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

by Honeycombe, Gordon

  As with Mrs Thompson and Mrs Rattenbury, the judge’s censure of the dead man’s widow was severe. He said: ‘The less said about you and your part in this case the better. I am not going to treat you with lenience because I think there is nothing particular in your condition that calls for it. Your case has aroused the most ridiculous nonsense. A great many people have treated you as though you were a sort of heroine. You were a participator in a vulgar and sordid intrigue.’ He ended: ‘Now please go!’ Mrs Casserley was given a nominal sentence of eleven days in prison and immediately released.

  Ted Chaplin served eight years of his sentence. When he was freed from prison on the Isle of Wight after the Second World War had ended, Ena Casserley was waiting at the gates. He put on a new suit and they went to a register office. On 17 May 1946, they became man and wife.

  31

  WILLIAM BUTLER

  THE MURDER OF ERNEST KEY, 1938

  The body of Ernest Percival Key, a sixty-four-year-old jeweller, was found in his lock-up shop at 74 Victoria Road, Surbiton, just before noon on Saturday, 24 December 1938, by his son, Jack Key, and his daughter, Mrs Arthur Bell. Covered in blood and unconscious, the old man was still alive despite one of the most savage knife attacks on record. He had been stabbed about thirty-one times in his head, face and neck, and there were well over a dozen cuts on his arms, which had been made as he tried to defend himself. He died on the way to hospital.

  Mr Key, a Yorkshireman from Hull, was well known locally, having been in business as a jeweller in Surbiton for over twenty years. He had been murdered during the course of a robbery – some jewellery was missing from the shop. A bowler hat, however, had been left behind by the assailant, and Dr Eric Gardner, the County Pathologist for Surrey, was able to use the size of the hat and hairs found within it to give the police investigating the murder some hints about its owner before Sir Bernard Spilsbury arrived on the scene.

  The owner of the hat turned out to be an unemployed driver called William Thomas Butler, aged about twenty-nine. He was married with two children and lived in Laurel Road, Hampton Hill, Teddington, about 3 miles north-east from the jeweller’s shop, beyond Hampton Court Palace and the park. He had previous convictions for housebreaking.

  Less than an hour after the knife attack on Mr Key. Butler took a taxi from Kingston railway station to the Kingston county hospital. Blood was issuing from his gloves. He was seen by Dr Day, who also examined Ernest Key. Butler gave his name as Charles Jackson, of Norbiton, and said he had been accidentally injured by a wood-cutting machine. He later told the police that his hands had been cut when he was knocked down by a motorcycle combination and that he gave a false name and address at the hospital because he could not afford the fees. The cuts had in fact been caused by a dagger or knife without a guard, which he had used to stab Mr Key.

  Butler was charged with the murder of Mr Key on 17 January 1939, and was put on trial at the Old Bailey a month later, on Wednesday, 15 February. The judge was Mr Justice Singleton, and the prosecutor Mr GB McClure. Butler was defended by Mr David Maxwell Fyfe, KC, MP – later to become Solicitor-General, and in 1951 Home Secretary. He claimed that Butler had acted in self-defence, and that the charge should be reduced to manslaughter.

  The trial ended on its second day. Butler was found guilty and sentenced to death. An appeal was lodged on 23 February and dismissed. He was hanged by Tom Pierrepoint and Tom Phillips at Wandsworth Prison on 29 March 1939.

  32

  UDHAM SINGH

  THE MURDER OF SIR MICHAEL O’DWYER, 1940

  On Wednesday, 13 March 1940, there was a joint meeting at Caxton Hall of the East India Association and the Royal Central Asian Society. Held in the Tudor Room, it was attended by about 160 people who had assembled to hear a lecture – ‘Afghanistan: the Present Position’ – given by Brigadier-General Sir Percy Sykes. The Secretary of State for India, Lord Zetland, was in the chair and several distinguished elderly gentlemen sat beside him on the platform, including Sir Michael Francis O’Dwyer, who had been Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab in 1919 at the time that the Amritsar riots were brutally suppressed by General Dyer. Sir Michael, now seventy-five, had succeeded Sir Louis Dane, who was now nearly eighty-four. Also seated on the platform were Lord Lamington, aged seventy-nine, former Governor of Bombay and President of the East India Association, and Sir Frank Brown, the Association’s honorary secretary.

  After the lecture, which lasted for about forty-five minutes and concluded at about four o’clock, Sir Michael O’Dwyer made what The Times called ‘A witty speech, which was warmly received. The substantial unanimity of the Moslem world in support of the Allied cause in the war was emphasised. After Mrs Malan (formerly Miss Audrey Harris) and Sir Louis Dane had spoken, a vote of thanks was moved by Lord Lamington.’ It was now about half-past four.

  When the applause had died away the officials on the platform stood up and moved to congratulate each other on the success of the meeting. As they did so, a burly Sikh walked down a gangway to the front of the hall and at very close range fired all six rounds of a .45 Smith and Wesson revolver into the group on the platform. Sir Michael O’Dwyer, who had been sitting at the end of the front row, was shot twice in the back, one bullet passing through his heart and right lung, the other through a kidney. A bullet broke Sir Louis Dane’s arm. Lord Lamington’s right wrist was injured. Lord Zetland had a miraculous escape: he was hit by two bullets in the chest, but their impact was minimised by the use of .44 cartridges, ammunition which was thirty years old and by his clothes. ‘I felt a sharp pain in my ribs,’ he said later. ‘It rather knocked me out, and while I was lying down I heard some other shooting going on, but did not see what happened.’

  The Sikh was overpowered by two members of the audience (one in RAF uniform) as he ran for the exit, shouting ‘Make way!’ and waving the gun. Found also to be carrying a knife, he was charged at Bow Street police station on 14 March with the murder of Sir Michael O’Dwyer, whose death was described by Mr Clement Attlee in the House of Commons as an ‘abominable outrage’. In India it was also officially deplored and condemned and Mr Gandhi said it was ‘an act of insanity’.

  The assassin was Singh Azad, a thirty-seven-year-old engineer who lodged in Mornington Crescent. He was also known as Udham Singh. A note of Sir Michael’s name was found twice in Singh’s diaries for 1939 and 1940, once spelt ‘O’Dyer’. It seems that Singh may have confused O’Dwyer with General Dyer.

  In custody Singh, who was excitable and spoke English badly, made several disjointed statements: ‘I did it because I had a grudge against him. He deserved it. I don’t belong to any society or anything else. I don’t care. I don’t mind dying. What is the use of waiting until you get old? That is no good … Is Zetland dead? He ought to be. I put two into him. I bought the revolver from a soldier in a public house. My parents died when I was three or four … Only one dead, eh? I thought I could get more.’

  In prison, awaiting trial, Singh went on a forty-two-day hunger strike.

  His trial began at the Old Bailey on 4 June 1940. The judge at the trial was Mr Justice Atkinson. Mr GB McClure led for the Crown and Mr St John Hutchinson for the defence. Singh said in his defence that the shooting was an accident. He had intended, he said, to fire at the ceiling in protest at the difficulty of getting a passport and at the treatment of Indians by the British government in India.

  Sir Bernard Spilsbury gave evidence. Looking far from well, having had a slight stroke a few weeks earlier, he spoke from the well of the court and was not cross-examined. On 5 June, the jury retired for ninety-five minutes before deciding Singh was guilty. He made a speech that the judge directed should not be reported in the press.

  An appeal heard on 15 July was dismissed and on 31 July 1940 Udham Singh was hanged in Pentonville Prison. On this occasion, Stanley Cross was the chief executioner. Albert Pierrepoint was his assistant. It was Cross’s first job as the chief executioner and he miscalculated the drop, which was corrected by Albert P
ierrepoint. Cross carried out four more executions but was removed from the list of executioners after that.

  Albert Pierrepoint, who was born in 1905 at Clayton in Yorkshire, had become an assistant executioner in December 1932. But he was not given his first job as the ‘Number One’ executioner until October 1941. He remarried in August 1943. He and his uncle, Tom, worked together on many executions, and although Uncle Tom was employed as a hangman for forty years, retiring in 1946 when he was seventy-five, having hanged 294 people, it was ‘Our Albert’ who was able to say on his retirement: ‘I have carried out the execution of more judicial sentences of death (outside the field of politics) than any executioner in any British record or archive.’

  To this end, on behalf of the Allies, he executed 200 people convicted of war crimes at Zuchthaus, Hameln in Westphalia, Germany, sometimes thirteen or fifteen in one day. Spies, saboteurs, traitors, deserters, German prisoners-of-war and some American soldiers were also among those he hanged. These executions continued after the Second World War until December 1949. Altogether, Albert Pierrepoint hanged 435 men and women in his twenty-three years as a hangman.

  33

  HAROLD TREVOR

  THE MURDER OF MRS GREENHILL, 1941

  Few murderers have exhibited quite as many of the characteristics of an archetype as HD Trevor, whose self-interest, self-pity, self-deception, self-dramatisation, stupidity, conceit, mendacity, charm and indolence were unbounded and apparently unending. Nonetheless, of minor criminals he seemed the least likely to end up as a hanged man. In doing so, he provided the police with one of their swiftest solutions of a crime – one made at the scene of the crime itself.

  Mrs Theodora Jessie Greenhill was the sixty-five-year-old widow of Major Greenhill and lived in a block of flats in Elsham Road, West Kensington. In the autumn of 1941, anxious to move out of bombed and blacked-out London, she decided to let her flat, furnished, and advertised this fact through a local estate agent.

  On Tuesday, 14 October, she was visited by a tall, slim, elderly gentleman, wearing a monocle and with thinning grey hair, who expressed a keen interest in renting the flat. Indeed, he was so pleased by it that he agreed to take it then and there. The few pounds she had requested as a down payment were forthwith produced – an advance or first instalment of the rent. No doubt much gratified by this speedy and satisfactory development, Mrs Greenhill seated herself at her bureau in the drawing room and began writing out a receipt for the money in her large bold hand – ‘Received from Dr HD Trevor the sum of s—’

  The pen jerked in her hand, making a jagged line down the note paper, as the monocled gentleman struck her on the head with a beer bottle, using such force that it shattered. Pieces fell on to the floor and into a wastepaper basket. Mrs Greenhill collapsed unconscious on to the carpet, where the phoney doctor got down on his knees and strangled her with a ligature. This done, he ransacked the flat, rifling through the drawers of the bureau and emptying a cash box that he found in the bedroom; he prized it open with a nail file. Having retrieved the rent advance, he left the flat. But before doing so he laid a handkerchief decorously over the dead woman’s face. Thus she was discovered by a daughter of her first marriage, Miss Tattersall, who, on receiving no reply from her ringing of the doorbell, let herself into her mother’s flat.

  DCS Fred Cherrill, called to the scene from Scotland Yard to assist the investigation begun by DCI Salisbury, examined the various fingerprints that had been found – four on fragments of the beer bottle, two on a small table near the body, and one on the cash box.

  Something seemed familiar to Cherrill about the name on the incomplete receipt – ‘Trevor’. Yet surely no one would be so stupid as to leave his actual name on the murdered woman’s desk, in her own hand? The name must be fictitious. Nonetheless, Cherrill contacted the Criminal Record Office at the Yard and asked for all the files bearing that name to be brought to him. When they arrived he began, with the aid of a magnifying glass, to compare the records of fingerprints in the files with the suspect prints in the flat. Before long he was able to tell the astonished Salisbury that the murderer was Harold Dorian Trevor.

  A warrant was issued for Trevor’s arrest and he was traced to Birmingham, where he had pawned and sold a cabin trunk and other articles that he had removed from Mrs Greenhill’s flat by taxi to King’s Cross station. There he had pawned two of her rings.

  He was picked up on Saturday, 18 October, as he stepped out of a telephone box in Rhyl, north Wales. After being cautioned by DCI Salisbury, Trevor said: ‘It wasn’t murder. There was never any intent to murder. I have never used violence to anyone in my life before. What came over me I do not know. After I hit her my mind went completely blank and is still like that now. Something seemed to crack in my head.’

  It was not surprising that the name ‘Trevor’ was familiar to DCS Cherrill – the sixty-two-year-old Yorkshireman had spent nearly all of his previous forty years in jail. In that time he had in fact known only eleven months of freedom, and had just been released from prison when he called on Mrs Greenhill, with robbery, it seems, in mind. He had never before, however, been involved in any kind of violence, the crimes for which he was so often incarcerated being those of petty theft and fraud. Posing as Commander Crichton, Sir Charles Warren, or Lord Herbert, he would ease money from any susceptible source, preferably female. His apparent aim was to avoid work and to live in the style and comfort he affected in his impostures. His subconscious intention seems to have been to dramatise and magnify a vacuous existence by making himself the centre of attention in police investigations and in a court of law. He must also have unconsciously sought the organised security of life in prisons, where he was known and cared for.

  The murder of Mrs Greenhill is so uncharacteristic and unnecessary, and his stupidity in virtually leaving his calling card, his name and fingerprints, so extraordinary, that he appears to have almost consciously sought the final satisfaction in his old age of being tried on a capital charge and making a spectacular and perfectly legal exit. Certainly he never lost the chance in all his court appearances to address the judge and jury, speaking the utmost humbug with dignity and courtesy, and with his honour apparently unsoiled.

  Trevor was tried at the Old Bailey on 28 and 29 January 1942. Mr Justice Asquith was the judge; Mr LW Byrne appeared for the Crown and Mr John Flowers, KC, and Mr Derek Curtis Bennett for the defence, which tried to prove that the accused was insane.

  Harold Trevor’s greatest moment came when he was asked if he had anything to say before sentence of death was passed. He declared:

  I would like once and for all, finally to say this …that I, as a man who stands, so to speak, at death’s door, would like to confirm all I have already said regarding this lady’s death, that I have no knowledge of it. Even as I am speaking the moving finger is writing on the wall, and the words, once written, can never be recalled. I sincerely hope that each of you, gentlemen of the jury, and the judge too, in passing sentence, will remember these words – that when each of you, as you surely must some day, yourself stand before a higher tribunal, you will receive a greater measure of mercy than has been meted out to me in this world … If I am called upon to take my stand in the cold grey dawn of the early morning, I pray that God in his mercy will gently turn my mother’s face away as I pass into the shadows. No fear touches my heart. My heart is dead. It died when my mother left me.

  There was much more. And if this were not enough, in the death cell he penned a long farewell in which he wrote: ‘I have lived my life not as I would have liked to live it – but as it was forced upon me by fate. I was educated at a first-class school in Birmingham, and was the friend and playmate of men who are Bishops today. Some of them are sitting in the Episcopal Chairs, while I am waiting the short walk from the condemned cell to the scaffold.’

  He was hanged on 11 March 1942 in Wandsworth Prison by Albert Pierrepoint and Herbert Morris. In the condemned cell he became much distressed and couldn’t eat. He went
to his death in a state of terror, shuffling along the short distance to the drop.

  34

  GORDON CUMMINS

  THE MURDER OF EVELYN OATLEY, 1942

  The fantasies of many murderers are seldom as fantastic as the stories about them perpetrated by some newspapers in the guise of news and truth. Facts are misrepresented, elaborated and dressed up in a feverish style that is supposed to attract the public and sell papers – or in the case of television to fill the space, as it sometimes seem, between the advertisements. Nothing unlocks the crime-writer’s cupboard of clichés more than the sexual murder of a woman or a child, when the murderer is presented as a monster or beast and the victim as pretty, if not attractive, and as innocence personified. In many cases, the victims have been far from pretty and have often been much more sophisticated than the reports suggest. No man is a monster, however monstrous his acts, and it is an unfortunate fact that many sex murderers have been good-looking, good company and good fun.

  Such a one was Gordon Frederick Cummins, aged twenty-eight, who went on a sudden, barbarous murder binge in wartime London in 1942. He killed four women in six days, horribly mutilating three of them. He picked up his victims in West End pubs and clubs, older women, some of them prostitutes, who were on the look-out for pleasant young servicemen to give them a good time.

  Nice-looking, agreeable Gordon Cummins was a most unlikely Ripper. But so was the Yorkshire Ripper, lorry driver Peter Sutcliffe, who at the age of thirty-four was sentenced to life imprisonment on 22 May 1981 for the murder of thirteen women over a period of six years. Another pleasant and plausible lady-killer was Neville Heath, a twenty-nine-year-old ex-air-force officer, who was active four years after Cummins. The two are, in fact, quite similar in many ways. But because Cummins’s atrocities were committed in wartime, they never received the press attention that made the other two men notorious. Nonetheless, the attacks on Cummins’s four known victims are almost unparalleled in their perverted savagery. They are also the most inexplicable. Little has been written about him. The few known facts are these.