A massive murder hunt was launched bringing in the services of Scotland Yard. Major lines of enquiry included following up all the reports of missing women and all women who had been receiving pre-natal advice and treatment. The police spread their net across the whole country on these enquiries. Door-to-door enquiries were carried out in Brighton and surrounding areas. Police had to deal with dozens of reports of sinister-looking men humping equally sinister-looking packages around or pushing them on carts or handbarrows. Most of these turned out to be easily explained and entirely innocent although they took time to be checked out which of course they had to be.
There was the usual crop of hoaxes and honest, well-intentioned but timewasting misunderstandings. An appeal to those who had been at Brighton station on the day the trunk had been deposited produced many responses but the only useful one was that it seemed highly likely that the trunk had been brought to Brighton on a train, and almost certainly from one of the stations not far away on the coast line and certainly not beyond Worthing. With a collective sigh the police decided to re-interview all those who had already been quizzed for information and to use different detectives. This was a long, tedious and drawn-out process, but if the dead woman was local, surely someone must have noticed her unexplained absence.
The dingy house in which Mancini had his flat and to which he had moved the trunk containing Violet’s body was badly in need of re-pointing and a firm had been taken on to do the job. Scaffolding went up around the building but it was not long before the workmen were complaining about the horrible smell that was emanating from somewhere low down in the building. Indeed so bad was the smell that the foreman decided to notify the police. Officers were detailed to investigate and had to agree that the smell was that of rotting flesh.
The owners of the house were away, and as no one else responded to the repeated knockings they decided to force the front door open. They gained access to Mancini’s quarters and homed in on a trunk which seemed to be the source of the smell. Retching almost uncontrollably the officers prised the trunk open and inside of course was the body of a woman. She was in an advanced stage of decomposition and myriads of large, prosperous-looking grubs were gorging themselves happily on her remains. Brighton now had a second trunk murder!
Sir Bernard Spilsbury found himself making a return visit to Brighton. He showed that the woman had been killed by a violent blow with a heavy blunt instrument. Enquiries quickly elicited who she was and her relationship with Mancini, who, feeling a growing sense of unease, had already decamped for London where he hoped to achieve anonymity until things quietened down. A description of Mancini was circulated throughout the UK. The description included mention of the rather odd way in which he walked.
On the evening of 18 July two police officers were sitting, rather bored, in their patrol car close to a pub in Lewisham, south-east London, when they saw a man walk past heading for an all-night café. There was something so distinctive about the way in which he walked that they immediately recalled the circular they had read about a man wanted for questioning concerning the finding of a dead woman in a trunk in Brighton.
They arrested the man, who readily admitted that his name was Mancini, and overnight he found himself being whisked at high speed down the A23 to Brighton. He appeared at the magistrates’ court the next morning. He was remanded in custody on a charge of murder. Soon he found himself the star turn at a murder trial at Lewes Assizes. This is a role that brought out the hitherto unsuspected thespian in him. He lied through his teeth and quite unashamedly and histrionically tried to play the jury.
He had returned one night to the flat that he shared with Violet only to find her dead, he said. He had not reported the death because he claimed that a man like himself with a record of various petty criminal offences would never be treated fairly by the police. Yes he knew it had been stupid but he had decided to move Violet’s body in a trunk to another flat. All this, you understand, between gulps, sobs, snuffles, tears coursing down his face and silences while he tried to cope with the emotional trauma he was undergoing. It may not have won an Oscar but it did win a verdict of ‘not guilty’. Mancini walked away from the court a free man.
What about the dead baby? The enquiries continued; they went nowhere. The senior officer in charge of the enquiry accumulated pieces of evidence to suggest that the woman – Violet – might have visited a member of the medical profession to obtain an abortion. The performance of an abortion was illegal. Perhaps the abortion went wrong and Violet died. The father of the unborn child and the back-street abortionist would have been anxious to keep what had happened secret. Perhaps they therefore dismembered Violet’s body and placed it in the trunk which was then deposited in the left luggage facility at Brighton station.
A possible performer of the abortion was identified and upon being questioned smiled unctuously and issued a veiled threat that he had friends in very high places who would not only ensure his immunity from prosecution but would be able to make things very difficult for any overzealous police officers who attempted to proceed with their enquiries. The murderer of Violet was never brought to justice.
Murder in the South Side
Pollokshields East is a station serving the Cathcart Circle line on the edge of Glasgow’s smart South Side late nineteenth and early twentieth-century suburbs. The Cathcart Circle was immortalised in a characterful novel by R.W. Campbell called Snooker Tam of the Cathcart Railway, published in 1919. The eponymous Tam is a lively and cheeky young station lad at the fictional Kirkbride station on the line, who gets into various scrapes with his elders and betters and finds many sonsie lasses to flirt with while he attends – or does not attend – to his platform duties.
Snooker Tam may be a cheerful and light-hearted read but there was nothing light-hearted about events at Pollokshields East around half past seven on the evening of 10 December 1945. It was a freezing night and three railway workers were sitting round the fire in the stationmaster’s office, glad of the respite from the cutting winds outside. They were Kerith Scott, an experienced railway employee who could turn his hand to just about any task around a railway station, a young junior porter called Robert Brown and a female clerk called Joan Bradshaw.
The three were chatting in a desultory fashion when suddenly a door burst open and a man opened fire with a revolver, aiming cold-bloodedly at each of them in turn. The woman was hit and she died immediately while Brown received injuries from which he died the next day. Scott was the lucky one. He was only grazed by the bullet fired at him. The intruder escaped clutching two metal boxes which he clearly hoped contained the day’s takings. They were actually empty.
A massive investigation was immediately set in motion by the police. The dying Brown managed to provide some kind of description, including the fact that the murderer seemed to be wearing ‘de-mob’ clothes. The net was thrown far and wide. Large numbers of people who had been in the vicinity of Pollokshields East about that time were traced and quizzed but with little result, and after six months the police had to admit that they were no further forward. It was therefore almost in desperation that a reward of £1,000 was offered to anyone providing information that led to the arrest and conviction of the murderer. Various cranks and time-wasters came forward but no useful information was gained. What could the police do that they had not already done?
On the morning of 9 October 1946, ten months after the murder at Pollokshields East, a police constable was on duty not far from Cathcart railway station on the same line when a young man walked up to him and requested that the officer accompany him to the police station because he wanted to confess to a murder. Was the man who made this revelation just another time-waster? The constable did not particularly want a rollicking from his sergeant for inviting a nutter into the police station but he would get an even bigger rocket if it turned out later that the man was indeed a murderer and he, the officer, had told him to go away.
He decided to play cautiously and to ask the m
an a few questions. The answers he gave made it clear that he was claiming to be the killer in the Pollokshields East murder. He had been living with the horror of what he had done for all those months, he said, and had tried to commit suicide by shooting himself but his gun had jammed. Concluding that the fates were against him, he therefore decided to turn himself in.
Pollokshields East station on the Cathcart Circle Line in Glasgow’s southern inner suburbs. A recent picture, showing the unprepossessing building which replaced an attractive Caledonian Railway installation with a fine umbrella canopy.
The investigating officers were understandably a little sceptical about his story, but when Kerith Scott picked him out in an identity parade as the man who had shot him at Pollokshields East on that dreadful night the previous December, they knew they had their man. He was a railway fireman and they charged him with the murder of Joan Bradshaw and Robert Brown and a number of other offences connected with the murder.
Immediately the issue of insanity was raised. The young man was examined by a panel of experts who concluded that while he was definitely mentally abnormal, he was not certifiably insane and had known the difference between right and wrong when he had committed the murder. The issue of insanity went on to be at the centre of the subsequent trial but a majority of the jury did not accept the plea of diminished responsibility and found him guilty. He was sentenced to death but reprieved on appeal, receiving a life sentence instead. Was he a young man living in a fantasy world of gun-toting or was he a cold-blooded killer prepared to murder entirely without conscience in the pursuit of robbery?
An Inhumane Killer
On a February day in 1936 Mr Arthur Mead took an early evening train at Aylesbury heading up to London, though his destination was High Wycombe. A Mrs Fuller joined the train at Princes Risborough and sat in an adjacent compartment. Just as the train was heading southwards through the tunnel near Saunderton on the Great Western & Great Central line she heard a sharp report followed by another shortly afterwards. She could not say exactly what the sound reminded her of but it made her uneasy.
She stuck her head out of the carriage window but there was nothing to be seen. When she arrived at her destination, High Wycombe, she alighted and noticed a man slumped on the seat in the compartment next to the one she had been travelling in. Perhaps he was asleep because he certainly looked dead to the world. Miss Fuller continued on her way, thinking nothing more about it.
The train changed guards at High Wycombe and the man who was taking over, Wood by name, walked the length of the train peering into each compartment to get an idea of the number of passengers and to ensure that all was as it should be. He spotted a man who was slumped in a compartment and looking distinctly unwell. He alerted one of the station clerks. The train left High Wycombe but when it arrived at Beaconsfield, Wood decided to take another look at his woebegone passenger. His condition was clearly deteriorating and Wood decided that he needed to be taken off the train.
He enlisted the help of a porter. Bingham, for that was the porter’s name, knew first aid and did what he could for the man who seemed weak and confused but who then suddenly blurted out that he had been shot by a stranger toting a revolver. A doctor soon arrived and confirmed that he had indeed been shot in the chest and that he was in such a bad way that he would not last long.
Two police sergeants arrived at the station and had to try to extract as much information as they could decently do before the victim of the shooting expired. They established that he was Arthur Mead from High Wycombe and he had got on the train at Aylesbury. He told them that at Princes Risborough a man who he did not know had entered his compartment and shot him with a revolver. He provided a description of a man in his mid-twenties and details of his appearance. Mead provided all this information with almost his last dying breath and his life was extinguished shortly afterwards.
The compartment of the carriage in which Mead had travelled was subjected to minute scrutiny by the police. There was no sign of struggle but a spent bullet was found in the kind of position consistent with the victim being shot from the front while being in a seated position. Mead’s overcoat provided evidence that the muzzle of a gun had been placed against it and fired from that position. Where was this weapon? If it could be found, it might elucidate some of the unanswered questions.
They did not have to wait for long but they were mightily surprised when it turned up. A track worker found a gun lying by the side of the line along which Mead’s train had travelled. Like a good citizen he handed it in and the police were, to use that ugly but descriptive modern word, gobsmacked. It was a humane killer of the sort used to despatch animals in an abattoir. It had not been very humane in this instance because it had fired the bullet that fatally injured Mead. What kind of a murderer used such a weapon? Was this the first time in history that a humane killer had possibly been used for the purposes of murder?
Question now piled on top of question. Miss Fuller said that she had distinctly heard two reports. If the gun had been fired twice, where was the second bullet? If it had actually only been fired once what, if anything, was it that she heard the second time? How come there was no trace of Mead’s supposed killer? What kind of a killer would apparently just pick a victim in such a random fashion or did Mead have an enemy? Did Mead actually kill himself? If so it stretched the bounds of credibility to suppose that he had held the gun against himself, fired it sustaining his appalling injury, got up onto his feet, lowered the compartment window and thrown the gun out.
Additionally the gun was found further down the line than Saunderton, which was just to the south of Princes Risborough. Even more incredible was the notion that he had shot himself and received the fatal injury, sat in agony for some minutes and then, almost as an afterthought, had thrown the gun out of the train. If he had fired the gun himself in the act of committing suicide, why lie about the stranger who shot him? Those people who are aware that they are dying do not usually lie when uttering their valedictory words. If Mead had killed himself, what was the reason?
Mead was a butcher by trade but had been working in a knacker’s yard. He had fought in the army during the First World War and, although physically uninjured, he had been mentally scarred and was unable to get over the sights and sounds he had experienced. He had severe mental health problems and his doctor had only recently recommended that he should undertake treatment as in-patient in an appropriate hospital.
He had owned two humane killers and although he had got rid of the more modern of the two, which was of the captive bolt type, he had kept the old-fashioned bullet one. His wife felt almost certain that the gun retrieved by the police was of this sort. As the police pursued their enquiries they found that Mead had been trying to borrow some money. What for?
An inquest was held which concluded that Mr Arthur Mead took his own life when he was not of sound mind. At the time many people felt that this was a not an appropriate verdict because it left so many questions unanswered. No further evidence has come to light that could be used to answer those questions.
Murder on the Aberdeen Express?
Britain was still in a state of post-war austerity in 1950. The London & North Eastern Railway had been in dire financial straits before the Second World War, despite the glamorous image of the streamlined expresses reaching speeds of 100mph and more on the East Coast Main Line. The demands of the war had just about brought it and the other three companies of the ‘Big Four’ to their knees, and nationalization just after the war had been necessary to prevent them collapsing completely.
Great efforts were being made to improve things although there were still many disgruntled passengers. Not so the young Women’s Royal Air Force Corporal stationed at RAF Leuchars who was standing on the down platform at Leuchars Junction waiting for an afternoon train to Aberdeen. With her was the young man, also in the RAF, who was ‘dating’ her. She was a widow and he was married but estranged from his wife who refused to divorce him. Both of them were
travelling northwards to spend Christmas with their respective families in Aberdeen. Their relationship was not an easy one despite the various interests they shared. They had frequent rows.
They joined the already crowded train and had no option but to stand in the corridor where they proceeded to have an audible row, embarrassing for nearby passengers. Soon after the train left Arbroath a passenger complained to the guard that the toilet had been occupied for what seemed like half an hour or more. The guard knocked on the door to be answered by a man’s voice. He opened the door, coming out looking somewhat bothered and confused. The guard could also see a woman in the tiny compartment but it was quickly established that she was dead. The man was arrested and charged with murder which was quickly changed to ‘culpable homicide’.
Medical examination of the woman demonstrated that she had a heart condition which made her especially vulnerable to the effects of shock. It seems that the couple had gone into the toilet to carry on their argument away from prying eyes, and as tempers rose she probably hit him and he retaliated by seizing her round the throat. The shock of this proved fatal and the court held that he had killed her, although obviously without having intended to do so.
The court took this into account in handing out a lenient sentence of just nine months’ imprisonment. A niggling doubt remained in the minds of some of those affected by the young woman’s death. Had the man used his knowledge of her heart condition to kill her? If this was true, it seems odd to choose the toilet compartment of a crowded train as the place to bring his relationship with the woman to such a drastic and sudden end. We shall never know.
A recent view of Leuchars station. The Inter-City 125s may now look a little outdated but they have proved to be a superb investment.
Blood on the Tracks: A History of Railway Crime in Britain Page 16