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

by Honeycombe, Gordon

  Gordon Cummins was a well-educated boy, of good family and of more than average height (5 ft 7 in), but unreliable, dishonest and unable to hold down a steady job. His father was the superintendent of an approved school. Cummins was born in New Earswick, to the north of York. He was educated at Llandoveris County School, and when his family moved to Northampton he attended the technical school there before going to work in London in a laboratory. He married a theatre producer’s secretary in 1936; they had no children. Called up in 1941, two years after the outbreak of war, he joined the RAF, became an air cadet, trained for the air-crew, and was billeted in the New Year in north London. His air force colleagues remarked on his phoney Oxford accent and pretensions and called him ‘The Duke’.

  On Saturday, 8 February 1942, he left an RAF establishment in a requisitioned block of flats in St John’s Wood, visited his wife, borrowed some money and then went into the West End for a night on the town. Early on Sunday, the body of forty-year-old chemist’s assistant Miss Evelyn Margaret Hamilton was discovered by an electrician in a brick-built air-raid shelter in Montagu Place, W1, just north of Marble Arch. She had been in London on her way from Hornchurch in Essex, where she worked, to her home in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Her clothes were disarranged and her scarf had been wound around her head. But Cummins’s motive for murder, apart from an unexplained lust to kill, seems to have been theft: her handbag had vanished and with it £80. Although she had been strangled, there was no sign of sexual assault.

  This was only a prelude.

  That night, a thirty-five-year-old former actress and Windmill showgirl (now a prostitute), Mrs Evelyn Oatley, also known as Nita Ward, encountered Cummins and took him home to her Wardour Street flat. Here she was strangled. Her nearly naked and crudely mutilated body was found on her bed on Monday, 10 February. After she was strangled, her throat had been cut, and the lower part of her body cut open with a tin-opener or a knife. Nearby was a pair of curling tongs.

  A few days later, on Thursday, 13 February, another prostitute, Mrs Margaret Florence Lowe, aged forty-three and known as Pearl, was murdered in her tiny flat in Gosfield Street, W1, parallel to Great Portland Street. She was strangled on her divan bed with a silk stocking and then cut and disfigured. By the body were the knife and razor used on her. There was also a candle. In the kitchen was a half-empty bottle of stout. While DCI Greeno, Sir Bernard Spilsbury and DI Higgins were still at the scene of the Lowe murder, they received news of yet a fourth.

  This time the victim was Mrs Doris Jouannet, aged thirty-two. The wife of an elderly hotel manager, she was also known as Doris Robson. Strangled with a scarf, and with her naked body obscenely mutilated, she lay in the two-roomed ground-floor flat she shared with her husband in Sussex Gardens, north-west of Marble Arch. A fountain pen and a comb had been taken from the flat. As with Miss Hamilton, her home town was Newcastle-upon-Tyne. DCI Greeno, who with DCS Cherrill was investigating the murders, realised after the discovery of the bodies of Mrs Lowe and Mrs Jouannet that a new Ripper was at large. Even the case-hardened Bernard Spilsbury was moved to say, on viewing Mrs Lowe’s injuries, that they were ‘quite dreadful’ and that their perpetrator was a savage sexual maniac.

  On Friday, 14 February, Cummins, now insatiable but careless, chatted up Mrs Greta Heywood in Piccadilly. They went for a drink and a sandwich in the Trocadero and then walked down Haymarket. She said later that he became unpleasantly forward, so she said goodbye and tried to leave him. ‘You must let me kiss you goodnight,’ he said, trying to do so. Having no wish to be his Valentine, she hurried away in the blackout. He chased after her, she claimed, catching up with her in St Alban’s Street. In a dark doorway he seized her by the throat and began to choke her. She struggled in vain and passed out. But her life was saved by a delivery boy who happened to be taking some drink to a bottle-party in the nearby Captain’s Cabin. He heard some scuffling, saw a flash of silk stocking as Mrs Heywood’s legs gave way and went to investigate. Cummins ran off, leaving behind an RAF gas mask that bore his name, rank and number (525987).

  A few hours later, still bent on a fifth kill, he acquired another companion, a young prostitute called Mrs Mulcahy, in Regent Street and returned with her in a taxi to her Paddington flat in Southwick Street. On the way there he gave her five £1 notes. It had been snowing and was very cold. Mrs Mulcahy lit the gas fire, and as her room was icy she kept her boots on while she removed her clothes. Cummins had hardly removed his great coat and belt when a ‘strange expression’, as she later described it, came over his face. He gripped her neck and squeezed. Mrs Mulcahy kicked him hard on the shins, making him cry out. As if recovering his senses he shook his head, put on his coat, and left, but not before giving her another £5 in notes. Perhaps he panicked, fearful of the noise he himself had made and of being caught in the act again. This time he stupidly left behind his belt.

  This, along with the gas mask and the £1 notes, enabled DCI Greeno to trace Cummins to his St John’s Wood billet, where Greeno at once came up against an apparently perfect alibi – Cummins’s name in the billet pass book showed that he had reported back to the billet and been signed in before midnight all that week, and must accordingly have been in bed when Evelyn Oatley Mrs Lowe and Mrs Jouannet had been murdered. He, of course, when interviewed, denied having had anything to do with the killings. It was not until Greeno ascertained that the airmen in the billet often vouched for each other’s return, and that on the nights in question Cummins, leaving the building by way of a fire escape, had gone out with another airman after being checked in, that the alibis were proved false.

  There was enough other evidence to clinch the case against Cummins, though. A white metal cigarette case belonging to Mrs Lowe was found in a pocket of his tunic; items belonging to Miss Hamilton were found in a dustbin outside the billet. The fountain pen belonging to Mrs Jouannet, and marked ‘DJ’, was found in his number-one uniform, and a cigarette case belonging to Mrs Oatley was discovered in a refrigerator in the billet. In her flat a print from a left thumb on a mirror and a print of a left little finger on the tin opener were identified as his. In Mrs Lowe’s flat, fingerprints from a left hand were detected on the bottle of stout and a candlestick. Cummins was left-handed. He was arrested on Sunday, 16 February.

  Two other murders, then unsolved, were later attributed to him: that of nineteen-year-old Miss Maple Church, whose body had been found the previous October in a bombed house in Hampstead Road, near Euston station, and that of a Mrs Humphries, whose body was discovered in Gloucester Crescent, north-east of Regent’s Park.

  Gordon Cummins was charged on 17 February 1942 with the murders of Mrs Oatley, Mrs Lowe, and Mrs Jouannet, and on 20 February with assaulting Mrs Heywood and Mrs Mulcahy. Finally, on 27 March, the murder of Miss Hamilton was added to the list.

  While on remand in Brixton Prison, Cummins was escorted to and from prison by DI Robert Higgins, who with a detective sergeant from Tottenham Court Road police station had discovered the body of Mrs Lowe after forcing open the door of her flat with a jemmy. Higgins was also with Cummins in court, and in his memoirs had this to say of his charge:

  He chatted to me on everyday subjects as though he had not a care in the world. He seemed to be completely unaware of the seriousness of the charges against him … He had an irritating habit of wanting to shake hands each time we met … Observed at close quarters, he was not an obviously unpleasant person … He was inclined to be slow and steady in his speech. From the physical point of view he appeared quite normal, being well built and proportioned, and would not have attracted special notice if put among a group of ordinary people. I did, however, take particular note of his unusually large, strong hands, which had been well kept. He was deceptively gentle in manner and quite good-looking – a man not unattractive to women.

  The trial of Gordon Cummins began at the Old Bailey on Monday, 27 April 1942 before Mr Justice Asquith, and he was indicted, as was usual, on just one count: the murder of Evelyn Oatley. The prose
cutor was Mr GB McClure, KC. Cummins was defended by Mr John Flowers, KC. The evidence was conclusive and the trial was brief, ending the following day on 28 April. The jury took thirty-five minutes to find him guilty and he was sentenced to death.

  Gordon Cummins was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint and Harry Kirk in Wandsworth Prison on 25 June, during an air-raid. His wife, who had stood by him throughout, visited him until the day of his execution, believing, it seems, that he was totally innocent, as he himself continued to claim. The post mortem on his body, as with many other executed murderers, was carried out by the pathologist who had examined the murderer’s victims – in this case, Sir Bernard Spilsbury.

  35

  JONES AND HULTEN

  THE MURDER OF GEORGE HEATH, 1944

  No full-length study has been made of the relationship between murder and wartime, when official military murder is rife. Some connections undoubtedly exist, as is shown by the increase and the casual nature of wartime murders, when life seems cheap. Living is difficult, passions are raised and people are on the move. Many post-war murders also had their roots in wartime, when the imagination of boys fired by experiences of death and glory, by the guns their fathers wore and used, sought some equivalent peace-time realisation. Then there were also the demobilised servicemen, their reason and feelings marred and bent by slaughter. In fact, while the majority of all murderers have previous criminal records, another large proportion, related to the first, are servicemen or ex-servicemen.

  In the autumn of 1944, the Allies were following up the D-day invasion on all fronts in Europe and in the Pacific. The liberation of Paris on 23 August had preceded the recapture of Antwerp and Brussels as well as the Allied advance through Belgium, Holland and France to the borders of Germany, forestalled for a time by the Arnhem disaster and the German counter-offensive in the Ardennes. British forces invaded Greece on 5 October. Meanwhile, V2 rockets had begun falling on the south-east of England and on London, as well as doodlebugs – the flying bombs.

  In the late afternoon of Tuesday, 3 October 1944, an American GI met a striptease artiste in wartime London. He was Private Karl Gustav Hulten, aged twenty-two, dark-haired and Swedish in origin, and absent without leave for six weeks from his paratroop regiment. He was now passing himself off as a lieutenant and called himself Ricky (Richard Allen). She was Elizabeth Maud Jones, aged eighteen, fair-haired and blue-eyed. Her stage-name had been Georgina Grayson, and it was as ‘Georgina’ that Betty Jones was introduced to ‘Ricky’ in a little café in Queen Caroline Street, Hammersmith Broadway, by Len Bexley, a coach trimmer who happened to know them both.

  Said Hulten: ‘I saw Len Bexley sitting there with a young lady. I took another seat, but he asked me to come over and join them, which I did.’ She said: ‘I thought he was a gentleman.’ ‘We were there a while in the cafeteria,’ said Hulten, ‘and afterwards we all got up together and left together. Mrs Jones and I walked down towards the Broadway. I asked her if she would care to come out later on … She agreed and then she left us. I told Bexley: “I don’t believe she will turn up.’”

  Hulten went off to see a girlfriend, Joyce Cook, whom he had only known for three days. They had met the previous Sunday by chance at the local Gaumont cinema. Betty Jones returned to her rented room in 311 King Street, Hammersmith.

  Born in South Wales on 5 July 1926, she had married at the age of sixteen. Her husband was a Welsh soldier and ten years older. On their wedding day he struck her and she left him there and then. Two months later in January 1943 she came to London, obtaining employment as a barmaid, usherette, waitress and ultimately striptease dancer at the Panama and Blue Lagoon clubs. But from the spring of 1944 she was out of work, living on the separation allowance of £11 5s 6d a week provided by her husband, who was then serving abroad. He went missing in September, and the letter confirming that fact was delivered to her on 13 October – the day she was formally charged with murder.

  On the night of Tuesday, 3 October, she turned up at the Broadway cinema at 11.30 pm as arranged, but Hulten failed to make an appearance. She was walking back to her room in King Street when a 2 1/2 ton ten-wheeled US army truck pulled up in front of her, driven by Hulten, now in a leather jerkin and khaki slacks. He hailed her and she climbed into the huge truck beside him. ‘I told her I was a paratrooper,’ he said, ‘and she said that was a dangerous profession to be in. I told her it was … She said she would like to do something exciting, like becoming a “gun moll”, like they do back in the States. At first I thought she was kidding … I then explained to her that we had a stolen truck. We drove on towards Reading.’ He also told her that he had broken into a pub and had run around with a mob in Chicago. He showed her a stolen pistol.

  At about 1 am, just outside Reading, they passed a girl on a bicycle. Hulten turned the truck around, drove past the girl again and stopped the truck. He got out, and as the girl cycled by he shoved her over. She scrambled away, and he seized her purse, which was hanging from the bicycle’s handlebars. After throwing the purse up to Betty Jones, he got into the cab (it had a left-hand drive) and they drove back to London. Their haul was a few shillings and some clothing coupons, which he later sold for £1. ‘During the night,’ she said, ‘he taught me to drive.’ At about 5 am, he dropped her off in King Street, parked the truck in a car park and slept there.

  He saw her again on the Wednesday night, but they didn’t make another foray in the truck. Instead, they went to bed in her rented room. Hulten discovered she had a rash on her stomach. ‘That put me cavy,’ he said, and accordingly, although they slept together, they went only as far as ‘the next thing to sexual intercourse’.

  On Thursday, 5 October, he called on her about 5 pm. They went out for a meal and then to the Gaumont cinema in Hammersmith. On leaving the cinema at about 8.45 pm, they entered a café. ‘Just as we got to the door,’ she said, ‘the sirens sounded.’ After the air raid they went to the car park, got in the truck and drove towards Reading again, to a pub near Sonning which Hulten intended to rob. But either his nerve failed or something disturbed him, for he drove the truck back to London, to Marble Arch.

  ‘When we got there,’ Hulten recalled, ‘she suggested that we rob a cab. She pointed one out to me and I followed it … out to Cricklewood.’ Having used the truck to force the taxi to stop, Hulten pulled a gun on the taxi driver and said: ‘Let me have all your money.’ However, the presence of a passenger in the back seat alarmed him and he fled. He and Mrs Jones drove slowly back through deserted, blacked-out London to Marble Arch. In Edgware Road, at Jones’s suggestion, he offered a young girl pedestrian a lift to Paddington, where she hoped to catch a train to Bristol. Hulten offered to take her as far as Reading. He put her suitcase, which was tied with rope, into the back, and she sat in the cab between Jones and Hulten, thankful for the lift.

  Said Hulten: ‘When we were almost through Runnymede Park going towards Windsor, I stopped the truck off the road. I told the girls we had a flat tyre. We all got out … I told Georgina to get the girl’s back to me. She said: “All right.” Georgina gave the girl a cigarette and lit one for herself … I hit the girl over the head with an iron bar.’ As she did not fall, he put an arm-lock around her neck, forced her to the ground and knelt on her back as Jones went through the helpless girl’s pockets. She found about five shillings. ‘By this time the girl had ceased struggling. I picked up her shoulders and Georgina picked up her feet. We carried her over and dumped her about three feet from the edge of a stream.’ The girl survived.

  The robbers returned to Georgina’s bed in King Street and stayed there till 3 pm on Friday afternoon. When Hulten left King Street an hour or so later he went to see his other girlfriend, Joyce. They went out to the pictures, returned to her house in Fulham Palace Road, and he left about 11 pm.

  Betty Jones had been expecting her American friend since six o’clock. She now had a very bad cold. Despite this and his broken promise she went out with him apparently without complaint or reservation wh
en he whistled for her down in the windy street. They decided to rob a taxi. They were sheltering from the wind in a doorway opposite Cadby Hall in Hammersmith Road when a grey Ford V8 saloon slowly approached them as if seeking their custom. Betty Jones called out – ‘Taxi!’ – and the car stopped.

  It was a private-hire car, driven by thirty-four-year-old George Heath. Earlier that night he had twice called for work at a Godfrey Davis garage in Eccleston Street, the last time at about 11.05 pm. But no work was forthcoming and he set off on his own to find some passing trade. His charge for taking his two young customers to the Chiswick roundabout marking the end of the Great West Road was an exorbitant ten shillings. Between them Jones and Hulten then had less than £2; she had 10s 3d. They expected to have more money soon.

  The Ford set off with its two passengers sitting in the back, Hulten behind the driver. It was now about 2 am. Once past the Chiswick roundabout, Hulten, the loaded gun in his lap, told the driver: ‘We’ll get out here.’ Heath brought the car to a halt at the kerb and leaned to his left over the back of the front seat to open the near-side door for the female passenger. Hulten fired – accidentally, he said later, claiming his jacket sleeve caught on something on the door and jerked his arm as he started to get up. Later, Betty Jones recalled: