EDWARD CHAPLIN
THE MANSLAUGHTER OF PERCY CASSERLEY, 1938
Mr and Mrs Casserley married in 1927 when he was forty-seven and she was twenty years younger. Nothing is known of their lives till then, except that in his youth he had been a long-distance runner of some distinction and had represented his country in France. His club was South London Harriers. In 1937, the Casserleys were living in suburban comfort in Wimbledon, at 35 Lindisfarne Road.
Percy Arthur Casserley was managing director of John Watney and Co., Ltd, a London brewers, earning £1,500 a year. Tall, spare and still with an athletic build, he was due to retire in February 1938, but certain circumstances caused him to stop work the previous September. He was an alcoholic. His wife later told the police that he drank a bottle and a half of whisky every day, that he began drinking after returning home from work and continued, hardly bothering to eat dinner with her, until well after midnight. Irascible rather than violent, he was abusive, unsociable and moody, and as a result the Casserleys had few friends locally and seldom went out together. They had no children. This was said to be Mr Casserley’s wish and not his wife’s.
There may have been other reasons, for in 1936 he had an unspecified operation that led to the total cessation of sexual relations between them. His consumption of whisky increased in 1937, and Mrs Casserley’s frustrations, seeking some release, focused on Ted Chaplin.
Lindisfarne Road was a cul-de-sac south of Wimbledon Common. In the spring of 1937, work began on the building of a house next to the Casserleys’ home. The builders’ foreman, there every day, was a strapping, handsome man aged thirty-five: Edward Royal Chaplin. Married in 1928, he had been divorced in 1934. One day, Mrs Georgina May Casserley (Ena) asked him if he would like a cup of tea. From there grew an association that deepened into an affair.
By September, Percy Casserley stopped going to work and his state of health was such that he started having treatment for his alcoholism. He was in a home for inebriates between 16 January and 17 February 1938. In his absence, Chaplin more than once stayed overnight in 35 Lindisfarne Road. Mrs Casserley also visited him in his flat 2 miles away in Abbotsbury Road, Morden. On her husband’s return, she had news for him: she was pregnant.
This was another painful humiliation for Mr Casserley – his pride was hurt as well as his manhood. On 23 February, he told his brother-in-law, James Barry: ‘One way out would be for me to shoot myself.’ He presumed that his wife’s lover must be ‘a tea-planter home on six months’ leave from Ceylon’. Before long he was back in the nursing home, described in court as a ‘home for nervous disorders’, and was said to have suffered a nervous breakdown.
While he was away from 8 to 22 March, Ted and Ena indulged themselves, careless now of what people might think or say. The live-in maid, Lydia Scott, had already been cast as Mrs Casserley’s confidante and messenger. As far as Ena Casserley was concerned, something had to be done about making her baby legitimate. There was no question of an abortion. Ena, at the age of thirty-eight, wanted the baby very badly, and she also wanted its father to be her husband. Ted Chaplin wanted both woman and baby to be his in name as well as in fact. So while Percy Casserley was still in the nursing home Ena wrote to him asking for a divorce. He replied: ‘Do you think I am such a fool as to give you up for someone else?’
Mr Casserley came home on to Lindisfarne Road on 22 March, and the next night he was dead.
On the morning of Wednesday, 23 March, Lydia Scott, who had the evening off, asked Mrs Casserley if she would like to go with her to the pictures that night. Mrs Casserley agreed, but later on said her husband did not want her to go. He had threatened, she said, to shoot her, and had put her into a state of fear and great distress. As Lydia Scott left the house at 6.45 pm, Mrs Casserley said to her: ‘If you happen to see Ted, tell him I shall only be able to see him for a minute or two. I won’t be able to get out. If he comes to the back door I’ll be able to see him … Do try and see him.’
Chaplin had, in fact, arranged to meet Mrs Casserley at 7.30 pm at Coombe Lane. Lydia Scott turned up there instead, and explained: ‘Madam can’t get out tonight. Will you go up to the house to see her, if only for a few minutes?’ Chaplin walked up the road to the Casserleys’ home and arrived, according to him, as Mrs Casserley came out of the front door, wearing hat and coat and in tears. They walked to Copse Hill, where at 7.45 pm she bought a bottle of whisky at an off-licence – presumably on his orders, or to account for her absence to her husband if required to do so. She told Ted of her husband’s threat and that she was afraid to go home.
They returned to the house in Lindisfarne Road and conferred in the scullery. Chaplin, wearing a raincoat over his sports jacket and trousers, and still wearing his hat, said: ‘You had better leave this to me.’ He sent her upstairs to her bedroom, from where she heard men’s voices raised in anger, the sounds of a scuffle, two gunshots, and then someone coming up the stairs. The door opened – it was Chaplin.
That was the story Mrs Casserley told the police. Chaplin’s story, as told in court, was as follows.
Percy Casserley was in an armchair beside the fireplace when Chaplin entered the lounge intending to have a man-to-man talk. ‘Good evening,’ said Chaplin, and removed his gloves to shake hands as Casserley got to his feet; his spectacles had fallen on the carpet. Chaplin made a speech: ‘I’ve called to see what the trouble is between you and Mrs Casserley. I’ve just left her and she’s terribly upset. You know about her condition. I’m responsible for it. I want to suggest to you that either she comes away with me tonight or I’ll phone and get her police protection, as I understand you’ve threatened Mrs Casserley.’ Percy Casserley stared at the other man as if shocked or dazed – or drunk. He said: ‘Oh, so it’s you, you swine!’
Chaplin waited, pulling on his gloves again, as Casserley went and sat at a writing bureau with his head in his hands. Then he opened a drawer and took out a gun. Chaplin dived forward and seized the other man’s right forearm with both his hands, twisting the arm so that Casserley was forced to drop the gun. Chaplin then released his grip as the older man ‘looked ill’. Chaplin was half supporting him. Casserley then leaned over and picked up the gun with his left hand, which was grasped at once by Chaplin’s right hand. With his left he seized the other man’s right wrist and there was a stand-up, face-to-face struggle, during which Chaplin endeavoured to keep the gun pointing in the air and away from him. The gun went off.
The bullet penetrated the back of Casserley’s neck, exiting at once – a superficial wound – whereupon Chaplin released his grip on Casserley’s right wrist and put his left arm around the other man’s waist, intending to throw him to the floor and disarm him. As he did so, Casserley’s right hand (the left one still held the gun) gripped Chaplin’s genitals – referred to in court as ‘a portion of his body’. Enraged by this, and in some pain, Chaplin reached out for a torch lying on the bureau and, left-handed, struck Casserley on the head three times. Casserley’s head – he was stooping – was by then on a level with Chaplin’s stomach and his left arm and the gun were held high in Chaplin’s right-handed grasp. After the second blow on Casserley’s skull, the head of the torch came off. The third blow was struck with the base of the torch.
Casserley let go of the younger man’s genitals as Chaplin made another determined effort to throw him to the ground. Casserley stumbled and fell backwards, pulling Chaplin down on top of him. Their faces touched, and in their fall Chaplin banged his head on a bookcase. All the time, fifty-eight-year-old Casserley struggled violently, trying to point the gun at Chaplin and using both his hands now. There were a couple of clicks from the gun. ‘He was like a maddened bull,’ said Chaplin. With both of his hands he seized the other man’s left wrist and pulled his left arm down and across his neck. Casserley, overpowered and unable to move under Chaplin’s weight, said: ‘All right. I give in.’
Chaplin relaxed his hold and began to get up. As he did so he heard another click and saw that bot
h of Casserley’s hands were on the gun. He pounced and forced the other man’s hands back to the side of his head. The gun went off.
Casserley went limp – shot in the head, just in front of his left ear.
Chaplin removed the gun from Casserley’s left hand and stood up, wrapped the gun in a handkerchief and put it in his raincoat pocket. He closed the open drawer in the bureau after taking out a box of cartridges he saw there and putting that too into a coat pocket. Noticing his gloves were stained with blood, he wiped them on his raincoat. He then went into the hall and upstairs to Mrs Casserley. ‘My God!’ he said.
They both came down and went to the kitchen. Chaplin then returned to the lounge, where Casserley lay on his back, stretched out diagonally opposite the door and in front of the small bookcase, on top of which was a large framed photograph and a bowl of yellow tulips. His head was near the skirting board, resting in a pool of blood. He was still alive, groaning but unconscious. Chaplin knelt and touched the wounded man’s head. He began to panic. He thought of getting medical help, then thought of staging a burglary ‘to save the publicity and to keep Mrs Casserley’s name out of it as far as possible’.
When the police arrived, at about 9.30 pm, they found the house in some disorder. They had been summoned after Mrs Casserley rushed to a neighbour’s house at 9.10 pm, sobbing and crying out that something terrible had happened – an intruder had broken into the house and her husband had been injured. The neighbour, Mr Burchell, went next door with his son, turned on the lights in the sitting room and saw Mr Casserley lying on the floor with every sign of an interrupted burglary. He sent for the police.
Mrs Casserley told the police she had gone out for a walk earlier that evening, being absent for about forty minutes. On her return, she said, she found her husband dying in the lounge and the house much disordered. Indeed, in the hall a coat stand had been knocked over; the kitchen window was open; silverware was scattered about the dining-room floor and other pieces lay on the floor of the lounge. A broken and bloodstained torch also lay on the lounge carpet and there was a grey button by the door. On the settee reposed one of the dying man’s slippers. An empty cartridge case lay against the skirting board by Casserley’s head, and about a foot above it there was a bullet-hole in the wall, which was spattered here and there with blood, as was the furniture and the floor.
Percy Casserley died soon after the police arrived.
Meanwhile, Chaplin went to Raynes Park and thence to his flat in Morden. There he put the gun, handkerchief and box of cartridges in the drawer of a bedside cabinet. Also in the drawer was a life preserver (a cosh), which Chaplin said later he had bought for his ailing father in October the previous year. He washed the front of his raincoat, burned the handkerchief and later the box, and then washed the life preserver, as some blood from the gun or handkerchief had got on to it. The following morning he went very early to Epsom and hid the gun and the cartridges in the cavity wall of a half-completed villa. Then he went to work.
Soon after the police investigation started they began to suspect that burglary was not the background to Percy Casserley’s death.
The autopsy, carried out by Sir Bernard Spilsbury, was on the 25th. On 29 March, the police visited Ted Chaplin, builders’ foreman, on his current site in Northey Road, Epsom. ‘Are you Mr Chaplin, known as Ted?’ enquired Detective Inspector Henry. ‘Yes, that’s right,’ responded Chaplin. DI Henry continued: ‘I wish to speak to you concerning the death of Percy Arthur Casserley.’ ‘Yes,’ said Chaplin. ‘It’s terrible. I read about it in the papers.’ He was asked to accompany DI Henry to a police station to be interviewed. Chaplin fetched his raincoat from a shed and put it on; it was still damp and was missing a button.
At the police station, after initially making a statement denying that he had been to Lindisfarne Road the night before, he suddenly decided to confess, and having done so, he obligingly took the police to the villa where the gun was hidden. ‘I’ll show you where the gun is,’ said Chaplin. ‘You’ll never find it on your own.’
He was charged at Wimbledon police station with the murder of Percy Casserley on the same day that the murdered man was buried at Gapp Road Cemetery, Wimbledon. His widow sent a wreath of red roses from ‘Sorrowing Ena’.
Three days later, Mrs Casserley was arrested in a nursing home and charged with being an accessory after the fact. She was remanded in custody in the hospital in Holloway Prison, where she was forbidden to have a bath and made to scrub floors. Her lawyer protested about her treatment when he asked for bail, saying his client was a lady, whose social position, refinement and pregnancy did not justify such harsh and humiliating treatment. Bail was granted.
The trial of Edward Royal Chaplin began at the Old Bailey in Court No. 1 on Tuesday, 24 May 1938, before Mr Justice Humphreys. Mr Norman Birkett, KC, defended Chaplin, and Mr St John Hutchinson appeared for Mrs Casserley, whose trial for being an accessory was to follow Chaplin’s. Mr GB McClure, KC, led for the Crown, assisted by Mr Christmas Humphreys.
Sir Bernard Spilsbury, appearing for the prosecution, said the blows on the dead man’s head could have been caused by the life preserver, as could three marks or injuries on his back. Casserley’s body was in fact bruised or injured in more than seventeen places. Not a single mark had been found on Chaplin when he was examined by a doctor soon after his arrest.
The judge told the jury in his summing-up: ‘What you have to decide is – did Chaplin unlawfully cause the death of Mr Casserley, and if he did, did he do it with the intention of causing his death, or of causing him grievous injury?’
The prosecution’s case was that Chaplin went to the house, and knowing that Casserley had a gun took the life preserver with him, which he then used to batter the older man before shooting him twice.
Having lodged in the house in Mr Casserley’s absence, Chaplin might well have known where the gun was kept. It was also possible that Mrs Casserley could have told him. He might have intended that Mr Casserley’s death should look like suicide. Perhaps the struggle in the lounge was not caused by Casserley’s efforts to kill Chaplin but by his own efforts not to be killed himself. However, Spilsbury suggested that the blows on Casserley’s head had been struck from behind, and that the bullet that sliced through the back of his neck must have been fired from a distance of more than 12 inches, as there were no powder marks on the neck. Neither man was left-handed. But Chaplin said he struck the other man with the torch in his left hand, and that the gun was in Casserley’s left hand each time it was fired.
Another problem was that Casserley, who was fifty-eight and ill, was unlikely to have put up much of a fight against a fit thirty-six-year-old with large, strong hands (Chaplin was asked to hold them up in court), even if he was fighting for his life. The prosecution also pointed out that Chaplin was unmarked in the struggle and that he had made no attempt to get help for the injured man. There was, after all, a telephone in the house. When Mr McClure asked Chaplin: ‘Why didn’t you hit him in the face with that large hand of yours?’ Chaplin answered: ‘I had no intention of harming Mr Casserley.’
Mr McClure, in his closing speech, again drew attention to the blood that had been washed off the life preserver – how did it get there? There were other questions too. Why was a diamond ring worn by Casserley found hidden in a basket in Chaplin’s flat? How could he have been in a panic if he troubled to remove the ring? Why did the accused never mention that Mr Casserley cocked the gun before the first shot was fired? Did this mean the gun in the bureau drawer had already been cocked? Why did Chaplin, with his superior strength, need a weapon with which to strike the older man? Would not Casserley, having been struck three times, be dazed at least and even less capable of resistance? Why, after disarming Casserley once when the gun was in his right hand, was it so difficult to disarm him when he held the gun in his left hand? Were the jury to believe that a man like Chaplin would take his eyes off the gun for a moment, and allow Casserley to get both hands on it? ‘Chaplin wa
s holding the hand that was holding the pistol,’ said Mr McClure. ‘Whose was the force that was pressing that pistol against the skin? The man was flat on his back.’ His suggestion was that Chaplin’s story was made up later to fit the facts.
One point in the accused’s favour was that the little gun, a .25 Webley and Scott automatic, had a defective mechanism. The firearms expert Robert Churchill concluded that the weapon would be more effective in the hands of the man accustomed to handling it – its owner. When the gun misfired, therefore, Casserley would have been more knowledgeable and quicker at clearing the jammed cartridge. On the other hand, the pistol had not been oiled, which seemed to indicate that Casserley knew or cared little about the maintenance of such weapons.
The judge reminded the jury that if they decided that Mr Casserley had been shot ‘in the heat of passion in the course of a quarrel so serious that the accused lost complete control of himself’, they might convict the accused not of murder, but of manslaughter.
This they did, and on Friday, 27 May 1938, Ted Chaplin was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to twelve years’ penal servitude.
Mrs Casserley – who was six months pregnant at the time – was waiting outside the courtroom and fainted when she heard the verdict. Twenty minutes later, supported by policewomen she was brought into the court to be dealt with as an accessory after the fact. She wept without pause.
Her counsel, Mr Hutchinson, began his plea by saying that for years she had been an excellent wife. The judge, Mr Justice Humphreys, interposed: ‘You are not putting her forward as an excellent wife now?’ Later, Mr Hutchinson said: ‘Also, I would ask you to take into account her condition at the moment.’ ‘We know she is pregnant,’ snapped the judge. ‘As hundreds of other women are pregnant. But there’s nothing the matter with her, no disease or anything like that?’ ‘No,’ replied Mr Hutchinson. ‘But the nervous strain …’ ‘She can pull herself together if she wants to,’ remarked the judge.
Murder of the Black Museum 1875-1975: The Dark Secrets Behind a Hundred Years of the Most Notorious Crimes in England Page 35