Barbaric Murders - Child victims, lady-killers and bodies in boxes (Infamous Murderers)
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Mrs Gregory was not so happy about the engagement, and could not believe that Arthur could deliver all the promises he was making. The marriage went ahead regardless, but within a few months Beatrice too was beginning to wonder whether Arthur’s vision of the future was just fantasy. He was child-like, impractical, and increasingly he found married life on his low pay much less exciting and romantic than he had pictured. He became pensive, preoccupied.
Beatrice gave birth to a son, Stanley, and Arthur loved him dearly. It began to look as if the child might save the marriage – but, as usual, that was a forlorn hope. Then Beatrice became pregnant again. That really worried Arthur; he knew they could not afford to have two children and his affections were already completely engaged with Stanley. Then Beatrice gave birth to twin boys, Evelyn and Lawrence. Arthur had no love left for them.
Over the following two years, the Devereuxs moved to Kilburn in north-west London. They were living in a flat, Arthur was still working as a chemist’s assistant, and Beatrice was under-nourished. Arthur increasingly felt trapped by circumstances, by marriage, by the two sons he had no interest in, by Beatrice. In his child-like way, he saw the removal of Beatrice, Evelyn and Lawrence as the solution to his problem; life would then be better.
It was probably late in 1904 that Arthur Devereux decided to kill them. First he asked the landlord if, when the tenants in the flat below theirs moved out, he could rent the extra flat. Then he brought home a big tin trunk and put it in the empty flat. Then, on 29 January, 1905, he brought home a bottle of morphine. He managed to get Beatrice to swallow nearly the whole bottle, perhaps by telling her it was a cough medicine. By the next morning, both she and the twins were dead.
Devereux put the three bodies in the tin trunk, arranged for it to be collected and taken into storage in Harrow, and then moved with little Stanley to another part of London. He was hoping to disappear, but he had reckoned without Mrs Gregory, the concerned and caring mother of Beatrice. Mrs Gregory called at the Kilburn flat and was surprised and concerned to find that it was empty. She wrote to Arthur and the letter was forwarded, but his answer was very unsatisfactory and suspicious. He said Beatrice had gone on holiday and he would prefer it if Mrs Gregory did not try to contact her. That was very strange. Mrs Gregory instinctively feared the worst. She heard about the furniture van that had called to collect a trunk, successfully traced it to a warehouse in Harrow, and eventually succeeded in getting an order giving her the authority to open the trunk.
The next day, the story of the discovery of the three bodies in the tin trunk was in all the newspapers. Arthur Devereux decided to change address again. This time he went to Coventry, where he found a job as a chemist’s assistant again. The police inspector in charge of the investigation, Pollard, had little difficulty in finding Devereux. It was simply a question of undertaking a nation-wide trawl of chemists who had recently taken on new male assistants with six-year-old sons.
Arthur Devereux made Inspector Pollard’s task even easier. When Pollard went to arrest him, Devereux gabbled, ‘You’re making a mistake. I don’t know anything about a tin trunk.’ Pollard had not mentioned a tin trunk. Devereux had just proved his own guilt.
At Devereux’s Old Bailey trial, Devereux tried to make out that his wife had killed herself and the twins, and that he had lost his nerve and hidden the body. But he was given away by a telegram he had sent to a chemist in Hull on 22 January. It was in reply to a job advertisement, and he had written, ‘Will a widower with one child aged six suit?’ And this was sent when Beatrice and the twins were still alive. There was only one way he could have known that his next job was going to be as a widower with one child - and that was by deciding that he was going to kill Beatrice and the other two children. He could not have known in advance that Beatrice was going to commit suicide after killing the twins.
A psychologist decided that Devereux was sane, but to make the sort of decisions that Devereux made surely took him to the very outermost edge of sanity. He must have known that killing his wife would lead to his own execution and therefore leave Stanley as an orphan. He must have known that his mother-in-law would come looking for Beatrice. He must have known that the three bodies would be discovered sooner or later, identified and traced back to him. But with the trunk, it was a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ – and Arthur Devereux was certainly out of his mind.
Arthur Devereux was found guilty and hanged at Pentonville Prison on 15 August, 1905.
Maria Goold
‘the Monte Carlo trunk murder’
The Monte Carlo trunk murder took place only two years after the Devereux case. The psychology of the second case has similarities with the first, though this time the killer was a woman, an adventuress called Maria Vere Goold. For business purposes she liked to call herself Lady Vere Goold: it gave her better credit. It was true that her feeble-minded and alcoholic husband was in line to inherit an Irish baronetcy, but she was certainly not a lady yet, and she never would be.
Maria Goold was born Maria Girodin, and she had already lost two husbands in suspicious circumstances before she met the third, the dim-witted Vere Goold. He had little money, but that did not deter Maria, as she was used to living on credit and loans. One year into their marriage, in early 1907, the Vere Goolds tried what gambling could do for them. They lost money, and had little choice but to try to get it dishonestly.
Maria scraped acquaintance with a rich old Swedish lady, Madame Levin, and succeeded in borrowing forty pounds from her. But Madame Levin would not part with any more, and nagged ceaselessly for the return of the £40. This was frustrating for Maria.
On 4 August, 1907, ‘Lady Vere Goold’ invited Madame Levin to her home, the Villa Menesimy, where she and her husband were living in considerable poverty. The old lady was sitting chatting with ‘Sir Vere Goold’, who was mumbling drunkenly, when Maria stole up behind Madame Levin and struck her very hard over the head with a poker. The old lady collapsed. Maria took a knife and cut her throat with it. Then Maria began cutting the body to pieces and pack them into a large trunk.
A niece who was staying with the Goolds – it is tempting to call them the Ghouls – returned that evening and was alarmed to see the place spattered with blood. Maria passed this off with the facile explanation that her husband had had a fit and vomited blood.
As with the Devereux case, it is hard to see what Maria Goold had in mind, long-term, but she and her husband left Monte Carlo that evening, taking the trunk with them, and went to Marseilles. The trunk was labelled ‘Charing Cross, London’. It was handed over to the baggage clerk to send on while the Goolds went to a nearby hotel to breakfast and sleep. But the baggage clerk, an observant and conscientious man named Pons, noticed blood seeping from the Goolds’ trunk. It was also August, and a hot August in the south of France at that; the trunk was beginning to smell unpleasantly. Pons went off to find the Goolds at their hotel to ask them what was in the trunk. Maria said dismissively that it was poultry and ordered the clerk to send it off at once. Pons did not send it off at once. He was suspicious and went to the police instead, where a police inspector told him that the Vere Goolds must not be allowed to leave Marseilles until the contents of the trunk were examined by the police.
It is odd that the police left it to the baggage clerk to detain the Vere Goolds, rather than doing that job themselves, but Pons obediently went back to the hotel, where he found the Vere Goolds on the point of leaving. Pons asked them to go with him to the police station. Maria coldly agreed and took with her the big carpet bag she had brought with her from Monte Carlo. She tried to maintain the façade of aristocratic contempt for this little man who was her nemesis, but in the cab she broke down and offered Pons ten thousand francs to let her go. Pons would not hear of it. On they went to the police station.
An hour later, the police had the trunk opened. Inside were the torso and arms of Mrs Levin. The police found her head and legs in the carpet bag. It was very obvious to everyone that Vere
Goold was a drunken dimwit and incapable of organizing or doing anything, so he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Maria was sentenced to death. The death sentence was not carried out, though. While Maria was in prison in Cayenne, she died of typhoid. Goold himself went to pieces without the support of drink and drugs, and killed himself.
Maria’s motive for killing Mrs Levin is obscure. It would seem that she may have had some twisted idea that she would somehow be able to get her hands on the old woman’s money, but if she had thought hard about it she would have realised that that was not so, unless she was a legatee. It is more likely that she killed her in anger and frustration. She knew the old woman had lots of money, but would not hand it over. Resorting to the trunk suggests a deep level of psychological inadequacy. Hidden in the trunk, the crime was out of sight and Maria was safe. But at some level of her mind, Maria must have known that the body would begin to decompose and the smell would give it away, and that in Marseilles or London or some point in between, a railway official would be bound to report it to the police.
Perhaps it was a simple, unconscious, need to be caught.
The Brighton Trunk Murder
‘the perfect murder?’
The idea of hiding a body in a trunk is an extraordinary one, because detection is certain. Sometimes the identity of the victim is obvious, and sometimes it has to be deduced as a result of forensic investigation. Usually there are enough clues on or in the body to point to a killer, too. The trunk itself may furnish clues.
The Chief Constable in Brighton was optimistic of success when on 17 June, 1934 he went to the left-luggage office at Brighton station to look at the naked torso of a woman. The remains had just been discovered in a plywood trunk. The clerks could remember nothing about the man who had left the trunk there on Derby Day, which was ten days earlier, on 6 June. It had been the busiest day of the year.
Even so there seemed to be lots of clues. The renowned pathologist and forensic expert Sir Bernard Spilsbury looked at the human remains, which were incomplete. She had been a young woman, probably in her early twenties. Her general physical condition suggested that she belonged to the middle or upper classes; she was well nourished, with a good figure, no slack flesh, and well-toned muscles that implied plenty of exercise. The golden brown of the skin also suggested that she could afford to spend a good deal of time in lower latitudes; that suggested wealth. At the time of her death she had been pregnant.
The Brighton police sent out an alert to all other left-luggage offices in England to search for mysterious abandoned packages. At King’s Cross station in London, the young woman’s legs were found in a suitcase. Each leg had been severed at the thigh and the knee, and they were the legs of a well-proportioned and athletic young woman. Some clues were emerging as significant. The body had been wrapped in brown paper and on one sheet was the suffix ‘-ford’. It looked as if it was the second half of a place-name, perhaps Guildford. In the trunk there were two newspapers, copies of the Daily Mail for 31 May and 2 June. They were of an edition only circulated within fifty miles of London.
Then a porter remembered helping a man to carry the trunk on Derby Day. The man had travelled from Dartford to Brighton. Dartford was a place-name ending in ‘ford’ and it was a place where the London edition of the Daily Mail might be bought. It began to look as though the murderer was a Dartford man. It also began to look as though the case was about to be solved. A girl who had sat in the same train compartment as the man from Dartford was able to give a general description of him. Five cheap day returns had been bought that day, and the ones that could be traced were eliminated by the police. The makers of the trunk and the suitcase were traced, but they were unable to connect the items with particular purchasers. Suddenly the trail had gone stone cold. There were no more leads.
The pathologist said the young woman had died on about 30 May, a week before the trunk was left at Brighton station. The man who killed her must have had plenty of spare time, and presumably a home where he could safely conceal a body for a whole week without detection; this would have to be a man with a large property or a single man who had (and expected) no visitors. The fact that a whole week went by before the body was dumped suggested that the murder was not premeditated; the disposal of the body had not been planned, and it had taken several days for the murderer to work out how to do it. A certain amount of reconstruction was possible.
A fairly well-off, strong and athletic man had a secret love affair with a rather similar girl – also well-off, strong and athletic. He lived in Dartford, in the stockbroker belt. The girl became pregnant. On 30 May she called on him to ask him what to do about it. His reactions perhaps revealed that he had no serious intention of marrying her. There was a quarrel, perhaps developing into a fight, and he hit her over the head with something heavy that happened to be to hand. The young woman’s head was never found, but there were no injuries to the rest of the body, so it can be assumed that she died of some head injury.
The man was severely shaken by the girl’s death, which he never intended or wished – he probably loved her and was very distressed at what had happened, but could not face the exposure of the affair or the accusation that he had murdered the girl. He needed time to decide how to dispose of the body. He decided to dismember it. He deposited the trunk in Brighton, travelling on a third class ticket so as to lose himself in the crowd and not be remembered by witnesses. He deposited the suitcase containing the girls’ legs at King’s Cross. Probably after that, he left the country, knowing that it was only a matter of days before the body parts would be discovered.
In theory, the crime should have been solved by finding out which Dartford resident emigrated immediately after Derby Day. The sports clubs and riding stables of the Dartford area would almost certainly reveal both the missing man and the missing woman. In reality, the police investigation revealed nothing whatever that led to the Brighton trunk murderer. None of the obvious leads led anywhere at all. Careful searching of left-luggage offices did not reveal the whereabouts of the young woman’s head, which was never found – though they did uncover the bodies of three children, opening up other murder enquiries. From that day to this, the Brighton trunk murder has never been solved. There is not even so much as the name of a suspect.
Table of Contents
Title Page
CONTENTS
PART ONE: CHILD VICTIMS
St William of Norwich
Little St Hugh of Lincoln
Sarah and Sally Metyard
William Andrew Horne
Captain John Sutherland
Esther Hibner
John Bell
Revd Thomas Hunter
Constance Kent
Carl Bridgewater
Michael Helgos and JonBenet
Francisco Arce Montes
PART TWO: THE LADY-KILLERS
William Corder
James Greenacre
Oscar Slater
PART THREE: BODIES IN BOXES
Kate Webster
Arthur Devereux
Maria Goold
The Brighton Trunk Murder
Table of Contents
Title Page
CONTENTS
PART ONE: CHILD VICTIMS
St William of Norwich
Little St Hugh of Lincoln
Sarah and Sally Metyard
William Andrew Horne
Captain John Sutherland
Esther Hibner
John Bell
Revd Thomas Hunter
Constance Kent
Carl Bridgewater
Michael Helgos and JonBenet
Francisco Arce Montes
PART TWO: THE LADY-KILLERS
William Corder
James Greenacre
Oscar Slater
PART THREE: BODIES IN BOXES
Kate Webster
Arthur Devereux
Maria Goold
The Brighton Trunk Murder
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Rodney Castleden, Barbaric Murders - Child victims, lady-killers and bodies in boxes (Infamous Murderers)