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TRUE CRIME Detective Monthly

He Was A Cop-Killer, Yes...But

DID THEY EXECUTE A SAINT?

JULY 2021

LONDON’S MOST DANGEROUS JOB...

GUARDING THE ENEMIES OF THE KRAYS Terrible Human Cost of Sex Pervert’s Murder Spree

LOUISE WAS McGURN’S ALIBI BUT WAS HE AT GANGLAND MASSACRE?

MURDER IN THE HEAT OF PASSION Fleck of green paint caught this killer

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CONTENTS JULY 2021 CASES FROM BRITAIN...

22 GANGLAND CONFIDENTIAL: LOUISE WAS McGURN’S ALIBI

The inside story of the Krays’ bid to silence their enemies by any means at their disposal, told by undercover cop Jo Lavery

Louise May Rolfe had been a theatrical performer at a haunt frequented by the Capone gang.

So was she putting on an act when she told cops that Jack “Machine-Gun” McGurn was with her when the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre took place?

4 GUARDING THE ENEMIES OF THE KRAYS

18 MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE?: “SEVEN REASONS WHY MY HUSBAND SHOULDN’T BE HANGED”

AND FROM THE REST OF THE WORLD...

36 MURDER THE FRENCH WAY: DID THEY EXECUTE A SAINT?

The murder of Hampshire teenager John Thompson on Field Meadow outside Alton shocked local people. Could they be sure, though, that the suspect who ended up in the dock was actually the 15-year-old’s killer?

He was sentenced to death for the murder of police officer Jean Vergne. But Jacques Fesch’s religious conversion and profound regret about his crime made a case for beatification

31 THE DEFENCE RESTS, PART SEVEN: “THE SADDEST STORY I HAVE EVER HEARD”

42 HUSBAND “PUSHED PREGNANT WIFE OFF CLIFF TOP” Semra Aysal appeared to be happy in the photographs taken by her husband Hakan from the cliff tops above Butterfly Valley in Fethiye. Tragically there would be no more sightseeing for the 32-year-old from Izmir that day, or ever again...

Sir Edward Marshall Hall came to the defence of foreigners and Brits alike during his First World War days in court. Could he save a girl from hard labour and deportation?

45 ASK TC: MURDER IN THE HEAT OF PASSION

FROM THE USA...

When 16-year-old Gaetane Bouchard went missing from the Canadian city of Edmundston, her family feared the worst.

Could a young American she had dated help the police with their enquiries?

12 TERRIBLE HUMAN COST OF SEX PERVERT’S MURDER SPREE For years Kenneth Rasmuson, a violent sexual predator, evaded justice for the murders of two young boys in California. DNA evidence finally put him in the frame but the lives of the victims’ relatives were never the same again Search “True Crime Library”

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O LAVERY was part of an elite squad tasked with guarding the men and women about to bring down the notorious Krays. Here’s his story...

J S

ERGEANT Bert Trevette, aide to Chief Superintendent Leonard “Nipper” Read, was a man guaranteed to stay calm in any crisis.

Dramas and disasters, triumphs and tragedies were all one to Bert. But just for once there was a certain urgency in his voice as he said: “Your job will be to guard the only people who can bring down the Krays.

You will be with them twenty-four hours a day. It won’t be enough just to keep them safe. They must feel safe too. Otherwise they’ll never find the courage to walk into the Old Bailey.”

It was May 1968. The Twins, Ronnie and Reggie Kray, and many of their top henchmen had been arrested in a dawn raid. And I was part of a hand-picked squad – later to be known as “The Untouchables” – chosen to guard the witnesses.

For more than a decade the Krays had operated a reign of terror throughout the East End of London.

And now Ronnie’s boast that “no one will ever dare to bear witness against us” was about to be put to the test.

Nipper Read had patiently infiltrated the ranks of what the Twins liked to call “The Firm” and had produced a band of witnesses strong enough to bring down the Bank of England – just so long as we could convince them that they were now safe.

They included Harry Hopwood (family friend of the Krays), Leslie Payne (the Twins’ financial wizard), Ronald Hart (the Twins’ cousin), Billy Exley (ex-boxer and by then a dying man), Frank Teale (East End hard man), Liza (nightclub hostess from Winstons), Mrs. X (the barmaid who’d seen the shooting of George Cornell), John “Scotch Jack” Dickson (Ronnie’s driver and bodyguard) and eventually “Big Albert” Donoghue (the Krays’ lieutenant).

4 truecrime

We were to operate in pairs, spending several weeks with one witness before moving on to another, and never leaving any of them unguarded.

Harry Hopwood (known variously as Harry the Jew and Hersh) and his wife Ivy were to become my main concern, for they were very much key witnesses. Harry’s testimony on its own was probably strong enough to bring down the Twins.

It centred around events which had taken place in the early hours of October 29th, 1967.

There had been a knock on Harry’s door and he’d opened it to find Ronnie and Reggie Kray standing there, covered in blood.

Nodding at his brother, Ronnie said, “He’s just killed Jack the Hat.” They took off their clothes, climbed into the bath and scrubbed themselves in a bid to wash away the blood. Not easy.

It’s nasty, sticky stuff that clings to the hair and gets under fingernails.

They then changed into fresh clothes brought hastily from their aunt’s house in Vallance Road. They washed their jewellery and watches and burned their paper money.

Ronnie Hart and Tony Bender had also come to the flat, bringing the gun and the knife used in the killing of Jack “The Hat” McVitie.

Hopwood had gone with Hart to the local canal and pitched them in. The Twins’ bloodstained clothing had been put in a suitcase, then taken away to be burnt by one of Harry’s relatives.

So Harry, and possibly Ivy, could have been charged as accessories to murder. But they were small fry and the Crown preferred to make a deal, using them as witnesses to bring down the real villains of the piece.

We had moved the Hopwoods from their home to a police safe house, a two-bedroom flat above a

LONDON’S M row of shops in Southgate, North London.

I found them sitting side by side on the sofa, a couple of frightened little sparrows. Harry was a smaller edition of Robert de Niro. Ivy too was dark and small, a vivacious lady who had doubtless turned a few heads.

We shook hands and Ivy hustled off to make tea.

Harry drew me aside. “Have you got a shooter?” he asked.

I smiled. “You’ve been watching too much television,” I told him. He wasn’t to be distracted. “No shooter?” he asked.

“No shooter,” I confirmed.

He looked shocked.

“Well, how the hell are you going to protect us without a gun? You’re not dealing with Boy Scouts, you know. If the Firm comes visiting, they’ll have guns in their hands.”

I shrugged. “Look at it this way,” I said. “If they’re going to shoot you, they’ll have to shoot me first.”

It didn’t seem to cheer him up all that much.

And he was, of course, quite right. The British Police have always taken great pride in the fact that their officers are normally Tea with the Krays in their East End home at the height of their power. Below, as young amateur boxers with their mum Violet

unarmed. But there’s no logic in it and – in the case of bodyguarding – little morality.

Mind you, there are makeshift weapons in every home. I’d already noted a short-handled poker and a

MOST DANGEROUS JOB...

GUARDING THE ENEMIES OF THE KRAYS The inside story of the Krays’ bid to silence their enemies by any means at their disposal...terror, torture, mayhem and murder down the street, crouched low over the wheel with the doors swinging madly.

If there were any shots, I never heard them. I was just concentrating on getting round the next bend.

My initial task with the

solid block of lead, the kind you once found in hot-metal printing works. But I would still have been happier with a gun.

One of the secrets of dealing with trouble is to make the first move before the other fellow has time to think. He who moves first usually wins. That tenet saved my life in Ireland a few years later.

It was at a time when the Troubles were at their worst. Members of the security forces were being kidnapped with inevitable consequences...a kangaroo court, a bullet in the head and a body found on some lonely road the following

day.

As an Irishman working on special assignment, I had no illusions about my own fate once snatched... and whatever happened, I’d promised myself that I’d never be taken.

Then one night as I stopped my car on a Dublin street, two men opened the driver’s and passenger’s doors. There were guns in their hands and the leader’s voice was calm enough as he said, “Out you get, Jack.”

The engine was still running, clutch down, gear lever in. “Sure,” I said just as calmly, and in that same split second I hit the accelerator...zig-zagging

Recalled by undercover cop Jo Lavery (above), with Edward T. Hart

Hopwoods was to ease away some of the fear. They were terrified. Harry had been close enough to the Kray family not to have any illusions. He had been the best man at the wedding of Charles and Violet

(the Twins’ parents) and Charles’s closest friend.

Like Charles, he had been a knocker on doors, a totter...what Ronnie called “a nuisancer,” buying and selling gold and silver.

When the Twins were small they’d frequently ridden on Harry’s cart.

During the war he’d deserted from the army, as had Charles; and he’d been largely responsible for getting Vallance Road known as “Deserters’ Corner.”

When the Twins decided to escape from military prison, it had been Harry who’d stolen a van and left it just outside the gates.

He knew them well enough to know just how vicious they could be.

The stories were legion.

He had heard how Lennie Hamilton had been tied in a chair and then branded across each cheek by Ronnie with a red-hot iron...how a harmless old boxer called Joe had greeted Ronnie by saying, “You’re putting on a bit of weight, Ron,” and then been taken into the washroom. They found Joe 10 minutes later with “half his face upon the floor.” truecrime 5

They needed 70 stitches to put his face back together again.

These were little more than whimsical acts to satisfy Ronnie’s sadism. Just what kind of punishment the Twins would hand out for betrayal didn’t bear thinking about. We knew that Ronnie had issued orders to his followers on the outside.

Everyone who had ever been hurt by the Krays must receive a visit just to remind them what would happen to anyone who talked.

But it wasn’t just the Krays that Harry and Ivy were scared of. They were scared about us too. It was an open secret that the Krays had bent coppers on their payroll. Just a scattering of the total force, but it had put doubts into too many minds. And if one of us was bent – just one – Harry would have no chance. The Krays would be tipped off.

On one occasion Harry had said to me, “You don’t look much like a copper, Jo.” Just to keep the chat going, I’d replied, “Well, what do I look like?”

“A villain,” said Harry.

“That’s what you look like.

Compared to you, some of the Firm have the faces of choirboys.”

I knew what he meant.

I had once been tagged as “Attila” (by some of the ungodly) and the name had stuck. Nature had given me the kind of face designed more to frighten than

Harry knew the Krays well enough to know just how vicious they could be. The stories were legion charm.

The only instructions I gave to the Hopwoods was that they must never open the door. If there was a knock they must disappear into the bedroom and let me open up.

The first week passed by uneventfully. But the two of them were getting a hunted, jumpy look, prisoners in their own home.

Over-disciplined guarding can do that to you. So I started taking them out to the shops, feeling that the 6 truecrime

chances of them running into anyone they knew were remote. But that wasn’t enough for Harry.

He approached me diffidently. “Ivy misses the boozers,” he said, “the Saturday night knees-up.”

“Okay,” I said, “but we stay out of the East End. And if anything happens, you both do what I say instantly, no arguments.

Otherwise I can’t protect you.”

They both agreed, but I still didn’t like the situation.

On the law of averages, it seemed inevitable that they’d bump into someone.

Initially it all went smoothly enough. Ginger and Fred had nothing on Ivy and Harry. Ivy loved the “Knees-up Mother Brown” stuff.

Many times Ivy and Harry

“Some eaters you’ve got there,” commented Bert Trevette, but he was smiling as he said it.

When trouble came, it arrived in an unexpected way. An erstwhile friend of Jack the Hat spotted Harry one night in a pub and picked on him partly because he was a known associate of the Krays and partly because he was small.

The friend whom we’ll call Alf was deeply tanned, swarthy with lank black hair hanging down to his collar. He was harmless enough when sober but – like McVitie – a real handful when drunk. Already there was space all around him.

“How’s that fat poof Ronnie?” he asked.

Harry didn’t answer, just stared into his glass.

“With luck they’ll top the slag,” said Alf. Again Harry said nothing.

Alf came up alongside him.

“I’m talking to you, you little...” he said. He took Harry’s glass and poured the lager over his head.

Harry lacked nothing in gameness. He was just about

Jack “The Hat” McVitie and the house in Stoke Newington where he was brutally murdered

would dance the night away and wind up having breakfast in the club the following morning. I was being given £150 a week to feed and entertain them, but for such big spenders this was never enough and I was continually having to draw more. Nobody minded that, but there was a snag.

With the force afflicted by paperwork, I had to produce receipts for every penny spent, and you could hardly ask a publican to give you a receipt without attracting some attention.

Harry and I solved this by going round the supermarkets and picking up other people’s discarded receipts which would frequently tot up to £300 a week.

to throw a punch when I grabbed him and steered him outside, protesting every foot of the way.

Alf followed. “Push off,” he said to me (although not exactly in those words).

“And mind your own business.”

He weighed about 15 stone and may well have been a hard case, but I didn’t give him the chance to prove it. While he was still talking I caught him with a left hook. So that he wouldn’t feel the pain, I crossed the right.

We rolled Alf neatly up against the wall of the pub

to make sure no one tripped over him, and left hurriedly.

The arrival of the local constabulary would have been an embarrassment.

Harry seemed impressed.

“We certainly showed that geezer,” he said, happy enough to share the pronoun.

A few days later Harry decided he wanted to go knocking on doors again. It appeared harmless enough, so I agreed on the condition that I went with him.

Hertfordshire seemed a safe place to begin.

While Harry knocked on doors, enquiring whether residents had any gold or silver they wished to sell, I watched discreetly – or so I thought – from the street.

Apparently I wasn’t discreet enough. After only a couple of hours a police car pulled up alongside me.

A seasoned old beat-style bobby climbed out and said, “We’ve had calls about the two of you. Do you mind telling me what you’re up to?”

“Oh, it’s all right,” I said, nodding towards Harry.

“He’s been a totter all his life.”

But it wasn’t Harry they were worried about. It was me. “And how about you,” asked the bobby, “why does he need you?”

“I’ve got the car,” I said.

“When he buys, I collect.”

I could tell by his expression that he wasn’t entirely happy. Totters normally work solo. A pair of totters can be bad news.

“Why don’t you do us both a favour,” he said, “and move back to London?”

We did better than that.

We moved to another town and Harry was miffed. “I told you,” he said, “that you look too much like a villain.

You’ll never be any good for this sort of work.”

I could, of course, have produced my warrant card and explained that I was guarding Harry and why. But security on this operation was so tight that we didn’t dare discuss it with anyone – not even our wives.

That night we had a party in Harry’s flat and danced to records from the 40s with the indefatigable Ivy partnering us one by one.

Around 2 o’clock there was a bang on the door and a gruff voice saying, “Open

up. Let me in.”

I switched off the record player and opened the door on its chain. Quite subconsciously I’d picked up the short poker and concealed it down the back of my arm.

There was a big fellow standing on the landing, clearly the worse for drink.

“I want to come in,” he said.

I recognised him as being one of the drivers on the nearby cab rank.

“It’s a private party, chum,” I said and took him back down the stairs.

At the foot of the stairs, he paused. “Any birds up there?” he asked.

“Only one,” I said.

Suddenly he smiled.

All was forgiven. “Now I understand, mate,” he said. “Only one to share out between you. No wonder you don’t want any gatecrashers.”

I wondered whether Ivy would be flattered. I decided not to tell her. It seemed wiser that way.

Although most of my days were spent keeping the Hopwoods free from harm, I also had spells guarding the family of “Big Albert” Donoghue and Leslie Payne.

Two Irishmen, and to me the most interesting characters in the entire Kray saga.

Donoghue, a big craggy man, was the hardest villain I ever met; and Payne, cultivated and charming, the cleverest.

Donoghue had been an armed robber, specialising in payrolls. Although he carried a gun, he rarely had to use it. That cold, hard face was usually menace enough.

Nothing seemed to scare him. Certainly the Twins didn’t. The first contact came after Ronnie had branded Lennie Hamilton, a fringe member of Donoghue’s team, with that red-hot iron.

Donoghue went to visit the Twins at their home in Vallance Road. He had a gun tucked into the waistband of his trousers and made no attempt to hide it.

There were no empty threats, just questions to be answered. Donoghue was quiet and calm and deadly.

No one had ever challenged the Twins in their lair before.

They knew that their lives were in danger, so they were polite. They talked peace. They explained that

river. Then getting to Reggie before he heard about the death of his twin.

He was still considering ways when the gang were arrested in that synchronised dawn swoop. Donoghue was

Left, possibly the Twins’ most famous pose.

Above, Reggie with actress Barbara Windsor, and below, Ronnie with Lord Boothby

Hamilton was a friend of theirs who had stepped out of line and been punished as a consequence. They hadn’t known that Hamilton was part of Donoghue’s team. It was nothing personal.

The parting was peaceful.

But Ronnie, obsessed with plots, saw Big Albert as a threat to his empire. So one night when Donoghue was leaning against the bar in the Crown and Anchor, just off Vallance Road, Reggie shot him in the leg.

Donoghue turned to see Reggie pulling back the hammer for another shot.

And even with the first bullet lodged in his leg, he began to walk towards him.

It was Ronnie who stepped between them.

Donoghue, true to the gangland code, told the police that he’d been shot from a passing car, gunman unknown. He was rewarded by being taken into the Firm and given a regular wage.

Charlie Kray, older and wiser than his brothers, had urged, “Don’t trust him.

He’ll never forgive you for the shooting. He’ll work for you, but he’ll always be an enemy.”

The Twins didn’t listen.

To them brutal initiations were part of the game.

They liked their henchmen to feel intimidated. They understood fear. But

they didn’t understand Donoghue.

He became their lieutenant and although nothing showed on that stone face of his, he hadn’t forgotten or forgiven. He still limped and every time the cold winds blew, he remembered.

He regarded the Twins with total contempt.

Although a breaker of legs, he looked upon violence purely as a matter of business. He despised sadism and was angered by what he regarded as the unnecessary murders of George Cornell and Jack the Hat. He had calmly considered ways of killing the Twins.

Taking Ronnie for a one-way ride through the Rotherhithe Tunnel and dumping his body in some secluded place south of the

picked up too and placed in a difficult position. He had never informed on anyone before, but he had no cause for loyalty. So the thought of making a deal with Nipper was tempting.

The decision was taken out of his hands during a meeting set up in Brixton Prison. Ronnie told him, “Don’t bother with notes, Albert. What we’re going to do is this. Scotch Jack (Jack Dickson) is going to hold up his hands for Cornell. Young Ronnie (Ronnie Hart) is going to hold up his hands for Jack the Hat. We want you to hold up your hands for Mitchell. And we’ll take all the violence and fraud.”

Donoghue could scarcely believe what he’d just heard.

As it sank in he looked at Ronnie.

“No,” he said. That single truecrime 7

love at all for the police, and conversation became impossible. Any question would be answered by a monosyllable.

I would drive her and the children down to Maidstone Jail to see Albert and barely a word would pass her lips during the entire journey.

Maybe this was just as well, for I would spend most of those trips watching the kids in the rear-view mirror.

They were apt to treat the back seat of the Cortina like an adventure playground.

We were keeping a discreet eye on Donoghue just to make sure that some henchman of the Twins didn’t make a move. But at Maidstone he didn’t really need any protection. In the world of violent men, there is a pecking order and it was Big Albert the others stepped carefully around. uarding key witnesses GTwins lined up to give the Kray their come-uppance

Detective Chief Superintendent Leonard “Nipper” Read who was determined to bring down the Firm

word ended all the pretence.

From that moment on, Donoghue knew that his life was in danger and so too were those of his wife and three children.

A week later he requested a secret meeting with Nipper Read. No promises were made, but a deal was set up.

Donoghue was moved to Birmingham. Nipper let it be known that he was being moved as punishment for refusing to co-operate with the police. London villains would normally prefer to be in a London jail so that their families could visit them more easily.

At the same time we moved Donoghue’s wife and three children into a safe house in Peckham and mounted a guard over them. It wasn’t easy.

Mrs. Donoghue had no 8 truecrime

meant looking after people like Leslie Payne. He knew more about Ronnie and Reggie’s wheelings and dealings than even the Twins themselves. Nobody could match his knowledge because he’d been the Krays’ financial wizard, making fortunes for the Twins by setting up long-term frauds.

He had all the charm of the Irish and was one of life’s oddities: a man who could have excelled in legitimate business, but who preferred to swim in muddied and dangerous waters.

Outwardly he reminded me of the actor Leslie Phillips. He was suave, sophisticated, highly intelligent, whimsical and a strange bedmate for the Twins. A minnow pitched in with the sharks.

But it wasn’t so. He was contemptuous of his bosses and unafraid: always convinced, I think, that he could control them with his superior mind. And to some extent he may have been right. The Twins stood in awe of educated, intelligent men because they had so little of this themselves.

Each morning he’d greet me with “Hello, Jo,” and the “Jo” would become a much longer word when rolled off the tongue of Leslie Payne.

I’d drive him around the London streets and for the first half-mile he’d be

watching, checking that we hadn’t picked up a tail. Then reassured, he’d settle back in his seat and talk in that lazy, slightly mocking way of his.

Once when discussing the Twins I’d said, “A scary pair.”

He’d smiled slightly and said nothing.

“But they don’t scare you?” I asked.

“No, I don’t fear them,” he said. “Maybe they ought to fear me.”

Another time he explained why he’d found it impossible to work with Ronnie and Reggie. “They were never content just to make money,” he said. “Violence would always get in the way of business. At heart they were just a couple of thugs.

“Hurting people gave them too much pleasure.”

He let the silence drag out. “I’ve never liked violence,” he added with a smile, “particularly when it’s directed against me.”

“They were never content just to make money. Violence would always get in the way of business. At heart they were just a couple of thugs” But although Payne may have disapproved of violence, he was a man who if pushed could have become very dangerous indeed.

Scotland Yard’s “Nipper” Read, who lived in a violent world, understood this. That was why when Payne first wanted to meet him Nipper suspected a trap. He went to the meeting armed, having first planted two undercover officers at the meeting place, similarly equipped. For underneath the easy-going charm of Leslie Payne there was a hard, streetwise man who carried a gun.

We knew this, and under the circumstances turned a blind eye. For having broken away from the Krays, Payne was in considerable danger.

The Twins had already made one attempt on his life, giving Jack “The Hat” McVitie a down-payment of £100 with the promise of

£400 more once the job was done.

McVitie got himself into the mood by taking a lethal mix of booze and Black Bombers. Then driven by the boxer Billy Exley and armed with a shotgun, he had gone to Payne’s house.

The shotgun had been concealed under a long coat which was draped around McVitie’s shoulders, Doc Holliday style. The door had been opened by Payne’s wife Mavis, who said that her husband was not home.

McVitie thanked her and departed...gratefully, I suspect. For the effect of the Black Bombers was wearing off and, despite his hard man reputation, he was no murderer.

He never tried again and he never returned Ronnie’s £100. That failure coupled with two moments of drunken foolishness cost him his life.

If you ever feel tempted to look upon the Twins as Robin Hoods of the East End, I suggest that you first read the transcript of the McVitie murder trial...the gruesome saga of how the Krays lured this pathetic, almost comical old villain to a supposed party. And then slashed and stabbed him to death before finally pinning him to the floor with a knife driven straight through his throat. By then the walls were covered in blood from floor to ceiling.

One of the more amusing incidents in Kray-Payne history came when they decided to con the master con-man himself. The plan, supposedly dreamed up

by Ronnie, was first to get Payne involved in a criminal act, then to have him arrested and jailed.

So two men approached Payne with an invitation to buy $200,000-worth of forged banknotes at a very tempting price. Sensing that this was a trap, he showed interest, but immediately tipped off Nipper Read.

So when men walked into the lobby of the Hilton Hotel carrying a briefcase filled with dodgy notes, the place was knee-deep in plainclothes officers.

Payne was watching from the distant bar, but in no hurry to join them. He stayed there until the police swooped and arrested the two men. Then to cover his

“No,” he said, “there never seemed any point.”

It was the reply of a man who liked to gain an edge by being underrated.

He was by any standards a mysterious man. He would never, for instance, allow us in his house, yet logically this was the position from which we could best protect him. Instead we had to sit outside in an unmarked car and that can be a cold job on a long winter’s night.

One night, with snow covering the car, my partner and I decided to slip down to the local pub for a brandy to warm us up.

We closed the doors quietly and pussyfooted down like thieves in the night. Twenty minutes later we returned a lot warmer, a lot happier and almost immediately the police The Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel where George Cornell (below right) was shot in cold blood.

Below, the bloodstained floor of the bar

tracks he rang the wife of one of the men and asked her whether she knew why her husband was late. She said that he was definitely on the way, and to be patient.

Payne told me the story, saying drily, “I reckoned I’d have a long wait.”

I used to try to figure out where he was carrying his gun. I think it was normally in a shoulder holster, but his suits were so beautifully

designed – possibly with the gun in mind – that it was hard to spot a bulge.

I once asked him whether he’d ever fired a gun in anger.

“Not since the war,” he said.

I probed a little deeper and discovered that as a

sergeant he’d led a crack commando unit. During the invasion of Italy they had operated at night behind enemy lines, so maybe it wasn’t surprising that the Krays failed to scare him.

I asked, “Did you ever tell the Twins about the commandos?”

phone rang. It was a call from Tintagel House. Payne had rung to say he’d been left unguarded.

Another mystery. Most mornings he would come strolling over to me and say, “Do me a favour, Jo, and give me a lift.”

I’d have delivered him safely to any address he cared to name. That was my job. But that wasn’t the way Leslie Payne played the game. Once away from his home without a tail, he felt secure. Invariably we’d head into the West End and then he’d insist upon being dropped beside a tube station or taxi rank.

Destination unknown.

A mysterious man indeed.

The winter of 1968 came early. By mid-October the winds were icy cold and so

was the rain. In their prison cells the Krays and their henchmen were aware of the chill world outside. They were even more conscious of the fact that their trial date, January 7th, 1969, was less than three months away.

The Twins’ confidence was fading. Anger and arrogance had given way to desperation and something very close to madness.

We had been tipped off that a £50,000 contract lay on the combined heads of Nipper Read and Leslie Payne, and that several key witnesses were to be “stopped at all costs.”

The streetwise Nipper was neither surprised nor dismayed. Knowing the Krays, he had expected nothing less. But he inspected the underside of his car each morning before turning the ignition key and constantly varied his route to work.

Leslie Payne seemed mildly amused by the contract.

“They’re penny-pinching,” he said.

And nothing showed on the stony face of Albert Donoghue, the Krays’

lieutenant-turned-informer.

But for Harry Hopwood, former family friend of the Krays, the situation was still a nightmare. He wasn’t all that worried about gang members finding him in his current hideaway. With me alongside, he was beginning to feel secure. It was the prospect of coming face to face with the Twins at the Old Bailey that terrified him, and as that day approached, truecrime 9

so the terror grew.

“You’ll be with me, won’t you, Jo?” he’d ask over and over again.

And I’d tell him, “Every step along the way, Harry.

We’re a team, you and I. So stop worrying.”

But he still fretted and the bad dreams still came. To keep him happy I let him live as normal a life as possible although I knew visits to pubs put us at risk.

One night I was picking up the drinks from the bar when I spotted a man in conversation with Harry. He was a Harry lookalike, hair parted down the middle, Brilliantined, a dandy with a style that had gone out of fashion 20 years earlier.

Although Harry had his back to me I could tell by his body language that he wasn’t enjoying the conversation.

I walked across, a glass in either hand. “Can I get your friend a drink?” I asked Harry.

The “friend” looked startled for a moment and then said hastily, “No thanks, guv. I was just going.” Then he quickly departed.

Harry was ashen.

“Trouble?” I asked.

Harry nodded. “Let’s drink up and go,” he said.

“I’ll tell you later.”

We came out of the pub and as always I looked around to make sure we weren’t being followed.We walked in silence for a while.

Then I said, “Time to tell me, Harry.”

He shrugged. “That was my cousin with a message from Ronnie.

“He’s heard a rumour that I’ve been talking to you lot.

If it’s true, he says he’ll find me, and Ivy.” Then after a pause he said, “I’m scared, Jo.” “I don’t blame you,” I said. “But just remember this: anyone who wants to get to you will have to get past me first. And you’re not alone any more. You’ve got an army out there and they’re all wearing blue.

When this is all over, we can give you and Ivy fresh identities. It could be the start of a new life for the two of you, and a better one.”

Harry was a ducker and a diver and certainly no angel.

But he was a likeable little villain and I’d grown quite fond of him. There was no real harm in Harry and definitely no cruelty. That 10 truecrime

was the quality he deplored most in Ronnie Kray.

He told me, “Ronnie was always a cruel little bastard, right from the start. Hurting people gives him pleasure.

I’ve seen him slice people’s faces apart just for the sake of cutting, and they’ll stand there and let him do it because they’re too terrified to resist.”

We were constantly using different pubs. But London pubs have a bush telegraph system all their own, and three weeks later the cousin reappeared.

“Don’t look at the faces in the dock.

Just look at the jury when you answer counsel...and keep thinking about that big drink we’re going to enjoy” This time he was with a young tough who clearly fancied his chances. He was wearing a black open-neck shirt, a gold chain around his neck, tailored trousers held up by a broad belt, silver buckle and a suede leather jacket. He had gold rings on each finger of his right hand with flat bands. They may have been simply decorative.

They may also have served as knuckledusters. He walked the way young toughs like to, half-roll, half-swagger.

I saw the cousin point us out to him and then they stayed at the far end of the bar in semi-shadows, heads down. It was this desire not to be seen that gave them away.

I suspected that the young buck was planning to attack Harry once we left the pub or to follow us back to the flat, which was only half a mile away. So I said to Harry, “Don’t turn your head to look. But your cousin’s at the far end of the bar with some would-be tough guy. So we’re going to drink up and leave quite casually. Once in the street, we’ll walk away from the flat.

Then just leave the rest to me.”

It’s difficult to shadow someone who knows he’s being followed, and this fellow was an amateur. Even

on a dark street I could spot him running in fits and starts, trying to hide behind parked cars. We turned into an even darker street and I said to Harry, “I’m going to leave you for a moment.

So just walk on at the same pace. Don’t hurry.”

I stepped sideways into a shop doorway and waited for my tough young friend. I heard his feet shuffling along the pavement and then as he came alongside I said, “Got a light, mate?”

As he turned his head I smacked him, catching him as he fell. I went through his pockets, taking away a knife and a knuckleduster with spikes. There wasn’t any identification. I propped him up in a sitting position against the shop door. Then I caught up with Harry.

“You were quick,” he said.

“He was young,” I replied.

Harry shrugged. “He should have stayed in bed.”

We moved on in silence for a while and then Harry said, “Jesus Christ, was I glad to see you!”

Irishmen “Big Albert” Donoghue (above) and Leslie Payne (right), two of the most interesting characters in the entire Kray saga

Approaches to Albert Donoghue were more devious. One day during prison visiting hours, his mother was handed a pie by a blonde woman who said, “I’ve brought this dinner up for Reggie, but he doesn’t want it. So would you like to take it to Albert?”

Donoghue declined the offer and to this day remains

convinced that the pie was poisoned.

He had always been confident that he could look after himself. The safety of his wife and children was his sole concern, so he wasn’t happy when a woman friend of Reggie offered to take the Donoghue baby away on holiday. It was presumably intended as a warning.

Albert told his wife, “Keep an eye on that baby.

Don’t let anybody take him anywhere.”

But for the Krays, Leslie Payne had always been the main target. And time after time he had outwitted them.

At one stage they were planning to blow him up.

A Kray henchman went to Scotland and bought 36 sticks of dynamite, enough to demolish an entire street.

Payne, with his own network of informers, knew about this in advance and tipped off the police.

“With the result,” as he drily put it, “that the dynamite stayed in Scotland, and so did the henchman!”

Another time Payne arrived at Heathrow to be greeted by a Kray associate and an imported Mafia gunman. The intention had been to invite Payne to take a car ride “to discuss

matters.” In all probability, a one-way ride!

But once again Payne had outguessed them. He had arrived with friends of his own – two Corsicans far more deadly than the American who very sensibly flew back to New York the same day.

The £50,000 contract on Nipper Read and Payne had been picked up by another Mafia hit-man known as Junior. Like Ronnie, he was homosexual and had a black panther tattoed on his arm.

proud of him.

He said, “My doorbell rang at between one and two a.m. I got out of bed and opened the door to find the Twins, Ronnie and Reggie Kray, standing there covered in blood.”

“What happened then?” prompted Kenneth Jones, the prosecuting counsel.

“Ronnie said, ‘Reggie’s just killed Jack the Hat.’ And then they asked whether they could come in and wash.”

He went on to describe

The Old Bailey where the Twins went on trial in January 1969

This time we’d been tipped off by Interpol. Junior was met at Shannon Airport by a contingent of the Garda, taken to a bare room and given an ultimatum. He could have an indefinite stay in an Irish prison or return to his native land. He was on the next flight home.

I don’t believe Harry Hopwood slept at all on the night preceding the trial.

In the morning he looked terrible. Haggard, with dark rings under his eyes.

“Come on, Harry,” I said, jollying him along, “you’re going to be a star today.”

“You’ll stay with me, won’t you, Jo?” he asked for what must have been the hundredth time.

“Of course I will,” I said, “every step of the way. And afterwards we’ll go off and have the best drink you’ve ever had.”

“I wouldn’t mind one before,” he said.

“We’ll do that too,” I promised. “Just so long as we don’t send you legless into court.”

He dressed like a man going to his wedding, diamond stickpin in his tie, suit brushed, shirt ironed,

shoes shining and not a hair out of place.

On the way to the Old Bailey I kept him talking, not giving him the chance to dwell on the ordeal ahead. I bought him a double brandy and gave him one final tip.

“Don’t look at the faces in the dock,” I said. “Just look at the jury when you answer counsel...and keep thinking about that big drink we’re going to enjoy.”

He took that advice and steadfastly refused to look at the Twins. Reggie, calm and composed, just stared at him and said nothing. But Ronnie, ever the frightener, growled at him as he walked towards the witness-box, “You’re letting us down, Harry. We won’t forget.” And then he mouthed silently, “We’ll find you.”

Harry’s voice was so low when he was being sworn in that it could barely be heard.

For one terrible moment I thought he was about to crack under the pressure.

But when he was invited to tell the court about what he remembered on the night of McVitie’s murder, his voice came through loud and clear...and suddenly I was

how the Twins had got into the bath and scrubbed themselves in a bid to wash away the blood, how they’d burnt their paper money and put on some clean clothes which had been hastily fetched from their aunt’s house in Vallance Road.

That testimony alone would probably have been enough to convict the Krays of murder. The smallness of Harry coupled with his age gave the words an added ring of truth.

Afterwards we had that promised drink in a dimly-lit wine bar I knew just on the fringes of Fleet Street.

A man in the next booth had come in with a copy of the Evening Standard fresh from the press. He was reading aloud to his friends the account of the Twins covered in blood.

Harry, feeling the first onset of stardom, turned to me. “Shall I tell them?” he said.

I put my hand on his shoulder. “That wouldn’t be all that smart, Harry,” I said.

“Let’s just drink and enjoy.”

And that’s what we did.

In 1969, after the Twins had been jailed for at least 30 years apiece, their gang disbanded. The Untouchables – as we

bodyguards had become known – broke up too and returned to more normal police duties, much to the relief of our wives and girlfriends.

Leslie Payne, one-time commando, one-time financial fixer for the Krays, decided to walk quieter paths.

Harry Hopwood in the fullness of time died peacefully enough.

Only one of the men I guarded, Big Albert Donoghue, was left with a story to tell. He wrote a book, The Krays’

Above, Reggie Kray’s hearse. Below, Ronnie’s funeral cortège

Lieutenant, which is still available from Amazon and well worth a read.

Editor’s note: Ronnie Kray remained in Broadmoor until his death on March 17th, 1996, while Reggie was released on compassionate grounds in August 2000, eight weeks before his death from cancer on October 1st that year. truecrime 11

TERRIBLE HUMAN COST OF SEX PERVERT’S MURDER SPREE He’s a violent sexual predator who managed to get away with murder twice, his heinous actions ruining many other lives too.

Now, justice has finally caught up with Kenneth Rasmuson

B

OB AND Connie Vargo still live in the house where life changed forever one summer afternoon in a quiet neighbourhood of Anaheim, California, in 1981.

It was two days before July 4th celebrations at nearby Disneyland, and their six-year-old son “Jeffy” had cycled off on his brand-new bike to buy fireworks for the family’s party.

He was last seen around 5.30 p.m., and when he didn’t return for supper Bob and Connie went out to search for him. They found his bicycle lying on its side half a mile away.

Police combed the area throughout the night but found no trace of the little boy until next morning when two builders on their way to work raised the alarm.

He was lying behind a pile of sand on a building site, partially clothed and with bruises round his neck where he’d been strangled.

An autopsy revealed he’d been sexually abused while still alive.

Although evidence was gathered at the scene, there was no DNA sequencing in 1981 and investigations gradually fizzled out leaving no record of any major suspects.

Today, three decades later, Connie often opens what she calls her “special box” which still contains Jeffy’s favourite dressing gown, slippers and Star Wars toys. Framed 12 truecrime

Kenneth Rasmuson. He was linked to the 1980s child-killings by DNA evidence

photos of a smiling, touslehaired boy dot the house.

“He’d be nearly forty now, but he’ll always be my little one,” she says. “We had another son to raise, so life had to go on when Jeffy died. But grief nearly killed us, too.”

Just months after Jeffy’s murder, 59-year-old Kenneth Rasmuson was

arrested for kidnapping, sodomising and orally copulating with an 11-year-old boy in neighbouring Santa Barbara County. He was sent to prison, and then committed to a mental hospital as a violent sexual predator.

But no-one investigated the possible connection between the two crimes.

While he was in hospital, he somehow became a poster boy for the success of new therapeutic and re-educating treatments for sex offences, and was released in 1985 having served just a fraction of his 17-year sentence.

His records state: “He is responding very well to treatment and is not viewed as a likely danger to the health and safety of others.”

The following year, a school bus driver dropped six-year-old Miguel Antero at his usual stop, expecting his mother to be there to meet him as she normally did. But she was running late after a doctor’s appointment and Miguel assured the driver it would only take him a few minutes to run home.

Waving cheerily and calling out his customary “see you tomorrow!” Miguel set off for his home in the serenely bucolic Agoura Hills district of Los Angeles County. Along with a dozen other families, the Anteros lived in a Vedantic commune founded by Alice Coltrane, widow of the jazz musician John Coltrane, where Buddhist, Christian and Islamic teaching was readily available to everyone.

But the idyll of this spiritual haven was shattered when Miguel failed to arrive home.

Seven hours later his tiny body was found in nearby brush, partially clothed and covered in stab wounds.

Several of his bones had

Case report by Mark Davis and Francesca Morrison been broken.

Because of his record as a sex offender, Rasmuson was high on the list of possible suspects. But no concrete evidence against him could be found to link him to the crime.

The Antero family fell apart in the aftermath of Miguel’s death, and despite therapy his parents separated within six months. Shankara lost his job, became homeless and feels he’s never recovered from Miguel’s murder. Ana roamed from place to place and job to job, unable to settle.

Exactly a year later, a three-year-old toddler was kidnapped, molested and left naked but alive in a gully in the Agoura Hills.

This time, however, Rasmuson astonished police by walking into an LAPD station, flanked by his parents, and confessing to what he’d just done. Once again, he was sentenced to 17 years as what the judge called “an unrepentant child molester.”

The precise timing of the crime – 12 months to the day – prompted Sergeant John Laurie to wonder whether Rasmuson had been marking a macabre anniversary of Miguel Antero’s death, and he obtained a warrant to search his house.

But although this yielded potentially incriminating evidence – zip ties, a knife, and literature about bondage and child sex – there was nothing definite enough to link Rasmuson with Miguel’s murder.

Laurie then pushed for a jailhouse interview with him, but he demanded a lawyer and invoked his legal right to stay silent. The impasse left Laurie deeply frustrated.

He’d spent long hours over and above the call of duty investigating the Antero case.

“Every retired cop will tell you about the unsolved cases that still haunt them,” said Laurie. “When I left the force, I think this was one out of the many homicides I’d worked on that haunted me the most. I worried about how many more young boys would fall into the grip of his evil hands before he was eventually put away.”

Fast forward 30 years to an evening in 2017 when Laurie, now long retired, turned on his TV and saw

Above, Connie and Bob Vargo whose son “Jeffy” (below, left) was raped and murdered by Rasmuson in July 1981. Below right, Miguel Antero who was stabbed to death in 1986

a mug-shot of Rasmuson alongside news that cold case detectives had finally linked his DNA to the murder of Jeffy Vargo in Anaheim in 1981.

“That’s him!” he shouted at the screen. “That’s gotta be the same guy who killed Miguel! The one we tried so hard to nail.”

He called the Los Angeles cold case unit and asked them to assemble all the evidence from Miguel Antero’s killing for DNA

Miguel’s tiny body was found in nearby brush, partially clothed and covered in stab wounds.

Several of his bones had been broken

analysis that wasn’t available in 1986 when the murder happened.

It had taken 31 years, but at last Kenneth Rasmuson was arrested at his home in Idaho and would stand trial for murdering both boys.

He’d moved to Standpoint in Idaho in 2010 after his release from jail and was on the state’s sex offender register there. Ironically, he lived opposite a park with a large children’s playground, but most of his neighbours truecrime 13

knew about his offences and he appears to have stayed within the law during seven years at that address.

As if the Vargo and Antero families hadn’t suffered enough, Rasmuson’s case ended up at the centre of a battle between furious district attorneys, each laying claim to prosecute it.

Newly elected District Attorney for Los Angeles County – the largest in the

Miguel Antero with his mother Ana. His parents separated within six months of their son’s murder

US – is George Gascoin, a zealous reformer who has vowed to rid the

social justice system of historic inequalities, racial discrimination, life sentences

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INSIDE KILLER’S CRAWLEY’S DEATH DEATHBED FACTORY CONFESSION 37 YEARS

Mysteries Remain After

TO SOLVE VIRGINIA’S TORTUREKILLING

BREAKTHROUGH!

FIRST KILLER CAUGHT BY IDENTIKIT THEY CONFESSED ON TV TO AMY’S TORTUREMURDER 14 truecrime

D-DAY “BATTERED SECRET OF BEYOND ALL MIRIAM’S RECOGNITION” – But was the wrongKILLER man hanged for it?

Australian Gold Miner Was

The Ballad Of Reading Gaol

…And The Brutal Real-Life Murder That Inspired It

FIVE CHILDREN DIED IN FAMILY MASSACRE… Or Did They?

A MYSTERY TO THIS DAY

without parole, and the death penalty.

Damned as a “rogue” by his more right-wing critics, Gascoin is accused of being pro-criminal, endangering communities, and reducing prison sentences.

His policies have enraged tough-on-crime Orange County DA Todd Spitzer who made the unusual announcement that he would fight to prosecute Kenneth Rasmuson for Miguel Antero’s murder because the victim was kidnapped in Orange County before his body was later found.

“I want justice for Miguel’s family,” he said.

“I don’t agree with taking the death penalty off the table, and nor do I want

“He must never be free again. Heaven known how many child molestations he’s committed over the years” him getting life with the possibility of parole. He must never be free again.

Heaven knows how many child molestations he’s committed over the years.”

Gascoin agrees, but says crime figures show the death penalty doesn’t work as a deterrent, costs taxpayers huge amounts of money in trials, and forces families of victims to re-live their trauma through endless litigation.

He’s also adamant that Rasmuson “will never share a sidewalk with us again.”

Despite the evidence against him, Rasmuson has taken the unusual step of pleading “no contest” to the two murder charges facing him. A “no contest” plea means I do not agree with the charges and make no admission of guilt but will accept the punishment associated with those charges. Whereas a guilty plea means I did what I am charged with and I admit it, and a not guilty plea protests innocence.

In April 2021, Rasmuson was sentenced to life without parole.

For the parents of those children he killed and abused, it was the very least he deserved.

CHRONICLES OF CRIME True Crime’s monthly diary of criminal events day by day as they were reported in the national newspapers. This month, news from around the world in April, May and June 2021. Researched by Richard Sharpe

April 28th JAIL FOR DRIVER WHO MOCKED DYING COPS AN AUSTRALIAN man who filmed and mocked four police officers as they lay dying at a crash

Above, jailed Richard Pusey. Below, the crash site in Melbourne

POLICE APPEAL FOR VICTIMS OF RAPIST April 29th REYNHARD SINAGA, Britain’s worst-ever rapist who was jailed for life in 2020, is believed to have made more than 200 sex attacks on men over a two-and-a-half-year period.

Greater Manchester Police are now hoping to trace a further 60 unidentified men who they believe were victims of the “monster.”

Sinaga lured victims to his apartment in Manchester’s

Jailed for life in 2020: Reynhard Sinaga

clubland before drugging them and attacking them when they were unconscious.

KILLER HUSBAND LOCKED UP FOR LIFE April 29th

site has been jailed for 10 months after admitting the charge of outraging public decency.

Sentencing 42-year-old Richard Pusey, of Melbourne, Victoria, Judge Trevor Wraight said: “Your conduct in recording the police officers in their dying moments, together with the words you used as you recorded, was not only derogatory and horrible, but it was also callous and reprehensible conduct.

Pusey was also fined A$1,000 and had his driver’s licence suspended.

The driver of the lorry, Mohinda Singh, who had been high on drugs at the time of the crash, was jailed for 22 years.

The officers – Kevin King, Josh Prestney, Lynette Taylor and Glen Humphris – were in the process of arresting Pusey for speeding on a freeway in his Porsche when they were killed.

Sinaga, 38, originally from Indonesia, was jailed for life with a minimum term of 30 years in January 2020.

However, the sentence was increased to 40 years by the Court of Appeal.

A senior officer involved in the case said: “It is important we continue to make attempts to trace the around 60 men we believe were victims of Sinaga, but who haven’t made contact with police or support services.”

JASBINDER GAHIR, 58, who battered his estranged wife Balvinder to death as she slept in her Leamington Spa home, has been jailed for life at Coventry Crown Court.

Gahir, of Maidenhead, Berkshire, brutally attacked his 54-year-old victim with a metal bar after breaking in, inflicting 17 head injuries, jurors were told.

He then escaped and later told police he blamed burglars for the killing.

The court heard that

Above, killer Jasbinder Gahir and, left, his victim Balvinder

the couple’s marriage had broken down after Gahir remortgaged the family home and secretly used part of the money raised to buy a flat in Slough.

The killer put the property in his own name and, after renting it out, did not share the rental income with his

wife.

Jailing Gahir for a minimum of 28 years, Judge Andrew Lockhart QC told him: “You were at the heart of a section of this family that was toxic. Your motivations were plain, manipulation, money and murder.

“The case against you displays violence and naked greed.

“Your life was a lie. You lived a Walter Mitty type of existence. You wove a complex web of lies. You continued with your lies right up until the moment you moved away from that witness-box.”

The couple’s son Rohan was jailed for three and a half years for perverting the cause of justice.

SEXUAL REJECTION LED TO FRIEND’S MURDER May 4th GAREECA GORDON murdered and dismembered her friend Phoenix Netts, 28, when her sexual advances were rejected, Bristol Crown Court heard.

The 28-year-old killer stabbed her victim four times at a shared property in Birmingham on April 16th, 2020.

She then used a circular saw she had bought

Killer Gareeca Gordon and her victim Phoenix Netts

second-hand on Gumtree to dismember Phoenix’s body.

Gareeca sent texts and emails to her victim’s family in an attempt to convince

them that she was still alive.

Police arrested the killer on May 12th when she was stopped in a Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, quarry and found Phoenix’s burned torso in a suitcase.

The killer pleaded guilty to murder before her trial. She must serve a minimum of 23 years and six months behind bars. l more Chronicles on page 29

truecrime 15

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NOVELIST WAS DANGEROUS TO KNOW How extraordinary – the tale of how Parisian beauty Marie-Louise Victorine Bessarabo dispatched her second husband to the bottom of Lac d’Enghien in a steamer trunk (“Marie-Louise’s Terrible Secrets,” June). She may well have killed her first husband and a lover in Mexico too, thus making her a serial killer.

Under the name Hera Mirtel, Marie-Louise wrote a string of well-thumbed fin de siècle passionate novels that included Loupita: Mexican Mores, Flowers of the Dawn and Doctress in the Alps. More importantly, she wrote significant treatises on antique feminism (still referred to today), wrote for and edited several literary, suffragette and feminist magazines.

Serial killer?

An occultist, Marie-Louise Marie-Louise conducted the Black Mass during Bessarabo which (naturally) she took the role of High Priestess. Amongst the attendees were a “real” marquis and a fallen priest. She held weekly séances. On one occasion, she invoked Madame de Pompadour. After sharing beauty tips, the famed courtesan thanked Marie-Louise for her staunch support of the monarchy and vanished – she was probably late for a date elsewhere.

Until she died in 1931, aged 62, Marie-Louise proclaimed her innocence. “I am not a woman who kills. Everything in my past life protests against such an accusation. All my works radiate with proof that I am a creatress. Being that, I cannot destroy.”

Andrew Stephenson, Newhaven

MURDER OF A STOCKPORT BOY I was wondering if you had ever published the story of a murder in Stockport in 1861. The victim was a little boy called George Burgess; he was two years old. The crime was committed by two other boys named Peter Barrett and James Bradley. They were both eight years old. I have lived in Stockport all my life and there is a lot of history here, especially in the market area. I would be really interested to read the full story.

Kerry, Stockport We don’t know the case.Would other readers like to know more about it?

IRELAND’S HANGMAN Researcher Matthew Spicer writes: In his account of the trial and execution of John Gregory – the last person hanged at Downpatrick Prison in Ireland (“Murder At the Gateway,” TC May 2021), author James Newbury says “some mystery surrounds” who the hangman was. I’m pleased to say we may now know his identity.

If we go back nearly a decade before Gregory’s hanging to another execution in Ireland, that of Joseph Kelly at Wexford in 1863, we find the executioner on that occasion was described as “a slightly built but active man who was performing his first ‘job’ in Ireland, but who claimed to have executed criminals in Australia, including multiple executions on the same day.” This hangman’s next known appearance was at Waterford Prison in April 1864, and then in 1866 he carried what turned out to be the last public executions in Ireland – in the South at Wexford in April 1866 and 15 days later at Downpatrick in the North.

With executions in public being abolished in Ireland and Britain in May 1868, this same man did jobs in 1870 at Dublin’s Richmond Prison, in 1871 at Downpatrick, and in August 1873 – when he carried out three executions in 10 days at Cavan, Castlebar and finally at The mystery hangman acted as assistant to both William Marwood (left) and Thomas Askern (below left). Some referred to him as an Irish counterpart to William Calcraft (below right)

IF ONLY CHRISTINE HAD ESCAPED I found it amazing that it took 21 years for Christine Jarrett’s body to be found (“Christine Was Buried Under Her Own Back Yard,” May). I’d imagined that when someone goes missing the last person to have seen her or him automatically becomes “a person of interest” in police investigations into the disappearance. That person was her husband and killer Michael Jarrett. Forensic searches of the couple’s marital home and mobile home proved negative but I can’t understsand why the surrounding outside areas weren’t searched. If they had been, Christine could have had a decent burial, and her two boys wouldn’t have wondered why their previously loving mother had Murdered by abandoned them. This was the line fed her husband: to them by her murderer, their father. Christine Jarrett If only Christine had taken her boys and escaped from a marriage that was already dead in the water. The boys had witnessed their father physically attack their mother, and Christine’s sister and brotherin-law heard her admit she feared her husband. They also saw the bruises he’d left on her face.

Apparently Christine endured this hellish existence because she imagined the boys “needed their father.”

16 truecrime

25 years ago this month...

True Crime magazine, July 1996

ALL OUR YESTERDAYS

S MYSTERY IDENTIFIED Omagh.

At the first of these he acted as Number One, but in the other two he assisted hangmen brought over from England – at Castlebar it was William Marwood; and at Omagh, where the man on the gallows was Thomas Montgomery, a police inspector executed for a murder during a bank-robbery, it was Thomas Askern.

Our mystery hangman appeared to end his career in Belfast in April 1876, assisting Askern again. On this occasion, as throughout his career in Ireland, he used the pseudonym of “Smith” (sometimes “Smythe”). He was also known as “the Irish Calcraft.” But for his true identity we must look to the State of Victoria, Australia, some two decades before his hanging career in Ireland.

By the late 1840s/early 1850s, executions in Australia were becoming dramatically rarer compared to the early period of the colony. Now, in the Victorian era, the hangman was an ex-convict from England called John Harris.

Harris seems to have spent a good proportion of his time in and out of the courts in Melbourne for being drunk. That, perhaps, could be tolerated in a hangman, but when Harris was convicted of robbery the authorities turned to another ex-convict, this time an Irishman named James Cahill. Cahill, though, had no experience and so Harris was soon given a second chance as hangman, with Cahill as his assistant.

Finally, by the mid-1850s, Cahill tired of this arrangement and returned to Ireland – where it seems almost certain he was the man who became known as “the Irish Calcraft.”

Thanks to Matthew for putting together the pieces of this jigsaw. Now, if only we had a picture of the mystery executioner. Can any of our knowledgeable readers help?

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UNSOLVED MURDER OF A YOUNG MUM

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A friend of mine called Elena Dimitri was murdered in her own home in Stanway Court, Hoxton, east London, in August 1987. Has TC ever covered the case? She used to babysit for me. Elena was 20 and had a little girl of two when she was murdered. She was stabbed to death. DNA is helping to solve cold case crimes like this, so how come her murder is still unsolved? There is a video about the case on YouTube.

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“SEVEN REASONS WHY MY HUSBAND SHOULDN’T BE HANGED” Wife’s Plea To Home Office T

WO BOYS made the shocking discovery.

At eight o’clock on the evening of Sunday, June 6th, 1926, they were crossing a field bordering the Basingstoke–Alton railway line in Hampshire when they noticed that tall grass near a hedge had been disturbed.

Wondering why, they went to investigate and found the body of a teenage youth, his face covered with blood.

The field, known as Flood Meadow, was on the outskirts of Alton. The boys promptly ran to the town’s police station, and officers were at the meadow within minutes.

Case report by

James Newbury The body was cold, they noted, and it was soon identified as that of 15-year-old John Richard Thompson, who lived in Lenten Street. He was employed as a garden boy at the home of a retired naval officer, Captain Gathorne Cookson, in nearby Beech, and his parents had reported him missing the previous day after he failed to return home for his tea.

He now lay dead, a strip of material having been ripped from his shirt, pulled tightly round his neck and knotted twice to strangle him.

Furthermore, his skull had been fractured, either by a blow or by a fall onto a large, bloodstained stone found 18 truecrime

A sketch depicting the discovery of teenage victim John Thompson’s body

embedded in the ground beneath his head. There were signs of a struggle, and an

attempt appeared to have been made to push his body under the high, dense hedge

MISCARRIAGE OF

JUSTICE?

which separated the field from the Basingstoke road.

An autopsy found that the boy’s death had been caused by asphyxia due to strangulation, and by his severe head injury. As to the killer’s motive, the police believed it was robbery.

On the Saturday that John Thompson disappeared, Captain Cookson had paid him his usual weekly wage of 15 shillings (75p), handing him a 10 shilling note and two half-crowns. No money at all, however, had been found in the murdered boy’s pockets. His cap, lying near his body, contained some birds’ eggshells An appeal was made for witnesses, and two 12-year-old schoolboys told the police that shortly after 5 p.m. on the Saturday they saw John Thompson walking along a footpath leading from Beech to the Basingstoke road. When he reached a stile into the road at the end of the footpath, they saw a man approaching.

He was aged about 20, with dark skin, curly hair and a cap on the back of his head.

He was carrying a big stick with a knob on one end, and the boys heard him call out “Knackers,” which was John Thompson’s nickname.

Thompson stopped, the man caught him up, and the two walked on together along the road towards Alton, leaving it to go into Flood Meadow where the boys last saw them walking along the hedge in the field.

Three more witnesses also came forward. They, too, had seen Thompson in the field with a curly-haired, dark-skinned young man, whom they recognised as Charles Edward Finden. He had a big stick, they recalled, and they said that he and the boy with him seemed to be looking for birds’ nests in the hedge.

An assistant scoutmaster reported that at about 6.20 that evening he saw Finden coming from the direction of Flood Meadow alone, and with no stick in his hand.

The police suspected that Finden had strangled and robbed John Thompson at some time between 5.50 and 6 p.m. He was a 22-year-old unemployed labourer living at 4 River View, Alton, and at 3.30 p.m. on Monday, June 7th, a constable knocked on his door. No money was found in his possession when he was searched and questioned at the police station, and at 10 o’clock that evening he was charged with John Thompson’s murder.

Asked to account for his movements on the Saturday afternoon and evening, he said he had gone to Flood Meadow at about 2 p.m., falling asleep there and not waking until about 6.15 p.m.

He had then begun to make his way home, meeting the assistant scoutmaster on the way.

Four more witnesses came forward, however, saying they had seen Finden on the Basingstoke road between three and four o’clock that afternoon, and one of the schoolboy witnesses identified him as the man he had seen with John Thompson.

But it was with a jaunty air that Finden entered Alton’s Police Court on June 24th. His “attitude in the dock was one of careless indifference,” the Hampshire Herald reported. “He lolled against the wall of the court, and fixed his eyes lazily on the prosecutor, Mr. Sefton Cohen, as he made the indictment against him.”

The magistrates were told that they would hear the evidence of several witnesses who saw Finden walking in the vicinity of the crime scene during the time he claimed he was asleep.

Mr. Cohen said that when asked by the police if he had

Above, Flood Meadow in Alton, where the body of John Thompson (below, right) was discovered in 1926. In 1867, Fanny Adams was brutally murdered and dismembered in the same field. Below left, Charles Finden

her that was where I got the money because she keeps on at me about getting work.”

He said the 10 shilling note and two half-crowns was, in fact, “money I had been saving up.”

The hearing ended with his committal for trial, which began at Winchester Assizes on July 5th, the prosecution claiming that although the evidence against Finden was entirely circumstantial, it was conclusive.

given his wife any money recently, Finden had replied that on the Friday he had given her 17 shillings which he got from the Labour Exchange.

But detectives had learned that in addition to the 17 shillings, on the Saturday Finden had given his wife a 10 shilling note and two half-crowns. And it was a

10 shilling note and two half-crowns that John Thompson had received that Saturday as his wages.

Finden had told his wife that he had been paid this money that day at the town’s Follies Tennis Club, but inquiries had established that he had not worked there that day. Asked to explain this, Finden had replied: “I told

“His attitude in the dock was one of careless indifference.

He lolled against the wall of the court, and fixed his eyes lazily on the prosecutor as he made the indictment against him” The defence pointed out that the stick Finden was alleged to have been carrying had never been found, and claimed that he was not at the crime scene at the time of the murder.

Finden’s counsel, Mr. A.H. Armstrong, also suggested that some of the police interview techniques had been “questionable.”

He claimed that one senior officer had told the accused that the money given to Mrs. Finden was definitely John Thompson’s, whereas there truecrime 19

was, in fact, no absolute proof of this.

On the trial’s second and final day, Finden told the court that he had served in the Army and had been employed by Southern Railways until May 15th, when he had been dismissed following a strike.

In his concluding speech, Mr. Armstrong conceded that Finden had told lies, but claimed the Crown had not proved its case beyond reasonable doubt He now denied ever saying he had been to the tennis club on the Saturday morning, or that he had been asleep in Flood Meadow that afternoon.

He told the court: “At 2.10 p.m. I came across Flood Meadow where I spoke to Walter Kemp” [Kemp said this was at 1.45 p.m.] “I then went on towards Will Hill Farm towards Beech. Between three and four I went past Ackender Wood and then onto some high ground to watch some cricket. I stayed there for some 30 to 45 minutes.

“Walking back to Flood Meadow, I saw the assistant scoutmaster, arriving home at 6.30 p.m. Although I knew the boy Thompson, I did not see him on Saturday.”

Cross-examined by the prosecutor, Mr. Ernest Charles KC, Finden simply shrugged his shoulders in response to difficult questions and kept turning away from the judge and jury.

In his concluding speech for the defence, Mr. Armstrong conceded that Finden had told lies, but claimed the Crown had not proved its case beyond reasonable doubt.

For the prosecution, Mr. Charles said that if Finden were innocent, then half-a-dozen witnesses were all lying.

After 40 minutes’ deliberation the jury found Finden guilty of murder, 20 truecrime

A map of the murder scene and the spot where the body was discovered

and the short silence that followed was broken by the sobs of his young wife.

He was then sentenced to death, and on July 26th his appeal was dismissed, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Hewart, ruling that the appeal court would not hear the evidence of new witnesses who claimed they had seen Finden some distance from Flood Meadow at the time of the killing.

Known as a “hanging judge,” Lord Hewart went on to say that the court was satisfied that Finden had been justly convicted.

Home Office officials noted that Finden had served in the Army with distinction, but he had convictions for burglary and poaching.

Taking into account the murder’s robbery motive, the Home Secretary agreed with his advisers that there were no grounds for a reprieve.

Two days before Finden’s execution, however, his wife contacted the Home Office, pleading for mercy for her husband and submitting seven reasons why he should not be hanged.

First, she pointed out that he had been convicted solely on circumstantial evidence.

Secondly, she claimed that his lies about the money were not proof of guilt. They were told, she said, simply to deceive her.

Thirdly, she complained that the police seemed to have made no effort to trace any more witnesses who might have been in the area at the time of the crime. Her fourth point

She pointed out that he had been convicted solely on circumstantial evidence. Secondly, she claimed that his lies about the money were not proof of his guilt concerned the evidence that the appeal court had refused to hear. She said that at the time of the murder, about 6 p.m., her husband was in Ackender Wood and saw a

Track from the Basingstoke-Alton light railway

school teacher enter it with a young woman. He had mentioned this at his trial but had got the time wrong, saying he was in the wood somewhat earlier.

Mrs. Finden said that the school teacher was prepared to testify that he and his girlfriend entered the wood at 6 p.m., but the appeal court had ruled that this was not new evidence as in the witness-box Finden had said that he saw the couple at an earlier time.

Mrs. Finden’s fifth point was the fact that no blood was found on her husband or his clothes. Her sixth reason for a reprieve was her claim that the investigation’s identity parades were a farce, as everyone in Alton knew her husband.

Finally, she argued that the crime was motiveless, for who in their senses would kill a boy for such a paltry sum?

Having read her missive, however, a Home Office official noted: “There is nothing in this.” So on August 12th, 1926, Charles Finden was hanged at Winchester Prison by Tom Pierrepoint and Robert Baxter, meeting his end calmly and giving no trouble.

There was some controversy, however, as he had chosen Hymn 249, which prompted the prison’s governor to complain to the Home Office. He found this “suggestive,” the governor said, as the hymn contained the words “wash away my foul offence.”

The prison’s chaplain was believed to have suggested this choice of hymn to the condemned man, but the priest said he was unaware of the hymn’s controversial words until Finden sang them.

The governor was asked to caution the chaplain, and the Prison Commissioners sent a memo to all prisons with gallows. This said that the governors should not discuss cases with prisoners, and that governors, not chaplains, should tell condemned inmates that they could attend a prison chapel service if they wished.

Any service attended by condemned prisoners should be the same as that attended by other inmates, and chaplains should not discuss cases with the condemned unless approached by them.

MURDER AT FLOOD MEADOW: THE HORRIFIC KILLING OF FANNY ADAMS I

nevitably, Finden’s case reminded Alton’s residents of another child murder committed in Flood Meadow nearly 60 years earlier. Eight-year-old Fanny Adams was the victim, and the horrors found by those who discovered the crime were almost beyond belief.

The alarm was raised on

her eyes was retrieved on a bridge spanning the nearby River Wey, in which her other eye was discovered floating.

The remains were placed in a sheet and taken to Alton’s Leather Bottle public house, while police went to question Baker at the

Frederick Baker

the afternoon of August 24th, 1867, when Fanny’s seven-year-old sister Lizzie told their mother that Fanny had been carried off in Flood Meadow by a young gentleman who gave her a halfpenny.

Mrs. Adams promptly went to the meadow, accompanied by some of her neighbours and led

by Fanny’s eight-year-old friend Minnie Warner, who had been with her when the girls were approached by the man. They had just reached the field when they saw Frederick Baker, a local solicitor’s clerk.

“That’s the gentleman,” said Minnie. “He gave us the money.”

That was so, Baker confirmed when the women challenged him.

“What’s your name, sir?” one of them asked.

“Never mind my name,” he replied, walking away.

“You will find me at Clements’ office if you want me.”

“I’ve a good mind to give you in charge to the police!”

Above, a contemporary sketch of the killer Frederick Baker holding the decapitated head of his eight-yearold victim. Above left, Lizzie Adams (left) and Minnie Warner beside Fanny’s grave in Alton cemetery

another woman shouted after him.

“You may do as you please,” Baker replied over his shoulder, and as he looked respectable and seemed too sure of himself to have been up to any

Two labourers found Fanny’s head impaled on a pole in the hop garden near Flood Meadow. Her eyes had been gouged out, and one of her ears was missing.

Her torso lay 16 yards away

mischief, the women didn’t pursue him. It was not unusual for someone to give children a penny or two for sweets, and it was assumed that Fanny was probably playing somewhere and would return soon.

But she didn’t, and shortly after the women went back to their homes, two labourers found Fanny’s head impaled on a pole in a hop garden near Flood Meadow. Her eyes had been gouged out, and one of her ears was missing. Her torso lay 16 yards away, cut open and minus all its organs, and her heart was found under some hedge clippings. One of her arms was in a field overlooking the hop garden, and her lungs lay nearby.

Her left foot was found in a clover field, and one of

solicitor’s office. He was unable to account for blood on his clothes, and a search of his locked desk revealed his diary. An entry for that day had already been made.

“Killed a young girl,” it read.

“It is fine and hot.”

“I made that entry,” Baker said, “after I had seen the women this afternoon, but I was drunk at the time.”

Charged with the murder, which he denied, he was tried at Winchester Assizes, the prosecution claiming that he had killed Fanny during his lunch break, returning later to dismember her body.

The defence argued that no sane man could have committed such an atrocity: if Baker were guilty, he must be mad and not responsible for his actions. But although the court heard evidence of insanity in his family, the jury took only 15 minutes to find him guilty as charged.

Sentenced to death, in the condemned cell Baker admitted the killing but insisted he had not violated Fanny. He said he cut her throat because he was enraged by her crying as he carried her away. A crowd of 5,000 watched his execution outside Winchester Prison on Christmas Eve, 1867.

And poor Fanny? As so little was left of her, she is immortalised in the expression “sweet Fanny Adams,” meaning “nothing whatever.” truecrime 21

This Report By Tom

Prior

D

ARK, DAPPER Jack McGurn sprang athletically up the steps of Chicago’s McCormick hotel and entered a telephone booth. As the chief executioner for Scarface Al Capone was making his call, he was hit by a fusillade of bullets. Frank and Pete Gusenberg of the rival Moran gang cut loose with a stream of pistol and machine-gun fire that virtually demolished the glass-enclosed booth.

McGurn dropped to the floor with a bullet lodged in his lung and blood running from several other wounds.

The Moran mobsters left him for dead, but the former boxer miraculously survived.

When police questioned him at his hospital bed all he would say was “Leave it to me.”

Six weeks later, as McGurn (recently discharged from hospital) sat in his car at a street corner a barrage of deadly steel-jacketed slugs demolished the vehicle, but McGurn clambered from the wreckage unscathed. Again he refused to answer police questions. “Don’t bother,” he said. “I’ll attend to it.”

Privately, he added James Clark and Billy Davern, two more north-side gangsters, to the names of those from whom he would personally exact retribution.

The following month McGurn was arrested while carrying a Tommy-gun in his car, but a shrewd mob lawyer managed to free him on a technicality. A short time later a raid on his hotel apartment yielded a cache of shotguns and pistols.

“A man can keep arms at home,” a smiling McGurn told police. “I have to keep an arsenal to protect myself.”

On the night of December 30th, 1928, Billy Davern’s dead body was tossed from a car. Jack McGurn had taken care of one of his attackers.

Seven weeks later he would account for the Gusenbergs and Clark in one of the most notorious crimes ever committed in America.

McGurn and other killers under his command lined up seven of the North-Side gang against a garage wall and slaughtered them with a withering enfilade of Tommy-gun bullets, in what became known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

22 truecrime

Louise Rolfe and Jack McGurn shortly after they were married in 1931

Was he aT The G

Louise Was J

ack McGurn’s life was governed by vengeance.

Shortly after his birth in Sicily in 1903, the family emigrated to America and took up residence in Brooklyn.

Christened Vincenzo Antonio Gibaldi by his parents, the boy inherited all the Sicilian traits of blood, honour, revenge and silence.

What happened to McGurn’s father is a mystery, but around 1912 his mother remarried. Her new husband,

olive-oil salesman Angelo DeMora, moved the family west to Chicago and opened a store that prospered with the onset of prohibition.

McGurn’s stepfather began selling sugar to the Genna brothers, who controlled illegal booze-making in Chicago’s Little Italy.

In 1923, Angelo DeMora was gunned down by unknown assailants outside his store. Nineteen-year-old Jack, now a professional

boxer, his widowed mother and five other children attended his stepfather’s inquest, at which Jack revealed that Angelo had received threatening letters telling him to get out of town. He too had received some. He said he didn’t know who had killed his stepfather.

Asked if he feared for his own life now he was head of the family, he answered ominously, “I’m big enough to take care of this case

Louise Rolfe – “The Blonde Alibi” – at the police station for questioning

GanGland massaCRe?

McGurn’s Alibi truecrime 23

myself.” He signed himself James DeMora, but thereafter kept to the Irish-sounding name he had used as a promising welterweight, Jack McGurn.

Legend has it that the killing of his stepfather turned him into a fearless avenger who stalked the killers of Angelo DeMora.

He supposedly practised marksmanship by shooting birds off telephone wires with a Daisy air rifle. In the lonely Wisconsin northwoods, using a Thompson submachine-gun, he quickly became an expert shot. The police attributed five murders to McGurn in retaliation for the death of his stepfather.

Within six weeks McGurn’s blazing Tommy-gun had reduced the Aiello ranks by six. “Slayers not apprehended” noted the coroner, except in the killing of one whose body, roped in a ball and stuffed into a sack, was found in a ditch.

McGurn and another Capone gunner were arrested but freed for lack of evidence.

With mounting losses, the Aiellos offered a reward of $50,000 to anyone who could kill Capone. Between May and October 1927, Antonio Torchio of New York, Tony Russo and Vincent Spicuzza of St Louis and Sam Valente of Cleveland travelled to the Windy City to try their luck.

All four met Jack McGurn.

When their bullet-riddled bodies were found, each had a nickel pressed into the palm of the right hand: McGurn’s way of saying that anyone who came gunning for his boss and the 50 grand bounty would receive a five-cent-piece and a lot of hot lead.

shoes, he frequented the classiest cabarets, usually accompanied by a statuesque blonde. He could dance the night away but be up the next day training and lifting weights at the converted gym in the Capone stronghold of the Metropole hotel. He took up golf and regularly hit into the 80s. By the late 1920s, he was at the top of his trade.

Another young man reaching the top in his profession was comedian Joe E. Lewis. Lewis was aware of McGurn’s sinister reputation.

For over a year he had pulled the crowds into the Green Mill casino where McGurn held a stake, but when offered $1,000 a week and a share of the profits to open at the New

Rendezvous Café run by the rival Moran gang, the young cabaret artist jumped at the chance.

The day after Lewis left the Green Mill, McGurn was waiting for him outside his hotel. “Hiya, Joe,” called McGurn pleasantly. “What’s the problem?” Lewis nervously answered that there was no problem, but he was going to start at the Rendezvous on November 2nd. Staring hard at Lewis, McGurn whispered chillingly, “You’ll never live to open.”

Attempting a show of bravado, Joe told McGurn he would reserve a table for him.

Over the next few days the young comic received threatening telephone calls

leek and handsome, McGurn was a product of the Jazz Age. Always fastidiously dressed in wide-checked suits, flowerprint ties and patent-leather

S Born Vincenzo Antonio Gibaldi, after temporarily adopting his stepfather’s name he settled on something more Irish – Jack McGurn – for his boxing career His now legendary skill with a Tommy-gun coupled with his nerve and courage attracted the notice of the Capone gang. Scarface Al hired him as one of his personal bodyguards. If Al went to a boxing match or a baseball game, Jack McGurn would be alongside him.

Soon Capone came to rely on McGurn’s talents to stay alive.

Sicilian mobster Joe Aiello and his brothers had taken over the old Genna gang after Capone had decimated their ranks. The Aiellos disputed Capone’s dominance of the Unione Siciliana and began fighting for control of the Chicago booze business.

Scarface unleashed McGurn upon the Aiellos, a task the young gunman relished, for he suspected some of the Aiello men of having a hand in the killing of his stepfather.

24 truecrime

Above, the victims of the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.” Below, Pete Gusenberg (on chair), Albert Weinshank, John Heyer, John May, Reinhardt Schwimmer; James Clark lies against the wall. Frank Gusenberg was en route to hospital where he died

an opportunity to try a third time.

Joe E. Lewis survived the knife attack but it would be 10 years before he could speak coherently, and only then in a raspy voice. He would never use his right arm again. The left side of his face would be a jagged scar that pulled his mouth into a perpetual smile.

But he would live. Others who crossed Jack McGurn were not so lucky. owards the end of 1928 the Aiello brothers formed an alliance with Bugs Moran.

Their combined forces struck on January 8th, 1929, killing Capone’s good friend and nominee for the Unione Siciliana, Patsy Lolordo.

Grief-stricken, Scarface ordered Moran’s and the Aiellos’ deaths. McGurn was given the job of killing them.

Around 10 a.m. on February 14th, 1929, Bugs Moran ordered his men to gather at a garage to receive a shipment of whisky, recently hijacked from the Capone gang. The delivery was never made. It was an elaborate ruse to lure Moran and his top lieutenants together so that

T

Born in Illinois on May 7th, 1906, Louise May Rolfe had been a theatrical performer under the name of “Lou Louise” at one of the Capone gang’s haunts telling him to be back at the Green Mill tonight, or else, Lewis opened to a packed house at the Rendezvous.

The night passed without incident, as did the rest of the week. In the early morning of November 7th, 1927, Joe Lewis was handed his first week’s wage. He smiled at the thick roll and happily went off to bed. At 9.15 a.m. ‹ the middle of the night in the entertainment business ‹ the ringing of the telephone roused Joe from his sleep.

“Don’t open the door for anybody,” a voice warned and the line went dead.

Joe went back to sleep.

An hour later a knock on the door roused Lewis from his slumber. He opened the

door and three men rushed in. Drawing pistols, one of the trio asked Joe a favour: “Don’t yell.” Lewis braced himself for the bullets that never came. Instead, one of his attackers came at him with a hunting knife and buried the blade into Joe’s jaw and ripped downwards.

The other two viciously pistol-whipped the young entertainer, smashing his skull until he lost consciousness.

The knifeman wielded his weapon again and again, slashing Joe from ear to throat, ripping his tongue and severing his vocal cords, barely missing the jugular vein. They left Lewis to bleed to death, his body a mass of bloody ribbons.

Joe somehow managed to crawl to the lift and press the button. The operator found him. When the police arrived they called the morgue, but then realised Joe was still breathing. Loading him into their squad-car, they rushed him to hospital, where surgeons operated for over seven hours.

North-Side boss Bugs Moran ordered the Gusenberg brothers to guard Joe’s room around the clock in case McGurn decided to finish Lewis off. Outraged

by McGurn’s incursion into his territory, Moran ordered his mob to find McGurn and kill him. They tried twice and failed. Machine-Gun Jack McGurn didn’t give them

Joe E. Lewis (above) never worked as a comedian again after a run-in with McGurn Jack McGurn could take his revenge. Instead of the booze shipment, a black Cadillac disguised as a police car pulled to a stop outside the garage.

Four men, two dressed as cops, entered the Moran headquarters. The bogus police ordered six Moran mobsters and another man, Reinhart Schwimmer, a trained optometrist who hung around the gang for kicks, to line up against the wall.

The northsiders offered no resistance, believing it to be a routine raid. Bugs truecrime 25

Moran, who had had the good fortune to oversleep that morning, watched the police car arrive and disappear from the scene along with his two bodyguards.

At the garage, the two Capone men in plain-clothes stepped from the garage office, removed machine-guns from under their overcoats and began raking the line-up with a murderous volley of .45-calibre slugs. One killer fired at head level from left to right. The other fired at waist-height from right to left, zigzagging down to the knees.

All seven dropped where they stood. Two bodies were still moving. Shotgun blasts to the head, fired from less than two feet by the “police” finished them off. The Capone men walked slowly to their car, continuing their play-acting as the plain-clothes killers held up their hands while the uniformed men held them under guard.

The real police arrived to find the garage flowing with blood and brain matter from ace-gunner Pete Gusenberg slumped over a chair; the garage owner, with his hat on his chest; the gang’s accountant gushing blood from a grievous head wound; Moran’s brother-in-law, lying parallel to the wall; a former safe-blower turned mechanic with half his skull blown away;

Fred “Killer” Burke.

Hired by McGurn for the massacre, he was later found to have two of the Thompson submachine-guns used that day and Schwimmer with his fedora still on his head.

A spark of life was found in Frank Gusenberg. Despite his body being punctured by 14 bullets he had crawled 26 truecrime

rooms in the Hotel Stevens.

They found McGurn in the company of a sinuous blonde woman called Louise Rolfe. The floor of the room they shared was strewn with newspapers open at headlines devoted to the massacre.

The police roughly disarmed the Capone gunman, taking a .45 automatic from a shoulder holster and a .32 revolver from his back pocket.

“How long have you been here?” asked the Lieutenant.

“A long time,” answered the woman. “Since – let me see – January twenty-eighth.”

“Married?”

“Not yet,” she sighed.

McGurn was booked on seven counts of murder while Miss Rolfe was held on a statutory offence. Before a grand jury, McGurn swore he had never left his girlfriend’s side from the evening of February 13th to the afternoon of February 14th.

Louise Rolfe supported his story so staunchly that the press dubbed her Machine-Gun McGurn’s towards the rear door where he was met by a policeman and rushed to hospital. For three hours he clung to life.

A police sergeant, an old boyhood pal, tried to get him to talk.

“Who shot you, Frank?” he asked.

“Nobody shot me,” replied Gusenberg, in true gangster tradition, then later, “Coppers shot me” and, finally before succumbing to his wounds, “I’m cold, awful cold, Sarge.

It’s getting dark.”

Breaking the gangster code, George “Bugs” Moran venomously spat out to newsmen: “Only Capone kills like that!” But the truth was that only Jack McGurn had the motive and nerve to massacre seven men in cold blood.

A 14-year-old witness placed McGurn at the scene of the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. He told police he had seen five men entering the garage and heard one say, “Come on, Mac.” He picked out McGurn from police mug-shots as the man addressed.

A

warrant was obtained for the arrest of McGurn, and on the afternoon of February 27th Lieutenant William Cusack led a police raid on a luxurious suite of

Above, Jack McGurn and Louise. She was with McGurn when he was arrested, and was questioned at the police station regarding his involvement in the St. Valentime’s Day Massacre (below)

“Blonde Alibi.”

Nobody was ever prosecuted for the massacre.

The police established that Fred “Killer” Burke, a gunman hired by McGurn, matched a vivid description of one of the killers given by a witness. Conclusive evidence was established when Burke was caught after a cop-killing in Michigan and found in possession of two Tommy-guns used in the massacre. Michigan refused extradition and Burke died in the Michigan State

proceed, so Jack McGurn left the courtroom a free man.

Unable to secure a conviction for the massacre, the police continued to hound McGurn and his “Blonde Alibi.” In July 1931, after a holiday in Florida and Hot Springs, Arkansas, they were convicted of conspiring to break an anti-prostitution law prohibiting the transporting of a woman across state lines for immoral purposes. McGurn was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and Louise to

Married life initally proved blissfully uneventful for the McGurns Penitentiary while serving a life sentence for the murder of a policeman.

Acting on underworld tips, the authorities went after McGurn and Capone’s two other favourite killers, John Scalise and Albert Anselmi.

The three Capone men were released on bail set at $50,000. McGurn put up a South Side hotel worth $1,300,000 as surety.

On May 8th, 1929, Scalise and Anselmi – known as the homicide squad – were found bludgeoned to death for plotting to overthrow Capone and seize control of the powerful Unione Siciliana.

This left McGurn to face the charges alone.

Under Illinois law, if a defendant demands trial at four court appearances and the authorities are not ready to proceed, then the state must drop its case. This happened on December 2nd, 1929, when McGurn’s lawyers insisted for the fourth time that the state try their client. The prosecution admitted it was not ready to

four months.

Neither served any time behind bars. Freed on bail, McGurn married his “Blonde Alibi.” In November, 1932, the US Supreme Court quashed the convictions, stating that as the couple lived together in Chicago, their trip to the south was not for immoral purposes but was incidental to their usual course of life. The court also ruled that a woman, as the presumed crime victim, could not be convicted of conspiring to victimise herself. This cleared Jack’s bride and in turn cleared McGurn, who could not be convicted of conspiracy unless there was a co-conspirator.

With his boss Capone imprisoned for failing to pay income tax, McGurn seemed to go into semi-retirement.

He insisted he was out of the rackets and moved Louise into a house in the plush Chicago district of Oak Park.

Golf and travelling with his wife seemed to be Jack’s pastimes.

Win the price of a pair of cinema tickets to see the current film of your choice. All you have to do is answer a simple crime movie-related question. Answer the bonus question too and you could win an extra £25!

PLUS

£25

This month our feature is Blow Out, a 1981 American suspensethriller film directed by Brian De Palma and starring John Travolta, Nancy Allen and John Lithgow.

While recording sound effects for a trashy “slasher” horror movie, Philadelphia sound Jack Terry (John Travolta) technician Jack Terry (Travolta) sees a car career off a bridge and into a river. He jumps into the water and saves Sally Bedina (Nancy Is Sally (Nancy Allen) an innocent Allen) from the car, but the driver – a victim or part of a conspiracy? governor intending to run for president – is already dead.

After analysing his tapes and suspecting a murder has been committed, Jack begins down two risky paths; investigating the death, and a romance with Sally who was hired as part of a blackmail plot against the presidential hopeful. A rival candidate had also hired Burke (Lithgow) to ensure the candidate was disgraced with a prostitute, but instead Burke shot out the tyre of the car, causing the accident.

After botching the cover-up of Sally by murdering a look-alike, Burke murders two more look-alike women with piano wire. The serial killer, “the Liberty Bell Strangler” – is his elaborate cover-up to disguise when Sally is successfully murdered...

Assassin Burke Jack is caught in a tangled (Lithgow) becomes a web of conspiracy, blackmail and serial killer assassination without knowing who he can trust...

Your question: De Palma’s film was an update and reinvention of a notorious “Swinging London” movie, made by Michelangelo Antonioni in 1966, starring David Hemmings (left). Name the film.

For the additional £25: In 1976 De Palma had directed John Travolta in a horror movie about a bullied schoolgirl with telekinetic powers which proved a career springboard for both them and the star Sissy Spacek (right). Name the film.

Send your answer(s) to True Crime, PO Box 735, London SE26 5NQ or email truecrime@truecrimelibrary.com First correct entry out of the hat after the closing date of July 18th, 2021, wins. Answers and winner will be screened in True Crime September.

Last time we featured Marathon Man (1976). We asked you to name the film that brought Dustin Hoffman and director John Schlesinger Oscar success in 1969. The answer was Midnight Cowboy (left). For the additional £25: Which 1975 film starred Roy Scheider as shark-hunting Police Chief Martin Brody (right)? The answer was Jaws. The winner is Brenda Malone of Luton. Well done – your prizes will be with you soon! truecrime 27

n 1933, while playing in a major open tournament, McGurn discovered the difficulties of being a golfer with a gangster reputation. He had shot the first six holes of the qualifying round in one under par, but at the seventh he became aware of a police presence which badly affected his swing. On the 8th green his score dipped and the golfing gunman picked up his ball and quit.

Early in 1934, McGurn bought a stake in a Chicago club. This burnt down soon afterwards and the police refused him and his partners permission to re-open. Other business investments failed to bring in the kind of money he needed to keep him in the style to which he’d become accustomed. Returning to his old profession, he began to reassert himself in the Chicago underworld.

But gangland had changed.

The Moran gang were no more. Capone languished in Alcatraz Prison while Frank “The Enforcer” Nitti headed the Capone gang, backed by tough Frankie Diamond,

I

In 1986, before an audience of 30 million, Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone’s “secret” Lexington Hotel vault live on US national television and Louise was interviewed about the era and her life with McGurn Louis “Little New York” Campagna and the clever Paul “The Waiter” Ricca.

They were not the type to let McGurn take over their rackets.

Shortly after midnight on February 15th, 1936, as Jack McGurn was at a Chicago recreation club choosing a ball 28 truecrime

Unarmed and empty-pocketed, McGurn was shot dead in a bowling alley by former gangland pals as he tried to return to the Chicago underworld

with which to bowl, three men entered the alley and silently grouped themselves behind the former Capone gunner.

“Everybody stand still,” one of the men cried. “Move and you die.”

As the other bowlers and McGurn’s companions looked on, spellbound, three guns blazed simultaneously. A bullet crashed into McGurn’s head. Another ploughed into his back. He crumpled to the smooth wood of the alley, instantly dead. The killers dropped their weapons into their overcoat pockets and disappeared into the night.

The contents of McGurn’s pockets bore witness to

hard times. Only $3.85 and two tickets for a fight were found on his body. The dead gunman, who once boasted he needed an arsenal to defend himself, wasn’t even carrying a weapon.

Police investigation revealed that he had “stepped on somebody’s toes” in the gambling business. As the Capone gang ran gambling in Chicago, it was clear that McGurn was murdered by his former gangland pals. Antonio DeMora, his stepbrother, claimed he knew who had killed Jack and swore to avenge the murder. Just over two weeks later, Antonio was shot dead in a pool-room

in much the same fashion as McGurn.

Fifty years after the death of her husband, McGurn’s widow appeared in a television programme about the Capone era. Looking remarkably fit and healthy despite a recent operation to have a pacemaker implanted, Louise Rolfe maintained that McGurn had been with her on the day of the massacre.

Married for the third time, she was living out her twilight years in California, still keeping the secret of the “Blonde Alibi.”

CHRONICLES OF CRIME OGRE OF ARDENNES DIES IN HOSPITAL

l continued from page 15

May 4th

DISABLED FARMER MURDERED BY “EVIL” ROBBERS POLICE IN South Africa launched a murder investigation after a disabled farmer was strangled to death by robbers in his own home.

The killing of wheelchair-bound Neil McKay in Winterton, Kwa-Zulu Natal province, has outraged local leaders.

Murdered in his own home: victim Neil McKay

Alf Lees, the MP for the Uthukela constituency, said: “Who would murder a man in a wheelchair? A man who was unarmed and physically unable to defend himself?

“Neil was a gentle and friendly man of peace who refused to carry or have a gun, despite living on a farm where his late father made it possible for him to work from a wheelchair.”

Mr. McKay, who was 46, was found dead by his mother when she visited the farm to check on him. He had been tied up in his wheelchair and strangled.

Twenty years ago Mr. McKay was paralysed when he was shot through the spine in an attack that remains unsolved.

Mr. McKay’s killers are believed to have targeted him in order to steal cash from a safe.

Three of the victim’s dogs were let out by the robbers and three others were slashed with knives as they tried to protect him from his attackers.

A family friend described the killers as “evil.”

May 10th MICHEL FOURNIRET, one of France’s most notorious serial killers, has died in hospital, aged 79.

Fourniret, who was reportedly suffering from a heart condition and Alzheimer’s disease, had been put in an induced coma before he passed away at La Pitié Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. He had been incarcerated at the nearby Fresnes prison.

Dubbed “The Ogre of the Ardennes,” Fourniret murdered at least eight girls and young women between 1987 and 2001. He was serving two life sentences for the killings and the kidnapping of his victims.

Jailed for life in 2008, in 2018 he was given a second life sentence for the murder of Farida Hammiche, the

Left to right, Michel Fourniret and Joanna Parrish

companion of a robber Fourniret had met in prison.

In the same year he confessed to the murders of Marie-Angèle Domèce, a disabled woman from Auxerre, and British student Joanna Parrish.

Ms. Parrish, 20, a Leeds University undergraduate

from Newnham-on-Severn, Gloucestershire, was found dead in the River Yonne in Auxerre in May 1990. She had been raped, beaten and strangled.

Fourniret was long suspected of the crime. l For a full case report see Master Detective August.

NINE KILLED IN SCHOOL SHOOTING May 11th AUTHORITIES IN Russia have detained a 19-year-old former student, following a mass shooting in Kazan, Tatarstan, which claimed the lives of nine people.

Seven eighth-grade students and two teachers were killed in the attack carried out by Ilnaz Galyaviev at Gymnasia No. 175. Many more

Emergency services at the school in Kazan. Left, suspect Ilnaz Galyaviev

students were injured and at least seven were treated in hospital for gunshot wounds.

Two students died after they jumped out of second-floor windows to

escape the shooter. According to reports, one teacher was shot dead as she covered students from the shots.

Armed police eventually arrested the suspect after sealing off parts of the building. Firefighters rescued some students from the third floor of the school.

Galyaviev reportedly set off an improvised explosive device during the incident.

In the aftermath of the shooting President Vladimir Putin ordered the government to tighten Russia’s gun laws.

GANG RIVALS BEHEADED IN PRISON FIGHT May 20th AT LEAST seven prisoners were killed – and most of them beheaded – in a bloodthirsty battle between rival gangs inside a jail in Guatemala.

According to the police, the violence broke out after a prisoner serving a sentence for murder ordered the attack on rival gang members in retaliation for the killing of his wife. She

Police at the prison

had been shot dead just hours earlier by gunmen who escaped on a motorbike.

The jail, in Quetzaltenango, is home to more than 2,000 inmates

but was only meant to house 500.

In response to the deadly violence between the members of the Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 gangs, police were deployed to take control of the prison.

According to reports, there are approximately 3,500 violent deaths in Guatemala each year. Half of these are gang-related. l more Chronicles on page 50 truecrime 29

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“THE SADDEST STORY...”

Part 7 in the series The Defence Rests sees Sir Edward Marshall Hall defending foreigners and Englishmen alike during the First World War

by William Kendal

A

nother client was Captain Weiner, an American millionaire of Austrian extraction who had fought for Britain in South Africa. Describing his Surrey home, Ewell Castle, the Evening News reported that “layers of concrete” had been laid in the grounds, and these could be used as “emplacements for heavy guns directed against London.” The newspaper

J

UST BEING a foreigner and living in England during the First World War could get you accused of spying. Most resident aliens were regarded with suspicion. More than a few were charged with espionage, and some of them turned to Edward Marshall Hall, the leading defence advocate at that time, to clear them.

One of them was Rolf Jonsson, a young Swedish artist charged with signalling to the enemy. His house in Cornwall overlooked the sea at Newlyn, and gossips said he was communicating with German ships by signalling to them from his windows.

A naval lieutenant was dispatched in a trawler, from which he signalled with a series of red and white flashes. He claimed he received answering flashes from Jonsson’s home, but Marshall Hall soon demolished the prosecution.

He learned that at the time the lieutenant saw flashes coming, as he assumed, from the Swede’s house, the police were also watching, and saw nothing.

The flashes the lieutenant saw, Marshall

Sir Edward Marshall Hall (above) judged Sir John Simon’s speech the best he had ever heard at the Old Bailey

Bomb damage in Brixton, south London, during the First World War. When a Zeppelin f lew over Holborn two sightseers were arrested as spies

Hall suggested, were the work of Jonsson’s suspicious neighbours, who had reported him to the authorities. The case was dismissed. truecrime 31

her. The baby had at once been taken to England, and had grown up speaking only English.

At 16 she had been left alone with her father, who was jailed for five years for drugging and assaulting her.

On his release he made her life such a misery that in desperation she married a German admirer, by whom she was treated little better than by her father.

Her husband was eventually sent to prison, and she tried to earn her living as a ladies’ hairdresser. Then in 1916 she met a British officer who fell in love with her and wanted to marry her if she could obtain her freedom. But her husband refused to divorce her, and during a visit to the officer she was arrested under the war nother case regulations and featured sentenced to an Englishman imprisonment named Usher and separation and the Swiss from him for manager of ever. The officer London’s showed his Holborn commitment to Viaduct Hotel. her, however, by On the night briefing Marshall of October Hall for her 15th, 1915, a appeal.

Zeppelin flew Marshall Hall over the city was nothing if dropping its not emotional, bombs. Many and the girl’s houses had story moved him. been destroyed “If you uphold in Zeppelin this sentence,” raids, but still The female defendant had been found guilty of visiting Folkestone (above), a he told the Usher and the prohibited area for foreigners during the war Bench, “it will hotel’s manager be a disgrace to went out onto hen in July 1918 humanity.” the roof to watch. While cost to one of His Majesty’s Marshall Hall defended The Bench responded by they were there Usher ships. a girl whose case, he told reducing the sentence to a lit a cigarette which was Eventually, however, an the bench, was “the saddest fine of £10, and the lovers spotted by policemen in the employee blew the whistle, story I have ever heard in left the court together. street, and he and the Swiss the fraud was exposed, all my thirty-five years’ manager were arrested and and Brotherton and a ot only Marshall Hall experience at the bar.” charged with signalling to colleague were prosecuted but the whole British The girl’s plight arose the enemy. for conspiring to bilk public was moved by another from the war and other When they appeared the King through “false wartime case in which he circumstances, and she was in court the next day the representations.” became intensely interested, appealing against a sentence cigarette’s stub and ash Marshall Hall claimed and in which he was eager of four months’ hard labour were solemnly produced that Brotherton’s actions to lead for the defence. But and deportation. as exhibits, and amidst had been in the national to his disappointment the As an alien enemy she had much laughter the case was interest. He argued that in brief went to Sir John Simon, been found guilty of going dismissed. order to work efficiently for whose low-key, carefully to Folkestone, a prohibited Shortly afterwards the Admiralty the shipyard measured style was the very area under the Defence of the magazine John Bull had to maintain a large, opposite of his own. the Realm Regulations. But carried a paragraph which skilled and fully trained Marshall Hall, however, as Marshall Hall pointed was taken to refer to the staff liable to be called to had a watching brief at the out, she was an alien only by incident. The hotel sued work both night and day. trial, which was to have a accident. Her father was a for libel, Marshall Hall But in the natural course remarkable sequel. naturalised British subject, appeared for the defendant, of events there were times The man in the Old but her mother had gone to and the case was settled out when there was not enough Bailey’s dock, charged with Germany to visit a dying of court...again, after much for them to do, and the firm murder, was Lieutenant relative, and while there had laughter. could not afford to pay them Douglas Malcolm. He came prematurely given birth to In a more serious affair, for nothing. By invoicing

also noted the presence of an “observatory” tower commanding a view of the surrounding countryside, and equipped with a powerful telescope.

The innuendo was obvious, and Weiner sued the paper’s publishers.

Marshall Hall’s witnesses included a doctor who testified that the captain had “no German proclivities,” and it transpired that his concrete had been laid to create a lake, while the purpose of the telescope was purely sporting. With its aid, Captain Weiner had bragged, he could “see a man wink on the grandstand at Epsom.”

He was awarded damages of £50.

Marshall Hall defended Eric Brotherton, the manager of the Humber Graving Dock Company at Immingham, where many of the Admiralty’s warships were sent for repair.

By all accounts the shipyard made an invaluable contribution to the war effort, but at the same time Mr. Brotherton was busy feathering his own nest. As he was doing so much for the government, he thought they should do something for him. So if he needed work doing in his house or garden, or extensions or repairs made at his firm’s premises, he charged the

the Admiralty for work done for his own and his firm’s benefit, Brotherton had simply been trying to solve this problem.

The argument was not entirely without merit, but it didn’t wash. It was estimated that Brotherton had defrauded the government of at least £50,000, and possibly twice that amount.

After spending 28 days in the dock at the Old Bailey he was convicted and jailed for 20 months, but it was generally agreed that he had got off lightly. With a less able counsel he could have received a much stiffer sentence.

A

T

N

32 truecrime

from a wealthy Scots family, had joined the army in 1914, and had fought throughout the war. His victim was a Russian, suspected of spying for Germany and involvement in the white slave trade. He was Anton Baumberg, but his card was inscribed “Count Anthony

semi-undress. He beat the Russian seducer virtually unconscious.

In vain Dorothy Malcolm told her husband that she loved Baumberg and wanted a divorce. Malcolm simply took her away, told her she must never see Baumberg again, and returned to France.

He hoped that was that, but it wasn’t.

His wife wrote to him saying she could not give up her lover, and asking again for

it any longer. I am going to thrash him until he is unrecognisable. I may shoot him if he has got a gun. I expect he has, as he’s too much of a coward to stand a thrashing.

“Of course, I may get it in the neck first. You see, I am quite cool. If that happens, oh, believe me, my own little darling, believe me, it’s for you. I swear to you I love you more than a man has ever loved a woman before...

“I thank God from the bottom of my heart for having sent me over in time to save you from the worst happens, when you will come to me with open arms and those beautiful eyes and say to me, ‘Darling, I forgive you.’”

Malcolm made a will leaving everything to his mother-in-law in the event of his death. Then in civilian clothes and armed with a gun and a horsewhip, he went to the boarding-house near Paddington station where Baumberg was living.

de Borsch,” Above, and in the Lieutenant Douglas words of Sir John Simon he Malcolm, was “the worst right, his wife of characters, Dorothy, and passing under far right, the man who went a false name by the name and with a of Count de bogus title, without honest Borsch. A melodrama of occupation, passion and and one of murder, made those pieces of all the more refuse carried interesting along in the

by Edgar tide of great Lustgarten’s cities, living book (top right) no one knew how.”

A police witness put it more succinctly, describing Baumberg as a man “of whom nothing good could be said.”

One of the bad things to be said about him was that he took advantage of Lieutenant Malcolm’s wartime absence to seduce his wife. When Malcolm returned on leave from France in July 1917 and found his wife missing he traced her to a country cottage where he burst in to discover her with Baumberg, both in a state of

a divorce. So Malcolm again returned home on leave, and in a letter to Dorothy he wrote of Baumberg: “This creature is the most insufferable blackguard that was ever born. That he even dared speak to you drives me mad. I simply can’t stand

this devil incarnate. Your honour is saved. Thank God, oh, thank God. “Goodbye, which means, God be with you. I love you and I shall go on loving you to eternity...I know I shall meet you in the next world if

He gained admission by telling the housemaid that he was Inspector Quinn of Scotland Yard, and he was shown to Baumberg’s room.

Angry voices were heard moments later, followed by four shots.

truecrime 33

Malcolm then left the house by the front door, approached a policeman in the street, and told him: “I want you to go to 3 Porchester Place. I have shot a man.”

Baumberg was found dead on his bed. A drawer on the other side of the room was open, and it contained a revolver which Baumberg had told Mrs. Malcolm he was keeping for protection against her husband.

“I did it for my honour,” Malcolm said when he was charged. “You can imagine how I felt when I saw the cad who had been trying to get my wife to go away with him, and me in France, helpless to defend her honour. Can you wonder at what I did on the spur of the moment when I saw the cur before me who was luring my wife to dishonour?”

At the inquest, however, he was mortified to hear Dorothy say that she loved the Russian, had been

It is interesting to speculate what the verdict would have been had Marshall Hall defended having an affair with him, and wanted a divorce. She had promised not to see him again, she said, but she had loved him too much to be able to keep her word.

The coroner recorded a verdict of “justifiable homicide in the name of self-defence.”

But was it a case of self-defence? Did Baumberg reach for his revolver, or did Malcolm shoot him through provocation? Whichever, the general view was that the shooting was justified.

T

he murder charge was not dropped, however, and Malcolm went to trial at the Old Bailey.

In his opening speech the prosecutor Richard Muir expressed his confidence that Sir John Simon would not ask the jury to break their oaths by making an appeal to “the unwritten law.”

“I do not appeal to it,” Sir John confirmed. “I do not require to do so. It would be contrary to my duty to 34 truecrime

do so, and contrary to your duty,” he told the jury, “to listen to me if I attempted it. This is a court of justice, and you are sworn to do justice, and it is justice, and justice according to law, which I stand here to ask you to mete out to the defendant...

“Nobody will ever hear me defend in a court of justice a review of the law of murder which will make light of the taking of human life. But, for my part, if such a situation were to arise and it became necessary to discuss and decide it, I should not be prepared to subscribe to the doctrine that in a case where no other conceivable course can possibly save your wife – not, indeed, from unfaithfulness, but from destruction of body or soul at the hands not of an admirer but of a blackguard – that the duty of protecting the woman is thereupon dissolved, and in the face of such a situation there is no other course within the common law of this country but that a husband should then retire and leave his wife to her fate. But that is not the defence here.”

Sir John went on to describe how the “black, evil, ugly shadow” of Baumberg had fallen across the Malcolms’ lives. He said that Malcolm “went to the room to punish and not to kill, and in the struggle which took place it was a choice between Baumberg’s life and his.”

Simon had decided not to call Malcolm to give evidence, for under cross-examination he might lose his temper and convict himself. And in conclusion the defence counsel told the jury it was for them to say whether Malcolm should go to the condemned cell or “return to the service of His Majesty, to put on again the uniform which he has done nothing to disgrace and much to justify.”

His client, Sir John said, awaited the jury’s verdict knowing that whatever it might be, “he has protected the honour of his nearest and dearest.“ And he knew “he shall never be ashamed.”

In his summing-up, delayed for three minutes by a standing ovation for the defence counsel, Mr. Justice McCardie told the jury that

if they found Malcolm guilty they could rest assured that the Crown had the right to show him mercy. But he pointed out that because Malcolm had not been called to testify, the court did not know if Baumberg had tried to get the revolver in his drawer. Furthermore, there had been no marks on Malcolm which indicated a struggle.

Nevertheless, the judge concluded, if the jury believed it had been a matter of Malcolm’s life or his victim’s, then Malcolm

Glancing through the book, Derek Malcolm noticed several pages had been torn out should be acquitted.

And it was an acquittal that the jury delivered just 20 minutes later, clearing Lieutenant Douglas Malcolm of both murder and manslaughter.

The popular verdict brought more cheers, and the prosecutor crossed the court to shake Malcolm’s hand.

Marshall Hall said that Sir John Simon’s speech was by far the finest he had ever heard at the Old Bailey, and others wondered how Malcolm would have fared had Marshall Hall been his counsel.

Edward Marjoribanks, Marshall Hall’s biographer, believed that the advocate would have put himself in the shoes of his client, as was his custom, and would have treated the court to a dramatic reconstruction of Malcolm’s final confrontation with his wife’s lover. “Marshall would have pointed the revolver at the jury, and the ring of steel and the click of its trigger would have been heard in court. He would have reproduced, in dumb show, Baumberg’s stealthy gesture in attempting to reach his revolver.”

Moreover, Marshall Hall would probably have called Malcolm to testify. With Sir John Simon, the defendant was in safer and no less talented hands. Marshall Hall’s histrionics and risk-taking strategy might

have won the day, but might equally well have resulted in Malcolm’s conviction.

As it was, on the evidence it is hard to resist the suspicion that the jury were more than ready to give Malcolm the benefit of any doubt, and that “the unwritten law” prevailed.

But the story wasn’t over. Some years later, Malcolm’s schoolboy son Derek was rummaging through his father’s bedroom, seeking some small-change so he could go to a cinema. Instead he found a book concealed beneath some clothes. It was Edgar Lustgarten’s The Judges and the Judged, an anthology of notable trials, and glancing through it, Derek Malcolm noticed that several pages had been torn out. He turned to the book’s contents list to see what was missing, and read: “Mr. Justice McCardie tries Lieutenant Malcolm: page 33.”

The book was the local library’s copy, which Douglas Malcolm had taken out and kept. He had also taken out page 33 and the ensuing chapter which described his trial. His son’s natural curiosity prompted him to obtain another copy, and discover his parents’ secret.

They remained married, the fear of further publicity dissuading Dorothy from continuing to seek a divorce.

But the marriage was never happy, for although Douglas Malcolm apparently remained devoted to the wife who lived with him intermittently, she was unable to return his affection. Rogue though Baumberg was, it seems he had a sex appeal Dorothy never found in her husband.

The couple’s story is told

by Derek Malcolm in his book Family Secrets. Among much else, he tells how his mother sprang a final surprise. Upon his father’s death, some years after that of his mother, he received a note from an aunt. She wrote: “Your mother asked me to tell you, when your father died, that you are not his son. Your father was the Italian ambassador in London in 1932.”

Some people never change, and Dorothy Malcolm apparently hadn’t.

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The crime he envisaged was born out of a desperate dream. But within minutes it had turned into a nightmare that stunned and divided Paris, setting the city asking: was he an evil murderer or a man of God?

B

Y THE time he was 20, Jacques Fesch had set his mind on a single objective – buying a boat.

In this boat he would sail from his native France to the Pacific, around atolls and islands, across coral reefs, and over warm, friendly seas under azure skies.

A tall, handsome Parisian, Fesch talked endlessly to his friends about his dreamboat. One of them was so enchanted with the idea that he said he would like to go along as secondin-command. The fact that Fesch had no idea how to sail a boat, and couldn’t even paddle a canoe across the River Seine, never entered his mind.

The catalyst for Fesch’s dream was his desperate, manic desire to escape from his family.

His father was a director of the Franco-Belgium bank, and a very wealthy man.

Georges Fesch lived like a French aristocrat and never lost sight of his distinguished ancestors. He was a direct descendant of Joseph Fesch, uncle of Napoleon Bonaparte. He was disdainful of his children, particularly Jacques, and hated his wife to the point where they lived apart as often as possible – divorce being out of the question in the 1950s for a man in his position.

Unlike his son, who dreamed dreams of travel, Georges Fesch actually did voyage around the world.

This was his great passion.

His business commitments smoothed the path for him – he could go where he wanted and for as long as he wanted on behalf of the bank.

France still had its colonies spread across the globe, and a wealthy Frenchman who visited them was still received like royalty. Georges Fesch,

36 truecrime

a true French colonial, loved this.

As far as travel was concerned, the difference between father and son was that Georges travelled to impose his dominating presence upon the rest of mankind, while Jacques dreamed of travelling in order to slink away from all vestiges of humanity.

It followed that the more affluent Georges Fesch became, and the more successful he was, the greater the gulf between him and the son he despised.

For Georges could find nothing at all endearing in his oldest son. At school in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Jacques was a flop. Funded

“He has become what you in your religion call a saint,” said a philosopher about Jacques Fesch (above). “So you have killed a saint.” Left, Paris in the 1950s, the setting for the murder of Officer Vergne

by an insufficient allowance from his mother, he began spending his days in bed and his nights in clubs with his two buddies, Criquet and Croquignole.

Their favourite watering places were in the Latin Quarter, then a shadowy, slightly seedy netherworld by night, where Fesch occasionally played the trumpet for the other bar folk. Inevitably the conversation turned to the boat he would one day sail away from post-war Paris When he had been hanging around nightclubs for a few years someone in the family said: “Perhaps he ought to start training for a job.”

So, mother put up some cash for him to start a central heating business. It never

truecrime 37

s

er

nd

the boatman.

“Two million, two hundred thousand francs,” was the answer. At that time this was about £2,000. It was money Jacques could only dream about.

So he decided to visit his father, staying in his country home nearby. Over dinner, for the first time in his life, he broached the subject of a loan for the dreamboat.

ew C S p a se i c re er c an all d ed Jo b hn y Sa

our family,” Georges Fesch wrote to his son. Despite the fact that his fatherin-law gave him a job, Fesch returned to live in his parents’ home.

One day he drove his Simca to a boatyard in La Rochelle and watched a 10-metre yacht under construction.

“How much will it be when it’s finished?” he asked

th

traded, and Jacques spent most of the cash on a Simca car. Then in 1951, when he was 21, he married Pierrette, a girl he met at school as a teenager.

He kept the marriage, in Strasbourg, a secret from his parents, until daughter Véronique was born.

When they heard, they were furious. “This is a misfortune that has befallen

at

DID THEY EXECUTE A SAINT?

M

He Was A Cop-Killer, Yes...But

“I’d need a down payment of 700,000 francs,” he explained.

Georges Fesch stared at his son aghast. In a few short, icy sentences he made it transparently clear that he was putting up no money for boats.

That night Jacques lay awake, more obsessed than ever with the idea that escape from the world was the only solution to his unhappiness.

Back in Paris he remembered his father had a 7.65-calibre revolver hidden in his study. Profiting from his parent’s absence he picked up the weapon and slipped it into his briefcase.

That night he went to a nightclub and met Criquet and Croquignole. “I’m working on a plan to steal the money to buy my boat,” he said. They nodded. It was as if he was already on his way to Tahiti.

The plan was to call on a money-changer Alexandre Silberstein in the Rue Vivienne, in central Paris, and steal 2,200,000 francs in gold – just enough to buy the boat. Criquet suddenly got cold feet, so Fesch and Croquignole alone staked out the change shop.

The chosen day was Wednesday, February 24th, 1954 – the time, 6 p.m.

Fesch entered the shop while Croquignole stayed outside as lookout. When the young customer said he wanted to buy more than two million francs’ worth of gold, Silberstein quickly explained that he didn’t have that amount in stock.

“Come back tomorrow at 5.30,” he suggested. “I’ll have a delivery by then.”

Next day Fesch, clutching his briefcase, with the gun and a hammer in it, was back in the Rue Vivienne.

This time Croquignole had chickened out and Criquet was persuaded back as a helpmate. At 5.30 Fesch opened the shop door.

Silberstein now had his son Claude, 22, with him behind the counter.

“The gold is on its way,” Silberstein said.

He phoned the bank to make sure – yes, it would be there in a few

M FR UR EN DE CH R W THE AY

Georges Fesch, who lived much like a French aristocrat. He was a director of the FrancoBelgium bank

minutes, he was assured.

Fesch had to wait, calmly, politely.

Claude Silberstein retreated into a back room and, for the next few minutes, the only sound in the shop was the ticking of the clock above the counter.

The silence was all engulfing.

It was too much for Criquet, whose nerves had reached a stratospheric tautness.

Unable to stand the tension, he threw open the door and fled.

Silberstein gaped – first at the open door and then back at Fesch. “My friend is always in a hurry,” Fesch babbled by way of explanation, and then, realising the money-changer suspected a trap, produced the revolver and shouted, “Give me your money, or you’re a dead man!” Using the gun butt, he delivered a vicious blow to Silberstein’s head.

Criquet, meanwhile, had found a policeman directing traffic. “Quick, come with me!” he yelled. “My friend is in the money-changing shop and he’s going to do something stupid!” The cop, somewhat bemused, decided to investigate. He arrived just too late.

Inside the shop Silberstein was trying to reason with his aggressor, but Fesch was already on the other side of the counter, wildly sweeping banknotes into his briefcase. Savagely he dealt the moneychanger another blow across the head, causing him to fall.

The gun then went off accidentally, wounding Fesch in the ear as the bullet shattered the shop window.

He gave the shopkeeper another blow and walked calmly out on to the street, to be confronted by angry passer-by Marcel Labarre, who happened to be deaf and had now discovered himself covered with broken glass.

Fesch ignored the indignant protestations and walked off along the street.

Suddenly he heard a piercing cry from behind him: “Help!

Help! Murder!” He turned, frightened. Silberstein was on the pavement, pointing at him, inviting everyone to intervene.

Led by the deaf Marcel Labarre, the passers-by formed a group that quickly became a crowd, in hot 38 truecrime

called the police. Fesch could hear the deaf man Labarre talking animatedly to the concierge. He waited.

Presently two policemen arrived and cleared the pursuers out into the street, after which one of them went for reinforcements.

Now the desperate fugitive reckoned his chance had come. Straightening his suit and drawing a deep breath, he walked calmly down the stairs, past the remaining policeman, Jean-Baptiste Vergne, who was standing at the front door, and into the street. He looked exactly what he hoped he looked like – a tenant leaving the building to go about his business.

He almost got away with it too. But then a sharp-eyed pursuer shouted: “That’s him! Quick! Catch him!”

Vergne called out: “Stop, or I’ll shoot!” Fesch swung round and fired blindly through his raincoat pocket.

The bullet went straight through Vergne’s heart, killing

Above, Jacques Fesch with his family in 1935 in the house of Victor Hugo.

Jacques is on the far right cuddling the teddy bear

pursuit of Jacques Fesch, who had now added a failed robbery to his long list of other failures. It was office closing time and desk workers gladly joined the chase.

Fesch was now so terrified that he ran right past his own parked car. Spurred on by cries of “Murder!” he tore through the rush-hour crowds. One moment he dropped his briefcase; turning, he dashed back for it, defying the pursuing rabble that slowed enough for him to retrieve the evidence.

Rue de Richelieu, Opéra-Comique, Rue des Italiens…the names whizzed past him. Suddenly there was the open front door of a block of flats. He ran inside and straight up the staircase to the fifth floor. Through a window he saw the pursuing pack filtering into the garden behind the flats.

A few had seen him entering the building and now they gathered on the ground floor while someone

Above and right, Fesch being led back down to the cells during his murder trial and sandwiched between two police officers after his arrest. He received the head wound during a tussle with two judo experts who cornered him in the Richelieu-Drouot metro station

him instantly.

Jacques Fesch, fleeing down the street with his loot of 300,000 stolen francs – not even enough for the deposit on his dreamboat – was now a cop-killer.

Emboldened by the gunshot, the mob was again hard on his heels. Fesch headed into the entrance of the metro station RichelieuDrouot. Frightened commuters flattened themselves against the wall as he tore past. There was panic as two pursuers, Georges Plissier and Marcel Riedler, cornered him on a staircase.

Fesch was about to discover that both were judo experts.

The fugitive fought them savagely, firing at Plissier, but missing. He got away but was caught again. He shouted: “Let me go, or I’ll shoot you!” Riedler, a retired cop, tightened his grip. Fesch fired twice more. Plissier forced the gun from his hand and hit him over the head with the butt. Fesch crumpled. It was all over.

At police headquarters, Rue d’Amboise, Fesch, still shaking with fear and despair, further compromised his situation by choosing momentarily to set himself above the events.

“I fired my gun, so what?” he sneered. “What would you have done in my position?”

Arrowed above is Fesch’s cell in Santé Prison in Paris.

It faced the courtyard where prisoners were allowed to walk around for half an hour a day

He was told: “The policeman you shot is dead.”

He gaped in disbelief.

Realisation of what lay ahead came swiftly. He bowed his head in abject shame. He had no excuses. He offered no mitigation.

In an age when gunmen simply didn’t kill cops, the news of Officer Vergne’s murder by a young rake from a wealthy family sent shock waves of horror through Paris. Lynch crowds appeared on street corners, the police adopted an ugly belligerent mood, and the

press became hysterical in its vilification.

One story dredged up by the newspapers was a disaster for Fesch. It seemed that, some months before the murder, friends had laid bets that he couldn’t get a girl named Thérèse into bed with him. Fesch accepted the challenge and laid a trap for her so that one night she had to stay with him.

She was a virgin and he seduced her. Now, at the point of his arrest, Thérèse, who had no idea he had a wife and daughter, realised she was pregnant with his child – a boy who would be called Gerard. Fesch

gradually to change as he began interviews with the prison chaplain, Father Jean Devoyod, a Dominican. “I don’t have any faith,” Fesch told the padre bluntly when they first met. But urged on

by Father Jean, Fesch began reading the lives of the saints and discovering life’s spiritual dimension.

And such was the extraordinary change initiated by Father Jean that after Fesch was guillotined an inquiry began into the killer’s suitability for sainthood.

At 8 a.m. each day he heard Mass in his cell. He tried to stay as long as possible “in conversation with God,” by means of meditation and prayer.

With the help of his spiritual advisers he slowly transformed himself into a monk, creating a vivid impression of sanctity in all those with whom he came into contact.

He knew, of course, that he was preparing himself for death. He was aware that his trial would be merely a ritual; that the vengeanceseekers would have their day in court.

It took three years for that day to come, in April 1957. There is no doubting that when it arrived Jacques Fesch was a vastly different man from the one who shot Officer Vergne. There is also no doubt that not many in France cared about this

“I hoped to learn. I wanted only one thing – to get away from where I was” knew nothing of this until the newspapers discovered Thérèse. He collapsed in his cell when he was told.

In despair he began to write, and philosophise.

“Authority strikes at the young, seemingly unaware that we are only what our fathers have made of us,” he wrote. “Our actions are the consequence of our education, and the experiences that have been revealed to us. Our parents’ foolish mistakes are bequeathed to us, and the punishment for all this falls on our heads.”

The contrary view, that while we are all victims of our parenthood, we don’t all shoot policemen, had escaped him.

This attitude was

metamorphosis.

When alone in his cell, he wrote about himself, trying to purge his youthful misdemeanours in a swathe of honesty.

“I have never been free, really free to choose one way or the other. I was born with a feeble nature, with no character, anaemic in my ideas, allowing myself to be won over by easy living, and indulging myself in a way of life which, without being luxurious, was sufficiently cosy for me not to have to face up to the sort of reality most people have to face.

“The reason I saw things in a certain way was a result of my upbringing.

I cried from the rooftops to be heard, knowing that my parents would never truecrime 39

respond. The result was an atmosphere in our family that was awful. There was no respect, no love.

“I knew I would come to a bad end. When I was old enough to make up my own mind I was incapable of reacting properly. I was very unhappy. Was I free? No, never.”

F

esch should have appeared before the Seine Assizes on April 8th, 1957, but the trial was brought forward to April 3rd. The reason for that was that Queen Elizabeth was scheduled to make a state visit to Paris on April 8th, and it would never have done for the capital of elegance and charm to be putting on a guillotine trial at the same time.

There was another, equally sinister, problem that caused the change of date.

This was that the gendarmerie was threatening to strike if Fesch wasn’t sentenced to death for the murder of their colleague. And the gendarmerie couldn’t of course be allowed to strike while the Queen was in town.

That the strike threat was made, and that the judiciary capitulated to it, suggested a breadth of cynicism that left no one in any doubt that the Fesch trial would be an execution showpiece staged for the masses.

The assize courtroom, vast and baroque, was a fitting backdrop for this piece of black theatre. Fesch wrote to his brother during the trial: “I’m no longer a man, I’m a worm, suffering all the odium of men and the scorn of the people. They have opened their maw like a roaring, tearing lion. I feel very calm. Let the Lord’s will be done.”

The court president, Raymond Janin, asked him: “Did you really want to sail round the world?”

“Fesch replied: “I wanted to escape, yes.”

“But you didn’t have a penny.”

“That’s why I thought of committing a robbery.”

40 truecrime

“And you know nothing about navigation?”

“I hoped to learn. I wanted only one thing – to get away from where I was.”

“You could have taken a job as a steward on a transatlantic liner.”

“I never thought about

understood what I was doing.

I came out of the shop and walked down the street like a sleepwalker. They said I was calm. That isn’t true. I was in a state of panic.

“And when I was leaving the block of flats I did not aim at Vergne. I was dying

of fright. I wasn’t capable of aiming at him.”

This in fact was the nub of the case. Fesch could not have aimed at Vergne, not only because of his distraught state of mind but because he fired through his raincoat pocket. As he said himself,

over the facts.

Police witnesses filed one after the other on to the witness-stand, each of them filled with hate. More honest was the money-changer Alexandre Silberstein. “I didn’t think I was being confronted by a bandit, even when he took out his revolver,” he recalled.

“That’s why I tried to reason with him. I told him he was committing an act of madness. For a second I thought he believed me, but then he began to beat me.”

Then the court listened in grim silence to Georges Fesch.

“My son is a poor type,” he said. “He’s an unhappy lad. I’m not going to gloss over the truth about him.

all he saw was a black mass standing by the door – it was conveniently forgotten that he was short-sighted and wasn’t wearing his glasses.

So he fired wildly, and it was by an incredible chance that the bullet went through Vergne’s heart. When that was understood, the verdict in an English court might well have been manslaughter.

But the police and prosecution wanted revenge and chose to ride roughshod

What would be the point?”

Pierrette, Fesch’s wife, said: “He was carried away by his dream. He was incapable of realising it, but he was also incapable of falling back to earth.” She revealed that before he left her Fesch gave her all the money he had – 300,000 francs, which was about the sum he managed to steal from the money-changer.

René Floriot, counsel for the victim’s family, was as

“He’s an unhappy lad. I’m not going to gloss over the truth about him” that. In any case, that wouldn’t have interested me.”

The questioning soon degenerated into a big sneer.

Prosecutor Maître Suduka scoffed: “There were of course other boats leaving France that might have

Above, Fesch’s case is reported in the French press. Right, Jacques and wife Pierrette shortly after their marriage

tempted you. Those going to Indochina, for instance.”

The point about that was that France was fighting a desperate and unpopular losing war for its colonies in Indochina, so why couldn’t Fesch have joined up if he wanted a boat ride? He didn’t reply. But the audience loved it.

Criquet told the court: “Honestly, we didn’t think this would happen. The boat, yes, we believed in that. But not the gun or the shooting.

I ran to get the traffic policeman as soon as I saw that gun.”

Fesch told the court: “I can tell you that I was crazy, but I

brutal as the prosecutor.

He sneered openly at the prisoner’s conversion. “What else is there to do in prison except repent, or pretend to repent?” he asked. As for the Fesch family: “Every year there are 10,000 little Parisians suffering from the struggles between their parents.

“Think about Officer Vergne,” he concluded.

In his summing-up, Prosecutor Suduka said: “I’ve searched everywhere in this young man’s background to find some mitigating circumstances. I’ve found only rottenness, a playboy, a thief, a calm and resolute killer. It is therefore my duty to ask you for the supreme punishment.”

Paul Baudet, who had the monumental task of trying to save Fesch’s neck, said his client had acted in a fit of madness, and had fired his pistol at random in the panic

The court rose on April 5th – the verdict was due to be announced next day, Fesch’s 27th birthday.

Some people wept, others applauded, as the sentence of death was read out. They hardly noticed that Criquet and Croquignole were found not guilty and discharged.

Next day the newspapers were beginning to have

Left, French President René Coty who had the power to commute Fesch’s sentence. Above, executioner André Obrecht

Jacques and Pierrette share a goodbye kiss following his sentence

of the chase.

“There is no crime on earth that deserves to be punished by another crime,” he said.

“When they were chasing him, it was death in mayhem.

If he goes to the guillotine it will be death in the cold light of reason. Does he really deserve death? Is that a proportionate punishment for what he did?”

the law.” Others felt that a lesson had been learned, and now it was time to pardon Fesch.

The Appeal Court didn’t agree, and refused to intervene. So the case went finally to the President, René

doubts about the death sentence. The conservative Le Figaro suggested: “May we be permitted to suggest that the severity of this verdict need not be pushed as far as the supreme and bloody penalty?”

Combat observed: “Everything in this trial, including generosity, has been effaced by the necessity to observe the strict letter of

Coty, who could grant a pardon. Coty was a strict Roman Catholic. His view of it was this: he was full of admiration for the prisoner’s conversion to Catholicism while awaiting trial and he didn’t think Fesch deserved to die – but he dared not upset the police.

Just before his execution in the yard of the Santé Prison in the early morning of October 1st, 1957, Fesch wrote: “I am not alone. God is with me. Less than five hours to live. In five hours I will see Jesus.”

As Fesch was prepared for the guillotine he refused a cigarette and glass of rum.

The assistants to executioner André Obrecht cut the hair on his neck and bound him up like a parcel, so much so that he could hardly walk and had to be dragged to his death. They threw him on to the bascule and seconds later the deadly blade fell.

His severed head was propelled outwards by the pressure of his blood, and rolled downwards into the basket. His body twitched and then became still.

At first the remains were buried unceremoniously in a cemetery reserved for victims of the guillotine. But under pressure from Fesch’s friends, the minister of justice agreed to release the body for reburial in the old cemetery

of Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

The ceremony took place on April 11th, 1958, before a huge, silent crowd.

Already the concept of elevating Fesch to sainthood for his dramatic conversion to Christ and his writings about God was gaining ground. The idea originated with Cardinal Lustiger, the Archbishop of Paris, who eventually, in December 1993, opened a preliminary Church inquiry with a view to Fesch’s eventual beatification. If that seems a long time ago, it is a process that can take many years.

“I hope that one day he will be venerated as a saintly figure,” the Archbishop declared.

The move prompted a philosopher, Armand Jacob, who befriended Fesch after his arrest but who declared himself an atheist, to write a vitriolic letter to President Coty.

“You are supposed to be a Christian, Mr. President, at least in the sense that you go to Mass on Sunday and fast on Friday. Did you know that there are other Christians who pray to the young man whose head you threw to the cops? He was a criminal, yes, but not as bad as many on whom you showed pity.

He has become what in your religion you call a saint. So you have killed a saint.”

Perhaps the most bizarre footnote to the Fesch saga occurred a few days after his execution. On October 12th, 1957, the Paris assize court judged the case of a man named Brunet, who had killed a police officer – exactly the same crime for which Jacques Fesch was tried and executed.

The president of the court was the indefatigable Raymond Janin, and the prosecutor was none other than Maître Suduka.

The accused Brunet was defended by Maître Marsepoil, who had been Criquet’s defence lawyer in the Fesch murder trial.

So would Brunet also die on the guillotine, just like Jacques Fesch? Well, no. For the death penalty to be enforced in a French court, the prosecutor had to first formally demand it. For reasons best known to himself, Maître Suduka made no such request – so the lucky Mr. Brunet was jailed for life. truecrime 41

HUSBAND “PUSHED PREGNANT WIFE OFF CLIFFTOP” Death came to Butterfly Valley when the couple stopped there for a rest. Now a court must decide whether it was accidental – or part of a sinister murder plot...

H

AKAN AYSAL, a bank clerk from Izmir in Turkey, had a surprise in store for his wife Semra, who was seven months pregnant. “Let’s go and visit my brother,” he announced.

Aysal’s brother lived in a village several hours away. Semra, 32, was not thrilled. She was a working woman and what with the strain of her pregnancy and her job she didn’t want to complicate her life visiting a distant relative. “I don’t want to do that,” she said. “It won’t be good for the baby.”

Semra’s mother agreed.

“She can’t travel that far when she is so close to her confinement,” she said. But Aysal insisted.

“Anyway, we’ll stop overnight,” Aysal said. “It’ll be a good trip. It will take your mind off things.”

So with some reluctance Semra bought the bus tickets and they set off. But at Mugla, where Aysal’s brother lived, her husband decided to change his plan. “We’ll make a detour to Butterfly Valley in Fethiye,” he said “You can cancel the return tickets and buy some more when we’re in Fethiye.”

Butterfly Valley, opposite the Greek island of Rhodes and the Turkish tourist resorts of Marmaris and Bodrum, is an isolated paradise of beaches, blue sea, romantic early-evening walks beneath the olive trees and more than a hundred species of butterflies, including the dramatic Jersey Tiger.

Despite her problems,

42 truecrime

Semra Aysal smiles above the stunning Butterfly Valley backdrop

Semra was captivated by the idyllic scenery as they made their way along the narrow path that leads to a promontory with breathtaking views, on June 19th, 2018.

At midday they reached the top, 300 metres above the rocks and the crashing sea below. The view hasn’t changed since the days when this was the ancient Greek colony of Lycia, more than 2,000 years ago.

Aysal said, “Let’s rest here

for a bit. You must be tired.”

Semra stretched out on the hard ground and relaxed.

They stayed there for three hours, taking lots of selfies in which she appears relaxed, carefree, smiling and in the happiest frame of mind.

But at the end of that time she vanished – over the cliff to her death where the sea washes on to the rocks.

Her remains were retrieved after an eight-hour search.

They were taken by boat in a body bag from the base of

the cliff.

“This is a very sad event,” said the rescue leader, Mete Kaplan. “The remains of the mother and child were found in separate places and placed in bags. You know, there are certain points in Butterfly Valley that should never be passed. In this incident a danger point was ignored.

People need to be more cautious.”

What happened? The Turkish police had no doubt about that. Having insured

Case report by Donald Carne her life, they claim, Semra’s husband simply rolled her off the cliff top so that he could cash in.

“They sat on top of that cliff for three hours so that he could make sure no one was around,” said a prosecutor. “Normally people spend 15 to 20 minutes admiring the view from that point.”

Suspicions were first raised by Semra’s family “When we went to the Forensic Medicine Institute to get her body, Hakan Aysal was sitting in his car,” said Semra’s brother Naim. “My family and I were distraught, but Hakan didn’t appear to be affected. At the funeral he talked about when Semra’s estate might be settled.”

Aysal was arrested when police discovered he was the beneficiary of a joint life assurance policy. “He planned the murder of his wife by first taking out a personal accident insurance on her behalf with a guarantee of 400,000 Turkish lira (£40,865) and where the only beneficiary was himself,” said the prosecution report.

Interrogated, Aysal said: “When we were on the cliff top, my wife took a photo on the camera phone and then put the phone in her bag. Later she asked for the phone back. I got up to fetch it just a few steps away and while my back was turned I heard her scream. I turned round, and she wasn’t there.”

As for the insurance policy: “I had life insurance before I got married. I have always been interested in extreme sports since 2014 – parachuting, bungee jumping, rafting. That’s why I need life insurance.”

But surely, it was pointed out, he must have been aware that, since it was a joint policy, if Semra died he would benefit from it?

“I didn’t examine the policy in detail,” he said.

“The banker arranged all the paperwork. I just brought it to my wife to get it signed. I

Above, Hakan and Semra seen in a selfie photograph taken at Butterfly Valley. Below, rescue teams carrying out the recovery operation. Inset below, Semra’s remains

wasn’t aware there was such a clause.”

Before Semra died, her husband had taken out three loans in her name to buy equipment for extreme

“My wife took a photo and then put the phone in her bag. Later she asked for the phone back. I got up to fetch it and while my back was turned I heard her scream”

sports. ”They couldn’t have been for her,” her brother said. “She had a fear of heights, so what extreme sports would she be doing in those circumstances?”

He pointed out that his sister’s fear of heights made Aysal’s story of her death implausible. “He persuaded her to edge towards the cliff edge on a narrow promontory, an area where access is forbidden even for able-bodied people. She was seven months pregnant and truecrime 43

it was very hot. Why would he keep her there for three hours on a hot, dry rock?

“When we asked him what happened he said at first, ‘She fell off the cliff as I took a photo. But later he said his back was turned and he didn’t see her fall.

“We later learned that he was treated in an Istanbul hospital for mental and neurological diseases from 2008 to 2010, and again in 2013 for psychological problems. He left all of these

treatments unfinished.”

At a preliminary court

MASTER DETECTIVE’S

AUGUST

Semra with Hakan. He had in the past been treated for mental health issues

hearing Aysal’s brother Murat stood by him. “Hakan

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LAST EXECUTION AT SLIGO

STEROID RAGE – OR COLDBLOODED MURDER?

TWO SISTERS HANGED HOLLYWOOD PUZZLER IN PUBLIC “I’VE FELT How He Became BETTER SINCE “The Most Hated I KILLED HIM” Man In Ireland” – But why did Penny do it?

In Brighouse, West Yorkshire…

Mary-Ann Found Dying Behind Her Shop Door

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44 truecrime

and his wife phoned to say they would visit us. They stayed with us for one night.

They left the next day, and when I was at the barber’s shop I heard what had happened to Semra.

“I rushed to be with my brother. When I arrived he was tearing himself apart.

There was no problem with their marriage – no financial difficulties as far as I could see.”

Murat’s wife Durdane added: “Hakan said they would call on us and surprise us. When they arrived we all went out together. We ate and talked about everyday things. In the morning my husband went to work. Hakan, Semra and I left the house. I went to my

“People have said to us, ‘This man is the very devil, so why don’t you punish him?’ But we believe Turkish law and Turkish judges should do the punishing” work and they said they were off sightseeing.”

The lawyer for Semra’s family, Karem Ozgen, said: “They sent a photo to their siblings ten minutes before the accident happened. It is clear that the bag and the phone are next to Semra.

This was no situation requiring Hakan Aysal to fetch it for her.”

The Fethiye High Criminal Court ordered Aysal to be remanded in custody on a charge of premeditated murder. He is expected to be tried later this year. He denies responsibility for her death. “I did not push her,” he said.

Semra’s brother Naim added: “People have said to us, ‘This man is the very devil, so why don’t you punish him? But we believe Turkish law and Turkish judges should do the punishing. If we act impulsively and kill him once, he will die only once. But if this incident is proven, if justice decides he did it, he will die every day in prison.

Let him not die one day, but every day!”

asktruecrime

Send your questions and updates to: Ask True Crime, PO Box 735, London SE26 5NQ • truecrime@truecrimelibrary.com

MURDER IN THE HEAT OF PASSION

FLECK OF GREEN PAINT CAUGHT THIS KILLER

I

T WAS early in 1972 that his cellmates noticed a subtle change that began to take place in the slim, darkly handsome prisoner as he went about his assigned duties in the Collins Bay Penitentiary near Kingston, Ontario.

Everyone still referred to him as “The Kid,” the nickname he was given when he first arrived at Collins Bay to serve out a life sentence. The nickname seemed like a misnomer now, however, because The Kid had passed his 13th year in jail long since.

The reason behind the change in The Kid was no secret to anyone. Nor was the timing. In a few weeks, The Kid would be up for another parole review, and even he may not have been aware of the special interest this event created in his fellow-prisoners. It was special, because The Kid was a rather special case.

Canadian laws regarding the punishment for convicted murderers had been changed some years before, and capital punishment had been abolished.

But when The Kid stood trial they still hanged killers,

Stuart Davies from Barnstaple writes: Gaetane Bouchard, 16, disappeared on May 13th, 1958, while out shopping after school in Edmundston, a Canadian border town. Her father learned that his daughter had been dating an American from Madawaska, just across the border. He got in touch with the young man, who told him that they had broken off their relationship as he planned to marry another girl. The police searched for the missing girl, but it was Mr. Bouchard who found her, in a “lovers’ retreat” gravel pit on the edge of town. Gaetane had been stabbed to death; but the police discovered something that would prove crucial to the outcome of the case: a flake of green paint. Does True Crime have a full telling of the story?

We know the case and have an account dating from the early 1970s when the killer came up for parole. However, there’s a curious discrepancy in that the involvement of the victim’s father is glossed over in an otherwise very thorough account. See what you think…. Case report by Warren Loring

John Jacob Vollman Jnr. The 20-year-old lived in Madawaska just across the river from Edmundston

and although the jury that convicted him recommended mercy, the judge didn’t see it that way and he sentenced the young man to die on the scaffold.

It had been a very near thing, but four days before he was due to meet the hangman The Kid became one of those rare individuals whose appointment with

death was postponed to another day. They commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment.

He may or may not have known what was going on around him in the Canadian prison early in 1972. By conservative estimate, about half the convicts in the place were involved in a pool on whether he would be granted parole in his coming meeting with the parole board. The outcome of that session was without doubt the major topic of conversation throughout the institution.

Even the guards were talking about it.

One of the older cons, who had done time in both American and Canadian prisons, made an interesting point. He was convinced that The Kid was going to be turned down, and for a specific reason.

“If this was the States, he’d be a cinch for parole,” the old prisoner pointed out. “But up here the parole boards are tougher – a lot tougher. He’s done nearly 13 years – 14, if you count the year he spent in the local jail before they sent him here. truecrime 45

In the States, he’d have been on the street four years ago, maybe even sooner in some parts.

“But up here – as far as parole is concerned – he’s got a tough rap to beat. He was under sentence of death, and then he was commuted.

Those clowns on the parole board up here figure he got a hell of a break, and they make a guy pay for that break by doing more time. In my book, he doesn’t have a chance.”

It was sound reasoning, but for some perverse reason the majority opinion among the inmates was that the parole board this year would prove the old guy wrong. hey all knew The Kid’s T story. The details of the crime which had brought him to Collins Bay had been told and retold among them hundreds of times.

It all started in the small city of Edmundston, New Brunswick, which sits almost astride the border between Canada and northern Maine.

It was 11 o’clock on the night of Tuesday, May 13th, 1958, when the worried family of a French-Canadian girl named Gaetane Bouchard phoned the local police station and reported that their daughter was missing.

Routinely, the matter was reported at once to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and Constable J.A.B. Latour at once checked with Customs and Immigration officials at the International Bridge over the St. John River, north of town, to determine whether the girl had crossed over in either direction.

Officials there checked their records and reported that Gaetane, a pretty, 16-year-old high school student, had not crossed the bridge that day. Latour drove out to the girl’s home to get more details.

The background of the disappearance seemed pretty commonplace.

After school, Gaetane had stopped at a local soda shop, Soucy’s, for a soda with a couple of girlfriends. She left them at about 4 o’clock to go home, saying that she was going to pick up some money to do some shopping and would be coming back to town. She went home, got the money, and headed back 46 truecrime

Above, the body of stabbed 16-year-old high school student Gaetane Bouchard is carried from the murder scene by police and officials

Gaetane Bouchard – she always observed curfews

from town. She had not been heard from since.

When last seen, the girl was wearing a light print dress and blue suede shoes.

She was described as a good, obedient girl who unfailingly observed family curfews. She had promised to be home by 6 p.m., and when she made such a promise, she always kept it. During the evening, her worried family had checked with all her friends and everyone who knew the girl, but no one had any idea

what could have happened.

Constable Latour returned to his office and put a bulletin on the teletype to all RCMP posts in the region. Meanwhile, friends and neighbours of the girl’s family were setting out in small groups to help look for her.

It was one of these groups that found Gaetane Bouchard a little after midnight in a gravel pit on the Boucher Office Road, about a mile and a half from her home. Her crumpled body lay face-down. The bloodstained skirt of her pretty print dress had been pulled up over her bare thighs. There was an ugly wound in the girl’s slender neck. She was dead.

Sergeant J.R. LaPointe, in command of the Edmundston detachment of the RCMP, was at the scene soon after receiving word of the discovery. With him were half a dozen Mounties, including Constable Latour, and a local physician, Dr. J.B. Gaudreau.

The doctor found nine

The green Pontiac sedan owned by Vollman

stab wounds in Gaetane’s body, four on the neck and five in the left breast. He estimated that she had been dead about four hours.

He said the death weapon had been a thin, sharp, double-edged dagger-like instrument, and he added that one of its thrusts had pierced her heart.

The doctor found nine stab wounds in Gaetane’s body, four on the neck and five in the left breast. The death weapon had been a double-edged dagger-like instrument It was obvious that Gaetane had fought like a tigress against her killer; the bruises and welts on her face and body attested to that.

Surface evidence suggested that she had been dragged across the rough ground, probably from the car which had left tyre impressions about 25 feet from where the body was found. At that point, the Mounties found a large area where blood had seeped into the ground.

Specimens of the bloody soil were packaged for laboratory

analysis and evaluation.

The murdered girl’s body was removed to a funeral home in Edmundston, where a post-mortem examination would be held.

Meanwhile, the ground search had proved productive for Constable Ralph Esau. Near the bloodstained patch of ground, where tyre tracks indicated that the car had turned around, he suddenly spied a small, heart-shaped chip of light green paint with brown undercoating.

It looked as if it might have been scraped from a car as the undercarriage struck a rock, or some other type of obstruction, in the rough roadway. Esau put it in a glass vial. Other searchers found an earring and a small comb, which were soon identified as the victim’s property.

Returning to town, RCMP investigators checked with relatives and obtained a list of the murdered girl’s friends and schoolmates.

The officers were told that Gaetane, although popular, had never gone steady with any boy. She had frequented a small number of places popular with teenagers in her group. None of those questioned had any idea who could have killed her.

The autopsy was performed the next morning and the report stated that death had been caused by a stab wound which penetrated the girl’s breast to a depth of four inches, piercing the heart. Rape might have been attempted, but it was not accomplished. The disarray of the girl’s skirt, however, strongly suggested a sexual motivation for the murder.

Partially-digested matter in the stomach indicated that Gaetane had died within three hours after eating a chocolate bar at the soda shop. Police learned that she had bought two, but had eaten only one. ne important detail was O withheld from the report given to the press regarding the autopsy findings. Dr. J.F. Harrigan had found, clutched in the girl’s clenched fingers, a single strand of hair – dark brown, of coarse texture, and about two and a half inches in length.

The task of retracing the victim’s movements before

The gravel pit on the Boucher Office Road where Gaetane’s body was found lying face-down

her death was entrusted to Constable Frank Fedor and Captain J.R. Quintal.

They quickly confirmed details of Gaetane’s meeting after school with her two girlfriends at the soda shop, of her trip home, then her return to town on a shopping trip.

Rape might have been attempted, but it was not accomplished.

The disarray of the girl’s skirt, however, strongly suggested a sexual motivation for the murder In the course of their interviews, the RCMP probers also learned that two of Gaetane’s girlfriends had been driven home from town by a Maine youth whom they knew who used to play saxophone with a band at teenage dances at Parent’s Lido. The girls said that Gaetane was still in the soda shop when they left.

However, a shop assistant who worked across the street from the soda emporium told police that she had seen Gaetane standing in front of the place at about 5 p.m. If this was true, it suggested that the girl had returned to the

soda shop after parting with her friends.

On Wednesday afternoon, any doubts that it was true were dispelled. Mounties found a young farmer who knew Gaetane and he told them that he was sitting in his parked truck near the soda fountain on Tuesday afternoon when he saw Gaetane cross the busy street in front of him. He was sure it was exactly 5 p.m. because the mill’s 5 o’clock whistle blew at that very moment.

“Gaetane and another girl I didn’t know stopped in front of my truck to let a car pass. But the car stopped and the driver asked, in English, ‘Do you want a ride?’ I heard one of the girls say no, and then the car took off.”

The informant said he didn’t think much about it at the time, but a few minutes later he saw Gaetane’s companion alone on St. George Street. “Then I remembered the odd look in the eyes of the guy behind the wheel of the green sedan when he tried to pick up the girls. I wondered if he had managed to get Gaetane into his car after all.”

At the mention of the green car Sergeant LaPointe recalled the chip of green paint found at the murder scene. Asked to describe the car more accurately, the young farmer said it was a light, two-toned Pontiac, maybe five or six years old.

Then he added a telling piece of information: “It was just like the car owned by the Edmundston chief of police.”

The farmer had not recognised the youthful, dark-complexioned driver of the green sedan, but he was sure he spoke English, which was rarely heard in that French-Canadian community. The farmer thought the driver might have been drunk, based on his recollection of the “strange look in his half-closed eyes.”

Within a few hours, LaPointe and his men had located other witnesses who had seen the schoolgirl in the light green two-tone sedan between 5 and 6 o’clock on Tuesday evening. A couple of teenage girls said they had seen the car near Parent’s Lido on Victoria Street Extension at about 5.30, and they recognised Gaetane in the front seat. A young man was driving.

Two other witnesses also saw the green sedan and recognised Gaetane as the only passenger, with a young fellow at the wheel. The latter witnesses were shown the police chief’s car and they said it was the same model, except that the car they’d seen was much dirtier, and that it had black and yellow Maine licence plates.

Once started on the trail of the green sedan, LaPointe’s men continued finding new leads to its movements on the day when Gaetane Bouchard was murdered. The next one, by coincidence, came from one of the girl’s close neighbours, who had started out for a ride with three of his children at about 4.45 that Tuesday afternoon.

He said he had headed for the gravel pit, where the youngsters enjoyed throwing stones into a small pond nearby, but as he approached a gravel pit he noted a green sedan parked ahead of him with a man and a girl in the front seat. Thinking it was a courting couple, he thought it best to go further on and did so, stopping at a point out of sight of the green car.

“We started back about 15 or 20 minutes later,” the informant continued. “My five-year-old asked again to be taken to the gravel pit.

So I drove there, but I saw, about 200 feet ahead of us, truecrime 47

the same green sedan. This time I couldn’t see anyone in it, but I assumed the couple were somewhere nearby, so I kept on going.”

Sergeant LaPointe did some quick research and learned that some 250,000 Pontiac sedans of the model in question had been manufactured. He could not immediately learn how many were green, but it was a popular colour, and it was safe to assume that several hundred, at least, might have been sold in the region on both sides of the Canadian border.

The car he was seeking, however, had Maine licence plates, so LaPointe contacted Otis N. Labree at Houlton, Maine. Labree, detective chief of the Maine State Police for Aroostook County, across the river, enjoyed a deserved reputation as one of the most successful investigators in the north-eastern United States.

LaPointe asked Labree if it would be possible to get a list of buyers of models of the green Pontiac from dealers in his county. Labree promised to get cracking on the chore at once, but warned that it might take some time. In fact it took far less time than either officer expected. Just a few hours later, Labree called LaPointe to report what appeared, for geographical reasons, to be a hot lead. e said that a Van Buren H car dealer had told him about selling a Pontiac of that model and colour just three weeks earlier.

The buyer was John Jacob Vollman Jr., 20. He lived in Madawaksa, just across the river from Edmundston.

Sergeant LaPointe immediately noted that this was the same youth who had given a ride home to two of Gaetane’s girlfriends on that fatal afternoon, about an hour before the murder victim failed to return home when she was expected.

Vollman, LaPointe learned, was the staff photographer as well as advertising manager for the weekly newspaper published in the little town directly across the river from Edmundston.

The two girls to whom he had given a ride were questioned again. They revealed that upon arriving at the home of one girl, they had declined Vollman’s 48 truecrime

Vincent Massey, the then Governor-General of Canada

invitation to take a ride out into the country. They said they knew that Vollman, whom they had first met when he played the sax with a band at the local dance hall, dated local girls. Most of their friends, the girls added, had been reluctant to go on second dates with the handsome American.

LaPointe very soon established that Gaetane Bouchard had known young

Vollman candidly admitted that one of his symptoms had been his inability to “control myself with women” Vollman. He had been along with his own girlfriend when Gaetane and a boyfriend had gone out with several other couples. LaPointe also learned that Vollman was engaged to be married to a girl who worked at the newspaper office where he was employed.

LaPointe sent Constable Esau to the lumber town across the river with instructions to meet Otis Labree and to check on Vollman’s green sedan before attempting to question the youth. Less than an hour later, Esau and Labree

were examining the young American’s green Pontiac in front of the newspaper office.

It didn’t take them long to find a small bare spot on the rocker panel under the right front door of the car.

Esau carefully took out the vial containing the green paint fleck he had found at the murder scene. Labree watched carefully as the Canadian officer placed the heart-shaped paint flake against the bare spot.

It fitted as perfectly as the key piece of a jigsaw puzzle fits into the last hole to complete the picture.

Labree, examining the car interior, found a half-consumed chocolate bar with a crimson smudge on the wrapper. It was the same kind of chocolate bar Gaetane had bought from the soda shop.

Before returning to headquarters in Edmundston, Constable Esau took the precaution of obtaining a sample of the green paint on the Pontiac sedan owned by Vollman.

He later sent it, together with the heart-shaped fleck he had found at the crime scene, to Mrs. Rolande Rouen, a forensic chemist at the Sackville RCMP crime detection laboratory.

In the meantime, young Vollman was being questioned in Madawaska by Labree and Sergeant W.C. Hetherington. Vollman freely admitted having been in Edmundston on Tuesday, but insisted that he knew nothing about the murder beyond what he had read and heard.

He claimed that the last time he had been along on a date when Gaetane was present was more than a month earlier.

Vollman, the son of a well-to-do manufacturer of fishing tackle, had grown up in New Jersey. He had quit high school to enlist in the US Air Force. He was discharged honourably less than two years later, in 1957, after having acquired a long medical record which included mental observation

by Air Force psychiatrists.

He resumed living with his family and went with them when they moved to Maine in 1957.

Asked for details of his medical problems in the service, Vollman said he himself had requested psychiatric treatment. He

didn’t know the medical term for his problem, but he candidly admitted that one of its symptoms had been his inability to “control myself with women.”

Clearly Vollman was not lazy. In addition to his duties as photographer, advertising and circulation manager for the weekly Maine newspaper, he gave accordion lessons, played the sax in the Edmundston dance band, directed an orchestra, served as deputy director of civil defence in Madawaska, and took an active part in other local affairs. As if that were not enough to occupy him, he managed to find enough time to squeeze in the job of managing a local bowling alley.

At the request of Maine detectives, Vollman gave them several strands of his dark, wavy hair. These were rushed to the forensic chemist, Mrs. Rouen, for comparison with the single strand of hair found clutched in the hand of the victim. he very next day, Sergeant T LaPointe received a report from the lab on the comparison of the paint flake samples. The specimen taken from Vollman’s car was found to be “very similar in physical charactenistics and chemical composition” to the one found at the murder scene. Mrs. Rouen also reported that the smudges on the chocolate wrapper found in the glove compartment of the suspect’s car were lipstick.

Then came the most damning evidence of all. From the Chalk River Nuclear Research Laboratory, to which Mrs. Rouen had forwarded the strands of hair, came word that for the first time in the annals of criminal investigation, radioactive isotopes had been used in analysing items of evidence in an attempt to prove a suspect’s involvement in a crime.

After comparing under powerful microscopes the single dark brown hair taken from the dead girl’s hand and a hair taken from John Vollman’s head, and finding them to be of the same dimensions, Dr. Rouen had suggested the experiments at the Chalk River laboratory.

There the two specimens of hair had been subjected

to radiation bombardment to determine whether both reacted alike when brought under the same radiation count. The fact that they did, in the opinion of the nuclear scientists, proved beyond a reasonable doubt that both hairs contained exactly the same chemical properties.

There could be no doubt that they had come from the head of the same person.

Thus far, the case against John Jacob Vollman Jr. had been purely circumstantial.

But now, with this scientific evidence to support their case, Canadian authorities requested the arrest of the young American on a charge of murder. He was taken into custody by Detective Chief Labree that same day, and was subsequently indicted and remanded to the provincial jail at St. John, pending a jury trial in Edmundston set for the first week in November 1958.

A week later, any lingering doubts which may have been entertained by investigators were removed.

In the course of his transfer to St. John by Constable Herman Martin, Vollman was left in the car alone with a relative of the officer – a middle-aged gentleman who guarded the prisoner during a brief stop in Fredericton. As they waited, the temporary guard turned suddenly to Vollman and said: “How come a smart young guy like you would be in a jam like this?” Vollman did not answer, so the man fired another question: “Did you kill that girl?”

Vollman, after a moment of thought, said: “Yes, I guess there’s no doubt about it.

I blacked out and when I came to, it was too late. The girl was dead. I have quite a temper…I sometimes have a hard time controlling myself.

I’ll be lucky to settle for life. I don’t think they have enough evidence to hang me…”

These words were repeated by the temporary guard when he appeared as a surprise witness for the Crown at Vollman’s trial before Mr. Justice Arthur Anglin four months later.

The prisoner’s counsel hotly contested the testimony of the 46 other witnesses presented by the prosecution, but after the surprise witness had testified, he decided to use Vollman as his only

convicted of the murder of a 16-year-old high school student in a lonely gravel pit within walking distance of her home, was denied.

All Vollman had left was the wistful hope that perhaps next time the decision would be in his favour. hat was by no means the T end of his story, however.

Five years later Vollman

Above, Edmundston in the 1950s. Below, Vollman in later life

defence witness.

After giving a few preliminary details, Vollman told how he’d picked up Gaetane after taking the other girls home and drove out to the gravel pit with her. “We started to caress each other,” he said, “and I was at a point in the heat of passion where I don’t quite remember exactly what happened…She let me kiss her, up to a point, but that was all…

“I believe I was hit while we struggled in the car. Then

be hanged at midnight on February 18th, 1959, “at the nearest strong jail,” where he was to be “confined away from all other prisoners” until the day of his execution.

Returned to the Madawaska Parish Prison, Vollman waited hopefully for a decision on an appeal to have his sentence commuted. Four days before his scheduled execution, his prayers were answered.

Word was delivered to him that Vincent Massey, then Governor-General of Canada, had approved the mercy plea and commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment at hard labour. y February 1972, B Vollman, by now 32, his dark hair greying at the

we both fell out of the car and I don’t know exactly what happened. The only thing I can remember is coming back to Madawaska after it was over and getting medication from a doctor before returning to work.

“I don’t remember seeing the hunting knife I kept in the glove compartment, and I don’t know what happened to it afterwards.”

The all-male jury required only three hours and 25 minutes to reach a verdict.

They found the accused guilty as charged, adding a recommendation for mercy. The judge ignored the mercy recommendation and sentenced Vollman to

temples but still handsome, had spent nearly 13 years in confinement. He was eligible for parole, and the application for release had been duly filed. His fellowprisoners had a big pool going on the parole board’s decision. An overwhelming majority believed that the old con who insisted Vollman would not get his parole was wrong; authorities nowadays were much more sensitive to the problems of prisoners, more lenient in their decisions in prisoners’ favour, and this was a strong factor The Kid had going for him.

Below the border, in the United States, their reasoning might have been proved 100 per cent valid, but in this instance, the instinct of the old con was proved to be absolutely correct. When the parole board’s decision was announced early in 1972, it was negative.

The application for parole by prisoner John Jacob-Vollman Jr.,

was freed and deported back across the border to the US. He moved south to Florida, where in the years that followed he turned his life around. By 1985, he was a respected community stalwart, serving on three city boards in Dania Beach.

Vollman, by then aged 47, had been appointed to the positions by the City Commission and maintained that he had been a model citizen since the murder.

The revelation of his criminal past made headlines in the Florida newspapers as convicted felons living in the state were banned from holding publlic office unless their civil rights were restored.

“I’ve got no United States criminal record,” Vollman reportedly said at the time.

“I’ve lost no constitutional rights in the United States.

I’ve broken no laws in the United States. The offence occurred in Canada – in a foreign country.”

The one-time killer described himself as a financially independent model citizen who contributed to the public welfare.

At the time, Broward County Sheriff Nick Navarro commented: “We have to look at this in good perspective. That [murder] took place 27 years ago. He got his degree. If you believe in rehabilitation, I think this is an exemplary case of total rehabilitation.

“As far as I know him in South Florida, he has been doing nothing but good.”

The controversy blew over and in later life Vollman became a teacher and academic, completing a PhD in criminology.

Vollman died in Florida in July 2010, aged 72.

Got a crime question?

Don’t hesitate to ASK TC at the address given on page 45

truecrime 49

CHRONICLES OF CRIME FRED WEST’S “VICTIM” NOT IN CAFE May 27th POLICE SEARCHING for the remains of missing waitress Mary Bastholm have ended their excavation work at a Gloucester cafe where serial killer Fred West was once a regular.

West, long suspected of killing 15-year-old Mary in 1968, even did maintenance

Police outside the cafe

work at the Pop-In Cafe, now called The Clean Plate, where Mary worked.

TRUE CRIME AUGUST ISSUE l OUT JULY 22ND

“I’M A GOOD GUY – I JUST HAPPEN TO BE A MASS MURDERER” BUCKINGHAMSHIRE SHOCKER

Horror oF THE HEADLESS CORPSE AT IVER STATION

ONE MAD, ONE BLIND… AND ONE LUCKY

60 YEARS ON… SHOULD WE HAVE HANGED HANRATTY?

Could Marshall Hall Save Them From The Gallows?

Excavations began following a tip-off from a TV production company that there was possible evidence that Mary might be buried in the cellar. Forensic archaeologists focused on six voids beneath a toilet floor.

However, Gloucester Police say that no “items of significance” were found.

WHO STOLE THE IRISH CROWN JEWELS? EIGHT VICTIMS FOR FR ANCE’S “SHADOW KILLER”

THE PLOT TO RUB OUT GANGLAND’S DEADLY BROTHERS

INTERNET HOMICIDE Hidden Face of The Predator

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l continued from page 29

“PEOPLE SLAYER” MAFIA BOSS RELEASED June 1st GIOVANNI BRUSCA, the Sicilian Mafia boss who confessed to taking part in the murder of more than 100 people, has been freed after 25 years behind bars.

A key figure in the Cosa Nostra, in 1992 Brusca detonated the bomb that killed judge

Giovanni Brusca in police custody in the 1990s

Giovanni Falcone, one of Italy’s leading anti-Mafia investigators.

Mr. Falcone’s wife and three bodyguards were also killed in the attack on a road near Palermo.

Brusca also killed Giuseppe Di Matteo, the 14-year-old son of a Mafia informant. After kidnapping the boy and keeping him in hiding for two years in retaliation for his father’s confessions to the authorities, Brusca and his brother strangled Giuseppe and dissolved him in acid.

Release of the 64-year-old killer has prompted grief and anger from the relatives of some of his victims.

Tina Montinaro, the widow of a slain bodyguard, said: “The state is against us. After 29 years we still don’t know the truth about the massacre and Giovanni Brusca, the man who destroyed my family, is free.”

Brusca was arrested in 1996 and turned state witness in a bid to get a reduced sentence.

His evidence helped the authorities to bring those behind several Mafia attacks in the 1980s and 1990s to justice.

Brusca must still serve four years’ probation and will be given a new identity.

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