Murder & Crime in London
Page 10
Sir Richard Muir was also at fault. He hadn’t examined the area properly because of the rainstorm. He had returned to the scene of crime after the trial and realised his mistake:
Good Lord, if only I had seen this earlier I could have proved that Vivian never got away in the way Mason said he did. If the Home Secretary reprieves Mason the fellow will get away with his life because of a thunderstorm!
Mason was released in 1937, served as a merchant seaman in the Second World War and was drowned when his ship was torpedoed.
seventeen
THE BLACKOUT RIPPER
The 1941 Blitz on London saw the implementation of safety measures designed to make London and other major cities lesser targets. One of the main measures was the ‘blackout’ of lights when night came. It afforded some measure of safety and some form of solace.
The blackout was also a perfect way for some enterprising Londoners to make money or continue in their transgressions without too much bother from the police. Some criminals were to take advantage of the situation by committing murder. One of the classic examples of the wartime murders is that of Rachel Dubinsky, whose partly burnt body was found under a stone slab in the grounds of a severely bomb-damaged Baptist church in Kennington. Patient detective work eventually convicted her killer – the harassed separated husband.
Montague Place air-raid shelter was no place to hide on the cold Sunday of 9 February 1942. Harold Batchelor discovered the body of a dark-haired, slender woman lying on her back, her ripped skirt hiked up to the thighs, her underwear stained with blood and her right breast exposed. She had only died a few hours before, from strangulation. There were no clues as to her identity or to the killer, except, as the chief of the Police Fingerprint Department, Detective Superintendent Frederick Cherrill, stated, when viewing the bruising on the neck, the killer was left-handed. Immediate investigations led to an emptied handbag a few streets away, followed by a painstaking door-to-door search that finally led to the woman’s identification: Evelyn Hamilton, a pharmacist, who had rented a room for the night in a local lodging house. Sir Bernard Spilsbury’s post-mortem revealed that she had eaten beetroot for her last supper. Later investigations revealed that she had eaten at the Lyons Corner House at Marble Arch late the previous night and had indeed consumed beetroot – this placed her death in the early hours of the morning.
Evelyn Hamilton.
Two meter readers came to empty the meters early in the morning of 10 February at 153 Wardour Street. The front door of Evelyn Oatley’s flat was slightly ajar. Her neighbour, Ivy Poole, was surprised because she knew that her friend ‘worked nights’ and liked to sleep in. She had brought an attractive military man late the night before and the noise of her radio had been quite deafening at times. The blackout curtains were still up so one of the meter men put his torch on. He ran straight out to find a policeman.
Inspector John Hennessey was just doing his rounds of Wardour Street when the meter man ran out. The bubbly, slim blond was dead. Her body was splayed across her bed with her throat slashed, jagged cuts near her pubic area and her own torch rammed inside her. A broken piece of mirror from her empty handbag, a bloodied tin opener and a pair of blood-smeared curling tongs were bagged and taken for testing. Spilsbury had nothing to add, but Cherrill’s search for prints revealed a thumbprint on the mirror and prints on the tin opener, all made by the left hand. There was, however, no reason for them to think it was the same killer.
Evelyn Oatley.
The newly divorced 30-year-old Mary Heywood was waiting, drink in hand, for her army officer boyfriend at the Universelle Brasserie on the corner of Jermyn Street and Haymarket. They were meeting between 8 and 9 p.m. that evening, Thursday 12 February.
While she was waiting she was approached by a well-spoken, good-looking young airman. He offered her a drink and then suggested they have a bite to eat at the Trocadéro. Slightly reluctant, she told him she was waiting for her boyfriend. He said it would be quick. It was. They only had a drink, as she had to get back. He asked and she gave her number, adding that she wasn’t easy. He then insisted on escorting her back to the Brasserie. Picking up his gasmask holder he took her round a back route, cornered her into a dark alley and started choking her.
A young night porter saw the scuffle and a flashing light. He shouted as a man ran past him. He picked up her handbag and a gasmask holder and helped the bloodied and shaken young woman to the Saville Row police station. It was a service gasmask, not hers, and the service number on the holder was traced to one Air Cadet Gordon Frederick Cummins at St James’s Close, Regent’s Park. The police requested to see the man in question.
Later that evening, part-time prostitute and married 25-year-old blond Catherine Mulcahy was standing outside Oddendino’s café in Piccadilly when she was accosted by a young airman. They agreed a price, £2, and took a cab to a flat near Marble Arch. The man then tried to choke her. She had the presence of mind to knee him where it hurt and run out of the flat screaming. A neighbour opened his door and both of them watched as the airman calmly put his clothes back on, left a further £8 in £1 notes, and left.
On Friday 13 February, 15-year-old Barbara Lowe reached her mother’s flat at 9-10 Gosfield Street at 4.30 p.m. She was a boarder at a school outside London and spent her weekends with her single mother. What she didn’t realise was that her well-dressed, well spoken, middle-aged mother paid the school fees with her earnings as a prostitute. ‘The Lady’, as she was known, operated alone. There was no answer at the flat but the next-door neighbour called her into his, where two policemen were waiting for her.
A war-time gasmask.
It transpired that a package had been left outside Margaret Lowe’s flat for two days. The neighbours had been worried and called the police. Once Barbara was there the police kicked the front door in and, finding the bedroom door locked, kicked that in too. Mrs Lowe had been strangled with a stocking.
Once DCs Cherrill and a colleague had arrived they found more. Pulling the sheets back showed the carnage. Her abdomen had been torn open, revealing the intestines and other organs. There were cuts all around the groin and a wax candle had been pushed up the vagina. Various bloodied kitchen knives were on the sheets and there were prints on a half-filled tumbler and a candlestick holder. The right hand print on the candlestick holder established that the killer was left-handed, not unlike the Oatley killer – in fact they were identical! Spilsbury thought that the killer was a ‘savage sexual maniac’. Mrs Lowe had possibly been killed on the 11th.
The papers were to dub the killer the ‘Blackout Ripper’. He hadn’t finished yet though. That same evening Henry Jouannet, the elderly manager of the Royal Court Hotel, returned at 7 p.m. to the flat he shared with his much younger wife, the statuesque, blond Doris, at 187 Sussex Gardens, Bayswater. The milk was still out, the bedroom door was locked and there was no answer. Fearing the worst, that she had reverted back to prostitution (which she had), he called the police. They smashed the bedroom door down to find a bloody mess. Doris was naked. She had been choked with a stocking. The flesh beneath her left breast was cut away and the genitals had been stabbed repeatedly. There were fingerprints on a hand mirror, bedroom door and wardrobe doors. Cherrill was convinced that this was the same person who had killed Oatley and Lowe. Furthermore, the prints matched.
Gordon Frederick Cummins was arrested at St James’s Close, Regents Park, for the attack on Miss Heywood. He matched Catherine Mulcahy’s description of her assailant: well-spoken, average height, light brown hair, moustache and grey/green eyes. His prints, furthermore, matched those held by the police and finally a piece of mortar found on the base of his gasmask holder matched that at the Montague Place air-raid shelter. A search of his belongings found several items belonging to his victims.
The married Cummins categorically denied everything. His wife wouldn’t believe what he had done. His fellow cadets, although irked by his airs and graces, for which he was nicknamed the ‘Count’, couldn’t b
elieve it either. The facts, though, spoke for themselves.
His trial on Thursday, 4 April 1942 was for the murder of Evelyn Oatley. The jury only took thirty-five minutes to find him guilty. He was hanged during an air raid on 25 June 1942 at Wandsworth Prison.
Gordon Cummins.
eighteen
REGGIE’S REVENGE
It was on the train into London that Eileen Evans had seen the ‘For Rent’ board on the top-floor flat of 10 Rillington Place in early 1948. It was the perfect location for her brother, Timothy, and his pregnant wife Beryl. It was barely ten minutes’ walk from the family home at St Mark’s Road, Notting Hill.
The diminutive 23-year-old Timothy (he was only just above 5ft), and his 18-year-old bride moved into the top-floor flat of the dilapidated house in Easter 1948. They were an ill-assorted couple. He was an engaging Welsh van driver with ‘educational difficulties’. She was a pretty, vivacious telephonist.
The house was divided into three ‘flats’. The ground-floor flat was occupied by the Christies, a middle-aged childless couple from Yorkshire, and the first-floor flat was held by Mr Kitchener, an elderly misogynist. Kitchener seemed a typical grumpy old man whilst the Christies, to the young couple, were very friendly. Mr Christie, a tall, bespectacled, balding man of about 50, worked at Ultra Radio, was an ex-policeman and First World War veteran, while Ethel Christie worked at the Osram factory.
Eileen Evans, who helped the young couple redecorate their flat, found John Reginald Halliday Christie repulsive, as did most women, especially as he wore plimsolls so he could pad about unheard. Something about him made her skin crawl, and well it might! Christie was undoubtedly highly intelligent but had been brought up in an austere household dominated by a very Victorian and successful father and older sisters who mothered the sensitive boy, to his detriment. He was a mathematician whose school career was punctuated with little academic success. The female-dominated Christie household was to have a profound effect. His first sally into the world of sex was disastrous, earning him the nickname of ‘Reggie No Dick’. His grandfather’s death and his ensuing visit to the body were to give him a fascination for the morbid.
No. 10 Rillington Place.
John Reginald Christie.
Christie, the Special Constable.
His joining the army was no less torturous. Fear of death and the effects of mustard gas were to make this sensitive and highly neurotic young man lose his voice. Once invalided out of the army he met and married Ethel, the daughter of neighbours. His twenties were punctuated by acts of violence, which led to a police record and the breakdown of his marriage. He moved to London in 1924, hoping that a clean break would give him some emotional independence. It apparently worked. He had a couple of relationships, albeit with prostitutes, hit one with a cricket bat during a quarrel and was imprisoned for six months. He was imprisoned again after being caught stealing a car.
While serving his sentence in 1933, he asked his wife to join him in London – after a nine-year absence. She did! They took a flat at the run-down 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill and he signed on with the local doctor, Dr Odess.
Shortly after the beginning of the Second World War, Christie became a Special Constable in the Reserve Police. The resumption of marital relations did not seem to affect his roving eye – he had an affair in 1943 only to be discovered by the cuckolded husband in flagrante delicto and beaten up severely. This reinforced his fear of violence. He could not stand up to male dominance and was to take sweet revenge.
Revenge took the shape of a 21-year-old German part-time prostitute he had come to know through his job. With his wife in Sheffield on a brief break, Christie invited Ruth Fuerst back to his flat, strangled her during sex and bundled her body under the floorboards of the front room when his wife telegrammed that she was coming home early, with her brother. The brother was to sleep, unknowingly, next to a corpse for the night. Christie interred Fuerst in his garden the following night.
He left the police force in 1944 to work for Ultra Radio and became friendly with the respectable catarrh sufferer Muriel Eady. Muriel and her boyfriend were to become good friends of the Christies. Little did she know that she was being groomed for his next fix! Indeed, sex for Christie was domination, and killing was the ultimate domination, giving him an inner calm he could not otherwise have. His visits to his doctor became more frequent when he needed his next fix. It was easy for him to arrange a sick note for the times when he decided to kill again.
Ruth Fuerst, Christie’s first known victim.
Ethel had her next trip to Sheffield in the autumn of 1944. Christie invited Muriel to the flat to try out an inhaler to alleviate her catarrh. He had woven an intricate tapestry of lies about his medical knowledge, especially in conjunction with the police. It was to be the last time she was ever seen. She arrived at the flat one day in early October. He showed her the inhaler with two tubes, placed it on her face and while she was inhaling the Friars balsam from one tube he gassed her with the other. He carried her to the bedroom and strangled her during sex. He would later bury her body in the garden. She was to be considered yet another victim of the German bombs.
The largely working-class neighbours were impressed with the middle-class Christie with his service in the Great War and with the police. Men tended to find him pleasant and intelligent and his hobby, photography, gave him quite a reputation. He also had another less salubrious hobby, collecting female pubic hairs – he now had two sets! A lonely man, he would talk to many people, and one, Mr Hookway, a furniture dealer on Portobello Road, became quite a chum.
Beryl Evans liked Mrs Christie. The Christies were quiet but always helpful. Reginald certainly liked Beryl, and unknown to all at 10 Rillington Place, he had made a peep hole in the wall to view the comings and goings.
Timothy Evans was an engaging character. Shortly after Timothy’s birth his biological father left, never to return. His mother had remarried, to a Mr Probert, and moved the growing family from Wales to London: St Mark’s Road, Notting Hill. It was a close-knit family. Timothy could not read or write, was educationally sub-normal but had a zest for life, managed to find a good job as a van driver and was liked by all. He was also a liar par excellence! His very fertile and largely innocuous imagination would give an Italian Count for his father and a brother with a fleet of cars, among other tall stories!
Beryl was gloriously pretty but an ineffectual housewife. The flat was perpetually dirty and their little daughter, Geraldine, who arrived in October 1948, was unwashed but well fed. Their early days were very happy and their daughter made their happiness even more precious. A friend said that ‘they were a lovely couple, very fond of each other. Yes, they did quarrel a bit but never badly and never for long. They both thought the world of Geraldine.’
There were, however, some potentially serious cracks in the Evans’ marriage: Beryl could not manage money and overspent: she invited a friend, Lucy, to stay at the flat, only for her husband to quarrel with her, leaving with Lucy and returning, tail between his legs, to his wife the following day.
Beryl became pregnant again in 1949. They could not afford another child and she desperately looked for ways to abort. She told the Christies. This was the perfect chance for Christie. He began grooming the impressionable Beryl for death, with precision. His chance came when Mr Kitchener had to be hospitalised for five weeks in October. Christie complained about the state of the house to the council and the owners were asked to deal with it. The builders, Mr Phillips, Fred Jones, Fred Willis and Robert Anderson moved in on 3 October 1949. Timothy wanted nothing to do with the abortion but Beryl pressed ahead, especially when Christie said he could do it at home. He explained to Timothy that he had done several before and was semi-trained to be a doctor anyway! The simple Timothy believed him.
After a quarrel with her husband, Beryl told him she and the baby were going down to Brighton the next day. He fully expected her to have gone when he returned from work but she had talked it ov
er with Christie and she would have her abortion the next day, Tuesday 8 November. Christie arranged for a sick note from his doctor.
This time the gas panicked the patient in the kitchen. Christie had to resort to violence, strangled her and then had sex with her, only to find that a friend of Beryl’s, Mrs Vincent, was trying to get into her kitchen. He wedged his foot behind the door until her friend left. He then dragged Beryl’s body to the bedroom and covered it with an eiderdown. What to do? He would wait for the unsuspecting husband.
Timothy returned to be told that the ‘operation’ had gone badly – he would have to help Christie to dispose of her. This he did, helping him carry the body down to Mr Kitchener’s empty flat. Christie assured him he would dispose of the body, down the drain. He would also look after the baby and make sure she would be adopted by a nice couple. All Timothy would have to say was that Beryl and Geraldine were in Brighton. Christie brilliantly manipulated the unworldly Evans, strangled baby Geraldine, and, on hearing of his sacking, suggested Evans leave for Bristol, or beyond. Christie assured him that Geraldine would be taken care of. He would also arrange for his friend, Mr Hookway, to buy the furniture. Evans left London on the evening of Tuesday 15 November, after having visited Mrs Vincent. Christie put the bodies in the garden washhouse.