The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

by Wilkes, Roger

  At the mortuary, the trunk was unpacked by the police surgeon. Not all at once, but over the next couple of days, the following facts were established apropos of the contents:

  Excepting the wounds of decapitation and dismemberment, the torso appeared to be uninjured; a small pimple below the left breast was the sole distinguishing mark.

  As well as the brown paper and the venetian-blind cord (19 feet of it; disappointingly unpeculiar, available from thousands of hardware stores at a halfpenny a yard), there were some hanks of cotton wool (used to soak up the blood?) and a once-white face-flannel with a red border. Written in blue pencil on one of the sheets of wrapping paper were letters that looked like f-o-r-d; there seemed to be a preceding letter—d, perhaps, or a hasty l—but this was only just visible, on the right-hand edge of a patch of congealed blood. Was “ford” the end of a surname? Or of a place name?—Dartford, Guildford, Stafford, for instance. Or was “ford” a misreading? Were the letters actually h-o-v-e?—and, if so, was there a connection with the so-named western continuation of Brighton? (None of those questions would be answered. Towards the end of the week, the sheet of paper would be sent to the government laboratories in Chancery Lane, London, but none of the new-fangled tests, using chemicals and ultra-violet rays, would bring to light the letter or letters that lay beneath the blood; and later, any number of people practising as graphologists would come up with any number of different readings of the visible letters.)

  On Monday morning, Inspector Pelling enlisted the help of the press. “What I should like,” he said, “is that members of the public, particularly those residing in the Southern Counties, including London, should contact the Chief Constable of Brighton if a female relative or friend disappeared without explanation on or prior to the 6th of this month.” (The response to the appeal was over-gratifying: by the beginning of September, twelve thousand letters, cards and telegrams—not to mention many telephone calls—had been received; more flowed in during the autumn and winter, but no one at the police station bothered to count these.)

  While Arthur Pelling was talking to reporters—guardedly concerning the crime itself—some of the policemen assigned to the investigation were scanning the Brighton and Hove missing-persons files, others were trying to establish whether those files required deletions or additions, others were at the railway station, working in the left-luggage office or quizzing staff and travellers in the hope of finding people who had been there between six and seven on Derby Day and noticed a man who, perhaps with assistance, was carrying, pushing, pulling or in some less conventional way transporting a trunk.

  And at other stations, policemen of other forces were sniffing unclaimed baggage or, more fastidious, standing by or back while left-luggage attendants sniffed on their behalf. One of these stations was, of course, King’s Cross, a primary metropolitan terminus of the LNER. There it was, on Monday afternoon, that William Cope, a porter deputizing for an attendant who was on holiday, sniffed and then unhesitatingly opened a cheap brown suitcase. Crammed inside the case were four objects wrapped in brown paper and copies of national newspapers, those wrappings soaked from within by blood and from without by olive oil. Cope looked no further before hailing a constable, who, having taken a fleeting glance at the discovery, blew his whistle to summon other, more senior officers, one of whom felt obliged to pay greater heed to the parcels. Finding that two contained a human leg apiece and that the other two each contained a human foot, he assumed that the feet had been cut from the legs, and that this had been done because, whereas the four parcels fitted snugly inside the case, two larger ones, roughly L-shaped, could not have been accommodated.

  The first of those assumptions was confirmed by Sir Bernard Spilsbury, the honorary Home Office pathologist, who, once the legs and feet, still in the case, had been removed to the St Pancras mortuary, went there to examine them. As well as noting that the legs and feet were, so to say, a matching set, he concluded that they had been chopped from the body of a woman—a natural blonde, he believed, basing that opinion on a microscopic examination of the faint down on the legs. The state of the feet—free of corns or other blemishes, the nails expertly trimmed—led Sir Bernard to believe that the woman had worn decent shoes (size 4½ , he reckoned) and that she had paid regular visits to a chiropodist, the final visit being shortly before her death.

  By the time the police received the pathologist’s report, officers at King’s Cross had learned that the suitcase had been deposited round about half-past one on the afternoon of 7 June, the day after the trunk was left at Brighton station; they had interviewed Cyril Escott, the attendant who had issued the ticket, but had been unable to jog from him the slightest recollection of the person to whom he had issued it. However, the newspapers that had been used as wrappings—one dated Thursday 31 May, the other Saturday 2 June—seemed to provide a small and very general clue: after looking at the blood-and-oil-sodden sheets, a newspaper printer said that the “make-up”, and “compositor’s dots” on a front page, showed that the papers were copies of editions distributed within about fifty miles of Fleet Street.

  Sir Bernard Spilsbury travelled to Brighton to examine the torso. He was occupied for three hours (during which time a crowd gathered outside the mortuary—a few locals, several reporters, and many holidaymakers, including “jazz girls”, some conspicuous in beach-pyjamas, some of these and others rendering the hit-song, “It’s the cutest little thing, got the cutest little swing—hitchy-koo, hitchy-koo, hitchy-koo”, over and over again) and then informed Inspector Pelling that:

  Internal examination of the torso had not revealed the cause of death;

  the legs and feet found at King’s Cross belonged to the torso;

  the victim had been well-nourished (which, put with the chiropody, suggested to Spilsbury “a middle-class background”); she had been not younger than twenty-one and not older than twenty-eight, had stood about five feet two inches, and had weighed roughly eight and a half stone; she was pregnant at the time of her death.

  On the Monday afternoon, Brighton’s seaward newsboys, standing at corners on the promenade or crunching through the pebbles on the front, had a cry in common:

  “Horrible murder in Brighton! Dead body in trunk!”

  The cry gave a man known as Toni Mancini the worst shock of his twenty-six years of life. Since the start of the holiday season, he had been employed as a waiter and washer-up at the Skylark Café, which took up one of the man-made caves beneath the promenade, entered from the beach. On this particular day, his attention had been almost wholly directed at the kitchen-sink. Therefore, he had heard nothing of the discovery at the railway station.

  “Toni Mancini” was not his real name but just the current favourite among an accumulation of aliases that included Jack Notyre, Luigi Pirelli and Antoni Luigi. He had committed a few petty crimes, but the Italianate aliases, rather than being inventions aimed at misleading the police, were symptoms of his Valentinoesque dream-world; so was the way he smarmed his dark hair diagonally back from a central parting, and so was his attitude towards a string-thin moustache, which was there one week, gone the next. Actually, he was a native of the South London borough of Deptford, where he had been born on 8 January 1908 to an eminently respectable couple—the father a shipping clerk—with a determinedly unforeign surname; the parents had borrowed from the nobility for his Christian name and made the mother’s middle name his, thus arriving at Cecil Lois England.

  Still, to save confusion, we may as well refer to him as Toni Mancini. He was already calling himself that when, in 1932 or thereabouts, in London, he met up with and soon moved in with a woman sixteen years older than himself. Though her first name was Violet, and despite the fact that she was still married to a man named Saunders, she insisted on being called Violette Kaye, which was the name she had used during an illfated career as a dancer in chorus-lines—first, “Miss Watson’s Rosebuds”; finally, “The Parisian Pinkies”—at tatty provincial music-halls. Subsequent to t
erpischory, she had turned to prostitution, and she was well versed in that trade when Mancini joined forces with her, soon to add business to pleasure by appointing himself her pimp. The partners moved from London to Brighton in the spring of 1933. Occasionally, slumps in the never great demand for the forty-one-year-old Violette’s services forced Mancini to work; but more often than not he spent afternoons and evenings in dance-halls, usually either Sherry’s or Aladdin’s Cave, for he was as much a master of the tango and the fox-trot as Violette had ever been mistress of tap and clog-dancing routines. They shared a succession of small flats, the last being in the basement of 44 Park Crescent, almost opposite the Race Hill Inn on the main Lewes Road.

  That was their residence on Wednesday 10 May 1934, when (according to the account given by Mancini a long time afterwards) he finished a stint at the Skylark Café, went home for tea, had a flaming row with Violette, who was the worse for drink or drugs, and, in the heat of the moment, threw a coal-hammer at her—with such unintended accuracy as to kill her. Flummoxed, he left the body lying on the floor, close to the fireplace. When he eventually thought that he must put it out of sight, rigor mortis was complete, which meant that he had the devil’s own job fitting it, standing in an upright pose, into a wardrobe (within which, as the rigor wore off, it dropped in fits and starts, making rather alarming noises while Mancini was trying to sleep). To forestall the arrival of Violette’s sister, who was looking forward to spending a week in Brighton, sleeping on the Put-U-Up, in the basement flat, he sent her a telegram:

  GOING ABROAD GOOD JOB SAIL SUNDAY WILL WRITE VI

  A week or so later, he decided for some reason to move from Park Crescent to the diminutive basement flat at 52 Kemp Street, the southern bit of a dingy thoroughfare that, after being crossed by a main road, became Station Street—so named because its western aspect was the blind side-wall of Brighton’s railway terminus.

  In preparation for the move, he purchased a black fibre trunk from a dealer in secondhand goods, not haggling at the asking-price of ten shillings. Having stowed his and most of Violette’s belongings in cardboard boxes and suitcases, he transferred the corpse from the wardrobe to the trunk, packed the crevices with female garments that remained, scattered a bag of moth-balls over the contorted body, closed and locked the trunk, and threw away the key. As, on his own, he could hardly shove the trunk, let alone lift it, he borrowed a wheelbarrow, then persuaded two acquaintances, a blind piano-accordionist named Johnnie Beaumont and a kitchen porter named Tom Capelem, to help him lug the trunk to the barrow and trundle the barrow to Kemp Street. When Capelem enquired, “What yer got in ’ere—a body?”, Mancini replied, with every appearance of nonchalance, “Silver and crockery do weigh surprising heavy, don’t they?”

  He involved himself in additional expense in the basement flat, for he decided that as he intended to use the trunk as a makeshift seat when he had more than one tea-time guest, he needed to cover it with something: he bought a square of pretty, primrose-patterned American cloth from Woolworth’s. Though, as the weeks went by, the trunk became increasingly malodorous and began to leak body fluids, Mancini continued to have visitors. He was fortunate in one respect: the landlady had no sense of smell—and when she commented on the fluids seeping into the floorboards, he told her that they were a unique blend of French polishes, so were enhancing the boards rather than disfiguring them, a reply that pleased her so much that she asked for a quote for spreading the stuff wall-to-wall. On one occasion, a lady guest broke off from munching a muffin to say, “Do excuse my curiosity, but I’m wondering if by any chance you breed rabbits or … um … skunks.” “That funny smell, you mean?” Mancini asked. “I must apologize for it. And when I have a minute to spare, I’ll remove the cause—which (I hesitate to admit this) is an old pair of football boots, reminders of my lost youth: QPR were keen to sign me on, you know. Won’t you partake of the raspberry junket? I made it with my own fair hands, and it would be such a shame to let it go off.”

  When, on the afternoon of Monday, 17 June, Mancini was allowed a five-minute break from his chores in the kitchen of the Skylark Café, he sauntered between the white-painted cast-iron tables and out on to the beach. There he heard the newsboys’ cry. Assuming, reasonably enough, that he was the only person in or anywhere near Brighton who had lately put a body in a trunk, he furthermore assumed that Kemp Street was at that moment a hive of police activity; and, once he was able to hear his thoughts above the beating of his heart, he registered surprise, astonishment even, that the only uniformed person within arresting distance of him was a deck-chair attendant. Extending his five-minute break, he staggered across the pebbles to where the occupant of a deck-chair was reading a copy of a special edition of the Brighton Argus. Forcing himself to look over the man’s shoulder, he read the headlines above, and stared at the picture illustrating, the report of the trunk-crime. Of a trunk-crime that was quite independent of his own. At last believing the unbelievable, he strode back to the café. And he whistled a happy tune.

  You will recall that when Toni Mancini first heard of what came to be called “Brighton Trunk-Crime No. 1”—differentiating it from the death and subsequent bundling of Violette Kaye, which was billed as “Brighton Trunk-Crime No. 2”—Sir Bernard Spilsbury was toiling over the torso in the mortuary. Also, policemen were traipsing the town, some checking on whether women reported missing were still astray, others looking in empty premises and even burrowing in rubbish dumps on the offchance of happening on the head and arms to augment the portions found fifty-one miles apart; and, at police headquarters, a trio of detectives was considering the first suggestions from the public regarding the identity of the victim (who, by the way, had already been dubbed “The Girl with the Pretty Feet” by a London crime-reporter—the same man, perhaps, who would call Violette Kaye “The Woman with Dancer’s Legs” and her terminal souteneur “The Dancing Waiter”). And, some time during the same period, Captain Hutchinson, the chief constable, had a word with Inspector Pelling and then telephoned the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police to request that Scotland Yard detectives be sent to Brighton to take control of the investigation; by making the request promptly, Captain Hutchinson ensured that the cost of the secondment would not have to be met by local rate-payers.

  The “murder squad” detective chosen for the assignment was Chief Inspector Robert Donaldson, who was, in comparison with most other policemen, quite short. His relative diminutiveness and neat apparel might have led people to believe that he was a “desktop detective”; also that he lacked endurance. Both notions would have been far from the truth. Not only had he taken part in a number of murder investigations, but on several occasions he had “gone in mob-handed” to arrest violent criminals, some carrying firearms. Any doubts about his stamina would be dispelled by his sojourn in Brighton, during which he worked eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, for months on end.

  The detective-sergeant who accompanied Donaldson to Brighton was Edward Sorrell, who at twenty-six had only recently joined Scotland Yard. Donaldson had not worked with him before, but chose him as his assistant after talking to him and getting “an impression (proved accurate) of intelligence and alertness”. (That and subsequent otherwise unattributed quotations are from letters that Robert Donaldson wrote to me from his home in New Zealand in the early 1970s.)

  Donaldson knew that it was vital to get the support of Arthur Pelling, who might feel put out at having had control of the investigation taken away from him. This he succeeded in doing; indeed, the two men became friends. Donaldson considered Pelling “a very competent detective. A Sussex man whose father had been in the force, he was serious-minded and conscientious. He showed no resentment that Scotland Yard were summoned to the inquiry, and it was largely through his efforts that the Brighton Constabulary, as a whole, were most cooperative.”

  Captain Hutchinson arranged for Donaldson to have a team of a dozen detectives and uniformed officers, and promised that additional manpower would
be provided if and when it was required. As no large offices were available to be turned into “trunk-crime headquarters” at the police station, Captain Hutchinson asked the town clerk if there was space to spare in any council-owned premises, ideally in the centre of Brighton. Thus it was that the investigators took over three apartments adjoining the music salon in the Royal Pavilion, and there, amidst the chinoiserie bequeathed by George IV, and sometimes to the muffled accompaniment of string quartets and of choirs eager with hosannas, got on with the task of trying to identify the Girl with the Pretty Feet, of trying to establish who had gone to such lengths to make that task difficult.

  The police did all the things one would suppose they would have done; and many that were out of the ordinary. The investigation, uniquely thorough, comprised a myriad of activities, some of long duration, others of a day or so or a matter of hours. For instance:

  As a result of what the press called “the great round-up”, 732 missing women were traced. A questionnaire was sent to every hospital and nursing home in the country. Hundreds of general practitioners and midwives were interviewed. At Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, London, 5,000 women, some from abroad, had received pre-natal advice or treatment between the beginning of February and the end of May; all but fifteen were accounted for.

  Statements were made by several residents of Worthing, just along the coast, to the effect that a man who had until recently owned a sea-going vessel had offered them the opportunity of seeing a rather unusual double-bill: first, the murder of a woman, then her dismemberment. The would-be exponent of grand-guignol was tracked down, interviewed, and dismissed as being “all mouth and no achievement”. Much the same description was applied to the several men and two women who insisted, despite clear evidence to the contrary, that they were the “trunk criminals”. Donaldson’s men took notes but little notice of what clairvoyants, water-diviners, teacup-readers, numerologists, vivid dreamers, and people who had been given ouija-boards for Christmas had to say. (One of the clairvoyants, known to his many fans as Grand Wizard of the Past and Future, told a Brighton detective—and, after being shown out of the Royal Pavilion, a reporter for the Sunday Dispatch—that “the trunk criminal is probably called George; he has busy hair, works in a wholesale seed-store, and originally used the brown paper found in the trunk for wrapping up tyres”.)