Murder on the Home Front

by Molly Lefebure

  Dr. Simpson’s idea was this: the demolition men, on the day they discovered the body, had removed all the rubble from the cellar and deposited it in a big pile in the old graveyard. For all they knew—or we knew—this rubble contained other fragments of the body; important identity clues, perhaps, such as the lower jaw, which was missing from the skull, the hands, or the feet. So now this pile of rubble, all three tons of it, must be sifted.

  “Well, Mr. Davis,” said CKS, taking off his jacket. “Well, Dr. Simpson,” said Chief Inspector Davis, taking off his. And beneath the baking sky, hot and blue as an enamel plate straight from the oven, the company picked up shovels and began digging into the pile of rubble. Two police constables held a sieve. The two demolition men propped themselves on their shovels, and stood gaping and grinning like zanies. Probably they had never seen people work so vigorously as that before. Certainly something struck them as very funny. But after a while they were persuaded to hold another sieve between them, and they grew quite interested.

  I had to stand by, noting the findings. These were not inspiring. A large number of mutton bones, rabbit bones, metal shoe-heel pieces, old metal buttons, hairpins, and shards of flowerpots appeared, but nothing else.

  It took two afternoons of hot work to sift all the rubble, but at last it was done. Work, alas, that yielded nothing, but which proved, if further proof were needed, that it is true the CID leaves no stones unturned in the course of investigation.

  There was by this time little doubt, if any, that Dobkin had murdered his wife and concealed her remains in the Baptist Chapel under the flagstone, after doing his best to mutilate the body and then destroy it in a fire. But the police were still a long way from being able to charge him with murder. The identity of the remains had still to be clinched and the cause of death established. Dobkin had murdered his wife, but how? It seemed that discovery of this might well prove impossible.

  Mr. Keeling now telephoned us to say he had a photograph of Mrs. Dobkin. Judged by this portrait the lady had been a rather wan, damp, dispirited personality, but she had somehow contrived for this holiday snap to twist her features into a watery holiday smile. Dr. Simpson was delighted to have this portrait. He was going to use it as the portraits of the two victims in the famous Ruxton case had been used…

  A photograph was taken of a full-face view of the dead woman’s skull and upon this the holiday portrait was superimposed. The two corresponded exactly.

  This additional evidence of identification was, however, not enough to establish identity beyond all possible dispute. For the final evidence we turned to the upper jaw.

  DI Keeling set about tracking down Mrs. Dobkin’s dental surgeon. Presently he was found, Mr. Barnet Kopkin, of Crouch End. Fortunately he had kept the most detailed record cards of the treatment he had given Mrs. Dobkin. He was able to draw a diagram of her upper jaw as he had last seen it, and then Mr. Keeling brought him along to Guy’s to compare this diagram with the upper jaw of the body.

  It was a very exciting moment: Mr. Kopkin, standing in our department, with Mr. Keeling, looking rather grim, standing behind him; Dr. Simpson politely handing Mr. Kopkin Mrs. Dobkin’s skull, Mr. Kopkin taking it in both hands and then saying, without hesitation, in a tone of mingled triumph and amazement, “This is Mrs. Dobkin’s upper jaw. That is the jaw I attended and those are my fillings.”

  The diagram he had drawn corresponded perfectly with the actual jaw.

  A further detail established the jaw as Mrs. Dobkin’s to an even more indisputable degree. Mr. Kopkin’s record card mentioned that in extracting two teeth from the left side of the upper jaw in April 1941 fragments of the roots of the teeth had been left in the jaw—not an uncommon occurrence. Sir William Kelsey Fry, the famous Guy’s dental surgeon, X-rayed the jaw on this side and discovered these roots.

  The police now considered the identity of the remains was established without a doubt. They could charge Harry Dobkin with murdering his wife, Rachel Dobkin, if they could find out how he had murdered her.

  Dr. Simpson bent all his energies to this task. And found that Harry Dobkin himself had done his best to help him.

  For Dobkin, in a last attempt to destroy the body, had sprinkled slaked lime over it, particularly around the neck. But slaked lime doesn’t destroy; rather, it preserves. In this case the slaked lime had preserved injuries to the throat, especially to the voice box, and these injuries told Dr. Keith Simpson everything.

  I remember leaving him, one evening, seated at the laboratory bench, with a large sheet of white blotting paper spread before him, and on the blotting paper the bones of the voice box, delicate and intricate as pieces of a Chinese puzzle. At these he probed, lightly but firmly, with a slender steel probe. He was in for a long, quietly satisfying session of “spare-time work.”

  Next morning, when he picked me up at Euston, I saw at once from his smile that it had been a very satisfying session indeed. As I settled myself in the car, he said, “It’s murder, Miss L.”

  “It is?”

  “Yes, without any possible doubt. When we get to Guy’s I’ll show you.”

  When we arrived at Guy’s we went up to our small but so-soon-to-be-famous department, and there CKS showed me what he had found. The bones of the voice box still lay carefully set out on the blotting paper. CKS took up the probe again, pointing with it.

  There was some dried blood clot around the upper horn of the right wing of the voice box; this clot indicated bruising and meant that there had been great pressure upon the throat while Mrs. Dobkin was still alive. Under the bruising was a fracture of this upper horn of the wing. Now, this was of enormous importance, for such a fracture never occurs except in cases of manual strangulation. Without a doubt Mrs. Dobkin had been strangled manually.

  There was one other injury, to the back of the head, where there was more blood clot, indicating heavy bruising. This injury suggested that Mrs. Dobkin had either fallen backward to the ground under the weight of her assailant, or had had her head bashed against the ground by the man who gripped her throat with frenzied hands, battering and strangling her.

  So the moment for which we had all been working had at last come. For three months we had guarded the secret of the discovery of Mrs. Dobkin’s body. No word had leaked out, even to the press. For three months we had all worked quietly but doggedly. In July the remains had been found, now it was October, and the time was ripe for DDI Hatton to arrest Harry Dobkin.

  Like so many murderers, Dobkin, undoubtedly, was convinced he had outwitted the police. He had killed his wife—though whether in a fit of fury, or after cold-blooded premeditation, we shall never know. He admitted she had said to him, at that last meeting on the fateful April 11, 1941, “If you don’t make peace with me I will make trouble for you.” As she had already on two occasions had him imprisoned for not paying her maintenance, he obviously had good reason for wishing her out of his way. She was becoming an awful nuisance. Therefore, coolly or heatedly, he put her out of his way by murdering her, and then set about disposing of the body with ghastly determination and considerable cunning; chopping, scalping, stripping away the face, gouging out the eyes, cutting away the lower jaw, and finally, after four nights of bloody toil, attempting to burn what was left. And when the lady would not burn he sprinkled slaked lime over her and left her under a heavy slab.

  There is little doubt that from time to time he revisited the cellar and probably took peeps at the decomposing body under the stone slab. Its condition reassured him that if it were ever uncovered it could never be traced as Mrs. Dobkin. The authorities would accept it as an old air-raid victim. He believed—what reason was there for him to believe otherwise?—that he had got away with murder.

  It is definitely known that Dobkin paid one of these visits to Kennington Lane on August 8, 1942, two and a half weeks after the discovery of the body. (Perhaps he had heard a rumor that the demolition workers had found some old bones there.) At any rate, a passing constable saw Dobkin go in
to 302 Kennington Lane—where he had no reason to go, for he had given up fire-watching there long ago—and presently open a window and peer out.

  Dobkin, surveying the chapel from his vantage point, could not fail to notice that the demolition workers had cleared and tidied the cellar of all the old debris, exposing it to the light of day, and that they had moved the stone slab from its old position. Obviously the body had been discovered at last.

  Did his heart sink suddenly then? Or was his confidence so great he felt no qualms? I think it was the latter case. Like most people, Dobkin had absolutely no notion of the extent to which the police use modern science to help them in their investigations. He never dreamed, for a second, that the body had been taken to an up-to-date laboratory and examined by a pathologist, an analyst, and a dental surgeon who were all leading experts in their respective spheres, and that it had been X-rayed, photographed, taken to pieces, and put together again like a jigsaw puzzle. Lastly, Dobkin greatly underestimated the intelligence of the CID. Detectives are no longer, if they ever were, flat-footed boys of the bulldog breed plodding about, laboriously counting up two and two on their fingers and, just about, making the answer four. Writing of the Dobkin case later in the Police Journal, Dr. Simpson said, “The case…is a good example of the versatility of the CID officer. The most scientific investigation the CID have ever had to perform was completed without a slip, extensive technical reports being compiled by an unselected group of officers with a competence which amply justifies its reputation.”

  Dobkin, like so many people, didn’t know the CID.

  But now October had come—a strangely fateful month, October, an eternal month of reckonings—and Harry Dobkin was to get to know the CID.

  DDI Hatton had Dobkin brought in to Southwark police station, into his office with its little high windows, its files, its paper-stacked desks. And Mr. Hatton said to Dobkin, “In fairness to you I am now telling you that human remains were found in a cellar at a chapel next to where you were fire-watching in April 1941, and we are satisfied they are those of your wife.” To which Dobkin, a born blusterer, replied, “I don’t know what you are talking about. I don’t know of any cellar at the chapel and have never been down there. In fact, I don’t believe it is my wife, but if you tell me so, I suppose I must accept it.”

  He was told that a police constable had seen him looking out of the window at 302 Kennington Lane, surveying the chapel and debris-cleared cellar in early August, whereupon Dobkin flew into a violent rage and jumped up, shouting, “Show him to me, the liar, show him to me.”

  The constable was brought in and asked if Dobkin were the man he had seen at Kennington Lane. He said, “That’s the man. I’ve spoken to him several times at Kennington Lane about lights he has shown. I know him well.” Dobkin, purple with anger, bellowed, “That’s a lie. I’ve never seen him before, and I wasn’t there. He’s lying! He’s lying!”

  Now Dobkin, from the start, was much given to writing memoranda and statements for the police. He had, for instance, sent Chief Inspector Davis a long voluntary statement (incidentally quite untrue) at the outset of the investigation, and he sat down now, quite of his own accord, in Mr. Hatton’s office, pulled an old grocer’s bill from his pocket and on the back of it wrote, in a big, rambling scrawl, a statement for Mr. Hatton. It began:

  “Divisional Inspector, Dear Sir,

  “In respect to what you say that my wife has been found dead or murdered, and that you say I know something I am holding back from the Police…”

  and off it roamed, but Mr. Hatton, on Dobkin handing it to him, didn’t bother with the roaming rest of it, for the first three lines were enough. “In respect to what you say that my wife has been found dead or murdered…” Ah, but nobody had uttered one word to Dobkin about his wife being murdered. How much better for him if he had not been so fond of writing voluntary statements!

  Without more ado DDI Hatton charged Harry Dobkin with the murder of his wife, Rachel Dobkin.

  During the following days Dobkin continued to pester Mr. Hatton with scrawled literary effusions: never, possibly, was a murderer so anxious to write notes to the police. Mr. Hatton, when we visited him in his office one afternoon, brought out handfuls of these “billets-doux,” as he called them, all scrawled on odd scraps of paper, any old scraps of paper, in Dobkin’s big, round, rambling hand. “Always writing to me, always! Thinks I haven’t anything better to do than read letters!” exclaimed the exasperated Mr. Hatton, with an impatient gesture that sent Dobkin’s communications scattering over the floor. Mr. Keeling, grinning, picked them up.

  We first saw Dobkin when he arrived at Southwark Coroner’s Court for the opening of the inquest. A stocky, very powerful, somewhat stupid, albeit cunning man, with small, quick, cunning eyes and a big, shovel-shaped, inquisitive nose. He was taken into the mortuary yard to await the inquest, and there he asked to see his wife. This, of course, was an impossibility. Very confident, he smoked a cigarette and offered West one, too.

  When he came into court he seemed very easy, almost contemptuous. He looked around at us all, and his expression plainly said, “Now let’s hear what you’ve managed to cook up against me.”

  Nothing was said on that occasion to shake his confidence. Mr. Harvey Wyatt merely adjourned the inquest until the trial should be over and Dobkin lurched, with a smug expression, out of the court.

  Next time we saw him was at Lambeth Police Court. He sat in the dock there, his hands comfortably resting on his knees, wearing that same smug expression on his face. He remained so until Dr. Simpson began giving his evidence. Then, gradually, a ghastly change came over Dobkin.

  Keith Simpson spoke clearly, slowly, sentence by sentence piling the facts. And Dobkin, realizing that the veil had been miraculously torn from his secrets, began to sweat. He pulled out his handkerchief and mopped his forehead, the back of his neck, the palms of his hands. His face became white. He shifted in his seat, gripped his knees with his big hands until the knuckles gleamed. If ever a man was shattered, Dobkin was.

  On Tuesday, November 17, 1942, Dobkin appeared for trial at the Old Bailey, before Mr. Justice Wrottesley. Mr. (now Mr. Justice) Byrne and Mr. Gerald Howard appeared for the prosecution and Mr. F. H. Lawton for the defense.

  Dobkin at the trial was fearfully nervous, impatient, very angry, darting furious glances around the court, and especially at Dr. Simpson, Mr. Keeling, and myself, who sat at a table directly below the dock. Mr. Keeling whispered to me, “If looks could kill, we’d certainly be dead.”

  From time to time Dobkin scribbled little notes which he passed to Mr. Lawton. Mr. Hatton, noticing this, grinned. “Still at it,” he commented.

  Mr. Lawton put up a magnificent and grimly tenacious struggle on Dobkin’s behalf, but in the face of the prosecution’s overwhelming evidence he could achieve very little. And what he did achieve was successfully sabotaged by Dobkin himself when he went into the witness box.

  During the first stages of the trial Dobkin, as I have said, was nervous, but also very angry. By the time he reached the witness box himself he appeared less angry, more apprehensive. He faced Mr. Byrne as if he did not quite know what to expect. Mr. Byrne’s eye flickered as he measured Dobkin with a cold, cold gaze, and then in even colder tones he began, “Were you fond of your wife?”

  Dobkin, startled, hesitated and then, of course, had to reply, “No.”

  Mr. Byrne questioned Dobkin about his arrears of maintenance money and terms of imprisonment imposed for these arrears, and then asked, “Did your wife tell you that if you did not make peace with her she would make trouble for you?”

  “She said if I did not make peace she would make trouble for me.”

  “You would have felt much happier if you had never seen your wife again after that?”

  Dobkin countered warily, “I would have been more content if she had kept away.”

  Mr. Byrne pressed his point. “You had no desire to see your wife again at any further date?”
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br />   “No, sir,” replied Dobkin, “I did not want to see her again.”

  “And after the eleventh of April,” said Mr. Byrne, again with that sinister flickering of the eye, “nobody saw your wife again?”

  Dobkin was obliged to stammer that it was so.

  This was the opening gambit of a long and brilliant cross-examination during which Mr. Byrne played Dobkin as a skillful matador plays a bull. Indeed, the simile was singularly apt. The lumbering, massive Dobkin, sniffing suspiciously with his broad, raised muzzle, faced the dark and graceful Mr. Byrne under the bright light, before an audience almost stiff with excitement, in an atmosphere charged with drama over which brooded the ultimate shadow of death. Mr. Byrne, utterly self-possessed, beguiled Dobkin here, goaded him there, incited him to charge full tilt and then brought him to a sickening, thudding halt, by degrees reducing this man, thereby, to a great, bewildered, panting hulk. All the good Mr. Lawton had done for his client was speedily destroyed. Dobkin accused all the witnesses—except the medical witnesses—of lying. Of everybody else, from chapel minister to CID inspector, he shouted, “He’s lying!” He insisted he had never been down in the cellar, had never even known the existence of the cellar; although two reputable witnesses had already described how they had seen him go down into it, and Mr. Burgess, the minister, had been warned by Dobkin not to go down into the cellar as it was dangerous!

  In his panic Dobkin scarcely knew what he was saying. Lying, blustering, floundering, sweating, and shaking, he gave us a hideous and unforgettable portrait of terror. The jury stared at him in a kind of hypnotized horror. The strong circumstantial evidence, the astonishing medical evidence, must have weighed heavily with them; the judge’s summing up was a pattern of what a lucid summing up should be, but without a doubt it was Dobkin’s performance in the witness box that set the final seal upon his fate.