by James Moore
An inquest was opened on 26 September at the Feathers, there being no local mortuary. Here Robert Money told the court that he felt that several men had been pursuing Mary romantically, but this evidence was hazy and the men that Money had specifically mentioned were soon ruled out by police as having cast iron alibis, although one did admit to knowing her and having given her a ring found on her body.
Slowly more came to light about Mary’s movements on the last day of her life.
Emma Hone, a woman who had worked with Mary, remembered that she had left their lodgings at 7 p.m. to go for ‘a little walk’ but had not returned. This was unusual. Interestingly, Emma stated that, to her knowledge, Mary had no regular boyfriends. Mary had just been paid and had a purse on her full of cash on the evening she went out. This was never found. Mary left the premises without a jacket, indicating that she didn’t expect to be going far. She was, however, wearing a white scarf. The last definite sighting of Mary was at a sweet shop at Clapham Junction station where she bought some chocolates and mentioned that she was on her way to Victoria station. It seemed clear that she had a rendezvous with someone. Had that someone suggested an impromptu train ride?
There were only a few trains that passed through the tunnel around the estimated time of death. A guard, who had been on the 9.33 p.m. train from Charing Cross, remembered seeing a young woman matching Mary’s description on the train travelling in a first-class compartment. She had been with a young man. They had been sitting close to each other at South Croydon, but when the train arrived at Redhill on the other side of the tunnel, only the man, described as thin, with a moustache and wearing a bowler hat, got off the train. By this time the woman seemed to have disappeared. Sadly this man was never traced. Meanwhile a signalman at Purley Oaks, situated before the tunnel, thought he had seen a woman and man struggling on the 9.13 p.m. train from London Bridge. Confusing things further, a man on another train, this time one travelling towards London, saw a woman matching Mary’s description in a nearby compartment. He heard a carriage door being slammed twice as the train went through the tunnel. Whichever train Mary was on, she – and any companion – would have had to change trains at London Bridge or East Croydon. It was an odd journey to take given that Mary was always home by 11 p.m.
Faced with this puzzle the police investigation soon ran into the sand. Officers conducted more than a hundred interviews and several experiments with train carriages in the Merstham tunnel. Yet no obvious suspect could be identified. At a final hearing into her death, which took place on 16 October, the jury recorded a vague verdict – saying that although Mary had met her death through severe injuries caused by a train, the evidence was insufficient even to show whether she had fallen or had been pushed from the carriage.
Many tantalising questions were left unanswered. Had Mary simply been the victim of a robbery? And if there was another motive, had she been killed by someone she knew well or simply a passing acquaintance? Where had she been going at that time on a Sunday evening? Was it, as some suggested, because merely travelling in a first class compartment would have given her and a companion some much needed privacy?
Over the next seven years, the case faded from the public consciousness and police shelved their enquiries. Then, in 1912, a shocking murder took place in Sussex involving Mary’s brother. It transpired that Robert Money, who had given up farming for property development, had been leading a bizarre double life. At first he had lived with a woman called Florence Paler in Clapham with whom he’d had two children. He then left her and somehow managed to marry her sister Edith, with whom he had another child, all apparently without either woman knowing what was going on. Robert was clearly a fantasist who had been using a string of aliases and passing himself off as a former soldier.
In August, using the name of Robert Hicks Murray, he took a house in Eastbourne where he lured both of his families. Here, on the 19th, he shot them all before turning the gun on himself too. Then he set fire to the house. All died except for Florence who escaped the inferno and survived a wound to her neck.
For a while there was doubt whether the man calling himself Murray was actually Money. Another of his sisters, however, confirmed it from samples of handwriting. The tragedy certainly seemed an incredible coincidence, and it left many asking the obvious question – could Money have somehow been involved in Mary’s death too? Adding to the mystery was an interview given at the time by James Brice, a former superintendent of the Surrey Constabulary who had been involved in the original investigation into Mary Money’s death. He now revealed that Mary had been a gambler and in his opinion she had killed herself because her stock was short with her employer. She was worried sick that they would find out. This conclusion seems at odds with the other known facts and it should be said that there was some criticism of the 1905 police investigation at the time. The police had also admitted that Robert Money had misled them about aspects concerning the Merstham Tunnel tragedy. Furthermore there was no suggestion that Mary had appeared depressed before her death. Indeed the last person to see her said she had been laughing. Nor does all this explain the scarf found in Maria’s throat. Given her lack of reputation for seeing male friends it seems much more likely that, rather than her own money problems, Robert Money was her problem. Crucially no satisfactory account of his movements on the night of Mary’s death has emerged. Given his disregard for life, he has to be the likely culprit in Mary’s death. Yet the case remains as baffling as it did in the Edwardian age when it left even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the great detective Sherlock Holmes, scratching his head.
LOCATIONS: The Feathers Hotel, No. 42 High Street, Merstham, Redhill, Surrey, RH1 3EA, 01737 645643, www.thefeathersmerstham.co.uk
THE PUB, THE POSTCARD AND AN INVITATION TO MURDER? 1907
The Grand Union, Camden Town; The Rocket, Euston; The Water Rats, King’s Cross; Swan Hotel, Bedford
‘Dear Phyllis. Will you meet me at the bar of the Eagle at Camden Town, 8.30 tonight, Wednesday.’ So read the letter, which was signed ‘Bert’. The recipient was a young woman called Emily Dimmock who lived in London’s Camden Town and was better known to the string of men she entertained as Phyllis. On 11 September 1907, at the arranged time, 22-year-old Emily headed for the Eagle, a pub which is today part of the Grand Union bar chain. She told her landlady, Mrs Stocks, that she wouldn’t be long and left with her hair still in curlers. The next morning Emily’s common law husband, who worked nightshifts, found Emily dead at their lodgings. Her throat had been slit. The Camden Town Murder, as it became known, would lead to one of the most sensational court cases of the century as a talented commercial artist attempted to clear his name.
The Grand Union was once The Eagle, where suspected murderer Robert Wood was seen with victim Emily Dimmock on the night of her death. (© James Moore)
Emily was born in the village of Standon, near Ware, in Hertfordshire and her family may well have been lodging at The Bell in the village, while other reports suggest that her father ran the Red Lion there. Her parents moved regularly in search of work, and at one time Emily was employed as a chambermaid in the Swan Hotel in Bedford. Aged 17 she was working in service in Finchley, North London. By 1905, Emily had drifted to the Kings Cross area of London, where she lodged for some time at a brothel before moving in with a man called Bertram Shaw, 19, who became her common law husband. They lived at No. 29 St Paul’s Road in Camden, a road which is now called Agar Grove. Bertram was a railway chef and worked away most nights on trains going north from St Pancras. He would leave home at 4.15 p.m. and return at 11.30 a.m. the following day. During these nocturnal absences Emily, who enjoyed a night on the tiles, saw a string of men without her partner’s knowledge. She sometimes brought them back to St Paul’s Road and occasionally they paid her for her company. Emily was often to be found in the Rising Sun, a Victorian pub at No. 120 Euston Road, now called The Rocket. She also frequented The Pindar of Wakefield in Gray’s Inn Road, which is now a music venue cal
led The Water Rats.
On Thursday 12 September 1907, at around midday, Bertram arrived home to find his mother, who had come to visit, waiting in the passage. Unusually, the couple’s rooms in the house were locked. Bertram borrowed a key from the landlady. On entering he was horrified to find Emily’s lifeless body on the bed. Her throat had been cut so deeply that her head had been almost completely severed. There was blood everywhere in the bedroom and the lodgings had also been ransacked. The killer had obviously washed their hands in the room’s sink too. Intriguingly Emily’s beloved postcard collection had been scattered around the room. Had the killer been looking for something that could incriminate them?
A few items were missing, including a silver watch, a cigarette case and keys to the rooms, while a post-mortem showed Emily’s death to have been between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. that morning. There were no cuts or bruises on the body to indicate a struggle and police concluded that Emily must have been killed while asleep. The examining surgeon said that there was no way the victim could have inflicted the wound herself. He also identified that in the hours before her death, Emily had consumed a meal involving bread and potatoes and probably been drinking stout.
Bertram had been in Sheffield that night and his alibi was rock solid. Emily appeared to have invited someone else back to their rooms that evening and police began to piece together Emily’s movements in the days before the crime. They discovered that on the Sunday, Monday and Tuesday nights she had slept with a ship’s cook called Robert Roberts, who she had met at The Rising Sun. He told police that on the morning of Wednesday 11th she had shown him a postcard which read, ‘Phillis darling. If it pleases you to meet me at 8.15 at the (then a picture of a rising sun) Yours to a cinder. Alice.’ The rising sun was taken to mean The Rising Sun on the Euston Road. Roberts told police that Emily had also shown him a letter that she had just received – the one inviting her to the Eagle – and commented on how similar the handwriting was. Police found the charred remains of this letter in the fire-grate of the room where Emily had died, though they only had Roberts’ word to go on in terms of its full wording. Roberts told them that he had seen Emily burn it, presumably in case it might alert Bertram to her ‘other life’. The cook himself was ruled out as a suspect when it transpired that he had an alibi for the night of the murder. He had been drinking at The Rising Sun before retiring with a woman called May Campbell.
The Rising Sun pub on Euston Road. It was at the heart of the Camden Town Murder mystery and is now called The Rocket. (© James Moore)
Two weeks later, while clearing out his belongings from No. 29 St Paul’s Road, Bertram Shaw found the ‘Rising Sun’ postcard. Deemed a vital clue in the hunt for Emily’s killer, it was reproduced in several newspapers in the hope that someone would recognise the handwriting. A woman called Ruby Young did – it was that of her former boyfriend, a young artist called Robert Wood. Then Wood contacted Ruby by telegram and asked her to provide him with an alibi for the evening, which she agreed to do. Wood’s plan soon unravelled. Ruby couldn’t keep the secret, telling a friend who passed it on to a journalist and hence the police too, who soon tracked Wood down. He admitted to Inspector Arthur Neil that he had first met Emily on 6 September at the Eagle and that he had written the ‘Rising Sun’ postcard to her in the pub at the time. Emily, it seems, had asked him not to sign his real name in order that Bertram’s suspicions shouldn’t be aroused. However, Wood denied having sent Emily any letters. Meanwhile, police had found a man called Robert McCowan who had seen a man matching Wood’s description coming out of No. 29 St Paul’s Road at 4.55 a.m. on the morning of Emily’s death. Wood was arrested and charged with murder.
His trial began at the Old Bailey on 10 December 1907.
Robert Roberts gave evidence, which was corroborated by others, that Wood had been in The Rising Sun on the night of 9 September when he, Roberts, had left with Emily. A bookseller said that on the evening of the 11th he had enjoyed a drink with Emily and Wood in the Eagle. He already knew Wood and had bumped into him by chance in the pub that evening. It seemed that Wood was the last person to be seen with the victim while she was alive. Another witness, who knew Emily Dimmock when she was probably working as a prostitute, reported seeing her several times with Wood, indicating that the accused had actually known her for fifteen months.
Things looked bleak for Wood but he had the good fortune to be represented by the dashing Edward Marshall Hall QC, who had already established a name for himself for his dramatic style in court and brilliant cross-examination skills.
While Wood’s frantic efforts to get a false alibi from Ruby Young looked damning, Marshall Hall explained them away, saying that his client was merely worried at how it looked, having been with the victim on that evening so late. He said that Wood hadn’t wanted his father to know he had been visiting prostitutes. And why, he asked, if Wood knew what time Emily had been murdered, had he only asked Ruby to vouch for him until 10 p.m.?
A resident of St Paul’s Road, William Westcott, was also produced to say that he had seen McCowan in the otherwise quiet road at the same time that the latter had reported seeing Wood. It was suggested that, in the dim light, Westcott could actually have been the man McCowan had seen, not Wood.
Finally Wood, who had been busily sketching in court, himself gave evidence on his own behalf – the first defendant to do so in a murder trial. Asked directly if he had killed Emily, he said, rather pompously, ‘Of course, not. I mean it is ridiculous.’ He swore that he had left Emily in the Eagle at around 11 p.m. and that he had then gone straight to his father’s home. A neighbour, who was in his garden at the time, said that he had seen Wood coming home at around midnight.
The judge ordered the jury to acquit Wood, saying that the prosecution had not proved their case. It took them just fifteen minutes to find Wood not guilty and so the murder remained officially unsolved.
A couple of years after the trial, the impressionist artist Walter Sickert took up the theme of The Camden Town Murder for a set of paintings which showed a clothed man and a woman on a bed. The American crime writer Patricia Cornwell has suggested that Emily’s real murderer was actually Sickert himself – and that his paintings could not have been done without intimate knowledge of the crime scene. She is also one of those claiming that Sickert was Jack the Ripper. Whether Sickert was the Ripper or not, the length of time between the Whitechapel murders of 1888 and Emily Dimmock’s death in 1907, plus the fact that her murder did not involve the same sort of mutilation, makes this theory highly questionable.
LOCATIONS: The Grand Union (formerly the Eagle), Nos 102–104 Camden Road, NW1 9EA, 020 7485 4530, www.grandunionbars.com/venue/camden; The Swan Hotel, The Embankment, Bedford, MK40 1RW, 01234 346565, www.bedfordswanhotel.co.uk; The Rocket (formerly The Rising Sun), No. 120 Euston Road, London, NW1 2AL, www.therocketeustonroad.co.uk; The Water Rats (formerly the Pindar of Wakefield), No. 328 Grays Inn Rd, London, WC1X 8BZ, 020 7209 8747
MURDER OF A SWEETHEART, 1914
The Goddard Arms, Swindon, Wiltshire
By the time Walter James White arrived at the Goddard Arms Hotel in Swindon, with murder in mind, the inn had already been trading for at least two centuries. It had seen a lot – including the coming of the railway in 1840, acting as a makeshift ticket office before a proper station was built. But the historic hotel was about to play host to its most scandalous event. In early 1914 a tragic chain of events unfolded which was to destroy the lives of White and his sweetheart, Frances Priscilla Hunter, and leave the community shattered.
Frances was born in the nearby town of Devizes, the daughter of a labourer, and worked as a maid at the Goddard Arms in Swindon’s Old Town. White was the son of a railway labourer and worked as a painter and decorator. In Autumn 1913, the pair started seeing each other and became engaged. A few months into their relationship the couple decided to visit Frances’ brothers who were working away at Gilfach in Glamorgan, South Wales. However, when they arrived, the landlady at th
e lodging house where they were staying, a Mrs Blewitt, refused to allow Frances in. It turned out that Mrs Blewitt had known Frances when she was in service in Wales and had some information about her character. Later she wrote to White telling him that there was something he ought to know. A worried White returned to Mrs Blewitt’s lodging house to see what she had to say. She revealed to him that Frances had previously run away with a married collier. Frances had lived ‘in sin’ for three months.
This news enraged 22-year-old White who was consumed with jealousy and anger at discovering that the woman he thought was pure and chaste had conducted an affair with another man. He later said, ‘That very much upset me, I couldn’t stand the strain.’ In fact White was so furious that he decided to take revenge: ‘I loved the poor girl dearly, but she deceived me, so I thought I would finish it to prevent further trouble.’ While in Wales he bought a revolver. Then, on 29 April, he wrote some letters before heading to Frances’ workplace, arriving at 6 p.m.
Inside the Goddard Arms he found the 23-year-old and asked to see her privately. The pair went to the staff room and then to the hotel yard. Ten minutes later gunshots were heard.
According to White’s statement to police he had confronted Frances over Mrs Blewitt’s claims. He said, ‘I asked her if it was right. She confessed she had disgraced me and hoped God would forgive her. I told her she would never deceive anybody else as I was going to kill her.’ Frances then said, ‘For God’s sake do it, then!’ before kissing White goodbye. He explained, ‘I then shot her and waited for somebody to come.’