Dr Hincks now attended her daily, and raised no objection when the major asked if his wife could take some of her homoeopathic brews – which the major prepared for her himself.
Two days later, Mrs Armstrong’s arms and legs became paralysed, and on Monday, 21 February, Dr Hincks told the major that his wife would not recover. Very early the next morning Nurse Allen heard Mrs Armstrong say: ‘Nurse, I’m not going to die, am I? Because I have everything to live for – my children and my husband.’ At 8 am, Nurse Allen summoned the major from the bedroom he had used since his wife’s return; she was all but unconscious. Dr Hincks arrived, and having done what he could for the dying woman he drove the major into town and dropped him off at his office in Broad Street at about nine o’clock. Some fifteen minutes later, Nurse Allen telephoned the major to say that Mrs Armstrong was dead.
Her demise was succinctly noted in Major Armstrong’s pocket diary (Full Moon 9.32 am) – ‘K died.’
Two nights later, he asked one of the maids, Inez Rosser, to bring a candle to the main bedroom, where Mrs Armstrong’s body now reposed in a coffin, her hair twined into two long plaits. The maid watched as, by candlelight, the major soaped his dead wife’s fingers and removed her rings.
Dr Hincks continued to be perplexed by the conflicting symptoms of Mrs Armstrong’s last illness. Eventually, he wrote on her death certificate that she had died of heart disease, arising from nephritis and gastritis.
She was buried on 25 February. The major coldly noted in his diary – ‘K’s funeral 3 pm Cusop.’
Within three weeks, Major Armstrong rewarded himself with a month-long holiday in Italy and Malta, where he picked up a skin infection that produced a rash over most of his body. On his return to England he visited Bournemouth and asked Mrs Gale to marry him. She demurred. But the marriage of a solicitor did take place in Hay that summer, on 21 June – that of Mr Oswald Martin and Miss Constance Davies.
Mr Martin, aged thirty-two, was the senior partner in the firm of Griffiths and Martin, and had become so when old Mr Griffiths died in November 1920. Mr Martin had come to Hay the year before. Wounded in the last months of the Great War, in which he had served throughout as a private, he had sustained an injury that half-paralysed one side of his face. This made him seem to wear a permanent half-smile, which some people found rather disconcerting. Something other than this, however, must have irritated the major during the three months that followed his professional rival’s wedding, for on 20 September, a 1 lb box of Fuller’s chocolates was posted to Mr Martin by an anonymous well-wisher.
Fortunately neither Martin nor his wife were partial to chocolates, although they sampled one or two. These had no ill-effects and the rest were put aside, to be brought out and placed in a silver sweet-dish on 8 October, when the Martins gave a dinner-party for his two brothers and their wives, who were in Hay on a visit. Of the six Martins only Gilbert Martin’s wife, Dorothy, ate any of the chocolates. Later that night she was violently ill – much to the embarrassment of her hosts and the vexation, no doubt, of Major Armstrong.
Oddly enough, a local inspector of taxes was also taken ill at about this time after dining at Mayfield, and an estate agent from Hereford, Mr Willi Davies, at odds with the major over some deal, actually died on 4 October. Local gossip was later to put a poisonous cast on both of these other mishaps.
A month after the chocolate-box incident, the major had definite cause for aggravation apropos Mr Martin. They were both involved in the sale of the Velinnewydd estate: Armstrong was acting for the vendor, Martin for the purchaser. Completion was more than a year overdue. On 20 October 1921, Mr Martin gave written notice of his client’s desire to rescind the contract, at the same time demanding repayment of deposits totalling £500, with costs and expenses. This apparently much agitated the major, who wished to defer the matter as his client had, without his previous knowledge, taken out two mortgages on the estate.
However, in an apparent attempt at conciliation, he asked Mr Martin to tea at Mayfield on Wednesday, 26 October. Mr Martin went there by car. He stated later:
When I arrived at Major Armstrong’s house (about 5.10 pm), I met him in the drive. We went round the garden, and went into the house … into the drawing room on the left as you go into the hall. There was a small table by the window laid for tea, and by it there was a three-tier cake-stand … The teapot and hot water were brought in by the maid. I sat with my back to the window facing him. It was getting dusk at the time. Major Armstrong poured out a cup of tea and handed it to me, and then he handed me a scone in his fingers.
It was a buttered scone and the gesture was uncharacteristically uncouth. ‘Excuse my fingers,’ said the major in mitigation. Mr Martin also ate some currant bread.
Within a few hours, Mr Martin began to feel ill. After dinner with his wife (jugged hare and coffee custard), he dashed upstairs and was horribly sick. He continued to retch and vomit throughout the night and was ill for five days in total. Dr Hincks, who attended him, was more than puzzled by this patient’s symptoms and rendered most uneasy when Mr Martin’s father-in-law, Mr Davies, the town’s chief chemist, informed the doctor that the major regularly purchased large quantities of arsenic from his shop. It was Mr Davies who then remembered the sudden sickness of Mrs Dorothy Martin. The two men agreed it might be advisable to have a sample of the invalid’s urine analysed – as well as the remaining chocolates, which were still in the Martins’ house – and on 31 October, a parcel containing the urine sample and the chocolates was sent to the Clinical Research Association in London. At the same time, Dr Hincks wrote to the Home Office, outlining his suspicions.
The Association’s laboratory found that two of the chocolates had been tampered with and that one was stuffed with 2.12 grains of white arsenic. The urine sample contained 1/33 of a grain of arsenic; the Association informed the DPP about this. But Dr Hincks, Mr Davies and the Martins were kept in suspense until 9 December, when a representative of the DPP met Dr Hincks in Hereford. Dr Hincks made a statement and a secret police investigation was instituted straight away.
It lasted for a month, during which the persistently friendly major assailed Mr Martin with further invitations to tea, as he had done throughout November. ‘I think I had about twenty invitations to tea,’ said Mr Martin, desperately trying to postpone the event with a series of increasingly lame excuses.
To avoid having to pass Mayfield on his way home, he began to take tea in his office. The major began to do likewise, however, and as the two offices were on opposites sides of Broad Street it was most difficult for the intended victim to find plausible reasons for not accepting an invitation whenever the major telephoned and suggested that Mr Martin nip across the road for a genial business chat over a cup of tea – especially after the police instructed him to give the major no cause for alarm.
Matters came to a head when, just before Christmas, Major Armstrong issued a formal invitation to both Mr and Mrs Martin. It was for 28 December. In truth, Martin had by now run out of plausible excuses, though he did manage to scrape up a weak reason for his wife’s and his own absence from this festive treat. Then at last, on 31 December, Inspector Crutchett of Scotland Yard came to the rescue.
Accompanied by Sergeant Sharp and Superintendent Weaver, the Deputy Chief Constable of Herefordshire, the inspector called on Major Armstrong in his antiquated office in a converted shop at ten o’clock that morning. They entered his office without knocking and stayed until four.
The major, who was wearing a snappy Norfolk jacket, riding-breeches and trench boots, was asked if he had anything to say about the suspicious circumstances of Mr Martin’s recent illness. ‘This is a very serious matter,’ he replied. ‘I will help you all I can.’ He then made a detailed statement, after which he was arrested on a charge of attempting to murder Mr Martin, and his clothes and the office were searched. A small packet of arsenic was discovered in one of his pockets. It was the twentieth part, he said, of 1 oz of arsenic purchased to eradicate
twenty dandelion roots in his garden. Another 2 oz of arsenic were found in his office desk. Major Armstrong was taken to the local police station, where he was temporarily lodged, to the stunned disbelief of the local worthies, before being remanded in custody in Worcester Jail.
On 2 January 1922, Mrs Armstrong’s body was exhumed from the snowy graveyard of Cusop church and examined the following day by Dr Bernard Spilsbury. Her remains, when analysed, were found to contain 3 1/2 grains of arsenic, a remnant of the massive dose that had killed her. As the gravediggers worked in the churchyard on the 2nd, Major Armstrong made his first sensational appearance at Hay in the magistrate’s court in which he had often assisted in the processes of justice. Throughout the hearing he was transported by car between Worcester and Hay. He was charged on 19 January with the murder of his wife.
Unseasonal snow was falling when the trial of Major Armstrong began at Hereford Assizes on Monday, 3 April 1922, the day after Cambridge won the Boat Race – a good omen, as it seemed to him. The trial lasted ten days.
The presiding judge was Mr Justice Darling, aged seventy-three. The Attorney-General, Sir Ernest Pollock, led for the Crown. Sir Henry Curtis Bennett, for the defence, suggested that Mrs Armstrong had committed suicide when of unsound mind and had taken the arsenic herself. It was also pointed out that hardly any of the money left to the major by his wife (£2,278) had been touched.
The major, himself a lawyer, was a confident witness and an acquittal was expected. But Mr Justice Darling’s questions – he asked over a hundred – were incisive, and Major Armstrong, five hours in the witness box, could give no satisfactory explanation for the presence of arsenic in his office and in his pocket.
‘If you were simply dosing dandelions,’ inquired the judge, ‘why did you make up that one ounce of arsenic into twenty little packets such as that found in your pocket wrapped up in paper?’ ‘Because of the convenience of putting it in the ground,’ replied the major.
The judge: ‘Why go to the trouble of making up twenty little packets, one for each dandelion, instead of taking out the ounce you had got and making a hole and giving the dandelions something from the one ounce?’ Replied the major: ‘I do not really know.’
‘Why make up twenty little packets, each a fatal dose for a human being, and put them in your pocket?’
‘At the time it seemed to me the most convenient way of doing it.’
Major Armstrong was found guilty of the murder of his wife on Thursday, 13 April. An appeal was dismissed and, having put his affairs in order and given small gifts to his lawyers and his warders, he was taken from his cell in Gloucester Prison on 31 May 1922 and hanged.
The Armstrong children were taken care of by an aunt. Mayfield was sold and its name was changed. Hay-on-Wye returned more or less to normal, and Mr Martin became the leading solicitor in the town. But the attempts on his life, the notoriety and the trial had deeply affected his health. He suffered from depression and became afraid of the dark. In 1924, he and his wife moved to East Anglia, where he died within a few years. Dr Hincks died in 1932 from a heart attack that struck him one day as he rode on the hillside above Mayfield. The judge, the Attorney-General and Sir Henry Curtis Bennett all died in 1936. The twice unhappy widow, Mrs Gale, known at the trial as Madame X and thereafter in reports of the case as Mrs G, outlived them all. She died in a Bournemouth nursing-home in 1960 at the age of ninety-one.
Nothing much – apart from the growth of a plethora of bookshops – has really changed since the murder of Mrs Armstrong in charming Hay-on-Wye.
20
RONALD TRUE
THE MURDER OF GERTRUDE YATES, 1922
More prostitutes have been murdered than persons of any other profession, including policemen, and several men have murdered women for resisting their sexual advances. Sexual problems are indeed at the root of many murders that are not committed for gain. But Gertrude Yates was murdered mainly because Ronald True was mad. An extreme example of the totally amoral murderer who fantasizes and lies, Ronald True had, like so many other convicted murderers, learnt to kill during a war. In fact, a wave of serious crimes followed the First World War, and the Flying Squad was formed to deal with it.
Ronald True was born in Manchester on 17 June 1891, the son of an unmarried sixteen-year-old girl. She married a wealthy man when Ronald was eleven, and he was sent to Bedford Grammar School. Even as a boy he habitually lied, played truant and was cruel to his pony and rabbits. When he left school at seventeen, he did no work and his step-father followed the usual line with family incompetents and misfits by sending him abroad to learn a job, such as farming. For brief periods, True lived and worked in New Zealand, Argentina, Canada and Mexico, leaving each country after being dismissed from his latest job or merely walking out. He kept coming home, as dissolute and as feckless as ever. And then he started taking morphia.
In 1915, he joined the Royal Flying Corps and crashed the following February on his first solo flight at Farnborough, suffering severe concussion. The head injuries he sustained may have affected his mind: his behaviour became odder and he developed an aversion to wearing hats. A month later he crashed again, and then had a nervous breakdown. Pilot Officer Guy Dent said of him: ‘He had a feverish air about him. He was always given to rushing about and laughing with a loud voice, and he seemed deficient in common sense … He was unstable, boastful … He was a very bad pilot … He gave me the impression of a man always on a strain – tense.’
Invalided out of the RFC in October, True acquired and soon lost a job as a test pilot at Yeovil. He went to New York, where he regaled ladies at parties with stirring tales of air battles with German planes. As an indirect result, he obtained a brief job as a flying instructor and married an impressionable young actress, Frances Roberts. He was an attractive man, tall (6 ft 1 in), dark and handsome, with large eyes and a moustache.
He wandered with his wife from America to Mexico, to Cuba, and then back to England, whence he was despatched to a Gold Coast mining company in February 1919. His lies and odd conduct again caused his dismissal within six months. In a statement that says much about the social mores of the time, one of his colleagues – John Thompson, an engineer – recalled that True was not only bombastic, irresponsible and erratic but was ‘in the habit of laughing and joking and generally playing about with the native black men, which was considered very infra dig [beneath one’s dignity] … which no white man does or would do … One must not hob-nob with the blacks.’ On True’s return to Bedford, his stepfather washed his hands of the young man, giving him an allowance but no further help.
His fantasies by this time had increased, as had his morphia addiction. For eighteen months he was treated for both, in and out of nursing homes. While hospitalised in Southsea, he was wheeled about in a bath chair, which was decked with flags and toys: a monkey, a cat, a hooter and a dog that barked. He giggled a lot; he shouted and swore; at other times he just sat and stared, at a tree, at the sea or the sky. In September 1921, he was convicted and fined in Portsmouth for obtaining morphia from a chemist using forged prescriptions.
Two months later, back home once more, he began displaying hostility towards his wife, who had taken up her acting career again. Anything disagreeable that happened to him was now blamed on another Ronald True, who became his bogeyman and the symbol of his split personality. He believed this man was impersonating him and forging his cheques – the ones that bounced. Sometimes he was violent, sometimes morose and brooding. His wife did what she could to humour and care for him. But when he became hostile towards their two-year-old son, whom he had once adored, she gave up, accepting his mother’s decision that he should be certified as insane; he used to wet and comb the child’s hair several times a day. He told his aunt, who rebuked him for staying out late: ‘I may as well enjoy life when I can. I am going to be killed through a woman soon’, adding that three palmists, in Buenos Aires, Shanghai and San Francisco, had told him so.
Early in January 1922, he disapp
eared in London, where he haunted West End bars and clubs. Now aged thirty, he lived richly, signing dud cheques, walking out of hotels without paying his bill, stealing from coats, purses and people’s homes. He was out having a good time every night, dining, drinking, dancing, picking up women and telling fantastic tales about his own achievements, wealth and plans. He formed instant friendships and liaisons, but was always on guard against his enemies – including the imaginary Ronald True.
One friend he acquired in the first week of February was an out-of-work motor tradesman named James Armstrong. They were introduced in the Corner House, Leicester Square. For some reason they took to each other and for the next few weeks were together nearly every day, travelling about, amusing themselves, with True the eccentric but congenial host. Interestingly, it was the women he met who thought him insane. During this time, True bought a pistol off Armstrong for £2, to protect himself against the other Ronald True. there was, in fact, a Ronald Trew around at the time, a singer whom True may have seen and heard sing in a club.
His wife, much concerned about his state of mind, traced his whereabouts in London and managed to see him twice over a period of two months. She was so alarmed by his conversation and appearance that on 3 March she sought the help of Scotland Yard – True had vanished again – and employed an enquiry agent to seek him out.
Some weeks before this, on Saturday, 18 February, True met Olive Young – ‘a member of the unfortunate class’, according to the prosecution at his later trial. Aged twenty-five, her real name was Mrs Gertrude Yates. She had given up working in a shop to become a call girl and was doing rather well, with money in the bank and some rather expensive jewellery. true stayed the night in her basement flat at 13a Finborough Road, Fulham, and on leaving removed a £5 note from her handbag. She resolved not to see him again, and succeeded for a while, although True kept on calling at the flat at night and pestering her with telephone calls.
Murder of the Black Museum 1875-1975: The Dark Secrets Behind a Hundred Years of the Most Notorious Crimes in England Page 23