Ghosts & Gallows

by Paul Adams

  Five months before, at around seven o’clock on the evening of 5 January 1937, Wilfred Tinsley, a coal carter, and his wife Lilian became concerned at the whereabouts of their ten-year-old daughter Mona, who had not returned home from school that afternoon. The Tinsleys lived in a council house in Thoresby Avenue, Newark and Mona, one of seven children, attended the Wesleyan School in Guildhall Street, which was about twenty minutes walk away. Mona had in fact been seen out of the school at the end of the day’s lessons at four o’clock by her class teacher, Miss Hawley, and normally got back to Thoresby Avenue half an hour later. When she failed to appear around that time her parents were not unduly concerned as they had relations in the area and assumed that Mona had called in to see them on the way home. Two and a half hours after she should have been back, Mr Tinsley went out to check, but their family members knew nothing of the young child. At a quarter to ten Wilfred Tinsley went for the police.

  The Newark Borough Constabulary quickly instigated an intensive search for the missing child. During the night empty properties in the town were checked, lorries passing along the Great North Road were stopped and examined, and officers searched the banks of the River Trent looking for some clue to Mona’s disappearance. The following morning, policemen visited all the Newark schools and assemblies were called. The children were asked that if any of them had seen Mona Tinsley on the previous afternoon following the end of the school day, they should speak immediately to the police. Soon Chief Constable Barnes, who was leading the search, had his first clues.

  A neighbour of the Tinsleys, eleven-year-old William Plackett who lived two doors down, said he saw Mona between four thirty and a quarter to five in the company of a man near the Newark bus station, and, later the same day, two women also came forward. One confirmed the schoolboy’s sighting of Mona near the bus terminus while the second lady, a Mrs Annie Hird who, similarly to William Plackett, lived two doors away from the Tinsleys in Thoresby Avenue, said that in the quarter of an hour before the Wesleyan School was due to finish for the day she had been walking down Balderton Street (now renamed Balderton Gate) and passing the end of Guildhall Street when she had seen a man she recognised as a former lodger of the Tinsleys standing alone on the street corner looking across towards the door of the school. The policemen returned to Thoresby Avenue and Barnes spoke with Wilfred and Lilian Tinsley. The couple at first were evasive but eventually admitted that fifteen months earlier, in October 1935, a man calling himself Frederick Hudson had lodged there for a short time. He had been introduced to them by Mrs Tinsley’s married sister Edie Grimes, who, like her other two sisters and her brother, lived in Sheffield, and during his time with the Tinsleys was known as Uncle Fred by their children. Hudson eventually left after three weeks having had difficulty in paying the rent. His departure had been amicable but he had at no time been given authority to take charge of Mona or her siblings.

  Barnes sent officers to Sheffield while in Newark the intensive search for Mona Tinsley continued. By the late afternoon of 6 January, the police had taken a statement from Charles Reville, a local bus driver who, the previous day, had taken the regular 4.45 p.m. bus to the nearby market town of Retford, approximately twenty-two miles south-east of Newark. Reville acted as both driver and conductor and remembered seeing a young girl answering Mona’s description in the company of a man who bought a half-crown return for himself but, ominously, only a tenpence single for the child. They had both got off his bus at a stop in Grove Street, Retford.

  At Sheffield, policemen visited the addresses of the Tinsley’s relatives and were soon knocking on the door of Thomas and Edie Grimes in Neil Road. In a similar vein to her sister, Edie Grimes and her husband were at first unhelpful and denied knowing anyone by the name of Frederick Hudson. When pressed, Mrs Grimes admitted she knew a man named Frederick Nodder but had not seen him for some time. When Barnes’ men checked with colleagues at Sheffield police station it soon became clear that Hudson and Nodder were one and the same person, who had good reason to go under an assumed name.

  Frederick Colmore Nodder was a motor mechanic and sometime lorry driver from Sheffield in his early forties. Separated from his wife and two children, he was the subject of an affiliation order (known at the time as a ‘bastardy warrant’) for unpaid maintenance on an illegitimate child. It later transpired that soon after leaving his wife, Nodder befriended Mr and Mrs Grimes and took up lodgings with them and, in their company, had visited the Tinsleys at Newark on more than one occasion. The police returned to Neil Road and interviewed Edie Grimes again, who continued to be uncooperative and insisted that she had not seen or heard from Nodder since he left to live with her sister and brother-in-law. While one officer spoke to Mrs Grimes, another policeman questioned a neighbour and it became clear that Mrs Grimes was lying. She had good reason, as she and Nodder were having an affair, something her husband may have known about and was possibly a voyeur. Her elderly neighbour recalled seeing a lorry with the word ‘Retford’ painted on the side parked in Neil Road close to the Grimes’ house the previous month, over the Christmas period. When confronted with this statement, Thomas Grimes admitted that Nodder had called on them around that time but insisted that he had no idea of his present whereabouts. This may have been true but his wife certainly did know where Nodder was living.

  During the afternoon of 6 January, Chief Constable Barnes established through enquiries at public houses and motor garages in Retford that a man by the name of Nodder was living on Smeath Road near the village of Hayton, some three and a half miles from Retford. The house, called ‘Peacehaven’, was recently built and still stands today, although the surrounding area was not so built up. When Barnes together with a detective-sergeant, two other officers and their driver arrived at around seven in the evening, they found it lonely and isolated; it was also in darkness with no immediate sign of the occupier.

  The policemen, having checked with the next-door neighbour and finding that Nodder had been seen there during the day, decided to wait and took up positions near the house and in the roadway. The night was dark with a gale-force wind. After nearly four hours Nodder appeared and, after Barnes had established his identity, went with him into the house using the back door, the front being fixed shut with screws. When questioned, Nodder denied any knowledge of Mona Tinsley or her whereabouts, although he admitted he knew her and claimed to have spent the day in Newark looking for work. The bastardy warrant enabled Barnes to hold Nodder while the police searched for evidence that might connect him with the child’s disappearance, and he was taken to the cells in Newark police station.

  The following day the police returned to ‘Peacehaven’. The house was searched thoroughly, floorboards were lifted and, aware that what had begun as an enquiry for a missing person could develop into a murder hunt, officers dug up the garden and opened the attic. Amongst a pile of newspapers and magazines a piece of paper was found covered with a child’s handwriting and, similarly, a child’s fingerprint was discovered on a plate on the kitchen draining board. The immediate neighbours were also interviewed and the daily maid – a woman living two doors down from ‘Peacehaven’ – stated that the previous morning, while taking rubbish to the dustbin, she had seen a young girl wearing what she thought was a blue dress standing in the back doorway of Nodder’s house; Nodder himself was digging in the garden at the time.

  While the police were turning over ‘Peacehaven’, Frederick Nodder was taking part in an identification parade at Newark police station. The Tinsley’s neighbours, William Plackett and Annie Hird, together with the bus driver Charles Reville confirmed that Nodder was the man they had seen on 5 January, but, when questioned again, the motor mechanic denied having taken the Retford bus that afternoon.

  Realising that the search for Mona was stalling for lack of new evidence, Barnes organised an appeal for information to be broadcast on national radio and statements were issued to the Press with a request for maximum publicity. Notices were sent to police stations
and posters with the child’s photograph and description were circulated. Three people quickly came forward – a passenger on Charles Reville’s bus together with two labourers, both acquaintances of Nodder – who stated they had seen a man and Nodder himself respectively in the company of a small girl resembling the missing child the previous Tuesday afternoon. Nodder’s drinking buddies noticed that he appeared to have come from the Retford bus stop and was walking with the girl along the road to Hayton village.

  The following evening, just after ten o’clock, Nodder made a request to see a detective sergeant. William Francis, who was on duty, went to the cells and Nodder stated that if Edie Grimes was brought to the police station he would make a statement that would lead to Mona Tinsley being found alive and well. Francis telephoned to Sheffield and a car was sent to Neil Road. At a quarter to one in the morning, Nodder was brought into Chief Constable Barnes’ office, where Mrs Grimes was waiting. Indicating the policemen, Nodder said to his mistress, ‘They know about us,’ and asked if Mona was with her in Sheffield, to which Edie Grimes said no.

  Nodder then made a statement in which he admitted seeing Mona in the street in Newark on Tuesday afternoon. She had asked after her Auntie Edie in Sheffield and asked if he would take her to see her baby cousin Peter, who she had not yet met. As he expected to see Mrs Grimes the following day (they were meeting regularly once a week at the time), Nodder said he reluctantly agreed and took Mona back to ‘Peacehaven’, where she stayed the night. However, his meeting with Edie did not take place, so he took her in the evening on the 6.45 p.m. bus to Worksop with instructions on how to get to Neil Road in Sheffield, together with a letter explaining his actions to Mr and Mrs Grimes. After seeing her off on the 8.15 p.m. bus to Sheffield, he drank at two pubs in Retford before returning home, where he was met in the road by Barnes and his men. His excuse for not taking the child to Sheffield himself was fear of trouble due to the warrant for non-payment of his illegitimate child maintenance. If anything had happened to Mona Tinsley, then it must have been during the time that he was travelling back to Retford or drinking ale in the Sherwood Foresters Arms.

  Worksop, then as now, is nineteen miles by road from Sheffield, and the Grimes’ house in Neil Road was a twopenny tram ride from the Pond Street bus terminus. Anyone taking the trip would have had to walk to the tram stop and also have a long walk at the other end down the length of Neil Road to number nine. It was a black winter’s night, Mona Tinsley was ten years old and had not visited her aunt’s house for several years. ‘Uncle Fred’, it seemed, was happy for her to do this entire trip alone, despite the fact that ten days previously he had driven to Sheffield in his lorry seemingly without fear of arrest. Chief Constable Barnes was unconvinced and by the end of the following day, with no progress in the hunt for Mona, Nodder was charged with abduction and removed to a cell in Lincoln Prison.

  Soon the entire country was caught up in the desperate search for the little girl from the Midlands. Newspapers reported the tireless efforts of search parties and volunteers: the searching of left luggage lockers and unopened parcels, the beating of woods and remote places around Retford by a search party of nearly 900 people, the dragging and draining of a five-mile stretch of the Chesterfield Canal, which ran suspiciously within fifty yards of ‘Peacehaven’ and Nodder’s garden, the opening up of cesspools and gravel pits, the countless statements taken by police forces across Britain from people who felt they had seen or knew where she was.

  It was in this atmosphere of intrigue and fearful expectation that Estelle Roberts entered into the story of Mona Tinsley and Frederick Nodder. Douglas Sladen, a friend of the medium who had been following the story, spoke to Roberts and asked if she would be willing to help in some way in the search. She agreed on the understanding that there would be no publicity of her involvement. Sladen contacted the police and the request was put to Barnes in Newark. Roberts’ standing in the Spiritualist movement was such that the policeman was disinclined to view Sladen as a crank and he put the request to Wilfred and Lilian Tinsley, who agreed and sent a pink silk dress which belonged to Mona to the medium in Hampton. Estelle Roberts was 150 miles away from the centre of the search for the missing child, but as soon as she held the dress in her hand she knew Mona Tinsley was dead. At the same moment, the medium’s dog, which had been sleeping in front of the fire, howled mournfully and began charging around the room.

  We will encounter this kind of experience, the reading or psychometrizing of an object by a sensitive for information, again in later chapters. All these cases are unique, but what makes this one stand out is that as well as psychometry, Roberts later claimed to have actually made contact with the dead child’s spirit and obtained first-hand information about the murder from the victim herself. After handling the dress, Roberts went into a trance and, making contact with ‘Red Cloud’, asked him to bring the spirit of Mona Tinsley to speak with her. The child told her how she had been taken to a small house and strangled, her body had been put into a sack and taken ‘on wheels to the water and thrown in’. She gave a description of the house and its location and Douglas Sladen wrote it down. When this was passed to the Newark police they realised the uncanny similarity to the lonely ‘Peacehaven’ – a small house with a water-filled ditch on one side (the way a child might describe a canal) and a field behind which lead on to a graveyard; there was an inn nearby and more fields and a river to which the medium felt compelled to move towards.

  Barnes took the description seriously enough to request the medium to travel to Newark, and sent a car to pick her up from the railway station. At ‘Peacehaven’, Estelle Roberts walked around the garden and the house, a striking figure in her long black cloak. The house was exactly as she had seen it, seemingly through the eyes of little Mona Tinsley. She said that the child had spent some time inside the house copying writing from a book; she had slept in the first floor back bedroom and been killed there, and, specifically, the murderer had taken the body out through the back door. This corroborated details only the police were aware of – the writing discovered in the living room and the front door fixed shut with screws.

  Outside, Estelle took the police down through Nodder’s garden and across the adjoining countryside – the graveyard and the layout of the fields were all as she had seen it remotely back at her home in Hampton. She told Chief Constable Barnes that the body of Mona Tinsley would be found in a river which lay beyond the fields and was not visible from where they were standing. The nearby River Idle had already been dragged but the continuing heavy rain had turned the stream into a raging torrent and had made the work incredibly difficult and dangerous.

  Despite a police embargo at the time on the medium’s visit, corroboration of Estelle Roberts’ vision did come from local sources. A Newark Spiritualist medium told Wilfred Tinsley that Mona would eventually be found in the River Idle as, in trance, she had tasted mud in her mouth, while another psychic told the police that the child’s body would be recovered from water ‘thirty miles in a north-westerly direction from Newark’.

  On 9 March 1937, two months after Mona Tinsley’s disappearance, Frederick Nodder appeared in front of the Warwick Winter Assizes at the Victoria Courts in Birmingham. The trial lasted a day and the jury took sixteen minutes to find Nodder guilty of abduction. The presiding judge, Mr Justice Swift, told Nodder: ‘It may be that time will reveal the dreadful secret which you carry in your breast. I cannot tell, but I am determined that, as far as I have part or lot in that dreadful tragedy … I will keep you in custody.’ Nodder was given seven years and returned to Lincoln Prison.

  It was to be three months before both the judge’s and Estelle Roberts’ prophesies were to come true. By the beginning of June 1937, the weeks of inclement weather which had plagued the hunt for Mona Tinsley had finally subsided. On the afternoon of Sunday 6 June, Walter Marshall and his family were again enjoying a boat trip on the River Idle in the company of some friends. About a quarter of a mile below Bawtry, Mr Marshall notic
ed an object in the water about five yards in from the river bank on the Nottinghamshire side and steered his punt towards it. As they came alongside, Marshall was horrified to see the trunk of a small body, the legs floating in the water, the whole corpse held in position by the head, which had become buried in the silt. Mona Tinsley had been found at last.

  Marshall sent his son to the nearest police station at Austerfield and officers removed the body to an outhouse at the Ship Inn at Newington, where Wilfred Tinsley was able to make a formal identification. The body was then taken to Retford Mortuary where Dr James Webster, the Director of the West Midland Regional Laboratory, carried out a post-mortem. Due to the extended time the corpse had been in the river there was extensive adipocere formation, which had prevented destructive decomposition or disintegration and Webster was able to state that death had been due to strangulation by a ligature (there was a dark circular mark around the neck) and that Mona had been dead before she was put in the water. A funeral service was held on Thursday 10 June at the Methodist Church where Mona used to attend Sunday school, and she was buried the same day at Newark Cemetery; several hundred people lined the streets and stood in silence as the coffin was laid to rest. Eighteen days later Frederick Nodder was charged with murder.

  Nodder’s second trial opened at the Nottingham Assizes at the Shire Hall on 22 November 1937 in front of Mr Justice Macnaghten (the judge at Nodder’s first trial had died a month before) and lasted two days. Among the many witnesses for the prosecution was Sir Bernard Spilsbury, the troubled genius of British forensic medicine, who confirmed that the child had been killed from behind, strangled by a bootlace or similar item. Nodder clung to his original defence that an unknown person had killed Mona Tinsley after he had seen her off on the Sheffield bus at Worksop, but the retiring jury only took an hour to find him guilty. Sentencing Nodder to death, the judge made a notable reference to Mr Justice Swift’s summing up at the previous trial by saying: ‘Justice has slowly but surely overtaken you … ’. An appeal was quickly dismissed and Nodder, who entered criminal history at the time as a man who, for all practical purposes, was tried twice for the same murder, ate his last Christmas dinner in the condemned cell at Lincoln Prison. He was hanged by Tom Pierrepoint and Stanley Cross at 8 a.m. on 30 December 1937.