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

by Honeycombe, Gordon

  Miss Margaret Lofty was thirty-eight, the daughter of a clergyman long deceased. Occasionally a lady’s companion, her last employment had ended in July and now she lived with her sister and aged mother. Disappointed in love earlier that year (ironically, her fiancé had turned out to be already married) she went out for tea on 15 December – and never returned. Two days later, on 17 December, without telling any of her family, she married ‘John Lloyd, estate agent’ in Bath. That same day, the Lloyds went to London and took rooms at 14 Bismarck Road (now Waterlow Road), Highgate. The house had a bath. That night ‘John Lloyd’ took his new bride to see one Dr Bates, and the following morning she went to a solicitor and made her will – her life had already been insured for £700. She wrote to her mother about her marriage, describing her husband as ‘a thorough Christian man … I have every proof of his love for me … He has been honourable and kept his word to me in everything. He is such a nice man.’

  About 8 pm on that Friday night, 18 December, she had a bath. At the time, the landlady, Miss Louisa Blatch, was ironing in the kitchen below the bathroom. She said: ‘I heard a sound from the bathroom. It was a sound of splashing. Then there was a noise as of someone putting wet hands or arms on the side of the bath, and then a sigh … a sort of sound like a child might make …’ (At Smith’s trial, the medical experts, Dr Spilsbury and Dr Willcox, agreed that Smith probably drowned his brides by raising their legs, his left forearm under their knees, as he thrust their heads under the water with his right hand and held them down.) Next, she heard the harmonium being played in the front room. It was a familiar hymn: ‘Nearer my God to Thee’. At about ten minutes later, the doorbell rang. It was Mr Lloyd. ‘I forgot I had a key,’ he said. ‘I have been for some tomatoes for Mrs Lloyd’s supper. Is she down yet?’

  Margaret Lofty was buried on 21 December, and Smith was back with Edith in Bristol in time for Christmas. One day she told him she was going to have a bath. He replied: ‘I would advise you to be careful of those things, as it is known that women have often lost their lives through weak hearts and fainting in the bath.’

  The inquest on Margaret Lofty was held on 1 January 1915, and the resulting story in the News of the World – ‘Bride’s Tragic Fate on Day after Wedding’ – was read by Alice Burnham’s father and by Mrs Crossley. Both were powerfully struck by the similarities between the deaths of Mrs Lloyd and Mrs Alice Smith, and communicated their anxieties to the local police and to Scotland Yard.

  On 4 January, Smith called on a solicitor, Mr Davies, at 60 Uxbridge Road, and instructed him to have Mrs Lloyd’s will proved and the insurance policy made good. As Smith waited for the money to be paid, the police were pursuing exhaustive enquiries that took them to towns all over England during the next four weeks. At last they had enough information to make a holding charge. When Smith returned to his solicitor on 1 February, he was detained as he left the building by Detective Inspector Neil and two police sergeants. He admitted he was George Smith, who had married Alice Burnham, and was then charged with bigamy.

  That same day, Margaret Lofty’s body was exhumed and examined by Dr Spilsbury, who later travelled to Blackpool and then to Herne Bay to supervise the exhumations of Alice Burnham and Bessie Mundy and carry out the respective post mortems. Spilsbury had by now become the Home Office’s honorary pathologist.

  After further police investigations, Smith was charged on 23 March with the wilful murder of Bessie Mundy, Alice Burnham and Margaret Lofty. Remanded at Bow Street several times, he frequently shouted abuse at the witnesses and lawyers, denouncing and reviling them.

  The trial of George Smith, aged forty-three, began at the Old Bailey on Tuesday, 22 June 1915, when he was indicted with the murder of Bessie Mundy. It was very hot in London that month, with temperatures over 80°F, but the court was packed, mainly with women eager to see the accused, whose denunciatory outbursts from the dock – he gave no evidence – became more frequent as the trial proceeded. He called Mrs Crossley a lunatic and Inspector Neil a scoundrel. ‘I don’t care twopence what they say,’ he told the judge. ‘You cannot sentence me to death! I have done no murder. I have nothing to fear.’ He vilified his lawyers and repeatedly shouted at the judge during the summing-up, complaining ‘You’ll have me hung the way you are going on!’ – ‘Sentence me and have done with it!’ – ‘It’s a disgrace to a Christian country, this is! I’m not a murderer, though I may be a bit peculiar.’ The prosecutor referred to him as ‘a systematic bigamist’.

  The trial was long, concluding on Thursday, 1 July. There were 264 exhibits and 112 witnesses. At one point, the jury were taken into an anteroom, where Inspector Neil demonstrated with a nurse (in a bathing costume) and one of the baths how the brides could have been drowned. So convincing was his demonstration that artificial respiration had to be used to revive the nurse.

  Smith was defended by Mr Edward Marshall Hall, KC, assisted by Mr Montague Shearman. The prosecutor was the senior Treasury Counsel, Mr Archibald Bodkin, assisted by Mr Travers Humphreys, and the judge was Mr Justice Scrutton. The Times, reporting on the trial on 23 June 1915, was full of war news: the Roll of Honour in the paper that day contained the names of over 3,000 soldiers and 80 officers who had been killed; 3,772 servicemen were listed as being Mentioned in Despatches. Justice Scrutton made reference to this larger world picture during his summing-up:

  Since last August all over Europe … thousands of lives of combatants, sometimes of noncombatants, have been taken daily, with no warning, and in many cases with no justification … And yet, while this wholesale destruction of human life is going on, for some days all the apparatus of justice in England has been considering whether the prosecution are right in saying that one man should die.

  The jury retired at 2.52 pm and took twenty-two minutes to find George Smith guilty. After he was sentenced – and he took this quite calmly – he leaned over the dock and said to Marshall Hall: ‘I thank you, Mr Marshall Hall, for everything you have done. I still have great confidence in you. I shall bear up.’ The judge commended the police who had carried out the investigation, in particular Inspector Neil, for their care and assiduity. The jury said: ‘Hear, hear!’ Outside the court, Edith Pegler wept.

  Smith’s appeal was dismissed. He was removed from Pentonville to Maidstone Prison on 4 August 1915. Unrepentant, though often in tears and prostrated, it is said, by fear, he was taken at 8 am across the sunny prison yard on Friday, 13 August and hanged in a high shed. John Ellis was the executioner.

  Inspector Neil formally identified the body, and the errant bridegroom, naked and exposed to strangers as his wretched brides had been, was buried in a pit of quicklime within the jail.

  The following day in Leicester, Caroline Thornhill – formerly Mrs Love, Smith’s first wife and now a widow – married a Canadian soldier serving with the RE, Sapper Tom Davies, by special licence.

  17

  ALFRED BOWES

  THE ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION OF SIR EDWARD HENRY, 1912

  There is a kind of premeditated murder in which the victim, a person of political, social or religious significance, happens to epitomise all the deep-seated grievances that the assailant has grown to feel and can only exorcise by destroying the imagined symbol or cause of his suffering. Murders where a political motive appears to be paramount are called assassinations. But most of the public figures who are shot at are also the victims of misguided, malignant obsession as well as of a perverted and morbid desire for fame.

  Edward Henry was appointed Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in 1903. Until Sir Joseph Simpson was appointed in 1958, no Commissioner had ever been a policeman himself: they were elderly gentlemen, reputable civil servants, colonial administrators or senior army officers, appointed by the government after years of public service to supervise the Metropolitan Police.

  Born in 1850 – his father was a London doctor – Edward Henry was educated at a Roman Catholic school, St Edmund’s College in Hertfordshire, and began work at the age o
f sixteen in the offices of Lloyd’s, the celebrated insurance company. Dissatisfied with his position as a lowly clerk, Edward Henry studied for and successfully sat the Indian Civil Service exams and was sent to work for the Bengal taxation service in Calcutta when he was twenty-four. He learned Bengali, played polo and hunted jackals in his spare time, and an unexceptional civil service career might have followed had not his curiosity been aroused one day on a visit to a Calcutta cashier’s office, where he first came across the system of identifying illiterate Indian workers that Sir William Herschel, a senior ICS official, had initiated. Each Indian workman made a thumb print by sticking his left thumb in an inkwell, wiping off the excess with a rag and then pressing his thumb on a wages sheet. Edward Henry realised, as others had done, that the resulting prints – no two of which were the same – might be used to identify and track down criminals. But how? Using duplicates of the thumb-print payment sheets of Bengali workmen, he began to study the differences and similarities in the prints and tried to work out some system of classification.

  In 1888, the year of the ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders in London, Edward Henry became a magistrate-collector, presiding over civil courts in which tax claims and disputes were settled. Two years later, aged forty, he married the young daughter of an Irish vicar while he was on leave in Britain. She was called Louisa Moore, and sailed with him back to Calcutta, where he had now lived and worked for sixteen years. The following year the ICS appointed him Inspector-General of Police in Bengal.

  He was now able to study the fingerprints of thousands of Indian malefactors, and gradually evolved a numerical system that classified the prints of each finger on a man’s hand according to its loops, whorls, arches, composites and lines.

  Dr Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, published a book called Fingerprints in 1892. His conclusions, however, were not favourable towards using them as a positive means of identification: there was still no proof that the line-patterns on people’s fingers did not alter between the cradle and the grave; their variety seemed to be endless, and there seemed no simple way of classifying them. In the meantime, Scotland Yard detectives, using a French system, continued to measure and photograph criminals for their records – although some fingerprints were taken in case they might prove useful in identifying villains, many of whom used aliases in those days.

  Then, in 1894, Edward Henry at last felt sufficiently confident about his findings and his system to write an official report, describing and advocating his system of identification by fingerprints. He sent it to the Government of India; the system was adopted throughout the country, and Henry published a textbook, Classification and Use of Fingerprints, which eventually became the accepted textbook on the subject all over the world. Nonetheless, magistrates in India continued to be reluctant to convict anyone on fingerprint evidence alone.

  In 1899, at Galton’s suggestion, Henry was invited to address a meeting of the British Association in London about his fingerprint researches and conclusions, and also to liaise with a government body, the Belper Committee, which had been set up to consider the various methods of identifying criminals and determine which might be best. Melville Macnaghten, Assistant Chief Constable in 1899, was a member. And so, after twenty-five years in India, Edward Henry resigned from the ICS and returned with his family to England, hoping to find some senior police post that would enable him to put his theories into practice.

  Nothing transpired, and he went to South Africa to take up a police job there, which involved the reorganisation of the Transvaal police force. In so doing, he instituted new labour passes for coloured workers that bore the fingerprints of the holders. But the Boer War put an end to any further experiments and improvements. Then, in 1901, he heard that Sir Robert Anderson, Assistant Commissioner and head of the CID at Scotland Yard, was about to resign. Edward Henry applied for the post and got it. He took up his duties at the Yard on 31 May 1901.

  Two months later, the Central Fingerprint Branch of the Metropolitan Police was established at the Yard under Detective Sergeant Charles Stockley Collins. It operated under many difficulties, much doubt and some opposition. Indicative of the scornful mistrust of many was this letter from ‘A Disgusted Magistrate’ to a national paper:

  Scotland Yard, once known as the world’s finest police organisation, will be the laughing-stock of Europe if it insists on trying to trace criminals by odd ridges on their skins. I, for one, am firmly convinced that no British jury will ever convict a man on ‘evidence’ produced by the half-baked theories some official happened to pick up in India.

  Another correspondent, writing in 1902, denounced Henry’s system as ‘hopelessly inaccurate, dangerous, and completely un-British’. But on Derby Day that year, the fingerprints of fifty-four people who had been arrested on Epsom Downs were taken and checked by Henry, DS Collins and a constable against the 2,000 or so that had by that time been filed away by the Fingerprints Branch. Twenty-nine of the fifty-four were found to have had previous convictions, and the next day as a result received heavier sentences from the magistrates who heard the charges against them.

  The first trial at the Old Bailey in which fingerprint evidence formed the main part of the prosecution’s case involved a burglar called Jackson, newly out of prison, who had left a neat impression of his prints on some new paint in a house he had robbed in Denmark Hill. He was found guilty, chiefly on account of the adept evidence of DS Collins, who had given the young barrister prosecuting Jackson (Richard Muir) a crash course on fingerprint deduction before the trial. However, these successes met with little public attention and even in the Yard Henry’s oddball enthusiasm for fingerprints was dismissively regarded by most of his colleagues. But when, in 1903, his book on fingerprints was published for the first time in Britain, police forces in other cities – and other nations – slowly began to put the Henry system into practice; Bradford, in Yorkshire, was the first English town to start its own fingerprint collection.

  On the retirement of the Commissioner, Edward Bradford, after thirteen years of service, Edward Henry was asked to be the next Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police; he was fifty-three.

  The fingerprint section at the Yard now flourished under Assistant Commissioner Melville Macnaghten and the newly promoted DI Collins. But it wasn’t until the murder of the Farrows in Deptford in March 1905 that the value of fingerprinting as evidence of identification became firmly established. At the ensuing trial of the Stratton brothers at the Old Bailey, Richard Muir was again the prosecutor, and the most damning evidence, despite the reservations of the judge, was Alfred Stratton’s thumb print on the cash box. A further advance in the science of fingerprinting was made when it was discovered that prints not immediately visible could be made so by dusting them with a very fine yellow powder called licopodium.

  Yet it took a candle and a burglary in Huddersfield in 1909 to fix fingerprinting as evidence that was legally beyond all doubt. The burglar, Herbert Castleton, had been convicted of breaking and entering – no defence was put forward and he subsequently appealed. A candle he had gripped and used to light his search for valuables had served to convict him – it bore a fine set of fingerprints. He claimed that various thieving acquaintances had also handled the candle. In the appeal court Justice Darling asked the prisoner’s counsel if he could produce anyone else whose fingerprints exactly matched those on the candle. This he could not do and the appeal was dismissed. Thenceforth ‘The Castleton Judgement’ became a point of law. Three years later, the Commissioner himself appeared in the Old Bailey as a witness for the prosecution in the case of his own attempted murder.

  Edward Henry’s responsibilities as Commissioner included the protection of foreign potentates and politicians and of the royal family, and as a result he had become acquainted with King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. When the King died in 1910, Henry supervised the full-scale security operation surrounding the coronation of George V in June 1911. After this, he was knighted. But his biggest s
ecurity headache was the state visit of the new King and Queen to India later that year. The former Lloyd’s clerk and junior ICS official travelled with them, overseeing security arrangements throughout the royal tour, which culminated in the imperial splendours of the grand Durbar at Delhi.

  By 1912, Sir Edward had stopped riding a horse to work, as had been his wont, and generally walked the five or six miles between his Kensington home and Scotland Yard. Sometimes, however, he made use of the car and chauffeur officially placed at his disposal, as he did on 27 November that year.

  About 7 pm that evening, the car taking him home, driven by Albert English, drew up outside Campden House Court. Sir Edward’s wife and his two young daughters were awaiting his arrival – he also had a four-year-old son, who was then in bed. His second daughter, Hermione, aged eleven, watched from the window of her bedroom above the front door porch as her father got out of the car. Sir Edward told English that he would not be needed again that night and turned towards the house. As he did so a young man approached him and said there was something he wanted to talk about. ‘Can’t speak to you now,’ said Sir Edward. ‘I’m busy. Call my office.’ Whereupon the man pulled out a pistol and fired three times. Two shots missed their target. Wounded by the third, Sir Edward staggered to the front door of his house, opened it, and was helped to a chair by his eldest daughter, Helen, who happened to be in the hall. The gunman had in the meantime been seized by the chauffeur, who was assisted in the resulting struggle by a porter and a decorator working in a house across the road. ‘Let me go!’ cried the gunman. ‘This man has done me a great wrong! Let me go!’