Unsolved London Murders

by Jonathan Oates

  Conclusion

  These 20 London murders which occurred in the years between the two world wars are all those which were unsolved in this period. However, we should note that three may not have been murders at all – those of Edith Emms, Kusel Behr and Josephine Martin. This is a very small number of unsolved murders, which work out at approximately one per year.

  Of these murders, assuming all were murders, nine were of men, one was of a child and ten were women (four of these being prostitutes). Strangulation was the most common method, accounting for six murders, with bludgeoning accounting for another four. Three were shot and another three were stabbed. One victim was electrocuted, another was poisoned and the method of death for two are unknown. For most of these crimes the motive is unknown, though four were concerned with money, two were political and one was motivated by sexual perversion. Apart from Behr, all the victims were of working-class or occasionally lower middle-class origin.

  Some of these killings, perhaps the majority, were murders by strangers, which made them all the more difficult to solve. It is probable that the death of Behr and the murder of Vera Page were both the responsibility of someone who knew the victim/s fairly well. Except in the case of poisoning, the killers were almost certainly all male – and may have been in that too, as poison is not exclusively used by women. All managed to commit their crimes without having any inconvenient witnesses around and managed to avoid leaving any damning clues. Although the police had their suspicions about some men, such as Field in the Norah Upchurch case and Philpotts in the Emberton one, there was never enough evidence to convict them, and in the latter case, not enough even to bring him to trial.

  The majority of these crimes took place in west London, especially in the district around Leicester Square. Only one occurred in the East End and only five in south London, with one in Croydon, and there were only two in north London. Perhaps one reason behind this is that vice was more fashionable an industry in the West End at that time than in the East End (the Ripper’s victims in the Victorian age were all from the East End, of course).

  The killers escaped the penalty of their actions in these cases, leaving behind them corpses and unanswered questions. They remain as mysterious today as they did then. The guilty walked free and their secrets died with them. Perhaps some of their descendants will read this book, completely unaware that it was their ancestor who was an undiscovered killer.

  Bibliography

  Primary Sources

  National Archives

  Metropolitan Police Files: MEPO3/268b (Buxton), 852 (Emms), 855 (Behr), 861 (Duff and Sidneys), 887 (Emberton), 1606 (Lechevalier), 1611 (Goodall), 1623a (Creed), 1648 (East), 1609 (Upchurch), 1671 (Page), 1672 (Lloyd), 1698 (Brentford/Waterloo corpse), 1702 (Martin), 1706 (Cousins), 1707 (Leah), 2190 (Priddle)

  Principal Division of the Family: Will of Kusel Behr, 1926; Wills of Violet and Vera Sidney, 1929

  Newspapers Consulted

  Acton Gazette, 1920

  Illustrated Police News, 1920, 1921, 1926, 1931, 1932, 1935, 1936

  Kensington News, 1931–2

  Kentish Mercury, 1929

  Middlesex Independent, 1935

  Southall–Norwood Gazette, 1926, 1938

  Thomson’s Weekly News, 1936

  The Times, 1920–4, 1926, 1929, 1931–2, 1935–6, 1938

  West London Observer, 1921

  Westminster and Pimlico News, 1938

  Other Printed Sources

  G Cornish, Cornish of the Yard (1935)

  T Divall, Scoundrels and Scallywags (1929)

  Kensington North Electoral Registers, 1918–47

  A F Neil, 40 Years of Manhunting (1932)

  S I Oddie, Inquest (1941)

  F D Sharpe, Sharpe of the Flying Squad (1938)

  B Thomson, The Story of Scotland Yard (1935)

  A Thorp, Calling Scotland Yard (1954)

  E Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (1945)

  E Waugh, Diaries (1976)

  F Wensley, Detective Days (1931)

  Oral Reminiscences

  William Bignell

  Electronic Sources

  Ancestry.com

  Timesonline

  Secondary Sources

  H L Adam, Murder by Persons Unknown (1931)

  D G Browne and E V Tulloch, Sir Bernard Spilsbury: His Life and Crimes (1951)

  The Chap Manifesto (2001)

  N Connell, Walter Dew: The Man Who Caught Crippen (2005)

  T A Critchley, The Police in England and Wales (1968)

  C Emsley, The English Police (1991)

  J G Hall and G D Smith, The Croydon Arsenic Mystery (1999)

  S Inswood, A History of London (1998)

  J D Oates, Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in Ealing (2006)

  J D Oates, Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in Lewisham and Deptford (2007)

  J D Oates, Unsolved Murders in Victorian and Edwardian London (2007)

  Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)

  A Rose, Lethal Witness (2007)

  C J S Thompson, Poison and Poisoners (1993)

  J White, London in the Twentieth Century (2000)

  J R Whitbread, The Railway Policeman (1961)