Having gained the platform, the passenger had several options. He could have left the station in the normal way through the ticket barrier – providing he had a London to Lewes ticket to show to the station staff, this would not attract any attention. Or, it was suggested at one point, he could have climbed the railings that divided the station from the town: though this theory was soon ridiculed by the Lewes stationmaster, Mr Marchant, as it would have drawn just the attention the man presumably hoped to avoid. Similarly, Mr Marchant pointed out, if he had tried to exit on the ‘offside’ of the train – onto the tracks rather than the platform side – he would have been seen by the signalman in his box immediately opposite the train. Other options were not to leave the station at all, but to rejoin the train in a different carriage to go on to Eastbourne; or to change platforms and join a train going back to London, or to a different destination entirely. Whichever option he chose, the man succeeded in evading attention: none of the station staff, questioned by the police the next day, could remember anything out of the ordinary about a departing passenger. ‘The man who got off at Lewes’ remained the chief suspect. The police hoped that either he would come forward himself, or a friend or relative would name him.
Tempting as he was as a suspect, though, there were some inconsistencies in this theory. Henry Duck, the guard, had seen him by the light of his guard’s lamp, and had even spoken to him. Yet Duck’s description of the man differs from that of Mabel Rogers. Duck saw the man wearing a ‘dark, drab mackintosh’ and a cap. He also thought that the man was of ‘athletic build’. And Duck stated that it was not unusual for people to exit the train in that hasty way; this alone did not constitute suspicious behaviour. However much the staff might wish that people would get into the right portion of the train at Victoria, or wait for the train to move up to the platform, the guard testified that they often did not do so.
While the hunt for the man who got off at Lewes continued, the local paper, the Hastings and St Leonards Observer, reported an odd incident that had occurred that same night, at Hayward’s Heath railway station on the Brighton line. The train going in the opposite direction to Florence’s, from Eastbourne to Victoria, stopped at Hayward’s Heath just after nine o’clock. The driver of an engine pulling just a brake van, passing in the southerly direction, saw a man jump onto the line from the train and lie down on the tracks. The engine and van passed over him, but without injuring him – and the young man then jumped up and re-entered the train. Having given everyone a fright, he was spoken to by the Head Porter at the station, and had his name and address taken, but he would not explain himself. He was allowed to proceed on his journey. Whether this incident was related to the attack on Florence, no-one could determine. Was it a failed suicide attempt from someone appalled by his crime and its possible consequences, or just an unrelated stunt? It seems a very odd thing for a man to do on a dark and freezing January night, with no audience, just for fun.
Alongside the search for the missing passenger, the various police forces were also pursuing the question of a motive for the attack. Mabel reported that Florence had been wearing a new fur coat and hat, which could have given the impression that she was well off. However, she had only been carrying three pound notes in cash, which were missing when she was found. Some of the jewellery she had been wearing when she left London, including her gold necklace and diamond ring, was also missing, and presumed to have been taken by the assailant. So it was initially assumed that the most likely motive for the attack was robbery.
Yet the three blows that inflicted the fatal head wounds had been struck with tremendous force, far more than might be required to overpower a small woman in order to steal from her. The day after Florence died, the newspapers were reporting speculation that the motive could have been even uglier. Under the headline ‘Fierce fight in defence of her honour?’ the Daily Mirror’s special correspondent reported from Hastings, where the compartment that Florence had travelled in was still in a siding at the station with its doors sealed by police tape.
‘The drama of that terrible struggle is eloquently revealed by the bloodmarks in the carriage, which remains sealed at the station here. They suggest the frenzied attack of a temporarily demented man, and point to assault rather than robbery as the predominant motive. One large smear, as well as a smaller trace of blood, has been found at the opposite end of the compartment to that at which Nurse Shore was seated, indicating that after one of the three wounds was inflicted, the man and his victim swayed in fierce encounter before the quietus was administered.’
The police urgently needed to find the weapon that had inflicted the blows, to see if that could shed light on the crime, and lead them to the person who had committed it.
As the crime had taken place on a moving train, the field for the search – both for the perpetrator and the weapon – was enormous. It also involved three different police forces. The Sussex police were involved because the crime had been discovered when the train arrived at Bexhill. The Metropolitan Police, in the form of Scotland Yard, were invited in to assist by the Sussex police because of the high profile of the case and the baffling nature of the suspect’s disappearance. The Met had no right to take over a murder case, however high-profile, complex or shocking: the principle of local police autonomy was sacrosanct. But they could be called in at the discretion of the local chief constable, if their special expertise was thought more likely to lead to a result. In a circular to Chief Constables in 1906, the Home Office had specifically advised that Scotland Yard should be called in immediately in cases of murders committed on trains passing through several police jurisdictions – largely as a result of the murder of Maria Money in the Merstham Tunnel the previous year.
That Scotland Yard could produce a result where local police had failed was not however guaranteed: a report to Parliament about local cases in which the Met had assisted between 1919 and 1920 showed that a conviction was secured in just over half of cases.
The third police force involved in the Nightingale Shore murder was the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway company’s own police. They had their own interests in the incident: the location of the crime scene, on one of their trains, and the potential for damage to their company’s reputation. Neither LB&SCR nor its police officers can have been pleased with the Hastings and St Leonards Observer’s article about Florence’s death, in the 17th January issue, which said in its first paragraph:
‘Recalling some of the most famous railway mysteries of modern times, in which lonely passengers were savagely attacked by persons who were successful in eluding capture, this outrage on the Brighton line presents a number of remarkable features, and if the full story is ever revealed it will probably be found to be of the most repulsive kind.’
Words like ‘lonely passengers’, ‘savagely attacked’, ‘outrage’ and ‘most repulsive kind’ were hardly likely to attract custom to the railway.
There had been police specifically employed on the railways since the 1830s. Recognition of the need for railway police is often attributed to the very first fatality on a railway line, in 1830, at the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. One of the distinguished guests disobeyed instructions, stepped onto the tracks and was killed by a passing engine. His death, and other problems with controlling the enthusiastic crowd, suggested that some form of official control was needed in this dangerous new area of transport. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway had its own police force in place by the end of that year. They also had ‘station houses’ at one mile intervals along the track, from where the police could control the road, deal with obstructions on the track, communicate up and down the line, and assist if any accidents occurred. The station houses became the hubs for both people and goods coming to and from the railway: and they are the reason that police buildings are called ‘stations’ today.
The first railway police were principally concerned with looking after signals and stations, rather than preventing or detecting crime. They wor
e uniforms and hats that were deliberately very similar to those of the Metropolitan Police – which had been formed at almost the same time as the first railway police – and carried truncheons, watches, flags and lamps. Having originally been set up voluntarily by the railway companies, in 1838 an Act of Parliament required the railway companies to employ constables to look after areas around railway workings, where the huge gangs of ‘navigators’, or ‘navvies’, were said to be frequently out of control, fighting with each other and terrorising the local inhabitants. The constables often had to be assisted by the reading of the Riot Act, and the arrival infantry troops, in their quest to keep order.
Once advances in engineering brought mechanical signals and more efficient communications, the role of the railway police became less about looking after the railway, and more about dealing with crime. Criminals leaving the scene of their crimes by train needed to be caught and returned; trespassers on the railway line had to be removed; and the regular thefts of luggage and freight items from railway goods yards also occupied the police’s time. But as the county police forces developed and organised during the 19th century, the privately-employed railway police were more and more restricted in their duties. They began once again to focus on work of importance to the company that employed them rather than policing in the public interest. The talents of railway officers were not entirely overlooked because of their limited sphere of operations, however: the captain of the North Eastern Railway police made the transition to become commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Given that his had been the first police force in the world to use dog patrols (Airedale terriers at the docks in Hull), perhaps he was an innovator and always destined for the top.
In 1920, it was Superintendent J J Jarvis and Detective Sergeant Vickers from the LB&SCR police who worked on the case of the assault on the Brighton line. With colleagues from the other forces, they searched alongside the railway line all the way back to London, looking for a weapon that could have been used to inflict such horrific head wounds. They knew that it had a broad striking surface, and it was very heavy; but there were no other indications of what they were looking for. The train compartments had windows that opened on each side by means of a leather strap, operated from inside the carriage: the weapon could have been thrown out – if it was discarded at all – at any point after the attack. And the train had travelled nearly 60 miles between London’s Victoria station and Lewes, passing through at least three significant tunnels, at Merstham, Clayton and Oxley, and over a long viaduct across the North Downs. Their search for a weapon was perhaps more in hope than expectation; and they did not find anything that seemed likely to have been used in the commission of the crime.
One potential clue that caught the public’s attention was the discovery of a bloodstained khaki handkerchief, found lying beside the railway line north of Wivelsfield. But its importance was soon down-played by the police, who pointed out that these were very common items amongst ex-servicemen, and so unlikely to be useful for identification purposes.
There was a brief burst of excitement at the end of January when the Press Association reported that a soldier returning to his barracks in London had made a statement confessing to having murdered a woman in a train. Scotland Yard interviewed him, but quickly issued a statement saying that officers were satisfied that he had had nothing to do with Florence Shore’s murder. He was handed over to the military as a deserter.
With no witnesses, no weapon and no sign of the main suspect, the case appeared to be unsolvable, in spite of the bravado of the Eastbourne newspaper on behalf of the local constabulary:
‘Eastbourne police have taken a very active part in the man hunt’, reported the Eastbourne Gazette (‘Largest circulation. Largest paper. Oldest established.’) ‘Many criminals have had cause to rue the smartness and ingenuity of Chief Detective Wells, Detective Sergeant Curtis or Detectives Cockerall and Sawkins. Few strangers to the town since the crime have escaped the searching scrutiny of one or more of the local sleuth-hounds and many respectable residents would experience considerable indignation did they know of the penetrating glances of suspicion which have been bestowed upon them.
The closest watch has been set upon all places where men gather together, and few of those who left theatres, music halls and picture houses have been aware of the man of law who, standing unobserved in the shadows, has watched them as they passed. Had the wanted man been in Eastbourne and attempted to leave by rail he would, probably, have been apprehended at the railway station.’
In spite of all this effort, Offley Shore, in America, had no confidence that his sister’s killer would be brought to justice. He wrote to his cousin Clarence that
‘I never thought for a single moment that our flat-footed ‘purliss’ would ever discover the murderer. How could they? But if the incident leads to better railway accommodation and adequate protection for women travelling alone on British Railways, it will be something gained in return for this sacrifice.’
Then, at the end of January, a new crime put the spotlight back onto the case. It brought a possible murder weapon to light, and required the expertise of one of the most eminent men of the day: Dr Bernard Spilsbury.
Chapter 23
The Arlington Road affair
Sir Bernard Spilsbury is known as the ‘father of forensic science’. He is credited with giving scientific respectability to what had formerly been a rather random and undervalued contribution to justice. After graduating from Magdalen College Oxford, he finished his medical training at St Mary’s Hospital in London, and almost immediately chose pathology as his specialism. Recognised for his potential by his mentors and colleagues at St Mary’s – the leading institution for forensic expertise – he was appointed resident assistant pathologist at the hospital in 1905.
The case that brought him to public attention was that of Dr Crippen in 1910. Spilsbury identified the decaying human remains buried in the cellar as that of Crippen’s wife, by finding a distinctive operation scar on a piece of skin. He went on to deduce how the ‘brides in the bath’ murderer, George Joseph Smith, had made three wives’ deaths from drowning each look like an accident.
The Scotland Yard detective in charge of that case, Inspector Arthur Neil, tested Spilsbury’s theory himself. By removing the baths from the scenes of the deaths, bringing them to London and conducting experiments using women in swimming costumes, he showed that pulling a person suddenly under the water by lifting their legs up caused water to rush into the nose and led to death by sudden inhibition of the vagal reflex. This did away with the need to hold the victim under the water, and meant there were none of the marks of struggle on the body or in the scene, to rouse the suspicion of deliberate drowning. (Only one of the volunteers came to harm in the experiments, and she was successfully revived.)
In 1920, Spilsbury was at the height of his fame, testifying in the trials of many notorious murderers. He would be knighted in 1923, but at the time of Florence’s death he was still simply Dr Bernard Spilsbury, Home Office Pathologist. He carried out the post mortem examination of Florence’s body, and would later testify at her inquest. Before that, he was asked to give his professional opinion as a forensic scientist on the only tangible piece of evidence possibly related to the attack ever to come to light.
The new crime which provided the evidence was an attempted burglary which took place in Eastbourne on Thursday 22nd January, and which the papers called ‘the Arlington Road affair’. The household at 31 Arlington Road was preparing for bed at about half past ten when Edith Williams, the parlourmaid, rushed screaming into the kitchen from the coal-house. She had gone out to fetch some wood, and was reaching up to take some from a shelf when she heard the noise of something falling, and saw ‘something black’ moving towards her. The other servants in the kitchen – the cook Mrs Carter and Elsie Brooks the nursery maid – took little notice at first, assuming she had bveen frightened by a mouse. When Mrs Carter looked outside, however, she realised that the
situation was much more serious.
‘When I got out there’, she told the reporter from the Eastbourne Gazette, ‘I saw a man standing in the coal-house doorway, pointing a revolver at me. I struggled with him and I managed to wrench the weapon from his grasp. The supper things were still on the table and Elsie (the nursery maid) lifted a vegetable dish, a knife and a clothes brush and threw them at him.’
This was probably not the way the would-be burglar had envisaged the crime taking place. Clearly deciding that the onslaught was too much for him, he attempted to get away from the house.
‘While I was struggling with him, he was endeavouring to open the back door,’ the cook’s story continued, ‘but as it was impossible to unlock the door without the aid of both hands, he failed in his attempt. When he saw that I meant to be equal with him he knocked me back against the gas stove and hit me in the jaw. My shoulder was hurt and I also got these cuts and scratches. Finding that he could not unlock the back door, the man rushed through the kitchen to the front. He seemed as though he was going upstairs then he tried the lavatory door, and finally got away.’
The burglar did not get far. The Arlington Road household had phoned for the police, and Inspector Cunnington responded. Cunnington called up Chief Detective Inspector Wells, and the two officers searched the local streets. They found a man on Orchard Road who looked as if he had been running, and was hatless. When questioned he gave his name as Billy Enyon, and said he had been to a ball at St George’s Hall – a venue that was in Brighton, not Eastbourne. He produced a card with the name Billy Enyon, and ‘boxer’ on it. The two detectives handed the man over to a constable for transfer to the Central Police Station, and went into the house at 31 Arlington Road to hear from the witnesses. There they were given the revolver that the cook had taken from the man, as well as a dented bowler hat found in the scullery.
The Nightingale Shore Murder Page 20