A signalman found a piece of cord by the track near Broad Street station. An eminent Home Office pathologist thought it may well have been used to strangle the child. A signalman in a signal box which the train had passed came forward to say that he had caught a glimpse of a dark-haired man apparently standing over a smaller figure with curly hair as a Chalk Farm to Broad Street train passed, just after two o’ clock. These revelations provided more questions that they answered. Additional and more concrete evidence was needed. The police did not yet have enough information to make a convincing case against Starchfield.
In appearance Starchfield was dark-haired, almost Mediterranean, and his face was decorated with one of those slightly absurd droopy walrus moustaches which large numbers of men sported at the time. The police then learned that on the day in question a woman shopping in the Kentish Town Road saw a man answering Starchfield’s description leading a little boy with a shock of curly hair.
This sounded like Willie and the woman had particularly noticed the couple on account of the child’s hair and also the fact that he was busily engaged in devouring some kind of cake. It was a coconut cake of a sort that matched some of the contents of the luckless Willy’s stomach. At the inquest she had no hesitation in picking Starchfield senior out as the man leading the child with the cake. Also at the inquest was a man who unhesitatingly pointed Starchfield out as the man he had seen with a small curly-haired boy at Camden Town station on the day which proved so fatal to little Willie.
Starchfield was charged with murder and tried at the Old Bailey but found not guilty, whereupon he was released and the newspapers then seamlessly and unblushingly converted him into the noble recipient of all that was best about the English judicial system. He died two years later of complications arising from his bullet wound.
Did Starchfield kill Willie? If he did, on a train and at the time when we can be fairly sure that the child died, how was it that no one else found the body, given that the train did at least one further return journey? He had a reputation for occasional bouts of ill-tempered violence but was he capable of cold-bloodedly killing his own child and why should he have done any such thing in the first place?
If Starchfield had got off the train after committing the murder, he must have known that it was only a matter of time before the body was discovered. Why had he not then made some attempt to hide the murder – by throwing the body out of the train, for example? How come the possible murder weapon was found near Broad Street? Had Starchfield stayed on the train to the Broad Street terminus after committing the murder and thrown it out there? And what about the alibi provided by the man who shared Starchfield’s squalid sleeping quarters? Why should he lie for someone likely to face a murder charge?
Starchfield advanced his own theory that Willie had been killed for revenge purposes by friends of the man who had shot him before he made the citizen’s arrest in Tottenham Court Road. Although this sounds highly fanciful the defence did produce three witnesses, two of whom attested that an hour or so before the earliest time the murder could have been committed they had seen Willie being led along the street by a woman. The third witness noted him with the woman on a bus from which they both alighted at Chalk Farm station. The tragic death of this little tousle-headed wean has never been fully explained. Nor will it ever be.
Oh What a Tangled Web We Weave…
On Wednesday 3 September 1924 Patrick Mahon was hanged at Wandsworth Prison in south-west London. He was aged only thirty-four but he had crammed an enormous amount of skulduggery and general villainy into those years. As will be explained, Mahon and his activities only tangentially concern railways, but the appalling nature of the crime for which he paid the ultimate price has never failed to attract interest.
He was an experienced embezzler and plausible con man with the looks and easy personal charm that are the stock-in-trade of his kind. Although he embezzled relatively large amounts of money, he also managed to get himself caught regularly and had to serve custodial sentences as a consequence. This suggests that he was not quite as clever as his enormous ego led him to believe.
He was a serious if not altogether successful gambler and he had a philandering habit to which he was utterly devoted, possibly to the point of obsession. He met, flattered, charmed and seduced a continuous succession of women, all of whom he abandoned totally without any scruples once they had begun to bore him and had therefore served their purpose. In spite of systematically putting it about, as it were, he was married with a wife and a home which he seemed to need in order to provide at least some kind of base or stability in his life.
His wife loyally stood by him. It appears that she had had quickly realised what kind of man she had married but seemingly accepted him for what he was and equally accepted his frequent absences ‘on business’, usually of a shady character. Sometimes ‘on business’ was a euphemism for a dirty weekend with his latest fancy woman, or for visiting the race meetings that he had repeatedly assured his wife he never attended. He was also a robber and burglar who had a violent streak. He had battered a maid with a hammer when she interrupted him while he was committing a burglary, serving time for this offence.
In 1923 Mahon established a little love nest in a bungalow on the Sussex coast between Pevensey and Eastbourne to which he brought the most recent of his conquests, a woman slightly older than himself called Emily Kaye. He was by no means averse to getting his hands on any money that his lady friends had, and he quickly found out that Emily was particularly promising in that respect because she had £400 in her bank account. She proved to be especially bad in other respects. She was a determined and forceful woman, very much in love with Mahon and intent on having him for her own. Unlike most of Mahon’s women, she persisted even when it was evident that his ardour was diminishing. She simply would not take no for an answer.
She went through his things one day while he had popped out and found incriminating evidence about his illegal financial activities and at least one of his convictions. Armed with this, she made it clear that she would not be averse to a little blackmail. The police would be informed unless he agreed that they should leave the country together and live abroad. Mahon was horrified. Like most of his kind, he could hand them out but he could not take hard knocks himself. He made empty promises and played for time but nothing dented Emily’s resolution. Very inconveniently, from Mahon’s point of view, she also declared that she was pregnant.
It is not surprising that the couple’s relationship became increasingly acrimonious. Emily found out about his embryonic relationship with a woman named Ethel and an argument developed over this and various other things. Mahon told the police that this became violent after Emily had apparently thrown an axe at him and then leapt at him, attempting to lacerate him with her fingernails. He said that he then lost his temper, hitting her and pushing her over. She fell heavily, banging her head on a coal scuttle, so he claimed, and at first he thought that she had knocked herself out. Shortly afterwards to his horror he realised that she was dead, so he said. It was, Mahon glibly assured the officers, an accident. The date almost certainly was 14 April.
Mahon had not allowed the problems he was embroiled in with Emily to get too much in the way of his continuing shenanigans with other women. On several occasions he had left Emily at the bungalow and gone up to London ‘on business’. On one such occasion, on 10 April, he had met a young lady by the name of Ethel Duncan for the first time. By dint of using every drop of charm he possessed he managed to get her to agree to a date. He would call her up soon, he said, when he had attended to various bits of business. He did not enlarge on what these involved. This is hardly surprising because one of these ‘bits of business’ involved a visit to a hardware shop in London SW1 where he purchased a large butcher’s knife and a meat saw, probably on 12 April.
On 15 April Mahon telegraphed Ethel asking her to meet him at Charing Cross the next day. The story becomes almost surreal at this point. Mahon turned up with his wr
ist bandaged, telling her that he had received this injury when he had fallen off a bus. He had of course sustained it during his scrap with Emily. Ethel and Mahon had a candlelit dinner during which he wooed her for all he was worth, and the successful outcome of all his efforts was a promise that she would spend a weekend away with him.
Ethel duly arrived at Eastbourne on 18 April and was elated and flattered to receive such a rapturous welcome from Mahon who, after all, was really little more than a stranger. The couple spent the following three days and nights largely engaged in energetic and no doubt passionate bouts of love-making. Ethel’s participation in this activity might have been rather less that fervid had she known that a few feet away in a trunk in a room which Mahon kept locked lay the dismembered remains of her paramour’s previous sexual partner. The butcher’s knife and meat saw had already played their appointed role in this unfolding drama.
On Monday 21 April Ethel and Mahon travelled up to London, he ostensibly being engaged ‘on business’. The next day he returned to the bungalow and set about disposing of Emily’s physical remains. He then gratefully made his way home. His wife welcomed him back from his ‘business trip’ knowing full well that it had almost certainly involved some heavy-duty philandering. This time, however, she found that he was behaving very strangely.
Normally he acted with total sang-froid and happily lied through his teeth if quizzed about his activities. Jessie, his wife, had largely learned not to probe too deeply but she quickly realised that this time there was something different about her husband. He seemed jittery and snappy. Such behaviour was of course not surprising given that he had just branched out to include murder in his bulging portfolio of multifarious criminal activities.
This is where the railway connection comes in. Normally sanguine about her husband’s quirks and peccadilloes, Jessie now felt that there was something amiss and she took the opportunity while he was out to go through his things. This was not the kind of thing she would normally do and was a measure of the unease she felt. She found a cloakroom ticket issued at Waterloo station. She mentioned her suspicions to a friend who happened to be a retired police officer and he surrendered the ticket at the cloakroom receiving in exchange a canvas bag. This was opened to reveal a knife and bloodstained female clothing. Our ex-police friend then acted with great canniness. He deposited the bag back into storage and informed the police, who agreed to watch and wait for Mahon to turn up to retrieve it. Understandably, they thought that he might be able to help them to elucidate a few points about which they were curious.
The surveillance was slow in bringing results but it was eureka at half past six on the evening of 2 May. Mahon turned up to reclaim the bag, was instantly arrested and then blurted out the first thing which came into his head. This was that he could account for any bloodstains which had been found in the bag – he had used it for carrying dog’s meat. He was less fulsome when he was informed that tests showed that the traces of blood in the bag were human. Also which dog was this that he was so generously feeding? He did not have a dog. He did not even like them. Swiftly recovering his composure, however, he told his interrogators that he would now come clean. He had butchered her body, he said, because no one would believe his story about how Emily had died and he was afraid that he himself might even have come under suspicion of having murdered her! A response to this might be ‘perish the thought’.
Ongoing investigations could not find any evidence in the doorframe that an axe had been forcefully thrown at him only to miss him and go on to hit the woodwork. Reassembling Emily’s bodily parts was a painstaking task for the pathologists and left uncompleted because her head was never found, but on the evidence available it was thought that Mahon had either strangled her or battered her with the axe. The jury had little difficulty in deciding that he was guilty of the murder.
The main entrance to Waterloo station. The Victory Arch was opened in 1922 as a War Memorial for employees of the London & South Western Railway who died in the First World War.
Mahon was a seasoned railway traveller, using trains to take him both to genuine business meetings – including those with crooked dealings in mind – and to his various amorous trysts. The canvas bag recovered from the Waterloo cloakroom he had taken with him on a train from Eastbourne to London with various items of Emily’s anatomy wrapped up in brown paper. He had intended to throw these from the carriage windows at various points along the line but he found to his chagrin that the train was too crowded to allow him to do this. He had to dispose of them randomly elsewhere, and it was the unpredictable placing of these gory relics that gave the pathologists so many headaches in trying to reconstruct the body of the unfortunate Emily Kaye.
Mahon showed many of the classic symptoms of psychopathy. He was amoral and ruthless, he made a career out of dishonesty and duplicity, he appeared to lack any sense of remorse and was seemingly totally indifferent to the judicial process and the sense of what is socially right and wrong, which the criminal law and the penal system, no matter how imperfectly, attempts to implement.
The Girl who Never got to the Station
In August 1881, the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway Co. opened a line from Eridge to Polegate, giving access from the Tunbridge Wells area to the Sussex coast at Eastbourne. This route became known affectionately as the ‘Cuckoo Line’, which gives some sense of the delightful rural scenery through which it passed.
In 1926 Emma Alice Smith, aged sixteen, set off on her bicycle from the village of Waldron to her local railway station nearby. This station had a number of name changes over the years but it was generally known as ‘Waldron and Horam’. Unfortunately Emma never got there. Her death remains an unsolved murder.
In 2008 a descendent of Emma’s family told the police that back in 1953 a dying man had confessed to Emma’s sister that he was responsible for her murder. He claimed to have killed her and then thrown her weighted body into a pond and disposed of the bicycle. When this revelation was made the family decided that it was best to keep quiet, and so it was more than fifty years later that the embargo on the information was lifted. It is unlikely that the details of the murder will ever come to light. Perhaps this is no bad thing.
The latest news in February 2009 is that the police are going to reopen the case.
The Left Luggage Horror
The railways no longer handle parcels and small consignments but they do, somewhat unwillingly, place lockers for left luggage in a number of major stations and there are still a few stations which operate a left luggage office. These are convenient for those wanting to leave a few items of hand luggage while they perhaps go and explore the town. Back in 1927 a new shade of meaning was added to the word ‘deposit’. Someone ‘deposited’ a large black trunk at the left luggage office at London’s Charing Cross station of the Southern Railway. ‘Deposited’ in the trunk was the dismembered body of a woman.
There was nothing particularly unusual about such large items as trunks being left in the temporary care of the railway and it is unlikely that the station worker who accepted payment for it and found it a shelf would have turned a hair. It would have been all in a day’s work. Anyway, the reasons why someone should wish such a trunk to be stored were the depositor’s business, and likewise the nature of its contents. The contents ceased to be a private matter, however, when the trunk started to exude an appalling stench.
Waldron & Horeham Road station. A Standard 2-6-4T heads a local train at the station which had changed little since the days of the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway.
It was opened and it was evident that not only were there human remains inside but they were the remains of someone who had died some while previously. The body parts were in brown paper parcels, but a leading pathologist was able to state that death had been due to asphyxia as the result of strangling and that the woman had been dead for at least a week. The initials ‘I.F.A’ were on the lid of the trunk and a label bore the name ‘F. Austin, St Leonards’. The
re was some blood-stained clothing. One item bore the name ‘P. Holt’. Others had what appeared to be laundry marks, including ‘447’ and what looked something like ‘588’.
There was a rush to get around to the home of F. Austin at St Leonards but the police were quickly satisfied that he had nothing to do with the trunk. It was extremely unfortunate that the paperwork relating to the depositing of the trunk was missing. The police thought that this was carelessness and that there were no sinister connotations. Doubtless the railway worker involved got a rollicking.
Enquiries were made about the shops that sold such trunks, either new or second-hand, and photographs of the trunk, its contents and an appeal for help were published in the press. The line of enquiry concerning the shops proved to be of little help, but someone called Holt living in Chelsea got in touch with the police as a result of seeing the appeal in the paper. One of the blood-stained items in the trunk, the police were told, belonged to a Miss P. Holt. The body in the trunk, however, was not a deceased member of the Holt family but that of a female cook who had worked for them briefly. The Holts did not know what had happened to the woman concerned, whose name was Roles, but they believed that she had been married.
In fact the woman in the trunk did indeed call herself Roles but she had lived with, rather than been married to, the Mr Roles who the police traced quickly. His story was that they had cohabited for some years but the relationship had cooled, and after a fair amount of bickering she had left. On the face of it this story gave Mr Roles a motive for murder, but after further enquiries the police were convinced that he was not the killer and so they concentrated on trying to find out more about the dead woman, her movements and her associates.
Blood on the Tracks: A History of Railway Crime in Britain Page 14