by James Moore
At Mabel’s suggestion, Vaquier stayed at the Hotel Russell in central London. Here, over the next few days, he would meet Mabel. It later emerged that a chambermaid had caught them together and told Vaquier: ‘You have no business to have anyone here’, to which Mabel replied: ‘It is alright; I am his wife.’
On 13 February, Alfred left The Blue Anchor for a short break in Margate to recuperate from congestion of the lungs. Whether simply besotted or browbeaten into it, Mabel paid off Vaquier’s bill at the Russell and invited him to stay at The Blue Anchor as her unpaying guest. He arrived on 14 February and would lodge there for the next six weeks. It’s possible that by now the Joneses had some kind of arrangement when it came to their marriage, for when Mr Jones returned on 17 February he seems not to have minded Vaquier’s presence. However, he was still sick and spent much of the following fortnight in bed, while Mabel and Vaquier dined together downstairs.
Yet the level of Mabel’s commitment to Vaquier may also have been lost in translation. Over the course of his time as a resident, Vaquier repeatedly asked Mabel to leave her husband. She refused. Mabel even told her husband not to loan cash to the evidently hard-up Vaquier.
Then on the evening of 28 March there was a party at The Blue Anchor and, as usual, Alfred enjoyed one too many drinks and slept late on the 29th, a Saturday morning. It was 10.30 a.m. by the time he came down to open the bar and went to take his usual post-hangover pick-me-up – some bromo salt, which he kept in a blue glass bottle on a mantelpiece.
There, already sitting in the bar, was Vaquier, sipping his morning coffee and watching carefully.
Alfred measured out a teaspoonful of the salts and mixed it into a glass of water. But the moment he had taken a swig of the concoction, he cried out ‘My God, that’s bitter.’ Mabel grabbed the bottle and, putting some of the salts to her lips, realised something was badly wrong, saying to Alfred, ‘Daddy, they have been tampered with.’ She gave him some warm salt water but by now Alfred was doubled up with pain. He was being sick and complaining of feeling numb and cold. Putting the bottle in a drawer in the kitchen for safety, Mabel then got some of the staff to help carry Alfred upstairs to bed before calling a doctor.
A Dr Carle arrived but Alfred’s eyes were already bulging and he was racked with convulsions. There was little he could do. Half an hour after taking the mixture, Alfred was dead from asphyxiation, the usual result of strychnine poisoning. The doctor spotted the symptoms and asked to inspect the bottle containing the salts. But when he came to inspect it the bottle had evidently been washed out and dried by someone. However, Dr Carle was able to recover some of the salts that had fallen onto the bar room floor. He was later able to establish that these contained strychnine crystals. The bitter poison causes a quick, but horrible death.
Along with the rest of those at The Blue Anchor, Vaquier was questioned the same night and made several statements to the police. He was not immediately arrested, but a few days later, on the recommendation of the police, he moved to stay in The Railway Hotel in Woking. Mabel was now convinced that Vaquier was responsible for the killing and any sentimental feelings she’d held for him had disappeared. As he left, she accused him, saying: ‘You have assassinated Mr Jones!’ He, Mabel later claimed in court, replied: ‘Yes Mabs, I did it for you!’ to which she responded, ‘I would have killed you if I knew you would have done a thing like that.’ By now the case was national news and Vaquier’s vanity got the better of him as he happily gave interviews to reporters and posed for pictures.
One of those who saw photograph in a newspaper was a chemist called Horace Bland. Bland remembered that a month before the murder, on 1 March, the same man had called at his shop in Southampton Row in central London to buy strychnine, purchasing enough to kill three or four people. He had signed the poison register under a false name – J Vanker. Yet he had given the correct address of the place he was staying – The Blue Anchor in Byfleet. Bland contacted the police and Vaquier was arrested on 19 April.
The Blue Anchor Hotel in Byfleet, Surrey, where Jean-Pierre Vaquier poisoned the landlord. (© James Moore)
Alfred Jones’ body was subsequently exhumed and a post-mortem by the famous pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury confirmed that he had been killed by strychnine poisoning.
Vaquier’s five-day trial opened on 2 July at the Guildford Assizes and he pleaded not guilty. He seems to have almost enjoyed being the centre of attention, perfuming his hair and beard every day of the proceedings and appearing immaculately dressed. Vaquier even entertained the court through an interpreter with a number of witticisms. When one witness was described as a builder and an undertaker, he said, ‘Ah I see he houses them above and below ground.’
His defence, however, was less clever. Vaquier had originally told the pharmacist that he needed strychnine for his wireless experiments. But he then changed his story in court, saying that Mr Jones’ solicitor had asked him to buy it so he could kill a dog.
After two hours of deliberation the jury returned. Vaquier was confidently smiling and clearly expected to be acquitted. When the guilty verdict was given he turned ashen. He pounded the dock with his fists and told the judge, Justice Avory, that he swore his innocence on his mother and father’s grave.
While awaiting his death sentence Vaquier offered up new evidence, saying that he had discovered that there was a separate stash of strychnine kept behind a loose brick in a shed behind The Blue Anchor and that someone else might have used this to kill Jones.The Court of Criminal Appeal did not find this new evidence convincing, especially since Vaquier seems to have supressed it at his earlier trial. He went to the gallows at Wandsworth Prison on 12 August 1924. His last words are said to have been, ‘Vive La France!’
LOCATIONS: The Blue Anchor, No. 155 High Road, Byfleet, Surrey, KT14 7RL, 01932 34630, www.the-blue-anchor.co.uk; The Hotel Russell, Nos 1–8 Russell Square, London, WC1B 5BE, www.hotelrusselllondon.co.uk
THE COBWEBS THAT CAUGHT A KILLER, 1927
The Lantern Pike, Little Hayfield, Derbyshire
Dubbed by newspapers at the time as the ‘lonely inn murder’, it was a crime that seemed as grisly and unpredictable as the weather that often gripped the isolated valley in which it took place. And the killing was all the more shocking because it occurred on Armistice Day, a time when the rest of the nation was marking the coming of peace at the end of the First World War, still fresh in the memory.
In 1927 The Lantern Pike, named after the glowering peak that towers over it, was known as the New Inn, though the eighteenth-century stone-built pub had been providing welcome sanctuary on a remote road through the fells of the Peak District for decades. It was a cosy, hospitable place serving a handful of locals from the tiny village of Little Hayfield and the odd soul passing through. The inn was run by a popular couple, Amy and Arthur Collinson, but much of the day-to-day running of the place was left to Amy, as Arthur also had another job sandpapering furniture which saw him set off on his motorbike early each morning for the nearby town of Glossop.
Returning at around 6 p.m. on 11 November, Arthur found a disappointed regular, Amos Dawson, on the doorstep, complaining that he had come in search of a pint on several occasions that day but found the place apparently shut up. Arthur let himself into the pub and made a horrific discovery: Amy was lying on the floor in the property’s sitting room, surrounded by a pool of blood. Her throat had been cut from ear to ear. The scene was made even more gruesome by the fact that a white-handled carving knife was still sticking out of the wound. A cash box kept upstairs and containing change for the bar was light by around £40. This was apparently the only thing missing and the property had not been ransacked.
A policeman and a doctor were on the scene within twenty minutes, with Dr Lynch estimating the time of death as having occurred between 10 a.m. and noon. When senior officers arrived, they soon realised that they were dealing with a murder, which the perpetrator had clumsily endeavoured to disguise as a suicide. It was concluded that there w
as no way that Amy could have cut her own throat and left the knife in the wound. Plus marks on the head indicated that Amy had been bludgeoned with a blunt instrument, rendering her unconscious, before the knife had been used to finish her off.
Other clues gave rise to the belief that this was a murder. There was a second pool of blood near the fireplace – signalling that Amy’s body had been moved so it could not be seen from the windows. Amy appeared to have been attacked whilst cleaning the fireplace, her attacker approaching from behind, giving her no time to defend herself. Yet there was no obvious clue to the killer. And though the knife was still present there was no sign of the weapon that had been used to hit Amy over the head.
Officers interviewed all the local drinkers and suspicion fell on one of them, George Frederick Walter Hayward, known as Jerry. Hayward was a desperate character. Aged 32, he had recently lost his job as a travelling soap salesman and was £70 in debt to his former employer. He owed money on the rent for his cottage, the White House, which he shared with his wife, Annie, located just half a mile from the New Inn. He was also in arrears on payments for furniture bought on hire purchase.
The lonely Lantern Pike Inn, Derbyshire, where the landlord discovered the bludgeoned body of his wife. (Courtesy The Lantern Pike Inn)
Described as a ‘small wiry figure with keen piercing eyes’, Hayward was friendly with the Collinsons. He knew that a float was kept at the inn and roughly where it was. But he was not alone in that. Any drinker sitting at the bar could easily surmise where it was from the telltale footsteps in the bedroom above every time one of the Collinsons went to get change.
Hayward clearly had a financial motive for stealing this money. But was he desperate enough to murder a friend for what was inevitably going to be a relatively small sum?
On the day of the murder he had told his wife he was going up to the nearby town of New Mills to collect his dole from the Labour Exchange. He had left at 10.05 a.m. and had been seen on the way by local Tommy Barr. By 10.45 a.m. Hayward had been seen at a nearby bus stop where witnesses confirmed he had caught the bus to New Mills Labour Exchange and duly collected his unemployment benefit. It was also known that he had gone on to Manchester where he paid off some of the money on his furniture and bought his wife a new pair of gloves.
This only gave him around fifteen minutes to have gone to the New Inn, kill Amy and make off with the cash. No one had seen him. Amy had been seen alive at 9.45 a.m. by a council road worker. Interviewed the same evening as the murder, Hayward admitted having gone to the New Inn on the morning of the 11th. He said he’d found the door ajar and stayed just ten minutes to buy some cigarettes but left Amy very much alive.
The police were unconvinced. The following day, they searched the pub looking for the weapon that had been used to hit Amy. For eight hours they found nothing. Then, at 1.15 p.m., one of the officers searching the outer kitchen found a disused toilet cistern that was covered in cobwebs. But what caught his eye was that in one place the webs had been broken. On further investigation a piece of bloodied lead piping was found at the bottom of the cistern.
Meanwhile a search was also made of Hayward’s house. They noticed that a piece of lead waste pipe from the kitchen sink was missing. When the two ends of the pipe were compared they were found to match. They had found the weapon used to batter Amy to death. A bag of money, containing about £30, was also hidden up the chimney flue of the cottage. Hayward insisted he was innocent, telling detectives, ‘I have not murdered the woman. You can examine my clothing if you like.’
The police duly took his clothes but already believed they had enough evidence to arrest him, which they did at 11.30 p.m. on the 12th. Blood was found on Hayward’s tie and shirt. He claimed he had cut himself shaving, even producing an unwashed towel with his own blood on it. There was too little blood to match the samples to Amy’s. But there were also bloodstains on Hayward’s hat – blood was unlikely to fly upwards if it really had been caused by shaving. Then a 13-year-old witness, Maud Lilian McBain, came forward to say she had seen Hayward tinkering with a length of lead pipe outside his home on 5 November.
Five days after the murder, Amy’s coffin was carried out of the pub as the local community gathered to pay their respects. The crowd simmered with anger. Most were already convinced that Jerry Hayward was responsible, but incredulous that one of their own could carry out such a pre-meditated and barbaric act virtually on his own doorstep.
Hayward was brought in front of Derby Assizes in February 1928 and pleaded not guilty.
On the first day of the trial there was more drama when one of the jurors collapsed as a Dr Lynch was describing Amy’s injuries. A new juror had to be found and the whole trial had to be started again.
A fuller picture emerged of what had happened. Hayward had found Amy cleaning the living room floor and bashed her head in before moving the body behind a cupboard. He had then gone to the dresser in the kitchen to get a knife and make it look like suicide. Going upstairs to the trunk in the bedroom where the cash was kept, he had only taken £40 from the box, leaving £10 behind, possibly in the hope that police would think Amy had done away with herself because the books wouldn’t balance.
And though the amount may not seem like much in today’s terms, it was equivalent to a year’s dole money back then. Hayward, who had been used to making £200 a year, clearly found being so hard up so impossible to bear that he had committed murder, not to get rich but simply in a bid to clear his debts.
The jury, who rejected the defence counsel’s argument that he had not had time to kill Amy and find the money, took just half an hour to convict Hayward. The voice of Justice Hawke, conducting his first murder trial, was said to have wavered as he pronounced the death penalty. Hayward was hanged in March 1928 in Nottingham, by Albert Pierrepoint.
LOCATIONS: The Lantern Pike Inn, No. 45 Glossop Road, Little Hayfield, High Peak, Derbyshire, SK22 2NG, 01663 747590, www.lanternpikeinn.co.uk
HONEYMOON HORROR IN THE LAKE DISTRICT, 1928
Borrowdale Gates Hotel, Grange, near Keswick, Cumbria
Nestled in a beautiful Cumbrian valley, surrounded by majestic mountains, the comfortable Borrowdale Gates Hotel, built in 1860, is the perfect base for a romantic holiday. Yet in the 1920s it was at the centre of a murder investigation after a pretty, young Chinese woman was found strangled at a local beauty spot.
On Monday 18 June 1928 Chung Yi Miao, a handsome 28-year-old Chinese law student who had been living in America, arrived at the Borrowdale Gates with his new, wealthy wife, Wai Sheung Siu. She was a 28-year-old art dealer and hailed from a well-to-do family in China. The pair had met at a dragon dance in New York in October 1927 and married the following May. Afterwards, they had travelled across the Atlantic for a two-month honeymoon tour of Europe, intending then to go on to China to visit their families. Included on the couple’s itinerary were stops in Glasgow and Edinburgh before a sojourn to the magnificent Lake District.
The day after the couple checked in, at around lunchtime, they left the hotel to go for a walk. A maid, Dorothy Holliday, saw them walking off into the countryside arm in arm. They seemed to be very much in love. Wai Sheung Siu was wearing a fur coat while Chung wore a blue overcoat and was carrying a camera. At approximately 4.30 p.m. Chung arrived back at the hotel alone. He seemed unruffled and told staff that, on a whim, his wife had decided to go on a shopping trip to the nearby town of Keswick to buy some warmer underwear.
At 7.30 p.m. that evening, a local farmer, Thomas Wilson, was walking through Cumma Catta woods not far from the hotel when he came across a woman wearing a fur coat lying by a rocky knoll above a popular bathing spot on the river. While he thought it strange, Wilson did not examine the woman closely as he thought she was sleeping. But when he got to the village of Grange-in-Borrowdale he happened to mention what he had seen to a local off duty policeman, William Pendlebury. By 8.45 p.m. Pendlebury and another local man had gone back down the footpath to investigate and discovered
that the woman was, in fact, dead. She was lying on her back, partly under an open parasol. Her legs were apart with her knees drawn up. Pendlebury alerted senior detectives who raced to the scene.
They determined that the woman had been strangled. A chord had been wound four times around her neck and had cut ‘deep into the flesh’. Next to the body lay a left-hand glove which was inside out. From marks on her hand, it was clear that a ring or rings had been wrenched from it, suggesting that she had been robbed. She was, however, still wearing an expensive watch. Her skirts were lifted above her waist and her underwear was awry. Could she also have been the victim of a sexual assault? It was certainly clear she had been murdered. An examining doctor estimated the time of death as about mid-afternoon.
The Borrowdale Gates Hotel, where the Chinese couple Chung Yi Miao and Wai Sheung Sui stayed. (Courtesy of The Borrowdale Gates Hotel)
Meanwhile, at the hotel, Chung had taken tea alone in the hotel dining room. The maid reported that when she took some hot water to his room at 6 p.m. he observed, ‘My wife has not returned. She said she would be back by six?’ An hour later, Chung took dinner at the hotel on his own. A little later he spoke to the owner of the hotel, Mrs Crossley, saying he was worried about his wife and asked her to ring around shops in Keswick. Mrs Crossley told him that the shops were now closed but that she would go and meet the 9 p.m. bus to see if Wai Sheung was on it. Oddly, Chung suggested that she would probably come by private car. Mrs Crossley went to wait for the bus anyway – but Wai Sheung wasn’t on it and she reported her guest as missing to the police.