On 2 March, posing as Major True and while he was staying at the Grand Hotel, Northumberland Avenue, without paying any bills, he acquired a chauffeur-driven car from a hire firm – the driver was Luigi Mazzola – and in unpaid-for luxury drove about with James Armstrong to Richmond, Reading, to tea-rooms, dance halls, hotels and clubs – after which True was penniless. At one tea dance he pointed out a man to an acquaintance, Robert Scales. Mr Scales later told the court: ‘He said this man was not treating a girlfriend of his right … He said the man had been at Bedford Grammar School when he first met him. He said the girl lived at Bedford, and that her name was Olive.’
Every night before midnight on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th of March, Mazzola drove True to Finborough Road and then drove him away. Each time Miss Young was out. But just before midnight on Sunday, 5 March, she was at home, and let him in – Mazzola was dismissed. true spent the night with her.
The following morning, a newspaper boy delivered the Daily Mirror at about 7.10 am. The milkman arrived about 7.30 am. Some time after this Ronald True made tea for himself and Miss Young. He took her cup into the bedroom. As she sat up to drink it, he struck her five times on the head with a rolling-pin before strangling her. It appears that he then downed his cup of tea and ate some biscuits. What he did for the next hour or so is not known, though he remained in the flat.
About 9.15 am, Miss Young’s daily, Miss Emily Steel, arrived, letting herself into the basement flat with her own key. She went to the kitchen, observing in passing that a man’s coat and scarf were in the sitting room and that the glass panel of the bedroom door was newly cracked. She began cooking some sausages for her own breakfast and did some tidying in the sitting room. She was there when True, whom she had seen there before, breezily entered the room from the bedroom.
‘Good morning, Major True,’ she said. He told her: ‘Don’t wake Miss Young. We were late last night … She’s in a deep sleep. I’ll send the car round for her at twelve o’clock.’ Miss Steel helped him on with his coat and he gave her half-a-crown before leaving to get a taxi. It was about 9.50 am.
She continued with what she was doing before knocking on the bedroom door to see if Miss Young was awake yet. there was no reply, so she opened the door and went into the room.
Blood was everywhere. there seemed to be a body in the bed, but on pulling back the bedclothes she discovered only two bloodstained pillows. A rolling-pin lay under the eiderdown; the dressing-table had been ransacked; some jewellery had disappeared. She eventually found Miss Young’s naked body in the bathroom. A towel had been rammed down her throat and a dressing-gown cord tied around her neck. She had died of asphyxia. Miss Steel ran out of the flat to get some help and in due course, not long after 10.15 am, an inspector from Chelsea police station arrived on his bicycle at the flat.
Meanwhile, True had taken a taxi to a post office, where he phoned Mazzola and then drove on to a menswear shop, Horne’s in Coventry Street, where he bought a bowler hat (18s 6d) and a ready-made brown suit (five guineas) which he put on, after showing the salesman some blood on his trousers. the salesman said later: ‘He said he had had a smash that morning in an aeroplane and hurt himself in the groin. He said he had come over from France and in landing he had had a smash.’ True was very jocular. He then took the same taxi, which had waited, on to 21 Wardour Street. there he had a shave at a barber’s shop and then a few doors along (Number 27) he pawned two rings for £25 and redeemed a silver cigarette case and a watch, which he had pledged the previous Saturday. He then met James Armstrong at the Strand Corner House at about eleven o’clock, and with Mazzola at the wheel they drove to Hounslow, to look at engines, then on to Feltham, and to Croydon for tea. there, True bought the Star, which featured Olive Young’s murder on the front page. they then drove on to Richmond, where he bought a shirt, which he put on. they eventually reached the Hammersmith Palace of Varieties about 8.40 pm, and Mazzola was then dismissed.
He returned to his garage, where the police were waiting. Having heard Mazzola’s story, four senior police officers returned with him to the Palace of Varieties, arriving about 9.45 am. Detective Inspector Burton later told the court: ‘I saw the accused and the witness Armstrong in a box in the theatre … I entered the box and got hold of the accused by both hands and said to him: “I am a police officer. Come out with me.” I took him outside the box, still holding his hands, and Superintendent Hawkins took from his hip pocket a revolver … It was loaded.’
True made a brief statement in which he said that a tall man, aged thirty-one, was in Mrs Yates’s flat the previous night when he arrived there, and that he left when a stormy scene ensued.
On 7 March, he was charged with the wilful murder of Gertrude Yates. While being held for observation in Brixton Prison’s hospital, he attacked a prisoner whom he thought was stealing his food, and was jolly with Henry Jacoby, an eighteen-year-old pantry boy who had murdered an elderly hotel guest, Lady White. ‘Another one to join our Murder Club!’ cried True. ‘We are only accepting members who kill them right out!’
His trial began at the Old Bailey on Monday, 1 May 1922. The judge was Mr Justice McCardie, who had just sentenced Henry Jacoby to death after a two-day trial. true’s defence was that of insanity, two psychiatrists agreeing with the prison doctor that the accused was suffering from a congenital mental disorder, aggravated by his drug addiction. there was a lengthy legal debate about the meaning of homicidal insanity and the McNaughten case was much discussed. (In 1843, this case had helped to establish the test of irresponsibility for a criminal offence on the ground of insanity.) The prosecutor, Sir Richard Muir, called no experts, relying on his cross-examination of witnesses to prove the defendant was not altogether mad. Victor Trew, twin brother of Ronald Trew, was produced at one point – his brother was in hospital with pneumonia – to show that his brother was quite unlike True in appearance, and to say that he never carried a gun and did not know Olive Young.
The jury concurred with the prosecution: the doctors might say True was mad, but they could not believe that he was truly a lunatic. On 5 May 1922, they found Ronald True guilty of the murder of Gertrude Yates. He was sentenced to death.
An appeal was dismissed by the Lord Chief Justice. But while True was in Pentonville Prison he was re-examined by three other medical experts on the orders of the Home Secretary, after which he was indeed declared to be insane. thereupon he was reprieved and sent to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum (later renamed Broadmoor Institution). This caused an outcry in the Commons and the press, especially as Henry Jacoby had just been hanged. It was felt that social position had damned the one and saved the other.
True spent the rest of his life in Broadmoor, where he proved to be a popular and cheerful chap. He died there in 1951, aged sixty.
In the summer of 1922, Reynolds News featured a series of articles entitled ‘Ten Years as a Hangman’ written by Harry Pierrepoint. He had been suffering a terminal illness for several years and died on 14 December 1922, aged forty-eight. Harry Pierrepoint had officiated at 105 executions, including six double hangings. the greatest number of condemned persons he hanged in one year as chief executioner was nineteen. His account of the execution of Abel Atherton in December 1909 appears in Appendix B.
His son, Albert, was now seventeen. He took possession of all his father’s papers and diary and studied them over the next few years. Even at school in Huddersfield he had written an essay when he was eleven that began: ‘When I leave school I should like to be the Official Executioner.’
21
FREDDY BYWATERS AND EDITH THOMPSON
THE MURDER OF PERCY THOMPSON, 1922
Nothing seems to incite one man to kill another as strongly as the urge to be the sole possessor of the other man’s woman or wife. Desire for a woman can become so obsessive that nothing but the most drastic action will resolve the situation. Rational thought is seldom employed. In this case, as in that of Mrs Casserley, the wife could have left her husband; she could hav
e deserted him and gone to live with her lover. But she chose not to do so. Love seldom conquers all. Apart from the fact that women are more responsive to social expectations and the sanctity of the status quo than men, some primitive instinct seems to demand that the possessor be aggressively dispossessed and the woman carried away. Moreover, so complex are the interactive feelings of those involved, that two people who become part of an unhappy triangle can only be realigned as a happy pair when the triangular involvement is torn apart.
Frederick Edward Francis Bywaters was a good-looking, virile young man, self-willed and well travelled. Although susceptible to emotion, he was not a man of imagination or a thinker. He was more a creature of instinct and of action, and, although impressionable, not the innocent lad his counsel would later describe. Nor was Edith Jessie Thompson the dominating seductress subsequently portrayed at the trial. A sensual, attractive lady, she was a dreamer, in love with love and anything that lifted her out of the shallows of her pedestrian life in suburban Ilford with Percy Thompson.
They had married on 15 January 1915, when she was twenty-two and he was twenty-six. There were no children. At the time he was a shipping clerk with a firm in the City of London and she was the book-keeper and ultimately the manageress of a wholesale milliner, Carlton & Prior, at 168 Aldersgate Street, EC1, a quarter of a mile north-east of the Old Bailey. Both the Thompsons continued with their jobs for seven years until the night of the murder, she earning as much as he: £6 a week.
In 1916, during the Great War, Percy enlisted in the London Scottish Regiment, but was soon discharged as unfit because he was suffering from heart trouble. At about this time, Freddy’s father, a ship’s clerk who had also enlisted in the army at the start of the Great War, was killed, and his mother moved from Manor Park to Norwood, south of the river. Two years later, Freddy Bywaters, then aged sixteen, joined the Merchant Navy as a ship’s writer or clerk.
In July 1920, the Thompsons took up residence in 41 Kensington Gardens, Ilford – a north-eastern suburb of London, where both had been born and brought up. They bought the terraced house from a crabbed old lady, Mrs Lester, who with her ailing husband remained in the house as the Thompsons’ lodgers. Every weekday morning the Thompsons set off about quarter-past eight to work in the City, returning about quarter to seven at night. They dined with friends or went to shows, but seem to have had few interests – except that Edith Thompson was an avid reader of popular fiction and magazines.
On 4 June 1921, Freddy Bywaters, then aged eighteen, returned from a four-month voyage to Australia on the steamship Orvieto. He had been friendly with Edith’s younger brothers and sister since his schooldays – her maiden name was Graydon – and at Percy’s invitation he joined the Thompsons and Edith’s sister, Avis Graydon, for a week’s holiday at Shanklin on the Isle of Wight. Edith was able to escape from her husband and to have fun with the younger people, going swimming and having tennis lessons. She and Freddy exchanged their first kiss. A year later, on 14 June 1922, she was to write: ‘One year ago today we went for that memorable ride round the island in the charabanc, do you remember? – that was the first time you kissed me.’
At the end of the holiday, on 18 June, Freddy was invited by Percy, who liked the young man, to lodge with them – presumably so that Freddy could be nearer the Graydon boys and his presumed girlfriend, Avis. The Graydons lived a mile and a half south of the Thompsons in Shakespeare Crescent, Manor Park. But Freddy’s romantic interest in Avis, if it ever existed, had already been diverted. Although both denied in court that they made any declaration of love until that September, Edith wrote in a letter dated 20 June 1922: ‘It’s Friday now darlint … I am wondering if you remember what your answer was to me in reply to my question “What’s the matter?” tonight of last year. I remember quite well – “You know what’s the matter, I love you” … but you didn’t then darlint, because you do now and it’s different now isn’t it?’
On 20 June 1921, Freddy Bywaters had been lodging with the Thompsons for just two days. Friday, 27 June, was his nineteenth birthday, a date and a day Edith looked back on several times in her letters as being of some significance. They met for lunch in the Holborn Restaurant. Bywaters later told the court: ‘Mrs Thompson told me she was unhappy, and I said: “Let me be a pal to you – let me help you if I can” … Mrs Thompson and I had been having an argument, and she suddenly burst into tears, and I advised her to wait, not to give up hope, and not commit suicide … I extracted a promise from her to wait five years, so that she should not commit suicide.’ In the interim she was to try to obtain a divorce or separation, and if this was not possible they would go away together or both kill themselves in a suicide pact.
A month passed, with Freddy still lodging in Kensington Gardens. By now, the Thompsons had been married for more than six years. She said later: ‘I think I was never really happy with my husband,’ and added that the question of a separation had been discussed between them long before Bywaters came to stay.
On Monday, 1 August it was aired again. She told the court: ‘I had some trouble with my husband that day. I think it originated over a pin.’ She was sewing and Freddy went to fetch a pin for her. ‘But eventually it was brought to a head by my sister not appearing at tea when she said she would. I wanted to wait for her, but my husband objected, and said a lot of things to me about my family that I resented. He then struck me several times, and eventually threw me across the room.’ Her arm was badly bruised. ‘Bywaters was in the garden … He came into the room and stopped my husband. Later on that day there was a discussion about a separation … I wanted a separation and Bywaters entreated my husband to separate from me. But he said what he usually said, that he would not. At first he said he would, and then I said to him: “You always tell me that … and later, you refuse to grant it to me.”’
Not surprisingly, Freddy was asked by Percy Thompson to leave, and did so four days later. ‘We were friends,’ Freddy said later of his relationship with Mrs Thompson at that time – ‘I was fond of her.’ But it seems the affair had already been consummated. In one of the only two surviving letters he wrote to her, found at Carlton & Prior’s and written two days before the murder, he wrote: ‘I do remember you coming to me in the little room and I think I understand what it cost you – a lot more darlint than it could ever now. When I think about that I think how nearly we came to be parted for ever. If you had not forfeited your pride darlint I don’t think there would ever have been yesterday or tomorrow.’ The little room was most probably where Bywaters lodged in Kensington Gardens.
After 5 August, he stayed in his widowed mother’s small house in Westow Road, Upper Norwood, a long way from Ilford. But he continued to meet Edith – or Edie, as her family called her.
The first extant letter she wrote to him is dated 11 August 1921. It reads: ‘Darlingest – Will you please take these letters back now. I have nowhere to keep them, except a small cash box I have just bought and I want that for my own letters only and I feel scared to death in case anybody else should read them …’ Apparently, she was referring in the first instance to ‘personal’ letters written to him by a girlfriend he had acquired in Australia.
Her next letter was a note dated 20 August – ‘Come and see me Monday lunchtime, please darlint. He suspects. Peidi.’ She explained in court: ‘I meant that my husband suspected I had seen Bywaters. I think it was on the Friday previous to that date. I usually saw him on Fridays and I continued to see him until he sailed on the 9th of September.’ On Fridays the Thompsons invariably visited her family, the Graydons, in Manor Park. So did Bywaters, calling on Avis and her brothers. Their parents also liked him and made him welcome.
It was before he sailed on the SS Morea to the Mediterranean, working as a mess-room steward, that Bywaters and ‘Peidi’ (‘Child’) affirmed their love for each other. Their letters – with hers breathing an ‘insensate, silly affection’ according to the trial judge – now began their lengthy travels across the world.
She wrote more than sixty letters to Bywaters over the period of a year, during which he was at sea five times: from 9 September to 29 October 1921; 11 November 1921 to 6 January 1922; 20 January to 16 March; 31 March to 25 May; and finally from 9 June to 23 September 1922. He kept all her letters in a sea chest. These five voyages were all in the SS Morea, where he was employed as a mess-room steward, a writer and then as a laundry steward.
She wrote to him nearly every day, often at her desk in Carlton & Prior’s, with a brass monkey – a present from Bywaters – sitting on the desk before her. Some of the letters were very long, running on like a diary from day to day, full of gossip and chat about the weather, relatives, shows, books, her thoughts and feelings. Very often she included newspaper cuttings, advertisements, invitations or other items that she thought might interest him – in fact, fifty enclosures were found with the letters. She also sent him books, chocolates and other gifts, probably using Carlton & Prior’s postage. He addressed some of his replies to her office, although later she used a poste-restante address at the Aldersgate post office under the name of ‘Miss P Fisher’. He reciprocated as best he could with letters and gifts, and sometimes, it seems, he humoured her fantasies, though on his fifth and longest voyage his enthusiasm was tangibly beginning to flag. Nonetheless, both at the beginning and at the end of their association they were undoubtedly very much in love – obsessively so.
Murder of the Black Museum 1875-1975: The Dark Secrets Behind a Hundred Years of the Most Notorious Crimes in England Page 24