by Colin Wilson
In fact, she and Archie had quarrelled violently that morning because Archie intended to go and stay the weekend with friends, and Nancy Neele would also be a guest. When Archie left for London, Agatha wrote him a long letter full of recriminations. After that, she left the house at about 10 p.m, drove to Newlands Corner and put her prearranged plan into operation. She parked on the edge of the road and then pushed the car down the slope, with its headlights full on. She left her fur coat and a case of her clothes – as well as her driving license – in the car. It had stopped in a clump of bushes on the edge of a chalk pit. After that, Agatha walked to West Clandon Station and took a train to London. There she went along to the home of her sister-in-law Nan, at 78 Chelsea Park Gardens, and stayed there the night. She had been to see Nan a few days before to tell her about her husband’s betrayal, so the visit was not wholly unexpected.
The next morning, Agatha posted a letter she had written to Archie’s brother Campbell, telling him that she was on her way to a Yorkshire spa. She sent this to his office in Woolwich so that he would not receive it until after the weekend. But in fact, on opening the letter Campbell Christie only glanced at it and then somehow managed to mislay it. This explains why it took so long for Archie and the police to find her – eleven days after her disappearance. Meanwhile, Archie got a little of his own back by telling a newspaper reporter that his wife had discussed the possibility of “disappearing” – implying that it might be a kind of practical joke or publicity stunt.
And so Agatha sat in the Harrogate Hydro Hotel, reading the newspaper accounts of herself and doing the kind of things that overseas visitors – she claimed to be from South Africa – did when they stay at a hotel during the Christmas holiday period.
On Sunday, 12 December, hundreds of members of the public set out to comb the Surrey hills for the missing novelist when in fact two members of a band who played in the Harrogate Hydro Hotel already thought they had recognized Agatha Christie on the dance floor, and went to inform the local police. A chambermaid called Rosie Asher had confirmed the bandsmens’ suspicions. She had noticed that the woman’s handbag had a zip, which was the first time she had ever seen this newly fashionable item but she was afraid to mention it to the management in case she lost her job. During the following Monday, plain-clothed police mingled with the hotel guests and quickly arrived at the conclusion that they had found Agatha Christie. The following day, the Yorkshire police rang Archie at work and asked him if he would travel to Harrogate to identify his wife. It must have been a relief to Archie to know that he was no longer suspected of his wife’s murder.
Early that evening, Archie sat in the hotel lounge hidden behind a newspaper as Agatha walked in and paused to look at her own photograph on the front of a newspaper lying on a table. Then she saw her husband looking across at her. With typical English coolness, the couple said hello, and then, a few minutes later, went in to dinner. There, apparently, Agatha admitted that she had staged her disappearance to spite her husband and that the prank had expanded beyond her expectations.
Now Archie learned that her sister-in-law Nan had known where she was all the time and had even lent her the money to travel to Harrogate and stay in the hotel. Agatha had posted the letter to Campbell – which was supposed to have guaranteed that she would be found quickly – and then had lunch with Nan in London. She then caught a train at 1.40 from King’s Cross to Harrogate, where she arrived six hours later.
The following morning, decoys who looked like the Christies left the hotel to be pursued by a crowd of reporters, while the Daily Mail cameraman, who was the only one who was left behind, took a photograph of the real Mr and Mrs Christie as they hurried out of the hotel at 9.15. At Harrogate station, they entered – by prior arrangement – by the goods entrance, but nevertheless found the London platform jammed with dozens of reporters and photographers. Agatha’s sister Madge had arrived, together with her husband Jimmy, but the attempt by the party to deceive the reporters by splitting into two pairs, male and female, failed in its purpose and flashbulbs popped as the sisters scrambled on to the train, with Agatha close to tears. At Leeds, they managed to mislead the reporters by changing trains, but the press caught up with them again in London where a photographer snapped Agatha as she walked up the platform. She then had to run the gauntlet of another crowd of reporters and managed to scramble on to the Manchester train. But one of the photographs of her that appeared that evening showed her grinning broadly, and strengthened the general impression that this was some kind of publicity stunt or hoax.
Seeking refuge at Abney Hall, in Cheadle, they were again besieged by newsmen, and Archie finally gave a single interview to a journalist who happened to be wearing his old school tie, explaining that his wife had lost her memory. No one, of course believed him. When Archie finally returned home to Styles, he received a bill from the Surrey Constabulary for cost of the search – £25. He refused to pay. But it was clear that the Surrey Police also felt that the Christies had been wasting their time.
Agatha herself escaped further publicity by leaving the country, together with her secretary and her daughter, for the Canaries. While she was abroad Members of Parliament raised questions in the House about the cost of the search, and one MP denounced the whole episode as a “cruel hoax”.
In fact, although the disappearance did her reputation no harm in the long run, Agatha was to discover on her return to England, that many old friends no longer wanted to know her.
Her disappearance had also failed in its immediate purpose – to persuade her husband to stay with her. Archie Christie was the kind of person who disliked publicity even more than his wife did, and he resented the spotlight that had been thrown on his affair with Nancy Neele. Less than two years later, in April 1928, his wife divorced him, and shortly after that, he married Nancy Neele, with whom he continued to live happily until her death in the summer of 1958. Archie himself died in December 1962.
Agatha Christie herself also found happiness of a kind. In 1930, she visited the archaeological site at Ur, in Mesopotamia, where Leonard Woolley had found evidence of what he believed to be the biblical Flood. There, Agatha met Woolley’s 25-year-old assistant, Max Mallowan, who was asked to take her on a sight-seeing tour. She was fourteen years his senior but the two found they had so much in common that when he asked her to marry him, she took very little time to accept. She also insisted that they should pool their finances – Mallowan was relatively poor – and divide them equally. She had evidently learned from her mistake with her first husband. She also made Max promise never to play golf, to which he immediately agreed.
In 1947, after the war, Max was appointed to the archaeological chair at London University. Here he was immensely popular with his students and since he was in his early forties, he could not resist the temptation to have the occasional affair. Agatha found out about this from Nan, but she now reacted less violently than with Archie, and so the two remained married until her death.
In 1948 Agatha’s financial fortunes reached a new peak when Penguin Books published a million of her paperbacks in one day. She was now the most successful detective writer of all time.
As she approached her eighties her health began to deteriorate and on 12 January 1976, she died quietly while Max pushed her in her wheelchair.
In 1997 the BBC made a documentary on the disappearance of Agatha Christie, and a young writer named Jared Kade was appointed as research assistant. The final result of that assignment was his book Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (1998), to which this present account is greatly indebted.
9
The Cleveland Torso Murders
Who Was “the Mad Butcher”?
The American equivalent of the Jack the Ripper murders (described in chapter 27) was the Cleveland Torso case. The Cleveland murders were more numerous, and in some ways – as will be seen – more horrific, than their Victorian counterparts.
On a warm September afternoon in 1935, two boys on their
way home from school walked along a dusty, sooty gully known as Kingsbury Run, in the heart of Cleveland, Ohio. On a weed-covered slope known as Jackass Hill, one challenged the other to a race, and they hurtled sixty feet down the slope to the bottom. Sixteen-year-old James Wagner was the winner, and as he halted, panting, he noticed something white in the bushes a few yards away. A closer look revealed that it was a naked body and that it was headless.
The police who arrived soon after found the body of a young white male clad only in black socks; the genitals had been removed. It lay on its back, with the legs stretched out and the arms by the sides, as if laid out for a funeral. Thirty feet away the policemen found another body, that of an older man, lying in the same position; it had also been decapitated and emasculated.
Hair sticking out of the ground revealed one of the missing heads buried a few yards away; the second proved to be buried nearby. Both sets of genitals were also found lying nearby, as if thrown away by the killer.
One curious feature of the crimes was that there was no blood on the ground or on the bodies, which were quite clean. It looked as if the victims had been killed and beheaded elsewhere, then carefully washed when they had ceased to bleed.
Forensic examination revealed even more baffling evidence. The older corpse was badly decomposed and the skin discoloured; the pathologists discovered that this was due to some unidentifiable chemical substance, perhaps used by the killer in an attempt to preserve the body. The man had been dead about two weeks. The younger man had only been dead three days. His fingerprints enabled the police to identify him as twenty-eight-year-old Edward Andrassy, who had a minor police record for carrying concealed weapons. He lived near Kingsbury Run and had a reputation as a drunken brawler.
But the most chilling discovery was that Andrassy had actually died as a result of decapitation. Rope marks on his wrists revealed that he had been tied and had struggled violently. The killer had apparently cut off his head with a knife. The skill with which the operation had been performed suggested a butcher – or possibly a surgeon.
It proved impossible to identify the older man. But the identification of Andrassy led the police to hope that it would not be too difficult to trace his killer. Andrassy had spent his nights gambling and drinking in a slummy part of town – the third precinct – and was known as a pimp. Further investigation also revealed that he had had male lovers. Lead after lead looked extremely promising. The husband of a married woman with whom he had had an affair had sworn to kill him. But the man was able to prove his innocence. So were various shady characters who might have borne a grudge. Lengthy police investigation led to a dead end – as it did in another ten cases involving the killer who became known as “the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run”.
Four months later, on a raw January Sunday, the howling of a dog finally led a woman who lived on East Twentieth Street – not far from Kingsbury Run – to go and investigate. She found the chained animal trying to get at a basket standing near a factory wall. Minutes later she told a passing neighbour that the basket contained hams. But the neighbour soon recognized the “hams” as being parts of a human arm. A burlap bag proved to contain the female torso. The head was missing, as were the left arm and the lower parts of both legs. But fingerprints again enabled the police to trace the victim, who had a record as a prostitute. She proved to be forty-one-year-old Florence (“Flo”) Polillo, a squat, double-chinned woman who was well known in the neighbourhood bars.
Again, there were plenty of leads, and again, all of them petered out. Two weeks later the victim’s left arm and lower legs were found in a vacant lot. The head was never recovered.
The murder of Flo Polillo raised an unwelcome question. The first two murders had convinced the police that they were looking for a homosexual sadist, which at least simplified the investigation; this latest crime made it look as if the killer was quite simply a sadist – like Peter Kürten, the Düsseldorf killer executed in 1931; he had killed men, women, and children indiscriminately, and he was not remotely homosexual. The pathologist also recalled that a year before that first double murder, the torso of an unknown woman had been found on the edge of Lake Erie. It began to look as if the Mad Butcher was a psychopath who was simply obsessed with the dissection of human corpses, as some boys enjoy pulling the wings off flies.
Cleveland residents felt they had one thing in their favour, however. Since the double killing, the famous Eliot Ness had been appointed Cleveland’s director of public safety. Ness and his “Untouchables” had cleared up Chicago’s Prohibition rackets, and in 1934 Ness had moved to Cleveland to fight its gangsters. With Ness in charge, the newspapers were confident that the Head Hunter of Kingsbury Run – another press sobriquet – would find himself becoming the hunted.
But it was soon clear to Ness that hunting a sadistic pervert was totally unlike hunting professional gangsters. The killer struck at random, and unless he was careless enough to leave behind a clue – like a fingerprint – then the only hope was to catch him in the act. And Ness soon became convinced that the Mad Butcher took great pleasure in feeling that he was several steps ahead of the police.
The Head Hunter waited until the summer before killing again, then lived up to his name by leaving the head of a young man, wrapped in a pair of trousers, under a bridge in Kingsbury Run; again, two boys found it – on 22 June 1936. The body was found a quarter of a mile away, and it was obvious from the blood that the man had been killed where he lay. Again, medical examination revealed that the victim had died as a result of decapitation – though it was not clear how the killer had prevented the victim from struggling while he removed his head. The victim was about twenty-five and heavily tattooed. There was no record of his fingerprints in police files. Three weeks later a young female hiker discovered another decapitated male body in a gully, with the head lying nearby. The decomposition made it clear that this man had been killed before the previously discovered victim.
The last “butchery” of 1936 was that of a man of about thirty, who was also found in Kingsbury Run; the body had been cut in two and emasculated. A hat found nearby led to a partial identification: a housewife recalled giving it to a young tramp. Not far away was a “hobo camp” where down-and-outs slept; this was obviously where the Butcher had found his latest victim.
The fact that Cleveland had been the scene of a Republican convention and was now the site of a Great Exposition led to even more frantic police activity and much press criticism. The murders were reported all over the world, and in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy they were cited as proof of the decadence of the New World.
As month after month went by with no further grisly discoveries, Clevelanders began to believe they had heard the last of the Mad Butcher. But in February 1937 that hope proved unfounded when the killer left the body of a young woman in a chopped-up pile on the shores of Lake Erie. She was never identified. The eighth victim was identified from her teeth as Mrs Rose Wallace, age forty; only the skeleton remained, and it looked as if she might have been killed in the previous year.
Victim number nine was male and had been dismembered; when his body was fished out of the river, the head was missing, and it was never found. This time the killer had gone even further in his mutilations, disemboweling the corpse in the manner of Jack the Ripper. It was impossible to identify the victim. It was believed that two men seen in a boat might be the Butcher and an accomplice, but this suggestion led nowhere.
The killer now seemed to take a rest for nine months. Then the lower part of a leg was pulled out of the river. Three weeks later two burlap bags found in the river proved to contain more body fragments, which enabled the pathologist to announce that the victim was a brunette female of about twenty-five. She was never identified.
The killer was to strike twice more. More than a year after the last discovery, in August 1938, the dismembered torso of a woman was found at a dump on the lakefront, and a search of the area revealed the bones of a second victim, a male. A quilt in
which the remains of this twelfth victim were wrapped was identified as one that had been given to a junkman. Neither body could be identified.
One thing was now obvious: the Butcher was selecting his victims from vagrants and down-and-outs. Ness decided to take the only kind of action that seemed left to him: two days after the last find police raided the shantytown near Kingsbury Run, arrested hundreds of vagrants, and burned it down. Whether by coincidence or not, the murders ceased.
Two of the most efficient of the man hunters, Detectives Merylo and Zalewski, had spent a great deal of time searching for the killer’s “labouratory”. At one point they thought they had found it, when a negative left behind by one of the earliest victims, Edward Andrassy, was developed and showed Andrassy lounging on a bed in an unknown room. The photograph was published in newspapers and the room was finally identified by a petty crook as being the bedroom of a middle-aged homosexual who lived with his two sisters. Upon investigation, blood was found on the floor of the room, and a large butcher knife was discovered in a trunk. But the blood proved to be the suspect’s own – he was subject to nosebleeds – and the butcher knife showed no trace of blood. And when another body turned up while the suspect was in jail for sodomy, it became clear that he was not the Torso killer.
Next the investigators discovered that Flo Polillo and Rose Wallace had frequented the same saloon and that Andrassy had been a regular there too. They also learned of a middle-aged man named Frank Dolezal who carried knives and threatened people with them when drunk. When they learned that this man had also been living with Flo Polillo, they believed they had finally identified the killer. Dolezal was arrested, and police discovered a brown substance resembling dried blood in the cracks of his bathroom floor. Knives with dried bloodstains on them provided further incriminating evidence. Under intensive questioning, Dolezal, a bleary-eyed, unkempt man, confessed to the murder of Flo Polillo, and the newspapers triumphantly announced the capture of the Butcher. Then things began to go wrong. Forensic tests showed that the “dried blood” in the bathroom was not blood after all. Dolezal’s “confession” proved to be full of errors about the corpse and the method of disposal. And when, in August 1939, Dolezal hanged himself in jail, the autopsy revealed that he had two cracked ribs, which suggested that his confession had been obtained by force.