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

by Honeycombe, Gordon

  In November 1969 the five-year experimental period during which the death penalty for murder was suspended came to an end, and on 16 December 1969 the House of Commons confirmed the abolition of capital punishment by a majority of 158 votes. The decision was reaffirmed by the House of Lords two days later, by a majority of 46.

  However, the scaffold at Wandsworth Prison was not dismantled, as the death penalty could still be exacted for treason and piracy with violence, and it still remained in force on the Isle of Man, which came within the jurisdiction of the Manx courts. In December 1982, a nineteen-year-old labourer, Stephen Moore, convicted of the murder of his girlfriend’s baby son in Douglas, Isle of Man, was sentenced to death by the island’s senior judge, Deemster Jack Corrin. In an outmoded ritual, outlawed on the mainland, he formally donned a black cap and declared: ‘You will be taken from this place to the Isle of Man Prison and thence to a place of lawful execution, where you will be hanged by the neck until you are dead.’ The sentence was never carried out.

  51

  STANLEY WRENN

  THE MURDER OF COLIN SAUNDERS, 1969

  Violent offences against homosexuals increased after the passing of the Sexual Offences Act of 27 July 1967, which legislated that ‘a homosexual act committed in private shall not be an offence, provided that the partners consent thereto and have attained the age of twenty-one years.’ The increase in violence was probably due to the fact that so-called gays tended, since the Act was passed, to pursue their sexual activities more openly and so make themselves more obvious targets for those whom they antagonised. Murders of homosexuals are not often solved, because of the random nature of the pick-up that may be involved. The following case is unusual in several respects: in the deliberate but casual way the murderer chose and killed his victim; in the choice of one of the weapons; in the absence of any attempt to conceal the crime or to evade capture; and in the acknowledgement of guilt.

  Stanley Wrenn was born in Liverpool on 20 January 1950. When he was sixteen, he joined the army as a junior private in the RAMC, but was discharged later the same year. After that, he drifted, finding employment as a car-sprayer, shop assistant, labourer and barman. In October 1969, he was in London, and one night during the first half of the month was in the concourse of Piccadilly Circus underground station when an older man came up to him and said: ‘How are you getting on? Haven’t I met you before?’ Wrenn was nineteen. The other man was thirty-five-year-old Colin George Saunders, who was born in Bedford on 12 June 1934 and was now a chauffeur with

  Warley Car Hire Services in Bromley, Kent. Saunders, who had previous convictions for importuning and gross indecency, continued: ‘Where are you living?’ ‘Nowhere,’ replied Wrenn. Saunders took him for something to eat in a café and asked him if he would like to come back to his place. ‘Yeah,’ said Wrenn.

  They went to 13 College Road in Bromley, a Victorian type of terraced house that was divided into various flats and single rooms. Saunders occupied a ground-floor room at the front. That night they slept in a double bed, but Saunders soon acquired two single beds. According to Wrenn, the older man had sex with him – ‘I did nothing’ – every night.

  This went on for five or six weeks. In the third week of November 1969, Wrenn discovered that Saunders had infected him with gonorrhoea. The relationship became very strained. On Monday, 24 November, ‘out of spite’, Wrenn made up his mind to kill Saunders.

  He went shopping for a knife, and having passed over one that cost 12s 6d – it was too dear – he bought a fisherman’s knife for 4s 6d. He also dismantled and removed a gas ring from another room in 13 College Road and concealed both it and the knife in a cubby-hole by the television set in their shared bed-sitting-room. The following night, Wrenn hid both weapons under his bed, going to bed himself at 10.45 pm.

  He later told the police that he stayed awake until 5 am on the morning of Wednesday, 26 November, listening to Saunders snore. Then he got out of bed – he was wearing a T-shirt – took the gas ring and knife from their place of concealment, and with the gas-ring struck Saunders, who was asleep on his side, on the head.

  ‘The second time I hit him,’ said Wrenn later, ‘he looked up. He was facing the wall. I then stuck the knife in his throat.’ Wrenn then went berserk, stabbing Saunders many times about the head. After drying his hands on his T-shirt, Wrenn pulled a sheet up over the corpse’s head and covered it with a dressing gown. He then found time to wash and shave.

  He remained in the room for some time, going through the dead man’s possessions. Eventually, Stanley Wrenn took what he wanted – money, clothes, car keys and some other articles – and packed the larger items into a suitcase. Carrying the suitcase, he left the flat.

  Saunders’s employer’s car, a Humber, was outside the house and Wrenn got in. He was not, however, familiar with cars or with automatic gears. The Humber reversed at speed and struck a Ford Consul being driven along Hammelton Road. The driver remonstrated with Wrenn, saying: ‘That’s a nice thing to do!’

  There was an argument that concluded with the driver of the Ford suggesting that they should telephone the police. Wrenn volunteered to do so and returned to 13 College Road, where he made no phone call but instead put Saunders’s chauffeur’s cap on the dead man’s bed. He returned to the impatient driver of the Ford and pretended he had telephoned for the police. Once more he returned to the house, this time leaving the car keys on Saunders’s bed before leaving the house once agin, this time avoiding the driver of the Ford. He walked to Bromley North railway station, where he got on a train to London.

  Wrenn spent that night in the West End. In the morning, he bought a newspaper and saw that he had been named in connection with the death of Colin Saunders. Police investigating the car accident had gone the previous day to Saunders’s address and discovered his body. Wrenn, seeing his name in the papers, decided to give himself up.

  He approached a police constable in Piccadilly Circus and said who he was. The PC took him to West Central police station, where he was charged on Thursday, 27 November.

  Put on trial at the Old Bailey on 24 March 1970 before Justice Sir Ralph Cusack, Stanley Wrenn pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment. He served ten years of his sentence, being released from prison in June 1980, when he was thirty.

  52

  MUSTAPHA BASSAINE

  THE MURDER OF JULIAN SESSÉ, 1970

  Sixty would seem to be a dangerous age for homosexual men, for those who invite, solicit or pay for the attentions of younger men. Such men, who grew up in the first part of the twentieth century, when their sexual inclinations and activities were of necessity closeted or repressed, once formed the majority of the gay minority who became murder victims. This was also true in 1970, despite the Sexual Offences Act of 1967. But then, as now, although some homosexual men still become victims of ‘gay-bashing’, of violence committed by deeply prejudiced and apparent straights, most of the more violent homosexual homicides are committed by and among homosexual men, resulting in an overkill of multiple stabbings and gross and brutal injury.

  Julian Louis Georges Sessé was the butler of Lord Bernstein, chairman of Granada TV. A Belgian, though born in Scotland, Sessé was sixty-five at the time of his murder and was living in a basement flat in his employer’s grand London residence at 32 Wilton Crescent, off Belgrave Square. When Lord Bernstein went on holiday to Bermuda on Friday, 18 December 1970, Sessé was left in sole charge of the house. He was last seen alive by a milk roundsman on the Saturday morning.

  At 9 am on Monday, 21 December, a van driver from Granada TV called at the house to make a delivery but received no reply to his knocking and ringing at the big front door. However, he noticed newspapers lying outside the basement flat below. He went down the steps into the basement area and banged on the door of the flat. There was no response. Apparently, when he found that the door was unlocked, he went inside, stood in the hallway, called out and after getting no reply he left.

  A part-time c
leaner, fifty-five-year-old Mrs Malmon, was the next person to arrive. She also tried to attract the attention of someone within the house, and after waiting for a while, uncertain what to do, she telephoned Bernstein’s private secretary, Jean Hazelwood, from a phone box. The cleaner waited for some time outside the house until Miss Hazelwood turned up with a key. She unlocked the front door and they went inside. Calling out Mr Sessé’s name, they made a search of some of the rooms. Eventually Miss Hazelwood, who was twenty-four, went down the inner stairs to Sessé’s flat. She found the living room spattered with blood: there was blood on the settee, on the walls and in the kitchen. There were also bloodstains on the floor outside the bathroom. But its door was locked. Alarmed, she ran upstairs and dialled 999.

  An ambulance and two local policemen, from Chelsea police station in Lucan Place, arrived soon after 11 am. At 11.15 the policemen forced open the bathroom door, which had been locked on the outside. Inside the bathroom Julian Sessé, wearing a crewneck sweater and trousers, lay on the floor in a pool of blood, partly covered by a large and bloody bath towel. His throat had been cut. There were stab wounds in his head and lower chest, and his stomach had been hacked open by another instrument – a meat cleaver.

  The Home Office pathologist, Professor Keith Simpson, who carried out the post-mortem, established that Sessé had died of haemorrhage, shock and loss of blood, and that he had been killed late on Saturday night or early on Sunday. Anal intercourse had occurred before his death.

  DCS John ‘Ginger’ Hensley, aged fifty, was put in charge of the case. He was assisted by DS Bernie Davis, aged thirty-three, who had just joined the Murder Squad. Arriving at the house about 12.30, they examined the basement flat and found a pair of bloodstained trousers in a washing machine, and a small meat cleaver and a knife in the lavatory bowl; its seat was down. Both implements had evidently come from the kitchen, where the killer had apparently picked up the knife and attacked the butler. The assault seemed to have continued in the living room. Sessé had apparently resisted and tried to escape. But after his throat was cut he had been dragged into the bathroom, where the killer, it seemed, had hoped to conceal the body and the weapons. The killer had also exchanged his trousers for a clean pair taken from Sessé’s wardrobe.

  Correspondence found in the flat and other inquiries revealed that Sessé, a kind and generous man and highly regarded by his employer, was homosexual and in the habit of picking up young men, entertaining them and paying some of them for sex. There were names, addresses and phone numbers in Sessé’s correspondence, but the police were far from certain that any of this information would lead them to the killer, who could have been a total stranger, picked up that Saturday night.

  Two days later, however, they had an unexpected breakthrough. On Wednesday, 23 December, Hensley and Davis received a message that a girl living in Tufnell Park, London N7, appeared to know something about the murder. She had dialled 999 in an agitated state and then talked to two policemen in a Q car who had called at her address.

  Jean Fitzgerald was a twenty-two-year-old Irish girl, who worked as a waitress in a café. She had met Julian Sessé through her boyfriend, a Moroccan male nurse called Mustapha Bassaine, whom she had known for over a year. Born in May 1944 in Rabat, Bassaine was twenty-six, unemployed, and had been living in a bed-sit with Jean Fitzgerald for several months. She told Hensley and Davis that on Saturday, 19 December, she had gone drinking in the West End with Bassaine and that after a while he telephoned Sessé’s flat. He then told her that he was going to call on Sessé to get some money off him. He left her around the pub’s closing time, about 11 pm.

  She next heard from him at about 9 pm on the Sunday night, when he telephoned her at the Tufnell Park bed-sit and told her that he wanted her to come to the Bernstein mansion in Wilton Crescent. He was apparently phoning from there. It seems that he remained in the house overnight on Saturday and most of Sunday. In hindsight, perhaps he wanted her to assist him in the disposal of Sessé’s body.

  Something in his voice or words made Fitzgerald fearful and she declined to do as he wished. He then threatened to kill her if she failed to obey him. She still refused. He concluded the conversation by telling her to get his clothes together and pack them as he was going away.

  Later that night, Bassaine turned up at the bed-sit, letting himself in with his key. He had been drinking. There was blood on his shoes and there were scratches on his neck. He said he had cut himself on some glass. She noticed that he was wearing a new pair of trousers that were too big for him. Too frightened to go to sleep, she sat up with him all night, as he sobbed and drank gin, smitten with uncertainty, self-pity and remorse.

  On the morning of Monday, 21 December, he went out and bought a newspaper. Later, he told her that he was going back to Morocco as his mother was ill. Later still, she went with him to Regent Street. There, at an airline ticket agency, he paid £44 in cash for a single ticket to Casablanca and also exchanged $50 American dollars for English pounds. The money had presumably been stolen from Sessé or from the Bernsteins. The two of them then journeyed out to Heathrow Airport, where Bassaine departed on a flight to Casablanca that left at 3.10 pm.

  Before leaving, he gave Jean Fitzgerald an address in Morocco and instructed her to send cuttings of any newspaper story that mentioned his name. Two days later, having read in the papers about Sessé’s murder, she dialled 999.

  The police found Bassaine’s bloodstained shoes and Sessé’s trousers in a dustbin in Tufnell Park. The blood on the shoes would later prove to match that of Sessé. But there was little that Hensley and Davis could do about an arrest, as there was no extradition treaty between the UK and Morocco. So Sessé’s killer was safe as long as he remained in North Africa.

  Nonetheless, an application for his extradition was made and a warrant issued on 23 December 1970 for his arrest. A description of the murdered man was also issued to the press, who were told that the police wanted to interview a young man who had been seen near Lord Bernstein’s house. For a time, Jean Fitzgerald’s lodging was put under police guard. But nothing more was seen or heard of Bassaine for nearly two years.

  Meanwhile, Hensley and Davis attended Julian Sessé’s funeral. Few others did. None of his family chose to be there. Lord Bernstein acquired another butler.

  Then, in October 1972, news reached New Scotland Yard that Mustapha Bassaine had been arrested for some alien’s offence at Rotterdam in the Netherlands. The Dutch police, via Interpol, had learned that he was wanted for murder in the UK. Extradition arrangements were made.

  DS Bernie Davis flew to Rotterdam to collect Bassaine, who turned out to be a man of good family, of average height and build, with a heavily pock-marked face. On the flight back to England they sat, handcuffed together, at the front of the plane. A stewardess suggested that the handcuffs should be removed, in case there was an emergency during the flight. Davis refused to oblige, saying: ‘If the plane crashes, we’re all in trouble, love.’

  Mustapha Bassaine, now twenty-eight, was tried at the Central Criminal Court in London in February 1973 before Mr Justice Forbes. The trial began on Thursday, 8 February, and ended the following Monday. John Buzzard, QC, was the chief prosecutor, and the defence was led by Mr Howard, QC.

  Bassaine pleaded not guilty to the murder of Julian Sessé and not guilty to stealing £80 from Lady Bernstein’s bedroom. He gave evidence on his own behalf and said that although he had spent the Saturday night with Sessé, he did not kill the Bernsteins’ butler. His story was that Jean Fitzgerald, when told of his association with Sessé, had threatened ‘to harm the old man’. Bassaine said that on the Sunday she left their digs and didn’t return until late that night. When she did, she was trembling, he said, and told him she was sick.

  The jury decided there was no truth in these allegations. Bassaine was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

  Privately, the police surmised that Bassaine had tried to blackmail Sessé, that Sessé had refused to
be intimidated, and that angry words were exchanged. In a rage, Bassaine had then picked up the knife.

  DCS Ginger Hensley retired from the police in 1975. He died of cancer two years later. Bernie Davis remained with the Murder Squad for another five years and was promoted to DCS. He retired in 1989.

  Mustapha Bassaine was released from prison in July 1984 and duly deported from the UK.

  In the five-year period from 1986 to 1991 inclusive, there were sixty-six known non-domestic murders of homosexual men nationwide, of which twenty-nine remained unsolved. Most of these murders involved older men, in their fifties and sixties, who were killed by young men, usually in their twenties. Young homosexual men are in fact less likely to be killed by their contemporaries, as they are capable of defending themselves and do not arouse deep feelings of loathing and disgust. Young gay men are more likely to be beaten and roughed up. The law courts have generally taken a lenient view of those who murder gays. Invariably the charge is not murder but manslaughter, and the resulting sentence three to five years, sometimes ten. There is even a recognised mitigating defence of ‘homosexual panic’, when it is felt that a heterosexual man’s killing of a homosexual man may in part be excused because of his shock, revulsion and consequent loss of self-control at being the object of homosexual advances and desire.

  53

  ARTHUR AND NIZAMODEEN HOSEIN

  THE MURDER OF MRS MCKAY, 1970

  Kidnap victims must be among the most pathetic and wretched victims of crime, living in acute discomfort, isolation and terror until, as sometimes happens, they are done to death. Kidnappers must be among the most cowardly and callous of killers. One of the many extraordinary features of the McKay case was that it was the first kidnap-and-ransom crime ever perpetrated in Britain. It was also one of the worst examples of cooperation between the police, the press and the victim’s family, and the ensuing investigation suffered as a result. It was also only the third case in fifty years in which a murder conviction was obtained without the body ever being found. the questions still remain. whatever happened to Mrs McKay? When, and where, and how did she die? The prime irony in the case is that she was kidnapped by mistake.