On 23 September, the ninth day of the trial, the judge asked the jury to go away and consider whether the defendant was or was not suffering from a genuine loss of memory ‘covering at least all the events with which he was concerned between 1 July 1959 and the time of his arrest on 16 July 1959’ and whether he was fit to stand trial. The jury returned after three-and-a-half hours. Podola, they thought, was not suffering from a genuine loss of memory. This had not, they felt, been established.
Podola’s trial for murder, with a new jury but the same judge and lawyers, began on 24 September. It lasted two days.
The main prosecution witness was DS John Sandford, who told how Podola had shot DS Purdy. In his defence Podola made a statement from the dock: ‘I understand the various accusations that have been made, and now the time has come for me to defend myself against these accusations. I cannot put forward any defence … I cannot remember the crime. I do not remember the circumstances leading up to the events or to this shooting. I do not know if I did it or whether it was an accident or an act of self-defence … For these reasons I am unable to admit or deny the charge against me … Thank you, my lord.’
The jury took half an hour to find Podola guilty and the judge sentenced him to death for a ‘foul and terrible deed’.
Guenther Podola, the last man to be hanged for killing a policeman, was executed at Wandsworth Prison by Jock Stewart and Harry Allen on 5 November 1959 after an appeal to the House of Lords was turned down by the Attorney-General. The appeal judge said: ‘Even if the loss of memory had been a genuine loss of memory, that did not of itself render the appellant insane.’
DS Purdy’s widow received a pension of £546 a year.
The last two men to be sentenced to death for murder and hanged were executed on the same day at the same time, at 8 am on 13 August 1964. They were Peter Anthony Allen, aged twenty-one, and Gwynne Owen Evans, aged twenty-four, both dairymen, who had been convicted of the murder in the furtherance of theft of John Alan West, aged fifty-two, in Seaton, Cumberland. A laundry-van driver, West was brutally beaten to death with a cosh in his home and stabbed. This happened on 6 April 1964. Allen and Evans were tried in June and their appeal was dismissed on 21 July by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Parker, by Mr Justice Widgery and Mr Justice Winn. Allen and Evans were hanged three weeks later, the former at Walton Prison, Liverpool by Jock Stewart, and the latter by Harry Allen at Strangeways Prison, Manchester.
Four months after the executions, Mr Sidney Silverman’s Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Bill, which suspended capital punishment for murder for an experimental period of five years, was given a second reading by the House of Commons by a majority of 185 votes. However, the bill did not become law until 9 November 1965.
49
ROBERTS, WITNEY AND DUDDY
THE MURDERS OF DS HEAD, DC WOMBWELL AND PC FOX, 1966
The murders of policemen invariably result in letters to the newspapers demanding the restoration of capital punishment – something the police themselves would generally support. After the triple murders of DS Head, DC Wombwell and PC Fox there was such a public outcry, such widespread demonstrations of outrage, that it seemed the death penalty might be restored for some sorts of murder.
The last time three policemen had been shot dead in one incident was at midnight on 16 December 1910 in Houndsditch, when seven anarchists were surprised digging their way through the rear wall of a jeweller’s shop. These deaths resulted in the fiasco of the Siege of Sidney Street, when two of the gang were trapped in a three-storey tenement at 100 Sidney Street, Whitechapel, on 3 January 1911. In the ensuing gun-battle, in which thirty-six guardsmen and many policemen were involved, the building burnt down, two anarchists were killed, and a fireman died when part of the building collapsed. Four other firemen were badly injured, and five policemen, four civilians and a soldier were wounded. Of the nine persons arrested by the police in connection with the shooting of the three policemen, not one was convicted, because of lack of evidence. The deaths of the policemen were later dignified by a memorial service in St Paul’s Cathedral.
In between these two cases, twenty-four policemen had been murdered on duty, eleven after 1956. There had also been a general rise in crimes of violence, of gang warfare and robbery in London, and many people believed that because hanging had been abolished the growing number of criminals armed with guns would not hesitater to use them.
It was warm and sunny on Friday, l2 August 1966, when the three-man crew of Q car Foxtrot Eleven took over their car, a Triumph 2000, at Shepherd’s Bush police station in Uxbridge Road. The three men, who were on duty from 9 am to 5 pm that day, had been working together for just a few weeks. The area they patrolled, F Division, centred on Hammersmith and took in Shepherd’s Bush and Fulham. A major murder enquiry in F Division, concerning the strangling of six prostitutes whose naked bodies had been dumped around the division, mainly by the river, had recently been closed after the suicide of the chief suspect, a security guard.
The driver of Foxtrot Eleven was forty-one-year-old PC Geoffrey Roger Fox. Married with three children, he lived in a council flat north of Northolt and had been a PC at ‘the Bush’ for the sixteen years he had been in the police force. (His wife, Marjorie, said later: ‘I always knew my Geoff would get killed some day.’) PC Fox was the regular driver of the Q car and, like the other two, he was in civilian clothes.
DS Christopher Tippett Head, aged thirty and unmarried, was in charge of the team. Born in Dartmouth on 24 December 1935, one of four children, he was five when his mother was widowed. She brought the children up on her own and Christopher went to the local grammar school. He became a police cadet when he was seventeen and did his National Service with the RAF police in Scotland. After he was demobbed, he worked in an aircraft factory in Newton Abbot until June 1958 when he was accepted by the Metropolitan Police in London and posted to Fulham after his training. He joined the CID in 1964 and was promoted to sergeant just before his move to Shepherd’s Bush.
DC David Stanley Bertram Wombwell, aged twenty-seven, was also a newcomer to the Bush and had only just become a temporary detective constable three years after joining the force. The only child of divorced parents, he had been brought up by his father and grandmother. After studying motor engineering at a polytechnic, he became a car salesman. When he was twenty-three, he married a seventeen-year-old hairdresser, Gillian Hague, in St Albans in 1962. They had two children and lived in East Acton.
On the morning of Friday the 12th, the crew of Foxtrot Eleven took DI Coote to Marylebone magistrate’s court, where he gave evidence against five men who had escaped from Wormwood Scrubs Prison in June. Coote had with him several court exhibits such as the ropes that had been used in the escape. Foxtrot Eleven went back on patrol, and the three policemen had lunch in the Beaumont Arms in Uxbridge Road before setting off again, driving up Wood Lane, past the BBC TV Centre and the White City stadium, where they turned left into Western Avenue.
At about 3 pm Foxtrot Eleven was in the East Acton area. So was a battered blue Standard Vanguard estate car, containing three other men. All three were petty criminals with previous convictions. They were on the look-out for a car to replace the one they were in. The stolen car was then to be fitted with a pair of false number plates, which lay in the back of the Vanguard, and would be used in the robbery of a rent collector that the three planned to carry out the following week. The Vanguard was untaxed and uninsured. It had failed an MOT test, and the insurance covering the car had expired at noon that very same day.
Its owner was John Edward Witney, aged thirty-six and unemployed, who lived in a basement flat with his wife, Lilian, in Fernhead Road, Paddington. Previously a lorry driver, he had ten convictions for petty theft. His longest prison sentence had been eighteen months. Earlier that year, he had met another lorry driver and petty criminal, Harry Roberts, and the two teamed up, stealing metal and lead until they were joined by a third man, John Duddy, aged thirty-seven, when they began ra
iding betting shops and robbing rent collectors. Duddy later said that Witney was ‘the brains of this outfit’.
Duddy was a Scot, born in Glasgow’s Gorbals district on 27 December 1929. He was 37, 5 ft 5 in tall, slightly corpulent, brown haired, fresh complexioned, and his right forearm was tattooed with a skull, a heart and the motto ‘True to death’. Four of his convictions were for theft: the offences had all been committed before he was twenty and none had involved violence. He was sent to borstal once and imprisoned twice for three months. But after 1948, no further convictions had been added to his record. He married and came to London, working from there as a long-distance lorry driver, and for seventeen years kept out of trouble. Then in 1966 he began drinking heavily and frequenting dubious West London clubs, in one of which he met Roberts and Witney.
Apart from the fact that they all had previous convictions, had all been lorry drivers, wanted easy money and lived within a mile of each other in London W9, they had little in common – except that Duddy’s father had been a policeman and that Roberts as a boy had wanted to be one. Oddly, in 1966, Roberts was living with an ex-policeman’s wife.
Harry Maurice Roberts was three weeks past his thirtieth birthday at the time of the shooting, having been born on 21 July 1936 at Wanstead in Essex, where his parents managed a pub, the George. An only child, he was cared for by a nanny who called him ‘Robin’. On the outbreak of war his father, who had a savage temper and sometimes assaulted his wife, joined the RAF. ‘I thought he was mental,’ she said much later of Roberts Senior. ‘He was always taking money off me and putting it on the dogs or drinking it.’ When her son was seven or eight she sent him to a Roman Catholic boarding school in Norwood, for which she had to pay, being determined that he would have a good education; she was convent-educated herself. Hard times followed. Mr Roberts walked out, and Mrs Roberts was left to bring up young Harry in post-war London. She slaved to pay for his education, sometimes working twenty-two hours a day, and lived on a council estate near Euston. She became manageress of a local restaurant. When Harry was thirteen he became, at his own insistence, a day boy at St Joseph’s, and as his mother was out working nearly all the time, he began to play truant. He started taking money from her handbag and pilfered the restaurant till. Later, his mother reflected:
Every time my boy got into trouble and I tried to thrash things out of him, I got nowhere. I just couldn’t seem to get through to him somehow … I know now where the turning-point was. It was when he was sixteen or seventeen, and I hauled him out of a fellow’s flat. He hadn’t been working; but he would go out all dressed up, obviously up to something … The man was no good. A criminal type. I went up one afternoon and banged on the door till they let me in. In front of my son, and this man’s wife, I told him I knew he was no fit company for a young lad, and he was never to see my son again. I made Robin come home with me. He said nothing until he got into my flat, then he turned on me like a savage and punched me in the face, splitting my lip open. I couldn’t believe he would do such a thing to his mother … I didn’t go to the police. I couldn’t bring myself to turn my own boy in … All his life he has liked the company of rotten people.
Her care and devotion, and his education, were wasted. Already, by the time he was fifteen, he had been put on probation for receiving stolen goods, and when he left school, early, he was variously a porter, an electrician’s mate, a street trader and a lorry driver, filling in time until National Service claimed him.
He then joined the Rifle Brigade, became a marksman and a lance corporal and served in Malaya during the emergency. Jungle training and guerilla warfare taught him much and hardened him. After he was demobbed, according to his wife Margaret: ‘He seemed bitter, and talked about killing and the fear of battle and the danger … He seemed to have become slightly ruthless and much more tough.’ He had met his future wife – a small, attractive barmaid and former vaudeville dancer, Margaret Rose – at a party while he was on leave. She called him ‘Robbie’. She said later that he was very clean and tidy and made no demands on her sexually. They were married on 3 March 1958, at which time he was employed as a motor mechanic/driver earning £7 14s 1d a week – slightly less than his wife, who worked for £8 a week as a barmaid.
For a time the couple lived with his mother, and there were rows. Then, in January 1959, he was convicted at Chelmsford in Essex for attempted store-breaking and larceny and sentenced to a total of twenty-one months in prison. While he was inside, his wife became worried by the knowledge that during another foray the previous November he had robbed and beaten up a seventy-eight-year-old man – for before her marriage, she had lodged with the same old man. The latter was now dangerously ill in hospital, and it was said a ring had been cut off his finger. Roberts admitted the assault when she questioned him. But – ‘I didn’t know what to do,’ she admitted. ‘I was his wife, after all.’
When Roberts was released from prison, he seemed different to her. ‘All his quiet manners had gone,’ she said. ‘Only his tidy habits and neat dressing remained. He did not seem to care how he got money from somewhere.’ They had a serious row when he suggested she could make some money for them both if she picked up men. A few nights later they were both in a Soho night club, drunk, when he repeated the suggestion. She was furiously indignant. He knocked her off the bar stool, punched and kicked her. Enraged, she staggered out to a call box, phoned the police, and told them about the assault on the old man in November.
Harry Roberts, aged twenty-two, was sentenced in March 1959 to seven years for robbery with violence. ‘You are a brutal man,’ said the judge. The maximum sentence was life, and Roberts could have been hanged if the old man had died. Instead he was in jail for four years and eight months. When he was sentenced he swore he would be revenged on his wife, who was seven months pregnant at the time. She collapsed in court and soon afterwards miscarried. She later became a stripper, calling herself Mitzi, and was billed as the Pocket Venus. She never saw Harry Roberts again.
In prison, despite an erratic, explosive temper that erupted over card games, Roberts was quite popular, although he had no interest in betting and football. He took courses in brick-laying and plumbing and did well in both.
In January 1963, he was transferred from Wormwood Scrubs to Horfield Prison in Bristol. A ‘trusty’, he was allowed to live in a prison hostel and do a normal job – brick-laying – provided he returned to the hostel by 10.45 pm. At weekends he went drinking with other inmates, some of whom, tempted by so much freedom, absconded.
It was in a pub that Roberts met Mrs Lilian Margaret Perry. She was auburn-haired, about thirteen years older than he, and was in the process of getting a divorce from her ex-policeman husband. She and Roberts became friendly.
When he was released in November 1963 he lodged with her in Horfield, continuing to work as a brick-layer for Wimpey’s in Weston-super-Mare. He worked hard for several years, earned good money, and bought a second-hand Daimler for £650, his only personal extravagance.
But by March 1966, he had had enough. Leaving a large overdraft and several sizeable debts behind him, he returned to London. Mrs Perry went with him. They stayed in Maida Vale with a married couple, the Howards, who had witnessed his wedding to Margaret and had three young children. By now Roberts was twenty-nine.
A police description of him issued later that year read: ‘Height 5 ft 10 in, slimmish built, slightly sunken cheeks, quiff of hair in centre of forehead that falls down frequently, George Robey eyebrows, left side of mouth twists up slightly, a big eater, drinks little and then brown or light ale or Coca Cola, has a passion for suede shoes, occasionally takes purple hearts, smokes tipped cigarettes fairly heavily, spends freely … Has long fingers and bites his nails … Needs to shave only occasionally.’
Mrs Perry later revealed:
We never had a cross word the whole time we were together … He said he had often rowed with his mother and would walk out of the room to avoid one. He was a very quiet man who kept himse
lf to himself. He hated pubs and clubs and just liked to sit at home and watch television or read … I think he had never had a real home life before. He loved getting home at night, seeing a big fire and finding a steak grilling for him. He used to say that was the life, and we’d sit there so peaceful and happy. Wrestling was his favourite programme and he read all the James Bond books. He was a deeply lonely man and wanted me to go everywhere with him … If the Labour Government hadn’t put the squeeze on and killed the building trade, Robbie wouldn’t be inside now. It was only when the building trade flopped that he took to doing jobs … Robbie had to have money. He always had money as a boy. His mother gave him plenty because she was working and could not spend much time with him … He reckoned it salved her conscience … He could always buy friends with money but he could never rid himself of this horrible loneliness. That’s why he was happy with me … There was no sex between us. I’m sexless, and Robbie didn’t like it either.
He vowed, she said, that he would do anything to avoid going inside again – that he would shoot it out rather than go back to prison.
Mrs Perry and their landlady, Mrs Howard, knew of Roberts’s association with Witney and Duddy – he was very fond of Witney, she said – and Mrs Howard often warned him about the loaded guns they had. ‘You’ll get fifteen years if you’re caught with them!’ she would say. ‘If only they hadn’t had the guns,’ said Mrs Perry. ‘Robbie always swore they were for frighteners.’ Said Mrs Howard: ‘If they were only for frighteners, they wouldn’t have been loaded, would they?’
At 3.10 pm on Friday, 12 August, Witney’s ramshackle, noisy blue Vanguard left East Acton underground station car park with Witney at the wheel, Roberts beside him and Duddy in the back with the false number-plates, a stocking mask and some overalls. A small canvas bag containing three guns occupied the space between the two front seats.
Murder of the Black Museum 1875-1975: The Dark Secrets Behind a Hundred Years of the Most Notorious Crimes in England Page 51