by Sly, Nicola;
20
‘EVERYONE WILL BE ASTOUNDED’
Poole, 1939
Walter Alfred Dinnivan was a self-made man. Having started his working life as a coachman in Branksome Park, Poole, he went on to start a business hiring out horses and carriages. A forward thinking man, he soon recognised the potential of the motorcar, developing a profitable sideline, which eventually superseded his livery trade. He turned his business into a garage and also introduced the motor hearse to Poole.
Having prospered in business, Dinnivan invested his profits wisely and, by the 1930s, had amassed a considerable property portfolio, which included a number of flats and houses and a site at County Gates, which eventually became the Hants and Dorset bus station.
However, Dinnivan’s success in business was tempered by tragedy in his personal life. In the late 1930s he lost both his wife and his only son, and, by 1939, he was sharing a flat in Poole Road, Branksome, with Hilda, his eighteen-year-old granddaughter, who took care of the cooking and housework.
On 20 May 1939, Dinnivan was to receive a visit from his grandson, Walter Dinnivan junior. Walter served in the Royal Navy as a telegrapher and had returned to England on leave after a period of duty on HMS Suffolk, which had taken him to China. Dinnivan met his grandson in the evening and, the following day, the two spent some time together playing darts at Westbourne Conservative Club, where Dinnivan senior was a founder member and former president and vice-president.
After he returned home to his flat, Hilda and Walter were aware of their grandfather taking a telephone call, although they were unable to hear any of the conversation, and he did not tell them who had called. He also made a withdrawal of around £25 from his bank account.
Branksome, 1946.
Poole Road, Branksome, 2008. Dinnivan’s flat is located behind the tall hedge on the left. (© N. Sly)
That evening, Hilda and Walter went out together to a dance, leaving their grandfather at home alone in the flat. At about nine o’clock in the evening, Miss Lancefield, the resident of the flat above, was sitting writing letters when she heard a thump from the flat below, then murmuring sounds, followed by silence. Fifteen minutes later, she was disturbed by a further noise, which she described as like the sound of somebody beating a carpet.
Worried, she went upstairs to rouse Miss Young who lived in the second floor flat, and both women thought that they could hear the sound of somebody breathing heavily. Nervously, the two ladies went downstairs and looked through the windows of Dinnivan’s ground floor flat. The gas fire was burning in the living room and they could see nothing out of the ordinary. They noticed that Dinnivan’s two cars were in his garage and wrongly presumed that his grandchildren were at home.
When Walter and Hilda returned at eleven o’clock, they found the door to the flat locked and assumed that their grandfather had gone out. They waited outside for his return for a few minutes, before walking around the house, peering through the windows. To their horror, by the light of the fire, they saw the old man lying on the carpet. Walter quickly smashed a window to gain entry and the two hurried to help their grandfather. They found him face down on the living room floor, his grey hair matted with blood and a large bloodstain on the carpet by his head.
Hilda hurriedly called the police, telling them that her grandfather had been shot. An ambulance was summoned, arriving at about half past eleven and rushing the sixty-four-year-old man to Boscombe Hospital, where he died soon afterwards without regaining consciousness.
A post-mortem examination, carried out by Home Office pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury, revealed that Dinnivan hadn’t been shot but had been savagely attacked with a blunt instrument. His skull bore at least ten round impressions, each about three-quarters of an inch in diameter, which Spilsbury concluded had been caused by a hammer or spanner with a circular head. In addition, Dinnivan had a broken nose and two broken ribs, probably caused by someone kneeling on his chest. Marks on his neck also suggested that an attempt had been made to strangle him.
Spilsbury gave the cause of Dinnivan’s death as injury to the brain and blood loss from multiple head injuries. Having examined the room in which the injured man was found, and noted extensive blood staining on his armchair and also on the back of his jacket, Spilsbury put together the most likely sequence of events on the night of 21 May. He believed that Dinnivan was sitting in the chair when the first blow was struck. The presence of bruising to the wound on the top of the victim’s head indicated that he had been alive and sitting in the chair for several minutes after the initial attack. He had then moved, or been moved, after which his attacker had tried unsuccessfully to strangle him, before finally striking him several more times with the hammer. The fact that the subsequent blows were mainly to his forehead would indicate that he was probably lying down when they were struck.
To the police, robbery initially seemed the obvious motive for the attack on the elderly man. Dinnivan’s wallet was missing, as were several items of valuable jewellery, including two gold rings and the silver watch that he had been wearing when his grandchildren left the house. The safe in the bedroom had been opened and emptied of bank notes and the late Mrs Dinnivan’s jewellery. Whoever had opened the safe had not forced it, but had used its proper key. However, as police began to investigate the murder, they heard rumours that Dinnivan had a secret life – one about which even the granddaughter who shared his home was unaware.
Apparently, Walter Dinnivan frequently engaged the services of a prostitute, ‘Miss Parsons’, who called regularly at his flat. Soon, police were engaged in interviewing a number of ‘women of a certain class’, since Dinnivan allegedly had similar arrangements with ‘Mrs Jones’, ‘Mrs Marlow’, ‘Betty’, ‘Gladys’, ‘Blondie’ and ‘Frenchie Lye’. According to neighbours, the visitors would enter the flat by a back entrance, via a secret passage leading from a garage in a nearby quiet road. The blinds would be drawn down, and then, a while later, the women would leave as secretly as they had arrived. On learning this, the police began to question whether the real motive might have been jealousy or blackmail and the robbery staged to throw them off the track, although after further investigation they conceded that Dinnivan’s alleged use of prostitutes had been greatly exaggerated.
The local police sought help from Scotland Yard and Chief Inspector Leonard Burt soon arrived to assist them in their hunt for the killer. Burt’s first action was to initiate a search for the murder weapon and also for Dinnivan’s front door key, which was missing. The grounds of Dinnivan’s flat were subjected to a fingertip search, which then spread out to encompass grass verges, parks and gardens within a one-mile radius. Drains and streams were also searched and two members of the public handed in hammers that they had found, but neither proved to be the one the police were seeking. Neither the key nor the weapon were ever located.
As well as investigating the possible connection with prostitutes, police were also anxious to find out who had made the telephone call to Walter Dinnivan on the morning of his attack. They appealed to the public for sightings of any suspicious people or vehicles near to his flat and were rewarded with reports of several cars and taxis seen in the area on the relevant evening, including one by a neighbour, Mr Smith, who had seen two men speeding away from the scene in a black car. In addition, Dinnivan’s flat was found to contain items that may have been left behind by his attacker.
On a table in the centre of the living room were two glasses, a whisky tumbler and a beer glass, with a beer bottle. Both of the glasses and the bottle had been tipped onto their sides and some of the beer had spilled onto the tablecloth. Dinnivan had never been known to drink beer and the glass bore a thumbprint that wasn’t his, nor had any other members of the family left it. In addition, the police found the dog ends of four cigarettes, each smoked right down to the cork tip. One lay on the tablecloth near the glasses, two more were found under the table and the fourth was found on the settee. Dinnivan himself smoked un-tipped cigarettes. On the floor
was a woman’s French hair curler of a most unusual design. It was made from imitation tortoiseshell and the celluloid used in its manufacture was so flammable that its sale had been banned in England because of the risk of fire. Finally, police retrieved a brown paper bag from the flat. It was bloodstained and had been folded on the diagonal.
Police officers travelled far and wide in their hunt for Dinnivan’s killer. They went to London in search of those prostitutes who regularly came from the capital to sparsely populated areas such as Dorset because they felt that the risk of arrest was smaller. They spoke to Dinnivan’s friends, relatives and business associates, as well as the taxi drivers and shopkeepers from the area and, before long, they felt that they had come up with a plausible suspect.
Local man Joseph Williams was a former Army officer, who had now fallen on hard times. Having separated from his wife in 1937 and moved in with another woman, Williams had taken out a large mortgage in order to buy two properties. However, in 1938 his business had failed and his partner had left him. His wife had returned and the couple had lived for a while in a boarding house before moving to one of the two houses in Ingworth Road, Branksome. He had defaulted on the mortgage payments and, in spite of selling almost all his possessions, was on the verge of eviction, an order having been granted to the building society for repossession by Poole County Court on 10 May 1939. By the time police arrived to interview him, Williams was living in a single room, with only a camp bed, chair and table for furniture.
Williams had known Dinnivan for more than fifty years and had often borrowed money from him in the past, the last occasion being when Dinnivan had loaned him £5 only a few days before his death. Williams told police that he had last seen his old friend on 14 May and again on either 16 or 17 May. On the first meeting, Williams had told Dinnivan of his imminent eviction and suggested that he buy the property from the building society, but Dinnivan had not been interested. On the second occasion, Dinnivan had invited Williams to his flat for a drink, loaned him £5 and showed him his wife’s jewellery.
On the night of the murder, Williams told police that he had been at home until about 8.30 p.m., only popping out for five minutes to buy cigarettes. At 9.30 p.m. he had walked into Bournemouth, hearing a clock strike 10 p.m. as he reached the square. After strolling round the pier and Pine Walk, he had caught a bus home, arriving at 11.30 p.m., after which he had gone to bed.
Williams was arrested on 20 June 1939. His response to being charged with the murder of Walter Dinnivan was incredulity. ‘The whole thing is ridiculous’, he said. ‘Everyone will be astounded’. He was remarkably unfazed by his circumstances, smiling cheerily at the press photographers as he left the police station en route to Poole magistrate’s court and chatting about his intentions to attend a whist drive that evening as he waited in court for the arrival of the magistrates.
Williams pleaded ‘Not Guilty’ and his defence counsel argued eloquently on his behalf. King pointed out the danger of Dinnivan’s lifestyle and the frequent visitors to his flat, who were able to come and go through a concealed entrance without being observed. King maintained that Williams was a sick man who, at the age of seventy, was now facing the most serious charge it was possible for anyone to face. The arguments failed to sway the magistrates, who determined that there was a case to answer, committing Williams to stand trial at the next Assizes in Dorchester.
The trial opened on 11 October before Mr Justice Croom-Johnson. J.D. Casswell prosecuted, while J.G. Trapnell KC led the defence.
Although he again pleaded ‘Not Guilty’, the weight of evidence against Williams seemed insurmountable to his defence counsel. Penniless and facing imminent eviction and homelessness, he certainly had the motive to rob his old friend, who he knew to be a wealthy man. Money found in his wallet after the murder, which Williams claimed to have won on the horses, was traced back to Dinnivan’s branch of Lloyds Bank. The thumbprint on the beer glass was identical to Williams’s and, in a ground-breaking forensic test, the saliva from the cork-tipped cigarettes was found to come from someone with blood group number 3, the same group as Williams. It was a particularly rare blood group, shared by only 5 per cent of the population.
Having checked 130 outlets in Bournemouth and Poole, police had conclusively established that the French hair curler was not available for sale anywhere in the area. Yet Mrs Williams used identical curlers. The bloodstained brown paper bag was found to have a fault in the serrations on its edge and no less than twenty-three similar bags were found in Williams’s room, each with a similar fault and all obviously manufactured by the same machine. The police were able to establish that Williams had bought a job lot of the bags from a shop that was closing down.
Casswell outlined the prosecution’s theory about the murder. Destitute and desperate, Williams had visited Dinnivan with the intention of robbing him. As the two men enjoyed a drink, Williams had removed the hammer he had brought with him from its paper bag and hit Dinnivan hard from behind on the top of the head, rendering him unconscious. Then, as Williams was rifling through the safe, either he heard the two ladies from the upstairs flats or Dinnivan had regained consciousness. It had then been necessary to kill him, to prevent him from later identifying his attacker.
On the third day of the trial – Friday 13 October – Williams himself took the stand and it was at that moment that the case went wrong for the prosecution team.
Casswell would later write in his memoirs, A Lance for Liberty, that Mr Justice Croom-Johnson appeared extremely prejudiced for the defendant, almost as if he were reluctant to put on the traditional black cap and pronounce a death sentence. Casswell believed that this was the first murder case that Croom-Johnson had presided over, and whether he was suffering from first-time nerves or just particularly sympathetic to the age of the accused, it soon became evident to Casswell that he was fighting an uphill battle.
As Casswell cross-examined Williams, Croom-Johnson fidgeted, snorted and exclaimed loudly from the bench, while Williams rather cockily proceeded to argue every piece of the evidence against him that the police had gathered. He denied being anywhere near Dinnivan’s flat when the murder was committed and explained the presence of his thumbprint on the beer glass by suggesting that it had been improperly washed after his previous visit on 14 May. He could have left the curler on another occasion and he wasn’t the only person in the area with a rare blood group. As for the paper bag – surely anyone from that area might have received one of the defective ones from the local shop?
As soon as Casswell had finished his cross-examination, Croom-Johnson immediately invited the jury to dismiss the case there and then. ‘You have heard this man and seen him in the box’, he told them. ‘Recollect that the prosecution has to establish a case for your satisfaction without any reasonable doubt and, having regard to the fact that none of the money has really been traced to this man and no bloodstains, with the exception of those on a pair of trousers, have been found on any of his clothing, if you think that this case is one in which it would be unsafe to leave him in peril any longer you are at liberty to say so but if you think the case ought to proceed you are also at liberty to say so.’ After a five-minute recess, the jury elected to continue the trial but Croom-Johnson had not finished interfering.
In his summing up, Croom-Johnson again seemed to bend over backwards to refute the case for the prosecution. He reminded the jury that the murder weapon had never been found, in spite of an extensive search and that none of the missing jewellery had been traced. He ridiculed the hair curler, asking if a woman’s hair curler were really the sort of thing that a murderer took along with him to the scene of the crime. He pointed out that there were approximately 15,000 people in the Bournemouth district with the same blood group as Williams and that there was no evidence that he smoked, or ever bought, cork-tipped cigarettes. He finished his summing up by instructing the jury that, while it was proper that they should punish the guilty, it was better that dozens of guilty persons should esc
ape rather than one innocent person suffer wrongly. They should be quite certain in their minds that they were not convicting the wrong person.
Within seventy minutes, the jury had returned a verdict of ‘Not Guilty’ and an obviously delighted Joseph Williams was a free man. He was whisked away from the court by Norman Rae of the News of the World, to whom he had promised an exclusive interview. Frustratingly for Rae, he subsequently found himself with not just a story, but with a journalistic scoop, but one that he was forced by journalistic ethics to withhold for twelve years until after William’s death in 1951.
Initially, Williams maintained his innocence to Rae, saying that he had known all along that he wouldn’t be convicted and had therefore taken a perverse pleasure in playing the police along, amusing himself at their efforts to tie him to the murder. However, after a long evening of celebratory drinking, Rae found Williams knocking at the door of his hotel room in the early hours of the morning.
In tears, Williams told Rae that he needed to clear his conscience. ‘The jury were wrong’, he confessed. ‘It was me. I killed Walter Dinnivan. Now I’ve told you, I feel better. I’ll be able to sleep now.’
Rae escorted Williams back to his own room then lay awake mulling over what he had just been told. In the eyes of the law, having been tried and acquitted, Joseph Williams could not be tried again for the same offence. No matter what statements he might make after the trial, he was officially innocent and could not now be brought to justice.