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

by Honeycombe, Gordon

  They got off the bus at West Croydon station and went down Tamworth Road. Said Bentley: ‘We walked down to Reeves’ Corner and crossed over, and then we came back up … We looked into the window of the sweet-stuff shop … I was still looking in it and Craig had got over this iron fence.’ It was in fact a 6-ft-high iron gate.

  It so happened that at that time – about 9.15 pm – a woman named Mrs Ware chanced to be putting her little girl to bed in a house opposite the wholesale confectioner’s, which was called Barlow and Parker. The child drew her mother’s attention to the two men near the side entrance of the confectioner’s. ‘They were just standing there,’ said Mrs Ware, ‘talking for a few minutes, and pulling their hats over their eyes.’ ‘I was always messing around with my hat, sir,’ said Bentley later. Mrs Ware: ‘All of a sudden the shorter one jumped right over the fence at the side on the left.’ The taller man, she said, ‘waited for a few more minutes, and then a motor came round the corner and he waited for that to go by, and when there was no one in sight he jumped over’. Her husband telephoned the police.

  Bentley stated: ‘Chris then climbed up the drainpipe to the roof and I followed. Up to then Chris had not said anything. We both got out onto the flat roof at the top … Someone shone a light in the garden, and so we got behind a stack or lift-shaft … Someone called out down in the garden. Chris said: “It’s a copper. Hide behind here …” We were there waiting for about ten minutes.’ They hid themselves in the shadows of the lift house at the far end of the roof. It was a dry night, but dark – ‘there was not much moon’ according to a police witness.

  At about 9.25 pm, a police van arrived outside the confectioner’s, moments before a police car. In the van were DC Frederick Fairfax in plain clothes, PC Norman Harrison, PC Bugden and PC Pain. In the car were PC Sidney Miles and PC James McDonald. All six were from Z Division. What happened in the next thirty minutes or so was to be variously interpreted by the accused and the police.

  In 1991, PC Pain, by then aged 83 and long retired, stated: ‘I was the first officer called that night. The scene on the roof was pandemonium. It was very chaotic. There were police sirens, an ambulance and a fire engine, people shouting. It was impossible to hear Bentley say anything. But if he had said, “Let him have it, Chris!” I would have heard it. And I didn’t.’ PC Pain was never called to give evidence at the trial.

  Fairfax’s story, and that of his colleagues, was as follows. He said his attention was caught by a footprint on a window sill of the warehouse and that he then climbed up a drainpipe onto the flat roof. Somehow aware of the presence of the burglars behind the lift house at one end of the roof, he approached them, walking carefully between four roof lights. ‘I’m a police officer!’ he shouted. ‘Come out from behind that stack!’ Craig retorted: ‘If you want us, fucking well come and get us!’ ‘All right,’ said Fairfax, and showing great courage and determination, he rushed towards the lift house and grabbed the nearest figure he saw, who happened to be Bentley. Fairfax dragged him out into the open. Still holding Bentley he tried to close in on Craig. But Bentley broke free, allegedly shouting: ‘Let him have it, Chris!’

  Craig fired, said Fairfax, 6 ft away from him, and a bullet grazed his right shoulder. He fell, got up and chased after Bentley. Fairfax floored Bentley with his fist and Craig fired again.

  With Bentley as a shield, Fairfax ducked down behind a roof light and frisked his captive, finding a knuckle-duster and a knife. ‘That’s all I’ve got, guvnor,’ said Bentley. ‘I haven’t got a gun.’ Firmly holding onto Bentley, Fairfax edged around the roof lights, finally finding shelter behind the staircase head to one side of the roof. Craig retreated back to the area of the lift house and was now about 40 feet away from them.

  PC McDonald, whose weight had made climbing the drainpipe difficult, was assisted onto the roof by Fairfax, who let go of Bentley in the process. Then Fairfax called to Craig: ‘Drop your gun.’ ‘Come and get it!’ came the answer, accompanied by another shot. According to McDonald, Fairfax said to him: ‘He got me in the shoulder,’ and Bentley said: ‘I told the silly bugger not to use it.’

  Meanwhile, PC Harrison had climbed onto an adjacent roof to the right of the lift-shaft (from Fairfax’s point of view) and to the left of Craig, who fired two shots in Harrison’s direction when the policeman edged out onto a connecting roof of asbestos and glass tiles. Harrison retreated behind a chimneystack, which he said was struck by a bullet – although no corroborative evidence of this was ever produced.

  McDonald then asked Fairfax: ‘What sort of a gun has he got, Fairy?’ Bentley intervened, saying: ‘He’s got a .45 Colt and plenty of bloody ammunition too.’ From then on, Bentley was allegedly silent.

  Several minutes later, police reinforcements arrived below. Some were armed. At least six guns are believed to have been issued to the police, some of whom surrounded the warehouse.

  PC Syd Miles, who had arrived at the scene with PC McDonald, had gone in search of the confectioner’s manager. From him, Miles obtained the keys to the warehouse. On his return, Miles was one of the policemen who entered the building and came up the interior staircase to the roof. PC Harrison was with him. PC Miles kicked the roof door of the stair-head open and stepped out. As he did so, a shot was fired and he fell down dead, a bullet having entered his head above the left eyebrow. It made a horizontal exit wound at the back.

  A second shot was fired as Fairfax and McDonald dragged Miles’ body behind the stair-head, leaving Bentley again unattended.

  Moments later, PC Robert Jaggs climbed on to the roof from the drainpipe and joined his colleagues. Whenever he poked his head around the stair-head he heard shots. Craig shouted: ‘Come on, you brave coppers! Think of your wives!’ Bentley allegedly said to Jaggs: ‘You want to look out. He’ll blow your head off.’ PC Harrison, after hurling his truncheon, a milk-bottle and a piece of wood in Craig’s direction – during which Craig cried: ‘I’m Craig! You’ve just given my brother twelve years! Come on, you coppers! I’m only sixteen!’ – dashed out of the stairhead door and joined his other three colleagues.

  Meanwhile, PC Lowe Stewart, who had arrived about 9.45 pm, had climbed a drainpipe to the roof, seen that Miles was dead, climbed down again and positioned himself in a small yard west of the building and below Craig’s vantage point. There was a dilapidated greenhouse in the yard. He heard Craig say: ‘It’s a Colt .45! Are you hiding behind a shield? Is it bullet proof? Are we going to have a shooting match? It’s just what I like … Have they hurt you, Derek?’

  Fairfax, McDonald and Jaggs now pushed and pulled Bentley around the open stairhead door and inside the entrance. Bentley is said to have shouted: ‘Look out, Chris! They’re taking me down!’ The three policemen, and Harrison, went down the stairs with their captive, Bentley.

  Before long Fairfax returned, armed with a .32 automatic. ‘Drop your gun – I also have a gun!’ he shouted. Craig replied: ‘Come on, copper – let’s have it out!’

  Fairfax darted out of the stair-head. A shot was fired, and he fired two shots in return as he rushed around the roof lights, crouching behind them and moving towards Craig, whose own gun, misfiring, clicked more than once – four times, according to PC Lowe Stewart, who then heard a shot and Craig say: ‘See – it’s empty!’ Craig said later there were just two clicks.

  Craig swung his body over the railings that edged the roof, stood for a moment and said: ‘Well, here we go. Give my love to Pam!’ He jumped.

  The drop was 25 feet. But on the way down, according to Stewart, Craig hit the edge of the greenhouse. Stewart ran over to Craig. Later, Stewart said: ‘I jumped on him and he said: “I wish I was fucking dead! I hope I’ve killed the fucking lot.’” Craig’s spine was fractured, as was his breastbone and his forearm. However, it seems highly unlikely that his leap took him as far as the greenhouse, which was 15 feet away from the warehouse wall. His injuries may have been caused when he hit a shed in falling: it was immediately below him on his right.
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br />   It was now about 10.45 pm. Craig was put in the same ambulance as DC Fairfax and taken to Croydon General Hospital, where he and Fairfax lay overnight in adjacent cubicles.

  Although Craig was in considerable pain, he was only given two codeine tablets (at 2 am on Monday the 3rd) in the twelve hours between his admission and the operation to set his wrist, at 11 am on the Monday morning. At 9.45 pm on the Monday night he was given a pain-killing injection of pethedine, another dose of the same at 4 pm on Tuesday, and more codeine at 10 pm on Wednesday the 3rd. On Wednesday morning he had another operation on his wrist.

  Craig said later in court that he dived head first off the roof, intending to kill himself. He said he landed on his head and knocked himself out. He remembered nothing thereafter, he said, until the early morning of the 3rd. He said in court: ‘I was in hospital and I woke up when someone hit me in the mouth and called me a murdering bastard, sir.’ He claimed later, and this must refer to the operation on his wrist on Monday morning: ‘They were pushing me down a corridor on a trolley and they were running me into the walls and all over the bumps so they could hurt me.’ He added, explaining his difficulty in remembering what the police claimed he said: ‘I was injected every twelve hours, sir … I was hardly conscious half the time, sir.’ ‘Hardly conscious!’ exclaimed the Lord Chief Justice. ‘Don’t talk such nonsense!’ Said Craig: ‘I was only half conscious. I was crying for my mother.’

  Six policemen from Z Division gave evidence at the trial about Craig’s callous and boastful remarks as he lay in a hospital bed under police surveillance. He said: ‘Is the copper dead? How about the others? We ought to have shot them all! – Did I really kill a policeman? – I shot him in the head and he went down like a ton of bricks – All you bastards should be dead – Is the policeman I shot in the shoulder still in hospital? I know that the one I shot in the head is dead – That night I was out to kill because I had so much hate inside me for what they did to my brother.’ Much of this was later denied by Craig.

  DS Shepherd said in court that he went to Croydon General Hospital at 11 pm on 2 November and saw Craig – who later denied seeing Shepherd until 11 November.

  DCI John Smith – who had already visited the scene of the crime, had seen the dead policeman’s body and spoken with DC Fairfax – said he charged the young gunman at about 11.30 pm on 2 November with the murder of PC Miles.

  This is contradicted by Fairfax himself, who some years later told author David Yallop: ‘Craig did not talk to anyone either voluntarily or any other way until the following day. He was out and stayed that way.’

  At 1.15 am, Smith and Shepherd went to Craig’s home, where they found a .45 bullet in his bed and 137 rounds of ammunition in a tin box in the attic. At 4 am, they saw Bentley in Croydon police station. Bentley said to Smith: ‘Are you in charge of this, guvnor? … I didn’t kill him, guv. Chris did it.’ He was then cautioned and made a statement, written down by DS Shepherd. It was read back to the illiterate Bentley, who scrawled a signature on each page. He was then charged. He said: ‘Craig shot him. I hadn’t got a gun. He was with me on the roof and shot him then between the eyes.’ In his statement he said: ‘I did not have a gun and I did not know Chris had one until he shot.’

  This contradicts a remark Bentley is said to have made in the police car taking him from Tamworth Road to the police station. After being taken down the warehouse stairs, Bentley had been handed over by Inspector Bodley to PS Edward Roberts, who cautioned him. Bentley said to him: ‘I didn’t have a gun. Chris shot him.’ Sitting between PS Roberts and PC Alderson in the rear of a police car driven by PC Stephens, Stephens and Roberts heard Bentley say: ‘I knew he had a gun, but I didn’t think he’d use it. He’s done one of your blokes in.’ According to Roberts, nothing else was said by anyone in the car. However, the driver, Stephens, added that Roberts also said: ‘I shouldn’t make any other statement now. You’ll be given a chance to make a statement at the station.’

  Apart from the fact that both Craig and Bentley later denied most of what police witnesses alleged they had said – on the roof, in the police car and in hospital – including the phrase ‘Let him have it, Chris!’ which was said to have been heard by Fairfax, McDonald and Harrison, these officers and others sometimes disagreed about the alleged shouts and remarks made by Bentley and Craig, who both also denied that Fairfax apprehended Bentley in the manner he described.

  Their version was that Fairfax, having seized Bentley, took him back across the roof, while McDonald was still struggling up the drainpipe. It was then, said Craig, that he fired ‘to frighten him away’, when Fairfax was about 30 ft from him. He said he fired at the ground, 6 ft in front of himself, and his defence suggested that the bullet flew up and grazed Fairfax’s shoulder. Said Bentley: ‘Fairfax leaned on me and fell over like that. He did not touch the floor, though … He got up – well, leaned up – and put me behind that staircase … I gave him the knuckle-duster. I took it out of my pocket myself.’

  Oddly, the alternative interpretation of the phrase ‘Let him have it, Chris!’ – i.e., ‘Hand him the gun’ – was never mentioned in court, not even by the defence.

  Craig’s defence was that although guilty of manslaughter, he was innocent of murder: he never intended to injure or kill. He fired at the policemen, he said, obliquely, not directly, and what he shouted was ‘Bluff, sir, so that they would not come at me.’ His version of PC Miles’s death was this. ‘The door flew open and I thought someone was rushing at me, sir, saw someone was coming out, and I fired another one to frighten them away … over the roof” i.e., to his right. The fatal bullet, he said, ‘might have ricocheted off’. Of Fairfax’s final armed charge at him, he said: ‘Someone fired two shots at me from somewhere I could not see.’

  Bentley’s defence was that the ‘joint enterprise’ had ended fifteen minutes before Miles died, that at the time of Miles’s death he was already under arrest, had made no move to rejoin Craig or escape when he might have done so, that he did not know Craig had a gun and did not urge him to use it.

  The prosecution had to prove that Bentley and Craig had a common purpose. The law was that an accomplice, although he did nothing, was as guilty as the person who struck a blow or shot a gun. It had to be proved that Bentley knew Craig had a gun before the shooting began and that he was prepared to use it, as Bentley urged him so to do, according to the prosecution. Bentley himself had two weapons in his possession, a knife and a knuckle-duster. But it was the latter that excited the interest and disapprobation of the judge in the trial – the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Goddard. Slipping it on his hand, he asked the jury: ‘Have you ever seen a more horrible sort of weapon? … Did you ever see a more shocking thing that that?’

  As regards Craig, the judge told the jury that in the special law concerning policemen, if a person ‘does a wilful act which causes the death of the officer, he is guilty of murder, whether or not he intended to kill or to do grievous bodily harm’. The defence, said the judge, had to show the act was accidental in order to reduce the charge to manslaughter.

  The trial of Bentley and Craig, who was now on crutches, began at the Old Bailey, on Thursday, 9 December 1952 – less than six weeks after the shooting. It ended on the morning of Saturday, 11 December. The chief prosecutor was Mr Christmas Humphreys. Craig’s counsel was a barrister from Leeds, Mr John Parris, and Bentley’s was Mr FH Cassels, son of Mr Justice Cassels. Mr Parris, busily employed in a trial in Leeds, was given the brief concerning Craig three days before the Old Bailey trial was due to start, originally on Monday, 6 December. When he complained, the start of the trial was postponed for three days.

  Twenty-four witnesses were called by the prosecution – sixteen of whom were police officers of Z Division – and only two by the defence, the accused themselves. The police witnesses failed to agree on how many shots were fired and some of their evidence was inconsistent. But, as the judge told the jury, speaking of Fairfax, McDonald and Harrison: ‘Those three officers in
particular showed the highest gallantry and resolution. They were conspicuously brave. Are you going to say that they are conspicuous liars? Because if their evidence is untrue – that Bentley called out “Let him have it, Chris” – those officers are doing their best to swear away the life of that boy. If it is true, it is, of course, the most deadly piece of evidence against him.’

  Craig himself said he reloaded his gun once and fired it eleven times, two shots being misfires. The prosecution produced Mr Lewis Nicholls, MSc, Director of the Metropolitan Police Laboratory, as their ballistics expert. He revealed that the gun was not strictly speaking a Colt .45 but a First World War standard issue .455 Eley Service revolver with a sawn-off barrel. He pointed out that ‘This weapon … was quite an inaccurate weapon.’ He agreed that it would be inaccurate to a degree of 6 ft at a range of 39 ft, although ‘if one aimed at the centre of a human being, one would more or less guarantee to hit him at 6 ft.’ This seemed to suggest that Craig was far more likely to have hit Miles, some 39 ft away, if he had not been aiming at him – a point that the defence failed to follow up.

  Nicholls said that of the twelve bullets and cartridge cases given to him on 15 November, nearly a fortnight after the shooting, one was a .32 and three were undersized and would make a shot completely inaccurate. These three had been fired, one being found later caught up in Fairfax’s braces. The rest were 45 Tommy-gun rounds, two of which were duds. The police had found only two spent bullets on the roof, and apparently none (apart from that in Fairfax’s clothing) elsewhere. One .45 bullet (Exhibit 8) was inside the doorway of the staircase head, and the other was in a far corner of the roof. Mr Nicholls agreed that Exhibit 8 was ‘badly distorted’ and had been fired by a revolver similar to Exhibit 6, Craig’s gun. However, he added: ‘I could find no evidence of blood on it whatsoever. Therefore, in all probability, it is not the fatal bullet.’