Agatha Christie's True Crime Inspirations

by Mike Holgate

  Faced with a lack of concrete evidence, the jury returned an ‘open verdict’, although media sexual innuendo about what may have transpired between the two men and the actress prompted her to sue the proprietors of the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail for articles ‘capable of casting imputations on Miss Oxford’s morality’. There was speculation that Vosper was upset that Muriel Oxford preferred Peter Willes’s company to his, although with no Hercule Poirot on the case, there was a twist to the love triangle evidently not considered during the investigation. Due to the veil of secrecy surrounding homosexual activity, which was then illegal, Vosper may well have taken his own life, not out of longing for a beautiful woman, but in a fit of jealous rage at witnessing the sight of his gay partner, Peter Willes, cavorting with the would-be starlet. In theatre circles Vosper was well known to be homosexual, and his play The Green Bay Tree was popular with those in the know, for it obliquely depicted a gay aristocrat who picks up a working-class boy and models him in his own image. Frank Vosper and Peter Willes’s relationship may well have held the key to the mysterious events of that fateful night on the liner, an aspect of the case that was summarised by the 1973 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Patrick White. In his autobiography Flaws in the Glass (1981), the gay author and playwright remarked that it was commonly believed at the time of the tragedy that Vosper had ‘thrown himself off a liner after finding his male lover flirting with a beauty queen’.

  22

  SIR CRISTOBHER LEE

  Murder Is Easy

  John Lee the Butler is now sent for trial, committed for murder there is no denial,

  Whether he done it, it is hard to say, it will be proved on some future day.

  Broadsheet ballad (1884)

  Distinguished actor Christopher Lee (b. 1922) was awarded a knighthood in 2009 in recognition of a long screen career, which included roles in the James Bond film The Man With the Golden Gun and the acclaimed adaptation of Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. During the 1990s, Lee narrated a number of audiobooks from the works of Agatha Christie – Hound of Death, Witness For the Prosecution and The Call of Wings – and was also heard, but not seen, as the uncredited voice of the mysterious host, Mr U.N. Owen, who records a message accusing his guests and servants of past crimes when they assemble on a remote island in the film Ten Little Indians (1965).

  As an RAF pilot during the Second World War, Christopher Lee spent some time on the English Riviera stationed at an Initial Training Wing in Paignton. The recruits frequented the pubs in the nearby Babbacombe area of Torquay and learnt about ‘The Man They Could Not Hang’, the story of a local villain called John Lee who notoriously survived three attempts to execute him for murder. Predictably, the future star of Hammer horror films soon had to endure being called ‘Lee of Babbacombe’ by his colleagues. He later recalled in his autobiography, ‘It became a constant joke among my mates that I wasn’t to be provoked or trifled with, because I was one of the undead who cheat the gallows’.

  His infamous namesake, John ‘Babbacombe’ Lee, had been arrested on purely circumstantial evidence in November 1884, charged with the gruesome murder of his elderly employer, Emma Keyse, at her home The Glen on Babbacombe Beach. Robbery had not been a committed and there was no sign of a forced entry, so therefore suspicion fell upon the only male among the four servants present in the house – John Lee.

  Tried at Exeter Castle in February 1885, he was sentenced to hang. However, he incredibly escaped execution when the trapdoors of the scaffold mysteriously failed to open on three occasions when the prisoner stepped onto the platform, fuelling the legend of ‘The Man They Could Not Hang’. Mortified officials abandoned the execution and the death penalty was commuted to life imprisonment following the intervention of Queen Victoria, who sent the following telegram to the Home Secretary: ‘I am horrified at the disgraceful scenes at Exeter at Lee’s execution. Surely Lee cannot be executed. It would be too cruel. Imprisonment for life seems the only alternative’. The Home Secretary concurred and told a packed House of Commons: ‘It would shock the feelings of everyone if a man twice had to pay the pangs of imminent death’.

  Although an official report concluded that the scaffold had failed due to a simple mechanical fault, the findings were not made public and many people believed God had acted to save an innocent man. In stark contrast to the prosecution’s portrayal of a depraved lunatic capable of smashing an old lady’s head with an axe, then slashing her throat with a knife before setting fire to the lifeless body, in passing the sentence of death the judge remarked how calm the demeanour of the accused had been throughout the trial. The prisoner leaned forward in the dock and replied firmly, ‘The reason why I am so calm is that I trust in the Lord, and He knows I am innocent’. In the days leading up to the date of execution, Lee read the Bible prodigiously and intimated to the prison chaplain that the real culprit was the lover of his half-sister, Elizabeth Harris, who was cook at The Glen and expecting a child, which was later delivered in the workhouse. Following his reprieve, Lee announced his belief that he had been saved by divine intervention and on the morning of the execution told two prison guards that he had dreamt that ‘Three times the bolt was drawn, and three times the bolt failed to act’.

  John Lee fully expected to be released after serving twenty years imprisonment, which was the usual period served by reprieved murderers. He was not informed that as a bungle on the scaffold had brought about his survival, not the merits of his case, the Home Secretary had recommended that the prisoner should remain in confinement for the remainder of his natural life. When press rumours of Lee’s imminent release did not materialise early in 1905, the prisoner’s mother engaged the services of Newton Abbot solicitor Herbert Rowse Armstrong to gain justice for her son. Acting on her behalf, Armstrong wrote to enlist the support of local MP Harry Eve: ‘I am quite aware that there is no statutory definition or power to diminish a life sentence, but the Home Office regulations do constantly allow of its reduction to 20 years and often less e.g. Mrs. Maybrick, as to almost nullify the effect’.

  The writer of this letter little realised that fifteen years later, he, like the aforementioned Florence Maybrick, would deny charges of poisoning a spouse and be condemned to stand on the scaffold. The difference was that there would be no reprieve for Armstrong, who would go down in the annals of British criminal history as the only solicitor ever to be hanged for murder.

  A year after representing John Lee, Armstrong married and set up a law practice in the Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye. After serving as a major in the Territorial Army during the First World War, he was demobbed in 1919 and his neglected business soon ran into financial difficulties. As his law practice floundered, he purchased arsenic, ostensibly to treat a patch of dandelions on his lawn, but administered it to his wife Katherine. She passed away in 1921 shortly after changing her will, leaving everything to her husband. Natural causes were accepted as the cause of death, but suspicions were aroused when the major attempted to poison a business rival and the exhumation of his wife’s body revealed that deadly levels of arsenic had caused her demise. The Armstrong case is recalled by characters in the Christie novels After the Funeral and Sleeping Murder, whilst in Murder Is Easy (1939) Major Horton, whose wife dies of ‘gastritis’, is clearly based on the real-life murderer dubbed ‘The Dandelion Killer’.

  During Agatha’s childhood, she enjoyed family picnics at the infamous crime scene on Babbacombe Beach. She cannot have failed to learn more about the sensational story when John Lee gained his release in 1907 and published his autobiography serialised in a national newspaper – proclaiming that it was not the butler ‘whodunnit’.

  23

  DENNIS O’NEILL

  The Mousetrap

  The Mousetrap is to the West End Theatre what the ravens are to the Tower of London. Its disappearance could impoverish us.

  The Financial Times

  Agatha Christie’s murder mystery The Mousetrap originated as a thirty-minute r
adio play entitled Three Blind Mice, the nursery rhyme that is the theme song of a murderer who plans to kill three victims. The drama was commissioned by the BBC at the request of Queen Mary after the corporation enquired what she would like to hear for her eightieth birthday in 1947. Her Royal Highness replied that she would like nothing better than to listen to a play by Agatha Christie, and the delighted author set about creating a classic ‘whodunnit’ – that would later develop into a theatrical tour de force and become the world’s longest running play – by choosing a plot based on a real-life case.

  Two years earlier, Agatha had been deeply moved by a horrific case resulting in the brutal death of a young boy, Dennis O’Neill, at Bank Farm, near Minsterley, Shropshire. Dennis and his younger brother Terrence had been maltreated by their foster parents, Reginald and Esther Gough. Terrence O’Neill testified that the boys were usually fed drinks of tea and only three slices of bread and butter each per day. They stole whatever they could from the pantry to supplement their diet and would even suck milk from the teats of the farm cows. Every night both boys were routinely given a severe thrashing with a stick on their hands and legs, sometimes receiving up to 100 blows each before the sadistic farmer made them say their prayers. On 19 March 1945, the jury deliberated for only twenty minutes before finding that the twelveyear-old had been beaten to death after his tormentor tied him to a bench in the kitchen of his farmhouse as punishment for eating a swede. Reginald Gough was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to six years in prison, while Esther Gough, who had been terrified for her own safety at the hands of her husband, was jailed for six months on charges of neglect.

  Agatha wondered how the trauma of such a childhood would affect a survivor in later life and developed the character of a similarly abused child whose ordeal leads him to grow up seeking revenge. When the play was expanded into The Mousetrap and opened at London’s Ambassadors Theatre on 25 November 1952, the author thought that it might run for six months at most; a view shared by the editor of the 1953 Theatre Annual, who gallantly chose not to disclose the identity of the killer:

  Suffice to say the interest is held and everyone appears more or less guilty until the most unlikely character in the cast is caught red-handed when about to commit the third murder. In case the play is still running when this appears in print we forebear to mention the name!

  During the first 700 performances of the phenomenal run, the pivotal role of Detective Sergeant Trotter, the policemen who arrives at a snowbound guesthouse to warn the visitors that there is a killer amongst them, was played by Richard Attenborough. Tragically, his long and distinguished career was not matched by the talented actor who immediately succeeded him in the part: Patric Doonan. He took over the role in August 1954 before leaving three years later to appear in All Kinds of Men, a new American play at the Arts Theatre by Alex Samuels. However, his next venture at the St Martin’s Theatre in February 1958, appearing in Anthony Pelissiere’s drama Roseland, proved disastrous and closed after only three nights as the implausible plot brought howls of derision from the audience. Although the reviewer from The Times was full of praise for his performance, writing: ‘Patric Doonan is excellent as the business-like ex-convict’, a month later the body of the thirty-one-year-old was found in a gas-filled room at his home in Chelsea. Letters found at the scene indicated that he intended to take his own life and at the subsequent inquest, the coroner found that suicide was the cause of death. Despite becoming recently engaged to actress Ann Firbank, the dead man’s brother, actor Tony Doonan, told the coroner that Patric had become rather depressed as ‘his show had collapsed on him’. The actor’s name lives on in a song by rock singer Morrissey, ‘Now My Heart is Full’.

  In March 1959, the cast from the Ambassadors Theatre found themselves involved at the scene of a real investigation. Using sets built by the prisoners, they agreed to put on a special Sunday performance of The Mousetrap for 300 inmates at Wormwood Scrubs, but as the play was reaching its thrilling climax in the final act, the alarm was sounded when warders suddenly discovered that two members of the captive audience were missing. A hue and cry ensued when it was realised that David Gooding and John Meyers, both serving three-year sentences for theft, had slipped away from the show unnoticed. The convicts made good their escape and were on the run for several weeks before they were recaptured.

  24

  KLAUS FUCHS AND BRUNO PONTECORVO

  Destination Unknown

  Agatha Christie writes animated algebra.

  Francis Wyndham (The Sunday Times, 1966)

  Agatha Christie’s novel Destination Unknown (1954) concerns the mysterious disappearance of several important scientists. The story is set against the background of the Cold War between the leading international powers, and was directly inspired by the true-life defection of top physicists Klaus Fuchs and Bruno Pontecorvo, who betrayed the West by passing atomic secrets to Communist Russia.

  German Klaus Fuchs (1911-1988) despised the Hitler regime and moved to Britain to complete his education in the 1930s. Having a brilliant mind for physics and maths, he obtained his PhD in Bristol and his ScD in Edinburgh. However, the fact that he was a German and a member of the Communist Party led to his detention at the outset of the Second World War and he was sent to an internment camp in Canada. Although he was subsequently released when agents accepted that his anti-Nazi sentiments were genuine, and then took up the offer of British citizenship and secured an important job working on scientific projects for the war effort, Fuchs still felt aggrieved at the treatment he had received. When approached by a Russian agent, he agreed to pass on any scientific secrets he learned to the Soviet Union. He believed that because the Russians were Allies fighting the Nazis, they had the moral right to know what America and Great Britain were doing to develop the atomic bomb.

  In 1944, Fuchs joined the staff working on atomic energy at Columbia University in New York City. Once a week, he walked to a street corner in downtown Manhattan and handed over reams of handwritten notes detailing the ongoing research to Russian-born immigrant Harry Gold. Transferred to Los Alamos, New Mexico, Fuchs worked on the actual construction of the bomb and the world learned of the lethal discovery when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were totally destroyed in 1945. When news of the first blast reached Los Alamos, the team engaged on the project decided to celebrate their success that so dramatically brought about the end of the war with Japan. Fuchs volunteered to drive into Santa Fe and buy some liquor and met Harry Gold in a bar, where he handed over complete instructions on how to build the bomb and detonate it. The traitor returned to England and joined the staff of the atomic research centre at Harwell in 1946 – the same year that Winston Churchill identified the existence of the ‘Iron Curtain’. Fuchs realised that his actions may have been naïve and dropped all contact with the Soviets. However, his past crimes caught up with him in January 1950 when an associate of Harry Gold bragged about the recruitment of a top British scientist and Fuchs soon became the prime suspect. During interrogation the physicist admitted his involvement and his statements led to the arrest of his handler Gold, who in turn revealed the full extent of the espionage and the role of laboratory worker David Greengrass. He had passed on information to his relatives, Soviet couriers Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the American husband and wife team who were subsequently executed for their part in the spy ring.

  Tried and sentenced to fourteen years imprisonment, Fuchs was released after serving nine years in Wormwood Scrubs and immediately travelled to East Germany, where the Soviets placed him in charge of nuclear research at Dresden – a reward for presenting them with the world’s most powerful weapon free of charge.

  Eight months after the disappearance of Klaus Fuchs, another brilliant scientist, Bruno Pontecorvo (1913-1993), failed to return to England after going on holiday with his family. Born in Pisa, the brother of film director Gillo Pontecorvo and geneticist Guido Pontecorvo, the physicist had left Italy in the 1930s to avoid the Fascist regime’s discrimination
against his Jewish faith. He lived in Paris until the Nazis entered the city in the Second World War, then worked in America until he was invited to contribute to the British atomic bomb project at Harwell in 1947. However, in August 1951, he abruptly abandoned his holiday in Rome and, accompanied by his wife and three children, boarded a plane for Stockholm without informing friends or relatives. Fears for his motives grew when a passenger on the flight revealed that five-year-old Antonio Pontecorvo had told him that the family were going to Russia. Unbeknown to the security services, Soviet agents had helped the Pontecorvos to enter the USSR from Finland. Confirmation of this outcome was not forthcoming until 1955, when Pontecorvo held a news conference in Moscow declaring that he had been granted refuge in the Soviet Union where he was involved in nuclear research for peaceful purposes and had left the West because, in his view, it was intent (like the megalomaniac in Agatha Christie’s novel) on ‘new war using atomic and nuclear weapons as means for achieving world domination’.

  In Christie’s political thriller Passenger to Frankfurt (1970) two characters discuss the most sensational spy scandal of the post-war period when Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean escaped arrest for their treachery by seeking sanctuary in the Soviet Union. With a theatrical flourish, the partners in crime fled the country on a ferry from Southampton to France en route to Moscow in May 1951, with Maclean dressed in drag and posing as Burgess’s wife. Guy Burgess, a native of Devonport who had undergone service training at the Britannia Royal Naval College on the River Dart near Greenway, was fully conversant with the novels of Agatha Christie and playfully fooled the security services by using The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and The Mysterious Affair at Styles to complete an elaborate disguise by using the alias ‘Roger Styles’.