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TRUE CRIME

INTERNET HOMICIDE Hidden Face Of The Predator

Detective Monthly

AUGUST 2021

60 YEARS ON…

SHOULD WE HAVE HANGED HANR ATT Y? “I’M A GOOD GUY – I JUST HAPPEN TO BE A MASS MURDERER” BUCKINGHAMSHIRE SHOCKER

HORROR OF THE HEADLESS CORPSE AT IVER STATION

WHO STOLE THE IRISH CROWN JEWELS?

THE PLOT TO RUB OUT GANGLAND’S DEADLY BROTHERS www.truecrimelibrary.com

STILL AVAILABLE! INSIDE THE

MINDS OF WOMEN WHO KILL

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AMERICA’S MOST EVIL Volume I: Prepare to be shocked at the evil men – and women – do. A bumper collection with full case histories of 17 American sadists, psychopaths, cannibals and serial killers, including Gein • Heidnik • Manson • Dahmer • Kemper etc.

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33 revealing case histories to help you get inside the minds of killer women including •Aileen Wuornos •Joann Dennehy • Dena Thomps a on • Karla Homolka • Katherine Knight and many more!

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Sadists, cannibals, psychopaths and serial killers – you’ll find 24 of the very worst in this bumper collection, including Rifkin • Rader • Unruh • Speck • Ridgway • Lucas & Toole and more.

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BRITISH MURDERS THAT SHOCKED THE WORLD What makes a murder echo round the world? Find out in this collection of 20 intriguing case reports featuring notorious figures including Brady and Hindley • Allitt • Sutcliffe • Shipman • Neilson • Sams etc.

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NOTORIOUS MURDERS OF THE 1960S A decade of celebrities, scandals and brutal killings • Celebrity slayings • Sex killings • Unsolved murders • Gangland killings • A legendary serial killer. All this and the last hangings too…

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CONTENTS

advocate found himself defending former officers scarred by their battlefield experiences

CASES FROM BRITAIN AND IRELAND...

10 MAJOR BRITISH MURDER CASES: HORROR OF THE HEADLESS CORPSE AT IVER STATION

FROM THE USA...

4 “I’M A GOOD GUY – I JUST HAPPEN TO BE A MASS MURDERER” He fled the United States to escape justice and set about creating a life of luxury for himself and his wife in Panama.

Trouble was, ruthless William Holbert was prepared to kill and kill again to make it happen.

He could come across as your best friend but if you owned a property he wanted then your days were numbered...

Buckinghamshire mum Katia Hopkins had left her village home to meet a friend late at night – but she never made it. How then, did she end up dead on the railway line?

14 MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE?: SHOULD WE HAVE HANGED HANRATTY? The brutal A6 murder of scientist Michael Gregsten and the attempted murder of his mistress Valerie Storie shocked Britain 60 years ago in August 1961. The curious investigation that followed, which resulted in the conviction of James Hanratty, left many wondering whether the right man ended up on the gallows

26 GANGLAND CONFIDENTIAL: THE PLOT TO RUB OUT GANGLAND’S DEADLY BROTHERS Chicago-based mobsters the Gennas had been at war with the North Side Gang and masterminded the assassination of their rivals’ leader Dion O’Banion. But the slaying of Angelo Genna signalled the beginning of the end for the notorious Sicilian-born brothers

32 WHO STOLE THE IRISH CROWN JEWELS?

AND FROM THE REST OF THE WORLD...

Former army officer Captain Richard Gorges was in a spot of bother – on trial for the murder of a London police officer. But that was far from the only crime this colourful character was suspected of committing...

46 ASK TC: INTERNET HOMICIDE John Edward Robinson, Hiroshi Maeue and Takahiro Shiraishi are just three of the killers who’ve used the internet to lure their victims. As our special report shows, many other killers have exploited the World Wide Web for their own evil ends

38 THE DEFENCE RESTS, PART EIGHT: ONE MAD, ONE BLIND...AND ONE UNLUCKY Continuing our journey through the stellar career of Sir Edward Marshall Hall, in the aftermath of the First World War the celebrated Search “True Crime Library”

AUGUST 2021

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“I’M A GOOD GUY – I JUST HAPPEN TO BE A MASS MURDERER” W

ITTY, CHARMING, cheerful, charismatic and highly intelligent isn’t how most people imagine a serial killer – but William Holbert continues to confound everyone’s expectations, even from his

After fleeing to Panama with his girlfriend to escape US justice, ruthless William Holbert hatched a deadly plan to achieve the luxury lifestyle enjoyed by the country’s most affluent expats...

CCase report by

by Mark Davis and Francesca Morrison cell in a Panama jail where he enjoys almost rock star status.

The tattoos that cover his body tell the story of a complex man torn between good and evil who acknowledges his crimes and says he regrets them. But is the remorse genuine?

Holbert, 40, was born in the mountain country of North Carolina where his family ran a cattle ranch and apple orchard. He attended high school near his home, played football, and is remembered as a gifted but un-academic pupil who could also be a bit of a troublemaker. In 1997 he signed up for an agriculture degree course at the local college, married a year later, and had three children.

Signs of his leadership skills surfaced when he led the Southern National Patriots, a right-wing quasi-militia party in North 4 truecrime

A chained William Holbert on his arrest. He fled North Carolina for Panama where the killing got under way

Carolina. It had a racist reputation and many of its 500 members patrolled the streets in uniform. But Holbert often argued the organisation couldn’t be racist as some of them were

black. The party disbanded in 2005 when Holbert fled Carolina leaving behind a trail of crimes including car theft, fraud, cheque bouncing, debt and assault.

For the next few months

Holbert and his girlfriend Laura Reese hit the road, featured on America’s Most Wanted, and drifted from town to town, Bonnie and Clyde-style. But the slog of cheap motels and rentals soon palled, and they decided to make a dash for Panama via Costa Rica, favourite bolt-hole for tax avoiders, criminals and American expats with something to hide.

The Rio Sereno border between Costa Rica and Panama is craggy and quiet, and Holbert said later that crossing it was “as easy as walking along a track, especially at dead of night when no one was around.”

He simply landed, caught a bus into nearby David, Panama’s northernmost city, hired an SUV, and drove back to collect Laura. He had $50,000 in cash, the spoils of a fraud committed in the US, and the couple bought a year’s lease on a house in David for $3,200.

Sweltering for half the year and humid monsoon for the other, David’s climate is testing and the pair were soon on the move again: to the cool mountain outskirts

of Chiriqui two hours’ drive away. Sick of their nomadic existence, they needed money and craved the luxurious lifestyle affluent Panamanians enjoyed.

To this end, Holbert began hatching a plan that would make use of the country’s unusual property laws which say that whoever holds the deeds or legal documents to a property owns it without any need for a lawyer.

Searching Craigslist – the American classified adverts website – he found a Michael Brown who wanted to sell his house in Bocas del Toro, a beautiful archipelago in Panama where tourism is vibrant but not brash, boutique and not high-rise.

He arranged to visit the property – set in the remote

Above, police tape around a victim’s grave in the grounds of the house in the hills of Bocas del Toro, Panama. Below, left to right, victims Michael Brown (pictured in 1980) whose wife Nan and teenage son Watson were also murdered by Holbert; Bo Icelar and Cheryl Hughes

“I wanted the property and decided to kill him and his family for it. I found out he’d been a drugs trafficker and was a desperate man like me” hills above Bocas – and meet Brown there to discuss the sale. His initial plan was to rob him, but that changed when he saw the house: “I wanted it and decided to kill him and his family for it. I found out he’d been a drugs trafficker and was a desperate man like me.”

Brown was certainly no innocent. His real name was Michael Salem and he’d been a drug lord on the run after escaping from prison in Florida. Much of his six-figure wealth was in Hong Kong.

Despite the plan, Holbert spent three days at the house as a guest, enjoying hospitality and charming Brown’s wife Nan and their 17-year-old son Watson with anecdotes and compliments.

But on day three he asked Brown to show him a well some distance from the rear of the building. When they arrived, he shot Brown in the head with a single bullet.

Hardly pausing, he walked back to the house and told Watson his dad wanted him

to bring a shovel up to the well. A short distance from where his father’s body lay, he shot the boy in the neck.

Returning to the house again, he found Nan working in the garden. Her back was towards him and he shot her in the neck. To make sure all of them were dead, he went back and shot each one a second time, throwing

the corpses into Brown’s pick-up truck and driving into the bush along a rough track above the house.

He dug two shallow graves, heaved Nan and Watson in one and Brown in the other, then drove back to the house. After soaping and bleaching the truck, he got drunk, and next day used Brown’s boat to return

Police officers find the bodies of Holbert’s victims

to Laura who was waiting for him in Chiriqui. No one filed a missing persons report on the family because of Brown’s dubious history.

Laura was thrilled by the setting and opulence of the Bocas house and they moved in on New Year’s Eve 2007, toasting the extra good fortune of the $9,000 cash they’d found there and Brown’s $225,000 bank account which Holbert managed to access by applying to HSBC in Hong Kong for a new PIN and debit card.

With dollars and leisure to spare, life sailed along fairly peaceably for a year or so, then Holbert decided to buy a boat and open a bar in Bocas called The Jolly Roger Social Club. He and Laura drank heavily and the relationship began to wobble.

Holbert held court there wearing a Viking helmet, and his mood swings grew increasingly unpredictable as he bulked up on steroids.

The bar’s slogan was: “Over 90 per cent of our members truecrime 5

survive.”

With money becoming an obsession, he put an ad in the local paper saying he bought houses, and was soon contacted by Bo Icelar, a 55-year-old semi-retired antique dealer. Instructing Icelar to bring the property’s paperwork with him so they could show it to a lawyer, Holbert collected him in his boat and shot him in the neck when they were out on the lagoon.

He’d already instructed workmen at the Bocas house to dig a hole in a small clearing 300 metres from the building, and he used this as Icelar’s grave, covering him with a thin layer of dirt and household garbage. Next day

the unwitting workmen came to fill it in.

Holbert and Laura pledged a new start by giving up booze for six weeks, and he did some improvements to Icelar’s house with a view to re-selling or “flipping” it.

Most weekends they had rowdy parties, and two of their most frequent guests were Cheryl Hughes and her husband Keith Werle.

Cheryl, 53, had moved from Missouri 10 years before to take over the Hacienda Cortez, a small but popular hotel. She was well-known in Bocas, but when Werle left her for a younger woman she became very depressed and often sought company and comfort with Holbert and Laura. Emotionally fragile and gaunt from too much cocaine, she trusted them as good friends. Little did she realise that when she told them over drinks one evening she was considering selling her properties, she was signing her own death warrant.

Holbert said he’d help her with the legal paperwork and told her to bring it over one afternoon when Laura was in town shopping. He greeted her as usual as she climbed out of her car, then executed her with a single 6 truecrime

He’d told locals Cheryl had needed to sell up in a hurry, but rumours began circulating that there seemed to be something very fishy about larger-than-life Wild Bill. Several people, including her estranged husband Keith Werle, filed missing persons reports and a local expat newspaper ran photos of Icelar and Cheryl Hughes asking if anyone had seen them.

H Holbert with Laura Reese. Below, the Hacienda Cortez.

Below left, the sign Holbert erected on the hotel after befriending and killing owner Cheryl Hughes

shot to the head – making her his fifth victim.

It was the same routine: transporting her body to the Bocas house in the Browns’ pick-up, and throwing it into a hole he’d already ordered his workmen to dig. All the documents relating to her home and hotel were now in his hands.

To ensure her friends and acquaintances believed she’d moved to Panama City, he packed all her clothes and personal belongings – including an unusual St. Francis print – into a large container and shipped it by plane to the airport there.

It remained, of course,

uncollected and unidentified.

He and Laura moved into Cheryl’s house, re-named it Casa Cortez, and even nailed a skull and crossbones over the door. But Holbert was still restless and took over the hotel in town with a view to re-vamping it.

Later he admitted he became “lazy, unhappy, boozed and missed Laura.”

Perhaps the murders were preying on his mind as he returned to Casa Cortez where she was living and tried to re-ignite the relationship. But the parties seemed to flop and weekends away proved just more of the same.

The home of semi-retired antique dealer Bo Icelar.

Holbert shot him and took over the property

olbert and Laura were visiting the nearby town of Boquette when a friend rang to say the police wanted to question them about recent disappearances and the return to Bocas of a container full of clothes now identified – thanks to the St. Francis print – as belonging to Cheryl Hughes.

They’d been using the assumed name of Cortez since fleeing the US, but Holbert realised it wouldn’t take the police long to make all the connections once they’d got a warrant to search Cheryl’s house.

He was right. They found her cheque book, credit cards, bank statements, purse and mobile phone, and widened the search to include all Holbert’s other properties. Within days, the bodies of the Brown family, Icelar and Hughes had been discovered on land behind the Bocas farm.

Holbert knew they had to hit the road fast, and they spent the next three weeks as fugitives bolting between motels and cabins. But by now their faces were all over the media, Interpol had been alerted, and the FBI were in pursuit as well as the Panama police.

Holbert’s plan was to cross into Costa Rica and aim for the border with Nicaragua which is marked by the broad, meandering San Juan River in the north of the country. Despite being spotted a number of times, terrain and communication in Panama and Costa Rica make policing hard and they outran their pursuers to reach the river in time to steal a powerboat – by dumping its owner in the water – and speed off from the Costa Rica bank over to Nicaragua.

The 007 drama ended abruptly, however, when a patrol of Nicaraguan soldiers realised they were trying to

enter the country illegally and met them with a line of machine-guns as they scrambled ashore.

For a few hours, it looked as though they might get away with it. Dressed convincingly in T-shirts, shorts and flipflops they posed as Dutch tourists who’d lost their way. But without passports to support the story, it quickly unravelled and they were extradited back to Panama City in handcuffs.

Laura Reese was trembling and mute as she stepped off the light aircraft, but Holbert strode down the steps, head held high, waving and smiling like a celebrity. It was a stance that bewildered the authorities – especially when he sat down minutes later with Panamanian prosecutor Angel Calderon and confessed everything with hardly a moment’s hesitation.

“He told me he was a fan of Hitler and Tony Soprano because for him it is all about power, respect and being loved by your people.

He believed he’d put this country on the map and said: ‘In the US they see me as some kind of sick serial killer, but here I’m a rock star who kills gringos. The Panama police may not love me, but the people of Panama do.’

Calderon continued: “He’s a master con-man, so I think he knew the game was up when he was brought back to Panama. He made no attempt at excuses or blaming other people, or that it was a big mistake.

“He’s a sick narcissist of the highest order. He has no trouble confessing to his crimes. He seems almost proud of them. Said he didn’t need a lawyer.

“He readily told us how many people he’d killed, why he’d killed them, how he killed them, and where they were buried. But he was insistent Laura Reese knew nothing about his crimes.”

She agreed, and after stonewalling every question with “I don’t know” or “nothing,” she demanded to see a lawyer – even as detectives identified the jewellery she was wearing as belonging to Cheryl Hughes.

The wheels of justice grind incredibly slowly in Panama and cases can take many years to come to court,

A handcuffed Holbert with accomplice Laura Reese in police custody. The couple later divorced

sometimes because police or judges have been bribed, lawyers find loopholes to endlessly prevent a trial, or organising unbiased jurors may be difficult. The system is widely regarded as chaotic and underfunded.

And so it was in 2016, six years after his full confession, that Holbert appeared in court at Chiriqui and was sentenced to 47 years in jail. The maximum sentence in Panama is 50 years and the country has no death penalty. Laura Reese was sentenced to 26 years for her part in murdering Icelar and Cheryl Hughes, and the pair were later divorced.

Holbert immediately appealed his sentence, citing the 20-year maximum penalty that was in force at

enjoyable.

With brilliance bordering on genius, he’s re-framed or re-defined jail as a tolerable place where he can develop a career, find God, learn skills, reflect on redemption, record rap music, and even have regular sex.

In 2019 he married Elizabeth Nunez, a Panamanian girl half his age, in a prison ceremony, and according to local law the couple enjoy weekly conjugal rights. She brings him his favourite fast food – pizza, McDonald’s, KFC – every day and he can barbecue her homemade sausages in the prison yard if he chooses.

“Everything in here has a price,” he says. “You can buy more time with your wife if you have the money.

When I was single, I’d have

“He’s a sick narcissist of the highest order. He has no trouble confessing to his crimes. He seems almost proud of them.

He readily told us how many people he’d killed, why he’d killed them”

Holbert behind bars in Panama

the time he committed the crimes, and although it will take years to be heard, he’s supremely confident he’ll win. In the meantime, he seems to find life behind bars challenging, rewarding and at times downright

girls come in and leave at four a.m.”

Now a devout Catholic, he’s won status among staff and prisoners by chairing and running Los Reos Unificados, a syndicated Christian inmate

organisation in Panama, and by heading the country’s Human Rights for Prisoners.

The roles mean he has daily discussion and mediation sessions to sort out disputes, rights and conditions.

Two years ago, he raised a stink about prison corruption which resulted in several high-level government figures being fired or shamed.

Despite being overcrowded – the new prison was built for 850 inmates, but houses 1,400 – he claims money and influence can get you a laptop, mobile phone, drugs, girls, weapons and better food. Drugs are floated in on helium balloons and passed between prisoners by rope.

Lavatories, water and heat are the main problems, he says. Prisoners have to defecate in the shower, wrap their faeces in paper, and throw it out of the window because the water is only supplied at certain times.

Without fans and constantly available water to drink, the heat can be unbearable.

He’s also founded Panama Prison Ministries, calling himself Brother Bill and creating a Facebook website that shows him on a pulpit with his thumbs up.

His activities undoubtedly give him access to cash and resources, but he talks a lot about his crimes, too.

“I killed a bunch of people to make money. I’m not that exceptional and the things I did are not really very interesting. I don’t view myself as a serial killer like Charles Manson or Hannibal Lecter. I’m humble. I hate being famous because it hasn’t gained me a single dollar. And you shouldn’t get fame for being ****ed up.”

Asked about the rights of the victims whose lives he snatched, he becomes angry: “I’ve heard that stuff all my time in prison. Isn’t the point of putting me here so I’ll stop being a bad person?

Or is it just punishment?

“I’ve done some good stuff and some bad stuff. I feel horrible. I killed innocent people.

I killed my friends. Now I’ve found my faith and I work for the church, helping other prisoners less fortunate than me.

No one wants to be a mass murderer, but I just couldn’t help myself.” truecrime 7

Comment

Send your letters to: Comment, PO Box 735, London, SE26 5NQ or email truecrime@truecrimelibrary.com (please put your address on emails). We pay £8 for any that are published

WHO RAPED AND MURDERED VERA? On December 14th, 1931, 11-year- old Vera Page was reported missing from her Notting Hill, London, home.

Two days later a milk roundsman discovered her raped and strangled body in shrubbery at a house in Addison Road. Pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury examined the body and noticed that Vera’s face was begrimed with coal dust and that candle wax had been dropped on her clothes; but, perhaps most significantly, Spilsbury found a finger bandage smelling of ammonia caught in Vera’s clothing and possibly Tragic little girl: belonging to her attacker. Does Vera Page True Crime have a record of this fascinating case?

Stuart Davies, Barnstaple We do know the case, Mr. D. – and it’s well worth re-telling.

Watch soon for a full account of the case!

OTIS THE LEGENDARY DETECTIVE “Murder In The Heat of Passion” (July) proved an encouraging tale of reform, with the killer J.J. Vollman taking steps to atone in part for his crime. Your report talked of the role played by a legendary Maine detective, Otis Napoleon Joseph Labree, in pinning down Vollman as the killer.

A young bilingual Labree began his career in the 1930s in what was then a rough-and-tumble Francophone border state. “They dressed me up in a fancy uniform, and stuffed newspapers in my hat because it was too big,” he said. “I looked like General Custer. If I fell down, I wouldn’t have been able to get up.”

He solved 40 murders in a career that spanned 25 years. He was an expert in many fields – handwriting, fingerprints, firearms and ballistics Forty-year career: among them. “Otis was a witness Otis Labree with finesse,” said Maine’s attorneygeneral. “He would charm the jurors on the stand until they were like putty in his hands.”

Labree handled the security for John F. Kennedy’s trip to Maine in 1963, shortly before the President travelled to a less-secure Dallas.

In 1984, Labree was dragged from retirement to solve the 20-year-old Fort Fairfield murders of Cyrus Everett, 14, and cocktail waitress Donna Mauch, 25. The killer taunted the police with doggerel such as, “With this note, we tempt you to peek, Searching in areas you first didn’t seek. Perchance an answer you may uncover, To two unsound corpses you did discover.” Have you ever covered this fascinating case?

Andrew Stephenson, Newhaven We do have a report on the Fort Fairfield murders and will present it in a near-future issue.

FRANCE’S ABOLITION ANNIVERSARY

MURDE COURAGE Fifty years ago this month...In a Blackpool jeweller’s on August 23rd, 1971, four armed men in stocking masks forced the shop’s two male assistants to lie facedown on the floor. The manager was pushed back into the office as the raiders grabbed handfuls of watches and gems, but with his foot he surreptitiously pressed the alarm button linked to the resort’s police headquarters. So when the gunmen ran out to the Triumph 2000 getaway car awaiting them with a fifth gangster at the wheel, officers were already on their way to intercept them.

After unsuccessfully grappling Above, slain with one of the robbers, PC Carl Superintendent Walker jumped into his Panda car Gerald Richardson. and gave chase. Then the Triumph Right, opposite, suddenly turned, rammed his top to bottom, car, and drove off again. Other fellow-officers police cars had by now joined Ian Hampson, the pursuit, led by Constable Ian Edward Gray and Hampson, closely followed by Carl Walker who other cars including one carrying all survived – but Superintendent Gerald Richardson, not unscathed.

38, and Inspector Edward Gray.

Below, Frederick Suddenly, the Triumph stopped Sewell who was and Hampson jammed on his convicted of Gerald brakes. The two cars were some Richardson’s murder distance ahead of the rest, and before Hampson could get out and approach the Triumph, one of the gunmen walked over to the police car and shot him. Then as the officer slumped over his steering wheel, the gangster ran back to the Triumph, jumped in, and was away.

As the chase continued, the Triumph was rammed from behind by an unmarked police car. Another squad car blocked the Triumph’s escape, and the gunmen climbed out to make their getaway on foot.

One was arrested after a violent struggle, while others dashed towards an alley, pursued by PC Walker who had hitched a lift in another police car after his own was rammed. As he closed on a thickset gunman, the gangster turned, fired at him, and Walker collapsed clutching the

25 years ago this month...

True Crime magazine, August 1996

I’m a big fan of your Murder The French Way series in TC. Did you know that October 2021 will be the 40th anniversary of the abolition of the death penalty in France? France was, I believe, the last Western democracy in Europe to execute killers – and, of course, by that most terrifying of methods, the guillotine. It would be interesting to see an in-depth article on the subject.

Peter Niall, Havant We agree, Mr. N. – and we have something special planned for that anniversary, which we’ll be marking in TC October.

Watch this space!

8 truecrime

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ER OF A EOUS COP top of his leg as other officers raced past him.

As the fugitives hijacked a parked butcher’s van, it was rammed by a police car. The gangster at the van’s wheel managed to drive off, but the steering had been damaged and moments later the vehicle crashed into a wall.

The gang now split up, and the heavilybuilt gunman became the target of Superintendent Richardson and Inspector Gray. As they cornered him, he turned to face them. Slowly, Richardson walked towards him, talking quietly. Then two shots rang out and the superintendent dropped to the ground, the gunman fleeing as Inspector Gray tried to stop the flow of blood from his colleague’s wound.

Richardson died shortly afterwards in hospital, where Walker was treated for groin wounds and Hampson was taken with gunshot wounds in both arms and a bullet lodged near his heart. Despite these injuries, doctors said he would make a complete recovery.

By the end of the day, three of the gang – Dennis Bond, 43, John Spry, 37, and Thomas Flannigan, 43 – were in custody.

On August 26th the gang’s getaway driver, Charles Haynes, 43, was arrested as he attended the National Pony Club Championships in which his daughter was competing in Warwickshire; and on October 7th Superintendent Richardson’s killer, Frederick Sewell, 38, was tracked down in London.

At Manchester Crown Court in March 1972, Sewell was convicted of murder and jailed for life, with the recommendation that he serve at least 30 years.

Spry was found guilty of manslaughter, attempted murder, robbery and conspiracy, and was subsequently sentenced to 25 years.

The other three defendants were convicted only of robbery, Bond being sentenced to 15 years, Flannigan to 13 years and Haynes to 10 years.

Superintendent Richardson was posthumously awarded the George Medal. l August 1971 also saw the death of a child-killer called Nathan Leopold who looms large in October’s TC – more details next month.

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Have you ever covered the murder of Katrina Taylor in Brighton in 1996? It is a very interesting case, and rather unique in as much as Katrina had been used in the police reconstruction of the murders of the “Babes in the Wood” Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway in 1986.

The murder of Katrina Taylor remains unsolved, but I’m sure a report in your excellent magazine would be interesting to your readers.

Derek Bailey, Lancing

H S I T I R B R MAJO R CASES MURDE

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HERE HAD been an incident at Iver railway station, Mr. Philip Hopkins, a 46-year-old company director, was told when at 8 a.m. on Saturday, October 30th, 1982, he walked from his home in the Buckinghamshire village’s Richings Park area to the local shops. Ninety minutes earlier, staff at the station had discovered a woman’s body on the busy line linking the west country with London’s Paddington station.

When Mr. Hopkins returned home from the shops, his 36-year-old wife Katia wasn’t there, but this neither surprised nor overly concerned him. They had separate bedrooms, were contemplating divorce, and he knew she was having an affair. What he didn’t know was that the body on the line was hers.

The couple had a four-year-old daughter, and Mr. Hopkins also had a 17-year-old son from a previous marriage. A former air hostess, Katia was an attractive blonde, but now she was an horrific sight, her decapitated head crushed by passing trains. At least four could have struck her as she lay on the line, but her death was neither suicide nor an accident, the police soon established. Marks on her neck showed that she had been strangled, and she was naked, except for her scarf. Blood on the station’s footbridge indicated a struggle there, and its trail led down the steps to a platform.

Katia Hopkins was soon identified as the victim, and the police learned that her husband and a married couple – a local vet and his wife – had attended a sports and social club’s dinner-dance together the previous evening. Katia was having a relationship with the vet, who left the function, went to her home, and agreed to meet her near the railway station after midnight.

Mr. Hopkins had returned home from the dinner-dance to find the vet talking to Katia in the study. At 12.45 a.m. she had gone out, telling 10 truecrime

HORROR OF CORPSE AT Buckinghamshire Shocker When the decapitated, naked body of 36-yearold mum Katia Hopkins was found on the railway line, investigators quickly established that her death was neither suicide nor an accident. How had the unhappily married, attractive former air hostess come to meet such a violent end?

Katia Hopkins. She lived with her husband, stepson and daughter but was contemplating a divorce

her stepson she was going for a drink, and asking him not to lock the door.

The vet told the police he had gone to meet Katia at the parade of shops near the station, but she hadn’t turned up.

Then an 18-year-old Iver

girl came forward to name her boyfriend Alan John Pinkerton, an 18-year-old machine-operator, as a suspect. He had behaved strangely while she was out with him that Friday evening, she told detectives.

He had said he felt like

killing somebody, and had tried to strangle her!

His St. Christopher neck-chain was found at the crime scene, and when questioned by detectives he admitted meeting Katia Hopkins that night, having sex with her, and putting her body on the railway track. He also led officers to a rubbish skip on a trading estate where he had dumped her clothes, but he denied killing her.

He was arrested, and three days after Katia Hopkins’s death he appeared before Beaconsfield magistrates, charged with her murder.

Pleading not guilty at his four-day trial at Reading Crown Court in April 1983, he heard Mr. John Morris QC, prosecuting, tell the jury that Mrs. Hopkins was attacked at about 1 a.m.

“She was then placed naked on the railway tracks by the accused, apparently so that her death would appear to be suicide.”

Pinkerton had stripped, sexually assaulted and strangled her before putting her body on the railway line near the steps of the footbridge at Iver station, Mr. Morris said. An autopsy had established that she was already dead, due to asphyxia and blows to the face, before she was dumped on the railway. Her corpse had then been run over by a

Case report by Matthew Spicer

F THE HEADLESS T IVER STATION station. We lay on the grass and took off our clothes.”

They had sex “to make each other happy.”

Pinkerton’s statement continued, and as they walked to the station afterwards the woman fell down some steps. He was unable to revive her, he said, so he put her body on the railway to make her death look like suicide. “I just ran and ran. I was really scared.”

The court then heard a statement made by Pinkerton’s girlfriend. She

Above, Iver station, where Katia Hopkins’s body was found on the track. Below, police attend the body found on the line

train, and when her remains were found her feet were mutilated and part of her head was missing.

A man living near the station had heard a woman scream and moan loudly around 1 a.m., and Pinkerton had told the police that earlier that night, after taking four pills which made him feel good, he had a lot to drink at the Tower Arms, near the station. Then he went to collect his girlfriend from her home in Iver.

He took her

back to the Tower Arms, and when he later walked her home he was sick on the way.

After leaving his girlfriend he walked back into the village and saw a woman by a telephone box outside the post office. “I was feeling very bad. I was on

the ground,” his statement said. “This woman came over to me, helped me up, and we started talking. She was telling me she had been going out with someone and he didn’t want her any more, and I was telling her about me and my girl. We were walking towards the railway

She was already dead, due to asphyxia and blows to the face, before she was dumped on the railway. Her corpse had then been run over by a train said that after telling her in the Tower Arms that he “felt like killing somebody,” as he walked her home he put his hands round her neck and began squeezing.

He stopped only when her necklace broke.

In another statement read to the court, Mr. Hopkins said his marriage to Katia, his second wife, was unsuccessful. She had become depressed, began drinking heavily, and they had been seeking a divorce.

On the night of her death he had attended a dinner-dance without her, and on returning home he found her talking to their friend the vet in the study.

After being verbally abused

by Katia, Mr. Hopkins’s statement said, he went to bed and slept soundly.

His teenage son said in a statement that Katia had told him of a boyfriend, a British truecrime 11

Airways steward she had met two years earlier when she was an air hostess. Their affair had ended the previous weekend.

girlfriend told reporters: “I knew he’d done it. From my experience of him, I just put two and two together.”

Pinkerton was a “Walter Mitty” character, who lived in his own bizarre dream world, she said. He told her he heard strange voices in his head, and that the Devil was watching over him.

She had decided to end their six-month engagement, she said, because of his increasingly violent sexual demands. “All the other boys I had been to bed with thought I was very good, but I felt inadequate with Alan.

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he vet’s statement said he had been married for 15 years, and had two children. He had come to know Mr. Hopkins and his wife as fellow-members of the Richings Park Sports and Social Club. On the previous August Bank Holiday Monday he’d had a long conversation with Katia, finding her easy to talk to but thinking no more of it until September, when he and his wife met the Hopkins couple at a barbecue, and he had another long chat with Katia.

He told her he heard strange voices in his head, and that the Devil was watching over him “She felt I was a sympathetic ear,” his statement continued. “She wanted someone to confide in.”

Later, she phoned him, asking him to meet her at the Swan pub in Iver. He told his wife of this, and she agreed to his going. At the meeting, Katia told him she was obtaining a legal separation from her husband, and she was unhappy about its terms.

Three days before her death, the vet said, he took her to the Monkey Island Hotel and gave her a bracelet. Then before the dinner-dance on Friday, he met her for a drink at the Swan. During the function that evening, he received a phone call from her asking him to go to her home, which he did. “She was in good spirits and was pleased to see me.”

Her husband came home at about 11.30 p.m. and asked what he was doing there. The vet said he replied that he was having a chat, and Mr. Hopkins asked Katia, “Why do you have to drag friends into this?”

The vet’s statement said he felt uneasy about being there, and he rejoined his wife at the dinner-dance.

When he went to meet Katia 12 truecrime

Teenage monster Alan Pinkerton. He made violent sexual demands on his girlfriend whom he “savaged”

Was Katia already dead when Pinkerton pulled her body up the stairs at Iver station (above) and along the bridge (below)?

Above, the shops in Richings Park, where Katia had arranged to meet the vet. Below left, the lane parallel to the station, where Pinkerton said he walked with Katia

Richings Park post office and the telephone box where Katia had arranged to meet the vet but met her killer instead

later that night, as arranged, she didn’t arrive.

After retiring for three and a half hours on April 21st,

the jury found Pinkerton guilty and he was jailed for life.

After the trial, his former

When he made love it would release great passion and ferocity. He would savage me and bruise me all over.”

She had managed to scream when he tried to strangle her, she said, and he had then gone down on all fours and growled like a dog.

Pinkerton’s minimum sentence was set at 16 years, but at the time of writing he is still behind bars.

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 June 2021. Researched by Richard Sharpe

June 7th RAPIST CHILD-KILLER SET TO BE RELEASED COLIN PITCHFORK, the first murderer to be convicted on DNA evidence, is suitable for

FAMILY KILLED IN “VEHICLE ATTACK” June 8th NATHANIEL VELTMAN, 20, has been charged with four counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder after four members of a Muslim family were killed in a suspected

Above, the victims. Left, driver Nathaniel Veltman

“premeditated vehicle attack” in the Canadian city of London, Ontario.

According to reports, the black truck that Veltman was driving mounted the kerb and struck the victims at about 8.40 p.m. local time.

Veltman, who had no previous convictions, was arrested at a shopping mall.

The victims were named as Salman Afzaal, 46, Madiha Salman, 44, Yumna Salman, 15, and Talat Afzaal, 74.

POLICE OFFICER GUILTY OF KIDNAP AND RAPE Above, Colin Pitchfork at the time of his conviction.

Below, left to right, victims Dawn Ashworth and Lynda Mann

release, the Parole Board has announced.

The 61-year-old double-killer was jailed in 1988 for the rape and murder of 15-year-old Leicestershire schoolgirls Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth.

Pitchfork was denied parole in 2018. However, the Parole Board authorised his release after the panel was told that his behaviour in custody had been positive and had included “extensive efforts to help others.”

Some politicians and relatives of the victims have greeted the announcement with shock and criticism, with South Leicestershire MP Alberto Costa calling the possible release “dangerous.”

Since 2018, Pitchfork has been kept in an open prison.

Lynda, who was killed in 1983, and Dawn, who was killed in 1986, were strangled in similar attacks.

June 8th METROPOLITAN POLICE officer PC Wayne Couzens has admitted that he kidnapped and raped Sarah Everard. Appearing by videolink at the Old Bailey, Couzens pleaded guilty to the kidnap and rape of the 33-year-old.

Accused Wayne Couzens and victim Sarah Everard

He admits responsibility for her death but did not

enter a plea on the charge of murder.

Miss Everard disappeared as she walked home on the night of March 3rd in Clapham, south London.

Her body was found a week later, following investigations, in woodland near Ashford, Kent.

MET POLICE ACCUSED OF CORRUPTION June 15th PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR Daniel Morgan was murdered in the car park of a south-east London pub in 1987.

Now, 34 years after the brutal slaying, an independent panel has accused the Metropolitan Police of “institutional corruption” in relation to the unsolved

Above, Daniel Morgan.

Left, Priti Patel

murder.

The Met stands accused of concealing or denying its failings in relation to the investigation and making its first objective its own

protection.

Home Secretary Priti Patel, speaking in the House of Commons, described the report as “deeply alarming” and said the report exposed a “litany of mistakes” by the Met. Mr. Morgan’s family said they welcomed the report.

Five police inquiries and an inquest have taken place into Mr. Morgan’s axe murder but no one has ever been brought to justice.

WIFE’S BOILING WATER ATTACK WAS MURDER June 16th A CHESTER wife who killed her husband by pouring boiling water and sugar over him has been found guilty of his murder.

A jury at Chester Crown court was told Corinna Smith, 59, poured the liquid over Michael Baines, 81, following a family row.

The victim, who was in

bed at the time, suffered extensive burns following the attack at the couple’s home in Neston, Cheshire, Attack after a on July row: Corinna 14th, 2020.

Smith

He died in hospital five weeks later.

The killer, who denied murder, had filled a bucket with two kettles of water and mixed in three bags of sugar.

Mr. Baines sustained burns to more than a third of his body. l more Chronicles on page 37

truecrime 13

60 Years On...

SHOULD WE HAVE HANGED HANRATTY? “H

ANRATTY TO Be Cleared After 36 Years,” said a Daily Mirror headline in November 1997. It would be 36 years too late to save James Hanratty’s neck, for the 25-year-old small-time crook had gone to the gallows, convicted of shooting a defenceless couple, leaving one dead, the other paralysed for life.

Ever since his trial, his family and various supporters had expressed

Case report by

A.W. Moss doubts about his guilt. With its many twists and turns, the case had become one of the most bizarre in British criminal history, and there would be more surprises 40 years after the shooting.

If you’re under 75 you are unlikely to remember what made the case a cause celebre.

So what was all the fuss about? Why were so many convinced of Hanratty’s innocence?

The couple were colleagues – Michael Gregsten, a 34-year-old scientist at the Road Research Laboratory near Slough, and Valerie Storie, 22, a research assistant at the laboratory, who died at Easter 2016, aged 77.

Michael Gregsten was married with two children.

His wife knew about his affair and was later to claim indifference, saying she simply regarded Valerie as her husband’s “bit on the side.”

Gregsten’s car was a grey Morris Minor which he had borrowed from an aunt. On the evening of Tuesday, August 22nd, 1961, he drove Valerie to a pub they often visited, the Old Station Inn at Taplow, 14 truecrime

James Hanratty. He was hanged for murder, but there are still many unanswered questions to this day

Buckinghamshire. Leaving at about 9.20, they drove to a cornfield near Taplow, another trysting-place they often used.

They had been there for about 30 minutes when a man rapped on their car’s side window. He was smartly dressed, with a handkerchief obscuring the lower half of

his face.

When Gregsten wound down the driver’s window, the man thrust in a gun and said, “This is a hold-up. I am a desperate man.” He added that he had been on the run for four months, and if the couple did as they were told they’d be all right.

He forced Gregsten to

MISCARRIAGE OF

JUSTICE?

hand over the ignition keys, then got into the rear, holding the revolver to Gregsten’s back. What happened over the next few hours was a living nightmare.

The man said he was hungry and had not eaten for two days, and that his revolver was a .38. The couple offered to drive him to where he could eat, but he said, “It is all right, there is no hurry.”

Valerie noticed that he kept looking at his watch.

After about five minutes he told Gregsten to drive further into the cornfield. He then ordered them both to hand over their money and watches, pocketing £3 from Gregsten’s wallet. But Valerie managed to take £7 from her shopping basket, hiding the notes in her bra.

Over the next two hours the man talked in brief bursts. “Jim,” as he said his name was, told Gregsten and Valerie that he had been to remand homes and borstal and had done five years’ CT (corrective training) and expected to get PD (preventive detention) next.

He told Gregsten to get into the car’s boot, but Valerie protested, saying the exhaust was defective and Gregsten could be asphyxiated.

Changing his mind, the gunman ordered Gregsten to drive out of the field towards Slough. They arrived in Slough at 11.45 p.m., and stopped briefly at a milk machine, but they lacked the necessary coins.

The gunman ordered Gregsten to drive on, through Hayes and Greenford, heading towards London. Near London Airport they pulled into a garage for petrol.

In Stanmore Gregsten was allowed to leave the car to get cigarettes from a

machine. He did not take the opportunity to run away or call for help because Valerie was being held hostage.

The nightmare journey continued, some 30 miles in all, through St. Albans, along the A6 to Luton and Bedford.

At one point Gregsten flashed his reversing light to attract attention. Another car drew alongside, its passenger pointing to the back of the Morris Minor. Gregsten stopped and got out with the gunman to check the rear lights.

Valerie could then have slipped behind the wheel and driven off. She didn’t, she was later to say, because she couldn’t bring herself to abandon Gregsten.

The gunman said he wanted a “kip,” and when they came to a lay-by at Deadman’s Hill, Bedfordshire, he ordered Gregsten to park. He discussed tying the couple up while he slept and they begged him not to shoot them.

“If I was going to shoot you I would have done it before now,” he told them.

Then he bundled Gregsten out of the car to search the boot for rope. Failing to find any, he tied Valerie’s wrists together with Gregsten’s tie.

When he told Gregsten to pass a duffel bag to the rear seat of the car, Gregsten leaned in to pick it up, then turned, perhaps intending to hurl it at the gunman.

Jim fired two shots into Gregsten’s head, killing him instantly. The time was 3 a.m.

Valerie screamed, “You shot him, you bastard! Why did you do that?”

“He frightened me. He moved too quick!”

Valerie begged the man to get a doctor, but he snapped, “Be quiet, will you! I’m finking.”

In earlier conversations Valerie had noticed that Jim habitually pronounced “f ” for “th.” There followed a hysterical conversation about whether or not Gregsten was dead, and then the gunman ordered Valerie to kiss him.

At that moment she saw his full face for the first time in the headlights of a passing car.

He forced Valerie to join him in the back seat where he raped her. Then he made her help him drag Gregsten

Above, the body of scientist Michael Gregsten (below left) in the lay-by at Deadman’s Hill on the A6. Below right, Valerie Storie. She pleaded with the gunman to leave her alone

in the morning and Valerie Storie discovered that she was paralysed, unable to move her arms and legs. She lay there for hours, hoping a passing motorist would stop, but eventually lost consciousness.

She was discovered at 6.45 a.m. by a farm labourer walking along the A6 on his way to work. He alerted a student doing a traffic census farther down the road and the student flagged

out of the car.

They laid the body on the concrete, close to the verge, and Valerie sat beside it, pleading for the man to leave her alone.

“There is no hurry,” he said coolly, and asked her to start the car and show him how the gears worked. Then he fired a volley of shots at her from a range of six feet.

Michael Gregsten’s Morris Minor. It was abandoned at Redbridge, 50 miles from the crime scene

She fell and heard a clicking sound as he reloaded his revolver. More shots were fired, all of which went over her head. He approached her and kicked her lightly, but Valerie lay still, feigning death.

The man then got into the car and drove off towards Luton.

It was now about four

They laid the body on the concrete, close to the verge, and Valerie sat beside it, pleading for the man to leave her alone down a motorist who went to a phone box and dialled 999.

The student knelt at Valerie’s side as she gasped out a few details of her ordeal.

He jotted what she said on the back of one of his enumerator forms and later handed it to a senior police officer at around 8 a.m. It was the first description of the killer: “Fairish brown hair and staring eyes.”

By 7 o’clock the police, led by Inspector Edward Milborrow, had arrived on the scene and Valerie told him what had happened. An alert was flashed to all police forces to be on the lookout for the Morris Minor. truecrime 15

Valerie Storie was admitted to Bedford hospital at 7.45 a.m. The consultant surgeon found her to be remarkably lucid and able to talk clearly about her ordeal, despite having bullets in her body and being paralysed.

He allowed senior police officers to take a statement from her.

The bullets which had struck Valerie had caused massive damage but had also had the effect of anaesthetising her to the pain and shock of her injury.

She gave Detective Inspector Whiffen a description of the man who had killed her lover and raped her.

That description was never made public and the inspector was not asked about it at the trial. However, as a result of what Valerie said, the press and public

Unable to agree a single portrait, the police issued two Identikit pictures: one selected by Valerie Storie, the second from other witnesses were alerted to look for a man aged about 25, 5ft 6in., of medium build, with a pale face, deep-set brown eyes and an East End accent.

At 3 p.m. Detective Superintendent Bob Acott of Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad arrived at Deadman’s Hill to take charge of the inquiry, and at 6.30 that evening the missing Morris Minor was found abandoned at Redbridge. On its floor were two cartridge cases and two large clots of blood.

Witnesses were traced who had seen the car being driven to where it was dumped. From their descriptions of the driver, an Identikit picture was issued.

The witnesses said they had seen him at 7 a.m., which was an important clue. Deadman’s Hill is 50 miles from Redbridge, and a poor driver, at night, would have taken three hours to do the journey by side roads.

This suggested that the man seen driving the car was the killer.

16 truecrime

Police at Deadman’s Hill searching for clues

The following morning a cleaner found a fully loaded revolver and five boxes of ammunition under a bus seat in a London Transport garage in Peckham. Ballistics proved it was the weapon used to murder Michael Gregsten.

The route of that 36A bus was a clue in itself. The bus travelled between Peckham, Kilburn, Marble Arch and Paddington Station, passing within 100 yards of the Vienna Hotel in Maida Vale.That establishment would crop up again and again in the investigation.

Somewhere along that route the killer boarded the bus and dumped the gun.

By Saturday morning, August 26th, Valerie Storie was being interviewed by Superintendent Acott. He called a police expert to her bedside to construct an Identikit picture from her description of the killer.

Acott also publicly appealed to landlords and landladies, asking them, “Do you have a lodger who has not gone out for the last few days?” As a result a woman staying at the Alexandra Court Hotel in Seven Sisters Road, Finsbury Park, complained to the manager about the behaviour of the man in the room next to hers. This man kept her awake all night by walking

about, talking to himself. He had booked in on August 23rd, the evening of the day of the murder.

A routine police patrol interviewed the man who gave his name as Frederick Durrant. His real name, however, was Peter Louis Alphon. His father was a records clerk at Scotland Yard’s Aliens Department, and he said he had booked into the Vienna Hotel in Maida Vale on the night of August 22nd after visiting his mother in Streatham.

Apparently, Alphon led a nomadic existence, moving from hotel to hotel. The register at the Vienna confirmed that a man called Durrant had booked in on the 22nd, and Alphon’s statement was routinely filed.

Detective Sergeant Jock Mackie, the officer detailed to draw up the Identikit picture with Valerie Storie, found it a difficult task because her description did not match that given by other witnesses. Unable to agree a single portrait, the police issued two Identikit pictures: one selected by Valerie, the second from other witnesses.

The two pictures, which differed sharply, appeared on TV and in the press on August 30th. They had one feature in common: the man’s “dark, staring eyes.”

Every newspaper described them as brown.

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Research assistant Valerie Storie. She survived being shot but was confined to a wheelchair

n Thursday morning, August 31st, a man left his lodgings in Boundary Road, Swiss Cottage, to walk to a dry-cleaners in the arcade of Swiss Cottage tube station.

Opposite the dry-cleaners was an antiques shop owned by William Ewer, the brother-in-law of Janet Gregsten, who was helping him in the shop when she saw the man go into the dry-cleaners. Suddenly she pointed and said, “That’s the man the police are looking for. That’s the man! He fits the description.”

The man was James Hanratty!

Both William Ewer and Janet Gregsten would later dismiss reports of this identification in the arcade as nonsense, but those who have researched the case in depth are convinced that the story has a basis of truth. The account of what

happened came from Ewer himself.

The story was broken by Peter Duffy, a crime reporter on the Daily Sketch who covered the whole case but could not, under the rules governing contempt of court, publish the account until after the jury at Hanratty’s trial had delivered their verdict. The story therefore appeared in the Daily Sketch on February 19th, two days after the trial ended.

Duffy reported: “The amazing intuition of Janet Gregsten, widow of A6 murder victim Michael Gregsten, helped to put James Hanratty on trial for his life.

“This intuition and two fantastic coincidences which set detectives on Hanratty’s trail were revealed last night – 24 hours after he was found guilty of the A6 murder.

Peter Alphon, aka Frederick Durrant

“Only eight days after the murder – when Scotland Yard were without a positive clue to the killer – Mrs. Gregsten pointed to Hanratty and said: ‘That’s the man who the police are looking for.’

“Mrs. Gregsten’s 50-year-old brother-in-law, Mr. William Ewer, had taken her to his antique shop in the station arcade at Swiss Cottage, north London, to try to help her to get over the tragedy which had struck her life. Mrs. Gregsten had been shown an Identikit picture of a man the police wanted to interview in connection with her husband’s killing.

“Her brother-in-law’s shop was 21 miles from the cornfield where the

An aerial view of the tented murder scene

A6 murder nightmare began. It was 50 miles from Deadman’s Hill where the horror climaxed. Far enough away, anyone would think, to dull the memory of tragedy.

“On the morning of August 31st, Mrs. Gregsten was standing in the shop window helping Mr. Ewer hang a picture – a Wilson Steer interior. Suddenly she clutched at Mr. Ewer’s arm and pointed through the window to a man with jet black hair walking into a cleaner’s shop only two yards across the arcade.

‘That’s the man. He fits the description,’ she said. ‘But it’s more than that. I’ve got an overpowering feeling that it’s him.’

“Said Mr. Ewer last night, ‘I calmed her down and told her she was overwrought.

But she was so convinced about what she had seen that I went into the cleaners later and talked to the manageress. She told me the man had brought a green suit in on August 21st to have a tear in the coat mended and the trousers tapered. He had called in that day to ask if it was ready. He gave the name J. Ryan, and an address in St. John’s Wood.’

“Neither Mr. Ewer nor the police knew then that J. Ryan was an alias of James Hanratty and that immediately after the murder he stayed in the road named with his friend, Charles France – only a mile away from the cleaners.

“Said Mr. Ewer: ‘So convinced was I about what Janet had seen that I vowed then to search for the man myself. I had to find him again!’”

In his study of the case

Who Killed Hanratty? Paul Foot recalls: “Mr. Ewer’s hunt, according to the story, did not last long. The next day he went to a cafe in the Finchley Road. As he sat drinking a cup of tea and pondering the almost hopelessness of the A6 murder he spotted a pair of hand-made Italian shoes.

Then he found himself staring into those blue eyes again. It was the same man.

“Stunned by this miracle, according to the story, Mr. Ewer decided to follow the man. He watched him go into a florist’s shop in the Finchley Road. Then, acting on an impulse, he rang Scotland Yard. The police came and made inquiries

at the florist’s shop, and the manageress told them the man had come in on September 1st wanting to send some roses to his mother – a Mrs. Hanratty of 12 Sycamore Grove, Kingsbury.”

The Sketch’s story continued: “A report was made to Scotland Yard.

But the Murder Squad had never heard of Jimmy Ryan.

They had never heard of the

address in Sycamore Grove, Kingsbury, which was the home of his mother. But Bill Ewer could not rest. Almost daily he went out looking for the man with the staring eyes.

“He walked into the shop of a business associate in Greek Street, Soho. He did not know that Hanratty, who the Greek Street dealer had befriended, had been in the shop only that morning.”

The publication of this story was the first indication that Scotland Yard had Hanratty’s name and his alias long before they started to hunt him as the murderer.

The only description of the killer had been released on the day of the murder, and did not fit Hanratty. Neither of the Identikit pictures resembled him. Yet here was Mrs. Gregsten “identifying” James Hanratty as he walked into the cleaners opposite her brother-in-law’s shop.

The coincidence was compounded when Hanratty appeared the next day in the same cafe as Mr. Ewer and went into a florist’s shop, giving the address of his parents.

What enabled Mrs. Gregsten to recognise Hanratty as her husband’s killer and put her brotherin-law on his trail? The Daily Mail reported: “The face in the crowd that caught the eye of Janet Gregsten left her gasping.

“Was it, could it be, the face of the man who only eight days before had cold-bloodedly murdered her husband? She saw the blue staring eyes when she looked suddenly out of the window of a tiny antique shop in Swiss Cottage.

It was a flash of intuitive recognition.”

Both William Ewer and Janet Gregsten attempted to rubbish the story as an invention of the popular press. But as Bob Woffinden says in his book Hanratty: The Final Verdict, “If one thing is certain about this curious episode, it is that the press did not invent it. Years later, I tried to establish precisely what had occurred.

It did not originally concern the Sketch journalist.

Ironically Peter Duffy was not one of those involved – nor did it take place after the conviction.

“Early one evening in the last week of the trial, George truecrime 17

Hollingbery of the Evening News and Bernard Jordan of the Daily Mail were having a drink together in the King’s Head, the pub affectionately known to all its patrons as the Merry Widows.

Unusually, there were no other reporters present.

William Ewer walked in and button-holed them.

‘We’d noticed this man at the outset,’ said Hollingbery.

‘He was always fussing, and taking a keen interest in the trial the whole time. He was always there, and so that evening in the pub when he came up we knew who he was, but this was the first time we’d actually spoken to him.’

“Jordan bought him a drink, and Ewer then regaled them with this tale. ‘This came completely out of the blue. It was something totally new, and quite dramatic,’ explained Hollingbery.

‘Neither of us made a move, to make notes or anything, because we thought it might frighten him off. We just let him speak. “‘When he’d gone, I said to Bernard that we’d better get this down quick. Neither of us had a notebook at the time, so I can remember making a shorthand note of everything that he’d said, all over this cigarette packet.

Then we went straight back to the hotel and each of us wrote it out in longhand. We agreed we would keep it to ourselves; we knew we were on to a good thing.’

“However,” Woffinden continued, “Jordan did not keep his part of the pledge.

He and Peter Duffy were very good friends. They’d worked closely together on the entire A6 murder investigation. When this happened, Jordan felt he couldn’t leave him out in the cold. So he let him in on the story. Duffy was thrilled.

“Being a conscientious journalist, he checked it all out for himself. It seems that he asked Ewer and Janet to re-enact it for him and a Sketch photographer in the arcade, although Janet’s role, as can be gauged from the fact that there are no direct quotes attributed to her, was a largely passive one.

“Hollingbery’s own story never saw the light of day.

By the time the Evening News was next published, on the Monday, both Sunday’s and Monday’s 18 truecrime

The two Identikit pictures issued by the police in August 1961. The left-hand image was based on Valerie Storie’s description

papers had already carried extensive trial reports, the story was getting stale and – the unkindest cut of all – Hollingbery’s colleagues had scooped him.

“Almost five years later, Duffy was questioned by John Morgan for BBC1’s Panorama about this story. He explained what happened, exactly as he had

James Hanratty’s friend Charles France.

It was France who would prove to be Hanratty’s nemesis

reported it, and the interview continued: Duffy: “‘The police went back to those shops and they questioned everybody on the block. They went into the florist’s and they found on that day, the day that Bill Ewer saw this man in the cafe, a man went into the florist’s and gave his name as Jimmy Ryan and sent a dozen red roses to Mrs. Hanratty.’

Morgan: “‘Does this seem to you an extraordinary coincidence that Mrs. Gregsten, having only the Identikit to go on, which doesn’t really look very much like James Hanratty – ’ Duffy: “‘Nothing like him...’

Morgan: ‘“– should look out and discover a man who’s eventually convicted of her husband’s murder?’

Duffy: “‘It’s something that’s completely inexplicable. It’s a tremendous coincidence and I’ve tried to explain it but I’m at a loss to explain how she was able to say, “That was the man who killed my husband.’”

“However strange,” Bob Woffinden relates, “there was no apology there for the journalism, no suggestion that it may have been in error.”

But the whole question of identification was suspect.

Until August 31st Valerie Storie had consistently told the police that the killer had deep-set brown eyes.

It was on August 31st that she was transferred to Guy’s hospital, London. Even as she was in the ambulance, Bedfordshire Police issued a new description of the killer.

Detective Superintendent Charles Barron now said that the wanted man had large, icy-blue, saucer-like eyes.

The reason for this dramatic change was that Valerie had remembered something else about the killer: a completely different description!

Mrs. Gregsten had visited

Valerie in hospital, to talk about the man they had shared, and naturally the topic of the killer came up.

But Mrs. Gregsten’s first visit to the hospital was not until September 21st.

On Monday, September 11th, Valerie Storie was again interviewed by Murder Squad detectives, who tape-recorded the interview.

She gave a detailed account of her ordeal.

The same day, the manager of the Vienna Hotel, Maida Vale, sacked one of his staff after discovering money was missing from the till. He subsequently decided to inspect all the bedrooms. In Room 24 he found two .38 cartridges on an armchair.

He immediately reported his find to the police and a ballistics check revealed that the cartridges had been fired

On the night before the murder, Room 24 was occupied by a J. Ryan, who gave a Kingsbury address.

On the night of the murder, the room had been occupied by Frederick Durrant – Peter Alphon from the murder weapon.

Detective Superintendent Acott descended on the hotel with his team; it was to become the focal point of his inquiry.

The register was checked and the staff questioned. On the night before the murder, Room 24 was occupied by a J. Ryan, who gave a Kingsbury address. On the night of the murder, the room had been occupied by Frederick Durrant – Peter Alphon. The cartridge cases had rested on that chair for 19 days because the room had apparently remained unoccupied from August 23rd until September 13th.

Acott decided to treat both men as prime suspects.

His first choice was Peter Alphon. On September 13th, Acott spoke to Alphon’s mother. She said she hadn’t seen her son at all on the night of the murder, which destroyed his alibi.

The sacked hotel employee gave his name as William Nudds, but that was only one of his eight known aliases. He was now an important witness but he had a long criminal record, was a notorious informer and known to be a pathological liar. Not long after Hanratty’s trial, he was jailed for six years.

He made several contradictory statements to Acott. In the first, on September 15th, he attempted to implicate Ryan by saying that he had seemed “in a hurry” and had asked for directions to get a 36A bus.

Nudds further said he thought Durrant had occupied room 6, but he couldn’t be sure. He was telling the police what he imagined they wanted to hear.

Despite this, the police now concentrated on Alphon, even taking away for analysis a pillow-case on which his head had rested.

O

n September 21st the sacked hotel worker was taken to Scotland Yard for questioning, and was kept there for most of the day.

His second statement said that Durrant (Alphon) had initially occupied Room 24, a basement room, but he had requested an upstairs room and it was arranged that he could transfer if such a room became available.

Durrant left the hotel shortly after booking-in at 1 p.m., leaving his suitcase in Room 24 and saying he wouldn’t be back until late that night. He hadn’t returned by 2 a.m. when Nudds went to bed, leaving a note on the reception desk telling the guest that Room 6 was now vacant.

At 9.50 a.m. Nudds went to Room 6 to see if Durrant wanted breakfast. Durrant was getting dressed. Nudds asked him, “What time did you come in last night?” and Durrant replied, “Eleven o’clock,” which Nudds knew to be untrue.

Nudds’ statement added that Durrant appeared to be upset. “Ryan was at all times cool, calm and composed, whereas Durrant was hurried and agitated,” the statement concluded.

On September 22nd Acott interviewed Alphon’s father at Scotland Yard, telling him

Above right, the cleaner shows where he found a fullyloaded revolver (below) and five boxes of ammunition beneath the seat of a 36A bus (above left)

that officers were looking for his son. At this point the police felt sure that Alphon was the killer because he had a history of odd behaviour, was familiar with the Slough area – especially the dog-track – and also fitted Valerie Storie’s original description.

Acott now issued a press appeal. “In relation to the murder of Michael John Gregsten, it is desired to trace the following man: Peter Louis Alphon, 31, five feet nine to 10 inches, complexion pale, his dark hair brushed back flat, eyes hazel, speaks like a Londoner.”

Acott went to see Valerie Storie in hospital to keep her

“We were left with two very strong suspects – Alphon and Ryan. One had to be eliminated.

The only one we could eliminate was Alphon” abreast of developments. If he told her he was hunting a man with brown eyes, one would have expected her to

have protested that the killer she saw had blue

eyes.

At the magistrates’ hearing, Acott said: “Valerie Storie’s description of the man with icy-blue eyes was only part of the description. It was not one we would depend on.”

At the trial, when asked why he wanted to interview Alphon, who had hazel eyes, Acott replied, “Because we were left with two very strong suspects – Alphon and Ryan. One had to be eliminated. The only one we could eliminate was Alphon...I did not think that Alphon had done it.”

Why did he not choose to eliminate Hanratty first?

Because, he said, at that point the police had not realised that J. Ryan and Hanratty were the same person.

Peter Alphon gave himself up at Scotland Yard at midnight on September 22nd. He later claimed that his interrogation lasted seven hours without rest.

The police said it lasted three and a quarter hours, from 2 a.m. to 5.15 a.m. on the 23rd. Alphon was put on a number of identity parades.

He was not picked out on the first, and at the second parade, on September 24th, Valerie Storie picked out an entirely different man.

She was questioned about this at the trial. “When it appeared that you had identified some other person on that parade, did you not afterwards say that there was a fair resemblance between Alphon and the man who attacked you?”

“Some time afterwards, yes.”

“Can you tell us to who you made this observation?”

“I believe it was a doctor.

I’m not sure whether it was Superintendent Acott or not.”

The police held talks with the Director of Public Prosecutions while Alphon was in custody, in order to decide whether to charge him.

In the event, he was released without charge. Had Valerie Storie picked him out, he might well have been hanged.

On September 25th the police finally linked Ryan to truecrime 19

James Hanratty.

Charles France, Hanratty’s friend, went to Scotland Yard with a postcard Hanratty had sent him from Ireland.

It was France who would prove to be Hanratty’s nemesis. From that day on the police kept watch on France’s home and tapped his telephone.

The following day Acott visited Hanratty’s parents at Sycamore Grove, Kingsbury,

Janet Gregsten and her brother-in-law William Ewer. She said she spotted her husband’s killer going into a dry-cleaner’s in Swiss Cottage station

inquiring about any friends their son might have in Ireland.

By now detectives were checking on five men. The killer told Valerie that he had “done the lot,” which police took to mean he had served all his sentence without remission. Records revealed that only five men in the entire country had recently completed sentences without remission. One of them was

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James Hanratty.

It was now that Alphon was dismissed as a suspect and the police began to concentrate on Hanratty.

Acott flew to Dublin and discovered that Hanratty had stayed in Cork and Limerick, using the Ryan alias, before returning to London.

The newspapers meanwhile were puzzling over the switch from Alphon to Hanratty as suspect.

On October 4th the Daily Mirror speculated: “Alphon matches almost perfectly the Identikit picture. Last night one of the theories being considered by detectives was the A6 killer spotted Alphon and tried to frame him...”

This was nonsense. For the killer to have set out from the very start to frame Alphon by staying at the same hotel and planting cartridge cases there was too bizarre. The cartridge

Gregsten’s car revealed no forensic clues – no fingerprints, no fibres, nothing to link Hanratty to the car – because Hanratty had been careful, the prosecution claimed cases – presumably left by Hanratty the day before the murder – had been fired.

The prosecution suggested that Hanratty might have put in some target practice in the hotel – without waking his fellow-guests!

The prosecution wanted it both ways. Gregsten’s car revealed no forensic clues – no fingerprints, no fibres, nothing to link Hanratty to the car – because Hanratty had been very careful, the prosecution claimed.

But if he had been so careful, why had he left clues on the bus and at the hotel?

Why did he place the gun where he knew it would be found, instead of throwing it into the Thames? Why leave two cartridge cases in the hotel before the murder?

Hanratty travelled to Ireland on September 4th to get a driving licence, and he returned to London a week later. From a fence he received a lot of money from

the proceeds of robberies in Wembley and Edgware.

On September 19th he bought a car, taking the France family on trips. He was still wearing the same dark chalk-stripe suit he had worn on the night of the murder.

On September 30th he broke into houses in Stanmore and stole a dark jacket, disposing of his old one and wearing the new one over his waistcoat and trousers. He sold a diamond ring he had stolen during this period, so he was quite well off.

Then on Thursday, October 5th, Hanratty went to his usual haunt, the Rehearsal Club where Charles France worked.

There he was told he was wanted for the A6 murder and he telephoned France in panic. His friend advised him to give himself up, and also tried to keep him talking so the police could trace the call.

At noon the following day Hanratty rang Acott at Scotland Yard and said he had had nothing to do with the murder. However, he refused to give himself up because he was wanted for housebreakings and had no desire to go back to prison.

Hanratty then rang the Daily Mirror and said substantially the same thing, adding that he had been in Liverpool at the time of the murder and had three friends who could substantiate his alibi. He refused to name them, saying they were also wanted by the police.

That evening Hanratty stole a car and drove to Liverpool, ringing Acott from a call-box when he got there. He said he was in Liverpool seeking his friends about the alibi. Those three men, all known fences, didn’t want to be implicated, he said, and he still refused to name them.

On Friday, October 6th, France and his wife were interviewed by Acott at Scotland Yard. France said that Jim Ryan had once told him that a good place to hide things was beneath the back seat of a bus.

At that point all that incriminated Hanratty in the A6 murder were the cartridge cases in the Vienna Hotel, and the fact that the killer called himself Jim, and

said he had done five years’ CT. Hanratty had done three years, and he could not have been due for “PD next” as he was too young.

The blood group of the killer – determined from semen samples – was group O. Both Hanratty and Alphon belonged to this group, which is found in 36 per cent of the population.

For the next few days Hanratty laid low. He had his hair bleached and sent flowers to his mother. Then he went to Blackpool, where he was arrested in a cafe on October 11th by two observant constables.

Acott made a hurried journey to interview the suspect in Blackpool. The notes taken of the interview

another identity parade was held at the foot of Valerie Storie’s bed.

She spent 10 minutes examining the men closely, and then asked each to say, “Be quiet, will you! I’m finking.” She picked out James Hanratty, and later that day he was charged with the murder of Michael John Gregsten.

W

hen his trial began at Bedford Assizes on January 22nd, 1962, the case against him was based almost solely on identification, and the most important witness was Valerie Storie. As she would later tell millions of TV viewers, “I was there. I was on Deadman’s Hill. I know it

Above, the sweet shop in Liverpool that Hanratty claimed to have visited on August 22nd. Below, Rhyl landlady Grace Jones. She had a green bath and remembered Hanratty from his photograph

“While I was facing him, after he’d shot Mike and I was still in the car, another car came up from behind and lit up his face. He seemed to be staring through me. Very large icyblue eyes” were neither read nor signed by Hanratty and he later denied that they were correct.

On October 13th he was put on an identity parade for the witnesses who had seen the driver of the Morris Minor. Of the four witnesses, two picked out Hanratty. They had not been present at Alphon’s identity parade. The following day

was Hanratty.”

She identified him in three ways: by sight, sound and the description he’d given of his life. She glimpsed the killer’s face only once, in the glare of a car’s headlights.

At all other times he’d kept a handkerchief over his face.

She told the court, “He told us to face front, presumably so that we wouldn’t be able to see his face, and every time we went to turn he told us to face the front.”

She was asked: “When he got out of the car and went round to the boot with Mike, were you able to see his face at all?”

“I could not see his face because he had a handkerchief or something tied triangular-fashion over his nose and mouth, presumably to stop Mike seeing him.

“While I was facing him, after he’d shot Mike and I was still in the car, another car came up from behind and lit up his face. He seemed to be staring through me. Very large icy-blue eyes. This was the only real proper glimpse I had of him...”

She told the student who raised the alarm when she was found that the killer had “fairish brown hair.”

The student remembered that particularly because he asked, “Do you mean like mine?” and she had replied, “Yes.” But the notes he made and had given to the police had been unaccountably lost...

The original suspect, Alphon, had fairish hair.

At the time of the murder, Hanratty’s hair was jet black.

Mrs. France had dyed it for him on August 5th, 18 days before the murder.

How accurate was Valerie Storie’s memory? She told the magistrates, “I described his eyes as icy-blue, very large. They appeared huge to me because they were just staring. Just very large, icy-blue. I could see almost the whole of the coloured part of the eye. They did not appear to be sunken back.

They looked very cold blue.”

Yet in early descriptions of the killer, she emphasised the man’s deep-set brown eyes. Despite all this, Superintendent Acott told the jury, “Her description of the murderer has never changed from the day of the truecrime 21

murder until now, and I have always regarded it as most reliable.”

At the first identity parade at Guy’s hospital, Valerie Storie picked out the wrong man, a man with dark, short-cropped hair.

Afterwards she was heard to cry out, “I have made a mistake!”

At the trial Mr. Michael Sherrard, defending, asked her, “On the first parade you surveyed the men paraded before you for as long as five minutes before saying or doing something?”

“Yes,” she replied.

“And you then identified a man as being the assailant?”

“Yes.” “Can you tell us what this man looked like?”

“No.” Yet this was a man she had seen recently, in a good light for five minutes.

It was suggested that Hanratty, who was asked to say, “Be quiet, will you! I’m finking,” was the only man on the parade who spoke with a cockney accent.

There was also Miss Storie’s identification of the killer by what he said about himself in the car.

She told the court: “He said he’d never had a chance in life. He said that when he was a child he was locked in a cellar for days on end with only bread and water to drink. He said that since he was eight he had done remand homes, borstal, he had done CT and the next thing he would get was PD. He said, ‘I have done the lot.’ I believe he said he had done five years for housebreaking.”

Some of this did fit Hanratty – as it would fit a great many criminals – but some of it did not. Hanratty had done CT but he had never been in a remand home or borstal. There had never been a cellar in any house he’d occupied. He’d first got into trouble at 16, not eight. He had done three years for housebreaking, not five.

Furthermore, Miss Storie declared that the man told her he could drive all sorts of cars, yet he had had to ask her how to operate the gears on a Morris Minor and he later drove badly enough to attract attention. In contrast Hanratty was a car-thief and an accomplished driver.

The murderer said he 22 truecrime

Digging for the truth? A large tent (above) covered Hanratty’s grave (below) when his body was exhumed

had not eaten for two days – Hanratty had breakfasted at the Vienna Hotel that morning. The man said he had been sleeping rough – Hanratty was staying at the hotel.

Miss Storie said, “The killer was not much taller than me.” She was 5ft.3ins.

Hanratty was 5ft. 8ins.

“If I was a stick-up man, I would not bother dyeing my hair. I would wear a mask of some kind because it is not your hair you have to worry about, it is your face” The prosecution claimed that Hanratty got himself a gun some time before the murder, although nobody had ever known him to own one. No evidence was produced to link him with the gun, yet it was contended he’d acquired one to become a “stick-up man,” practising with it and leaving the empty cartridge cases in his room at the Vienna Hotel on the night prior to

the murder. He then went to Slough to look over houses for possible burglaries – dressed in his new Hepworth suit – and ended up in a cornfield where he spotted a courting couple and was overcome by lust. It was a simple sex-murder!

Afterwards, the prosecution claimed, he went to Liverpool to fake an alibi by sending a telegram to Charles France on August 24th.

Under cross-examination in the witness-box this suggestion was put to Hanratty, who dismissed it with scorn.

“Are you trying to suggest to this court that I went out on August 22nd to do a stick-up with a gun? Is that what you are trying to say?” he demanded.

“It is indeed.”

“Well, is it not quite obvious that if I did, I would not be looking for a car in a cornfield? I would be looking for some cash, a bank or a shop or something. If I was a stick-up man, I would not bother dyeing my hair.

I would wear a mask of some kind because it is not your hair you have to worry about, it is your face. And if you are suggesting I have done stick-ups, then you are wrong...”

The prosecutor asked, “Do you always hold your right eyebrow higher than your left?” and Hanratty replied, “I do not know, sir, because I cannot see it.”

Asked if he had been a professional housebreaker since the age of 16, Hanratty agreed, but reminded the jury, “This is a murder trial, not a housebreaking trial.”

He went on, “The man who committed this is a maniac and a savage. I am not the kind of man the court can approve of, but I am not a maniac of any kind.

I can prove it with my past girlfriends. I am a decent – I cannot say honest – man, but I try to live a good and respectable life except for my housebreakings.”

The prosecution introduced the evidence of a prisoner on remand in Brixton who claimed that Hanratty had confessed his guilt. But the defence produced two other prisoners who testified that the prosecution witness had never spent any time alone with Hanratty.

The cartridge cases remained a mystery. If they were planted in the hotel room, then by whom?

Who knew that Hanratty had spent August 22nd at the Vienna Hotel?

Charles “Dixie” France.

This “friend” was to prove Hanratty’s downfall, turning up as a prosecution witness. He said he had seen Hanratty’s receipt for his hotel room and been unable to believe it had cost so much.

France told the court that he put Hanratty up at his house because he felt sorry for him. Although he professed ignorance of Hanratty’s housebreaking activities, he admitted advising him on the value of his hauls. The witness also said that Hanratty behaved very well towards Mrs. France and the couple’s three children, often bringing them gifts. So what caused him to turn against this family friend?

Hanratty had once taken France’s 16-year-old daughter to a fair, and they had petted. Hanratty told his solicitors about it before the trial, saying, “Her father would go potty if he knew.”

France did just that – he went potty.

Three days before the

trial he was rushed to Hammersmith hospital after a suicide attempt, and he gave his evidence flanked by two nurses.

The centre-piece of the defence case was Hanratty’s Liverpool alibi. He stood by it, saying he’d gone to Liverpool by train in the morning and spent the day of August 22nd there. His solicitors had his detailed account of his movements: he’d deposited a case of stolen jewellery in the left luggage office at Lime Street Station. He described the attendant as having “a withered or turned hand.”

He then called at a sweet shop to ask for directions to Carlton Road. Later he tried to sell his gold watch to a man on the steps of a billiard hall.

Police were mobilised to find these people and the defence hired a private detective to help with the search. The detective found two attendants who had been on duty that day. One had fingers missing from a hand, the other an artificial arm.

In April 1970 the investigative journalist Paul Foot found the attendant with two missing fingers still at work at Lime Street left luggage office.

The attendant said he’d recognised Hanratty from his photograph and was sure it was the same man he’d seen on August 22nd.

The police traced a Mrs. Dinwoodie, an assistant at a sweetshop who also identified Hanratty from a photograph.

She’d only worked at the shop on August 21st and 22nd to help out, so Hanratty must have called there on one of those days.

She wasn’t sure which.

The police did not hand this information to the defence; it had to be pried from them. Under cross-examination at the magistrates’ hearing, Superintendent Acott agreed that Hanratty had been identified from his photograph by a shopkeeper in Liverpool as having called in there on August 21st or 22nd.

What were Hanratty’s movements prior to the murder? At midnight on August 21st he booked into the Vienna Hotel. Earlier that day, Mrs. France testified,

James Hanratty. From the condemned cell he wrote to his mother: “I feel without any doubt that one day my name will be cleared...I am about to take the punishment for someone else’s crime”

he had come to her home at about 2.30. “He stayed until 6.30. My daughter Carol was at home. She’d just had a tooth out. When Hanratty left he said he was going to see his old aunt in Liverpool.”

A dental surgeon verified the date of Carol France’s tooth extraction. If Hanratty was in London on the 21st, then his Liverpool trip must have been planned for the 22nd.

Another witness said he’d seen him at the Rehearsal Club on August 21st. “His hair was black. That was not the usual colour of his hair.

He left at about six or seven p.m. He told me he was going to Liverpool.”

So if Hanratty did visit that Liverpool sweetshop on the 22nd, he had a cast-iron alibi. But the prosecution produced a man who said he visited the shop on the 21st and heard the lady there tell of a man who had come in asking for directions to Carlton Road.

The man on the billiard hall steps was traced. He confirmed that he had been offered a gold watch but he couldn’t confirm the date beyond that it was some time in August.

The prosecution dismissed doubts about the 21st or

22nd by saying it didn’t matter. Hanratty might have paid a “double” to go to Liverpool and fix him an alibi!

But just as the defence was building a reasonable case, Hanratty himself demolished

“It was quite obvious to me that as I never committed this crime I had nothing at all to fear. But as this case went along, I got so frightened with all the evidence being brought against me” it. On February 9th he changed his alibi. Warned by his counsel that he had to name the three Liverpool men he’d gone to see, he refused to do so because they were wanted criminals.

And he now told the court that he’d spent the night of the 22nd at Rhyl, 40 miles from Liverpool.

He’d been to Liverpool, and the incidents he had spoken of – the sweet-shop, the attempt to sell his watch

and so on – were all true.

But after failing to contact the three men who were his alibi, he travelled on to Rhyl to see a man called John who worked on the fairground. He’d stayed at a boarding-house for two nights but he couldn’t remember the address.

He described the landlady and the boarding-house in detail, so the defence sent a private detective to Rhyl in a desperate attempt to find out if such a place existed.

In the witness-box, Hanratty was questioned about Rhyl. He said the landlady was about 50 and wore glasses. There was a green bath in the house, and he’d heard trains shunting nearby.

The detective traced the landlady, a Mrs. Grace Jones.

She had a green bath, and she remembered Hanratty from his photograph. She said she put him up for two nights in the latter part of August, but she could not be more precise.

The prosecution produced guests who had stayed at the boarding-house at that time and none of them could remember seeing Hanratty.

Why did he change his alibi? One explanation is that at the beginning of his trial he was so confident of acquittal that he felt invincible. But when he realised how powerful a case the prosecution had against him, he was rattled. He replaced an invented alibi with the true one, thinking that the truth would save him.

He told the court: “I know I had already told Mr. Acott a lie about Liverpool, but it was quite obvious to me that as I never committed this crime I had nothing at all to fear. But as this case went along, I got so frightened with all the evidence being brought against me, with all the lies and such things – well, it is disgraceful to talk about them.

“When I spoke to Mr. Acott I did not fear any danger because I knew in my heart and soul I did not commit this crime.”

Asked why, during his time on the run, he had not gone to Rhyl to find the boarding-house and substantiate his alibi, Hanratty reminded the court that he was a wanted man, facing five years for truecrime 23

housebreaking. To go to Rhyl and knock on doors would be to invite arrest.

In his closing speech the prosecutor listed the evidence against Hanratty: the identification by Miss Storie and the two men who had recognised him as the driver of the Morris Minor; the cartridge cases found in the room Hanratty had occupied at the Vienna Hotel; the gun found in his alleged favourite hiding-place, under a bus seat; the confession in prison which Hanratty was alleged to have made to a fellowinmate; the fact that the jacket to his suit was missing – had it been bloodstained?

And there was the incriminating conversation that Hanratty was alleged to have had with Superintendent Acott.

“You won’t find my housebreakings, Mr. Acott. I never leave my fingerprints.

I always rub them off with a handkerchief. I’m a really clever screwsman. I never make a slip-up now. I’ve made over a thousand pounds in the last two months. I stick to jewellery and keep to one fence. When I came out of Manchester in March I went to see him in Ealing and he gave me twenty-five quid to start me up in business. He asked me what I was going to do now.

I said: ‘I think I’ll pack up my jewellery lark,’ and asked him to get a shooter to do some stick-ups.”

Acott: “Are you trying to tell me you tried to get a gun from a man in Ealing?”

Hanratty: “Yes. He wouldn’t play and never got me one. Oh, Mr. Acott, I’ve never killed a man in my life.”

This reported conversation made a bad impression on the jury, but even worse was Hanratty’s change of alibi.

T

he jury deliberated for six hours and then came back to seek clarification of the term “reasonable doubt.”

Four hours after that, on February 17th, they found James Hanratty guilty and he was sentenced to death.

Collapsing in the dock, he cried out, “I am innocent, my lord!”

The length of time the jury had taken indicated the depth of the initial doubt.

Hanratty’s appeal was rejected on March 13th.

24 truecrime

By then 90,000 people had signed a petition for a reprieve. It was not granted.

On March 16th Charles France committed suicide by gassing himself in a doss-house. At his inquest on April 5th, the day after Hanratty’s execution, the coroner refused to reveal the contents of letters France had left, saying it was “not in the public interest,” but he disclosed that the letters were “written with great bitterness against Hanratty.”

So did France kill himself because he couldn’t live with his guilt?

From the condemned cell, Hanratty wrote to his mother: “I feel that without any doubt that one day my name will be cleared...I am about to take the punishment for someone else’s crime.”

He was hanged at Bedford

“You won’t find my housebreakings, Mr. Acott. I never leave my fingerprints. I always rub them off with a handkerchief.

I’m a really clever screwsman” Prison on Wednesday, April 4th, 1962, after walking with dignity to the scaffold.

Then the movement began to clear his name, prompting two Parliamentary debates and numerous books and articles claiming that Hanratty was innocent.

In 1967 Mr. Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary, announced an investigation of Hanratty’s Rhyl alibi. It was headed by Detective Chief Superintendent Douglas Nimmo, head of

James Hanratty Sr. Until his death in 1978 he campaigned to clear his son’s name

the Manchester CID. He spent six days in Rhyl, interviewed a number of witnesses and concluded that Hanratty’s alibi could not be substantiated.

Then Peter Louis Alphon entered the picture again. He was an odd character, a drifter living on an allowance from his parents. He spent most of his time reading books on witchcraft, black magic and theology. Politically he described himself as Fascist, with a lifelong admiration for Hitler.

On November 6th, 1961, Alphon had taken out a writ against Superintendent Acott, alleging defamation of character and wrongful imprisonment. But it was never followed up and he allowed it to drop.

Jean Justice, who was to write a book about the A6 case, became friendly with Alphon, who made a confession of the crime to her, saying he’d spotted Ryan (Hanratty) at the Vienna Hotel and realised at once that he was a crook.

He decided to frame him for the murder by planting the cartridge cases in Room 24 and imitating his

cockney accent.

Jean Justice told the MP Fenner Brockway of Alphon’s “confession” and in 1963 the MP led a debate in the House and read from transcripts of Alphon’s calls to the author.

The Home Secretary refused to reopen the case and Alphon promptly took out a writ against Fenner Brockway. Over the next few years Alphon repeatedly confessed to the A6 murder.

The framing of Hanratty had actually been done by Charles France, he said, who had been paid to put the bullet cases in the hotel room and the gun under a bus seat.

In 1967 Alphon called a press conference in Paris and told the assembled newsmen that a wealthy London businessman had paid him a large sum of money to end the relationship between Gregsten and Miss Storie.

“Another man then put a gun in my hand. I gave the couple in the car two chances. I gave Gregsten two chances to go away. I sent him away twice, but each time the bloody man came back.” (This was a reference to Gregsten leaving the car to go to the milk dispenser and later to the cigarette machine).

The authorities took the view that Alphon was a mentally-ill publicity-seeker who had found a cause confessing to a crime he had not committed. His story was remarkably detailed and fitted the psychological pattern of the crime, but it was too like an attempt by a novelist to get inside the mind of the killer. While convincing as narrative, it was weak on proof.

On his return to Britain, Alphon wrote to the Home Secretary, repeating his confession, only to retract it and then repeat it time and again.

By this time few took Alphon seriously, but his antics kept the case in the public eye. Many had doubts about the safety of Hanratty’s conviction and continued to express them.

We had not heard the last of him.

With the introduction of DNA “fingerprinting,” investigators realised that this new scientific tool could not only solve mysteries of

the present: it could also reach back to the grave to crack unsolved and disputed crimes of the past.

Preserved on the underwear Valerie Storie wore at the time of the murder was semen from the man who killed her lover and then raped her. It wasn’t much use to the investigators in 1961, but the 1990s were a different story. Thanks to DNA that semen could now signpost Gregsten’s killer.

To put it mildly, it could scientifically determine James Hanratty’s guilt or innocence.

Confident that such a test would at last clear their hanged relative, the Hanratty family pressed for it to be applied in what had become known as the A6 murder. The government’s new Criminal Cases Review Commission announced that Hanratty’s case would be reinvestigated, and for a start James Hanratty’s 59-year-old brother Michael gave a saliva sample for DNA comparison with samples on Valerie Storie’s preserved underwear.

Predictably, Peter Alphon bobbed up yet again.

Expressing his willingness to be DNA-tested to prove his innocence, he said he would give a sample if Hanratty was cleared.

In 1997 the Mirror’s story that Hanratty was set to be cleared was welcomed by his relieved family. The case would be sent back to the Appeal Court early in 1998, the paper reported. “It is understood it will NOT be contested, and his conviction will be quashed.”

Other newspapers carried similar stories, and Hanratty’s brother Michael said the development was long overdue. “I only wish my father – and James – were here to share this with us. We just want his name cleared. That is all we live for.”

Four months later, however, it was reported that DNA found on Valerie Storie’s underwear showed a match with samples taken from Hanratty’s relatives.

The results were short of the 100 per cent match required to make the tests conclusive, but comparison with samples taken from Hanratty’s remains would put the match beyond doubt.

So the forensic scientists

VALERIE’S COURAGE AND DEFIANCE

V

alerie Storie was an ordinary young woman whose life took a turn for the extraordinary on that day in 1961 when, after seeing her boyfriend gunned down, she was raped, shot and paralysed. How do you lead a normal life after such an experience?

In Valerie’s case, the answer was: with courage and defiance.

Courage in facing the long, drawn-out legal process that led to the controversial hanging of James Hanratty.

Defiance in the face of her life-changing injuries. And there was conviction too: never, during decades wanted his body to be exhumed.

In 2000 DNA tests on samples found on a handkerchief wrapped around the murder weapon matched what was known of Hanratty’s DNA, but the findings were dismissed by Michael Hanratty.

“I still believe that Hanratty was innocent. The prosecution did not have a coherent case, and Hanratty’s alibis cannot be dismissed in the way that they have been today” “When the original tests were carried out,” he said, “the piece of cloth was dropped on a bench and contaminated, but it was kept as the only sample. This was used for the new tests, and the report on the new evidence does acknowledge it is contaminated. We believe this evidence is nothing to worry about.”

Later that year three Court of Appeal judges authorised Hanratty’s exhumation to test fragments of his bones for a match with DNA

Valerie Storie in 2008

of attempts to prove the wrong man had been executed, was she swayed, even for a moment, from her conviction that Hanratty was the guilty man.

Determined to carry on with her life, she found at the murder scene.

And in the early hours of March 22nd, 2001, five cemetery staff, watched by police and two Roman Catholic priests, began digging up Hanratty’s coffin at Carpenders Park cemetery, near Bushey, Hertfordshire.

The outcome was a bitter blow for Hanratty’s relatives, when on May 10th, 2002, the Appeal Court judges rejected all 17 grounds of appeal brought by his family and friends.

“The DNA evidence establishes beyond doubt that James Hanratty was the murderer,” Lord Woolf, the Lord Chief Justice, told the packed court. “The DNA evidence makes what was a strong case even stronger.”

The family’s counsel, Mr. Michael Mansfield QC, had argued that Valerie Storie’s clothing and the handkerchief could have been contaminated by samples taken from Hanratty, but this was rejected as extremely unlikely.

Mr. Mansfield also claimed that the police had suppressed evidence and doctored statements; that Detective Superintendent Acott – who had since died – failed to disclose relevant documents and misled the jury; and that the trial judge’s summing-up was flawed.

returned to work, supporting herself and her parents.

They had spent their savings having their home adapted for Valerie’s wheelchair and special car. As the years unfolded and her parents died, she became president of her local Women’s Institute and worked to organise transport for local disabled people.

Despite the traumatic events, she never had counselling, rejecting it because, she said, “you end up blaming everybody else for what has happened to you.”

Valerie Storie died on March 26th, 2016, aged 77.

But the Appeal Court ruled that procedural errors at the trial were not so serious as to make it unfair, and that “the number of alleged coincidences [in the evidence against Hanratty] mean that they are not coincidences, but provide overwhelming proof of the safety of the conviction.”

On the steps of the Appeal Court, Michael Hanratty told reporters: “We will fight on to the House of Lords, and then on to the European Court if we have to.”

“I still believe that Hanratty was innocent,” said Bob Woffinden.

“The prosecution did not have a coherent case, and Hanratty’s alibis cannot be dismissed in the way that they have been today.”

For many others, the case had cast a long and disturbing shadow that would continue to linger.

Some argued that DNA evidence could be flawed, and that it would be only a matter of time before it was successfully challenged.

There was already proof that two people can have the same DNA. James Hanratty has been reburied, but not his story. From time to time it will doubtless resurface, an intriguing mystery still with unanswered questions, and one that refuses to go away. truecrime 25

this report By tom

T

HE BEGINNING of the end for Chicago’s notorious Genna gang began on a cool May morning in 1925 when Angelo Genna left the honeymoon suite of the elegant Belmont Hotel, setting off in his new $6,000 Cadillac to drive to the plush Chicago suburb of Oak Park where he intended to buy a house for himself and his bride of four months.

The marriage in January had been a lavish affair

Sam Genna

Prior

professional and political figures toasted Genna, immaculately dressed in full tuxedo, with his bride in pure white silk and orange blossoms. No one mentioned the two murder raps the groom had recently beaten.

Or the year and a day he had spent in prison for intimidating witnesses.

Now, a red rose pinned to his lapel and a lingering kiss from his young wife still on his lips, Angelo gunned

them, according to a police report, were Hymie Weiss, the new boss of the Northsiders, Bugs Moran and Vincent “Schemer” Drucci. The driver was believed to be Frank Gusenberg, one of three brothers in the gang.

With such heavy odds against him Angelo realised that the two revolvers in his belt were useless. His only chance was to flee. Hoping to out-distance his pursuers, he accelerated in a frantic

Vincenzo “Jim” Genna

the gun on the seat beside him.

In a desperate move to escape, he threw the steering wheel of his car hard over.

The Cadillac careered around a sharp corner on two wheels and skidded wildly across Hudson Avenue.

Swerving out of control, it crashed into a lamp-post.

As Genna sat stunned, the black tourer pulled alongside and stopped. The men inside poured a final

Peter Genna

GANGLAND’S DEA befitting one of Chicago’s most prominent gangsters.

Angelo had placed an open invitation in Chicago’s newspapers which read, “Come one, come all.” Three thousand guests took up the offer to see Angelo marry 18-year-old Lucille Spingola, the beautiful daughter of a prominent Sicilian family.

The elaborately decorated wedding cake towered halfway to the ceiling and weighed more than 2,000 pounds.

The finest Italian wines flowed freely as Chicago’s 26 truecrime

his car along the newly widened boulevard of Ogden Avenue that connected the city’s North and West sides.

He had travelled only a few blocks when a large touring car pulled out of a side street and began following. Angelo spotted it as it rounded the boulevard behind him, and he knew he was in danger. He was deep in the North Side territory of the O’Banion gang whose leader had been slain by Genna’s hit-men.

The black sedan contained four gangsters. Three of

dash to save his life. Guns barked behind him as he tore along the boulevard.

Bullets smashed into his car, whistling past his head. He floored the accelerator. His roadster reached 75 mph but the big black sedan began gaining.

Guns blazed again as the pursuing car drew almost level. Angelo snatched one of his revolvers and emptied it out of the window at his would-be-killers. His aim was blind. He could not fire his weapon and control his car at the same time. He dropped

volley of bullets into Angelo, one of which shattered his spine. Bystanders found him semi-conscious and fumbling at his belt in a vain attempt to draw his second pistol.

“You are about to die,” Detective Sergeant Roy Hessler told Genna at the Evangelical Deaconess Hospital. “Tell us who shot you.”

Angelo shrugged weakly and remained silent. His wife arrived at his bedside and burst into uncontrollable weeping. “My darling Angelo,” she screamed, “how

According to some the Gennas were an “alley cat breed” who had arrived from the Sicily around 1910. The six sons were Sam, the eldest; Vincenzo, known as Jim; Pete, Angelo, Antonio and Mike. They discovered that the quickest route to riches was crime – and Prohibition provided an opportunity they grasped with brutal efficiency. But by the middle of 1925 three of the “Terrible Gennas” would be dead, victims of...

the PlOt tO ruB Out

Angelo Genna

Antonio “Tony” Genna

Mike Genna

ADLY BROTHERS could they do it?” As his life ebbed away he managed a faint smile and called her “Sweetheart” before the darkness came and took away his last sight of his young bride.

A

ccording to one experienced reporter the Gennas were an “alley cat breed.” They had been brought to Chicago by their father from the Sicilian port of Marsala around 1910.

The six sons were Sam, the eldest; Vincenzo, known as Jim; Pete, Angelo, Antonio and Mike, the youngest.

They joined thousands of their fellow-Sicilians in a desperate search for food and work. With their mother dead their father found work as a railroad hand at $1.25 a day, but died not long after bringing his boys to Chicago.

The brothers soon discovered how to make money. Using their brains and muscle, they began extorting cash from their fellow-immigrants. This bankrolled the opening of a pool hall, followed by a gambling den. Then at the beginning of Prohibition, through the influence of

Diamond Joe Esposito, the unofficial mayor of Chicago’s Little Italy, they obtained a government licence to produce and distribute industrial alcohol.

Little of this went to legitimate users. Instead the Gennas redistilled it to 180-proof, reduced it with tap water to 90-proof and flavoured it with juniper berry extract. Glycerine was then added to make it smooth enough to drink.

Then they sold it as gin, or they coloured it with coal-tar dye, flavoured it and sold it as 180-proof bourbon or

whisky at $6 a gallon.

It was a dreadful concoction, teeming with toxins that could cause acute pain, blindness and even death. If a batch of the Gennas’ “whisky” had not had the chemical by-products of fermentation removed it would more often than not drive the drinkers insane.

Nevertheless the brothers had a problem in meeting the demand for their brew. It was Henry Spingola, Angelo’s future brother-in-law, who discovered that by cooking sugar long enough in a certain way you could truecrime 27

provided low-cost, reliable insurance policies for its Sicilian members. Whoever controlled the Unione held tremendous power. Mike Merlo was the current head, but Angelo Genna coveted the presidency. rohibition had brought new opportunities for Chicago’s gang lords. One of the first people to exploit the demand for illegal liquor was Johnny Torrio. A brilliant underworld organiser, he began acquiring control of Chicago’s breweries and approached other major gang leaders with a plan to form a

P

A toast from the “Terrible Gennas” (except Mike) pictured at James Genna’s home on Lakeside Place in 1924. From left to right: Sam Genna, daughter Mary and wife Vitina; Angelo Genna next to Anthony, Peter Genna’s son, and Peter; Tony Genna (in glasses); James’s wife; and James Genna produce a small pool of alcohol. Once they acquired the secret the Gennas were on their way to making a fortune out of homemade hooch. They went from tenement to tenement in Little Italy, installing stills in kitchens and paying the head of the family a handsome $15 a day to sit and brew.

Genna trucks pulled up every few days to pick up the stuff and take it to a giant warehouse on Taylor Street, only four blocks from the Maxwell Street police station, where it was redistilled, flavoured, coloured and sold.

By 1925 the Gennas had

Gangster Dion O’Banion (above) owned a flower shop, across from the cathedral where he had once sung in the choir, as a front for his criminal empire 28 truecrime

the whole city reeking of fermenting corn and rich, raw alcohol. Their profits ran to $150,000 a month.

Some 400 policemen at the Maxwell Street station were on the Genna payroll.

They provided escorts for the brothers’ delivery trucks through enemy territory. They smashed stills belonging to Genna rivals and tipped off the brothers

The newly married Angelo Genna in life (left) and in the morgue (above)

Angelo’s Cadillac roadster resting against the lamp-post where he crashed it whenever a raid on the Taylor Street warehouse was planned.

The Gennas were high

up in the councils of the Unione Siciliana di Mutuo Soccorso negli Stati Uniti, a fraternal organisation that

mutually beneficial alliance.

He offered political protection and also muscle if any territory was encroached

him on bootlegging. And his promises soon came true. To help him achieve his aims he sent for his young protègé from New York – Al Capone.

The Gennas had joined Torrio’s alliance. So too had the North Side gang boss Dion O’Banion, a little fat-faced man with an angelic smile who owned a flower shop on North State Street, across from the cathedral where he had once sung in the choir. O’Banion was credited with at least 25 killings and Chief of Police Morgan Collins called him “Chicago’s arch criminal.”

Early in 1924 the alliance that Torrio had established began to fall apart when the Genna brothers began peddling their cheap booze in O’Banion’s North Side territory, undercutting by up to a half his price for top-quality imported Canadian whisky. Since Torrio was the leader of the federation of bootleggers, O’Banion asked him to keep the Gennas off his patch. Torrio replied that no one could tell the Gennas what to do except Mike Merlo, head of the Unione

Above, Mike Genna’s car after it collided with a lamp-post (foreground). The police car rolled up (bonnet open) and the three hoodlums drew their weapons. Two cops were killed in the resulting gun battle. Genna, mortaly wounded, crawled through the basement window of 5941 Artesian (below) in an attempt to escape on by another mob, promising gang leaders that he would make them all rich if they would abandon their robbing and concentrate with

Johnny Torrio – leader of the federation of bootleggers. His scarf covers a shotgun wound

When Alphonse Capone took over from Torrio, the Gennas became a problem Siciliana. O’Banion cursed and stormed out of Torrio’s office, saying he’d deal with the Gennas himself.

Soon afterwards his gang hi-jacked a $30,000 delivery of Genna whisky. The six brothers unanimously decided to kill the cocky Irishman, but they were restrained by Mike Merlo and Torrio who both wanted a peaceful settlement.

O’Banion, however, became increasingly hostile to the Sicilians. When Angelo Genna lost $30,000 at the truecrime 29

Ship, a Cicero gambling den jointly owned by O’Banion, Torrio and Capone, it was proposed that his IOUs should be cancelled.

O’Banion flatly refused and telephoned Angelo himself to tell him to pay up within the week.

T

he collapse of the alliance came when O’Banion double-crossed and swindled Torrio and Capone, precipitating the arrest of Torrio for operating an illegal brewery.

In the spring of 1924 O’Banion had told Torrio he was retiring to his ranch in Colorado because he was afraid of the Gennas, and offered to sell his share of the massive Sieben Brewery.

Torrio jumped at the chance and paid O’Banion $500,000. On an inspection tour of his new acquisition Torrio and 28 other gangsters were netted in a police raid that O’Banion knew was scheduled. He also knew that Torrio faced prison because of a previous Prohibition offence – a fact that greatly amused the Irishman.

O’Banion’s lieutenant Hymie Weiss urged him to make peace with Torrio and the Gennas. “Oh, to hell with them Sicilians,” was O’Banion’s reply. The insult reverberated around gangland, reaching the ears of Torrio and the Gennas.

The bloodstained floor of the basement (above) where Mike Genna (right) died shop thousands of dollars in increased business. Torrio ordered $10,000-worth of flowers and Capone $8,000worth. Jim Genna called at the shop on Sunday morning, ostensibly to collect a $750 wreath, but in reality to case the joint.

Late on Monday morning O’Banion was in the workroom at the back of his shop. He wore an apron that held the usual scissors and

Albert Anselmi (above left) and John Scalise, the Gennas’ killing team. They were imported from the old country to murder on command...but they would soon be taking orders from Al Capone They began planning the cocky Irishman’s murder, but once again the respected Sicilian leader Mike Merlo held the Gennas in check by advocating the benefits of gangland peace.

On Saturday, November 8th, 1924, however, Merlo died of cancer. His funeral brought O’Banion’s flower 30 truecrime

shears of his trade. He also had three guns – one up his left sleeve, one on his right hip and another strapped to his left leg.

The door bell announced the arrival of three men.

O’Banion stepped out from the back, a pair of clipping shears in his left hand. He evidently knew the man in

the centre as he held out his hand in greeting. “Hello, boys,” he said. “Are you for Mike Merlo’s flowers?”

The man gripped O’Banion’s right hand and held it in a vice-like grip as his companions drew their guns and fired six shots in quick succession. Two bullets struck O’Banion in the right breast, two in the throat, a fifth smashing into his jaw.

One of the men stooped over O’Banion’s body and fired the final bullet into his face.

The trio then rushed out through the shop and leapt into a blue Jewett car. The man at the wheel, believed to be Angelo Genna, stepped on the accelerator and carried the killers away.

The assassin who had gripped O’Banion’s hand was Mike Genna. His accomplices were the Gennas’ deadly killing team of Albert Anselmi and John Scalise, imported from the Gennas’ home town of Marsala to kill on command.

Each was paid $10,000 for the O’Banion hit and given a four-carat diamond ring for a job well done.

A

fter O’Banion’s cohorts had staged a lavish funeral for their slain chieftain they sought revenge on Torrio, Capone and the Gennas. O’Banion’s successor Hymie Weiss narrowly missed killing Capone in early January 1925. In a drive-by shooting Capone’s parked car was raked with bullets, his chauffeur wounded, but Capone had left the car moments earlier to call at a restaurant. Two weeks later the Northsiders ambushed Torrio outside his apartment, filling his chest and jaw with buckshot and leaving him for dead.

Torrio recovered, and on February 9th appeared in court with his jaw still bandaged to be given a nine-month jail sentence for his involvement in the Sieben Brewery. Upon his release he announced his retirement from gangland, leaving Al Capone to inherit the multi-million-dollar criminal organisation of breweries, brothels and gambling dens.

Angelo Genna had become the proud new president of

the Unione Siciliana before O’Banion gunmen took their deadly revenge. This had annoyed Al Capone as he had wanted to install his own man as president. Capone himself could not take over because he was not a Sicilian.

After Angelo was killed the Gennas’ political fixer Sam “Samoots” Amatuna took over the presidency. Capone’s annoyance intensified. He too turned against the Gennas.

His first act was to entice Scalise and Anselmi from the Genna clan with promises of rich rewards. On Capone’s orders they were to take Mike Genna for a ride.

Mike, the toughest of the six brothers, had sworn to avenge his brother Angelo’s death. On the morning of

weapons as the police car rolled up.

“What’s the big idea, didn’t you hear our gong?” called Detective Conway.

The answer was a barrage of bullets from Scalise and Anselmi which blew off the top of Officer Harold Olson’s head. A second blast filled the lungs of Detective Charles B. Walsh with hot lead. Another fusillade met Conway as he came around the car, his gun drawn. He dropped, severely wounded.

Detective William Sweeney emptied his gun at the trio, forcing them to flee. He then snatched up two pistols dropped by his fellowofficers and gave chase.

Scalise and Anselmi escaped but Sweeney followed Mike

were finally found not guilty on the grounds that they were defending themselves against police aggression! he killing of Angelo and Mike had deprived the Genna clan of its principal fighters. The next to die was Antonio, the brains of the family.

Known as “Tony the Gentleman” for his passion for opera and architecture, he was not a killer like his brothers but did not object to his family committing murder. Since the deaths of Angelo and Mike he had barricaded himself in his hotel suite, refusing to leave. His girlfriend Gladys Bagwell, a clergyman’s daughter, went shopping for

T

He offered to return to the Gennas and lead the fight back, but said he first needed to meet and talk. At 10.30 a.m. on July 8th, 1925, Tony Genna arrived outside a grocery store at the corner of Grand Avenue and Curtis Street for his appointment with Nerone. A car pulled up on the opposite side of Curtis Street and two men got out.

They waved to Tony, smiling broadly as they crossed the street to meet him. “Hello, Tony,” said Nerone. He held Tony’s hand in a lingering grasp as his companion drew an automatic from his pocket and pumped five bullets into “The Gentleman’s” body.

Then the two fled, leaving

Tony Genna in hospital (left) and deceased (above) June 13th, with Scalise and Anselmi, he had ambushed two of Angelo’s killers, Bugs Moran and Schemer Drucci.

The North Side gunmen escaped with Drucci only sustaining a slight wound.

Scalise and Anselmi then headed south, intending to carry out Capone’s order to kill Mike Genna.

Four policemen touring in a detective bureau car passed them in the opposite direction. Detective Michael Conway recognised Mike Genna and said, “Hoodlums – let’s get after them.”

The police car made a U-turn and followed the Genna car, its gong sounding and horn blaring. The chase soon reached 70 miles an hour. At 59th Street a truck turned directly into the path of the speeding Genna car. With a screeching of brakes the car swerved, spun twice and collided with a lamp-post. The gangsters jumped out and drew their

Genna down an alley, firing as he ran.

Genna turned and levelled his shotgun at the young cop.

The hammer banged down on an empty shell. Sweeney answered with a bullet that tore through Genna’s leg.

The gunman limped off, taking refuge in the basement of a house.

Other officers had now joined Sweeney. They burst into the basement and found Mike Genna lying on the floor, blood spurting from a severed artery. An ambulance was called, and as the attendant placed the gangster on a stretcher, Genna raised his uninjured leg and kicked him in the face, saying, “Take that you, bastard!” It was his last act before dying from loss of blood.

Captured trying to escape on a streetcar, Scalise and Anselmi were charged with the murders of Olson and Walsh. At the end of three trials spanning two years they

necessities as Tony stayed behind locked doors, fearing for his life.

It was a telephone call from Giuseppi Nerone, a former trusted enforcer of the Gennas, that finally persuaded Tony Genna to leave his room. Nerone, also known as Tony Spano and by his nickname “Il Cavaliere” – The Cavalier – was a dreaded gunman who had taught mathematics at a Palermo cottage but applied his university education to the bootlegging business.

He had helped to build up the Gennas’ bootleg business, but had been refused a share of the profits he believed he was entitled to, so he had left the Gennas and had gone into bootlegging with his cousin Philip Piazza in Chicago Heights: Capone territory.

The Cavalier phoned Tony Genna, telling him that Scalise and Anselmi had defected to Capone.

Genna barely alive.

He was rushed to hospital, where police asked who had shot him. True to Sicilian tradition, Tony remained silent. It was only when his girlfriend and his brothers Pete and Sam gathered at his bedside that he whispered “Cavalier.” The police began a fruitless search for a killer called Cavalier, unaware that Tony was using a nickname.

Realising that both Capone and Hymie Weiss were out to slay them, Jim, Sam and Pete fled back to Sicily. Jim was later imprisoned for two years for stealing jewels from a religious statue.

Eventually the three brothers returned to Chicago where they lived in relative obscurity, running a cheese and olive oil import business. They and Chicago’s gangland never forgot the six weeks in 1925 in which the power of the Gennas was so savagely broken. truecrime 31

WHO STOLE THE IR CROWN JEWELS? T

HE TALL, well-built ex-officer in the Old Bailey dock had a string of military decorations and looked a useful man to have in a tight spot. But Captain Richard Gorges was now in a tight corner of his own making. He was on trial for murder.

On Wednesday, July 14th, 1915, he had shot dead a London policeman arresting him, and it seemed that the captain’s colourful career had at last come to an end.

He was also a suspect in the unsolved theft of the Irish Crown Jewels, stolen eight years earlier, and his whole history was chequered, to put it mildly.

Born in Kingstown, County Dublin, in 1873, he was the black sheep of a family with aristocratic connections.

Right from his childhood, he had been a problem, terrorising housemaids and firing catapults at patrolling policemen. At 14 he emigrated to Rhodesia to join the British South African Company’s police force, and 1895 found him in the thick of the fighting in the Matabele War. Two years later he took part in the Mashona and Bechuanaland Campaigns, for which he was decorated, and when the second Boer War began he became a trooper in Thorneycroft’s Horse. But his activities were rumoured to be not entirely military. He was suspected of developing a sideline in highway robbery, holding-up an army pay-cart, and also plotting to rob the De Beers company’s diamond stores.

Discharged ignominiously from his regiment, he was later given another chance, serving with Scott’s Mounted Infantry, in which he successfully defended a number of strategic positions against attacks from superior numbers.

On his return to Ireland with four medals on his chest,

32 truecrime

he obtained a commission in the militia battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment. Then he tried unsuccessfully to get a military appointment under the Colonial Office, and he spent the next few years drifting to and fro between London and the Irish capital.

He also began to drink heavily and became involved in a homosexual circle whose activities scandalised Dublin society, and it was during this period that he was investigated for his alleged involvement in the theft of the “Irish Crown Jewels,” an escapade of which more was to be heard later.

On the outbreak of the First World War he obtained a commission in the 9th Border

Regiment, but he had become an alcoholic and was soon discharged.

H

e was now 42, and the events which led to his trial at the Old Bailey in 1915 began when Detective Sergeant Arthur Askew and Detective Constable Alfred Young set out from Hampstead police station for Gorges’s lodgings at 1 Mount Vernon, not far from Hampstead Heath, to arrest him on a magistrates’ warrant, after “serious complaints of a revolting character” were lodged against him at Hampstead Police Court.

In fact the warrant was for “indulging in illegal sexual practices.”

Detective Constable Alfred Young, who was shot by Captain Gorges on the stairs of his lodgings at No.1 Mount Vernon in Hampstead

The two officers went to Gorges’s lodgings several times that day without finding him. On searching his room in his absence they took away a revolver and 197 rounds of ammunition, and they were unarmed when they went again to Mount Vernon at 9.30 p.m.

This time Gorges was there. According to the police, the landlady led the officers down the basement stairs to find him, and they saw him standing in a corner of the staircase.

“Are you Captain Gorges?” asked Young.

“Yes,” Gorges replied.

“Who are you? What do you want?”

Young told him they were police officers and Askew said they wished to speak to him privately. Gorges told the landlady to bring a light to his sitting-room and began to lead the way upstairs. Young was immediately behind him, and they were half-way up the stairs when Gorges stopped and asked if he were under arrest. Young replied, “Yes,” and was promptly shot in the chest, receiving wounds from which he died instantly.

In the struggle that followed Gorges was overpowered by the sergeant, assisted by Gorges’s landlord – a former Hampstead policeman – and another lodger. Gorges was found to have been armed with a fully loaded revolver which had fired the fatal shot.

When he appeared before Hampstead magistrates the next morning, charged with murder, he claimed that the shooting had been a tragic accident for which the two police officers were responsible because his gun had gone off when they tried to seize it.

The court was told that Detective Constable Young was 35 and had twice been commended for arresting armed robbers. A shot had been fired when he made one of these arrests, and

RISH he had received the King’s Police Medal for bravery.

His death had orphaned his four-year-old daughter, for he was a widower.

Detective Inspector Duggan testified that at 1.45 a.m. at Hampstead police station Gorges had said: “I wish to say that I did it accidentally. It was his fault for having tried to take the revolver from me.

I had no more intention of shooting him than of shooting you. I was in liquor.”

The inspector added that on being charged at the police station Gorges said, “Don’t call me ‘Captain’, for the sake of the regiment.”

He was remanded in custody, and five days later Hampstead came to a standstill, to pay its respects to Detective Constable Young. All the High Street’s shops closed, and the funeral procession was led by a police band playing the Dead March.

Mourners in the cortège included the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, and the service was followed by Young’s burial at Hampstead Cemetery next to his wife.

An inquest had earlier been opened and adjourned in Gorges’s absence: he was in the hospital wing at Brixton prison, suffering from a knee injury received when he was arrested. He recovered sufficiently to attend the inquest when it reopened, and the jury returned a verdict of wilful murder against him.

C

ommitted for trial, Gorges again denied murder when he appeared before Mr. Justice Low at the Old Bailey on September 17th.

For the prosecution, Mr. Cecil Whiteley said that on the evening in question Gorges had returned to his lodgings with a youth with whom he had spent all that day. After his landlady told him that the police had called to see him, Gorges had loaded a second, smaller revolver, putting it into his pocket together with 50 rounds of ammunition.

When the two policemen called again and met Gorges on the basement stairs the sergeant saw that he was fumbling with something

Captain Richard Gorges, a chronic alcoholic, had had a colourful life. Not only was he on trial for shooting a policeman in 1915 but he was also a suspect in the unsolved theft of the “Irish Crown Jewels.”

A.W. Moss reports on the fascinating scandals which shadowed the captain in his ignominious career...

Dublin Castle from where the jewels were taken, and some of the “Irish Crown Jewels” (top) which were stolen from a Ratner safe (now in the Garda Museum at Dublin Castle).

Below, Richard William Howard Gorges on trial at the Old Bailey

behind his back. When Gorges brought his right arm forward the sergeant made a grab for the other arm. The officers were unaware that Gorges had drawn a gun until they saw it in his right hand, and the fatal shot was fired a moment later.

When Gorges had been subdued and was being taken to the police station, the prosecutor continued, he said: “I don’t care a ------ about myself. I did not intend to kill him.” But at the police station he said, “If I’d had a free hand, I’d have shot fifty of them,” apparently referring to the 50 rounds found in his pocket. “I don’t care a -----for the whole police force, and if I’d had two guns I would have fired the lot of them.”

Shortly afterwards he said to another officer, “I have shot one of your fellows tonight.

How many policemen are there at this station? Fifty?

Well, I had enough rounds for them.”

Robert Churchill, a London gunmaker later to truecrime 33

he could not form the intent to cause serious injury or resist arrest.

This was what the jury believed, and after 45 minutes’ deliberation they returned with a manslaughter verdict.

Sentencing Gorges to 12 years’ imprisonment, the judge told him the jury had taken “a merciful view.”

be acknowledged Britain’s foremost firearms expert, told the court that the weapon used in the shooting had a safety device and would be difficult to fire accidentally.

The court then heard the evidence of Charles Thoroughgood, a professional boxer who said that Gorges often carried a small revolver in his hip pocket, and one night had threatened to shoot him when they were in Gorges’s rooms.

Cross-examined, the witness agreed that Gorges drank heavily all day and often behaved childishly, although he never appeared to be drunk.

When Thoroughgood added that Gorges had told him he was an army officer the prosecutor asked: “Why did he say he was at home?”

“He said he had been gassed.”

D

etective Sergeant Askew’s evidence seemed to seal Gorges’s fate with a date with the hangman, when he showed the court how Gorges had raised the gun and fired it. Under cross-examination, he denied it had been too dark on the stairs to see what happened.

Gorges’s landlord told the court that the defendant had been acting even more strangely than usual prior to the shooting, behaving “like a madman.” But the Hampstead police surgeon Dr. W.H. Payne said that although Gorges was under the influence of drink when examined that night, he was sober.

The youth who had accompanied Gorges home, however, told a different story.

He was Alfred Muncer, an unemployed shop assistant, and he said that Gorges was very drunk.

“When he found that his revolver and cartridges were missing he got into an awful rage. He paced up and down, clutched at his throat and foamed at the mouth.”

Gorges’s counsel, Mr. Gordon Hewart KC, said there was no evidence of criminality and at the most the shooting was manslaughter, the detective constable’s death a tragic accident.

Mr. Hewart then began to describe his client’s career, saying he had joined the army at 14 and had served in the Cape Mounted Police.

Before the defence counsel

34 truecrime

G

Captain Gorges leaves Hampstead Police Court in custody

could continue, however, the prosecutor warned him he was running a risk in pursuing this course. Taking the hint, Mr. Hewart said he would say no more, except that while in South Africa Gorges had suffered severe sunstroke which had subsequently made him excitable if he had a drink.

Gorges then entered the witness-box to tell the court that he had taken to drink only because of his sunstroke, and it made him “practically mad.” He said that after he resigned from the Border Regiment, giving up his commission, his drinking increased.

When he saw the two plainclothes policemen on the stairs at his lodgings, he continued, “I didn’t know whether they were friends of the landlord or not. I got into the corner to let them pass. As far as I remember, one of them passed me. He first asked, ‘Are you Captain Gorges?’ I said, ‘Yes. What do you want?’ One of them said, ‘We want a quiet talk as man to man.’ I said, ‘Very well. Come upstairs to my sitting-room.’

“I told the landlady to light the gas. I asked the detectives to go up first. I suspected they were detectives when they asked my name. Detective Young said, ‘You go up first’, and he then asked me what

I had behind my back. I first said, ‘That’s my business’, and then I produced the revolver from behind my back. It was in my hand.

“The production of the revolver was the signal for a general assault upon me.

Sergeant Askew commenced by giving me a violent kick in the right knee. Detective Young caught me by the right wrist and tried to take the revolver from me. I would not let it go, and was very much enraged at such an unprovoked assault, as nothing was said about a warrant or arrest. What happened in the struggle was that the gun went off. I then slipped down the stairs, and Sergeant Askew fell on top of me.”

He had no intention of harming Young or resisting arrest, Gorges insisted.

A Hampstead doctor called by the defence confirmed that he had examined Gorges two months before the shooting and had found him to be suffering from chronic alcoholism. The physician said that on examining Gorges again a few hours after the shooting he found he was not drunk but had been drinking heavily.

In his summing-up Mr. Justice Low told the jury that the shooting could be considered manslaughter if they were satisfied that Gorges had been so intoxicated that

orges earned full remission, and after his release on March 13th, 1925, he gave various accounts of his escapades in South Africa.

He said that one night while on blockhouse duty he held up a pay-cart with some of his men. He was returning to the blockhouse with a heavy bag of gold when a patrol came along, and to avoid arrest he had to throw the bag away.

He also said he had robbed a mail-cart in Ireland to get the registered letters, and he was known to have tried to induce a man in the south of Ireland to join him in such raids.

His plan to steal millions of pounds’ worth of diamonds from the De Beers store in Kimberley had come to nothing, he said, because of the cowardice of the 25 men he tried to persuade to join him.

What the public wanted to hear most, however, was his inside story of the theft of the “Irish Crown Jewels.” He said he had tried to sell his account to newspapers, but none would pay him enough to persuade him to tell it.

It is more probable that none would touch it through fear of libel, for the story could not be told without naming people who would be quick to sue.

To this day the affair remains a mystery, but not through lack of speculation.

Although the gems were popularly known as the Irish Crown Jewels, this was a misnomer.

They were the insignia of the Order of St. Patrick, created in 1783 and the Irish equivalent of the Order of the Garter. Worn by the Viceroy on ceremonial occasions, they comprised emeralds, rubies and Brazilian diamonds and were believed to have formerly belonged to Queen Charlotte. King William IV had presented them to the Order in 1831, and they were kept at Dublin Castle, which was also the headquarters of the Royal Irish Constabulary.

But on July 6th, 1907, to the consternation of those responsible for their safety, the jewels were found to have vanished.

They had been locked in a safe which two years earlier had been ordered to be installed in the strongroom of the Office of Arms in the Castle’s Bedford Tower. But the safe was too big to go through the strongroom’s doorway, so until a smaller safe was obtained the overlarge one was kept in the Office of Arms’s library, which was open to the public during the day.

The safe was still there in July 1907, nothing having been done to replace it. In addition to the Crown Jewels it also contained the collars and badges of members of the Order, and Sir Arthur Vicars, the Ulster King of Arms, was the regalia’s custodian.

Virtually everything had been taken, including some of his mother’s jewellery which he kept there. The police launched an investigation, and locksmiths found that the safe’s lock had not been forced or tampered with.

Whoever stole the jewels had used a key, and nobody could say when the robbery was committed. The jewels had last been seen on June 11th when Vicars showed them to a visiting librarian.

King Edward VII was furious. He was about to visit Ireland. On his trip he was scheduled to invest a knight of the Order of St. Patrick, but now there was no regalia.

Vicars refused to resign

O

with Vicars at Clonskeagh, and was believed also to share Vicars’s bed.

A letter Vicars had sent him seven weeks after the robbery indicated that both Vicars and Francis Goldney, another keyholder in his role as the Athlone Pursuivant, thought that Shackleton knew the jewels’ location. This letter was read by the commission, but it found there was no evidence that Shackleton was involved in the theft.

He had returned from Italy to appear before the commission, pointing out that he was only one of several people linked by gossip with the robbery. There was also the Viceroy’s son Lord Haddo, who the cleaner had been surprised to see lurking one day in the Bedford Tower.

It seemed that she would have made a better custodian than Vicars.

This said that the Office of Arms had been the scene of drunken parties, later claimed to have been homosexual orgies. At one of these functions, it was alleged, Vicars had passed out, the safe’s key was taken from his pocket, and the jewels were taken and then posted back to him.

This was where Captain Richard Gorges came into the

A

n the morning of Wednesday, July 3rd, 1907, the door of the Office

part from damning Vicars for negligence, the commission reached no

The jewels were discovered to be missing on July 6th, 1907, four days before a visit by King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra Francis Shackleton, brother of the explorer Ernest Shackleton

Sir Arthur Vicars, Ulster King of Arms

of Arms was found unlocked by the woman cleaner, but when this was reported Vicars barely raised an eyebrow. His reaction was much the same three days later when the cleaner arrived for work and found the strongroom door ajar.

That afternoon Vicars handed the Office messenger a box containing the regalia of a deceased knight, telling him to put it in the safe and giving him the key. The messenger found the safe’s door was unlocked, and hurried back to inform Sir Arthur.

Alarmed at last, Vicars opened the safe to find it had been cleaned out.

and was given notice, his friends launching a campaign to reinstate him. When a commission of inquiry was appointed he refused to appear before it, and its findings severely criticised his off-hand reaction to the breaches of security reported to him just days before the robbery was discovered. The commission also noted that the safe could have been opened only with its key or a copy, and the only two keys to it were in Vicars’s possession.

Several honorary officeholders had keys to the Office of Arms, and one of them was Francis Shackleton, brother of the explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, who held the appointment of Dublin Herald. Although Francis was abroad at the time of the robbery, he came under suspicion because he was known to be in financial difficulties, shared a house

Francis BennettGoldney: Athlone Pursuivant of the Order of St Patrick

firm conclusions. The media floated a variety of theories – that Irish Republicans, Nationalists or monarchists were responsible for the robbery; that the British Secret Service and Loyalists were behind it, hoping to blacken the name of Republicans and Nationalists; or that the robbery was simply the work of criminals intent on splitting up and selling the jewels, which were valued at £31,500.

Nearer the mark, perhaps, was an article published in an American-Irish newspaper.

picture. He was an associate of Shackleton, and the article alleged that the two later repeated the party prank, but only up to a point. Instead of mailing the jewels back to Vicars the pair were said to have sold them to prop up their flagging finances.

Several years later, the article’s author said that in 1912 Gorges had confirmed that the account was not far from the truth.

In the aftermath of the robbery the RIC suffered further embarrassment. First the jewels had been stolen almost under their noses, then their inquiry had got nowhere, and now the British government ordered Scotland Yard to investigate. The job was assigned to Detective Chief Inspector John Kane, a former RIC constable and one of the Yard’s most successful sleuths. Before leaving for Dublin he was instructed to tread carefully, because the King wanted no scandal. No fewer than 19 of the possible suspects were titled or otherwise well connected, and truecrime 35

several were known to indulge in unmentionable sexual practices.

Instead of encountering the wall of silence he anticipated, Kane was met with a barrage of misinformation. And if this was calculated to muddy the waters to frustrate his investigation, it succeeded.

One story put his way was that the jewel-thief was a flighty countess disguised as a man, but she turned out to have been on the Continent at the time of the robbery.

MASTER DETECTIVE’S

This and countless other red herrings were strewn across the detective’s path, and he finally had to admit defeat.

Too many people in high places, it seemed, wanted the crime to remain unsolved.

W

hen Vicars learned in 1908 that there was no possibility of his being reinstated he refused to surrender the strongroom keys to his successor, who had to break in to gain entry. Retiring to Kilmorna

House in County Kerry, the erstwhile Ulster King of Arms surprised all who knew him by marrying in 1917. Four years later his home was torched by the IRA, and he was shot dead.

In his will he reproached King and country for making him the robbery’s scapegoat, and he named Shackleton as the man behind it. In 1907 he had sought the deductive advice of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose mother was his second cousin. He told

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36 truecrime

the author that he thought he had been drugged on June 30th, and he voiced his suspicion of Shackleton, who he believed had gone abroad simply to establish an alibi for the crime he had set-up to be committed in his absence.

Doyle didn’t crack the case, but in 1908 he used it as the basis for his Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans.”

In this the jewels become the top-secret plans of a submarine, stolen from a safe at Woolwich Arsenal. Sir Arthur Vicars becomes Sir James Walter, and we know who the author suspected because the story’s culprit turns out to be Walter’s brother, modelled on Francis Shackleton, who Doyle had met and disliked in South Africa, where he also heard of Gorges, his exploits on the veldt and his homosexuality.

Shackleton got his comeuppance in 1913 when he was jailed for fraud. He changed his name to Mellor on his release, and died in 1925.

Goldney became a suspect upon his death in Canterbury, where he had been mayor.

Unknown to his associates, he had been a kleptomaniac, squirrelling away the treasures of the institutions with which he was connected. Two communion cups belonging to Canterbury Cathedral, ancient charters that were the property of the City of Canterbury, and a painting owned by the Duke of Bedford were found among his possessions. The discovery suggested that Goldney might well have stolen the jewels following his appointment as the Office of Arms’s Athlone Pursuivant five months before the robbery.

And Richard Gorges? He continued to keep whatever he knew to himself for the rest of his life. In May 1941 he was arrested and sent to jail for obtaining clothes with a worthless cheque. He died under the wheels of a London Underground train at Edgware Road in January 1944. The coroner recorded an open verdict.

Why had the King been so anxious to avoid scandal? His brotherin-law the Duke of Argyll was too close for comfort to Francis Shackleton, and this is believed to have prompted the police to drop the investigation.

CHRONICLES OF CRIME June 16th GYMNAST’S BROTHER CLEARED OF TRIPLEMURDER HE WAS accused of shooting dead three men at a New Year’s Eve party in 2018. However, US soldier Tevin Biles-Thomas, the brother of Olympic gold medallist gymnast Simone Biles, has walked free from court after being acquitted by a judge at a court in Cuyahoga, Ohio.

Judge Joan Synenberg ruled that prosecutors

CHILDREN “MURDERED” BY TENERIFE DAD June 16th A FATHER, separated from his wife, murdered his two daughters at home before throwing their weighted bodies in bags into the deep sea waters off the island, according to police in Tenerife.

Tomas Gimeno, 37, whose boat was found drifting at sea, is then believed to

Above, Olivia and Anna Gimeno Zimmerman. Left, their father Tomas Gimeno

have committed suicide by drowning.

The body of Mr.

did not have enough evidence to convict Mr. Biles-Thomas in respect of the killings of Delvante Johnson, 19, Toshaun Banks, 21, and Devaughn Gibson, 23.

Mr. Biles-Thomas was arrested in 2019 over the shootings in Cleveland.

On the night of the shooting, a group of uninvited guests walked into a home and a fight began, according to authorities. The fight led to the shootings and multiple people were hit.

Following the judge’s ruling, the mother of one of the victims reportedly charged towards Mr. Biles-Thomas but was restrained by sheriff’s deputies.

The accused had always maintained that he was innocent of the crimes.

Mr. Biles-Thomas’s lawyer, Joe Patituce, commented: “This was a horrible tragedy; three families lost family members. So we understand emotions were running high.”

Gimeno’s eldest daughter Olivia, six, was found in the sea tied to an anchor.

Deep-water searches were continuing for her one-yearold sister Anna.

The girls and their father had been missing since April 27th.

An investigating judge alleged that the girls were killed to “cause the greatest pain” to their mother.

LIFE BEHIND BARS FOR BRUTAL DOUBLE-KILLER June 17th

Above, a victim’s mother is restrained in court. Top right, acquitted Tevin Biles-Thomas

l continued from page 13

A KILLER who murdered two sex workers 21 years apart has been jailed for life and must serve a minimum sentence of 37 years behind bars.

Gary Allen thought he had got away with the murder of Samantha Class, 29, in Hull in 1997.

He was tried and cleared of her murder in 2000, despite DNA evidence linking him to the crime.

However, Allen’s acquittal was quashed after he was charged with the 2018 Rotherham murder of Alena

Above, double-killer Gary Allen. Left, top to bottom, victims Samantha Class and Alena Grlakova

Grlakova, 38.

Allen, of no fixed abode, was found guilty of both murders by a jury at Sheffield Crown Court, following a seven-week trial.

Prosecutors outlined how Miss Class had been stamped on, strangled with

a ligature and run over by a car before being dragged into the River Humber on the night of October 25th, 1997.

Miss Grlakova’s body was found in April 2019 in a stream in Rotherham some four months after she went missing.

Jurors heard that Miss Grlakova had been planning to return to her native Slovakia before she was killed.

Sentencing Allen, Judge Julian Goose told the killer that his past had caught up with him, adding: “You are an extremely dangerous man with a long-held, deeply seated, warped view of women, particularly sex workers.

“I am satisfied that you fantasise and plan serious violence to sex workers, intending that they should suffer and be killed.”

HUSBAND ADMITS HE KILLED BRITISH WIFE June 18th A GREEK husband has confessed to killing his British-born wife Caroline Crouch in Athens in May. Pilot Babis Anagnostopoulos had orginally claimed that his wife, 33, the mother of his baby, had been murdered during a robbery at the couple’s home in an Athens suburb.

He originally told police that he had been tied up and

Caroline Crouch with her husband and confessed killer Babis Anagnostopoulos

the intruders had escaped with thousands of pounds’ worth of cash.

However, investigators concluded that his story did not add up.

Mr. Anagnostopoulos, was arrested by police after attending his wife’s memorial service on the island of Alonnisos.

According to police, Caroline’s smart watch showed that her heart was still beating at the time her husband claimed she was murdered. l more Chronicles on page 50 truecrime 37

ONE MA AN

H

“

OW CAN men who have remained at home in quiet and safety be competent to judge the brainwaves of a man who has seen so much death that it is of no importance?” a correspondent wrote to Sir Edward Marshall Hall.

“Why is not the jury for such cases composed of men who have been in the trenches and in Mesopotamia, and know all the horrors and how these can affect some men?”

It was 1919, and Marshall Hall’s client in the dock was Lieutenant Frederick Rothwell Holt, on trial for murder.

The distinguished defence advocate had been knighted two years earlier. He had also retired from politics to devote himself solely to the bar, and the aftermath of the First World War found him defending a number of ex-army officers whose lives had been changed for ever by their battlefield experiences.

Holt was such a man; so affected by his war service, Marshall Hall argued, that he was unfit to plead.

Called-up in 1914, Holt had served in the trenches and had been invalided out of the army suffering from amnesia and depression.

Back home in Lancashire in 1918, he met and fell in love with Kitty Breaks, a beautiful 25-year-old girl who told him she was single, but later confessed she was unhappily married and living apart from her husband, who she had left shortly after her wedding.

She and Holt became lovers and lived together for nearly two years... until the early morning of Wednesday, December 24th, 1919, when Kitty was found shot dead in the sandhills at St. Annes, near Blackpool.

Holt’s revolver and gloves lay near her body, his footprints were found at the scene and he was arrested the next day when he went to the hotel where she was staying and asked for her.

It was Holt’s strange behaviour as he awaited trial at Manchester Assizes that prompted the defence counsel to raise the issue as to whether his client was fit to plead. Holt complained that the police had sent dogs 38 truecrime

Part 8 In The Series

THE DEFENCE RESTS

by William Kendal and huge germ-carrying American flies into his cell to persecute him, and the defence called several doctors who all said he was insane.

The Attorney-General Sir George Howard, however, claimed that Holt was faking madness, and the Crown won the argument when Howard questioned a physician who had been sent to examine the prisoner.

“What,” asked Howard, “did the prisoner say when he was asked if he objected to a medical examination by you?”

“He said he would like to see a solicitor first.”

That convinced the jury that Holt was fit to plead, and a fresh jury, already in court, was sworn for his trial.

The prosecution described how Holt had tried to insure Kitty for £10,000 with himself as the beneficiary, but the insurance company rejected the application because he would have an insurable interest in her only if he married her. So he persuaded her to insure her life for £5,000, paying the premiums himself and

In the aftermath of the First World War Marshall Hall found himself defending a number of ex-army officers whose lives had been changed for ever by their battlefield experiences. One of them was Lieutenant Frederick Rothwell Holt (above), who was accused of the murder of Kitty Breaks (right)

getting her to make a will leaving him everything.

“I will not dwell on the accumulated evidence,” the prosecutor concluded. “The gloves – his gloves – how did they come to be there?

The revolver – his revolver – how did that come to be there? The footprints show that she walked some distance with a man, and I ask the jury to say that that man was the prisoner.”

From several witnesses the court heard that Holt and Kitty had travelled by train from Bradford.

Holt alighted at Ansdell, Kitty continuing alone to Blackpool, where she booked into a hotel, had dinner, and then walked alone to the sandhills where

she was shot three times.

Holt was seen boarding a tram near the sandhills between nine and 10 o’clock that evening.

He killed Kitty for the insurance pay-out and to rid himself of an embarrassing relationship, the Crown alleged. The evidence was damning, although Marshall Hall called a witness who had seen the couple fondling each other lovingly on the train only hours before the murder.

But the court was told of Holt’s extraordinarily callous behaviour immediately after Kitty’s murder. He had a few drinks, had a good supper and went home to bed.

AD, ONE BLIND ND ONE LUCKY Could Marshall Hall Save Them From The Gallows?

The next morning he caught a tram which passed within 50 yards of Kitty’s body, and on alighting at Blackpool he bought two Christmas presents – one for Kitty’s sister, the other for another girl living in Lytham.

In custody he spoke only of the dogs and flies he claimed had been sent to persecute him. He said nothing to help his defence, and he could not be called to testify.

That left Marshall Hall with just two arguments: insanity and an alibi, defences extremely difficult to submit together without one demolishing the other.

And as Holt sat in the

dock, his arms folded, he seemed indifferent to the proceedings.

To doctors this might suggest insanity, but to others it indicated callous disinterest.

One by one, Holt’s entire family told the court he had been at home at the time of the shooting. Everyone felt sorry for them as they tried to save him from the gallows, but few, if any,

believed them.

The insanity defence was supported by evidence that Holt’s grandfather and a cousin had been mad, and Marshall Hall was convinced that no sane man could have behaved as his client did. But the defence was desperately short of material. “What an earth can I say to this jury?” Marshall Hall asked his clerk. “They are dead

against us, and I can’t think how to tackle it.”

He found one answer in the couple’s love letters to each other, which he read to the court so movingly that the judge and jury were reduced to tears.

Repeatedly calling her lover “Mr. Dreamer,” Kitty had written: “I want to put my arms round your neck and kiss you when you are away. I feel so lonely – you truecrime 39

know why. You are such a dear, I love you ever so much...

“You are the one person in the whole world to me...I cannot thank you nearly so much as I want for your extreme goodness to me...”

And Holt? In his last letter, written just days before the shooting, he had written: “My Dear Darling Kitty, You have no idea how lonely I feel without you, dearest...I do so want you nearer me, you dear, sweet thing...You love me, I love you; I feel I must always be near you – you have no idea how I feel after I leave you, or you leave me, darling. I do so want you.

You are the one and only

“What on earth can I say to this jury?”

Marshall Hall asked his clerk.

“They are dead against us, and I can’t think how to tackle it” to me in this world, and I think the world of you and do so want you to think the same of me...I long for Christmas and some long day; I feel you will never leave me after Christmas.

I long for some good Christmases with you in times to come, and feel that some time there will be no parting us.”

On his way to the courtroom Marshall Hall had been jostled by fashionably dressed women thinking only of securing their seats in the public gallery. This upset him, and he glared at them as he continued his speech. “It makes one’s heart ache to see that gallery packed with women,” he said in disgust.

“It makes one feel sick for the femininity of this country that women should come here in their furs and diamonds, day after day, to gloat over the troubles of a poor demented wretch on trial for his life.”

The Crown’s case that Holt had murdered through avarice, he claimed, was incredible. “I do not suppose,” he told the jury, “that there could be a worse crime that that of a man who, under the guise 40 truecrime

of making love to a lovely woman, was really keeping her quiet until the moment came when he could murder her and put the proceeds of her insurance in his pocket.

“I suggest to you that this theory is so improbable that it becomes impossible.

And, for the honour of our sex, thank God it is impossible, because we

by point, of the Crown’s overwhelming evidence.

And in his summing-up Mr. Justice Greer described the evidence of insanity as very slender, although he told the jury they could acquit Holt if they found he had acted under an uncontrollable impulse.

But it took them less than an hour to decide that Lieutenant Holt was guilty,

cannot conceive the creator created anything so vile as that man.”

But this was empty rhetoric, and Marshall Hall must have known it.

He was on firmer ground when he argued that if Holt had indeed committed the crime, it was in an act of mad jealousy.

This theory was not without supporting evidence. A former lover had written to Kitty, pleading with her to marry him. The letter was produced in court, and in Kitty’s handbag the police had found a letter purporting to be Kitty’s reply, a strong refusal. This was unsigned, was in Holt’s hand, and had apparently been drafted by him and had never been sent. The situation was enough, Marshall Hall argued, to push his client over the brink of insanity.

“A man like the prisoner, who has been in France and subjected to the nerve-racking experience of the Festubert bombardment, a man who is neurasthenic and has suffered from loss of memory and depression, is the very man who might at any moment go mad.”

But the attorney-general reminded the jury, point

Early on the morning of Christmas Eve, 1919, Kitty’s body was found in the sand dunes between Blackpool (right) and St. Anne’s (above). She had been shot in the head

and when he was asked if he had anything to say before he was sentenced he just shrugged and glanced at the clock.

“Well, that’s over,” he told the prison governor as he was taken below after being sentenced to death. “I hope my tea won’t be late.”

Unusually, the Lord Chief Justice allowed Marshall Hall to present additional evidence when the case went to the Court of Criminal Appeal. Holt had worked in the Malay States after his discharge from the army, and a doctor who had attended him there read reports of the case on the last day of the trial and realised that he had treated

“If there had been another week to wait before the execution I think we would have collapsed with the worry that man was giving us”

him for syphilis.

This was a well known cause of insanity, and Marshall Hall made the most of it. The doctor’s telegram had reached the defence too late for him to be called to testify at the trial, but he was now called to give evidence at the appeal.

He told the court that Holt was suffering not

only from syphilis but also apparently from shell-shock.

And Marshall Hall claimed that through insanity caused partly by heredity and partly by syphilis, Holt had killed Kitty Breaks on an uncontrollable impulse.

Another doctor said that Holt’s request to see a solicitor before he was medically examined was a sign of insanity rather than level-headedness, and fresh evidence was given of Holt’s excitability over trivialities.

But none of this warranted interference with the jury’s verdict, the appeal judges decided, and Holt’s conviction was upheld.

A petition was launched for a reprieve, and Marshall Hall wrote to Holt’s

solicitors: “I feel so strongly that he is now mad, and as a man, contemplate with horror the idea of executing a madman, that I am quite willing you should if you think fit communicate the contents of this letter, or send the letter itself, to the Home Secretary or the Attorney-General.

“As you know I have never had any doubt in my own mind that Holt’s hand fired the shot that killed Mrs. Breaks, nor have I ever had any real doubt that the deed was done under some uncontrollable impulse acting on a mind

Wounded British soldiers following a gas attack. When one of Marshall Hall’s clients was invalided home his wife promptly left him holding the baby – literally

put the white cap over the prisoner’s head, “You are not going to put that thing on!” Holt shouted.

It was another affront to his dignity, but seconds later he was dead.

“Well, that’s the last of him, and I’m not sorry,” said a warder.

“If there had been another week to wait before the execution,” the governor added, “I think we would all have collapsed with the worry that man was giving us.” hereas Holt neither received, nor perhaps deserved, much public sympathy, the case of another of Marshall Hall’s clients stirred everyone’s compassion.

This time the man in the dock, charged with murder, was a young soldier who had married on Christmas Day, 1916. When he returned from France to rejoin his bride, he had been blinded in action and could not see their little daughter.

He was supported by St. Dunstan’s, the blind ex-servicemen’s charity, but his wife soon tired of the situation and left him literally holding the baby.

He somehow managed to dress, feed and look after the child––and he did this, said a witness, “better

W enfeebled by shell-shock and disease.”

But there was no reprieve, and Frederick Rothwell Holt went stoically to the gallows at Strangeways Prison on Tuesday, April 13th, 1920, to be hanged

by John Ellis who, like the jailers, found the condemned man arrogant and had no sympathy for him.

When Holt had to change into the broad-arrowed attire of a convict he had protested, “Why can’t I be measured for this suit in the same way as I am for my own clothes?”

He also objected to being pinioned for his execution, saying it was unnecessary.

And when Ellis moved to

than many men that can see.” But eventually, in the child’s own interests, he sent his daughter to a home.

His wife paid him occasional visits, and on one of these she asked where the child was. The toddler’s proper place, she said, was with her mother.

At this her husband fell on his knees, imploring her to return to him as his wife.

But she refused, and the next day she called again to say she was going abroad.

To stop her leaving he blocked the doorway, and in the struggle that ensued he grabbed her by the throat.

He suddenly felt her go limp, heard her fall to the floor, and when he realised she was dead he tried to take his own life with a razor.

St. Dunstan’s briefed Marshall Hall to defend him, and the victim was found to have an enlarged thymus gland in her throat.

This enabled Marshall Hall to submit a defence he had used some years before.

He argued that due to the woman’s medical condition, status lymphaticus, her death was accidental.

For the prosecution, two physicians said they believed the woman had died from violence. But Marshall Hall called a doctor who told the court of a patient suffering from

status lymphaticus. That patient, said the witness, had died solely from excitement.

Tears poured from the defendant’s blind eyes as he faced a court he could not see, accused of murdering the wife he adored. “I had done everything for her,” he said, “and loved her dearly, passionately.”

After only 10 minutes’ deliberation, the jury acquitted him of both murder and manslaughter. But there was one question neither they nor Marshall Hall could answer. “What is my life?” the blind man had asked. “What have I to live for?” onald Light was another shell-shocked ex-army officer defended

by Marshall Hall. He had been educated at Rugby, qualified as a civil engineer, and then served with the Royal Engineers and the Honourable Artillery Company. After demobilisation he became a maths master at a school in Cheltenham, and his peacetime troubles began at 9.50 p.m. on Saturday, July 5th, 1919, when the body of a 21-year-old factoryworker, Bella Wright, was found beside her bicycle in a country lane near Little Stretton, Leicestershire.

R

truecrime 41

There was a pool of blood by her head, but at first the doctor called to the scene thought she had died of heart failure. Then the observant village constable spotted a bird’s bloody footprints on a nearby gate, and in the field beyond he found a dead raven which was believed to have died from gorging Bella’s blood.

When the blood was washed from her face a small hole was found in her left cheek, and a larger one on the right side of her head. A bullet was discovered 17 feet away on the road, and it was believed to have drilled through her cheek, travelling upwards and out through the other side of her head.

The police learned that she had last been seen leaving her uncle’s home at Gaulby, about two and a half miles from Little Stretton, with a man wearing a raincoat and riding a green bicycle.

A cycle dealer in Leicester reported that he had repaired such a green bicycle, and that its owner had collected it that Saturday, saying he was going for a ride in the country.

Two schoolgirls told the police that at around 5.30 p.m. that day a man on a green bike had tried to get into conversation with them in a road near where Bella’s body was found. They said they were frightened by his manner.

The police appealed for information, describing the suspect as a man “aged 35 to 40, height five-feet-seven to nine inches, dressed in a light rainproof coat, said to have a squeaking voice, and to have been riding a gent’s BSA bicycle with a green enamel frame.”

The investigation made little progress, however, until the following February when the tow-rope of a barge snagged on what turned out to be the frame of a green bicycle submerged in a canal near Leicester.

The manufacturer’s name had been erased, but the serial number on the frame identified the machine, and it was found to have been bought by Ronald Light in 1910.

When he was arrested 42 truecrime

he said he had never had a green bicycle. Later, however, he admitted owning one, which he said he had sold long ago.

The two schoolgirls identified him as the man who had accosted them near the crime scene on the day of the shooting, and the cycle repairer recognised him as the customer who had collected his green bike the same day.

And that wasn’t all. A revolver holster had also been recovered from the canal. It was almost conclusively identified as belonging to Light, and it contained ammunition of the same type as the bullet found near Bella Wright’s

any bullet from the type of revolver which had been traced to Light’s possession.

Marshall Hall was confident that if he could prove this to the jury’s satisfaction, he would probably secure Light’s acquittal. But there was a snag. If Light persisted in

Ronald Light’s story had the ring of truth, he made a good impression on the jury and public opinion swung round in his favour...

Marshall Hall could not put him in the witness-box to repeat statements he knew to be untrue.

He had no prior consultation with his client, and did not see Light until he stepped into the dock.

They then talked briefly together.

Opening the case for the prosecution, the attorney-general detailed the Crown’s evidence that Light was the owner of the incriminating bicycle, holster and ammunition.

Describing the meeting of Bella Wright and the man on the green bike, he said the man had been heard to say, “Bella, I thought you had gone the other way.”

Ronald Light, f lanked by two warders, leans forward in the dock during his murder trial.

For most of the proceedings his fate hung in the balance

body.

Ronald Light was in a fix, and his solicitor decided that if anyone could clear him it was Sir Edward Marshall Hall.

No defence advocate knew more about firearms, and Marshall Hall’s knowledge was to prove crucial. Before the trial, he went to a gunsmith and experimented with a revolver of the same type as the one Light was alleged to have used. This convinced him that Bella Wright could not have been shot at close range, either by the bullet found in the road or by

denying that the retrieved green bicycle, revolver holster and ammunition were his – despite the prosecution’s overwhelming evidence that he was their owner – he would almost certainly be found guilty.

Counsel were not allowed to suggest a defence to a prisoner which was in direct conflict with the accused’s instructions.

The initiative had to come from the prisoner, so would Light realise the futility of his denials and admit the ownership of the bicycle, holster and ammunition?

If Light failed to do this,

Their departure, said the prosecutor, “was at about a quarter past nine o’clock in the evening. The girl’s body was found about thirty-five minutes later. Who was the man in whose company Miss Wright was last seen alive? Who was the man with the green bicycle? The evidence that I shall put before you will go to show that the man was Ronald Light, and his was the hand that killed the girl.”

By the time the attorneygeneral sat down, the chain of evidence seemed virtually complete. All that was lacking was evidence

of motive. Not, he pointed out, that the Crown needed to prove a motive. “But suppose that the prisoner had made certain overtures to her and been rebuffed...”

The two schoolgirls went into the witness-box to repeat their story of meeting the man with the green bicycle, but Marshall Hall had little difficulty in discrediting their evidence.

They might well be telling the truth, but one of them admitted that the police had suggested the date to them when they were first questioned, and that put the reliability of their testimony in question.

Bella’s uncle told the court that he had heard the man say, “Bella, I thought you had gone the other way.” But Marshall Hall suggested that the man had not said “Bella,” but Ronald Light (below) was another shell-shocked ex-army officer defended

by Marshall Hall. Light’s troubles began when the body of Bella Wright (right) was found beside her bicycle in a country lane. Below right, a police officer takes part of the green bicycle to court

“Hello.” The uncle would not concede that he might be mistaken, although Bella had told him at the time, “This man is a perfect stranger to me.”

The doctor who had

attended the scene produced a piece of Bella’s skin, with the bullet’s exit hole clearly visible.

Marshall Hall produced a slender silver pencil, and demonstrated that it would hardly pass into the wound.

The doctor said he believed the bullet had been fired from a range of five to seven feet, and Marshall Hall put it to him that a much larger exit hole would be made by a .45 bullet fired at such a close range and starting on a flight of 1,000 yards at tremendous velocity. The girl’s head, he said, would be almost blown off, so the bullet must have been fired from a greater distance.

The doctor disagreed.

“Then how do you get

out of this dilemma?” asked Marshall Hall. “A bullet going in an upward direction at high velocity found six yards away from the body?”

“My theory.” the doctor replied unconvincingly, “is that the woman was shot whilst lying on the road, and the bullet went through her head into the ground.”

He suggested it had then ricocheted to where it was found.

“If a bullet,” asked Marshall Hall, “was fired without any further resistance than the girl’s head, it would be absurd to suppose that it would be found only six yards away?”

The doctor agreed.

The next witness was Mr. Clarke, a gunsmith. He was handed the bullet found at the scene, and Marshall Hall asked him to examine it under a microscope, directing his attention to a particular mark on it.

Mr. Clarke agreed that the mark showed that the bullet had passed through a rifled barrel, and this would enormously increase the range of the weapon.

“This bullet could have been fired from a rifle as well as a revolver?” asked Marshall Hall.

“Yes,” said the gunsmith.

“Supposing the shot to have been fired some distance away, and that in its flight it came into contact with a fence, tree or something else, and then struck someone on the roadway, would you expect to find that bullet within a few feet of where the person was shot?”

“Yes,” Mr. Clarke replied, “it is possible.”

Marshall Hall’s cross-examination of the doctor and the gunsmith had given the case an entirely fresh complexion.

It was now apparent that Bella, cycling along a lane flanked by a high hedge, could have been shot accidentally by someone firing a rifle or revolver at a distance, perhaps for practice.

But the court had yet to hear from Ronald Light. If he went into the witness-box and again denied knowing anything about the bike, holster and ammunition found in the canal, the jury would know he was lying and truecrime 43

his counsel’s brilliant cross-examination would have been in vain.

If he gave no evidence that would seem equally damning. And if he went into the box and now admitted owning the items retrieved from the canal, he would face the jury as a man confessing he had lied.

That was his dilemma.

At this point in the trial a note from Light was passed to Marshall Hall: “Will you please ask me to tell the jury in my own words exactly why I did not come forward? I shall say I was dreadfully worried, and for some days was quite dazed at such an unexpected blow and could not think clearly.

When I began to think, I could not make up my mind to come forward, and hesitated for days. I could not give the police any information whatever as to how the girl met her death.

If the police and papers had only stated the known facts and asked the cyclist to come forward, I would have done so. But they jumped to wrong conclusions, and I was frightened when I saw I was wanted for murder...

Let me do this in my own words.”

When the case for the prosecution was completed on the trial’s second day, Marshall Hall rose and said quietly: “I desire to call the prisoner.”

Light admitted owning the bicycle and holster, but said he had left his revolver behind in France at a casualty clearing station when he was sent home because of shell-shock.

He admitted meeting Bella Wright at about 8 p.m. on July 5th, but said he had never seen her before. She was having trouble with the front wheel of her bicycle and asked him for a spanner.

They cycled on together until they reached her uncle’s home. She said she was only going in for 10 minutes, and he took this as an invitation to wait, which he did not accept.

He set out to cycle home to Leicester, but was delayed by a puncture.

Having mended it, he knew he would be late for supper anyhow, so he thought of the girl and decided to take a short cut to see how far she had got.

44 truecrime

He did not see her, however, until he reached her uncle’s home. She was just coming out of the house as he arrived.

“Hello,” he said, “you’ve been a long time. I thought you had gone the other way.” He did not say “Bella”, and did not know her name until he read reports of her death in the papers. He accompanied her to a fork in the road, where the girl said, “I must say goodbye to you here,” and pointed to the left.

“But that’s the shortest way to Leicester,” he told her, pointing to the right.

“I don’t live there,” she replied, and they parted.

“I never saw her again,” Light told the court.

He admitted he panicked on learning he was the murder suspect, and to escape from the affair altogether and avoid distressing his invalid mother, he disposed of his bicycle, holster, and also the clothes he had worn that

not.

“First of all,” Marshall Hall continued, “you have got to satisfy yourselves that the girl was murdered.

Even the attorney general has not put forward a definite theory for the crime.”

Secondly, there was no evidence of motive – the one suggested by the attorney-general would not bear the least critical examination. “There was no sign of any struggle nor of any molestation of the girl. Is it suggested that the man, having been rebuked by word of mouth, shot her? A man of that class would have done what he wanted first, and shot her afterwards.”

Mr. Justice Horridge, summing-up, reminded the jury that the prosecution had not established a motive. But he asked: “Do you think it is credible or possible that an innocent man should have behaved in the day he did? The

The Green Bicycle case as it became known remained unsolved, but a plausible theory was advanced by writer H. Trueman Humphries. The key to the mystery, he suggested, was the dead bird. Whoever heard of a raven dying from over-gorging? fatal night.

His story had the ring of truth, he made a good impression, and public opinion swung round in his favour. The prosecution failed to shake his story, and at the close of the cross-examination Mr. Justice Horridge asked him to give the reasons for his concealment and lies.

“I did not make up my mind deliberately not to come forward,” Light replied. “I was so astounded at this unexpected thing that I kept on hesitating, and in the end I drifted into doing nothing at all. I had drifted into the policy of concealment, and I had to go on with it.”

Addressing the jury, Marshall Hall said the defence was two-fold. First there was the impossibility, or extreme improbability, that the bullet found on the road had been fired from nearby, whether it was the cause of the girl’s death or

question you have to decide is whether that deception could have been practised by an innocent man, or whether it points the finger at the guilty man.”

When the jury had spent three hours and seven minutes deliberating, the judge recalled them and asked if there were any prospect of their agreeing.

Their foreman asked for another quarter of an hour, but they came back again within three minutes.

In the dock, Ronald Light gripped the rail for support.

The suspense, he was later to say, was worse than anything he had suffered in France when he had been near death so much longer.

When the foreman announced, “Not guilty,” Ronald Light collapsed.

The verdict was greeted with cheers in the court, and there was more applause from thousands assembled outside. But Light slipped out alone, to

return home to his mother by tram. He was recognised only by a friend, who lent him threepence for his fare, and on reaching home he sat down and wrote a letter to Marshall Hall, thanking him for saving his life. He must have realised just how lucky he had been.

“Please convey to your mother my sympathetic regards,” Marshall Hall replied, “and you will, I am sure, forgive me if I say that you can best show your gratitude to me by making her life happier in the future than I fear it has been in the past. I am indeed glad to have been of service to you, and through you to her.”

After the trial the judge had complimented him on a defence “which seemed to me to be without fault,” and Marshall Hall told a friend, “I think it is the greatest success as an advocate I ever had.”

The Green Bicycle Case remained unsolved, but a plausible theory was advanced by H. Trueman Humphries, a writer who made a magazine short story out of it. The key to the mystery, he suggested, was the dead raven found in the field. Whoever heard of a raven dying from over-gorging? It was more likely that the bird had been shot and had bled internally, he suggested. As it perched on the gate, it was spotted by a reckless marksman who dispatched it with a bullet that passed through its body and through the head of Bella Wright as she cycled past.

The writer visited the scene, and speculated that the shooter took cover behind a sheep trough to avoid alarming the bird.

From there he could see the raven as it perched on the gate where its bloody footprints were found.

If he were lying down, the trajectory of his bullet would be a rising one, as was the case with the bullet that passed through Bella Wright’s head...

NEXT MONTH: Marshall Hall defends Harold Greenwood, a solicitor accused of his wife’s murder through poisoning.

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INTERNET HOMICIDE

Hidden Face Of The Predator S

OME TIME in the 1990s, when most of us weren’t looking, the world changed.

Thousands of computers around the world became interconnected. The thousands grew into millions and suddenly the internet had taken over.

“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity,” Einstein wrote, but technology is neither good nor bad – only the way in which it is used...

Helen Lang, of Royal Wootton Bassett, got in touch to remind us how, via the internet, we could all be potentially inviting some of society’s most dangerous individuals into our lives without realising – until it’s too late. Tragically, many have done so. “With its limitless boundaries the World Wide Web certainly has the means to nourish the minds of the already depraved, whilst introducing the more curious to its darker recesses. I would be interested in reading about the progression of such crimes and the advancements in their policing,” she writes.

Helen’s letter set us thinking... Here’s our specially written report by Donald Carne

resh from a F Missouri jail and a six-year fraud conviction in 1993, John Edward Robinson was one of the first to grasp the evil potential of the internet. He was already a serial killer with three victims to his name – Paula Godfrey, 19, in 1984; Lisa Stasi, 19, in 1985, and Catherine Clampitt, 27, in 1987.

He loved to be the centre of attention.

At the age of 14, he’d flown to England with a troop of eagle scouts. After watching Judy Garland at the London Palladium, he ran up to her.

“She kissed him on the cheek and this made a big story in the Chicago papers,” said his biographer Stephen

46 truecrime

How do you really know who you’re communicating with?

Singular.

Robinson felt lucky that nobody suspected he was a serial killer but his time in prison gave him cause to reflect – his modus operandi of advertising a job vacancy and hiring his victim, then taking them away on a “training course” was altogether too slow and tedious...

The internet offered him an increase in productivity.

Calling himself Slavemaster,

he roamed the social networks looking for submissive victims. With his boyish round, happy face, he found them readily enough.

Sheila Faith, 45, was a single mother with a disabled 15-year-old daughter called Debbie.

Hidden behind the mask of anonymity that the web provides, Robinson claimed to be a millionaire prepared to pay Debbie’s medical bills. Mother and daughter

flew to meet him in 1994 and promptly disappeared.

For the next seven years, Robinson cashed Sheila’s pension cheques.

“He didn’t look dangerous,” said Tony Rizzo of the Kansas City Star. “He looked like this mild-mannered, grandfatherly guy. He looked like he could be, you know, the clerk at the drugstore.”

Five years later – though who knows if there were others in between? – Izabela Lewicka, 21, a Pole, thought she was to marry Robinson, not knowing he was already married. She willingly signed a “slave contract” that gave him control over her bank accounts – and then vanished.

Around the same time as Izabela, Suzette Trouten, 28, moved to Kansas from Michigan to be with Robinson as his sex slave.

She quickly vanished too but he kept up the pretence that she was travelling the world with him by sending postcards to her mother from exotic places – all postmarked Kansas.

Robinson was picked up in 2000 at his farm near La Cygne, Kansas, when one of his slaves complained to the sheriff’s office that he’d stolen her sex toys. Searching the farm, deputies found two decaying bodies in oil drums.

Three more were found in a nearby storage facility.

John Robinson, often considered the first internet serial killer, currently resides on Death Row in Kansas. He is 77 years old. As Kansas hasn’t executed anyone since 1965, he is likely to die in jail. he threads of the web T offer many routes into your mind – chat-rooms, social media, role-playing games, special interest groups, messenger apps and dating sites, to name but a few.

Those who contemplate suicide need professional help – suicide chat-rooms are not the place for them.

Japanese serial killer Hiroshi Maeue, 36, killed three in 2005 through an internet suicide club.

Hiroshi’s method was to agree to a double suicide with his victim. They drove in a car to an isolated spot.

The plan was to seal the windows and light a charcoal burner in the back seat of the car, but before that happened, Hiroshi strangled his victims – one was a 14-year-old boy. Hiroshi was hanged in 2009.

More recently, Twitter-killer Takahiro Shiraishi, 27, killed nine in 2017 after inviting them to his home. All of his victims, mostly young women, were in a suicidal frame of mind.

Takihiro said he’d discussed with them how they might die together – but before doing so, he strangled them.

“None of the nine victims consented to be killed, including silent consent,” said the judge. “It is extremely grave that the lives of nine young people were taken away. The dignity of the victims was trampled upon.” Takahiro was sentenced to death. He has said he will not appeal the sentence.

Nor is internet suicide a strictly Japanese phenomenon. Conrad Roy, 18, died after being encouraged to kill himself through texts by his

John Edward Robinson. He was one of the first to grasp the evil potential of the internet. Below left, Michelle Carter

girlfriend, Michelle Carter, 17. “You keep pushing it off and say you’ll do it but u never do.

It’s always gonna be that way if u don’t take action,” Michelle chided him.

Michelle was specific on detail.

“You can take a hose and run that from the exhaust pipe to the rear window in your car and seal it with duct tape and shirts, so it can’t escape. You will die within, like, 20 or 30 minutes all pain-free.”

Michelle had mental health issues of her own which were

recognised by the court, and at 17 she may not have known what she was doing.

Found guilty of involuntary manslaughter, she was sentenced to 15 months in prison.

There is evidence that social media can influence suicides – particularly among adolescents. Suicide pacts, suicide parties, cyberbullying and social media interventions have all left their mark.

In 2006, Megan Meier, 13, hanged herself after a series of messages from the mother of a so-called friend, posing as an 18-year-old boy named Josh, chided her into believing she was worthless.

Many have broadcast their suicide online. They

include British engineer Kevin Whitrick, 42, who was depressed after the break-up of his marriage. Incredibly, some members of the chat-room appeared to egg him on.

In 2019, Moscow University student Gleb Korablev shot himself in the head online. The video of the incident was rumoured to be cursed.

One small step away from assisted suicide is consensual homicide. In 1996, Sharon Lopetka, 35, agreed to be tortured and strangled by Robert “Bobby” Frederick Glass in North Carolina.

Sharon created a fantasy avatar of herself called Carlson, described as a disciplinarian dominatrix.

She quickly found a disciple in Bobby Glass. Both were married to others who knew nothing of the storm that was gathering.

On October 13th, 1996, Sharon and Bobby met up and travelled to his mobile

“None of the nine victims consented to be killed, including silent consent.

The dignity of the victims was trampled upon” home in Lenoir. Sharon left a note for her husband: “If my body is never retrieved, don’t worry: know that I’m at peace.”

Tracked down through their email correspondence, Glass – an IT tax specialist – admitted his role. He said killing Sharon had been an accident. “I don’t know how much I pulled the rope. I never wanted to kill her, but she ended up dead.” He was convicted of voluntary manslaughter. rue friendships grow over T many years – internet friendships may spring up

Left to right, Japanese serial killers Hiroshi Maeue and Takahiro Shiraishi who both murdered suicidal victims

quickly through a shared interest. How well do you really know those that you meet this way? Bobby Jo Stinnett, 23, thought she had a new friend in Darlene Fischer. They’d met through Ratter Chatter, a rat terrier truecrime 47

chat-room.

Bobby Jo said she was pregnant; Darlene said she was pregnant too, and they should meet. But Darlene Fischer was a fake name.

Lisa Montgomery, her real name, 35, arrived at Bobby Jo’s Missouri home on December 16th, 2004.

Lisa strangled Bobby Jo and cut her eight-month-old foetus from her womb.

Later that day, she rang her husband to say she had given birth. She was arrested the next day. Lisa was executed in January 2021, the first woman to be executed by the Federal government for 67 years.

“Can we clean this up before my mom gets home? I don’t want her to come home and see my dad dead” Although nothing can excuse what she did, we should note that Lisa’s childhood was truly awful – she’d been the plaything of the most brutal of fathers. “She was isolated, brainwashed, humiliated and degraded, not allowed to speak, and beaten at will,” said clinician Janet Vogelsang.

As an adult, Lisa hoped to find solace with a child. a minority, the internet FFirstorbecomes an addiction. noted in Japan when teenage boys – the hikikomori – locked themselves for months, sometimes years, in their bedrooms to play video games, it has become a problem for all affluent societies.

Breaking an addiction can be hard. When Arizona’s Ted Schlicker banned his son Hughstan, 15, from the internet in 2008, the boy was pushed over the edge.

Playing truant from high school, Hughstan searched for his father’s hidden shotgun – and when Ted arrived home, his son blew away the back of his head.

When officers arrived, Hughstan said, “Can we clean this up before my mom gets home? I don’t want 48 truecrime

Heiss used the internet to harass and stalk Joanna and Matthew,” said a police spokesman. “He eventually found out where they lived and other information about them that enabled him to carry out his plans.” ot everyone understands N the Dark Web. It is not a separate web but only part –

Above, pregnant Bobby Jo Stinnett who met her killer Lisa Montgomery (inset) through a rat terrier chat-room

her to come home and see my dad dead.” Convicted of second-degree murder, Hughstan was sentenced to 20 years.

To find yourself cyber-stalked is horrendous.

You may change your phone, your email address, your friends and even your URL but with modern surveillance equipment even that may not be enough – sometimes there is nowhere to hide.

German office worker David Heiss, 21, was a keen member of Nintendo’s Advance Wars video game.

He joined a fan-site run by flame-haired Joanna Witton, 20, and her boyfriend, Matthew Pyke, 20. David visited his new friends in the UK twice and made a play for Joanna – only to find himself firmly rebuffed.

Heiss proceeded to stalk the couple through social media. Each attack was more extreme than the last until Heiss came to the UK and killed Matthew with a knife.

He was jailed for life in 2009.

“While this is an extremely unusual case, one thing is clear and that is that

Left to right, stalking killer David Heiss and Matthew Pyke.

Heiss was obsessed with his victim’s girlfriend

a large part – of the existing web accessed through the Tor open software search engine. The attraction is that the users are anonymous.

Consequently, a 2019 survey estimated that 70 per cent of activity on the Dark Web is linked to illicit material – drugs, weapons, pornography and things best not thought about. To keep one step ahead of law enforcement agencies, the architecture of the Dark Web changes daily.

“There’s a compounding and unraveling chaos that is perpetually in motion in the Dark Web’s toxic underbelly,” said James Scott, Senior Fellow of the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology.

Cyber-currencies provide the exchange mechanism for deals on the Dark Web. Tired of your husband or business partner? There is a common myth that you can buy an assassin with Bitcoin.

Truth is, you are more likely to be scammed by websites with names like Azerbaijani Eagles. “It’s a fantastic opportunity to defraud people because you give them just enough sense of danger,” said Emily Wilson of Terbium Labs.

“What are you going to do if they don’t go through with it?”

You don’t need to visit the Dark Web to find anonymity.

“Who am I talking to?” is a question we should never forget to ask ourselves.

Is the person who responds to your messages a cute 17-year-old guy who plays volleyball and sings in the choir – or is it a middle-aged man with strange tastes in leather clothing? How would you know?

“There are some sadistic predators that rely on the Mardi Gras (Masquerade) Effect – the ability to hide one’s identity on the internet – to lure and murder repeatedly,” said forensic consultant Maurice Godwin.

In a similar way to reading

a novel, you build a picture in your mind of the person you are engaged with – a picture built from the words they feed you. The human mind has a remarkable capacity to sustain that image over time.

Garry Francis Newman, 50, posed as Brandon Kane, 20, a rock musician, to prey upon bubbly fun-loving teen Carly Ryan, 15. Garry lured Carly to a secluded beach in Port Elliot, South Australia, in 2007 where he killed her after first appearing on the scene as “Shane,” the father of Brandon.

In July 2010, Newman was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum period of 29 years. Justice Kelly said: “You were sexually obsessed with Carly to the degree that when you couldn’t get your own way, you prepared to and did kill her.”

In 2007, actress Katherine Olson, 24, currently resting and at work as a nanny, met Michael John Anderson, 19, through Craigslist.

Posing as a woman named Amy, Anderson advertised for a nanny “in order to lure a woman to his home so he might experience what it felt like to kill,” wrote the New York Daily News. When Katherine arrived at the home of Anderson’s parents in Minneapolis, he invited her in and shot her in the back with a .357 Magnum.

The media dubbed him the Craigslist Killer, the first recorded use of the term. It has appeared in many additional deaths since. That’s not intended as any slur on the website which provides a legitimate classified ads service – it’s merely the vehicle used.

Australian killer Garry Newman, who pretended to be a 20-year-old called Brandon Kane. His victim Carly Ryan (inset) was just 15 when she was lured to her death

seems to come pretty close: In a bizarre case that shows how easy it is to deceive, a British boy we shall call John presented an array of online identities or avatars to encourage his own murder.

John met Mark in a chat-room in 2004 and discovered Mark wanted to be a secret agent. “The initial contact was made when Mark, the older boy, went into an internet chat-room and talked to a person purporting to be a 16-year-old girl. That girl was in fact the younger boy, John,” said Greater Manchester Police.

This is where it gets complicated. John, posing as “Alice,” introduced Mark online to John, who Alice said was her stepbrother.

Another character John created was British secret agent, “Janet,” 42, who had “discovered” Mark’s interest

in being a secret agent.

Janet told Mark that John was dying from an incurable disease – a brain tumour. To prove he was secret agent

“The older boy thought he was talking to five or six different people when he was in fact talking to the younger boy all along” material, Mark was ordered to kill John. If he succeeded, Mark would meet the Queen and become a secret agent.

Mark may not seem the brightest of bunnies but any hypnotherapist will

hould we treat cybercrime S or “cybercide” as a distinct new crime? Not everyone thinks so. “Why is this anything other than murder?” asks Susan Brenner, professor of law.

“We do not, for example, refer to killings orchestrated over the telephone as ‘tele-murder’ or by snail mail as ‘mail murder.’ It seems that it is simply a real-world crime the commission of which happens to involve the use of computer technology.”

So is it possible to find a crime linked to homicide that could only happen on the internet? There may be others but here’s one that

Left to right, Craigslist Killer Michael John Anderson and his victim Katherine Olson whom he lured to her death

tell you it’s possible to make a subject believe the most outlandish of things through monopolisation of perception. Basically, people believe what they want to believe.

Part of the process of conditioning Mark involved a convoluted tale of John’s girlfriend being murdered by a rogue agent who was then tracked down and killed as well – the whole story pieced together in real time by other avatars of John.

Told with the skill of an experienced scriptwriter three times his age, the story pulled Mark down the rabbit hole. The process culminated with a trip to Manchester’s mock-colonial mall on June 28th, 2004. “U want me 2 take him 2 trafford centre and kill him in the middle of trafford centre??” Mark asked to be sure.

“Yes.” Mark met John as instructed. In an alleyway behind the Trafford Centre, Mark attacked John and stabbed him several times but was unable to kill him.

When he recovered, John was convicted of inciting his own murder. Mark was given a two-year supervision order for attempted murder.

“The older boy thought he was talking to five or six different people when he was in fact talking to the younger boy all along,” said a representative of Greater Manchester Police.

“Skilled writers of fiction would struggle to conjure up a plot such as that which arises here,” recorded Judge David Maddison. “It’s staggering to be dealing with a case that arises out of a 14-year-old boy’s invention of false personalities, false relationships and events arranged for his own killing at the hands of a 16-year-old boy who he had met via an internet chat-room.”

We can only imagine what led John to create this elaborate fantasy that would lead to his death.

Thankfully, he failed – but if he’d succeeded, he might have created, by chance, the world’s first true internet homicide.

Got a crime question?

Don’t hesitate to ASK TC at the address given on page 46

truecrime 49

CHRONICLES OF CRIME EX-MARINE RAPED AND MURDERED June 21st AUTHORITIES IN Russia have detained an ex-convict in custody following his admission that he raped and murdered a former US marine.

The body of 34-year-old Catherine Serou

Above, suspect Alexander Popov. Left, Catherine Serou

was discovered in a forest on the edge of the city of Nizhny Novgorod, days after

TRUE CRIME SEPTEMBER ISSUE l OUT AUGUST 26TH

Bullet-Riddled Body Was Stuffed In Toolbox – And

“IT WAS THE DOG THAT DID IT” IRENE’S KILLERS WERE SO EVIL THAT EVEN THEIR DEFENCE SAID:

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GANGLAND CONFIDENTIAL How The Feds Caught Capone No Shoot-Out Required…

she was reported missing, following a massive search operation. She had been stabbed Suspect Alexander Popov, 43, has appeared in court over the death of Miss Serou who was studying law at a university on the city.

She had lived in Russia for three years.

60 YEARS AGO THIS MONTH, THE LAST MAN WAS HANGED IN LONDON...

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JAIL FOR PAL WHO TURNED KILLER June 22nd FORMER PRISON officer Ross Willox, who murdered his platonic friend and former work colleague Emma Faulds at his South Ayrshire home before hiding her body in woodland, must serve at least 20 years behind bars.

The 42-year-old killer was found guilty of murder, following a trial at the High Court in Glasgow.

The court heard that youth worker Emma was murdered after a party at her killer’s Above, Ross home in Monkton on Willox. Below, Emma Faulds April 28th, 2019. Her remains were found six weeks later in a shallow grave at the end of a remote track in Glentrool Forest, Dumfries and Galloway, by which time Willox had been charged with murder.

Investigators found out that the killer used to work building wind farms near the forest.

Willox’s Mercedes SUV had been spotted on CCTV heading towards the area where the body was found.

He had bought four bottles of bleach and rubber gloves at various shops after the killing, the court was told.

Willox’s DNA was found in his victim’s car which had appeared “abandoned” at her home. He claimed that they had carried on partying together at her house on the night of the murder.

Jailing Willox, Judge Lord Mulholland told him: “Only you will know what happened in your house that night that led you to killing your friend.

“Having murdered her you created an elaborate scheme to cover up your crime.”

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