The sensational climax of the Manchester Cab Mystery, also known as ‘The Mystery of a Four-Wheeled Cab’, was widely reported in the local and national newspapers. As stated in the Daily Telegraph, confidence in the police had been restored after the fear instilled in the general public by the ‘Whitechapel butcheries’. The Manchester Courier also praised the investigation:
Great credit is due to the Chief Constable of Manchester and to his excellent lieutenant, Chief Detective-Inspector Caminada, for the thoroughness with which they had succeeded in unravelling what, at that time, was regarded as a serious outrage.
Soon after the watch committee increased Chief Inspector Caminada’s salary from £200 to £250 per annum.
On 23 March the Lancaster Gazette printed a short article apparently containing the confession of the murderer. It reported that while Parton had been held at Manchester Town Hall, an acquaintance of his father had visited him in the cells and the prisoner had given a full confession. It was alleged that Parton, referring to the administration of the drug, had said, ‘I gave him more than I intended, and when we came out of the Three Arrows I saw he was a ‘‘gonner’’, so I put him in the cab and got away as soon as I could’. The dubious confession was never passed on to the police.
There was no doubt that Charles Parton was guilty of this heinous crime but, maybe influenced by the Lancaster Gazette confession, the people of Manchester were keen to save him from the gallows and soon after the sentencing his barrister initiated a petition to the Home Secretary for a commutation of the death penalty. The request was granted and Parton’s sentence reduced to penal servitude for life. A year later Parton’s actions claimed the life of a second victim, when John Parkey succumbed to the lingering illness that he had suffered from since being drugged.
Although Detective Caminada was not a ‘first-class chemist’ like Sherlock Holmes, his solving of the Manchester Cab Mystery in record time was undoubtedly his finest moment and perhaps the pinnacle of his illustrious career. It was the case with which he would be most closely associated and, according the Manchester Courier, ‘placed him in the foremost rank of the detectives in his day’.
Chapter Twelve
The Beautiful Crook
(1890–1891)
To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex.
(Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Scandal in Bohemia, 1891)
The infamous adventuress of the Sherlock Holmes novels, Irene Adler, is beautiful, intelligent, resolute and above all, a consummate forger and blackmailer. While Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was writing about Holmes’s first meeting with her, Detective Caminada was tackling a real-life Irene Adler, who bore many striking similarities to her fictional counterpart.
In March 1890 an advertisement appeared in a Manchester newspaper for a loan of £300 requested by a lady with security in the form of an inheritance of £11,000 (equivalent to almost a million pounds today). The ‘lady’ was Alicia Anna Harris Ormonde aged 25, a well-educated woman with an aristocratic background and expensive tastes, including a penchant for drinking Madeira with dinner. She was also an experienced crook: an expert swindler, who was ‘one of the most skilful in her profession’ and wanted in various parts of the country for a string of offences. As soon as the police were on her tail, Alicia would disappear again without trace. A highly skilled forger, she employed aliases and disguises to hoodwink her victims, who were usually moneylenders. She was particularly adept at imitating other people’s handwriting, which she put to good use forging legal documents and letters to elicit money from her many lovers.
When it became apparent that this seductive swindler had taken up residence in Manchester, the case was assigned to Chief Inspector Caminada, who began his investigation by searching out one of Alicia’s victims. The detective soon located a moneylender who had answered the request for the loan. Mr T. Alker, a financial agent with offices in Manchester city centre, had requested to meet the potential borrower before making the necessary arrangements for the transaction. At the meeting Alicia Ormonde had explained that she was still waiting for the inheritance from her late mother and produced a copy of her mother’s will as proof, in addition to a reference from her solicitor in Market Harborough. After she signed the forms agreeing to the terms of the repayment, Alker had written to the solicitor for a further guarantee, from whom he had received a favourable reply. The paperwork was completed and Alker was ready to hand over the cash.
However, the evening before the transaction was due to take place, Caminada arrested Ormonde near Manchester Cathedral. On meeting her for the first time, he was captivated:
Our adventuress was young, beautiful, and lady-like. She had a good carriage, and understood all the shifts and expedients, however singular and ingenious, to which the female aspirant for fashion has recourse.
In her pocket he found a draft copy in pencil of the fake letter from her solicitor to Alker and several copies of the phony will.
Despite her airs and graces, Alicia Anna Harris Ormonde was the daughter of a labourer in Leicestershire. She had forged the will, the letters and the legal documents. Caminada succeeded in securing her conviction for fraud and three other charges of theft, even though her infatuated victims were reluctant to testify against her. The ‘lady of many aliases’ was sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment. On her release she took up her ‘position’ again and served a further 12 months in Birmingham during 1892.
In A Scandal in Bohemia, ‘the best plans of Mr Sherlock Holmes were beaten by a woman’s wit’. In fact, Irene Adler was the only woman in whom the consulting detective showed any interest, perhaps because she outwitted him. In real life Detective Caminada came across many duplicitous women and Alicia Ormonde was not the only sham heiress that he encountered. Soon after, he met another woman who also used her charms to procure money from gullible men.
When Elizabeth Margaret Burch resorted to subterfuge to save her sisters from financial ruin, the act would start her on a lifetime of crime. Her sisters, Augustine and Zara Burch, were court dressmakers. They had set up a business in Kensington with a capital of £400, but after three years they went bankrupt. Their charitable sister, Elizabeth, stepped in and raised enough cash to pay off their debts.
Elizabeth Burch, 39, was able to help her sisters because she had recently become a wealthy heiress. The circumstances of her unexpected inheritance were widely reported in the press. In May 1888 Burch, who was living in South Kensington, had been among a crowd gathered in St James’s Park to watch the arrival of ladies to Buckingham Palace, when an elderly gentleman had fainted. She helped him to a seat in the park and sent an errand boy for a cup of water to revive him. The grateful gentleman asked for Miss Burch’s card before he left for his home in the Midlands. A few years later Elizabeth Burch heard from the gentleman’s solicitor that he had died and left his estate to her, as he had no near relatives. The unexpected inheritance amounted to £150,000.
Following the publication of this wonderful news, Miss Burch, who had moved to Ashford, Kent, began to enjoy her new lifestyle by placing orders with local shopkeepers for fine foods and expensive clothes. Receiving many letters of congratulations, as well as the inevitable requests for charitable donations, the newly-made ‘Ashford Heiress’ used her elevated position to raise money for various charities, notably for the victims of the Sandgate Landslip in Folkestone and a colliery explosion in South Wales. Generous donations came flooding in, but when the supposed inheritance was not forthcoming, Miss Burch’s creditors began to pursue her in earnest.
The Ashford Heiress dealt with her problems by changing her name and moving to a different town. She repeated this clever act several times, before ending up in Manchester as ‘Lady Russell’. An ingenious con artist, her first port of call was a gentleman’s house in Higher Crumpsall, where she stole sheets of headed notepaper. She later used them to forge letters of introductio
n from this respectable family to gain access into the higher circles of society, ready to re-start her ‘charitable’ works. However, she had not bargained for the suspicious nature of Chief Inspector Caminada who, as soon as he learned that she was receiving correspondence under a different name, detected an elaborate scam.
When the detective and his colleague visited Lady Russell at her apartment, she was sitting at her writing desk. She explained to the officers that she was a ‘lady of means’ connected with a titled family and was raising money for the South Wales colliery explosion fund. Caminada noted, ‘She was most stylishly attired, and wore a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles’. On searching the property he found letters from donors, some of which arrived with the postman while he was present. He also discovered subscription lists for several charities, such as the National Benevolent Institution and the Aged Pilgrim’s Friendly Society, and when he inspected them more closely he saw that she had marked the names, mostly female, of those to whom she had addressed begging letters. Among her private papers, he spotted a memorandum book interleaved with blotting paper and, although she had torn out the pages, the imprint of sums of monies received, ranging from 1s to £5 5s, remained as evidence to her fraudulent activities.
The publicity generated by the case brought forth further evidence of Burch’s long career of swindling and she was convicted of obtaining money by false pretences, receiving a sentence of six months’ imprisonment with hard labour in Strangeways Prison. She later admitted that the letters were fake, but said that the incident with the elderly gentleman in St James’s Park was true, although there had been no subsequent inheritance. During her stay in prison she turned her hand to creative writing and submitted her stories to publishers and to the novelist, James Payn, who was coincidentally Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s patron at the Cornhill literary magazine. Although her previous existence had been a work of fiction, there is no evidence to suggest that she was as successful in her endeavour to become a writer.
Not all the female criminals that Detective Caminada encountered were beautiful and sophisticated; most of them were far from it. In Victorian Manchester life was hard for women, especially in the rookeries of the city centre. The undercover journalist who investigated the slums for the Manchester Evening News in 1874, ran into some pitiful examples in Deansgate: ‘The women are of a class whose degradation was utter, and whose reclamation, as a body, is an absolute impossibility’. During his research he met plenty of colourful female characters, with nicknames such as One-Armed Kitty, Cabbage Ann and Ginger Liz – all of whom were well-known to Caminada. Adopting numerous aliases and operating from some of the poorest quarters of the city, these women were thieves, pickpockets and prostitutes.
According to the Manchester Police returns for 1874, 33 per cent of those arrested were female. Crimes typically committed by women included pickpocketing, theft, receiving stolen goods, counterfeiting coins, begging, drunkenness and prostitution. Women often worked as the accomplices of pimps and bullies. They would deceive a passing gentleman into helping them or, less innocently, pose as a prostitute and then take him to a dark corner or narrow alleyway, where with the rest of the gang, she would attack and rob him. If the victim was lucky, he would escape a garrotting. The bold and brutal practice of garrotting was a regular feature of the Mancunian underworld, especially in the early 1860s, when garrotters terrified the public throughout the country. A letter to the London Standard summed up the dangers in 1862:
Garrotting has been so common of late that it is absolutely necessary that steps be taken at once to crush its growth… Surely such a state of things cannot be endured. We shall have to arm ourselves to the very teeth or the punishment of these base cowards must be made proportionate to the injury they inflict.
Detective Caminada was accustomed to dealing with such women and their antics were part and parcel of his daily work. Once when he was walking near Victoria Railway Station after dark, a woman tapped him on the shoulder with the words: ‘Hello, Sharp Shoes! You haven’t got me yet’. It was so dark that Caminada could not see her face, but when they came into the light of a vault, he recognised her as ‘Sally’, a begging letter writer often seen outside the station asking for money to take her sick child to the Clinical Hospital in London. In a good mood that evening, she set the detective a challenge to arrest her. Caminada rose to the bait: ‘Well, I’ll start from tonight, and see how long it will take me’.
It did not take him long at all. During the same week he was at the house of the mayor, when the mayor’s wife told him about a woman who had been pestering them with begging letters. The detective knew immediately that the culprit was Sally, so he arrested her that evening. She was charged with four cases of begging and received a 12-month prison sentence. After that she gave Detective Caminada a wide berth.
Street begging was endemic on the streets of Manchester and Caminada had little time for professional beggars, as he suspected that most of those in genuine need were too proud to cadge from strangers. Although he had compassion and sympathy for the needy, he believed from experience that giving alms when importuned in public, was often misguided and a real dilemma for passersby:
It can never be a matter of indifference whether money given to the poor is given rightly or wrongly; it either does a great deal of good, or a great deal of harm. Given to one person it may tide him over a moment of difficulty, and rescue him from hopeless beggary; given to another, it merely supplies him with the means of spending one more night in the gin-shop, and encourages his neighbours to do the like.
On one occasion Caminada was patrolling Oxford Street, when he encountered a regular street beggar known as ‘Soldier Mary Ann’. Stationed near the Prince’s Theatre with a child in her arms under a shawl, she reached out to well-dressed theatregoers for a few coins. Having gained their attention she would follow gentlemen for a few yards, recounting her sorrowful tale of having been abandoned by her husband who was in the army, until they handed over some money. Caminada engaged her in conversation and as she regaled him with her usual patter, he noticed that she kept putting her hand inside the shawl, as if to make breathing space for the child.
Uncomfortable with challenging a beggar who might be in genuine need, he walked on ahead of her to watch what she did. As soon as his back was turned, Mary Ann fled down the street, dropping the baby as she ran. The infant turned out to be a ‘good, big lad’, who also took to his heels. Caminada gave chase and handing Mary Ann over to the custody of two onlookers, he followed the lad to his home where he discovered that his parents hired him out for three pence a night. As there was no law against irresponsible parenting, Caminada had to content himself with giving them a stern lecture.
‘Soldier Mary Ann’, whose real name was Ann Ryan, was found guilty of begging and received a sentence of 12 months. Following her release, Caminada came across her once again in equally dubious circumstances. He had been walking in Salford, when he saw two women with bulky packages under their skirts. He followed them home to Fleet Street near Deansgate, through a passage and into the garret of the house where Ann Ryan lived. The packages contained corsets that they had stolen from a draper’s shop and when Caminada questioned the women, Ryan flew at him, pinioning him around the body and arms so that he could not move. The other two women opened the window and threw out the corsets, before fleeing down the stairs and out into the street. Still in Ryan’s tight grip, Caminada dragged her down to the back yard, where he recovered the stolen goods. The inveterate felon was sentenced to a further two months.
Ann Ryan, who used a number of aliases, was convicted a record 19 times in 16 years, serving a total of almost three years in prison. Her convictions were invariably for begging and drunkenness and as Caminada concluded, Ann ‘was a fair specimen of the average street beggar’.
Familiar with the ways of criminal women, Detective Caminada once used their technique of acting as bait to his own advantage, in order to apprehend a fraudulent businessman. When a senior pa
rtner of a firm in Manchester absconded, it was discovered that he was guilty of commercial fraud amounting to the enormous sum of £370,000. His creditors applied to the police for a warrant for his arrest, which was duly granted and entrusted to Detective Caminada. When he gained information from a reliable source that the culprit was living in Ilkley, a genteel town on the outskirts of Bradford, the detective travelled to West Yorkshire to investigate.
The purported residence of the errant businessman was a semi-detached villa with front and back gardens in a fashionable quarter of the town. The house was so quiet that Caminada had to resort to ‘special use of ordinary means of influence’ to identify the occupants. Knowing that young women enjoyed music, he hired a quartet band comprising a guitar, flute, harp and cornet to lure the serving girls into the garden, so that he could befriend them. When the band played a ‘rollicking waltz’ a maid appeared at one of the windows, but fearful of strangers, she ran back into the house. After the failure of his first attempt Caminada asked the guitarist to sing a plaintive tune about home. This time the ruse was successful and the back door of the villa opened to reveal two maids, who came out to listen to the music. The detective made a ‘date’ with the two maids for their day-off the following Sunday.
Despite his considerable effort, which included a walk in the woods, Caminada concluded that the owner of the villa was a retired banker from Dewsbury, who knew nothing of the fugitive. The next clue led Caminada to a small village near Otley, five miles from Bradford, where the businessman was believed to have been staying with a merchant friend. He travelled to the village with a former employee of the debtor and a young boy. The merchant’s house was on the high road to Bradford and opened out on to a field. Whilst gathering information from the local gossips, Caminada met a butcher who regularly delivered supplies to the property. He offered the detective lodgings with his sister, from which Caminada had an excellent view of his target and was able to observe the merchant going about his daily business to and from the warehouse.
The Real Sherlock Holmes Page 13