Silent Witnesses

by Nigel McCrery

  The following morning, at about 6 AM, the local postman William Alec Ward was on his rounds when he dropped some mail off at the post office in the little village of Stapleford Abbotts. He then continued along the Ongar road, over Pinchback Bridge towards the village of Stapleford Tawney. It was while he was negotiating a bend that he noticed a large object at the roadside ahead and, as he drew closer, realized that it was the body of a man. The body was slumped against the grass bank in a semi-sitting position, with legs extended out into the road. To his horror, Ward recognized the body as PC Gutteridge. Jumping back into his van, Ward raced to a nearby cottage to summon help before driving to Stapleford Tawney to telephone the Romford police.

  The first officer on the scene was Police Constable Albert Blockson, who took charge until Detective Inspector John Crockford arrived from Romford at about 7:45 AM. The inspector examined the body. Gutteridge was still grasping a pencil stub, while his notebook lay in the road nearby. His billy club was still in the pocket in which it was usually kept, as was his flashlight. On the left side of his face, just in front of the ear, there were two holes that appeared consistent with the entry of two large bullets. On the right side of the neck there were two exit wounds. Two further bullets appeared to have been discharged, one into each eye. It was thought that the reason for this might have been the superstition that the last thing a person sees before he dies is photographically imprinted on the retinas of the eyes—the shots had been fired in order to destroy any such “image.”

  The assessment that four bullets had been fired was confirmed when two .45 bullets were prized out of the road surface and two more were recovered from the body during the subsequent postmortem. The time of death was estimated to be about four or five hours prior to the discovery of the body. Because he had been holding his notepad and pencil when found, it was deduced that Gutteridge had stopped a car and had been about to record details when he was shot. The bullets and the cartridge case were handed over to the foremost ballistics expert of his day, Robert Churchill, for examination. Although deformed, the bullets retained sufficient rifling characteristics for Churchill to establish that they had been fired from a Webley revolver.

  A full-scale hunt for the killer—or killers—began. From the outset the murder was connected with the theft of a Morris Cowley car, registration number TW6120, which had been stolen on the same night from the garage of Dr. Edward Lovell in Billericay (about ten miles away from the scene of the crime). Neighbors remembered the sound of a car being driven off at high speed during the early hours of the morning. By the time the car had been reported stolen later that morning, however, it had already been found—in Brixton, South London. The left fender had been damaged, and blood traces were discovered on the bodywork. The car’s odometer also showed that it had been driven forty-two miles—the precise distance of a direct journey from Dr. Lovell’s garage to Brixton.

  The police searched the car and discovered a cartridge case inside. It appeared to have been scarred by some kind of fault in the breechblock of the gun that had fired it. This mark resembled a jockey’s cap; because of the significance it would later have in the case, the crime became known as the Jockey Cap Murder. The cartridge also carried the letters RLIV, which signified that it was of an old Mark IV type and had been made in Woolwich Arsenal at the Royal Observatory for use in the First World War.

  The murder hunt went on for four gruelling months—at one point DCI Berrett and his assistant Sergeant Harris worked for 130 out of 160 consecutive hours. They came to suspect two car thieves, Frederick Browne (46) and Pat Kennedy (42), but lacking any evidence against them were unable to take things further. Two Webley revolvers were found in the River Thames, but Churchill proved that neither of them could have been the murder weapon because neither made the tell-tale jockey-cap mark on a cartridge case.

  However, the fortunes of the investigation changed when, on January 20, 1928, police arrested Frederick Browne at his garage near Clapham Junction on suspicion of stealing a Vauxhall car. Browne had convictions for insurance fraud, stealing cars, violence, and, most significantly, for carrying firearms. He was searched, and twelve .45 cartridges were discovered in his back pocket. After this a further search was made of his car, and a fully loaded Webley revolver was found inside the driver’s door. More police officers were now called in. As a result, a further sixteen .45 cartridges were discovered wrapped in paper in the office of the garage. Twenty-three .22 cartridges were found as well, in addition to a small revolver. Finally, a search of Browne’s lodgings in Lavender Hill turned up a fully loaded Smith & Wesson.

  Browne was known to have employed Kennedy, a notorious alcoholic, though had sacked him on December 17, 1927, as his drinking problem was affecting his work. Kennedy was an unusual mix, having been born in Scotland to Irish parents—he had an Irish accent but considered himself Scottish. He had been dishonorably discharged from the army for desertion and had convictions for housebreaking, indecency, drunkenness, and theft.

  When they parted on December 17, Kennedy took a train to Liverpool. Three weeks later he returned to London in order to get married. Having been away in Liverpool, he had not heard about Browne’s arrest. As a result he visited Browne’s garage in the early afternoon of Saturday, January 21. He found it locked. When he looked through the crack between the doors, he noticed two men in trench coats and hats. He suspected at once that they were detectives and that they were waiting for him. Being careful to ensure he wasn’t followed, he returned home and collected his wife before catching the midnight train to Liverpool.

  However, Kennedy could not evade the police for long. At 11:40 PM on Wednesday, January 25, he noticed several men in the street outside his lodgings. Realizing by the way they were dressed that they were probably detectives, he made a run for it. He left in such a hurry that he didn’t have time to put on a shirt or to fasten his trousers or shoes. He did not go unnoticed. DS Bill Mattinson, who had arrested him on several occasions and knew him well, approached him. Kennedy pulled a pistol from his pocket and shouted at Mattinson, “Stand back, Bill—or I’ll shoot you!” True to his words, he then pulled the trigger, but fortunately for Mattinson the gun failed to go off. (It was later discovered that he had left the safety on.) Mattinson then grabbed Kennedy’s gun arm in one hand and punched him hard with the other, calling for assistance as he did so. Three of his colleagues soon arrived, and they were able to disarm and restrain Kennedy.

  By the following day, Kennedy was back in London and under arrest in New Scotland Yard. While he was there, Detective Inspector Berrett interviewed him about the murder of PC Gutteridge. Kennedy asked if he could have a few moments to consider his situation. When Berrett agreed he then asked if he could speak to his wife. Berrett once again agreed. After a short conversation he offered to make a statement. In it, he implicated Browne in the murder of PC Gutteridge.

  The ballistics expert Robert Churchill examined the weapons recovered from Browne and was able to prove, by the use of the comparison microscope, that the empty cartridge case retrieved from the vehicle had been fired from the Webley revolver found in Browne’s possession when he was arrested. Browne’s only possible defense against this evidence was that he had obtained the gun from Kennedy after the murder had occurred.

  The trial opened at the Old Bailey on April 23, 1928, before Mr. Justice Avery. Browne maintained his innocence of any involvement in the crime, claiming he was at home in bed that night. Evidence was heard from over forty prosecution witnesses, including four ballistic experts. The trial was notable for the forensic evidence given by Robert Churchill; through the use of photographs, Churchill proved to the court that the markings on the cartridge case matched those on the revolver, thus proving that the gun found in Browne’s car was the murder weapon. Both men were eventually found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. They were executed on May 31, 1928.

  George Gutteridge is buried in Warley Cemetery. The inscription on his headstone reads:

&nbs
p; In proud memory of George William Gutteridge, Police Constable, Essex Constabulary, who met his death in the performance of his duty on September 27th 1927.

  The bullets and Webley revolver used to kill George Gutteridge are in the Essex Police Museum, while other exhibits relating to Browne and Kennedy are in the Black Museum at Scotland Yard. The road where Gutteridge was murdered has been altered since 1927, and a short stretch of it, now marked by a memorial stone, has been renamed Gutteridge Lane in his memory.

  Gunpowder was probably discovered in China in the ninth century, but not until the middle of the tenth century is there any visual evidence of a weapon using gunpowder. A picture that includes “fire-lances” was painted on a tenth-century banner from Dunhuang in western China (see Plate 4). It depicts demons attacking with these fire-lances. In essence a fire-lance was a gunpowder-filled tube attached to the end of a long pole, used as a sort of crude flamethrower. The Chinese also discovered that shrapnel rammed tightly down the barrel would fly out along with the flames and maximize the weapon’s killing potential. An account of the siege of De’an in 1132 records that Song defenders used fire-lances very successfully against the Jurchen attackers.

  There are a few theories as to how gunpowder came to Europe. One is that it made its way from China along the Silk Road, another that it came with the Mongols during their thirteenth-century invasion. The first recorded account of firearms being used in Russia states that during the defense of Moscow from Tokhtamysh’s Golden Horde in 1382, the defenders used firearms called tiufiaks. During the fourteenth century in Europe, smaller and more portable handheld cannons were developed. Such was the speed of development that by the late fifteenth century the Ottoman Empire was equipping its infantry with their own firearms.

  Outside of warfare, however, guns tended to be owned only by the rich, mainly for hunting—after all, they were very expensive. It took several more centuries before they became the preferred weapon of criminals. The numerous wars in the seventeenth century, where firearms replaced more traditional weapons such as the longbow and crossbow, not only taught numerous less well-off people how to use guns, it also flooded Europe with an accessible supply of them. This in turn led to a dramatic increase in crimes involving guns, especially the now much-romanticized highway robbery.

  However, early guns were by no means without their operating problems: they were slow to load and only fired one shot, after which the whole laborious loading process had to begin again. A traditional longbowman could have fired off half a dozen arrows and an experienced crossbowman considerably more bolts in the time that it took to reload a firearm. There is a famous account written about an encounter between a highwayman and a young tailor during the eighteenth century. The tailor was crossing Hounslow Heath in the London borough of Hounslow—a dangerous place at that time, infamous for highwaymen. Sure enough, he was attacked by an armed highwayman who demanded his purse. The tailor handed it over and then, thinking quickly, asked the highwayman to put a shot through his hat, so that it looked as though he had put up some sort of a struggle and would not be labeled a coward. The highwayman obligingly did as requested. His single shot fired, he was now, in essence, unarmed. The clerk then drew his own pistol and pointed it at the highwayman. He not only got his purse back, but also those of the other people the highwayman had already robbed.

  When looking at forensic ballistics, it is useful to understand the principles that lie behind the operations of a firearm. From slow and unreliable beginnings, they soon developed into the efficient modern killing machines available today. Matchlocks were the first and simplest firing mechanisms developed for small arms. They were also slow to use. Gunpowder had to be poured down the barrel; this was followed by a lead ball, and then by some sort of paper wadding to keep the ball in place. All these then had to be rammed home with a ramrod. The weapon was then primed by pouring powder into a pan at the back of the barrel. In the middle of the pan was a small touch-hole, which connected to the powder in the barrel. The powder in the pan was then ignited by touching it with a lit match or piece of saltpeter-soaked string. A flame from the exterior gunpowder then raced inside the weapon through the touch-hole to ignite the gunpowder in the barrel. This burned extremely rapidly, creating a large volume of hot gas that blew the ball out along the barrel, along with clouds of smoke. It was not uncommon for there to be so much smoke on the battlefield that it was impossible to see your enemy.

  The successor to the matchlock mechanism was the wheel lock, which was first seen in Europe around 1500. Its invention is sometimes attributed to Leonardo da Vinci because of some drawings he made of such a mechanism in about the mid-1490s. Despite its many faults, the wheel lock was a significant improvement on the matchlock in terms of both convenience and safety, since it eliminated the need to keep a smoldering match in proximity to loose gunpowder, which is never a good idea. It operated using a small wheel, much like those used on cigarette lighters today, which was wound up with a key and then, when the trigger was pulled, spun against a flint, creating a shower of sparks that ignited the powder. Although the wheel lock was a useful innovation, it was not widely adopted due to the high cost of the clockwork winding mechanism.

  But it was the flintlock mechanism that really revolutionized small arms. The French artist and inventor Marin le Bourgeoys (c. 1550–1634) is credited with fixing the first flintlock mechanism to a firearm he had prepared for King Louis XIII in 1610. In this design, a sharpened piece of flint was clamped in the jaws of a “cock” (a spring-loaded arm, so called because of its resemblance in shape to a rooster). When this was released by the trigger, it struck a piece of steel called the “frizzen” to create the necessary sparks. The cock had to be manually reset after each firing, and the flint had to be replaced periodically due to wear. The flintlock was widely used during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in both muskets and pistols (see Plate 5).

  Flintlocks were considerably more effective than previous mechanisms but still had a number of drawbacks, such as their unreliability in wet weather due to the flash pan of gunpowder being exposed. In approximately 1820, an invention by Reverend John Forsyth in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, addressed this issue. The percussion cap was a small cylinder, usually made of copper or brass, which contained fulminate of mercury, a shock-sensitive chemical compound that explodes when struck. The percussion cap was inserted into a hole at the back of the barrel of a gun. It was then struck by a spring-loaded hammer much like the cock of a flintlock, causing the fulminate of mercury to explode. The force of this explosion would travel down into the main barrel and ignite the gunpowder that had been loaded there, which in turn would propel the shot out of the barrel.

  The appearance of the percussion cap was quickly followed by that of the cartridge during the second half of the nineteenth century. Ammunition had previously always been delivered as separate bullets and powder. The cartridge combined a percussion cap, powder, and a bullet in one completely weatherproof package. The main technical advantage of the brass cartridge case was the effective and reliable sealing of high-pressure gases at the breech (the part of a firearm behind the barrel), since the gas pressure forced the cartridge case to expand outward, pressing it firmly against the inside of the chamber. This in turn prevented the leakage of hot gas, which could injure the shooter. The use of cartridges, by uniting the bullet, gunpowder, and primer into one assembly, also opened the way for modern repeating arms.

  However, in spite of all these developments, accuracy was still an issue. The origins of rifling—whereby spiraling grooves are added to the inside of a gun barrel in order to impart a stabilzing spin to the projectile—are difficult to trace, but some of the earliest practical experiments seem to have occurred in Europe during the fifteenth century. Early muskets produced large quantities of soot, which had to be cleaned from the barrel of the musket frequently, through either the action of repeated scrubbing, or a deliberate attempt to create “soot grooves.” This might have led to a perceived i
ncrease in accuracy. True rifling, where the grooves are part of the inside of the barrel itself, dates from the mid-fifteenth century. This feature of firearms would become extremely significant for forensic ballistics, as we shall see later.

  The barrel of a nineteenth-century French cannon, showing rifling in its interior. Rifling would later play a crucial role in allowing ballistics experts to match bullets with the guns that fired them.

  In 1794 in Prescot, Lancashire, England, a man by the name of Edward Culshaw was shot through the head by a burglar. This murder made history as the first ever to be solved by forensic ballistics. The local surgeon performed a postmortem on Culshaw. When he did so, he discovered not only the ball that had been fired from the pistol but the remains of a small quantity of paper that had been used as wadding (this being the time of older, muzzle-loading weapons), which had been fired from the gun at the same time. When examined, it proved to be a small section from a song sheet. After some enquiries, an informant put forward eighteen-year-old John Toms as a possible suspect. Toms was arrested and searched, whereupon a ripped song sheet was discovered in his pocket. The wad of paper removed from Culshaw’s head perfectly matched the damaged remains of the paper fired from the gun. Toms was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death. He was hanged for murder at Lancaster Assizes on March 23, 1794.

  A similar case occurred almost a century later in France in 1891. Charles Guesner was a happy man, who had married the love of his life and settled down with her to begin a family. However, his happiness was to be short-lived. A few months later, a man broke into their bedroom while they were sleeping and, without warning, brutally shot Charles Guesner in the head. He died almost at once. The sound of the shot awoke his wife who, on seeing the bloody mess, immediately passed out. The killer fled the scene, vanishing into the night.