Murder of the Black Museum 1875-1975: The Dark Secrets Behind a Hundred Years of the Most Notorious Crimes in England Read online

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The author and publishers wish to thank the following: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office for permission to reproduce the 1980 criminal statistics (pp xii, xiii); George Walpole & Company, Official Shorthand Writers to the Central Criminal Court, London EC4, for permission to quote from trial transcripts; Times Newspapers for permission to quote from trial reports; Michael Joseph Limited for permission to quote from No Answer to Foxtrot Eleven by Tom Tullett (pp 246-55); and Harrap Limited for permission to quote from Executioner: Pierrepoint by Albert Pierrepoint (pp 283-87); Pierrepoint, A Family of Executioners by Steve Fielding, published by John Blake Publishing.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  Introduction

  1 Charles Peace: The Murder of Arthur Dyson, 1876

  2 Jack the Ripper: The Whitechapel Murders, 1888

  3 Florence Maybrick: The Murder of Mr Maybrick, 1889

  4 Mrs Pearcey: The Murder of Mrs Hogg, 1890

  5 Dr Cream: The Murder of Matilda Clover, 1891

  6 Frederick Deeming: The Murder of Miss Mather, 1891

  7 William Seaman: The Murder of John Levy, 1896

  8 Milsom and Fowler: The Murder of Henry Smith 1896

  9 Mrs Dyer: The Murder of Doris Marmon, 1896

  10 Richard A Prince: The Murder of William Terriss, 1897

  11 Samuel Dougal: The Murder of Miss Holland, 1899

  12 Alfred and Albert Stratton: The Murders of Mr and Mrs Farrow, 1905

  13 Dr Crippen: The Murder of Cora Crippen, 1910

  14 Steinie Morrison: The Murder of Leon Beron, 1911

  15 Mr and Mrs Seddon: The Murder of Eliza Barrow, 1911

  16 George Smith: The Murder of Bessie Mundy, 1912

  17 Alfred Bowes: The Attempted Assassination of Sir Edward Henry, 1912

  18 David Greenwood: The Murder of Nellie Trew, 1918

  19 Major Armstrong: The Murder of Mrs Armstrong, 1921

  20 Ronald True: The Murder of Gertrude Yates, 1922

  21 Freddy Bywaters and Edith Thompson: The Murder of Percy Thompson, 1922

  22 Patrick Mahon: The Murder of Emily Kaye, 1924

  23 Norman Thorne: The Murder of Elsie Cameron, 1924

  24 John Robinson: The Murder of Minnie Bonati, 1927

  25 Browne and Kennedy: The Murder of PC Gutteridge, 1927

  26 Samuel Furnace: The Murder of Walter Spatchett, 1933

  27 Parker and Probert: The Murder of Joseph Bedford, 1933

  28 Charlotte Bryant: The Murder of Frederick Bryant, 1935

  29 Leslie Stone: The Murder of Ruby Keen, 1937

  30 Edward Chaplin: The Manslaughter of Percy Casserley, 1938

  31 William Butler: The Murder of Ernest Key, 1938

  32 Udham Singh: The Murder of Sir Michael O’Dwyer, 1940

  33 Harold Trevor: The Murder of Mrs Greenhill, 1941

  34 Gordon Cummins: The Murder of Evelyn Oatley, 1942

  35 Jones and Hulten: The Murder of George Heath, 1944

  36 Jack Tratsart: The Murders of John and Claire Tratsart, 1945

  37 Neville Heath: The Murder of Margery Gardner, 1946

  38 Jenkins, Geraghty and Rolt: The Murder of-Alec de Antiquis, 1947

  39 Donald Thomas: The Murder of PC Edgar, 1948

  40 Harry Lewis: The Murder of Harry Michaelson, 1948

  41 John Haigh: The Murder of Mrs Durand-Deacon, 1949

  42 Daniel Raven: The Murder of Mr Goodman, 1949

  43 Craig and Bentley: The Murder of PC Miles, 1952

  44 John Reginald Christie: The Murder of Mrs Christie, 1953

  45 John Donald Merrett: The Murders of Vera Chesney and Lady Menzies, 1954

  46 Ginter Wiora: The Murder of Shirley Allen, 1957

  47 Michael Dowdall: The Murder of Veronica Murray, 1958

  48 Guenther Podola: The Murder of DS Purdy, 1959

  49 Roberts, Witney and Duddy: The Murders of DS Head, DC Wombwell and PC Fox, 1966

  50 Reggie and Ronnie Kray: The Murders of George Cornell and Jack McVitie, 1966–7

  51 Stanley Wrenn: The Murder of Colin Saunders, 1969

  52 Mustapha Bassaine: The Murder of Julian Sessé, 1970

  53 Arthur and Nizamodeen Hosein: The Murder of Mrs McKay, 1970

  Appendix A

  Appendix B

  Appendix C

  Appendix D

  Afterword

  Select Bibliography

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  Note

  The years given above refer to the year of the crime in which the named victim was killed, not the year in which the ensuing trial took place. In cases of multiple killing the victim listed is the one for whose death the accused was tried. Neither Tratsart nor Merrett ever came to trial.

  FOREWORD

  The Black Museum is now called the Crime Museum. The original Black Museum came into being in 1875, when exhibits that had been acquired as evidence and produced in court in connection with various crimes were collected together and privately displayed in a cellar in 1 Palace Place, Old Scotland Yard, Whitehall. Ten years later, the augmented collection was moved to a small back room on the second floor of the offices of the Convict Supervision Department. By then the objects on display, consisting mainly of weapons, and all carefully labelled, numbered about 150.

  In 1890, when the Metropolitan Police began moving into their impressive new headquarters at New Scotland Yard on the Victoria Embankment (designed by Norman Shaw, RA), the museum went too. It was then called the Police Museum, its primary object being to provide some lessons in criminology for young policemen and its secondary one to act as a repository for artefacts associated with celebrated crimes and criminals. Privileged visitors, criminologists, lawyers, policemen and people working with the police were guided around the museum by the curator, who over the previous century has always been a former policeman, with a special responsibility for the cataloguing, maintenance and display of the exhibits, and for dealing with correspondence from criminologists all over the world.

  In 1968, when the Metropolitan Police moved into their modern high-rise premises at 10 The Broadway, London SW1, the museum – by now officially called the Crime Museum – occupied a large room on the second floor. Eleven years later, on the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Metropolitan Police force, it was decided to reassess, reorganise and modernise every aspect of the museum – as well as the three other Metropolitan Police museums: the Historical Museum on the top floor of Bow Street police station; the Thames Museum at Wapping; and the Training Museum in Hendon Training School. The last had taken over the instructional role previously shared with the Crime Museum, which was now able to fulfil its entire function as a museum. Its original title was restored, and on 12 October 1981 the Black Museum, on the first floor of New Scotland Yard, was officially reopened by the Commissioner, Sir David McNee.

  The Black Museum’s historical collection of articles and exhibits was and is unique. It covers more than murder. Other sections deal with Forgeries, Espionage, Drugs, Offensive Weapons, Abortions, Gaming, Housebreaking, Bombs and Sieges, and Crime pre-1900. The museum also houses displays concentrating on particular crimes, such as the Great Train Robbery and the attempted kidnapping of Princess Anne, and possesses such peculiar exhibits as Mata Hari’s visiting card, a fake Cullinan diamond, a loving-cup skull with silver handles, two death masks of Hein
rich Himmler, and thirty-two plaster casts of the heads of hanged criminals, men and women, executed in the first half of the nineteenth century at Newgate in London, at Derby and York. The heads, still bearing the mark of the rope, are said to have been made to record the features of those who were executed. Many criminals then used aliases, and the only way of identifying them after death (before the use of photographs and fingerprints) was to keep these plaster likenesses. In addition, some if not all of the heads were probably made for doctors or phrenologists bent on proving theories about the physiognomy of criminal types by examining the bumps and shape of a criminal’s head after its owner was dead and gone.

  Visitors’ books, also maintained in the museum, contain records of a different sort: the signatures of such notable persons as King George V, Edward, Prince of Wales, Stanley Baldwin, Sir Arthur Sullivan, WS Gilbert, Captain Shaw of the London Fire Brigade, and William Marwood, executioner.

  There is an undisplayed mass of other material (newspapers, cuttings, photographs, documents, letters and miscellaneous objects) relating to the exhibits on show and to other crimes. This material is kept under lock and key, generally in cabinets or cupboards below the showcases and mainly because space is restricted, but also because some of the items – for instance, the police photographs of Gordon Cummins’s victims – are too obscene to be shown. The museum was rearranged and refurbished early in 2008.

  I first visited the Black Museum in 1979. It was a most interesting and very disturbing experience. There was a certain grim fascination in seeing the actual instruments and implements used by criminals, infamous or otherwise, and in seeing other more innocuous items given a sinister cast in the context of their use. But the effect of the exhibits on display was cumulatively shocking. They presented a dreadful picture of ruthlessness, greed, cruelty, lust, envy and hate, of man’s inhumanity to man – and especially to women. There was nothing of kindness or consideration. There was no nobility, save that of the policemen murdered on duty. There was very little mercy. But the museum made me realise what a policeman must endure in the course of his duty: what sights he sees, what dangers he faces, what depraved and evil people he has to deal with so that others may live secure. The museum also made me curious to know more about the people whose stories were shadowed by the exhibits on display.

  This book deals with a very few of the murders investigated by the officers of the Metropolitan Police between 1875 and 1975. This hundred-year period embraces many of the major murder cases in the history of Scotland Yard as well as the major advances in crime detection. The museum has some exhibits relating to murders before 1875 (notably a letter written by the poisoner William Palmer) and several associated with murders after 1975 (notably the murder of Lesley Whittle by Donald Neilson in 1975 and the murders of Dennis Nilsen a few years later). But, writing in 1982, I felt that the grief suffered by families whose relatives had been murdered after 1975 was too recent to be revived by a detailed account. The murder that ends this book, that of Mrs Muriel McKay, seemed a fitting conclusion to the whole sequence, having been more publicised than most and being in many ways extraordinary.

  The accounts of these particular murders of the Black Museum have been dealt with as case histories, with an emphasis on factual, social and historical detail, and on the characters and backgrounds of both the victim and the killer. Principal sources are listed at the back of the book, but in the main, statements and court proceedings have formed the basis for each story. No dialogue has been invented; it has been reproduced from statements and evidence given by the murderer as well as by witnesses and the police. What was said or alleged at the time by those most closely involved in a murder case may not always be true, but it is, I feel, of paramount importance in understanding the events that lead up to an act of murder and the complex motives and personalities of those most closely concerned. Like the superintendent or inspector in charge of a case I have tried to find out exactly what happened and why. It is my impression that the police officers investigating a murder ultimately have a clearer understanding of character, method and motive than some of the lawyers who take part in the ensuing trial. A court of law is seldom a place where the whole truth is told or revealed. It is in some respects a theatre of deception, with witnesses, defendants and barristers seeking to deceive the jury and each other. Even the judge, the arbitrator of truth, can mislead and be misled through ignorance or bias. But in a police station, although a suspect may lie as much as he likes, a truer picture of events and character is more likely to be attained in the end. Police reports concerning a murder and sent to a chief constable or commissioner are most sensible, lucid presentations of comment and fact. It is a pity they are not also available to the members of a jury in a court of law.

  In researching and writing this book in the early 1980s, since revised for this edition, I was afforded the constant and generous cooperation of New Scotland Yard. I would particularly like to thank the following for their individual assistance at the time: Peter Neivens; Patricia Plank and the staff of the Commissioner’s Reference Library; the Museums’ Coordinator, Paul Williams; and the then Curator of the Black Museum, Bill Waddell. More recently, various Home Office and Ministry of Justice departments have also been helpful in updating information about the subsequent lives and deaths of those in this book who were given a prison sentence or detained in Broadmoor, and in this instance I would like to thank Les Blacklaw, Miss L Douglas, Kathryn Coleman, Emma Reed, David Keysell and Dave Norris, as well as Syd Norris and Sandy Macfarlane. The two Curators of the Museum who succeeded Bill Waddell have also been unfailingly helpful. My special thanks to John Ross, and to Alan McCormick, the present Curator of the Crime Museum.

  INTRODUCTION

  Murder is a very rare event in Britain. Its exceptional nature is, in fact, part of its fascination. More than ten times as many people are killed on the roads each year as are victims of a murderer.

  In 1980, 564 cases of murder, manslaughter and infanticide, all now classed as homicide, were currently recorded in England and Wales. On the roads of Britain in 1979-80, 6,352 people were killed and 81,000 injured. It must be said, however, that these figures for death on the roads were the lowest for thirty years and that the homicide figure was unnaturally high. Indeed, the car-death figure, when compared with that of other decades and with the number of cars on the roads, shows an astonishing decrease in fatalities. In 1931, for instance, when 1,104,000 cars and vans were on the roads, 6,691 people were killed and over 200,000 injured. Yet in 1979-80, with over 15 million cars on the road, the death toll was much lower, as was the number of those injured. The worst year for road fatalities was, significantly, 1941, the second full year of the Second World War, when the blackout was in full force: 9,169 people were killed that year. It is worth noting that deaths caused by reckless driving are not classified as homicide by the police, who recorded 235 such deaths on the roads in Britain in 1980.

  The year 1980 was unusual in terms of homicide in that, of 564 homicides, seventy occurred in fires – thirty-seven in a Soho club and ten in a hostel in Kilburn. In addition, twenty-three deaths that had occurred in fires in the Hull area between 1973 and 1978, when they were regarded as accidental, were recorded as homicides in 1980. This meant that the homicide figure for 1980, without the unusually high figure of deaths in fires, would have been under 500 – a great reduction on the 551 homicides recorded in 1979. Instead, with the figure of seventy deaths in fires included, the overall number of recorded homicides in 1980 (564) was the highest on record.

  Although this figure was very small when compared with road fatalities and when seen against the total population of this country, it nonetheless showed a small increase in deaths by murder, manslaughter and infanticide. The figure, seen as a percentage per million of the population of England and Wales, was 11.5. In 1970, when 339 homicides were ultimately recorded, the figure was seven per cent.

  There is no doubt that we live in an increasingly violent society, in
which more violence is being committed by the young and in which even more is directed against women and the elderly. In London in 1980, there were 13,984 incidents involving robbery, mugging and violent theft – an increase of 20 per cent on the previous year. Of the victims involved in these incidents, nearly 2,000 were over the age of sixty, and 3,387 were over fifty. And in the 584,137 serious offences recorded in London in 1980, 25 per cent of those arrested were aged between ten and sixteen.

  Nonetheless, although there has been a vast increase in all types of crime since 1900, the comparative rise in murder is very slight, and there is little variation in the kinds and causes of murder. The commonest murders are still domestic ones – of a wife by her husband, of a woman by a lover, of a child by a parent. Of 456 murders examined in the period 1957-60 (70 per cent of those victims over the age of sixteen were women) the victim and the murderer were related in 53 per cent of all cases. In 27.9 per cent they were known to each other and 19.1 per cent were strangers. This is very similar to the Home Office statistical interpretation of the figures for homicide between 1970 and 1980: when about 50 per cent of the victims and killers were related, when over 30 per cent knew each other and about 19 per cent were strangers. A notable feature of the Home Office statistics is that infants less than one year old, viewed as a percentage of that age group in the population, were most at risk.

  The survey of the 1957-60 murders, carried out by Terence Morris and Louis Blom-Cooper, also found that a very high percentage of the murderers had previous criminal records, usually for property offences, and that 70 per cent of the men convicted of capital murder in 1960 had previous convictions. It was also found that murderers were predominantly of the lower classes; that many of these had been in the services or were merchant seamen; that not a few were coloured; and that many murders were associated with heavy drinking.