Their executions caused an outcry, reinforcing the demands for the abolition of the death penalty. But very little was said or done about Mrs de Antiquis and her six children – except that the police gave her a medal commemorating her husband’s bravery.
Terence Rolt was released from prison on licence in June 1956.
Sir Bernard Spilsbury committed suicide two months after Jenkins and Geraghty were hanged; he was seventy. He had never fully recovered from the wartime deaths of his wife and two of his sons. His mental and physical health had deteriorated: he had become absent-minded and unobservant, and had suffered from several strokes and arthritis in his hands. On 17 December, after leaving the Hampstead hotel where he lived, he performed a post mortem, gave his staff Christmas boxes, destroyed notebooks and papers in his laboratory in University College, Gower Street, and wrote out his last post-mortem report. After an early dinner at his club he returned to his laboratory and turned on the gas. A post mortem said he died of coronary thrombosis and carbon monoxide poisoning. He was cremated at Golders Green.
39
DONALD THOMAS
THE MURDER OF PC EDGAR, 1948
Another petty criminal shot a policeman to avoid arrest in 1948. This case was different in that the gunman had a north London and middle-class background – and, because of a temporary suspension of capital punishment, he was never hanged.
Shortly after 8 pm on 13 February 1948, a woman was walking along a suburban road, Broadfields Avenue in north London, with her brother. They heard three shots coming from the direction of another road, Wades Hill, and then a man ran past them, in and out of the street lights. The couple found a badly wounded policeman lying in the drive of 112 Wades Hill. They summoned help.
The policeman, PC Nathaniel Edgar, aged thirty-three, married with two children, had been patrolling in plain clothes an area called Winchmore Hill on the look-out for any break-ins. There had been a spate of burglaries in the Southgate district. Seeing a young man acting suspiciously, he had stopped to question him, going as far as writing the man’s name and address in his notebook, when the suspect suddenly pulled out a gun, fired three times and fled. PC Edgar, shot in the back – in the base of the spine, the buttocks and right thigh – was able to tell his colleagues what happened – ‘I got his identity card and name … The pocket book’s in my inside pocket’ – before he died an hour later in hospital. The notebook referred to ‘Thomas Donald 247 Cambridge Road, Enfield. BEAH 257/2’.
Donald George Thomas turned out to have a record. He was twenty-three and had been born and brought up in Edmonton, a suburb adjacent to both Enfield and Southgate. A member of the Boys’ Brigade, he had been educated at a good school where he had become the cricket captain and had done well academically. However, he had been put on probation several times, and once, when he was sixteen, was sent to an approved school. Called up for military service in January 1945, the last year of the Second World War, when he was nineteen, he had soon deserted. After nearly two years on the run he gave himself up and was sentenced to 160 days in detention. On being returned to his unit, however, he absconded again. This was in October 1947, since when the army had been on the look-out for him.
The police now joined the hunt, but failed to find him at his Enfield address. They appealed for help on the radio as well as in the papers, saying that they wished to interview Donald George Thomas as he ‘might be able to help them in their enquiries’. It was apparently the first time that this familiar formula was used in a press release.
As a result, a Mr Winkless, living in Camberwell, south London, got in touch with the police. He had known Thomas for about three months, and within that time Mrs Winkless had fallen passionately in love with the debonair younger man and had absconded with him, leaving her home, her husband and her three children.
Her photograph, supplied by Mr Winkless, was published in the papers on 17 February. It was seen that morning by a Mrs Smeed, the landlady of a house converted into bed-sits in Clapham. She immediately telephoned the police, saying that the woman in the picture was, she thought, in the top flat with a young man.
Four policemen arrived a few minutes later and it was agreed that Mrs Smeed should, as usual, take a breakfast tray up to her lodgers. This she did, closely attended by the police. She put the tray down outside the door of the top-floor room, knocked and said that breakfast was outside. There was a pause before a key turned in the lock. The door opened an inch or so.
Simultaneously the police and Thomas, in his underpants, glimpsed each other. The police rushed forward, preventing him from shutting the door. He sprang for the bed, in which was the shrieking Mrs Winkless and a Luger pistol under the pillow, but was overpowered and disarmed before he could use the gun. He said: ‘You were lucky. I might just as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.’
Bullets from the Luger matched those extracted from PC Edgar. Mrs Winkless made a statement saying that Thomas had told her about his involvement in the shooting. Seventeen rounds of ammunition were found in the bedroom as well as a jemmy and a rubber cosh.
Donald Thomas was tried at the Old Bailey in April 1948, before Mr Justice Hilbery, and was found guilty and sentenced to death. But the Home Secretary had announced that no executions would be carried out while the House of Commons debated an experimental five-year suspension of the death penalty. So Donald Thomas did not hang.
Nor did James Camb, a ship’s steward who had been sentenced to death in March, also by Mr Justice Hilbery, for the murder of twenty-six-year-old Eileen Gibson, known as ‘Gay’, a first-class passenger on the Durban Castle en route from Cape Town to Southampton. She was believed to have been strangled and her body, which was never found, pushed through the porthole of Cabin 126.
The sentences on Donald Thomas and Camb were commuted to life imprisonment. Soon afterwards the ‘no hanging’ clause, passed in the Commons by twenty-three votes, was deleted from the Criminal Justice Bill in June in the House of Lords by 181 votes to 28. Lord Goddard, making his maiden speech, spoke against the amendment. The death penalty was restored. Nonetheless, a Royal Commission was set up in May 1949 to consider whether capital punishment should be modified or limited.
James Camb was released from prison in 1959. Donald Thomas was released on licence in April 1962.
Between 1909 and 1949, life imprisonment lasted on average for eleven years. No one was detained for more than twenty years during this period and only a few served as many as fifteen years. Most lifers now serve ten years or less. However, in a few cases, life can still mean life.
40
HARRY LEWIS
THE MURDER OF HARRY MICHAELSON, 1948
In the early hours of Sunday, 26 December 1948, Boxing Day, the night porter at Furzecroft, a large block of flats in George Street, Marylebone, was startled out of his night-time reverie by a cry for help. It came from the basement. The porter trotted down the interior stairs and saw, standing outside the entrance door of No. 75, one of the basement flats, Mr Harry Saul Michaelson, a well-known commercial artist and cartoonist. Mr Michaelson was dazedly using a towel to dab the blood that spilled from a deep wound on his forehead. Although seriously injured and in pain, he was quite coherent. But he had absolutely no idea how the injury had been sustained. His wife, who lived with him in the basement flat, happened to be away on holiday.
Mr Michaelson was taken to St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, where his condition swiftly worsened: his ribs had been fractured as well as his skull. An operation on his brain was performed, but he died on the 27 December without regaining consciousness. The head wound and his other injuries had clearly not been self-inflicted or caused by accident. But who had struck him, with what, and why?
The police soon answered the first two questions. The assailant had left bloody finger-and palm prints on a tubular metal chair, which proved to be the unwieldy and unusual weapon used to batter Mr Michaelson. The prints matched a set in the Criminal Record Office at Scotland Yard. They belonged to a you
ng known thief, Harry Lewis, aged twenty-one. He was arrested on 18 January 1949 and charged with murder.
His story was of a chance break-in. Penniless at the time, he happened to be on the prowl in George Street when the sight of an open basement window invited his inspection. He clambered over the railings edging the basement area and cautiously climbed through the window. He found himself in a bedroom: a man lay asleep in a bed. In the darkness Lewis fumbled his way about the room, finding a pile of clothes, some loose change and a wallet, which he pocketed. Exploring further, he opened the bedroom door and crept into the hallway of the flat. As he did so a fuddled voice behind him called out from the bedroom – ‘Who’s there?’
Lewis panicked. He told the court: ‘I went back into the bedroom. The chap was getting out of bed. I picked up the metal chair. It was the first thing I could put my hand on … I admit I gave him two bashes.’
Having temporarily incapacitated the occupant of the flat, Harry Lewis fled via the basement window. Out in the street he hailed a passing taxi and was driven away from the scene of the crime.
He was tried at the Old Bailey on 7 March 1949. The judge was the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Goddard; the prosecutor was Mr Anthony Hawke. Lewis’s counsel tried to attribute Mr Michaelson’s death to the hospital operation, claiming that it was not Lewis who killed the cartoonist but the surgeon. Pathologist Dr Donald Teare, appearing for the Crown, said the patient would have died in any case, the operation not having contributed substantially to his death.
The defence hoped for a verdict of manslaughter. But Lord Goddard told the jury that the accused man should be found guilty if they thought that the deceased had been killed by a burglar seeking to evade apprehension. Persuaded by this and by the facts of the case, the jury found Lewis guilty of murder, although they added a recommendation for mercy.
The recommendation was ignored. Harry Lewis was duly sentenced to death. An appeal was likewise ignored by the Home Secretary, and at the age of twenty-one, on 21 April 1949, Lewis was hanged at Pentonville Prison by Albert Pierrepoint and Harry Allen, who invariably wore a bow-tie when assisting at executions.
41
JOHN HAIGH
THE MURDER OF MRS DURAND-DEACON, 1949
Gross insensitivity and vanity characterise most murderers, as does a limited imagination. In some cases the daring, almost divine aspect of depriving a human being of life seems to infect the murderer with a belief in his own invulnerability. Or perhaps some death wish is at work. For whatever reason, many murderers, like Haigh and Norman Thorne, feel compelled to assist the police with their enquiries, convinced, it seems, that they can get away with murder. Or is it that they feel they should not be allowed to get away with murder, and wish subconsciously to be caught?
Mrs Olive Henrietta Helen Olivia Robarts Durand-Deacon, aged sixty-nine, was a stout, intelligent widow whose husband had left her well provided for. For over six years she had lived in South Kensington at the Onslow Court Hotel, Queen’s Gate.
She was in the habit of exchanging pleasantries with another long-term resident, a neat, smiling little man with twinkling eyes and nice manners, who sat in the dining room on his own at a table next to hers and had done so for over four years. He was somewhat younger than the other residents, being only thirty-nine, and when he first appeared in the hotel about six months before the end of the war she was probably curious about his single status and the source of his income, but was too well bred to ask personal questions. However, a nodding acquaintance developed in time into a certain friendship, and whatever he told her about his antecedents and irregular absences – she was a lady of regular habits herself – must have sounded very plausible. Although he was clearly not a gentleman born and bred – he had a slight accent and was rather flash – she learned he was a Yorkshireman, an engineer, a company director, and that he patented inventions. She often chatted to him as they sat at their separate tables. She had no idea, and would never have believed, that nice and gentlemanly Mr Haigh had already murdered five people for monetary gain.
On St Valentine’s Day, 1949, Mrs Gwendoline Birin, assistant secretary of the Francis Bacon Society, lunched, as she usually did on a Monday, with Mrs Durand-Deacon, and during the meal her hostess, after excusing herself, produced a box of plastic fingernails, which she showed to their neighbour, Mr Haigh, and discussed briefly with him. She told him about an idea she had had for a new type of artificial fingernail. Later, she showed him some she had made of paper and glued to her own nails. Could he make something of her idea, she wanted to know. Would it be possible to manufacture and market such fingernails? He said he would think about it – it seemed like a good idea. But the idea she had actually given him was quite a different one.
John George Haigh was in debt. His gambling losses, on horses and dogs, had of late been rather heavy, and he had no regular income. His bank account was overdrawn by £83; his cheques were beginning to bounce; and he had not paid his hotel bill (£5 15s 6d a week, plus 10% for services) since the beginning of January. He now owed the Onslow Court Hotel nearly £50, as the manageress discreetly but firmly continued to remind him. To avoid further embarrassment he had to acquire some instant cash.
He looked at Mrs Durand-Deacon and saw money in what she wore.
The next day, Tuesday, he set about depriving her of her jewellery and of her life. He drove south to Sussex, to Crawley, then little more than a large village. He drove to Leopold Road, where he had acquired the use of a small workshop in Giles Yard. The ramshackle, weedy yard also contained some lock-ups for cars. The workshop itself belonged to Hurstlea Products Ltd, for whom Haigh had once worked, and when they had discarded it, he borrowed it off them.
He called on a business acquaintance, a welding engineer called Mr Davies, and instructed him to collect a carboy of acid from London. Mr Davies had performed a similar task for Haigh a year before. He also called on the manager of Hurstlea, Mr Jones, and asked him for a £50 cash loan. This he was given on condition the money was repaid that week.
On the Wednesday he paid his hotel bill in full, using the money he had borrowed, and was left with 4s 11d in change.
In Crawley, Mr Davies went to Haigh’s workshop in Giles Yard and emptied one of three carboys of sulphuric acid that were there by filling up the other two. He took the empty one away, and on Thursday exchanged it for a full one at White’s, Dallington Street, EC1 – one carboy contained about 10 gallons of acid. Haigh had previously telephoned White’s and ordered the carboy in his own name. Davies brought the carboy back to Haigh’s workshop and dumped it there.
That afternoon Haigh himself went to Barking, and at Victor Blagden’s wharf obtained a 45-gallon black drum, which he then exchanged for a green drum, specially prepared to resist corrosive acids. He had in the meantime told Mrs Durand-Deacon that he thought he could do something with her idea for false fingernails and suggested that she should come down to his factory at Crawley. He asked her whether Friday would be convenient for her.
In the hotel dining room at breakfast on Friday, 18 February, he told Mrs Durand-Deacon that everything was arranged for later, but he would confirm the appointment at lunchtime. He drove down to Crawley, helped Mr Jones to move some steel sheeting from Giles Yard to the Hurstlea premises in West Street, and was back at the hotel in time for lunch.
Mrs Durand-Deacon had already eaten, and he met her in the Tudor Lounge of the hotel and asked her if she was still free to come with him to Crawley. She was. He drove her there in his Alvis. They left about half-past two. On the back seat was a square leather hat box, in which was a .38 Enfield revolver and eight rounds of ammunition.
The last time Mrs Durand-Deacon was seen by anyone else was when she and Haigh called at an ancient coaching inn, the George Hotel in Crawley, and visited the cloakrooms. It was about 4.15 pm.
What happened next was later described by Haigh himself in his third statement to the police:
She was inveigled into going to Crawley by me in view of
her interest in artificial fingernails. Having taken her into the storeroom at Leopold Road, I shot her in the back of the head while she was examining some paper for use as fingernails. Then I went out to the car and fetched in a drinking-glass and made an incision, I think with a penknife, in the side of the throat. I collected a glass of blood, which I then drank. Following that, I removed the coat she was wearing, a Persian lamb, and the jewellery, rings, necklace, earrings and cruciform, and put her in a 45-gallon tank. Before I put the handbag in the tank I took from it the cash, about thirty shillings, and her fountain pen and kept these, and tipped the rest into the tank with the bag. I then filled the tank up with sulphuric acid, by means of a stirrup pump, from a carboy. I then left it to react. I should have said that in between having her in the tank and pumping in the acid I went round to the Ancient Prior’s for a cup of tea.
He also had a poached egg on toast with his tea and chatted cheerily to the proprietor. (For several years, the owner of the restaurants and bars that would later occupy the historic timbered building was the former middleweight boxing champion, Alan Minter.)
Murder of the Black Museum 1875-1975: The Dark Secrets Behind a Hundred Years of the Most Notorious Crimes in England Page 41