He was employed as the chauffeur and secretary of the manager of an amusement arcade called McSwann, whom – as we have seen – he later murdered. He became quite friendly with the McSwanns, but soon he embarked on another swindle. Posing as a small-town solicitor winding up the estate of a client who wished to dispose of some non-existent shares at a good price, he offered them for sale to anyone who paid a 25% deposit. For a time he was successful, collecting the cheques and moving on from town to town. In all, he made over £3,000. But eventually the law latched on to him and in November 1937 he was charged at Surrey Assizes in Kingston with obtaining money by false pretences. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four years’ penal servitude.
He was released in August 1940, and during the Blitz was employed as a firewatcher in Pimlico. Within a year he was back in prison, sentenced to twenty-one months for stealing household goods.
This third experience of prison, together with his experiences as a firewatcher, seems to have hardened and darkened his mind. He wrote later: ‘The ghastly sights after two land-mines had wiped out a block of buildings are fixed indelibly in my memory.’ He began to doubt the existence of God. He is thought to have studied the effects of acid on mice, seeing how long their bodies took to dissolve if immersed in a mug of sulphuric acid. He resolved not to get caught again and to abandon the generally unrewarding petty crimes of the cheap crook.
On his release, he became a salesman for an engineering business at Crawley, where he lived for about two years, often being seen in the lounge of the George Hotel having tea. In March 1944, he was involved in a motor accident in which his head was cut. Some months later, now living in London, he chanced to meet young McSwann.
The brief trial of John George Haigh began at Lewes Assizes court in Sussex on Monday, 18 July 1949. It finished the following afternoon. The judge was Mr Justice Humphreys; the Attorney-General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, KC, MP, led for the Crown, and Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, KC, MP, for the defence.
The prosecution produced thirty-three witnesses, of whom just four were cross-examined, and then but briefly, by the defence. Haigh gave no evidence and only one witness was called for the defence, Dr Henry Yellowlees, a leading psychiatrist, with little or no court experience at that time. Dr Yellowlees was an early exponent of forensic psychiatry and later on appeared for the defence in other trials, successfully supporting verdicts of guilty but insane. Of the nine doctors who had examined Haigh in prison, he was the only one prepared to speak on the prisoner’s behalf, after talking with him on three occasions for a total of twenty-four hours and ten minutes.
Dr Yellowlees maintained that Haigh had a paranoid constitution that could produce paranoid insanity. Early influences in his life had contributed, the doctor said, to this condition. But when cross-examined, Dr Yellowlees was forced to admit that Haigh knew he had done something which was ‘punishable by law’, and therefore ‘wrong by the law of the country’.
In his book, To Define True Madness, published in 1953, Yellowlees wrote about the ‘sadly overrated Haigh case’, and said that the only point of real interest was that Haigh was ‘medically mad’ but not ‘McNaghten mad’. Yellowlees said that he had been prepared in court to admit that Haigh ‘did not satisfy the McNaghten criteria’. But so ‘unfriendly and hostile’ was the atmosphere in the court that when his evidence was attacked in toto, he felt ‘improperly treated’.
No medical evidence was called by the Crown in rebuttal, the Attorney-General submitting there was nothing to rebut. The judge, commenting in his summing-up on Dr Yellowlees’ statement that there was no sex element in the case, said that this was ‘really rather a comfort in a way. One gets rather tired in these courts of sex complexes.’
The jury were out for seventeen minutes, returning at 4.40 pm. They found Haigh guilty of murdering Mrs Durand-Deacon. Asked if he had anything to say, Haigh replied: ‘Nothing at all.’
Before his execution he wrote a remarkable account of his life, which appeared in the News of the World. He was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint and Harry Kirk at Wandsworth Prison on 6 August 1949, thirteen days after his fortieth birthday.
Pierrepoint used a special strap of pale calf leather to bind Haigh’s wrists, as he had done with Heath. He used this special strap on only about a dozen occasions, on those occasions when he made a red-ink entry in his diary on the day of an execution – to indicate, as he said, ‘more than a formal interest in this particular execution’.
42
DANIEL RAVEN
THE MURDER OF MR GOODMAN, 1949
Among the murderers who kill without apparent motive are a number of sons who for some reason or other cannot exist without extinguishing members of their families – frequently a mother or father, or both. Such inimical offspring tend to plead guilty or to be found insane, and so no explanation or motive is ever officially put forward for their fatal deeds.
In this case, the deadly son was actually a son-in-law. No motive for his extraordinary actions was ever aired before or during his trial. But on Monday, 10 October 1949, after visiting his young wife, Marie, in a maternity home in Muswell Hill – where on 6 October she had given birth to their first child – the father, a dapper twenty-three-year-old Jewish advertising agent called Daniel Myer Raven, drove to the home of his parents-in-law and savagely battered them both to death.
The fact that Mr Leopold Goodman, aged forty-nine, and Mrs Esther Goodman, aged forty-seven, were Russian Jews and possessively proud of their daughter and of their new grandson, is probably not as relevant as the fact that they were also at the maternity home that evening, sitting beside their daughter and watched by their son-in-law. Something surely must have been said, some opinion, prejudice or attitude expressed by the middle-aged couple that provoked their son-in-law to exterminate them.
The Goodmans left the nursing home at about 9.05 pm, followed soon after by their son-in-law. He drove to the Goodman home in Ashcombe Gardens, Edgware, where at about 9.30 pm he attacked them, battering Mrs Goodman seven times on the head and Mr Goodman at least fourteen times. In both cases the weapon was the base of a television aerial.
The presence of a television set in the house gives some indication of the Goodmans’ affluence. For television was then in its infancy and sets showing the few black-and-white TV programmes the BBC broadcast on one channel were expensive. The BBC’s transmissions from Alexandra Palace, begun in November 1936, had been discontinued during the war, only being resumed on 7 June 1946. Daniel Raven, earning about £20 a week, was not monied enough to own a TV set.
After the attack, Raven drove around the corner to Edgwarebury Lane, where he lived with his wife in a house bought for them by Mr Goodman. Here he tried to remove the bloodstains on his dark blue suit, and having failed to do so satisfactorily, he stuffed the suit into a coke-boiler in the kitchen, hastening the burning process by leaving a lit gas-poker in the boiler.
At about 10.30 pm, he received a telephone call from the police, possibly while he was still trying to clean his suit. The police requested him to come round to his in-laws’ house straight away – they had some rather bad news for him. If the telephone call interrupted him in his efforts to clean the suit, he must have set about burning it in some haste before dressing himself in a new shirt and tie and suit.
Unfortunately for Raven, about twenty minutes after he left Ashcombe Gardens Mrs Goodman’s brother-in-law, Mr Frederick Fraiman, had called at the house with his wife and eldest daughter to enquire about Marie Raven and the baby. (Mr Fraiman was a business partner of the Goodmans in L Goodman Radio Ltd.) When the three Fraimans received no response to their knocking and ringing at the front, side and back doors, Mr Fraiman climbed into the house through an open window and came across the savaged bodies of the Goodmans in their blood-soaked dining room. He dialled 999 at 10.02 pm. The police and a doctor were soon at the scene, the police investigations being led by DI Diller. The aluminium aerial that had been the murder weapon was found in a sink in the sculler
y.
Robbery as an associated motive for the murders was discounted when bundles of pound notes were found untouched in the house, including one cache of notes under a mattress. There was also over £2,500 in a safe.
When Daniel Raven arrived he was overcome with emotion and sat sobbing on the stairs, crying: ‘Why did they tell me to go? Why didn’t they let me stop?’ He had wanted to stay, he said, as his in-laws were apprehensive about being burgled. But they had insisted, he said, that he left. ‘I don’t get on with Mr Goodman too badly,’ he confessed. ‘Although we do quarrel at times. But Mrs Goodman and me didn’t get on at all well.’
DI Diller was doubtful about the young man’s explanations and sorrow, and was given further cause to be so when one of his policemen, who had questioned other relatives of the Goodmans, passed on the information that the young man had been wearing a dark-blue suit earlier that evening – not the light-grey suit he now wore. Diller also noted that Raven’s shirt seemed very crisp and fresh.
The lamenting son-in-law was asked to accompany the police to Edgware police station for further questioning. But before this happened Diller asked Raven for the keys to his house. he handed them over reluctantly, adding: ‘But you won’t find anything there – I only had a bath.’
It was not until 11.45 pm that Diller entered the Raven’s nest. As soon as he did so, he noticed a smell of burning. It came from the kitchen. He saw the gas-poker projecting from the blazing boiler, removed it, closed the vent and flue, and was able to retrieve part of a suit. Later it was found to be stained with blood (from the Goodmans’ rare blood group AB), as were a pair of shoes that had been washed and hidden in the garage. The driver’s seat in Raven’s car had also been scrubbed.
When asked to account for the burning, bloody suit in the boiler – he had admitted the suit was his – Raven replied: ‘How the blood got on it I don’t know.’ He had left it, he said, in the bathroom, where the police found no evidence of a bath having been recently taken.
Daniel Raven was charged by DCI Albert Tansill at Edgware police station on the night of Tuesday, 11 October with the murder of Mr Leopold Goodman. In proclaiming his innocence, Raven said that his father-in-law had made several enemies as a result of crooked business deals.
This was elaborated in court by counsel for the defence, who suggested that Mr Goodman had been a police informer, assisting the police with information about persons suspected of currency offences, and that the elderly couple had been murdered in revenge by a person or persons unknown. Raven’s story by now had also been elaborated. When he gave evidence he said that after leaving the Goodmans alive and well he had called on his cousins nearby, who were out, and then decided to return to Ashcombe Gardens as he knew the Fraimans would probably call that night. Receiving no reply, he said, to his knocking at the door, he entered the house through a window and found Mrs Goodman in the dining room, her skull cracked open. He felt sick at the sight, he said, and in the witness box he swayed and appeared on the point of collapse. He continued by saying that blood got on his clothes and shoes when he knelt by her body. Overwhelmed by fear, he said, he fled from the house and drove to his own home, where he burned his suit and washed his shoes.
No defence involving the accused’s mental instability or possible insanity was ever broached.
He appeared at the Old Bailey on Tuesday, 22 November 1949 before Mr Justice Cassells, with Mr Anthony Hawke appearing for the Crown and Mr John Maude, KC, for the defence. Found guilty on 24 November, Daniel Raven was sentenced to death.
In support of an appeal, a solicitor, Mr Rutter, then produced evidence that Raven was insane, that on account of his ‘severe anxiety neurosis’ he had been discharged from the RAF after a plane crash that he alone survived. He had joined the RAF when he was sixteen. A doctor who had treated Raven in the past stated that he used to suffer from ‘black-outs and brain-storms’. Another said he had a kind of epilepsy. The appeal was heard on 20 December 1949 and dismissed.
All other appeals for clemency as well as a petition failed. Daniel Raven was duly hanged in Pentonville Prison on Friday, 6 January 1950, the executioners being Albert Pierrepoint and Harry Kirk.
43
CRAIG AND BENTLEY
THE MURDER OF PC MILES, 1952
Few murder trials exemplify the instinctive ‘Them and Us’ attitudes of those who uphold the law as starkly as Regina v Bentley and Craig in 1952. It was Regina (nor Rex) versus the accused as although Elizabeth II would not be crowned until June 1953, she had become Queen in February 1952, when her father, King George VI died. Seldom has an execution raised so many agonising problems. Questions were later asked in the House of Commons. Mr RT Paget said: ‘A three-quarter witted boy is to be hung for a murder he did not commit, which was committed fifteen minutes after he was arrested. Can we be made to keep silent when a thing as horrible and as shocking as this is to happen?’ But the law was determined to make an example of Craig and Bentley in order to deter young criminals in post-war Britain, and in doing so succeeded in making a disturbing example of itself. Bentley was hanged; he was nineteen. But crimes of violence committed by boys and youths continued to increase.
Christopher Craig was born on 19 May 1936, three years after Derek William Bentley. Both lived in south London, in Norbury, and both went to Norbury Secondary Modern School and left when they were fifteen. Craig suffered from word blindness, dyslexia, a disability that was hardly recognised then and rarely treated. As a result, he was scarcely able to read or write, only comics being within his comprehension. Other boys, he said, ‘used to take the mickey out of me’. To improve his status he cultivated athletic skills – he was a good swimmer – and carried weapons, guns and knives. The guns he took to school, displaying them and swapping some with other boys. Between the ages of eleven and sixteen he possessed in all about forty guns: his ambition was to be a gunsmith. This interest arose from the fact that his father, a chief cashier in a bank, had been an army captain with the London Scottish during the First World War and was himself the possessor of two wartime revolvers. He also took his sons target-shooting, using air guns. Christopher, the youngest of nine children, was included. He proved, however, not to be a good shot, unlike his oldest brother, Niven.
Christopher’s fantasies involving firearms were fed by the films he saw – he went to the pictures three or four times a week – and gangster films were his favourites. Niven, who was ten years older, had turned those fantasies into fact. Convicted of shop-breaking when he was fourteen, he was found guilty as a juvenile of two other offences and sent to an approved school. He was convicted twelve times in the army, being eventually court-martialled for armed robbery and given a five-year sentence. In March 1952, Niven was involved with four other men, one of whom died later in prison, in an armed robbery at Waltham Abbey. The haul was a cigarette lighter and £4. Niven Craig, aged twenty-six, a motor mechanic, denied any involvement in the robbery: he said he was elsewhere at the time. Nonetheless, he was convicted of the offence and of possessing a pistol at the time of his arrest. He denied making a grab at it when the police burst into his bedroom.
On Thursday, 30 October 1952, he was sentenced at the Old Bailey to twelve years in prison. Some of his family were in court, including his youngest brother, Christopher. They heard the judge, Mr Justice Hilbery, say to the prisoner: ‘You are not only cold-blooded, but … I believe that you would shoot down, if you had the opportunity to do so, any police officer who was attempting to arrest you.’
Three days later, on Sunday, 2 November 1952, Christopher Craig, then aged sixteen, went to the pictures with a girlfriend. They saw a film in which the hero was hanged after a gunfight during which a policeman was shot. The film was called My Death is a Mockery. Between 8 and 9 pm, after going home for a meal, Craig called at the home of Derek Bentley.
Bentley, born on 30 June 1933, was then nineteen; his father owned an electrical business. He is said to have fallen off a lorry in 1938, landing on his head, an acci
dent that allegedly cause him to suffer from epilepsy all his short life, and when he was bombed out twice during the Blitz, when bricks and rubble fell on him, injuring his head, this was claimed to have resulted in the fact that he was of below-average intelligence and illiterate. He was later adjudged by a prison doctor to be ‘feeble-minded’ and a psychiatrist at the trial adjudged his mental state to be bordering on being retarded. Perhaps to compensate for his intellectual failings, he took up bodybuilding. He was proud of his physique, and was a tall, nice-looking boy. On leaving school, he worked occasionally as a dustman or removal man. Convicted of shop-breaking, he was sent to an approved school in March 1948, being released in July 1950. About the time of Niven Craig’s arrest in 1952, he began an infrequent association with young Christopher Craig whom he rather admired, an association that his parents did their best to stop after some trouble in May that year. Worth a mention here is the fact that Bentley once refused to go on a raid with Craig when he found out that Craig carried a loaded gun.
On 2 November 1952, when Craig called at the Bentley home about 8.30 pm, Mrs Bentley said Derek was out. Derek was, in fact, watching television. He said later: ‘A little later Norman Parsley and Frank Fazey called … My mother told me that they had called and I then ran out after them. I walked up the road with them to the paper shop, where I saw Craig standing. We all talked together and then the other two left. Chris Craig and I then caught a bus to Croydon, a 109 bus.’
‘What for?’ demanded the judge at the trial. Said Bentley: ‘Just for the ride, sir. An ordinary ride.’
He and Craig had already met that morning. According to Craig, who gave Bentley a knuckle-duster on the short bus ride into Croydon, Bentley had dared him to break into a butcher’s shop. This Bentley later denied. But both now had weapons. Craig had a revolver with a sawn-off barrel, some ammunition, and a sheath knife, which he wore on his belt. Bentley had a smaller knife and the knuckle-duster, which Craig said he had made. He also said in court: ‘I did not know what Bentley had got, sir, and he did not know what I had got.’ According to him, their common intent that night was burglary.
Murder of the Black Museum 1875-1975: The Dark Secrets Behind a Hundred Years of the Most Notorious Crimes in England Page 43