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

by Honeycombe, Gordon

  He had flown over from Germany, as he had done the last time, specially to see her. She did not know he was travelling with a false passport, using the name of Leslie Chown, a real photographer whom he resembled in this disguise. She probably never realised the purpose of his second visit, as she was fortunately in a drunken stupor when he overpowered her, dragged her into the bathroom, and held her face down in the bath in six inches or so of water.

  It was all part of a plan to provide Ronald Chesney with some money – money that he must have felt was rightly his. For after he and Vera had married in 1928, by eloping to Scotland when he was twenty and she was seventeen, he had at the age of twenty-one inherited a fortune of £50,000 from a grandfather, of which he settled £8,400 on his teenage bride. The interest on this sum was to be hers as long as she lived. When she died, the capital would revert to her husband.

  For a time this did not mean much to him, as he spent the rest of the inheritance in the ten years before the Second World War, acquiring in the process a taste for adding to his diminishing income by criminal means: theft, smuggling, blackmail and fraud. Any thoughts of acquiring his wife’s nest egg were further diverted by the war and by various illegal wartime enterprises. During the war he served in the RNVR and was captured by the Italians at Benghazi. After the war his criminal career branched out into black-market activities, mainly in the ruins of post-war Germany. But by 1954 he was short of funds and devised a new scheme to enrich himself. He was not sentimental. After twenty-five years of marriage, much interlarded with mistresses, he decided to reclaim the £8,400 that had been part of his inheritance by killing his wife.

  It was not the first time he had killed a woman. His first victim had been his none other than his mother.

  Chesney’s real name was John Donald Merrett – Donnie to his friends. Born in New Zealand on 17 August 1908 at Levin in the North Island, he was the only son of an electrical engineer who deserted his wife, Bertha, in 1924. Bertha returned to England with sixteen-year-old Donnie, who was sent to school at Malvern College. He was an intelligent, enthusiastic boy, good at languages. He was also very tall for his age and well developed, and his enthusiasm for the pursuit and conquest of girls soon resulted in his being removed from the school and in Mrs Merrett’s move in January 1926 to Edinburgh, where Donnie was sent to the university to study art.

  On 10 March, mother and son moved into a first floor flat at 31 Buckingham Terrace. In the meantime, Donnie had been enjoying himself, spending much of his time in the Palais de Danse studying the art of the foxtrot and the female form, his studies being financed by his unsuspecting mother. For by now he had discovered another talent – that of forging her signature on cheques. By this means, he withdrew £458 from her two accounts by means of twenty-nine cheques, although he was prevented from making it an even thirty by a worried letter that reached Mrs Merrett from a bank manager querying the size of her overdraft. This filled her with a certain unease, which was nonetheless nothing compared to the uneasiness felt by Donnie, who in order to avoid any future financial embarrassment – and to avail himself of her annual income of £700 – decided to kill her.

  Her death was carefully planned, but the plan misfired. It was supposed to look like suicide. On Wednesday 17 March 1926 at 9.40 am, Mrs Merrett’s maid, Mrs Sutherland, was disturbed in the kitchen by the large seventeen-year-old youth, who rushed in crying: ‘Rita, my mother has shot herself!’ And indeed, Mrs Merrett lay on the sitting-room floor by her bureau with a gunshot wound in her right ear and a gun in her hand. However she was still alive, though unconscious.

  She was removed to the Royal Infirmary – the grieving Donnie being driven there by the police. As an attempted suicide – a criminal act – she was isolated and was asked no questions when she recovered consciousness. However, she was able eventually to tell Dr Roy Holcombe: ‘I was sitting down writing letters and my son Donald was standing beside me. I said: “Go away, Donald, and don’t annoy me!” and the next thing I heard was a kind of explosion, and I don’t remember anything more.’

  She died on 1 April. Her death might still have been classed as suicide had not the Edinburgh police discovered one of her cheque books in Donnie’s bedroom.

  Further slow but diligent enquiries revealed that the signatures on some of Mrs Merrett’s cheques were forgeries, and almost reluctantly, it seems – so unbelievable was the charge – Donald Merrett was eventually arrested on 29 November 1926 for the murder of his mother. He was at that time staying with family friends at Hughenden Vicarage in Buckinghamshire, ‘preparing for an academic career’.

  His trial began at the High Court of Justiciary, Parliament Square, Edinburgh, on 1 February 1927 and lasted until 8 February. The Lord Justice-Clerk, the Rt Hon Lord Alness, was the judge and the Lord Advocate, the Rt Hon William Watson, KC, led for the prosecution. Mr Craigie M Aitchison, KC, defended the tall, pleasant-looking teenager, now eighteen, his defence being that Mrs Merrett had shot herself and had not been shot by her son. The suicide theory was disputed by the absence of any powder marks on or near Mrs Merrett’s ear, no blackening or ‘tattooing’. Sir Bernard Spilsbury, appearing for once for the defence, said that this fact could be consistent with either suicide or accident.

  The jury were bemused by the whole matter and returned a verdict possible in Scottish courts – ‘Not Proven’. Donald Merrett was, however, found guilty of ‘uttering as genuine’ twenty-nine forged cheques. For this he was sent to jail for a year, though after serving eight months of his sentence he was released. While in jail he was visited by a friend of his mother, Mrs Mary Bonnar, and on his release he went to stay with her in Hastings. A few months later he eloped with and married her daughter Isobel, who was known as Vera.

  Mrs Bonnar apparently never believed that Donnie did shoot his mother. But Vera, in later years when her husband insisted they call themselves Chesney, sometimes borrowed a book from the local lending library – a book in the Notable British Trials series – and read about the trial in 1927 of young John Donald Merrett. What did she believe? Whatever it was, she could never have believed that twenty-seven years after shooting his mother, Donnie/Ronnie would drown his wife. But in 1954 Vera Chesney died, drowned in her own bath.

  Unfortunately for Chesney/Merrett, the perfect murder plan once again went wrong. Mrs Bonnar, now calling herself Lady Menzies, encountered him accidentally him in the suite of rooms in Montpelier Road that she shared with her daughter. She recognised him, despite his disguise, and accordingly had to be silenced. Small and elderly though she was, she fought for her life until she was eventually overpowered, battered and strangled by her hulking son-in-law.

  He left the house and flew back to Germany. But someone had noticed a heavily built stranger in the neighbourhood that night, of the same build as Mr Chesney, and the police knew from their files that Mr Chesney had once been Mr Merrett. Was it possible after all this time that he had now killed not only his wife but also his mother-in-law?

  The police in France and Germany were alerted and asked to find Chesney/Merrett. But less than a week after the murders of Vera and her mother, on 16 February 1954, his body was found in a wood near Cologne. He had shot himself.

  Pink fibres from Lady Menzies’s scarf were found on his clothes, as were hairs from her dog and traces of blood. Dark hairs similar to his were found on her cardigan, and under her fingernails were slivers of skin. They came from his arms, scratched and bruised by the frail old woman as she struggled for her life.

  The British police asked the Germans if this evidence could be checked, and with Germanic thoroughness his arms were cut off and dispatched to London to assist the police with their murder investigations there. These arms, which were later displayed as evidence at a coroner’s inquest in London, are now the most strikingly grisly exhibit in the Crime Museum – two arms, severed above the elbows and crossed, erect, in a tank of formaldehyde.

  46

  GINTER WIORA

  THE MURDER OF SHIRLEY ALL
EN, 1957

  Ginter Wiora was a Polish art student aged thirty-four, who lived with his twenty-four-year-old girlfriend, Shirley Marguerite Allen, in a basement flat in 21 Leinster Square, Bayswater. They had moved into the flat in November 1956, she posing as his wife and calling herself Mrs Wiora. He was known as Peter. A jealous man, he suspected her of having posed for pornographic pictures and was angered by her carefree attitude to and association with other men, whether real or imagined.

  On Saturday, 4 May 1957 – it was Cup Final Day (Aston Villa beat Manchester United 2-1) – the landlady, fifty-five-year-old Mrs Doreen Dally, was awakened at 8 am by a loud banging noise. She lived in a basement flat opposite that occupied by Wiora and Shirley Allen. Mrs Dally then heard a woman cry out: ‘No, Peter! No! Oh, Peter, please.’ This was followed by a terrible scream of agony and fear.

  The landlady, in her night-dress, apprehensively went to the door of her flat, opened it and looked out into the passage. She saw Shirley Allen, wearing a red dressing-gown, emerge from the door of Wiora’s flat, with blood streaming down her neck from a head wound. But something or someone seemed to be holding her back and Miss Allen, seeing Mrs Dally, said softly: ‘Oh, Mrs Dally. Help me, please. Peter’s gone mad.’ Mrs Dally seized the other woman’s right arm and was able to pull her away. The door was only slightly ajar and she saw nothing of Wiora.

  She guided Shirley Allen into her own flat and told her to lock the door. She then hastened towards the basement stairs, intending to reach a telephone on the floor above, but had only mounted two or three steps when she heard a sound behind her. She turned and saw Wiora standing in the passage, gazing at the door of her flat. His hands, crossed high on his chest in an oriental pose, held what the police said later was a Japanese samurai sword. In fact, it was a long, thin-bladed, slightly curved sword with a long hilt called a dha, which was used in Burma and other adjacent countries in South-east Asia.

  Wiora turned and looked at her. Suddenly swirling the sword in the air, he pointed the sword at her and lunged. The point pierced her left breast and entered her chest. He withdrew it and then returned the sword to its previous position, his arms ceremonially crossed over his chest.

  Mrs Dally fled up the stairs, blood staining her nightdress. She aroused the occupant of a ground-floor flat and telephoned for the police. Meanwhile, screams could be heard coming from her flat below.

  When the police arrived they found Mrs Dally sitting in an armchair in the ground-floor flat, waiting to be taken to hospital. She told them what had happened. Cautiously, PC Tennyson descended the stairs into the basement.

  The door of Mrs Dally’s flat was open, and Shirley Allen lay dead on her back behind the door, her head against the wall. A sword with a bent blade lay on the floor by her right leg. Nearby was a broken standard lamp with which she had been battered on the head. She had died of a haemorrhage caused by a deep stab wound in her chest.

  With PC Tennyson was DC Patrick Drown. He discovered that the door to Wiora’s flat had been locked. He listened, and could hear the sound of a radio and some moaning. There was also a smell of gas. The door was kicked open and the police burst in, hastening to turn off an unlit and hissing gas fire and a kitchen stove. On a bed in a corner lay Wiora, writhing and moaning. He had tried to commit suicide by stabbing himself with another sword and by cutting his wrists with a bread knife. He and Mrs Dally were taken to St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington.

  Ginter Wiora was tried at the Old Bailey on 25 July 1957. His defence was that of diminished responsibility. The jury found him guilty of manslaughter and he was sentenced to twelve years in prison.

  He tried to commit suicide in prison and was transferred to Broadmoor on 31 October 1958. A special restriction on his discharge expired in July 1969. But he remained in Broadmoor until 1987, when he was transferred into the care of a local psychiatric hospital.

  47

  MICHAEL DOWDALL

  THE MURDER OF VERONICA MURRAY, 1958

  The body of Veronica Murray, a thirty-one year-old prostitute, was found in her room in a boarding house at 58 Charteris Road, Kilburn, on Christmas Eve 1958. She had been dead for five or six days. Sprawled on her bed, she was naked except for a pullover drawn up over her head, which had been battered six times by a blunt instrument, apparently a bloodstained 6 lb dumbbell that was lying on the floor by the bed. The fatal injuries she sustained, which had fractured her skull and caused her death, were evident on her forehead above her left eye. There were slight lacerations and abrasions on her body, including a series of small circular marks that had been inflicted after death.

  Fingerprints of her possible assailant were found on a cup, but police investigations into the murder produced no result for nearly a year.

  Then, on 10 October 1959, a certain Mrs Hill, celebrating her birthday in the West End, met a youth whom she invited back to her flat in Ismailia Road, Fulham. When she refused to have sex with him he hit her, tore her clothes off and strangled her with a silk stocking until she became unconscious. She survived the attack, however, and from her evidence and the young man’s fingerprints the police were able to connect the assault with another on a sixty-five-year-old woman who had been battered with a poker as she slept in her home near Sloane Square. She had been robbed, as had Mrs Hill, of money and a bottle of whisky.

  The assailant’s fingerprints also connected him with a series of break-ins and burglaries over the previous year, including three in Chelsea, one in a Fulham pub and another in the Westbury Hotel, Mayfair. Apart from possessing the burglar’s fingerprints, the police now knew he was young, drank heavily, chain-smoked and was called Mick.

  DI Peter Vibart of Chelsea police station, investigating the Fulham attack, was struck by a curious feature of the assault on Mrs Hill. There were odd circular marks on her body, indicative of some sexual perversion. Vibart recalled that such marks had been found on another woman’s body some time previously. He checked the files, studied the unsolved murder of Veronica Murray, and saw that the fingerprints in the Murray file matched those of the youth called Mick who had attacked Mrs Hill. The police were now convinced that they were dealing with not just a dangerous criminal but a psychopathic, perverted killer who might murder again.

  Previous burglaries and assaults on women in the London area were double-checked and a further detail emerged: Mick had a cigarette-lighter bearing the unusual name ‘Texas Gulf Sulphur Co.’ A picture of a similar lighter was published in the newspapers one month after the attack on Mrs Hill. It produced a response, from a young guardsman stationed at Pirbright in Surrey, the depot of the 1st Battalion Welsh Guards. He informed his CO that another guardsman, called Mick, had just such a lighter. His full name was Michael Douglas Dowdall.

  The police were informed. Dowdall’s army record was checked against the police file on Veronica Murray, the attacks on Mrs Hill and other women, and the weekend burglaries. At the time of Miss Murray’s murder, Guardsman Dowdall, then barely eighteen, had been absent without leave. He frequently spent his weekends off duty in London and he drank and smoked a great deal. He had in fact been AWOL four times, and once, when in military detention, had tried to hang himself. His CO, Lt Col Mansell Miller, later described Dowdall as ‘a bit odd’ and thought that the boy had delusions of grandeur despite (or perhaps arousing from) the fact that he was in reality ‘small, weak and insignificant’.

  Mick Dowdall had joined the Welsh Guards as a drummer boy. He was born on 12 December 1940 and his father, an army captain, was killed during the Second World War in 1943. Described as ‘quite uncontrollable’ at school, he had been a problem child from the start, being referred to a child-care officer with the London County Council when he was six-and-a-half. He was also said to be ‘destructive’. He had a tendency to become hysterical, and once, according to his brother, he tried to set fire to the Dowdall home. His mother died in 1948, after which he was brought up by an aunt in Wales. He was an unruly child and a violent, vicious youth. After joining the We
lsh Guards he would brag about his prowess with women and burst into tears when he was disbelieved. To prove himself he drank heavily, stealing money to buy both drink and women.

  On his eighteenth birthday he went with Sgt Clotworthy, Cpl Hopkins and other guardsmen, all older than he, to a hotel in Guildford, where he drank four or five half-pints of gin. At Dowdall’s trial the judge asked Sgt Clotworthy: ‘You did not feel it incumbent upon you to stop him? Did you have no responsibility for him?’ Replied Clotworthy: ‘Not while he was out of barracks.’ Cpl Hopkins, who said that the rest of the group drank beer, told the judge that after two hours, and two pints of gin, Dowdall had to be carried out of the hotel and taken back to camp in a taxi. He was unable to go on parade the following morning and was taken for a walk by Hopkins.

  On 24 November 1959, Dowdall was interviewed by the police at Pirbright. His fingerprints were taken and were found to match matched those in the Murray file. Dowdall was brought to London, to Chelsea police station, where he was questioned by DCI Acott. Dowdall said: ‘Everybody has been against me. It’s when I get drink in I do these things. I’m all right when I’m sober. It’s been worrying me for a long time, and I wanted to go to a doctor. I’m glad it’s over. I’ll tell you all I can remember.’ He went on: