Parsons was lodging with the Bryants in May 1935, when on 14 May Fred Bryant became suddenly ill, vomiting and suffering from acute pains in his stomach. The local medic, Dr MacCarthy, diagnosed gastro-enteritis, and his patient’s strong constitution soon assisted him towards a full recovery. Another such attack on 6 August was similarly diagnosed and Fred Bryant was soon on his feet again and back at work.
By October, Parsons’s feelings for Charlotte Bryant seem to have cooled, for towards the end of the month, deterred perhaps by her demands, he went away and never returned. Indeed, he told her he was not coming back. She became more distraught as time passed, and on 11 December a third poisonous assault on her husband’s innards laid him very low. A week later, when he was still incapacitated, although believed to be recovering, she travelled north to a gypsy camp near Weston-super-Mare, seeking Parsons. She encountered instead Priscilla Loveridge and her pipe-smoking crone of a mother, Mrs Penfold. Mrs Bryant was heartily abused by both and sent away.
The next day, Friday, 20 December, Fred Bryant’s condition suddenly worsened. On Saturday he was in agony, saying there was something inside him like a red-hot poker that was driving him mad. A neighbour, Mrs Stone, saw him that day, and when his employer’s wife, Mrs Priddle, called, he was so ill he could not speak. On Sunday he was removed from the cottage in an ambulance to the Yeatman Hospital, Sherborne, and that afternoon he died. He was thirty-nine.
This time Dr MacCarthy was suspicious and refused to sign a death certificate. He communicated his concern to the police. There was an inquest. ‘What is an inquest?’ asked Mrs Bryant, and waxed indignant when she understood – not surprisingly, as on 28 December 4.09 grains of arsenic were discovered by the Home Office analyst, Dr Roche Lynch, in the corpse of poor Fred. But even before this, Scotland Yard’s assistance had been sought by the Dorset police.
Meanwhile, Mrs Bryant and her five children were lodged in the Poor Law institution at Sturminster Newton, a former workhouse, while the Bryants’ cottage was minutely examined by the police in the shape of DCI Bell and DS Tapsell of Scotland Yard. The place was virtually taken apart, but not before Tapsell, equipped with three paint-brushes, had gone about carefully sweeping shelves and cupboards and acquiring in all about 146 samples of dust, dirt and refuse, of which thirty-two samples later revealed some traces of arsenic.
Parsons was questioned and was luckily able to convince the police that he had had nothing to do with Mr Bryant’s demise. He said he had met Mrs Bryant towards the end of 1933, when he was lodging at Babylon Hill and going under the name Bill Moss. Soon afterwards they became intimate and remained so for two years. In the summer of 1935, he said, she remarked more than once that she ‘would soon be a widow’, after which they might marry. To this he had unkindly replied: ‘I wouldn’t marry any woman.’
An elderly widow, Mrs Lucy Ostler, who had lately lodged with the Bryants, related that Mrs Bryant had once said: ‘I hate Fred.’ When Mrs Ostler asked her why she didn’t leave him, Mrs Bryant replied that she did not want to leave the children. The older woman revealed that on the night of 21 December – Bryant died the following day – his wife had coaxed him to take some liquid Oxo, a meat extract. On another occasion, Mrs Bryant, said Mrs Ostler, had disposed of a tin of weed-killer, saying: ‘I must get rid of this.’ On being told what an inquest implied, the young widow had said: ‘If they can’t find anything, they can’t put a rope around your neck.’
The police discovered that an insurance agent, Mr Tuck, had been approached by Mrs Bryant in December 1934, when she said: ‘I would like to insure my old man.’ This was not followed up, but a year later, on 20 December 1935, Mr Tuck happened to call at the Bryants’ cottage. Mr Bryant, he thought, looked a very sick man – gastritis, said his wife – and Mr Tuck concluded that the husband was not a fair risk. However, he effected some insurance for the children. On 22 December, Bryant died. Mr Tuck, unaware of this, returned to the cottage on Monday the 23rd. Finding only the children at home he drove off, but on the way met Mrs Bryant and Mrs Ostler returning to the cottage on foot. He gave them a lift. Mrs Bryant had a bundle with her and she told him that she had been to the hospital to pick up her dead husband’s clothes. ‘Well, he’s gone,’ she said. ‘I’ve been a good wife to him – nobody can say I haven’t. And nobody can say I poisoned him.’ Mr Tuck, mystified by this remark, said: ‘No. Why should they?’ She replied: ‘Well, you never know what will come of these things.’ She did not seem to the insurance agent like a woman who had just been widowed.
The police also made an exhaustive search of the area about the cottage and an empty, battered tin was found in some rubbish, and in it traces of arsenic. The tin was identified by a firm who manufactured weed-killer.
On Monday, 10 February 1936, Superintendent Cherett of the Sherborne police visited Mrs Bryant in the Sturminster Newton institution. After being cautioned and formally charged with the murder of her husband, she said: ‘I have never got any poison from anywhere, and that people do know. I don’t see how they can say I poisoned my husband.’ She was taken by car to Exeter Prison. Her five children, aged twelve, ten, six, four, and fifteen months, remained in the Institution, despite an offer from the NSPCC to find them a home.
On Wednesday, 27 May 1936 the trial of Charlotte Bryant began in Dorchester at the Dorset Assizes. The judge was Mr Justice Mackinnon; the Solicitor-General, Sir Terence O’Connor, KC, led for the Crown; and the accused was defended by Mr JD Casswell.
Neither the defendant nor the principal witnesses for the prosecution, Parsons and Loveridge, seemed to comprehend the gravity of the situation – Mrs Bryant munched caramels in the dock. In giving evidence, she said she knew nothing about poison and had never bought any weed-killer, and she denied nearly all the prosecution’s allegations, including what Parsons and Mrs Ostler had told the court. She was, she said, on very good terms with her husband. ‘Never a breath wrong with my husband in my life until Leonard Parsons come along.’
The jury didn’t believe her, and on Saturday, 30 May 1936, she was found guilty of murder and duly sentenced to death.
An appeal was heard on 29 June and dismissed. Ten days later the Labour MP for Nelson and Colne, Mr Silverman, asked the Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, whether he was aware that the appeal judges had refused to admit certain additional evidence on the ground that it could have been produced at the original trial, where, said Mr Silverman, the defence had been conducted by junior counsel only, whereas ‘such a heavy battery of leading counsel’ appeared for the Crown that ‘the minds of a rustic jury’ might have been considerably affected. The Home Secretary replied that counsel for the Crown were not a battery directed against the accused, and that in his view the defence was most adequately conducted.
Meanwhile, in Exeter Prison, Mrs Bryant’s hair turned white at the roots. She refused to see her children so as not to upset them any further. The day before her execution she sent a telegraph appealing for mercy to the new, uncrowned king, Edward VIII – to no effect. ‘Mighty King,’ she wrote. ‘Have pity on your afflicted subject. Don’t let them kill me on Wednesday.’
Charlotte Bryant was hanged by Tom Pierrepoint and Tom Phillips in Exeter Prison on Wednesday, 15 July 1936. She was thirty-three. It is said that she went to her death bravely. Said a priest: ‘Her last moments were truly edifying.’ Mrs van der Elst, a leading campaigner for the abolition of capital punishment, staged a small demonstration outside the prison and was fined £5 for obstructing an officer. She also handed in £5 for the police sports fund and said she was going to pay for the maintenance and education of Mrs Bryant’s five children.
At the inquest on the body of Mrs Bryant the jurors asked the coroner if they might give their fees to her children. The coroner replied that it was a small amount and provision had already been made for the children. The jury then handed their fees to the prison governor to give to the Discharged Prisoners’ Aid Society.
Three months before the execution of Charlotte Br
yant, another woman was hanged for murder: Dorothea Waddingham. She was thirty-six, and also had five children. Nurse Waddingham, who ran a small nursing home in Nottingham, had been charged with the murder by poison (morphia) of two elderly women in her charge: Louisa Baguley, aged eighty-nine, and Ada Baguley, fifty, who weighed 16 stone and suffered from disseminated sclerosis. Found guilty of the murder of Ada Baguley, Nurse Waddingham was executed at Winson Green Prison, Birmingham, on 16 April 1936, the execution being carried out by the two Pierrepoints.
It was the last time that two women (both poisoners) were hanged in the same year – in which six other women who had been sentenced to death were reprieved. No woman would be executed in Britain for over twelve years, the next being a forty-two-year-old lesbian, Margaret Allen, hanged on 12 January 1949 for the murder with a hammer of an elderly eccentric, Mrs Chadwick.
29
LESLIE STONE
THE MURDER OF RUBY KEEN, 1937
Only one policeman has ever been tried for murder at the Old Bailey. This was PC William Teasdale, who strangled his wife in bed in their Clapham home during a row about his association with another woman. Teasdale was tried at the Old Bailey in April 1938, found guilty and sentenced to death. He was reprieved in May. The year before this, two policemen were among the main suspects in a murder case outside London to which the Metropolitan Police’s CID were called.
Ruby Anne Keen was an attractive young woman, aged twenty-three, who lived with her widowed mother, elder sister and her lorry-driver brother in Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire. She worked in a factory in the nearby town of Dunstable, and when she was free liked to go out and have a good time, which several young men in the district were glad to provide. She enjoyed the attention, the affirmation and exercise of her attractions, and if invited out by one of her admirers was not loath to accept.
One of her regular boyfriends was a builder’s labourer, Leslie George Stone, aged twenty-four, who lived in the hamlet of Heath and Reach, a mile north of Leighton Buzzard. He and Ruby had been friends since 1931, and it was thought by their families that one day they would get married. But Stone was a soldier, serving with the Royal Artillery, and in 1932 he was posted to Hong Kong. After a year or so, Ruby’s letters became less frequent and then stopped altogether. Out of sight meant out of mind. Besides, her other admirers – in particular, two young policemen – were not slow to occupy her time and affections. Before long one of them was favoured above all other suitors, and in 1936 she became engaged to a PC with the Bedfordshire Constabulary. Not long after this, in December 1936, Stone was discharged from the RA on medical grounds and returned to Leighton Buzzard.
It was more than two months before he saw Ruby again, and when he did she was in the company of another man. Stone said later: ‘I did not speak to her as I did not want to look a fool.’ However, he spoke to her the following Sunday, 4 April. He bought her a drink in a pub, the Golden Bell, and she said they must have a night out together for old time’s sake. She would not commit herself to an actual date.
But a week later, after going to evening service in a local church with a girlfriend, she dropped in again at the Golden Bell about seven o’clock; Stone was waiting. In expectation and in honour of the occasion, he had put on a new blue serge suit, one he had never worn before. He had three pints of mild and she had a glass of port. They moved on to the Cross Keys and ended up in the Stag Hotel. They sat in a corner of the saloon bar, their conversation being overheard in part by some of the locals drinking at the bar. Leslie Stone was trying to persuade Ruby Keen to give up her fiancé and marry him. After he had drunk two more pints and she two ports, they left just before closing time at ten o’clock.
Two of the more inquisitive locals followed the couple, who walked past Ruby’s home in Plantation Road and entered a lover’s lane, the Firs, on the outskirts of the town about 300 yards from her home. The locals gleefully hurried back to the Stag with this bit of gossip, leaving the couple alone.
Stone later told the police that he left Ruby about 10.15 pm outside the Stag; they went their separate ways, he reaching home about 10.45 pm.
Ruby’s presence in the Firs was accidentally confirmed in a curious way by a married couple who chose to take a short cut home along the lane about 10.30 pm. In the shadows they saw Ruby in the arms, they said, of a policeman – an assumption easily made, for the man was dressed in what they swore was a dark blue uniform with silver buttons. And who but a policeman would be embracing Ruby?
Early next morning, about 7 am, her almost naked body, wet with dew, was found in the lane by a railwayman, Mr Cox, on his way to work. No attempt had been made to hide her. She had been strangled with her own black silk scarf. Although most of her clothing had been torn off her, she was still wearing her gloves, and there was no sign of sexual assault. But there was every evidence in the sandy ground of the desperate struggle she had made, presumably to avoid being raped. She had been struck on the chin before being strangled, and her assailant had knelt as he killed her. The assault must have been swift and silent, for dogs in a nearby cottage had not been disturbed sufficiently to bark.
On the afternoon of 12 April, Les Stone called at the house of PC McCarthy, who was out. Mrs McCarthy thought that Stone looked very worried and agitated. He said he had heard about Ruby’s death and asked her to telephone Leighton Buzzard police station as he had been with Ruby the previous night and wanted to make a statement to clear his name. He did so. But the police were more concerned about the evidence of the couple in the lane and the involvement of two local policemen with the murdered girl.
The assistance of Scotland Yard, in the person of Chief Inspector Barker, was speedily sought. He had been closely involved in 1927 in the arrest of Frederick Browne. It fell to Barker to question the two young policemen who had been the friend and the fiancé of Ruby Keen, as well as the young workman who had been drinking with her on the night she died. The fiancé said he had last seen Ruby on the Sunday afternoon, before he went on duty at the village of Hockliffe, 3 miles east of Leighton Buzzard. It was an unbreakable alibi. But he and the other PC owed their ultimate elimination from the enquiry to Leslie Stone’s new suit.
All footprints beside the body had been trampled and defaced in the frantic struggle between Ruby and her assailant. But his knee marks – shallow, rounded depressions in the ground – remained. Plaster of Paris casts were made of them, and when they were examined by Sir Bernard Spilsbury a clear imprint of the trouser crease and the material was revealed.
The dark-blue trousers of the main suspects were inspected. Despite the fact that the trousers of Stone’s new suit, as well as the jacket, had been cleaned or brushed – so hard at the knees that the nap had worn away – Spilsbury’s microscope picked out granules of sandy soil in the fibres of the suit, and similar specks in the turn-ups. They were identical with the trampled earth by the dead girl’s body. The fact that the suit had been worn by Stone on 11 April for the first time meant he could not claim to have got earth on his suit on any other night. Just as incriminating was a single silk fibre found embedded in the lining of Stone’s jacket. It matched the cream underslip Ruby had been wearing the night she died. Stone was charged with her murder on Wednesday, 24 April 1937.
His trial began at the Old Bailey on Monday, 28 June before the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Hewart. The chief prosecutor was Mr Richard O’Sullivan, KC, assisted by Mr Christmas Humphreys, son of Mr Justice Travers Humphreys. Christmas Humphreys had become a Treasury Counsel in 1934, when he was thirty-three. Mr Maurice Healy, KC, defended the accused.
The evidence was scant and circumstantial. But on the second day of the trial, Stone changed his story in the witness box, saying in his defence that he and Ruby had quarrelled – she had struck him and he had choked her. He explained, saying that in the old days Ruby had had a trick of poking her little fingers in his ears and tickling them. This annoyed him. He had once struck her when thus provoked, but had missed and hit a brick wall. On the nig
ht of the murder she referred to this, and asked him if he had any trouble with his hand. He told the court:
I told her she was lucky that I hit the wall instead of hitting her. She called me a dirty devil and hit me above the left ear. It was a full-arm swing. I was surprised and went up to her, and she struck again at me with her other hand. It made me jump at her. I caught hold of her scarf I think and pulled it. I think I knotted it again after that … She started to fall down and I caught hold of the front of her clothes. I was in a kind of rage. Her clothes were torn off as she was falling.
Then, he said, he knelt. He decided that she was not dead, only stunned. He said he did not try to interfere with her and walked away, thinking she would revive. When he got home he brushed his clothes.
The jury were out for twenty-five minutes. They found him guilty and he was sentenced to death.
When he appealed against the verdict on the grounds that the jury had been misdirected, it was on the basis that the judge had replied: ‘Yes, undoubtedly,’ to a question from the jury, sent to him as they considered their verdict: ‘If as the result of an intention to commit rape a girl is killed – although there was no intention of killing her – is a man guilty of murder?’
Stone’s appeal was dismissed. He was hanged by Tom Pierrepoint, assisted by Alfred Allen, at Pentonville Prison on Friday, 13 August 1937.
In 1938, Tom Pierrepoint dealt with all eight of the executions carried out that year, the first time in over twenty years that the chief executioner had done so. His nephew, Albert, assisted him on three occasions. Fewer hangings were now being carried out. More than a dozen people were reprieved that year, three of them women.
30
Murder of the Black Museum 1875-1975: The Dark Secrets Behind a Hundred Years of the Most Notorious Crimes in England Page 34