The Supernatural Murders

by Jonathan Goodman

  In December I told Browne I was going away, and he made no objection then, and drove me to Euston in the car about, I think, 17 December 1927.

  I then went to West Kirby to an address I don’t want to mention, and remained until 13 January last, when I returned to London with a woman whom I have married, and I have lived at 2 Huguenot Place till last Saturday, 21 January 1928, when I left and went again back to Liverpool, where I was arrested. Since I came to London on 13 January I have called at the garage on two occasions, and he said, ‘Hullo, you’ve come back.’ On the first occasion no mention was made of the crime.

  On 17 January 1928 – a Tuesday – he wanted me to go to Devonshire with him in a car, but my wife persuaded me not to, and told me that, whatever he was going for, I was better out of it. I think Browne went, and I left.

  I went to the garage again at 2pm, Saturday, 21 January 1928, and when I got to the entrance I found the gate locked, and saw two men who I took to be detectives, and suspected something was wrong. I went to my wife and told her to pack, as we were going away, giving her no reason. I went to Clapham Common and sent a bogus telegram to myself saying someone was ill. This was an excuse I made to explain our leaving.

  1. Employed by Browne as a general handyman.

  The Hand of God or Somebody

  The Protracted Murder

  of Gregory Rasputin

  Rasputin

  Prince Yousoupoff and his wife, Princess Irina

  The Gutteridge Murder

  Browne’s ‘living-room’, where he was arrested

  I have seen Browne in possession of two Webley revolvers, which were always kept loaded, and he had plenty of ammunition. He also told me he had a Smith & Wesson, but I never saw it. I believe he kept it at home. He also had a small nickel .22 revolver, which was also kept at home.

  I have been worried ever since the murder of the constable, and at times I became desperate, expecting I should be arrested, and not knowing what to do.

  I have made this statement quite voluntarily, after being cautioned, and am prepared to give it in a court of law if necessary.

  It has been read over to me, and all I have stated is the whole truth of what took place on the night of 26–27 September 1927.

  Signed W. KENNEDY

  Though a statement made to the police is worth little or nothing until much or all of it has been checked and corroborated, it is easy to imagine with what eagerness and keen attention this one was heard – then considered almost word by word. How much or how little of it was true? From information already in hand, it seemed likely that most of it was fact.

  Obviously Kennedy felt that the net was closing tightly round him and believed that the only way for him to escape the gallows was to incriminate himself up to a point, while endeavouring to lay the heavier burden of guilt upon Browne. But he overlooked the fact, of which he afterwards felt the full force, that he was not the less a murderer even if he had not fired a shot.

  Some of his statement could not be checked; much was closely followed up. Whether the two did or did not travel to Billericay from Liverpool Street at or about 7pm did not much matter. As regards the attempt to steal the Raleigh car, which was interrupted by the barking of a dog, that assertion was substantiated in a somewhat curious way. At the trial, one of the witnesses, a domestic servant employed by a resident in Southend Road, Billericay, said: ‘Mr Pitcher has a Raleigh motor-car, which he keeps in his garage near his house. I remember the night Police Constable Gutteridge was shot. The car was in the garage that night. The door was not locked with a key, just shut. We do not have a dog in the house, but a dog comes every night round to the dustbin in the garden.’

  It was known that Browne’s advice: ‘We will go by the byways and escape the main road’ was acted on and that they did get on to the Romford Ongar Road. As to the exact incidents of the murdering, no one will ever learn the full truth. It does not matter who fired the shots. The original of the bogus telegram was produced and proved to be in Kennedy’s handwriting.

  His statement, or confession as it may well be called, could not be used as evidence against Browne; only against himself if proved to be true. All that was needed to hang him was to prove that he had been Browne’s companion and accomplice; his statement provided almost all the necessary evidence.

  Evidence against Browne

  It had to be proved that Browne also was in that car, and Browne had provided the necessary evidence. The doctor’s stolen instruments were found in Browne’s possession. Browne had used words, when arrested, which, if not conclusively incriminating, were at least highly suspicious. When charging the jury at the trial, Mr Justice Avory said:

  The inspector who had Browne in charge on that evening, and who, as you know, had charged him only with stealing a Vauxhall car, found in Browne’s pocket a driver’s licence in the name of Frederick Harris, and Browne said, ‘That is a dud in case I am stopped.’ The inspector adds that when they found in Browne’s trousers pocket twelve cartridges, service cartridges, which can be fired from a Webley revolver, Browne said, ‘That’s done it; now you have found them, it’s all up with me,’ nothing at that time having been said about any crime of violence. And they found in his pocket a mask, which was produced, and Browne said, ‘There you are, you have got it now; that’s the lot, you won’t find anything else.’ It was then that Detective Bevis came in with the ‘new’ Webley revolver in his hand and the six cartridges which he had taken out of it, and Detective Bevis said, ‘I have just found this fully loaded in the off-side pocket by the driver’s seat of the Angus car outside,’ and Browne said, ‘You have found that, have you? I am done for now.’ Hawkyard, another detective, has sworn he heard Browne say, ‘That’s done it; now you have found them, it’s all up with me.’ And when the mask was found, he said, ‘There you are, you have got the lot now.’ And when Bevis brought in the revolver, Browne said, ‘Now you have found that, I am done for.’ And, at nine o’clock that evening, Browne said, ‘How many of you were there? All you lot to pinch me? It’s a good job you didn’t collar me when I was in the car or some of you would have gone west, and me after you. I have seen a man shoot six down with a gun like that, and you can take it from me that they didn’t get up.’ Bevis also heard Browne say, when the nickel-plated revolver was produced, ‘That’s no good, it would only tickle unless it hit you in a vital part. If you had stopped me in the car, I would have shot five of you and saved one for myself.’ And later on he heard him say, ‘From what I can see of it, I shall have to get a machine-gun for you bastards next time.’ Now, those things are the things alleged to have been said by Browne at the time when he was found in possession of at least four revolvers, all fully loaded, and, in view of those statements – in view of the statements that he is prepared to shoot down anybody who attempts to stop him when he is in the car – you must judge whether you believe him when he says in that witness-box that he has never fired a revolver in his life, and that he only keeps them loaded in order to prevent them going rusty. Browne has disputed that he said some of these things; he has admitted that he said others of them; and the explanation which is offered to you of his saying the others is that he thought at the time that he might be charged with being unlawfully in possession of firearms without a licence. It is for you to judge whether you think that affords a reasonable explanation of the statements that he made – ‘It is all up with me’, ‘I am done for now’ – fearing he is simply going to be charged with an offence for which he is liable to a fine.

  The use of those questionable words and the possession of the doctor’s property, severally or taken together, would not have justified a verdict of guilty against Browne. But, in conjunction with his being in possession of the revolver from which was fired the cartridge-case found in the car and of unusual ammunition of the same kind as that with which Constable Gutteridge was slain, the possibility of mere coincidence was wiped out. The innocent accumulation of coincidence upon coincidence does not happen outside fictio
n.

  When asked to account for the Webley revolver, Browne declared that he had never fired it and that he had bought it in April 1927 at Tilbury Docks from a sailor whose name he did not know and whom he could not describe; he had obtained the ammunition from a man he knew in the army whom he did not wish to name. In his statement, from which the above assertions are taken, he went on to say:

  Shortly after I got the revolver it began to go rusty, but I kept it well oiled. I have never used it. I loaded it so that it would frighten anyone in case they interfered with me, and the reason I carried the weapon was because at the beginning of the War, when I was working for Pytchley Auto Car Co, Great Portland Street, W., delivering cars by road in different parts of the country, on two occasions – once when I was going through Gloucester to South Wales – a man at dusk signalled to me when I was driving the car to stop. As I slowed down in accordance with his signal, and I was engaged on the near-side speaking to him, two other men jumped on the off-side running board and demanded money. I was unprepared, and gave them what little money I had. Some six weeks after that occasion, when going to Bournemouth with another car, the same kind of thing happened to me, with a man calling on me to stop, but I declined on this occasion to stop. After this second occasion I made up my mind to be armed when taking cars to the country, and I purchased a revolver with a long barrel, but I had no ammunition.

  I later joined the army, but have never been threatened since. I remarked on the revolver to my firm when I got back, but not to the police, and the reason I had it on me today was because I had been on a country run to Devon.

  As the Solicitor-General put it at the trial: ‘Remember that this cartridge was the comparatively rare Mark IV, and ask yourself this question: “How does Browne account for the possession of that weapon, how does he account for the possession of that rare sort of ammunition, some of which was used in the perpetration of the murder, except on the footing of his own complicity in the murder?”’

  Bullets of an unusual character had been discovered in and near the body of the murdered man. An empty cartridge-case from which one of those bullets had been fired had been found in the doctor’s car. Browne possessed the Webley revolver from which that cartridge had been fired. Robert Churchill, the fire-arms expert, stated at the trial: ‘The cap of the cartridge takes the imprint of the breech-shield of the revolver, and under microscopic examination it is possible for me to see that this particular cartridge was fired from this Webley revolver, and could not have been fired from any other revolver.’ Also, the Chief Examiner at the Royal Small Arms Factory, Enfield Lock, examined the cartridge-case and compared it with the breech-shield of the Webley revolver. When asked, ‘Does the examination enable you to express an opinion as to the revolver with which that cartridge was fired?’ he replied: ‘Not only an opinion – I say that case was fired from that revolver.’ And in answer to this question, from the Judge, ‘You mean to say that without doubt?’ he answered: ‘Absolutely.’

  We have followed this crime-story from the finding of the body of the murdered constable to the discovery of the damning evidence against Browne and Kennedy, who were tried at the Central Criminal Court on Monday, 23 April 1928, and succeeding days. The jury returned a verdict of Guilty of what was rightly described as ‘a most foul and brutal murder’.

  Highly-coloured melodrama flooded the press while the murderers were awaiting execution: letters, confessions, poems, memoirs, and much descriptive matter, in which fragments of truth were swamped by masses of fiction. These productions have little historical value, and therefore do not concern us.

  On Thursday, 31 May, at 9am, Browne was executed at Pentonville Prison and Kennedy at Wandsworth.

  Editor’s Explanation

  Readers who have read few books of this sort will probably be wondering why an account of the Gutteridge case appears in this one; readers versed in the true-crime genre may be wondering why I chose to use an account that makes no specific reference to a matter that, because it is picturesque, is remembered after the facts of the case are forgotten. I guess that Teignmouth Shore, undoubtedly aware of the matter, lumped it with other ‘productions’ that, in his penultimate paragraph, he consigned to a trashcan labelled ‘Highly-Coloured Melodrama’; – sub-labelled ‘Productions [in which] fragments of truth were swamped by masses of fiction’.

  I have written elsewhere that ‘legend is more pliable, and therefore more durable, than truth’ – and that aphorism, needing supportive evidence, receives some in the form of the Gutteridge matter, which is certainly a concoction, and which seems to have been concocted shortly after the trial of Browne and Kennedy by a shameless journalist in the pay of a national paper. I say seems because many national-newspaper stories blazoned as being EXCLUSIVE! are nothing of the kind: often, main parts of a so-called scoop have been pinched from or inspired by a modest ‘filler’ in an earlier edition of a rival paper – or, more likely, of a paper so limited in its circulation that it provides no competition at all. Unless a researcher is so stupidly diligent as to scour every apt earlier edition of every paper, not excepting the South-East Huntingdon Bugle, it is quite as stupid of him to insist that a story appeared, entirely new, uniquely in a particular paper on a particular day.

  By 1969 (actually, long before – but never mind), the Gutteridge figment had become An Acknowledged Fact. On 16 July of that year, The Times of London, a ‘newspaper of record’, noted the death of a detective involved in the Gutteridge investigation – and stated that:

  Brown [sic] and Kennedy, fearing that their image would remain ‘photographed’ on the pupils of the dead policeman, shot out his eyes.

  Whoever invented the superstitious reason for Browne’s or Kennedy’s post-murder act was not so creative as to have invented the superstition. The retina-retention notion was at least a hundred years old in 1928. At some time during those years, it had been given a pseudo-scientific fillip by a German laboratory-worker who said that he thought he had seen a likeness of the flame of his bunsen-burner on the retina of a frog that he had just killed on behalf of science.

  Seven and a bit years before the murder of Constable Gutteridge, the retina-retention notion had been publicised – uncontemptuously – by the Times of New York, apropos of the murder of Joseph Bowne Elwell, whose first claim to fame was as the foremost bridge-player of his time, and who had also received notice as a daring gambler on the stock exchange, the owner of a string of race-horses, a developer of real-estate in Florida, an unofficial ‘spy-catcher’, a dealer in bootleg booze, and, ever since he had separated from his wife, an industrious philanderer – his eligibility as a grass-bachelor enhanced by the loveliness of his hair and the dazzling perfection of his teeth.

  Early in the morning of Friday, 11 June 1920, Elwell’s daily-woman let herself in to his fine house on West Seventieth Street, Manhattan – and found him sitting in a throne-like chair, dying from a gunshot wound through his cranium. She didn’t recognise him at first, for he was as bald as a coot, and the gaping of his mouth revealed that he had only three teeth, none contiguous. That slight who-he? mystery was explained before the case became one of murder, Elwell having died without saying a word: an investigator, traipsing around Elwell’s bedroom, noticed an expensive bespoke wig on a block and a complicated dentural contraption in a glass of water.

  Chiefly because of an excess of investigative groups, each working in rivalry with the others, and each more anxious to prevent any of the rival groups from succeeding than to succeed themselves, nearly all of the other mysteries remained mysterious – among those, the three main ones: what was the motive for the murder?… who had committed it? … how had that person managed to get undamagingly into the house, the outer doors of which were locked, the downstairs windows of which were covered with grilles, the skylight of which was covered with an iron frame?

  What with all the wild surmise about Elwell’s ‘harem’, his discarded (and therefore, of course, revengeful) lady-friends, the devoted hu
sbands he had cuckolded, the business associates and bootleggers and gamblers who had either owed him vast sums or been owed vast sums by him, foreign (and no doubt Bolshevik) agents, et al, there was great public interest in the case. On 16 June, a member of the local Times Brigade, ordered to gather ‘all the [Elwell] news that was fit to print’, reported on a claustrophobic time he had had the day before, under the heading 25,000 JAM ELWELL BLOCK. The number does not seem to have been a misprint, for, as you will see, it also appeared in the report; but one is dubious of the reporter’s arithmetic: even if there was an 0 too many, that would still have crammed very large crowds into quite a small area. Here is the report:

  About 25,000 persons yesterday visited the block in West Seventieth Street between Broadway and West End Avenue, where the Elwell house is located. Several traffic patrolmen were on duty at both ends of the block to regulate the motor cars attracted to the neighbourhood of the murder.

  The detectives have been consistently annoyed with all sorts of cranks going to the house to volunteer their services in solving the mystery…. A woman of sixty, who told the detectives she had come all the way from Chicago because she was interested in the case, advised them to pin their faith in the ouija board and employ it until the mystery was solved….

  One man, a doctor, ninety-four years old, who refused to give his name, spends most of each day in front of the house in company with newspapermen.

  In my book The Slaying of Joseph Bowne Elwell,1 I reprinted that report, and then commented: