As Heath was leaning over I saw a flash and heard a bang. I was surprised there was not a loud bang because Ricky had told me it would make a big noise when it went off … Heath moaned slightly and turned a little towards his front. Ricky said to him: ‘Move over or I’ll give you another dose of the same.’ I saw that he still had the automatic in his hand. Heath seemed to understand what Ricky said, because he moved further over to the left-hand side of the front seat … I heard him breathing very heavily and his head slumped on his chest.
Heath had been shot through the middle of his body. Hulten now occupied the driver’s seat and drove speedily towards Staines. Said Jones: ‘Ricky then told me to go through Heath’s pockets. I leaned over and I heard his breath coming in short gasps. Ricky told me to look for his wallet in the breast pocket of his jacket. I felt in that pocket but did not find the wallet. I found it instead in the left-hand outside pocket of his overcoat.’ She emptied the dying man’s pockets, including his trouser pockets. She removed his wristwatch. That and the pound notes, pennies, fountain pen, silver pencil and cigarette case she found were given to Hulten. Everything else was thrown out of a window: his cheque book, identity card, licence, petrol coupons, photos and letters. Paralysed by a bullet deflecting off his spine, Heath died of haemorrhage within fifteen minutes, drowning in his own blood.
His body was dumped in a ditch on the edge of Knowle Green near Staines. Jones found the bullet that had killed Heath – it had ricocheted off the front nearside door, striking the dashboard and dropping to the floor. It too was thrown from a window.
The couple drove back to London, parking the Ford in the old Gaumont cinema car park behind Hammersmith Broadway at about 4 am. They wiped it clean of fingerprints, ate in the Black and White café and then asked some cab drivers there to take them home. None of them would, so they walked. In Jones’s room they examined all their trophies before going to bed about 5 am on Saturday, 7 October.
Three hours later, at about eight o’clock, an electrician’s apprentice, John Jones, was walking along the Great Southwest Road that leads to Staines when he came across the wallet, identity card, driving licence and cheque book that had belonged to George Heath. The body was discovered soon after 9 am by an auxiliary fireman attached to the National Fire Service, Robert Balding. He had just finished a night duty at the Ship Garage, London Road, and was taking a short cut across Knowle Green on his way home.
Tyre marks on the grass verge helped to identify the car. Police enquiries about the murdered man traced his movements the previous night and a description of his car, registration RD 8955, was circulated to all police stations.
Meanwhile, Jones and Hulten got up at ten to eleven. He went out to a barber’s shop at 16 Queen Caroline Street and sold Heath’s wristwatch to a hairdresser, Morris Levene, for £5. The fountain pen and silver pencil were sold to Len Bexley for eight shillings. ‘He said he was broke and wanted some money,’ said Bexley, who then went to a pub with Hulten before returning with him to 311 King Street. On the way there, Hulten bought a small bunch of flowers for Georgina.
The three then took a taxi to the White City Stadium where they bet on the greyhound races. Jones looked very tired, according to Bexley, but the couple, he said, seemed very fond of each other. She won some money, and when she and Hulten returned to King Street she asked her landlady, Mrs Evans, to mind some money for her, £7 in all. ‘I said to her,’ said Mrs Evans later, ‘if she had any money at any time, as the buzz-bombs are about, I put anything of mine in the oven, and let me put it in the oven for her … and she did.’ Later, Mrs Evans, like Bexley and Levene, said Hulten was ‘a very decent chap’. The couple went out for a meal and then saw a film, Christmas Holiday, starring Deanna Durbin.
On Sunday, 8 October, Ricky Hulten spent the afternoon with Joyce and most of the night with Georgina, during which they drove about in the Ford V8, using it as a hired car, having further unknown adventures and returning to King Street – the car was parked behind an air-raid shelter – about 7.30 am. They slept until about 1.45 pm. When Hulten left King Street, he picked up the car, saw Joyce at the bakery where she worked, drove to his camp near Newbury in Berkshire, and called on Joyce about 6 pm, when he had promised to visit Betty Jones. He parked the car in Lurgan Avenue.
At about ten-past eight on the night of Monday, 9 October, PC William Walters observed the Ford and its number, RD 8955, when he was out on his beat. After telephoning Hammersmith police station from a police box, he was soon joined by Inspector Read and a sergeant, who arrived at the scene in a police car. All three waited, PC Walters at the rear of the Ford.
At about nine o’clock, Hulten emerged from Joyce’s house and entered the stolen Ford. Walters dashed up, seized his hand, and said: ‘Is this your car, sir?’ Hulten was silent. Walters shouted – the police car put its lights on and the other policemen ran up. Hulten was dragged out and searched. In his left-hand hip pocket there was a Remington automatic, the safety catch cocked; ammunition was found in a trouser pocket. He was taken to Hammersmith police station, where he said he was 2nd Lt Richard Allen, 501 Parachute Infantry Regiment, US Army.
The police communicated with the American authorities, as an act passed that year had laid down that no American serviceman could be tried in a British court. At 3 am on Tuesday, 10 September, Lt Robert Earl de Mott, aged twenty-seven – an American CID officer who had once been a lawyer in Denver, Colorado – interviewed the suspect and established his real name and that he was a deserter. Hulten said he had found the car abandoned near Newbury. He was removed to the American CID HQ in Piccadilly and questioned further. This time he said he had spent Friday night with Georgina Grayson.
On Wednesday morning, he offered to show de Mott where Georgina lived. He did so, and two British inspectors entered the house at noon, found Jones in bed and took her to Hammersmith police station, where she made a statement and was allowed to go home, not as yet being thought to have been involved in the shooting of Heath.
That afternoon, at about half-past four, she happened to go into a cleaners’ in Hammersmith where she met a War Reserve constable, Henry Kimberley, whom she had not seen for two years – not since she had been a very young waitress. He had gone to the cleaners’ to pick up a suit. She said: ‘Hello.’ Struck by her haggard appearance, he remarked how tired she looked. ‘I should think so,’ she said. ‘I’ve been over at the police station for hours about this murder.’ She pointed to a newspaper she held, which reported the murder of George Heath. The papers called it the ‘Cleft Chin Murder’ and the ‘Inky Fingers Murder’, both descriptions applying to Heath. Kimberley asked her why that should worry her if she had nothing to do with the murder. She said she knew the man they had got inside – adding that he couldn’t have done it as he was with her all Friday night. Before she left, he commented once again on her worn-out appearance. She said to Kimberley: ‘If you had seen someone do what I have seen done, you wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.’
A few hours later, Inspector Tansill and Constable Kimberley called at 311 King Street. Betty Jones arrived at the same time. Alone for a moment with Kimberley, she asked him why he had brought the inspector. ‘I think you should tell him the truth,’ saiKimberley. ‘All right, I will,’ she said.
She made a full confession, implying that Hulten had led her astray and that she was only obeying his orders. She denied helping him carry the body out of the car. A fortnight later she elaborated this idea, writing to the police and saying she had acted throughout in fear of Hulten’s threats and violence. This was to be the mainspring of her defence. Hearing of her confession, Hulten made a statement of his own, blaming her for egging him on ‘to do something exciting’ and participating far more than she had admitted. ‘If it hadn’t been for her, I wouldn’t have shot Heath,’ he told the police.
The American government waived its rights on the Visiting Forces Act and allowed Hulten to be tried in a British court.
Hulten and Betty Jones appeared be
fore Mr Justice Charles at the Old Bailey, on Tuesday, 16 January 1945. Mr LA Byrne led for the prosecution, Mr John Maud and Mr JD Casswell for Hulten and Jones respectively. Mrs Lloyd Lane also appeared for Jones, the first woman barrister to defend a prisoner accused of murder. And for the first time in legal history, a female accused in a murder trial was allowed to appear hatless and with no covering on her head.
After a six-day trial, both the accused were found guilty and were sentenced to death. Eighteen-year-old Betty Jones was taken shrieking and sobbing down to the cells. Appeals pleading manslaughter were heard – and dismissed – in February.
Elizabeth Jones was reprieved, just two days before the date set for her execution. There was no reprieve for Karl Hulten, though. He was hanged by Tom Pierrepoint and Harry Critchell at Pentonville Prison five days after his twenty-third birthday, on 8 March 1945. The war in Europe ended two months later.
Betty Jones was released from jail on licence in January 1954. She was twenty-seven.
36
JACK TRATSART
THE MURDERS OF JOHN AND CLAIRE TRATSART, 1945
Lyons Corner Houses – tea rooms and restaurants of some distinction – were celebrated features of the London scene for more than fifty years. In their heyday before the Second World War, there were 250 of them, employing hordes of swift-footed, aproned waitresses known as ‘nippies’. The first Corner House was opened in Piccadilly in 1894, and the last bearing that name closed in 1969. They were phased out in the 1960s, being converted into self-service restaurants under the name of Jolyon. The Corner Houses were large, bright, cheerful establishments, providing cheap but agreeable teas and meals. They were popular places of rendezvous and formed the familiar setting of many tête-à-têtes and scenes of domestic affection, argument, parting and celebration. The Oxford Street Corner House, near Tottenham Court Road, was once the setting for a very unusual double murder.
At about 5 pm on 20 April 1945, the ground-floor restaurant was crowded, buzzing with conversation and busy nippies. The end of the war was in sight – the surrender of Germany was only a fortnight away. Few people glanced at the family of six gathered around one of the tables, although one or two of those sitting nearby noticed that a young man wearing glasses was fooling, so it seemed, with a pistol. A water pistol or an air-pistol, they assumed, naturally enough as the other members of the family continued to laugh and joke as if nothing at all was amiss.
Then, six shots cut across the tea-time chatter.
Customers screamed and some ducked below tables, as three members of the family fell from their chairs, their heads and bodies spurting blood. The young man wearing glasses stood over them, a smoking gun in his right hand.
Two soldiers, quicker to react than most, seized him, and the police and a doctor were sent for. The initial panic soon subsided. After five years of war, the Blitz and flying bombs, Londoners were accustomed to violent sights and sounds. The Corner House staff soon calmed their customers and persuaded them to stay put, coolly screening off the scene of the crime. No more teas were served that day. Meanwhile, the first police constable to arrive on the scene – he had hurried in from Oxford Street – informed the local police station in Tottenham Court Road.
By the time DI Robert Higgins arrived, the bodies were being removed. One man was dead; a woman was dying; and a young man was seriously injured, shot through the jaw. The bespectacled gunman, still guarded by the two soldiers, sat calmly in a chair. Higgins asked where the gun was. No one could tell – no one knew. He approached the gunman, assuming that he had concealed the murder weapon somewhere on his person, and after introducing himself Higgins asked the young man for the gun. Speaking clearly and firmly the killer informed the police officer that as he was a detective it was up to him to find it.
A search of the gunman and of the floor-space round him produced no gun, although nineteen bullets were found in a pocket. Higgins was becoming anxious when something odd in one of the light fittings on a pillar caught his eye. Through the bowl-like glass of the lights he saw the silhouette of a gun. It had been thrown there after the shooting, but to Higgins’s amazement no one in the restaurant had noticed the gunman doing this. No one, it also appeared, had actually seen the shooting – presumably because, on hearing the bangs, everyone automatically dived for cover under the nearest table or chair.
The short-sighted young man was removed to Tottenham Court Road police station for questioning. To this he was not at all averse and spoke freely, his words being carefully written down in longhand as he sipped at a cup of tea.
His name was Jack Adrian Tratsart. He was twenty-seven, unmarried, and a toolmaker by trade. His father, John Tratsart, was a Belgian, who had come to Britain before the First World War and had settled in Norbury, south London. He designed shoes for a living. He and his wife had six children. When she died in 1937 he married his housekeeper. After the start of the Second World War, the Tratsarts left London for Northampton, except for the eldest son, Jack, who remained ‘for business reasons’ in Norbury.
As the war came to an end, the family in Northampton began to think about returning to Norbury. A meeting to discuss the move was arranged by Jack, who had plans of his own. It was decided that Mr Tratsart (aged fifty-seven), his son Hugh, and two of his daughters (Claire, twenty-eight, and Anne, thirteen) should meet Jack and Mr Tratsart’s first wife’s middle-aged sister, Miss Coemans, at the Lyons Corner House in Oxford Street.
Claire had been an epileptic for seven years. Young Hugh suffered from a kind of palsy. Jack himself was an insomniac and a manic depressive. He had been to see a specialist about his depressions, but having no faith in doctors he soon terminated his visits. The casualties and suffering caused by the war used to excite his concern. He was particularly outraged, according to his aunt, by the Italians’ treatment of the Abyssinians. As it was, life seemed to him to be full of almost intolerable pain, delusions and difficulty, and when disabilities were added, as in the case of his sister Claire and brother Hugh, the sufferers might as well be dead. For that matter, so might his father, whom he hated and despised.
Thus reasoning, he resolved to kill the three of them and then commit suicide himself, and he decided that the family gathering in the Lyons Corner House would provide the best occasion for the deed. He already had a revolver, bought two years previously ‘from a sailor’ for £5. ‘They say that opportunity only comes once,’ remarked Jack Tratsart.
In the long statement he made to the police he declared:
I have considered killing my brother Hugh and my sister Claire for some time, four or five years really, ever since I came back from Belgium when I was nineteen. My sister Claire is an epileptic and my brother Hugh has never been able to use his hands – a sort of semi-paralysis. They’ve never stood a chance and my father didn’t help them in their deficiencies. He is miserably, terribly bigoted, and the worst person to have as a father. You know what an epileptic is? She can’t get married, and her life isn’t worth living whatsoever. My sister Claire is a staunch Roman Catholic, and all she thinks about is going to heaven. She’s got every possible disadvantage and couldn’t keep her job. I have been contemplating killing myself for a number of years. I tried once, but failed. That was in Belgium. I was the only one of the family who could help Claire and Hugh. My father only thought of making money. I had decided to commit suicide, so I thought I would do a good job while I was about it.
So on the afternoon of 20 April, Jack Tratsart travelled up to London with his aunt to meet the other members of his family at the Oxford Street Corner House. In a pocket was his gun and twenty-five bullets, six of which had been loaded in the breech. The family took their seats and gave their orders to the waitress. The three women – Anne, Claire and the aunt – sat opposite the three men, Mr Tratsart, Hugh and Jack. Said the latter:
I sat in the right position so that nobody could interfere with me shooting them and myself. We all sat talking normal gossip. I got the gun out and the funniest thing h
appened. I tried three times to fire it and couldn’t. I didn’t know you have to pull the top back. I decided to shoot Claire first then my father, then Hugh, then myself. I pointed the gun across the table at Claire and pulled the trigger. But nothing happened and only Hugh saw me and grinned. Ten minutes later I repeated the performance and pulled hard at the trigger, with the gun only about two feet from Claire. But again nothing happened. They did not seem to realise that I was going to kill, and when my aunt asked, jokingly, what I had there, I said: ‘Only a water pistol.’ They joked about it and I put it under the table. Then I carried my plan through. I fired two bullets at Claire, but did not see what happened. I then fired two at my father and two at Hugh, coming round in a line. I was then standing up and pointed the gun at my head and pulled the trigger once or twice. But nothing happened.
Mr Tratsart died almost at once. His daughter died on the way to hospital. Hugh, shot through the chin, survived.
Jack Tratsart was charged with double murder and attempted murder. After a preliminary hearing at Marlborough Street court he was sent for trial at the Old Bailey. But he never appeared there. Doctors and psychologists who examined him in prison decided he was unfit to plead. He was declared insane and sent to Broadmoor, where two years later he died.
Before he died he learnt how to play tennis and to play the piano. He became quite good at both. He also began writing a book, which opened: ‘This is a world of youth, all men over forty scram.’
37
NEVILLE HEATH
THE MURDER OF MARGERY GARDNER, 1946
It is difficult to comprehend why some men who kill women should go on to grossly mutilate their bodies. Such obscene acts may have some origins, probably sexual, in things that happened when the murderer was child. But, as with Jack the Ripper, mutilation with a knife or other instrument would seem to be the ultimate thrill in the murderer’s mind, not the actual murder.
Murder of the Black Museum 1875-1975: The Dark Secrets Behind a Hundred Years of the Most Notorious Crimes in England Page 38