Murder & Crime
Page 9
Dear Stan don’t get frighten there is a dead woman in no 22 and you can believed me Stan it nothing to do with me but you know what the police will say it was me for sure but if they take the trouble to find out where I was all the time what they won’t take the Trouble to do, Stan I can’t write I to upset about it. Stan you can believed me I don’t know anything about how this woman got in the cellar of no 22.
A perturbed Stanley Wilton and the manager, Godfrey Pollock, made a quick search of the shop before heading downstairs to the basement. It was dusty and dirty and full of bed frames and mattresses. At the far end, beneath the pavement outside the shop, the stone-floored cellar was so dark they had to light a candle. ‘We found a lady’s shoe in a corner there,’ said Mr Wilton. ‘A trunk was in the entrance of the coal cellar. Some brown paper was beyond the trunk. I lifted it and saw the hand of a female. I lifted the paper further and saw the profile and hair of a woman.’ He then sent for the police.
The body was found in the cellar, behind the case, covered with brown paper. (National Archives)
Detective Inspector Arthur Lount noted that there was no sign that the dead woman had been dragged through the dirt into the coal cellar. Her stockings were still on, although her skirt had been drawn up slightly. She had been dead at least twenty-four hours. Blood trickled from the mouth and nose, and there was obvious bruising under the chin, suggesting strangulation. It was one of the easier cases of Dr Bernard Spilsbury’s career. Bruising to the larynx, along the lower jaw and to the lips and tongue, together with a fracture of the hyoid bone in the neck, revealed death was caused by manual strangulation. Later that night, the victim was identified as Rosina Field by her sister Mary Leat. Rosina was forty-nine years old, 5ft ¼in, with greying, dark brown hair. She was the mother of a grown-up daughter, Ivy Crafter, and was living apart from her husband at a hostel for women at No. 13 Duncan Terrace. Although her sister was unaware of any ‘habit of associating with men’, Rosina appears to have earned her living as a prostitute. She was last seen alive leaving the hostel at seven o’clock on Coronation Day, wearing a dark blue coat with fur across the shoulder, a bright blue woollen jumper underneath, and a little hat.
Rosina Field, a forty-nine-year-old prostitute living at No. 13 Duncan Terrace in Islington. (National Archives)
The first person the police wanted to speak to was Frederick George Murphy, the author of the strange note about the body. He wasn’t at his flat at No. 57a Colebrooke Row, but his partner Ethel Marshall knew about the dead body already – he had taken her down to the cellar to see it. According to Ethel they had been out drinking on 13 May and he had told her: ‘I have got something serious to tell you. There’s a woman’s body in the shop.’ She hadn’t believed him and he had proved it by leading her down into the basement at Harding’s. ‘He was not upset … he said he was innocent and knew nothing whatever about it,’ she told police. ‘He said he found it there in the morning.’
Murphy was fifty-two years old, a thickset, unattractive hulk of a man with a mobster’s face. He claimed to have been born in the East End and spent his early working life on ships travelling across the world. In Australia, he received a ‘cut-throat scar’ on his neck during a fight. Later he earned his way as a greengrocer, a coalman and an unsuccessful gambler at dog tracks. In between, he served short spells in prison for frequenting (a brothel most likely) in 1907, assault and living on prostitution in 1909, for vagrancy in 1913, theft in 1924 and attempted burglary in 1925. He called himself different names at different times – James Johnson, George Taylor, or just ‘Mick’. His abiding passion, aside from betting on the dogs, was women, or more particularly prostitutes. Murphy had a history of offering women money for sex, including two other residents of the hostel at No. 13 Duncan Terrace. Edith Williams, sixty-four, declined the offer of 1s but Emily Robinson, a fifty-six-year-old charwoman, agreed to sex on a pile of mattresses in the corner of the dirty basement at Harding’s in return for 8d. A porter had seen him taking Rosina Field into the shop a few months earlier, and a builder swore he had seen the two of them there on the morning of the Coronation at around six o’clock.
The police didn’t have long to wait to get their hands on Murphy. In the early hours of 15 May he walked into the station at Poplar and asked to make a statement ‘about the Islington murder’. His story was an unlikely one and involved taking a prostitute he knew as Rose (not Rosina Field) into Harding’s for ‘sexual intercourse standing up in the passage way’, on Coronation Day evening. As they left, he had given her 2s 6d and then went to put some money on a dog race and to have a drink at the pub with his ‘missus’ Ethel Marshall. The next morning, the 13th, he went to the shop to sweep up. ‘I put the light on and saw a woman lying on the floor near some mattresses,’ he said in his statement. ‘She was lying longways in the basement … her head towards the cellar door.’ Murphy said he waited for the manager to arrive but when that didn’t happen he went back to the basement, picked up the body and carried it into the cellar. He covered her with the fur coat, put the brown paper over that and then moved the tin trunk in front of the body, ‘so nobody could see it and get frightened.’
Murphy claimed that after writing the note for Mr Wilton he decided to commit suicide. ‘I went to Stratford, hung around there walking up and down the canal bank. At about 11 p.m. I did try to hang myself by the railway bridge.’ His makeshift noose snapped and he ended up in a heap, still very much alive, on the ground. ‘I then made up my mind to go to the police and tell them what I knew about the dead woman.’ His defence to the charge of murder was, in the words of Murphy himself, ‘I didn’t do her in but I admit I handled the body.’ The police believed that the ‘Rose’ he admitted meeting on Coronation night was Frances Keen, who lived with Rosina Field at No. 13 Duncan Terrace. She told detectives that she went drinking with him in the Carved Red Lion on the corner of St Peter’s Street and Essex Road. On several occasions he had asked her back to the shop but she had always refused. The next night, at the same pub, he told her about the body – ‘Well Rose don’t be frightened if I tell you,’ he said. ‘When I went on Coronation night I saw a body lying on the floor. For Christ’s sake Rose, don’t tell anybody else.’
Photo of No. 13 Duncan Terrace today. (Author)
Murphy’s cack-handed attempt to explain away the woman he had been seen taking into Harding’s on Coronation night was further demolished by the evidence of Herbert Fennings, a car-park attendant for Collins’ Music Hall across the road. Mr Fennings, who knew both Murphy and Rosina by sight, had seen them meet up in Islington Green at around eight o’clock that night. ‘They went down past Collins’ towards the furniture shop,’ he said. ‘That was the last time I saw the woman.’ Murphy was seen at the Queen’s Head pub at half nine and at the Fox at ten o’clock. Later that night he was seen by Mr Fennings walking with his partner Ethel Marshall. If he had killed Rosina Field, it must have been between eight and half nine that night.
Murphy’s defence didn’t convince the jury at the Old Bailey either. On 2 July 1937, he was convicted of murder. Like Frederick Seddon, he saw his last words as a chance to criticise the case against him and to proclaim his innocence to the judge, the Lord Chief Justice. ‘In your summing up my Lord you did not give one good word for me. You told the jury I was nothing else but a liar, that I was telling nothing but lies.’
The judge responded, ‘You know as well as I know that the verdict is right,’ and pronounced the death sentence with the traditional ending: ‘May God have mercy on your soul.’
Murphy sneered, ‘Mercy on my soul – oh, yes!’, as he was taken down to the cells. He would spend the next six weeks at Pentonville Prison awaiting execution. The News of the World said he would:
Go down in history as the most callous prisoner who has ever occupied the condemned cell … he plays cards and draughts all day long and at night enjoys a glass of beer with which he toasts his guardians, the judges who tried him and the detectives who brought about his
conviction.
Murphy was quoted as saying, ‘I will meet whatever waits me smiling.’
The end came at nine o’clock on the morning of 17 August 1937. But Frederick George Murphy still had one last card to play, even after death. Five days later, the News of the World printed Murphy’s stunning confession to another murder. And by a strange, sinister twist of fate, this earlier victim was also known as ‘Rose’.
At around twenty-five to one on the morning of 12 March 1929, Inspector Sidney Jordan of M Division was on patrol with a sergeant in Elstead Street in Walworth, south London. At the end of a block of flats known as Hearns buildings he spied what looked like a bundle of clothes lying in the street. ‘We found it was a woman, lying on her back, still,’ he recalled. ‘Her head was on the roadway, her feet on the footpath. She was breathing very stentoriously. I saw blood on the road under the woman’s head. We opened her coat and found she was bleeding from a wound in her throat.’ Within fifteen minutes the woman was dead – in all likelihood the officers had only missed catching the killer red-handed by a few moments.
The victim was forty-five-year-old Katherine Peck, who lived with her husband and nineteen-year-old son in Flint Street, Walworth. In recent years, for whatever reason, she had started staying out late at night to work on the streets and was known by her friends as ‘Singing Rose’ or ‘Rose Sullivan’. She had started hanging around with a man variously known as Tim Murphy or Tubby Murphy, a man who wasn’t afraid to punch her in the face if he saw her chatting to other men. This same Murphy was with her when she was last seen alive, at around ten o’clock on 11 March, outside a pub in Mansell Street near Aldgate. Three hours later Murphy returned to his 8d a night bed at a lodging house in Tooley Street, alone.
Murphy gave several different explanations as to his movements that night. He told one friend that he had left her ‘safe and sound at 11.15 p.m.’. When interviewed by police, he claimed that he walked with her from Gardner’s Corner across the river to the junction of Tower Bridge Road and Grange Road before heading back to his lodgings at around midnight. The nearest he got to the truth was what he told one of his friends at Aldgate the following afternoon. ‘I’ve done the old woman in,’ he explained. ‘I’m on the run.’ He remained at large for another two weeks, before handing himself in at Bethnal Green police station.
Despite the confession, the lack of an alibi, and the fact he was the last to be seen with the victim, detectives were unable to pin down his movements between half ten and the finding of the body two hours later. His trial, which began on 28 May 1929, ended in his acquittal. It was another eight years until the police’s suspicions were confirmed by Murphy’s confession. He had written it shortly after walking free from court, safe in the knowledge that he could not be charged twice with the same crime. It remained locked away in a safe for eight years before being handed over to the News of the World after his death.
In his tortuous scrawl, Murphy claimed that he had armed himself with a ‘chive’ or tobacco knife in anger when Katherine Peck had refused to leave the pub and laughed in his face.
I got hold of her and pulled her out. When we got near her home she asked me for fourpence. There was a quarrel. She tried to take a lump out of me. I gave her a dig with my chive … and I left her. She was lying on the ground … that’s the whole story. The rest you know. I now want to leave England forever.
Sadly for Rosina Field, he did not leave England. Instead of counting himself a lucky man, he pestered the police with a series of letters accusing the police and the key witness of perjury. He openly vowed that he would one day hang for killing a police officer and boasted that he had procured a gun to take revenge on those who had tried to convict him of the murder of Katherine Peck. Murphy, claimed the News of the World, was ‘the vainest, toughest and most callous of murderers’.
Notes and Sources
Stand and Deliver!: The main source for the life of Claude Duval is ‘The Memoirs of Monsieur Du Vall’, containing the history of his life and death (1670), printed in Thomas Osborne’s Harleian Miscellany, Vol. 3, pp.295–299. The ‘faithfully recorded’ version by Edwin T. Woodhall, Claude Duval, Gentleman Highwayman and Knight of the Road, was printed in 1937. One of the few mentions of Duval in action was apparently made in a newsletter in 1666 after a highwayman politely asked a group of gentlemen for their money so he could bet it on a horse called ‘Boopeepe’ at Newmarket. ‘It is thought that it was Monsieur Claud Du Vall, or one of his knot.’
Dick Turpin: Contemporary reports of Dick Turpin in Islington can be found in The London Magazine, Sunday 22 May 1737; Daily Gazetteer, 24 May 1737; Weekly Miscellany, 27 May 1737. He may have been given credit for robberies that he was not involved in – see the London Evening Post of 7 June 1737, which reported: ‘Last Tuesday morning, about ten o’clock, three gentlemen coming from Highgate in Mr Dacosta’s Coach were robb’d of about 17l [£17]. By a single Highwayman, whom they suppos’d to be the famous Turpin.’
Newspaper reports of his crimes all over London were collected in a book by Arty Ash and Julius Day, Immortal Turpin: The Authentic History of England’s most Notorious Highwayman (1948). See also James Sharpe, Dick Turpin: The Myth of the English Highwayman (2005), Christopher Hibbert, Highwaymen (1967), John Nelson, The History and Antiquities of the Parish of Islington (1829), and the fictional versions of Turpin’s life in William Harrison Ainsworth’s Rookwood (1834) and Henry Downes Miles’ The Life of Richard Palmer; Better Known as Dick Turpin, the Notorious Highwayman and Robber (1839).
The Thief-taker: See the Proceedings of the Old Bailey online for details on the trials of Jack (Joseph) Sheppard (t17240812-52), John Wigley (t17210830-51), James Reading (t17210830-50) and William Burridge (t17220228-30). Further details on Wild can be found in Gerald Howson’s Thief-Taker General, the Rise and Fall of Jonathan Wild (1970); and on the Fielding brothers in The Life and Work of Sir John Fielding by R. Leslie Melville; newspaper reports on houses in West Street in Illustrated London News, 17 August 1844; Morning Post, 7 August 1844; Lloyd’s Weekly, 11 and 18 August 1844; the Examiner, 17 and 18 August 1844. See also Spinks, History of Clerkenwell, and Old and New London, Vol. 3.
A Duel: The famous seventeenth-century scientist Robert Boyle examined the waters of Sadler’s Wells in 1684 for his Short Memoirs for the Natural Experimental History of Mineral Waters. There are various accounts of Sadler’s Wells and Musick House in Pinks’ History of Clerkenwell, Thornbury’s Old and New London and Nelson’s History of Islington. See also A True and Exact Account of Sadler’s Well, published by T.G. Doctor of Physick (1684) and The Story of Sadler’s Wells 1683 to 1964 by Dennis Arundel. Trial of Patrick French for murder in Proceedings of the Old Bailey, t17120910-28.
The Cricket Field: The description of White Conduit House in Old and New London and Spinks, History of Clerkenwell. In 1784 it was reported that a cricket match was played in the fields by the Duke of Forset, Lord Winchelsea, Lord Talbot, and other dignitaries. The field was apparently abandoned by the club for Marylebone because Islington was ‘too public’. For the Fryer case see Martin Clinch and John Mackley in The New and Complete Newgate Calendar by William Jackson, p.491, and the Proceedings of the Old Bailey online, t17970531-1.
Clowns and Robbers: The original resting place of Joseph Grimaldi and his mentor Charles Dibdin are marked by a clever piece of public art in the same garden area, near to Pentonville Road. Phosphor bronze tiles have been set into the ground in the shape of two coffins, which when danced upon play musical notes. Grimaldi’s ‘casket’ is tuned so that you can play his most famous song ‘Hot Codlins’. The story of the Pentonville Robbers is told in the Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi by Charles Dickens. See also Richard Findlater’s Grimaldi, King of Clowns (1955), and Andrew McConnell Scott’s The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi (2009).
House of Blood: Accounts of the murders, the inquest and the burials in The Times, 10, 11, 12 and 17 September 1834; Morning Chronicle, 11 September 1834; Royal Gazette, 25 Nov
ember 1834; agency copy in the Sydney Herald, 29 January 1835; Edmund Burke’s Annual Register of World Events for 1834; Reports of the ‘museum’ in Pinks, History of Clerkenwell, pp.507–510; and the Standard, 3 October 1834.
Who Killed Mr Templeman?: Charles Dickens would refer to the Templeman case in a letter to the Home Secretary on 3 July 1840, a few days before Gould left for Australia. Dickens wrote that:
The terrors of transportation and confinement under the present system are known to few but those who have penetrated to the heart of parliamentary reports and commissioners’ enquiries; by that class for whose especial benefit and correction they are intended, they are known least of all. I have felt this for a long time, and have had my old thoughts upon the subject wakened up afresh by the sentence passed upon the convict Gould the other day, which is shorn of its impressiveness and example by the one unfortunate circumstance that the people do not know, and do not suspect, what his real punishment is … It has occurred to me that a strong and vivid description of the terrors of Norfolk Island and such-like places, told in a homely Narrative with a great appearance of truth and reality and circulated in some very cheap and easy form (if with the direct authority of the Government, so much the better) would have a very powerful impression on the minds of the badly disposed and … would have a deep and salutary effect in inspiring all rising convicts with a tremendous fear of the higher penalties of the law … I would have it on the pillow of every prisoner in England.