the dead man’s tracks east out

of the hills and into the desert where his footprints became clearly defined in the soft sand and soil. He had been wearing riding shoes.

There was no record of anyone by the name of D. E. Pugh and the victim was eventually buried at Flagstaff on the other side of the reservation. For a while, we speculated that the yellow shards found in his sleeping-bag meant he was yet another prospector trying his luck in a disused mine. But as the case progressed it seemed more likely he was simply the victim of a callous

SHOES

robbery.

From the outset I believed that the solution to the mystery lay somewhere along that hot winding road through the desert, so Daw and I questioned Native Americans living near it and anyone who had been in the area at the time of the killing.

While we were busy with this, FBI Special Officer Aldrich from the US Indian Service – who spoke Navajo fluently – traced Pugh’s final journey from the time he left Highway 89 at the junction of the Tuba City road to the

Case recalled by Tillman Hadley, former chief of Navajo Police, as told to Maurice Kildareson

Bearing in mind the state of the marks in the sand and clay, it was extraordinary that the tracker could narrow down the suspect list to just three people spot where he died.

Several witnesses reported seeing him near a trading post 21 miles north of Highway 89, then around nightfall

at Tuba City. He was spotted again next morning 25 miles further north near the Tonalea trading post, and twice more during the afternoon of November 22nd, the day of his death.

Almost at once we got a lead on the owners of several cars which had been on the road near the murder scene. One was a van driven by a Navajo called Billy Fat Goat.

For some reason, the van had been repainted a few hours after the discovery of the crime, so Aldrich took Billy and his companion Dickson Begay into custody.

However, after extensive questioning, they were released several days later.

Meanwhile, Daw had been back to scrutinise the crime scene again. But he often shook his head in puzzlement.

“It isn’t like a Navajo to take a dead man’s shoes,” he said. “They would be useless to him. A Navajo would never wear them. But I will recognise their marks if I ever see them again, and also the marks of the shoes worn by the man who dragged the body into the gully.”

Once he knew the time of Pugh’s death, Daw was able to deduce exactly where he had been standing when a car, coming from Kaibetoh trading post, passed him. Two or three minutes later, a truck from Kaibetoh also drove past, followed by a man on a horse.

Bearing in mind the smudge of other tracks on the road, it was extraordinary that Daw could narrow down the suspect list to three. As it turned out, the car had been occupied by a nurse on her way to an emergency in the desert, so she and her driver were

Top, a touchedup mortuary photo of the victim. His identity, other than a name found in a Psalm book, remained a mystery. The arrow points to the spot in the dry gully where his body was found

21

quickly dropped from our inquiries.

The driver of the truck proved to be a schoolboy truanting from another state and he too was quickly eliminated from our list of suspects.

The search now focused on the unknown rider. But despite endless questioning of Navajo in the area, we received little to go on and our work through the rest of November and into December was slow and plodding.

One December afternoon, John Daw and I stopped at the Tonalea trading post, 17 miles from where Pugh’s body had been found. As we were leaving, Daw froze. He was staring at a patch of windblown sand near the store’s concrete steps.

“There’s the track of the dead man’s riding shoes!” he whispered.

We went back inside where a dozen or so Native Americans were bartering and gossiping. Within minutes we had checked that none of them were wearing Pugh’s shoes and taken the names of more than 100 Navajo who had been trading there over the last two days.

Elated by our discovery that the killer

Two witnesses remembered seeing a Native American riding a piebald stallion up the road towards the murder scene on the day of the killing was actually wearing the dead man’s shoes, we decided to question everyone who could have made the prints. As we drove away from Tonalea, Daw repeated: “No Navajo would wear a dead man’s shoes.”

This had bothered me too, and I began to wonder whether one of the few white men scattered over the reservation could be implicated.

Then we got our second break. Two witnesses remembered seeing a Native American riding a piebald stallion up the road towards the murder scene on November 22nd, the day of the killing.

Neither had been close enough to identify him, but they showed us where they had seen him.

Daw said immediately that the horse tracks were the same as those he had found at the gully. But as we tried to backtrack, we found that the hoof prints had been obliterated by a large flock of sheep.

Our hopes of a fast arrest were quickly dashed, so we decided to concentrate on finding the piebald stallion – not a quick task amid the several thousand horses that roamed this area of the reservation. Dozens fitted the description.

Undaunted, Daw and I tracked down all their owners only to discover they had neither ridden nor loaned them to anyone on the days in question. We decided our killer must have stolen the horse or ridden it without the owner’s knowledge and switched our inquiries

22

to families who lived in the Navajo log huts called hogans. At last, Daw found the track of the dead man’s shoes near one of them.

“But surely these aren’t the same as the ones we found at the trading post?”

I said.

Daw smiled. “The man who wears them has cut out the centre of the rubber heel and replaced it with something else,” he said.

We followed the shoeprints back to the hogan and asked whether anyone had passed by recently who might have made them.

“Only my husband who just went over there,” said a squaw, pointing to a sandhill nearby.

We followed the track she had indicated, but her husband had saddled a horse and ridden off.

While I interviewed the women and children, Daw searched inside the hogan where Navajo families keep all their possessions. He found no trace of the dead man’s shoes, but we both suspected the man who lived there.

We had known him a long time. He had served a prison sentence for grand larceny and it was not long after his release that he stole a saddle and saddle blanket from a trading post. Howard Balli Begay was known among Native Americans as a “bad man.” But we still had insufficient evidence to secure a conviction.

“He’s a half-breed Piute,” said Daw as we left the hogan. “They’ll wear the shoes of the dead.”

In the weeks that followed we were unable to prove that the Piute owned or had owned a piebald stallion or a .22- calibre rifle. But he had been seen at the Nocki Dance close to the hogan from where the rifle had been stolen and he had arrived at Tuba City on a truck from Tonalea the night after Pugh’s murder.

While he could have made it from the crime scene to Tonalea in time to catch a ride to Tuba City, it was obvious to me that he could not have used the missing rifle to commit the murder. My hunch, it seemed, had misfired.

A few days later, one of John Daw’s sons overheard a conversation which proved that Begay had indeed owned a piebald in November, but the horse was now dead. It had died – or been killed, as we suspected – a few days after the discovery of Pugh’s body.

But we still had too little evidence and decided to continue working on the case until we had conclusive proof.

“We wait,” said Daw in his broken English. “Pretty soon now he make mistake. Then I catch…”

But Begay was cunning and despite Daw’s constant surveillance several months passed before we were able to arrest him, and then it was for a different offence.

S

heep shearing is a busy time on the reservation and John Daw was on duty around the corrals when

Eli Shorty’s wife approached him at Tonalea. She was sobbing hysterically.

“Howard Balli Begay beat me!” she cried. “I want him taken away. He’s a very bad man.”

“Why did he beat you?” asked Daw, looking at the welts and bruises on the woman’s face.

“He hit me with a rope on the head and shoulders in an argument over sheep,” she said. “I was in the corral shearing when he appeared and said the sheep were his. I told him he was mistaken and he started whipping me.

“And that isn’t all,” she continued.

“He’s the man you want. You talk to his wives. They know all about it.”

Within minutes Daw had telephoned me at headquarters.

“We get him now,” he said when I arrived. “We put him in jail and that means he can do no harm to the people

than ever and kept cocking their heads as if they could hear Begay returning home.

“Was this the gun Begay used to kill the white man?” asked Daw. The question shocked the women into admitting all they knew. They had bottled up the terrible secret for far too long and were relieved to let it all out.

“This is the rifle Begay stole at Tuba City,” said Ruth. “He borrowed the one which killed the white man and then loaned it on to Dirty Whiskers.”

None of them was certain Begay had killed the horse, but they agreed it had died under peculiar circumstances far from the hogan. They also knew about the shoes and had seen him alter the heels when he heard a rumour that Daw had recognised the tracks.

On the night of the murder Begay had returned to the hogan and boasted to his wives about killing Pugh on the Kaibetoh road. He gave three dollars

Left, Ruth, wife of Eli Shorty. She had the misfortune to get in a violent argument with the killer.

Beaten and bruised, she hurried to John Daw (right) and told him a strange tale. He, in turn, notified Tillman Hadley (below), chief of the Navajo Police and co-author of our story

Living under the threat of death, fear sealed the lips of the suspect’s two wives, Ruth and Ellen (above)

who know, so they will talk.”

We had suspected for a long time that fear of Begay had silenced witnesses, but with him in jail we could concentrate on digging up the evidence against him.

We drove eight or nine miles out of Tonalea to Begay’s hogan and saw him with a flock of sheep as we approached round a bend in the road. Although the ground was full of holes and hummocks, it was just about passable for a car so we drove straight towards him.

He knew Eli Shorty’s wife had made a complaint against him and when we were still some distance away he dashed back through the sheep and up onto a knoll where his horse was tethered, leaped into the saddle and galloped off.

The ground was too bumpy and potholed for us to pursue him in the car, but we knew he would not leave

the reservation and could be picked up later. With Begay out of the way, our priority was to question his two wives, Ruth and Ellen, so we collected Eli Shorty and his wife and assembled all four in Begay’s hogan.

They were clearly very uncomfortable and frightened. Scared looks passed between them and questions brought shakes of the head or “don’t knows.”

“Stay here and keep asking them things,” Daw whispered to me. “I’ve got a hunch about the sand hill where we found those prints a few weeks ago and I’m going to search it.”

He returned an hour later carrying a bolt-action .22 rifle and a pair of riding shoes with cut-down heels.

“They were buried in the sand,” said Daw. The women looked more frightened

to each wife, saddled a fresh horse and galloped off to Tonalea where he managed to pick up a truck ride to the Nocki Dance at Tuba City 25 miles away. The women said he had 10 dollars in his pocket taken from the dead man. They were certain he would kill them for talking.

“Don’t worry,” said Daw, “I go catch Begay now.”

Minutes later he had walked the short distance to a neighbouring hogan and borrowed a horse while I took Ruth and Ellen to Tuba City to take down their statements.

Daw followed Begay’s tracks diligently and patiently and saw they were heading towards the mysterious Navajo heartland of Black Mountain. He lived between Tonalea and the mountain so he stopped to switch to one of his own horses before resuming the hunt. When

23

darkness fell, he called at a friend’s hogan close to Begay’s trail. But the Piute seemed to have melted into the moonlight. No one had seen him.

A

round midnight, after food, talk and a pipe, Daw rolled himself into his blanket and fell asleep thinking about his state-wide reputation as a hunter who never returned from a hunt without his man.

In a cave on the other side of the hill Begay was also thinking about Daw’s reputation. He knew the policeman was after him – he had seen him from a promontory on the mountain – and that nothing would stop him. He reasoned that Daw wanted him only for beating Mrs. Eli Shorty and that 90 days in jail would be the most he would get for the offence. So he decided to give himself up.

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crime Detective Monthly

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Never Too Old To Kill MAJOR BRITISH MURDER CASES

FIEND WAS FREED TO KILL SARAH , 8

McNeil Island Penitentiary, Washington State, in the 1930s

At three in the morning a sound woke Daw. He raised his head to listen and heard a horse approaching. Still lying down, he continued to listen

GUILLOTINED! The Crime That Put Germaine’s Head On The Block

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An East End Copper – On The Trail Of London’s Original Cat Burglar On sale at W.H. Smith and all good newsagents from January 23rd or see the offer on page 34 24

until the rider arrived, dismounted, and shouted through the hogan’s open door.

In the darkness of the interior he got silently to his feet and reached for his gun. The first thing Begay knew was when Daw leapt forward and pushed him into the brighter moonlight to frisk him for weapons.

“We ride to headquarters now,” said Daw quietly.

They made the 70-mile journey in record time and arrived at 11 a.m. next morning. Begay looked startled when we began questioning him about Pugh’s murder and retreated into

“Yes, I killed the white man.

I made signs that I was going to kill him. He turned to go and when he did I raised the rifle and shot him in the back of the neck” obstinate silence, so we left him in a cell to cool his heels for a while.

Next time we brought him out we showed him a glimpse of Ruth, Ellen and Eli Shorty and his wife. Once he knew they had talked he made a full confession.

“Yes, I killed the white man. I saw him on November 21st and followed him along the road all next day. About sundown he stopped at the red hill cedars and when I heard a car coming I rode behind a tree. When it was gone I went after the old man. He stopped still and turned round to look at me. I made signs that I was going to kill him.

He picked up a rock and motioned for me to go away. I made more signs, and he showed with his hands that if I killed him I would be hanged. He turned to go and when he did I raised the rifle from the saddle and shot him in the back of the neck. I thought he would be carrying plenty of money. But he only had seventeen dollars.”

Howard Balli Begay was convicted of first-degree murder on August 16th, 1938, at Prescott, Arizona, and served a life sentence on McNeil Island, Washington. The man who wore a dead man’s shoes never walked free again.

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MDforum MD“The Lock Gave Way And The Lid Was Raised. A Man In Striped Overalls Fainted...”

Your Questions, Answers & Updates

26

MD Forum, PO Box 735, London SE26 5NQ masterdetective@truecrimelibrary.com Alice Wharam from Liverpool wrote to ask: “I read the short Murder Month account of the life and crimes of ‘Velvet Tigress’ Winnie Ruth Judd in your December issue. Has this case ever been covered in full by MD? If not I’d love to read the full story!”

Now seems the perfect time to review the facts. Here’s a full case report written by A.W. Moss

I

T USED TO be said that, for sheer variety, Los Angeles took some beating in the way its citizens despatched and disposed of each other.

They used hammers, home-made bombs, ice-picks and rattlesnakes. They buried their victims in chicken yards, cisterns and basements. They even freighted them by rail, which was the transport favoured by a copper-haired lady named Winnie Ruth Judd.

The trunks which contained the corpses of two women who had shared a bungalow with Winnie Ruth Judd

Her story began one day in 1931 when Arthur V. Anderson, a baggage-man at the South Pacific station in Los Angeles, became curious about a couple of trunks in the baggage-room. The trunks had arrived a while before from Phoenix, Arizona, and it was evident from the aroma rising from them that something was not well inside.

Anderson wasn’t looking for murder

evidence. He was looking for illegal shipments of venison into the state.

Blood dripped from the big black trunk onto the station platform.

Anderson looked. Anderson sniffed.

Anderson stuck around and waited.

Around noon a copper-haired young woman and a red-haired young man in a college sweater and corduroys walked into the baggage-room. The young woman handed two baggage-tickets to the man at the window.

“I want my trunks,’’ she said coolly.

The man glanced at the stubs, nodded and disappeared, to come back a moment later with Anderson.

“Sorry,’’ said Anderson. “You’ll have to open the trunks.’’

The young woman hesitated. Then she sighed and said, “My husband has the keys. I’ll have to call him.’’

“We’ll be right back,’’ said the red-haired youth. He took her arm and off they went. Being suspicious, Anderson followed, got the number of the roadster car the red-haired young man was driving, and then went back to wait. He waited three hours. More

WHY CHOP HER F blood ran out of the big trunk. The noxious fumes thickened. He called the police.

Detectives Paul Stevens and Frank Ryan arrived. They looked at the big black trunk and the smaller steamer trunk. They hefted them.

“Deer meat all right,’’ said Ryan.

“Get me a crowbar.’’

Crowbar in hand, he set to work on the larger trunk. He pried off the lock and lifted the lid.

According to a newspaper report, the detective said in a hoarse whisper, “That’s not venison. It’s a human body.’’ Actually, he said something more pungent.

But undoubtedly his whisper was hoarse. Wedged in a crouching position and wrapped in a sheet was the body of a woman – a brunette about 30 years old. She was wearing orange silk pyjamas.

“Taken aback momentarily,’’ the newspaper account continued, “the officers stared at the grisly find.

RUTH PPED UP FRIENDS

Winnie Ruth Judd in court

The authorities thought the two trunks dripping blood at Los Angeles central railway station contained deer carcasses. Police broke the locks and discovered two mutilated bodies...

27

Then they set to work on the steamer trunk. By this time a small crowd had gathered. The lock gave way and the lid was raised. A man in striped overalls fainted. From the trunk protruded a human foot. Ryan took hold of it. A leg appeared – a leg severed at the knee.’’

He then found another leg and the upper torso of a woman with head and arms attached. A few parts of the body, the upper legs from the knees to the hips, and the lower torso, were missing. Ryan also found evidence that the bodies were those of Agnes Anne LeRoi, a twice-divorced nurse, and Hedvig Samuelson, a tubercular schoolmistress, both of North Second Street, Phoenix. The trunks were full of letters addressed to the dead women and snapshots of them.

H

ad Mrs. Judd disposed of the trunks she might have got away with the murders. There was nothing in her history to indicate that she would start knocking off her friends. An ex-nurse recovering from tuberculosis, she had lived a quiet life of respectability. Her husband was a Los Angeles physician. She had been a good wife, and was only separated Above, the murder weapon.

Below left, the hat box and black bag which stored the 25-calibre pistol and nurse’s surgical instruments that Ruth used to dismember Hedvig’s body

from him by her illness.

Into those trunks she had packed not only the bodies but letters revealing her close friendship with the dead women.

Police read the letters and looked at the photographs and the records revealing that Mrs. Judd had sent the trunks to herself in Los Angeles. They were certain who the murderer was.

But where was the rest of Miss Samuelson’s body? How could a

28

woman as small and slight as Mrs. Judd have butchered that corpse so neatly?

Did she have help? Where in hell was she?

The first question was answered within a few hours. The woman who took care of the station rest-room

appeared carrying a suitcase. In it were the missing pieces of Miss Samuelson.

Whether Mrs. Judd had help or not is still a moot question. At first she said she didn’t. Later, at her trial, she intimated she did. But she wasn’t specific.

It wasn’t long before the police were on Winnie Ruth’s trail. Armed with the car number, they traced the roadster to Burton J. McKinnell, a 26-year-old law student. McKinnell was Mrs. Judd’s brother. He had an apartment in Beverly Glen, a pleasant canyon

north of Beverly Hills which had been the scene, many years back, of an interesting murder. A reporter found a woman’s body accidentally. It was a hot day and he bent down over a water tap and turned it on. He seldom touched water after that, for the woman was in the cistern.

Burton was not at home. The police searched the place and came up with the name and address of Dr. William C. Judd of Santa Monica. They hot-footed it to his address. At the kerb stood McKinnell’s roadster. McKinnell and Dr. Judd were upstairs.

Both men were quite calm. Dr. Judd admitted that Winnie Ruth was his wife and that the last time he saw her was in Phoenix, where she lived because of her health.

Burton said she was his sister. “This morning,’’ he continued, “as I left my classes I found her waiting for me.

“She had just arrived from Phoenix.

We had not expected her. She was nervous and wrought up. About her left hand she wore a heavy bandage. When I inquired about it she told me she had been shot. Then she grabbed my shoulder and said, ‘Burton, there are two trunks at the station. You must help me get them. We must take them to the beach and throw them in the ocean.’”

McKinnell admitted he was bewildered by his sister’s behaviour.

“I was puzzled by the request and by the wound in my sister’s hand, but I accompanied her to the rail station.

When the baggagewayman refused to turn over the trunks without an inspection, I knew something was wrong.

“I asked sis what she had in the trunks. She finally admitted there were bodies in them. I asked if they were men or women. She replied that the less I knew about it the better. I drove her to Sixth and Broadway, gave her five dollars, and that’s the last I saw of her.’’

There were those who felt that Burton McKinnell’s attitude and actions were peculiar, but he was young and he was fond of his sister, who was in a hell of a jam.

What would you do if your sister asked you to help get rid of a couple of bodies?

Dr. Judd was also bewildered.

He hadn’t heard from Burton. J. McKinnell, his wife and he had no Ruth’s brother idea why she was killing her friends and shipping their bodies around in trunks. To the day of his death in 1945 he was still bewildered by it all.

There wasn’t much the police could

Hedvig Samuelson in various states of assembly at the LA County morgue

do about it but haul the two gentlemen in for further questioning and start looking for Winnie Ruth. They didn’t find her for a while.

However, they did find another clue linking her to the murders. One of the toilets in the rest-room of a department store wouldn’t work. A plumber investigated. He found what was left of a long letter written by Mrs. Judd in which she admitted killing her friends during a quarrel. It showed how inexperienced she was in the art of murder.

You don’t do things like that if you want to stay out of jail. You make it as tough for the masterminds as possible.

Until her disappearance Mrs. Judd left a trail anyone could follow. Only when she started running did she use her wits. She might never have been caught if the bullet wound in her hand hadn’t become infected.

A

ccording to the newspapers, the search for Winnie Ruth was the greatest, most exciting and most intense since the manhunt for William Edward Hickman a few years before. That was an exaggeration. There had never been anything like that hunt for Hickman – not in Los Angeles anyway. The city was in the grip of terror when Hickman was on the prowl – a city where it wasn’t safe to venture forth at night because it was full of guys with guns who were ready to shoot on sight any young man with curly black hair.

It wasn’t like that when they were looking for Winnie Ruth. The cops were excited, with the angry excitement of frustrated men, but the citizens bore up well. People phoned in now and then to say they had seen her in Mexico, or San Francisco, or Santa Barbara or at the corner of Hollywood and Vine, but people always do that. It makes them

29

feel useful.

By the time the hunt was well under way it was known that Mrs. Judd had been employed for a time in the same clinic where Mrs. LeRoi was a nurse. Off-duty, Mrs. LeRoi took care of Miss Samuelson, a former Alaskan schoolteacher who had come to Phoenix suffering from tuberculosis.

Mrs. Judd was there, apparently alone.

She showed him a big trunk and said she wanted it taken to the station.

Grimm hefted it. Too heavy, he said.

Much too heavy to check on a ticket.

“What’s in it?’’ he wanted to know.

“Books,’’ said Mrs. Judd. “My husband’s medical library.’’

Then she told him to take it to her

containing the trunks and their human cargo.

By Wednesday night the police were convinced she had committed suicide.

As one spokesman put it, “Undoubtedly she has thrown herself in the ocean where she intended to throw her victims. We will find her body on the beach in due time.’’

Dr. Judd disagreed. He was convinced his wife was alive, so he appealed through newspaper advertisements for Winnie Ruth to give herself up. He had employed two attorneys for her – Richard Cantillon and Louis P. Russill.

He urged her to get in touch with them.

He said every effort would be made to keep her off the Arizona gallows.

The following afternoon, while the coroner was conducting an inquest and a jury was blaming Mrs. Judd for the two murders, she phoned Cantillon.

“This is Mrs. Judd,’’ she said. “Can you please put me in touch with my husband?’’

Cantillon gave her the telephone number of Attorney Patrick Cooney, saying he and the doctor would wait in Cooney’s office for another call.

That was because Cantillon was very Left, the mug-shot of Winnie Ruth Judd taken at the time of her arrest

For months the three women lived together in a bungalow in North Second Street. A few months before the murder Mrs. Judd had moved to an apartment of her own in East Brill Street on the other side of town.

Even after Mrs. Judd moved the three women were friendly. Every now and then they got together for a party. They had got together on the night of October 16th, a Friday, at the Samuelson-LeRoi bungalow.

On Saturday H. N. Grimm, a baggage-transfer man, was summoned to the North Second Street address.

Above, the house where the victims were butchered and dismembered.

Left, Winnie undergoes treatment at the hospital, attended by her brother and her husband, Dr. WIlliam C. Judd

Brill Street address. She said she’d put some of the books in another trunk.

Grimm did what he was told.

Next day he got another call from Mrs. Judd. This time she had three pieces of luggage – the big trunk, a steamer trunk and a suitcase. He was not a curious man. To him baggage was baggage. It was his job to move trunks.

So he took them to the station, thinking that would be the end of it.

Mrs. Judd followed the trunks to the station. She bought a one-way ticket to Los Angeles. Fittingly, she rode in the first Pullman behind the baggage car

30

popular with the press, and a number of reporters were in the outer office drinking his gin.

The reporters tried to tail him but he gave them the slip. He and the doctor waited an hour. Then Mrs. Judd called again. For 15 minutes the doctor argued with her and finally she said all right, she was fed up with hiding out and would meet him in the lobby of the Biltmore Theatre. That’s where Judd met her. That wasn’t where the cops and the reporters met her. Two hours later Cantillon, looking very smug, led them to an undertaking establishment.

T

hey found Winnie Ruth lying in bed upstairs and looking pretty sick and bedraggled. Her wounded hand had become infected and the injury had been freshly dressed. But she was quite calm. Downstairs there were several bodies waiting for burial, but that didn’t worry her.

She told the police: “I met Mrs. LeRoi shortly after I arrived in Phoenix.

We soon became fast friends. She told me about herself and I told her

Phoenix I had made the friendship of a millionaire lumberman. Jack was a splendid fellow, a good scout and a true friend to me.

“I introduced him to Anne. He seemed to like her. After I moved over with Anne and Sammy, Jack often came to the house in the evenings. We would have parties. He would bring his men friends.

“Jack, although he seemed to like Anne, was also kind to me. At first this was all right. Then Anne began to resent it. Finally I moved to my own apartment. Anne became very cool to me.

“There was another little nurse at the clinic and she was very cute. Her name was Lucille. Jack found out that Lucille was going on a hunting trip to the White Mountains. Jack planned a similar trip. He asked to meet Lucille, and said they might make it a party.

On Thursday evening, October 15th, I invited Lucille to my apartment for

to Jack. She was angry because I had introduced him to Lucille. Sammy was furious because my action brought sorrow to her beloved Anne.

“Our words became heated. We were shouting at each other. Finally Anne screamed, ‘Ruth, if that Lucille goes hunting with Jack I’ll tell him things about other girls you have introduced him to.’

“The threat infuriated me. ‘Anne,’ I

The bodies were those of Hedvig Samuelson (left), a schoolmistress, and Agnes Anne LeRoi (right), a twice-divorced nurse, both of North Second Street, Phoenix

about my life. Anne invited me to her home. There I met her pal, Hedwig Samuelson, whom we all called Sammy.

“Sammy was ill. Anne took care of her. In return Sammy helped Anne financially.

“Anne was a stunningly beautiful girl and loved all men. Not in an immoral way but as friends and companions.

She loved a good time. Sammy, on the other hand, cared for no man. She was consumed by a very unusual love for Anne.

“I got to know both of the girls very well. Finally when Dr. Judd left Phoenix to come to Los Angeles I moved in with Anne and Sammy. We were very happy together.

“During my early months in

dinner. Then I asked Jack to come up.

He brought two men friends. We had a happy evening. Anne learned about the party, for Jack had stopped by to see her on the way to my house. He had taken Anne and Sammy a radio.

“The next day, Friday, Anne went to lunch with me. She insisted that I come over to see her and Sammy that evening. I tried to renege but she insisted. I had special work to do at the clinic. I didn’t get to the Second Street bungalow until after nine o’clock.

“Anne and Sammy were tired. They insisted I stay all night. I slept on the davenport. In the morning we were all three in the kitchen in our pyjamas getting breakfast. Anne started to upbraid me for introducing other girls

said, ‘if you do a thing like that I will tell Jack about you.’

At these words Sammy sprang to her feet, ran into the bedroom and came out with a little black-handled gun I had left behind with some other things when I moved to my own apartment.

“Sammy’s face was drained of blood.

Her eyes pierced me through. She pulled the trigger of the little gun. I threw up my arms. The bullet struck me in the hand. I threw my whole weight against Sammy and grabbed the gun.

She fell behind the breakfast-nook table.

I was over her. I shot twice.

“Anne screamed and ran at me with the ironing board. I pointed the gun at her and fired one shot.’’

That, according to Winnie Ruth, was it.

31

She had two bodies on her hands and she didn’t quite know what to do with them. While thinking it over, she went to work.

“I told the people at the clinic I was sick,’’ she said. “I also told them Anne was sick. Then I went back to Anne’s house.’’

Winnie Ruth was a busy girl that day. She packed both bodies in the one big trunk and had Grimm take them to her apartment. Then she cut Sammy up with a meat saw and a butcher’s knife and put most of her in the steamer trunk and the rest in the suitcase. Anne stayed in the big trunk.

After she left her brother in Los Angeles, Winnie Ruth started walking.

She walked 20 miles to La Vina Sanitarium near Altadena, where she had been a patient, and hid in a vacant cottage. At night she crept to the kitchen to swipe food. Her hand

Above right, the murderess during an insanity hearing in 1933, and below, Winnie after her third escape in 1947

began hurting, so she left, intending to give herself up, she said. En route she got hold of a newspaper, saw her husband’s advertised appeal and called Cantillon.

A

DDY A D R A G U S Y H W GINA R O E G D E L G N A STR

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QUARTERLY TRUE CRIME 1 O. N ’S LD WOR

Y A SURVIVOR’S STOR

THE BEAST WHO TRADED IN CHILDREN’S BODIES

What Has He Done With Theresa, Joan And Christine’s Bodies?

Horror Of The Heaven’s The Evidence Gate Cult That Hanged 39 Dead With Plastic Bags On Their Heads

Sidney Fox

115

elibrary.com www.truecrim

Horror In Western Australia

KILLED KILLED BY BY HIS DAD HIS DAD –– BURIED BURIED BY BY HIS SIBLINGS HIS SIBLINGS

All this and more, in our next issue – IN SHOPS ON JANUARY 30th. Or subscribe and save – see page 34

32

t her trial the Arizona authorities called her a liar. They said it wasn’t self-defence but premeditated murder. They proved to the satisfaction of the jury that she went to see Anne and Sammy with a gun in her pocket on the night of October 16th, that she shot both women and then shot herself in the hand. Motive? Jealousy over the close friendship of her two victims, and jealousy over the attentions paid to them by some of Mrs. Judd’s gentlemen friends.

The jury decided she should hang.

She was in the death house waiting for the noose when psychiatrists came to her rescue and called her insane.

Undoubtedly, they were right. All the evidence presented by the state pointed to insanity. Premeditated or

MURDER MONTH February urder for money...Michael Apelt M and his brother Rudi were born in Germany on February 28th, 1960, and

Winnie Ruth Judd after her release in December 1971

not, the murders were not committed by a normal woman, but by an insanely jealous one.

She was locked up in the Arizona state hospital, and that should have been the end of it. The tumult and the shouting died. She was forgotten.

But the peace and quiet of the hospital palled on Mrs. Judd. In October, 1939, she vanished. Six days later she was found hiding in an orange grove near Tempe.

In December of the same year she escaped again. For two weeks police in three states sought her. On the 15th of the month a slim, bedraggled woman, shoeless and unkempt, walked into a drugstore in Yuma and asked for food.

The assistant recognised her and called the cops.

“The door was open and I walked out,’’ she said. “I kept on walking until I reached Yuma. Here I am.’’

Yuma’s sheriff returned her to Phoenix. She refused to implicate anyone else in her escape, and it was never learned how she managed to get to Yuma.

Her third escape occurred on May 11th, 1947. She was recaptured the following day in a nearby orange grove.

Winnie Ruth Judd made several more short-lived escapes from the asylum, until her final one on the night of October 8th, 1962. Shielded by friends, she managed to remain

undiscovered by the authorities for six and a half years. She was living under the name of Susan Clark when she was recaptured.

But as she had been at liberty for more than six years without further trouble, her case was re-examined and on December 21st, 1971, she was given her freedom.

The steadfast friends who had stuck by her were waiting to welcome Winnie Ruth home on Christmas Eve when she reached the affluent California suburb where she had lived happily as Susan Clark.

That was another mystery. With her record for carving-up pals, how did she inspire such friendship?

Reporters who met her at the time of her first arrest found her off-putting.

“I got the impression that she was a pretty cold-blooded article,’’ recalled one, “and so did all the other guys who talked to her.’’

But then the horror of what had been found at the station was still all too fresh in the reporters’ memory.

How else would you expect them to describe someone who’d just butchered two friends and packed them in trunks?

She lived to the age of 93, dying on October 23rd, 1998 – the same date of the month she had surrendered to Los Angeles Police in 1931.

August 1st, 1963, respectively. Taking America’s motto “the land of the free” rather too literally, the Apelts emigrated there in August 1988 – they believed the freedom offered by their new home would include being free to carry out a homicidal plan.

The idea was that Michael would find a gullible American woman, marry her, take out a large life insurance policy and then kill her. The brothers landed in San Diego, California, with Rudi’s wife Susanne and Michael’s former girlfriend Anke Dorn, and moved into a motel.

By October 6th, Susanne had returned to Germany. That night the brothers met Annette Clay at a bar, telling her they were international bankers and were staying at a Holiday Inn. She grudgingly gave Rudi her phone number and the next day he called her.

The brothers met Annette and her friend Cindy Monkman for a drink.

Michael spent the night dancing and flirting with Cindy, even telling her “You’re the woman I want to marry.”

The women became suspicious when they discovered that $100 was missing from Cindy’s flat and that the Apelts were not staying at a Holiday Inn but a cheap motel. They went there Michael and found Anke Dorn. (top) and The next day, the brothers Rudi accused the two women of Apelt wrecking their “high-security clearance” and costing them their jobs.

The women were most apologetic.

Michael moved into Cindy’s flat and Rudi into Annette’s. Rudi and Annette soon fell out, but on October 28th, 1988, 30-year-old Cindy Monkman and Michael Apelt were secretly married in Las Vegas. He now suggested the life insurance and Cindy wrote a cheque for the first premium on the $400,000 policy.

As she signed the cheque, she signed her death warrant.

On December 23rd, she was driven into the desert near Apache Junction where she was stabbed five times. Her head was almost severed. The Apelts came under suspicion and on January 6th, 1989, they and Anke went to the police to report that several people had threatened them. They were questioned individually and the police offered Ms. Dorn immunity if she would testify.

She did and the Apelts went on trial separately. Convicted of capital murder, Michael was sentenced to death on August 10th, 1990, and Rudi received a death sentence on January 8th, 1991.

33

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More fascinating material from MD’s archives...

30 YEARS AGO IN CRIME February 1990

Feb 10th, 1990

Feb 19th, 1990

Feb 21st, 1990 Feb 4th, 1990

Feb 25th, 1990 Feb 4th, 1990

35

MDTragic Mum Vanished After The School Run

Above, the house in New Elgin where Arlene lived until her sudden disappearance. Below Fraser and Arlene’s wedding day

36

B

Y ANY standard, Nat Fraser, a 53-year-old fruit and vegetable wholesaler, was in an extraordinary situation. Back in 2003 he had become only the third person in Scotland to be convicted of murder in the absence of a body. The victim was his 33-year-old wife Arlene, who

Case report by A.W. Moss had disappeared from her home in Elgin, Moray, on April 28th, 1998, after waving her two children off to school.

In May 2008, Nat Fraser’s appeal against his conviction was dismissed, but at the Supreme Court two years later he successfully challenged the appeal judges’ ruling. He had not received a fair trial, the Supreme Court decided. But although his conviction was quashed, he was sent back to prison to await a retrial.

So on April 23rd, 2012, Fraser stepped into the dock at Edinburgh High Court to face trial for murder a second time. Denying killing Arlene because she wanted to end their 11-year marriage and was seeking a cash

settlement, he claimed in papers lodged in court that he was at work delivering fruit and vegetables when she vanished. His defence would be that if his missing wife was murdered, a possible suspect was one of his farming friends, a man whom we will call George Stewart.

However, the prosecution alleged that between April 28th and May 7th, 1998, Fraser had killed Arlene in the Smith Street, New Elgin, home they had formerly shared, or elsewhere. The indictment also claimed that, together with a person or persons unknown, Fraser had arranged the “surreptitious purchase” of a car with a boot, later setting fire to it after Arlene went missing.

The first witness to testify was Arlene’s mother. She said that Arlene had been devoted to her two children.

Further, Fraser “didn’t seem that bothered” by her disappearance – he even put on a false moustache, joking that this was the disguise Arlene had used for getting away.

“I felt it was terrible that he could joke about anything like that. He didn’t seem to be upset about anything,” Arlene’s mother said.

The court heard that Arlene’s contact lenses, passport, credit cards and cheque book had been found in her home after she vanished, and she suffered from a

scotland’s classic cases

Arlene Fraser. She vanished in April 1998 after waving her children off to school

bowel complaint which would cause her agony if she missed taking her medication for more than a day.

On the fourth day of the proceedings George Stewart was called to give evidence. At the 2003 trial he, Fraser and another man (by now deceased) had been accused of Arlene’s murder, but Stewart had left the dock and testified for the prosecution.

He now told the court that a few weeks before Arlene’s disappearance Fraser had told him he was going to give her £25,000 “to sod off.” He had recalled this, Stewart testified, when he learned that Arlene was missing on reading a local newspaper report. He also recalled Fraser telling him, “There’s ten thousand people a year go missing

and none of them is ever found.”

“He certainly had ill will towards his wife, so I took the comment in the context that it was towards his wife,” Stewart told the court.

He also remembered that two days before Arlene disappeared,

Stewart said that the day before she vanished, Fraser asked him to obtain a car for him “on the quiet.” He did so, buying a second-hand Ford Fiesta, and when it was returned to him after Arlene went missing he set it on fire and it was crushed for scrap and shipped abroad.

The court heard that the police believed that the Fiesta had been used to abduct Arlene.

Cross-examined by Mr. John Scott

in Arlene’s murder.

The court heard that in 2001 he had been jailed for lying about the car, after he admitted attempting to pervert the course of justice.

As the trial continued, a retired detective inspector told the jury that Fraser had displayed false emotion when he was asked if his missing wife might have killed herself.

“A tear came to his eye,” the witness

The Killing Of Arlene Fraser

NO BODY – BUT NO DOUBT

Fraser told him, “If I can’t have her, nobody will.”

Fraser had gone on to say that he understood that, without a body, there could be no murder prosecution, and that bones shorter than three inches couldn’t be identified.

“I was a bit concerned,” Stewart said, “but he’d been talking rubbish in some ways. I’d heard similar from him before, but not in that context. I think Arlene had been going out socially and he was green-eyed jealous over that.”

Stewart then went on to say that Fraser had later admitted paying a hitman £15,000 to kill Arlene, confessing that her body had been burned, her teeth had been ground up, and nothing would ever be found.

Right, a handcuffed Nat Fraser in 2008 after his appeal was dismissed.

Above, the killer when he was sentenced to serve a minimum of 17 years behind bars – reform of the Scottish parole system could see him stay behind bars forever

QC, defending, Stewart admitted that most of the statements he initially made to the police after Arlene vanished were lies. But he denied that he had made up his story about a hit-man in order to “weasel” himself out of trouble when he was on remand in Inverness Prison in October 1999, suspected of involvement

recalled. “I remember him saying, ‘I don’t want to think about that.’ He said it, but I didn’t get the feeling that he meant it. There was no distress. There was no anxiety or signs of worry coming from him.”

The jury then heard the story of Arlene’s wedding, eternity and

37

MURDER MONTH February rong” man was shot...

“W Sometimes it happens that people are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Such was the case with Anton “Tony” Cermak, the mayor of Chicago, Illinois, who was elected in 1931.

An Austro-Hungarian immigrant, Cermak arrived in America with his parents in 1874 when he was around a year old. In 1902, he joined the Illinois House of Representatives and gradually rose up the political greasy pole until 1928 when he lost a race for the US Senate to Republican Otis F. Glenn.

Three years later, he was running Chicago – the third largest city in America – during the Great Depression, thanks in part to his wooing of the city’s large immigrant population.

On April 6th, 1931, he beat the corrupt “Big Glad to be Bill” Thompson to City shot: Mayor Hall. Thompson had Anton “Tony” resorted to deliberately Cermak mispronouncing his rival’s name. “He doesn’t like my name... it’s true I didn’t come over on the Mayflower, but I came over as soon as I could,” Cermak responded.

Mayor Cermak’s win ended the Republican stranglehold in Chicago, but his administration was beset by financial problems.

On February 15th, 1933, President-Elect Franklin D. Roosevelt was shaking hands with Mayor Cermak at Bayfront Park, Miami, Florida, when Giuseppe Zangara attempted to shoot him. A woman, Lillian Cross, hit Zangara’s arm with her handbag and spoiled his aim. Instead of killing Roosevelt, the bullets hit the mayor in the lung.

As he was taken to hospital the mayor is supposed to have told the president-elect, “I’m glad it was me instead of you” – although the historical authenticity of this is doubted by many authorities.

Mayor Cermak died of peritonitis on March 6th, 1933. He was buried at the Bohemian National Cemetery in Chicago.

Zangara pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to death. He then said, “You give me electric chair. I no afraid of that chair! You one of capitalists. You is crook man too. Put me in electric chair. I no care!” A fortnight after Cermak died, Zangara was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Penitentiary in Raiford, Florida.

A plaque honouring the mayor stands at the murder site at Bayfront Park. It bears the legend, “I’m glad it was me instead of you.”

38

engagement rings. Their disappearance and reappearance had helped prosecutors put Fraser behind bars in 2003. But more evidence about them was in the Crown’s files, and when it belatedly came to light after Fraser’s murder conviction, he had been released on bail in 2006 pending the hearing of his appeal.

The undisclosed evidence concerning the rings should have been made available to the defence. But it wasn’t, and this had led to the quashing of Fraser’s conviction.

Nine days after Arlene vanished, the jury at Fraser’s 2003 trial had been told, he put her rings in the bathroom at her home. He was unaware that the police had videoed the bathroom early in their investigation, and there was no sign of the rings on the videotape.

They were not in the bathroom when Arlene’s relatives searched the house shortly after she suddenly disappeared, but on May 7th a relative found them in full view in the bathroom after Nat Fraser visited the house to see his children.

“The discovery of these rings represents one of the most compelling pieces of evidence that you will ever hear in a court in a case of this kind,” the prosecutor told the jury at Fraser’s trial in 2003. “Eight or nine days after her death these rings were removed from the dead body of Arlene Fraser and taken to the house to be planted in the bathroom...The finding of these rings is the cornerstone of the entire case against the defendant – it is something for which Mr. Fraser has simply no explanation and it demonstrates his complicity and his guilt beyond any doubt.”

On that circumstantial evidence alone, the prosecutor said, the jury could convict Fraser, without the testimony of Stewart who had turned Queen’s evidence, alleging that Fraser had hired a hit-man.

But in his summing-up the 2003 trial judge said that if the jury did not accept that Fraser had placed the rings in the bathroom on May 7th, they could not convict.

Found guilty and given a life sentence, Nat Fraser had been told he would serve a minimum of 25 years before he was considered for parole.

Lurking like a ticking time-bomb in the Crown’s files on the case, however, was something that had been overlooked and of which the prosecutor was unaware. olice Constable Neil Lynch had P gone to the house early in the investigation. He had made a statement in which he mentioned seeing the rings in the bathroom, and now, 14 years later he came out of retirement to step into the witness-box and confirm that he saw the rings in the bathroom the day Arlene vanished.

Another officer, PC Julie Clark, told the court that she too saw the rings

at the house within hours of Arlene being reported missing. So what the prosecution had described as the “cornerstone” of its case at Fraser’s first murder trial was now seen to be questionable.

Summing-up for the Crown on May 25th, 2012, Mr. Alex Prentice QC, prosecuting, said it had never been his case that Fraser himself did the killing.

“The Crown’s case is that that was achieved by someone else.”

All the evidence, the prosecutor told the jury, indicated that Arlene was the victim of a premeditated murder.

“If that is right, premeditated murder requires a motive, and I submit to you there is nobody in the world, other than Nat Fraser, who had a motive.”

A woman friend of Arlene had told the court that Fraser had threatened Arlene: “If you are not going to live with me, you are not going to be living with anyone,” Mr. Prentice reminded the jury.

Describing Fraser as possessive and controlling, he said the accused could not bear the thought of Arlene leaving him, of her being with another man, or of parting with the money that his marriage break-up would cost him.

“These thoughts festered in his head and gnawed at him to such an extent that he organised the murder of his wife,” the prosecutor said.

In his closing speech to the jury for the defence, Mr. Scott urged them to reject Stewart’s evidence, saying the witness had “lied so often, even he cannot always separate out the lies from the truth.”

A great deal of the prosecution’s case depended almost entirely on Stewart for its detail, Mr. Scott went on to claim, adding that the fact that Fraser had not given evidence did not “take the Crown one millimetre closer to proving their case.”

Commenting on the prosecution’s

Left, Fraser and Arlene early in their relationship. Below, her three rings. They helped the prosecution put Fraser behind bars in 2003.

Above, the High Court in Edinburgh where Fraser stood trial

Left and above, police photos taken inside the Frasers’ New Elgin home showing the bathroom sink and main bedroom

claim that Fraser’s motive was that his wife was leaving him and had seen a lawyer, the defence counsel said: “If that is a motive for murder, then Scotland has thousands of men police will need to keep a close eye on.”

Summing-up, the trial’s judge, Lord

Bracadale, told the jury that they could find Fraser guilty even if they rejected the evidence given by Stewart. There would still be enough evidence, if the jury accepted it, he said, to permit a conviction.

He went on to remind the jury that

Stewart had given damning evidence against Fraser – “Evidence about the Ford Fiesta and evidence that the accused made confessions which would, if believed and found reliable, be strong evidence against the accused. It is for you to assess the credibility and reliability of the evidence he gave.”

And in so doing, Lord Bracadale said, the jury must “take account of the powerful and extensive criticisms of his evidence made by Mr. Scott. On any view, he [Stewart] has a history of lying.

You can have regard to the way in which he gave his evidence, and have regard to what he said on earlier occasions about matters on which he gave evidence.

“It would be open to you to take the view that he was such an untruthful and unreliable witness that you reject his evidence out of hand. How you view his evidence is entirely a matter for you.”

The judge added that even if the jury left Stewart’s testimony entirely out of account, “in the absence of his evidence there would still be sufficient circumstantial evidence coming from more than one source which, when brought together and considered as a whole, would allow you to find the accused guilty of murder. Again, whether you accept that evidence

and whether it satisfies you beyond reasonable doubt is entirely a matter for you.”

After five hours’ deliberation on May 30th the jury found Nat Fraser guilty.

He shook his head on hearing the verdict.

Jailing him for at least 17 years, having taken into account the seven years and nine months he had already served in prison, Lord Bracadale told him: “You instigated in cold blood the premeditated murder of your wife and the mother of your children...The murder and disposal of the body must have been carried out with ruthless efficiency.”

Fraser is still behind bars – and Arlene’s body has never been found.

Under a new proposal, to be named Suzanne’s Law, published by the Scottish government in November 2019, killers who refuse to reveal information about the whereabouts of a body may not be freed from prison. The move is one of several reforms of the Scottish parole system.

Could such a law inspire Fraser to break his silence on the subject?

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DENHAM...BRITAIN’S The village nestles prettily in the Thames Valley, and boasts more than a fistful of celebrities living in its peaceful surrounding countryside. People come to this mellow “village of the stars” for its picturesque buildings and sense of history, but few know that it is also infamous as a village of murders...

MDCases Recalled By Matthew Spicer

T

40

HE PEOPLE of Denham had worked up a good thirst on Thursday, August 26th, 1886. It was certainly one of the hottest days of that year, and although the officially recorded temperature was a mere 86 degrees, some locals claimed it must have soared well over the 100 mark.

Even the normally restrained local newspaper had been distressed enough to refer to the heat as “excessive.” It was certainly the kind of weather that might fray tempers.

Regardless of the accuracy of the meteorological data recorded that day, the farm labourers of Denham must have found going about their business while exposed to such conditions very hard work indeed.

At that time the magnificent Denham Court (now the clubhouse of Buckinghamshire Golf Club) was owned by the dashing Captain Harold Swithinbank. He had been a hussar, and after his retirement in 1885, he had determined that with his flair for running the agricultural estate and the latest techniques in animal husbandry, he would make the most of Savoy Farm, which represented a substantial part of his country home.

Two men toiled side-by-side in Captain Swithinbank’s turnip fields on that sweltering day. The farm manager James Moreton had set them to work hoeing the rows of crops.

Working alongside 46-year-old Charles

Plumridge was Alfred Hitch, a 35-yearold ex-soldier with some experience of such fierce conditions gained during his time in the military. From personal experience he knew that too much of the heat could do strange things to any man.

The man appeared to be motionless and so, with great caution, the gamekeeper removed the jacket.

An appalling sight was revealed t about noon another employee on A the farm was gleaning in the next field. Mrs. Lydia Giles glanced up and saw Hitch, who lodged with her family, walking slowly past. He smiled and showed her a coin that he said Moreton had given him, as an advance on his wages, to buy some beer with his lunch.

Back at his lodgings he changed from his work smock into a jacket and next showed the coin, this time to Joseph Giles, Lydia’s son, and invited him to come along to the Falcon public house with him for a drink. The lad eagerly accompanied him on such a stifling day, downed just the one pint and left. But Hitch, still flush with cash, decided that

Captain Harold Swithinbank (right) was the owner of Denham Court (left) at the time of the murder. Both the murderer and the victim were employees on his farm

he needed another drink.

Hitch walked along to the Dog and Duck pub on the main road from Uxbridge. After he had enjoyed a few more drinks the landlord, Henry Woodley, became concerned about his new customer, as his behaviour became increasingly curious.

At one point he lifted his jug, went to drink it but instead dropped it on the floor. Hitch apologised profusely to the landlord, paid for the damage, but then jumped up and screamed: “Look. There the bugger is. Look at him pulling that wire.”

A silence descended on the pub and Woodley shouted at him, “Sit down and be quiet, you mad wretch.” Hitch quietened but became preoccupied with looking under his seat and calling out that the “man” was under there, though when he caught the landlord’s stare he shut up. But soon he was off again shrieking out: “I have murdered one man today – Charley Plumridge!”

Stunned silence once again descended on the pub. When Hitch then asked for more drink, he was briskly refused and eventually left the pub and started walking towards Uxbridge.

Another farm employee had also seen an extraordinary sight, and unlike Hitch’s invisible companions this one was certainly real. In fact it was edible. As the labourer looked on in amazement he saw a basket, a bottle of tea and some food wrapped in a handkerchief slowly passing down a stream through the farm.

MURDER VILLAGE

Part Two In The Series

The Dog and Duck public house in Denham

“I HAVE MURDERED ONE MAN TODAY...”

Tempers boiled on a sweltering summer day in 1886, and once again there was murder in the village of Denham was a very busy period for the farm and Plumridge lived alone, he had not been missed from Thursday lunchtime.

The body was carried to the Swan, where the police were called and a post-mortem was carried out. It was determined that the wounds were similar in shape to those that would result if a hoe was used as a weapon.

Furthermore it quickly became The Swan Inn

t the coroner’s inquest, again A convened in the Swan, it emerged that during his military service in

The items were taken from the water and examined. Other people looked at them and wondered to whom they belonged. Strange things were afoot in Denham, it seemed. wo days later, on August 28th, T William Peterill, one of the estate’s gamekeepers, was out on his rounds in a wood called Cuckoo Pen, when he thought he saw a labourer asleep, laying on his back with his jacket over his head. The gamekeeper called out to the figure and asked if he was sleeping – but on receiving no reply edged slowly forward. The man appeared to be motionless and so, approaching with great caution, the gamekeeper removed the jacket.

An appalling sight was revealed: the head had been viciously staved in with some kind of weapon or tool. The gamekeeper struggled to look away from the ruined head of the corpse.

Rousing himself and replacing the jacket over his gruesome discovery, Peterill ran the half-mile back to Denham Court as fast as he could and alerted Moreton the manager.

The men returned with a group of farm labourers, one of whom instantly recognised Charles Plumridge. Since it

missed – even by his landlady Mrs. Giles, who now made it quite clear that in fact she was glad to be rid of him.

It was known that his mother lived in Basingstoke, and with remarkable speed the local police found him wandering around the country lanes near the town in a disorientated state and detained him before returning him to Buckinghamshire.

Home Secretary Henry Matthews

apparent that the victim had been robbed of 19 shillings.

The murder inquiry began, led by Inspector Sapwell, and very quickly the local authorities learnt of Hitch’s strange behaviour in the Dog and Duck on the likely day of the murder, and his duties in the fields that day. He was already known to the police as he had a criminal record for what was at the time a grave offence – attempting suicide.

But like his co-worker Plumridge, Hitch had vanished and hadn’t been

India Hitch had been court-martialled and sentenced to seven years for the attempted murder of an officer, and gross insubordination. On his discharge from the army the inside of his left arm had been branded “BC” for “bad character,” as was the procedure at the time. As a result of the inquest he was accused of the wilful murder of Charles Plumridge.

Appearing at the Bedford Assizes before Mr. Justice Grantham on Tuesday, November 16th, 1886, Hitch said he had no recollection of the crime. Mr. Trevor White, acting for the defence, claimed that Hitch was clearly insane, but the Crown’s rebuttal presented by Messrs. G. Still and W.A. Attenborough convinced the jury, and they found him guilty of murder, although they did recommend mercy on the grounds of “diminished responsibility.”

Under the circumstances the Home Secretary Henry Matthews, who was known for his personal opposition to the death penalty, spared Hitch the rope and commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment on Wednesday, November 24th, 1886.

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J

AMES FINCH’S house in the middle of Denham village was throbbing with the sound of tambourines, fiddles, dancing and drinking. It was Easter Monday in 1830, a holyday when farm workers and local girls let their hair down and partied.

Mary Moulder was acting as unofficial barmaid and mostly kept her head while all around her were losing theirs, so she saw what happened during that crazy night when Denham logged the first of the 13 killings that have earned the village its deathly reputation.

She particularly noticed 21-year-old Frederick Whitfield chatting up 19-year-old Ellen Turner in a corner.

Local gossip reckoned he fancied her, but no one knew whether Ellen felt the same. Tonight they were squashed together on the same chair and talking all soft, as Mary put it.

As she was collecting some of the empty pots, Mary saw Whitfield had a jug of beer in his hand. He was pressing Ellen to take a swig from it, but she kept saying it tasted funny.

The young men plied the girls with their tainted brew in the hopes of inflaming their passions

PARTY Y A ID L O H A T A G IN N O IS O “SEX DRUG” P “Come on, lass,” wheedled Whitfield, squeezing her round the waist. “It’s only a bit of malt or ginger. There’ll be no more beer tonight if you don’t drink that.”

A while later Mary saw the empty quart jug on the window ledge, so she went across to hang it over the window on a nail, according to the custom of the day. The couple seemed to be enjoying themselves – though she wasn’t surprised to see Ellen rush outside 15 minutes later and start vomiting over a railing.

Next day Ellen was very ill, and when Mary went over to visit her she could see this was no ordinary hangover.

Wracked with pain and sweating profusely, the trembling girl told her she knew the beer had tasted odd.

Mary walked over to the party house and saw the same quart jug dangling over the windowsill in the corner where she had hung it. The name John Tomson was printed on it and there was a powdery substance round the rim.

Tomson was landlord of The Falcon pub in Denham and he had supplied the jugs and ale for the party. Other people in the village also reported they had felt ill after the shindig.

Mary returned to Ellen’s home and was showing the jug to her mother when Ellen’s brother Joseph walked in. The young man was tearful and implored the two women to call a doctor for his sister.

Hearing Ellen’s groans from the bedroom next door, Mary quickly dispatched her niece to fetch Dr. Arthur Hilder from nearby Uxbridge. She took the jug with her to show him.

Dr. Hilder recognised the dark green powder as a cantharides, a sex drug still known today as “Spanish

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Everyone was already in high spirits at the Easter celebrations in the village – but the young men had plans to spice things up by spiking the drinks...

Fly.” Cantharides is often given to farm animals to incite mating, but for centuries it has been used as a human aphrodisiac and is still widely advertised on internet sex sites.

A small amount stimulates the urinary passages in males and females to

cause an erection or excite the vagina.

However, when the drug is excreted in urine it irritates the urethral passages, causing inflammation of the genitals.

Cantharides is a very powerful and dangerous drug and the amount required is minuscule. Used carelessly, it causes painful urination, fever and bloody discharge. It can also cause permanent damage to the kidneys and genitals. Dr. Hilder identified all these symptoms in Ellen and tried to stabilise her condition. But she died four days later in agony.

The immediate suspect was Whitfield, but it soon emerged that two other men were involved with him in a plot to have sex with Ellen Turner and turn the party into an orgy. One of them was her own brother, and the other was 20-year-old James Barrett. n Easter Monday morning, Joseph O Turner and Fred Whitfield had bought a large quantity of “Spanish Fly” in Uxbridge, telling the shopkeeper they needed it for a local farmer who wanted to encourage his stallion to mate.

They were almost caught out in the lie, as the farmer happened to walk past at the very moment they were spinning the story, and Turner had to quickly amend it to “the farmer’s son.”

In the end, shopkeeper Joseph Stubbs sold them thruppence-worth of the drug, warning them sternly that even the smallest quantity could kill and to play no sexual tricks with it.

The men romped back to Denham, and met Barrett in the Swan Inn early that evening. They bought several jugs of ale, slipped in a few grains of Spanish Fly, and sat back to see what happened.

The results were disappointing as the expected debauchery and decadence

failed to materialise. A few people felt queasy and went home, and the festive atmosphere at The Swan died.

Meanwhile, the “do” at James Finch’s house was in full swing by the time the men arrived, and the noise could be heard several streets away. Whitfield had brought a jug of beer with him, and at some stage of the evening Barrett blew out the candles on the tables so that Whitfield could add some more Spanish Fly to the ale under cover of darkness.

It was five minutes before they were relit, by which time Whitfield had passed round his jug to a number of people, including the band. Then he went over to Ellen Turner and gave her what was left.

At the inquest into her death, witnesses said that Barrett, Turner and Whitfield had drunk none of the ale themselves and that those affected by

“No,” Whitfield had said. “It’s some damned rum stuff.”

William Fountain, one of the guests at the party, said he had overheard Turner saying to Barrett at the inquest: “Didn’t I put the stuff in your hand?”

Barrett had replied: “Yes, and it was through you they’ve made all this row.”

Barrett then began berating Turner for “buying the stuff” in the first place.

Local baker Agnes Worts testified that a fortnight before the incident Turner and Whitfield told her you could “give girls stuff to make them fond of you.”

Agnes had poured scorn on this at the time, but Turner claimed he knew someone who would sell him what he wanted so they could hand it round to the girls.

The defence claimed there was clearly no intent to “kill and slay” Ellen Turner and rejected the charge

“Spanish Fly” THE PREPARATION is made from an emerald-green beetle, Lytta vesicatoria (above). The tiny insect (half an inch to an inch long) is known with good reason as the common blister beetle as it contains up to 5 per cent cantharidin, an irritant with both interesting and deadly side effects on the human body.

Cantharides, as the powder made from the crushed beetles is sometimes called, has been used by humans since the age of Hippocrates. It is now banned in the United States, except for use in farming and by prescription for the medical treatment of warts.

But cantharides has always been a dangerous aphrodisiac, it had drunk from the jug while the candles were out.

All three men admitted knowing about the drug, and said they had bought it as a practical joke rather than to cause any serious harm. Turner said he had no idea Whitfield would give it to his sister. The inquest lasted 10 hours and returned verdicts of manslaughter against them.

At their trial at Buckingham Assizes in July 1830, James Finch testified that it was impossible for him to say how many jugs of ale came into his house on the night of the party.

“But I remember the one hanging over the window as I went over to play the tambourine by it,” he said. “But then I felt too ill and had to lie down.”

Whitfield alleged he had no idea the beer had been tampered with when he gave it to Ellen Turner, but Finch told the court that Whitfield had shown him something wrapped in a hankie, which he took to be tobacco.

WHAT KILLER WHITFIELD DID NEXT FTER SERVING his short A sentence for manslaughter, Frederick Whitfield returned to Denham and resumed his life of crime and anti-social behaviour, mostly driven by his addiction to drink. He frequently appeared at the local magistrates’ court for small thefts and minor assaults.

But on Saturday, January 23rd, 1836, Whitfield, now 26, was drinking with some friends in the Falcon pub in the village. He decided to pick on another drinker, John Wharton, who had been singing in a way that seemed to enrage Whitfield. Soon the landlord and his staff had no option but to eject the men.

Moving away from the pub, the fight continued for nearly an hour in a neighbouring field called Hancock’s Meadow. As darkness fell someone

The Falcon Pub in Denham Village

with dosage the key factor between pleasurable arousal and agonising pain, and even death... of manslaughter. However, in his summing-up, the judge dismissed this argument, saying it had long been established in law that a man of sound mind was presumed to intend the natural consequences of his actions. The accused knew cantharides was a very dangerous drug.

The judge also said he believed there was clear evidence that the men conspired to mix the drug and each knew of this plan.

The jury returned their verdicts at midnight, finding Turner and Whitfield guilty of manslaughter, but acquitting Barrett. They added that they were not convinced the men understood the drug to be a deadly poison. Accordingly, both men were jailed for only six months – a sentence, some might argue, that failed to value the life of a girl who died simply because her drink was spiked.

fetched a lantern to allow the fighting to continue. Eventually Whitfield got the better of Wharton and finished him off with several blows to the head.

Unconscious, Wharton was taken home, seen by a doctor, and died a few days with brain damage from the beating he’d endured. Soon the police came for Whitfield. They then arrested two of his friends, Robert Taylor and John Poole, who had also been in the field. All three were tried at the Aylesbury Assizes in March.

Witnesses said that Taylor had been shouting out for Whitfield to “put the knee in.” Taylor and Whitfield were found guilty of manslaughter, but on the judge’s direction Poole was acquitted as he had not egged on the killer.

Despite his previous manslaughter conviction, Whitfield was actually given a shorter sentence this time – he and Taylor were given just two months. He soon returned to his old ways, receiving a three-month sentence in July for beating up a local policeman. Finally, in May 1838, his career was brought to an end with a seven-year sentence for the theft of fowls from the village.

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High Wycombe from the Lambeth Workhouse in south-west London with a three-week-old baby boy that she had named Frederick. She had walked to Uxbridge the day before and had intended to reach High Wycombe on the third.

On the night of July 2nd she had stayed at a pub in Uxbridge but her son was ill, and fearing he might die the landlady had thrown her out. She began walking towards Wycombe and in Denham came across a patrolling policeman who directed her to the Green Man in the village, where she was

DEAD BABY BOY FOUND IN A DITCH

O

N THURSDAY, July 3rd, 1856, two women were walking through Denham on what is now the main A40 road out of west London. In a ditch by the road near the Queen’s Head pub they found the body of a dead baby boy wrapped in cloth. The police were called and the body was removed for a post-mortem, which found traces of morphine and laudanum in the stomach.

Police already had a suspect – a woman who had walked to

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“I hope they will have mercy on me for the sake of my other child,” said Mary Jones be in possession of a small phial of laudanum. When questioned she said that she had been suffering from face pains and had used the drug to soothe the pain. However, at the inquest she confessed, saying: “I have had a deal of trouble these last few months, and the anxiety of my other child; this is the first time that I ever committed any offence before the magistrates. I hope they will have mercy on me for the sake of my other child. I gave him a few drops, thinking to compose the child, because he was so fretful. He sucked at the breast at about 2 o’clock in the morning, but there did not seem to be anything for him. I did not think, when I gave him the cordial, that it would cause his death.

I uncovered him at the nighthouse to

SYDNEY’S SHOCKING CONTRACT KILLING CASE

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Teenagers Were Kidnapped, GangRaped And Murdered

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44

given a room. She asked to be woken when the postal coach for Wycombe came. She was woken at 3 o’clock but, in a somewhat distressed state, said this was not the right coach. She then said she would begin walking to Wycombe and wait for the proper one to pass her. Later she was seen, by the same officer, sitting on some stones on the main road, with the child in her arms – this was about one and a half miles from the spot where the body was found.

The police soon traced the woman, Mary Ann Jones, to her mother’s house in Wycombe where she was found to

The Times carried the report of Mary Jones’ trial in 1856

warm him, but he seemed very cold.

I did not leave the nighthouse till past three and I think he died about four. I won’t be positive sure. My arms were quite stiff with carrying him, and when I found out he was gone, it gave me such a shudder, I could not bear the thought of it.”

Charged with murder, Mary Jones appeared at the Aylesbury Assizes just nine days later, before the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Campbell. Although no defence was offered at her trial, which only lasted a few hours, the judge, in tears, advised the jury that there was no evidence of murder. However, he said that giving a small child laudanum was extremely dangerous and therefore she was, in law, guilty of manslaughter through “gross negligence.” But he felt he and the jury would have great sympathy for her and how she spent that night in Denham.

Without leaving their box the jury found Mary Jones guilty of manslaughter and she was sentenced to one month in prison.

THE KING OF SPAIN AND THE BODY IN THE WATER HE 1830s were a deadly time T to live in Denham. In another case from that decade, the body of a newborn was found on Wednesday, September 17th, 1834, at the opening of a yard-wide sewer which led into the River Misbourne in the north of the old village and in the grounds of Denham Place.

At the inquest, held two days later at the Swan Inn, a local woman called Mary Meads said that her

he had business in London. Through his land-agent he said he wished to help the police with their enquiries and that he would foot the bill for tracing the mother, who he felt needed help.

The local police had spent Wednesday and Thursday speaking to every female capable of having a child in the neighbourhood and were satisfied that the mother was not local. The jury, after a short retirement, found the case to be one of an “unsolved murder.”

Joseph Bonaparte

seven-year-old son had been playing outside at about eight o’clock on the Wednesday morning when he saw something “odd” and called his mother to come and look. Realising immediately that it was a dead baby, she fished the little body out of the water and washed it, then took it to the overseer of the village’s workhouse.

Another local, Mary Brown, said she’d seen evidence of a child’s birth at the head of the sewer and it was clear that the corpse had come out of the drain and into the shallow clean water of the river.

A local surgeon who performed the post-mortem said the baby boy could have been as old as seven days. He had been born alive and had suffered “internal and external violence” after birth. The surgeon added that it was a clear case of murder, as the child had been struck repeatedly across the back of the head with a blunt instrument, perhaps a spade.

The local landowner at the time was the former king of Spain, Joseph Bonaparte, now known as the Count de Survilliers, who stayed in Denham when

WAS THIS REALLY A FAIR FIGHT? EARLY 20 years after the fight N which resulted in the death of John Wharton, the Falcon pub was the scene of another pub brawl that had fatal consequences.

It was Saturday, May 13th, 1854, which was Fair Day in Denham, and several of the local men had been drinking. Two of them, William Allen (28) and James Edwards (30), were in the Falcon, as was George Carr.

Allen, full of alcohol and bravado, felt like fighting. He lurched over and punched Carr in the head. Allen, Carr and Edwards were ordered off the premises and, in time-honoured tradition, took their fight to a neighbouring field. Witnesses said they could clearly hear Edwards telling Allen to knock Carr down, “give it to him” and “give it to him underneath.” This Allen did, and after a few blows Carr was quite dead.

Tried at the assizes two months later, Carr and Edwards each received sentences of just one month, the judge calling it a “common fair fight.”

Cattle graze on the banks of the River Misbourne that passes through the grounds of Denham Place

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This Report By Matthew Spicer

T

MD“Why Is It That When We Kiss, You Turn Your Face Away?”

HERE WAS nothing special about Florence Wakeling. She was a 20-year-old telephonist and to most people she would have seemed like any other girl going about her daily work in the Stockwell area of Brixton, south-west London.

But not to John Wyatt.

He was a 27-year-old clerk and he was madly in love with her. So much so

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Stockwell area of Brixton. There wasn’t enough room in the new house for John Wyatt, who had to find new lodgings nearby.

Wyatt was unhappy with the new arrangement. He felt that his comfortable world was beginning to fall apart. Even so, every night he went round to Speenham Road to see his beloved.

One a week they played whist, and to make up the foursome Wyatt invited his best friend, Arthur Whellock. The two men usually left at 10.30, and that’s

Julie?” he asked They went back into the living-room and while Florence went upstairs Wyatt said: “I’m worried about Florence. She doesn’t seem to care for me like she used to. Do you think she really loves me?”

Julie had noticed a change in her sister too. Florence was becoming more aggressive. “Well, she does take advantage of you,” she said. “You should stand up to her a bit more.

You’re letting her ride roughshod over you.”

Last Death Sen The “Old” Old that it nearly cost two lives – hers and his.

The fatal romance started in Ferndale Road, Brixton in 1905, when Florence’s sister Julie, who was separated from her husband, invited Florence to come and live at her house.

John Wyatt was already lodging in the house and at first sight of Florence – whoosh! – the blue touch paper was alight and what came next was unstoppable. Within a few days they were engaged to be married. The world was all blue skies and bluebirds of happiness as they made plans for a beautiful future.

Well, not quite. Sister Julie noticed that there was a sharp edge to the lovers’ conversation when they were not billing and cooing. One was always trying to out-smart the other. Wyatt was the difficult one; it seemed as if he was always trying to pick an argument.

Julie, who had had her own fill of romance with her estranged husband, shook her head sadly. Although the two love birds always made up their little quarrels in the end, she didn’t think it was going to work.

Perhaps that was the reason why the two sisters decided to move to a smaller home, No. 1 Speenham Road in the

Wyatt gesticulated and hung his head, looking for a suitable reply. “What really bothers me is the way she kisses me,” he volunteered eventually. “When we say goodnight she doesn’t want to kiss me on the lips. Instead, she turns her cheek formally. It’s hardly romantic.”

Wyatt was looking drawn and pale, and Julie could see he was upset. She softened her tone. “Take no notice of her,” she said. “It will be all right when you’re married and settled down. Come again tomorrow and bring Arthur with you. We’ll play some party games.”

T Miss Florence Wakeling – the victim – was shot in the right eye and right breast

what happened on the night of Friday January 11th, 1907. As the evening’s entertainment ended, Arthur Whellock was escorted to the front door by Julie, and, left alone, Wyatt lingered behind.

“Could I have a word with you,

Speenham Road in Stockwell (pictured in the 1960s) where Florence and her sister lived

he next day was Saturday, and if an evening of party games on Saturday doesn’t sound all that inviting to a modern reader, we should recall that this was Edwardian England, where there was no radio and no TV, and in many places, including Speenham Road, Brixton, no electricity.

The evening started early – at six o’clock. Julie was hoping that things would go well, but she noted glumly that Wyatt was still white and agitated.

Hardly had the frustrated lover sat down than he jumped up again, “I’m clearly not wanted,” he said. “So I’m off.”

But now it was Florence’s turn to complain. “He’s been threatening to hit me,” she said. “He waved his fist in my face.”

Julie said: “Don’t be silly, Flo. I’m sure he didn’t mean it.”

“Well, he can leave if he wants to, and he can take his ring with him. I’d be quite happy not to see him ever again.

For all I care he can throw himself into the Thames.”

A lovers’ tiff isn’t always the end of the affair, but there is an air of finality about it when it is played out in front of other people. That makes it much harder to withdraw hurtful remarks.

John Wyatt got up and left without

John Wyatt couldn’t stand the way his girlfriend kissed him. He was convinced it meant that she didn’t love him – and for that he planned a terrible revenge... another word, but Julie, ever the peacemaker, was determined that this should not be the end of it.

“Go and fetch him back, Arthur,” she told Wyatt’s friend.

John Wyatt (right). The erratic behaviour he displayed reached a crescendo with the purchase and use of a weapon – as pictured in the Illustrated Police News (below)

ntence At Bailey

47

Arthur did as he was told. The two men did not return to the house immediately, but hung about in the street, talking. Eventually Julie went to the window and called to them, “If you don’t come back in here, we’ll come out to you.”

Arthur Whellock shouted back: “Let’s all go to a music hall.”

This was another popular way of passing Saturday night at the beginning of the 20th century, and the two women readily agreed. They started off along the road, two by two, but very quickly Wyatt and Florence fell behind, and began to argue.

Even the music hall performance failed to clear the air between them.

On the way back home they weren’t speaking to each other. The wall of silence continued when they arrived back at Julie’s house. They sat at opposite ends of the room ignoring each other.

The resourceful Arthur suggested that he and Wyatt should go for a pint.

“Just a quick one,” he added. “We’ll be back in half an hour.”

And so they were, and it seemed to do the trick. For a little while, anyway.

An hour after their return, though, Julie later remembered, the tension began to build up very quickly “We were playing whist,” she recalled later. “I noticed Florence had taken off her engagement ring. For just a short moment I left the room, and so did Arthur. We were both in the kitchen when suddenly there was a terrific bang, followed by two more in quick succession.

“Arthur and I raced back to the living-room. What we saw was terrible.

Florence was face-down on the hearthrug in front of the fire. Her head and face were a mass of blood. She was unconscious.”

Florence had been shot twice, in the right eye and the right breast. John Wyatt, standing in the middle of the room, was waving a revolver around.

Arthur ran forward to disarm him.

Wyatt said, “I’m sorry,” and bent down to kiss Florence.

The noise attracted Julie’s landlord and his wife. Arthur gave the landlord the revolver and Wyatt shouted, “She isn’t fit to live!” Then the police arrived.

Wyatt told the officers: “It’s all been going wrong with her. I wrote her a number of letters, but she replied less and less – it was becoming absurdly one-sided. Then she stopped writing.

She told me not to bother to write any more because having to reply was too boring.”

He paused for thought, and shook his head mournfully. “After Christmas there was a complete change in her.”

An ambulance arrived and took Florence off to hospital. She never recovered consciousness and died at 7 a.m. the next day, Sunday.

A 48

rthur Whellock told police he had known Wyatt for four months. His

An illustration of Wyatt and the house where the murder occurred

friend was passionately in love with Florence, although most of the time she didn’t seem interested in him.

“He is a good-natured, well-behaved and modest fellow,” he said. But he recounted a gloomy tale of his friend’s romantic problems.

“When we walked home together the night before the shooting he began crying and saying that Florence wouldn’t kiss him properly,” Arthur recalled. “He was greatly upset. I tried to cheer him up and arranged to meet him next evening outside the Bon Marché office, where he worked.

“Later we met Florence and she completely ignored him. He told me, ‘She doesn’t want me any more. I shall throw myself over the bridge.’ Later he said, ‘I have some laudanum at home and I might take some and kill myself. I am rash enough to do anything.’”

Wyatt was indeed rash enough to do anything. A police investigation revealed that on the morning of the shooting he was planning to kill Florence that same day.

That Saturday he didn’t turn up for work. Instead he left a note for his boss, saying, “I have urgent business elsewhere.”

The urgent business, at 10 o’clock that morning, was to buy a gun licence.

An hour later he bought the murder weapon and 100 cartridges.

That Saturday afternoon he went along to Speenham Road, where the landlady, Mrs. Jamieson, answered the door. She said later, “He wanted to see Julie, Florence’s sister, but I told him that neither of them were in.

“He began talking to me about his difficulties with Florence, and I asked him in for a cup of tea. He said he was planning to go to Portsmouth, where Florence’s parents lived, and talk to them about his problems. He said, ‘I can’t bear the thought of her being with another man.’

“I thought he was suffering from depression. I know that Florence was often cold and indifferent to him at times.”

Arthur Whellock said that when they arrived at Speenham Road on the evening of the murder Wyatt immediately asked Florence why she was wearing her best dress. “He seemed suspicious that she had been out that Saturday afternoon with another man.”

The denouement had all the trappings of Edwardian melodrama.

Arthur said he had no idea that Wyatt was armed that night. He was in the kitchen when the shooting began. “I thought the first gunshot was a gas-bulb blowing. I knew the next two were revolver shots.

“When I rushed into the living-room Wyatt was holding the gun over Florence’s head, as if he was going to fire again. He then turned to me and said, ‘This is a case for the police!’

“I replied, ‘I know!’ Then I went into the street and blew a whistle. When I went back into the house Wyatt tried twice to kiss Florence as she lay dying.”

M

ore evidence of Wyatt’s careful premeditation emerged when he was taken to the police station. He handed two letters, both sealed and King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra at Temple Bar on their way to officially open the new Old Bailey on February 27th, 1907 – the day before Wyatt’s trial began

stamped, to an officer, and asked him to post them for him. One was to his mother, the other to Florence’s mother.

To his own mother he wrote: “By the time you receive this I shall have done a terrible deed – one I have feared for a long time and one I regret having to do. Florrie has at last proved herself so unfaithful that, as her punishment, and because I feel that such people are unfit to exist, I have shot her.

“If all the people which treat others as Florrie has treated me were removed from the world, the world would be purer, happier and better for those left. I do not worry about what happens to me. I expect to be hung.Your affectionate son.”

To Florence’s mother he wrote: “Florrie has become indelicate, lying, unfaithful, unreliable and absolutely deceitful. Such people make only mischief in this world, therefore I have killed her.

She is unfit to live. I deeply regret the pain you will feel. She would have proved worse had I let her live, and she would have done more harm than ever.Yours in deep sorrow.”

The police discovered a bundle of documents containing draft letters to Florence and some finished letters too, which gave deep insight into Wyatt’s mind at the time. He was obsessed with anyone who came close to her – even his friend Arthur, of whom he says to Florence, “I think he is a bit too familiar with you.”

It emerged from the correspondence that Florence had a boyfriend before Wyatt – and that Wyatt was paranoid about that relationship. “How much longer are you going to punish me for the way that other fellow treated you? Are you afraid I shall do the same? Cannot you trust me better than that?”

He goes on: “Why is it that when we

kiss, you turn your face away? As your accepted lover, it is quite reasonable that I should have that privilege Do you suppose, if you allow me to be affectionate to you, that I shall tire of you? I cannot enjoy life as I should, I cannot work and cannot live with this pain always at my heart – you do not realise how much I love you.”

And he goes on and on, endlessly, until all sympathy evaporates and is inevitably transferred to the long-suffering Florence.

One of his last letters is pleading, cajoling, begging, cringing, commanding: “You have made me a very happy man, for did not you say that we are engaged? You must give me all the privileges an engaged man is entitled to.

You must not turn your face away when I kiss you. I must have my kisses in true fashion, as all true lovers should.

“When I come tomorrow and you meet me with a happy, smiling face, let me press my lips to yours, firmly but gently.”

The next letter harks back again to the old boyfriend, who is always close to the surface of his mind, and is curiously reminiscent of the 18th-century novels, written in the style of interrogatory letters, by Samuel Richardson.

“Your manner makes me so very unhappy, and I fear it is because of the caddish way your old lover treated you, that you punish me so unjustly. I feel sure you do not love me, but, dear, if you saw how cruel and unjust it is to me, I should have no cause to complain.

“Are you afraid of me? Are you afraid I should treat you as he did? Cannot you trust me better than that? Do you really think that because you are affectionate to me I should tire of you? Sometimes when I come round to you, you receive me so coldly.

“Since I met you, I know what a good thing a woman’s love is. Let me live in the love I have won. I want to keep it. No harm shall come to you while you let me by your side…”

A Above, Mr. Justice Ridley, illustrated in a contemporary publication in a light-hearted fashiom. Below centre, with the black hood in place as he undertakes his grim duty – sentencing Wyatt to death

ll these letters and many more were put to an exhibit file and went to the “old” Old Bailey, where Wyatt was tried before Mr. Justice Ridley on February 28th, 1907.

Building work on the new Bailey had begun five years earlier, in 1902, with the process of demolishing Newgate Prison. King Edward VII had opened the New Old Bailey Central Criminal Court the day before Wyatt’s trial, but the New Session did not start until after the trial, so Wyatt had to put up with the inconveniences of the old court.

49

When the trial began, prosecutor Sir Charles Matthews pressed for a murder verdict. Even so, he told the jury, he was “greatly moved” by Wyatt’s letters to Florence.

Although the defence had not suggested the prisoner was insane, Sir Charles advised the jury to listen carefully to the evidence of Dr. Thomas Brabant, who had treated Wyatt’s father, suffering from “delusions and

suspicions” about his office managers that were totally unfounded.

The court was told that Wyatt senior eventually gave up his pensionable job at the Royal Mail because of his mental illness.

The jury appeared to take the hint. They retired to find Wyatt guilty of murder, but added a strong recommendation to mercy on the grounds of “hereditary taint.”

MARCH

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Fortunate to be reprieved and spared the noose (top), Wyatt spent the next 15 years in prison before his release (below) in 1922

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The judge didn’t like this at all. He showed his disagreement by asking irritably, “Do you all agree with this?”

The foreman said they did, and the judge had to accept it.

The case was forwarded to the Home Office and preparations were made to hang Wyatt at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, March 19th, at Wandsworth Prison. But even while that was happening a committee of civil servants was meeting to discuss the case. There were fears about Wyatt’s state of mind, and they must have been very real, for in those Edwardian days the Home Office rarely bothered itself about jury recommendations for mercy.

Despite no real evidence being presented to the committee it was decided that Wyatt was suffering from diminished responsibility when he killed Florence and that he should therefore be spared execution.

Instead, he was given a minimum 15-year life sentence, and was released in February 1922, after exactly that period. So the last death sentence at the “old” Old Bailey was never in fact carried out.

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