Bad Penny Blues

by Cathi Unsworth

  The clandestine class-swapping circuit of sex parties and stag films that many of the victims found themselves revolving around connects to the Profumo scandal and the 1963 trial of social-climbing osteopath Stephen Ward that would eventually bring down the Tory government of Harold Macmillan. Hannah Tailford, found floating in the Thames on 2 February 1964, told stories of a sinister party she attended in a big house in Eaton Square in the autumn of 1960, in which she was duped into providing a floorshow with a man in a gorilla suit for an audience of the great and the good.

  Irene Lockwood, beached on the shores of the Thames on the morning of 24 April 1964, was a shakedown artiste given to blackmailing marks with the aid of a photographer, both of whom had known Tailford and the circles she moved in. Just before her death, Irene had been aiding the caretaker of the Holland Park Tennis Club, one Kenneth Archibald, to fleece punters in illegal late night card games. After her body was discovered, mention of a man called ‘Kenny’ was found in Lockwood's diary – and then Archibald himself turned up at Notting Hill police station, claiming responsibility for her death. He appeared to know the exact time she had been dropped into the Thames, the method of her murder, and the location from which her body was dumped. But with no evidence other than his confession to prove it, Archibald was acquitted and subsequently told the press he had made the whole story up while depressed. The police had no reason to suspect otherwise – Archibald was a frail, bumbling old man on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Besides which, there had been another murder while Archibald was in custody – that of Helene Barthelemy, found in a cul-de-sac in Brentford on the morning of 24 April 1964.

  The body of Barthelemy, a half-French, half-Scottish former circus performer, provided the police with what they thought would be a breakthrough. She was covered in spray paint. From the moment of her discovery, the force concentrated their efforts on attempting to match the colours of the spray to those used in garages – the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of garages in London. This trail would prove as frustrating and ultimately fruitless as the ‘Wearside’ Jack tapes would be to the West Yorkshire police's efforts to ascertain the true identity of the Yorkshire Ripper a decade later.

  Curiously, the next two victims also hailed from Scotland. Mary Fleming, originally from Glasgow, was a well-known Ladbroke Grove working girl who frequently boasted of having serviced every lord in London. Her body was found outside a garage in Acton on 14 July 1964. Not the garage the police were looking for, obviously. But was the killer taunting the Met with his choice of location?

  Unlike most of the witnesses called in the trial of Stephen Ward, Frances Brown testified in the doomed doctor's defence. She was also from Glasgow – Brown and Fleming were friends who had traded false IDs in the past. To the girls who drank in the Warwick Castle on Portobello Road, running a sweepstake on who would be next, it seemed like the Stripper might have a case of mistaken identity on his murdering hands.

  The final victim appears unconnected to the five women murdered in 1964. Bridget O’Hara, a native of Dublin, was found on the Swan Factory Estate in Acton, close to a garage with a paint-spraying operation, on 16 February 1965. O’Hara, not widely known to have been a prostitute, lived in Shepherd's Bush with her husband and children. Although she had been missing for a month when her body was discovered, it was in perfect condition. The pathologist concluded that she must have lain in cold storage until her body was dumped.

  There were conflicting accounts of where Bridget was last seen on the night she disappeared. One witness put her on Holland Park Avenue, near the coffee stand, from where Elizabeth Figg had taken her last ride five and a half years previously.

  After that, the killings stopped.

  But were these women all really murdered by the same person? Bobby Figg had no previous convictions for prostitution and had not been on the game for very long. Her body was discovered in Duke's Meadows, a patch of common ground on the banks of the Thames in Chiswick that was notorious for late night assignations, on the morning of 17 June 1959. She had been strangled, her dress ripped open, her shoes and handbag missing.

  It would be another four years and five months until the badly decomposed body of the second victim attributed to the Stripper was found. Gwynneth Rees, from Barry in South Wales, had been dead for months. She was naked but for a pair of stockings around her ankles and the pathologist could only conclude that strangulation was the most likely cause of death. Like Figg, Rees was a short woman with dark hair. Unlike Bobby, her career had been long and notorious – congenitally unable to develop any street smarts she had bounced around the East and West Ends in a disastrous attempt to make money from hooking or stripping. Her pimp was the most vicious of the lot – a woman known as Big Tits Gladys who had her girls servicing scores of lorry drivers down the Mile End Road and ‘disciplined’ any infractions by thrashings administered with wire coat hangers. Gwynneth, whose pitiless life affected me the most deeply of all, had apparently made a lot of enemies.

  Neither of these girls had any social connections to the five of ’64. But Rees had been buried in a shallow grave on the opposite side of the river to Figg, behind a pub called The Ship in Mortlake. Just before the next victim, Hannah Tailford, disappeared, she had told friends that she was about to leave her common law husband for a man who was going to take her to live in Mortlake. Her body was found on a floating pontoon by members of the London Corinthians Sailing Club, on the Upper Mall between Chiswick and Mortlake.

  Why such a gulf of time between the murders of Figg and Rees?

  The methodology of murder was what led the police to connect the eight. All were asphyxiated or strangled. All except for Figg were naked, but for Rees’ stockings and the pair of knickers found lodged in Tailford's throat. The last four women also had teeth missing, apparently knocked out by force, although there was no bruising around their mouths. The cause of these injuries baffled the pathologists who studied each corpse.

  Location would also seem to be a potential key to the case. Seven bodies were found within a short distance of each other, in or around the Thames, each getting closer to the final destination of Bridget O’Hara, near to the paint shop on the Swan Factory Estate. Which was the re-sprayer with the correct colour match for the last four corpses.

  The exception was Frances Brown. Not only was the Kensington locale where her body was dumped an anomaly, but Brown's body had been carefully hidden, under a pile of branches and a dustbin lid. All the others had been left in plain view.

  All of the women were short, around five feet tall, and all had dark hair – except for Lockwood, whose bouffant style was defiantly bleached blonde.

  This was the evidence my fictional detective Pete Bradley had to sift. I had him involved from the very beginning, recasting that morning at Duke's Meadows so that he would be the first on the scene, first to look into the eyes of the first of the victims and try to divine an answer from her infinite gaze. Then I got him embroiled in the underworld while working in Soho with Detective Sergeant Harold Wesker, whose unique methodology was inspired by the real life antics of Detective Sergeant Harold ‘Tanky’ Challenor. Challenor, the originator of the phrase: “You're nicked, me old beauty!” and the inspiration for Inspector Truscott in Joe Orton's Loot, had been an extremely brave soldier during WWII, working missions for the SAS in Italy, and subsequently found fame as the detective who would ‘clean up’ Soho. But when he was accused of planting pieces of brick on several protesters arrested during the state visit of Queen Frederika of Greece in July 1963, in a prosecution mounted by the Council for Civil Liberties, Challenor was declared to be too ‘unwell’ to take the stand. For more on Tanky, I recommend Joe Thomas’ Bent, published by Arcadia in 2020 and written by an author who, as a young boy, was bounced on the knee of ‘Uncle Harry’.

  Challenor's world links to the Stripper case by persistent rumour and urban myth. The nightclubs he patrolled included the one owned by the ex-boxer and showbiz personality Freddie Mills, who w
as mooted as the man responsible for the unsolved murders by ex-gangster Jimmy Tippett in 2001. I also found mention of Mills on a website chat thread where retired detectives discussed unsolved cases. Here one man named singer Dorothy Squires as his source for the story that Mills and his ‘friend’ (to use the euphemism of the day), popular middle-of-the-road singer Michael Holliday, were responsible for the unintentional murders of Elizabeth Figg and Gwynneth Rees at sex party scenarios that got out of hand.

  Mills himself also died in mysterious circumstances in July 1965, five months after Bridget O’Hara's body was found, having apparently committed suicide by shooting himself twice in the head in a car parked outside his West End club. Michael Holliday had already killed himself back in October 1963, ten days before the discovery of Gwynneth Rees’ three-month-old remains.

  Shortly after I found this Mills thread, BBC Four ran an old episode of Six-Five Special, the corporation's first attempt at a pop music show, from April 1958 – the only complete episode that had not been subsequently wiped. Anticipating the likes of Johnny Kidd, Billy Fury or The John Barry Seven, I watched in disquieted fascination as instead guest star Freddie Mills was interviewed by host Pete Murray, while an excitable Michael Holliday jived along in the audience. This was not who I had been expecting to see. Yet there they both were, ghostly in grainy black-and-white, bequiffed, besuited and curiously similar in looks – the diminutive Michael a ‘Mini-Me’ of his burly boxing pal.

  But by far the strangest of all my Bad Penny experiences happened while I was travelling to work one rainy morning on the number 31 bus to Camden. From behind my seat, I heard what sounded like someone turning on a transistor radio and turning the dial, trying to locate a channel between bursts of static, distorted voices and mangled bits of tune. A man's voice came through, in the clear Received Pronunciation tones of a BBC newsreader of yesteryear: “Police investigating the recent spate of murders of young women around the river in Hammersmith…” he began. The static increased, the dial slipped, another burst of interference then: “The pathologist reported the cause of death as strangulation…”

  Unable to believe my ears, I turned around to see the source of this apparent broadcast from 1964 – to find that all of those sounds were emanating from the mouth of large, dishevelled-looking man a few seats behind me. No sooner had I made eye contact than he lurched back in his seat as if being administered an electric shock, his eyes rolled in his head before he closed them and all the noises he was making – or channeling – stopped. This entire episode was witnessed by my partner Michael Meekin, who was sitting there beside me, so even though I cannot explain how this man appeared to get into my head and report back, I can at least assure myself that, as obsessed as I was by this case, I didn't fall asleep and dream it.

  To be honest, apart from the ‘transmissions’ – those parts of the story that take the form of messages from the dead girls, which flowed easily and instantaneously onto the page – writing Bad Penny Blues was a nightmare. Bad luck and botheration seemed to dog my every moment, the worst of which an accident that could have killed my mother as my family gathered on my 39th birthday. Now lost in my own blind alleys of coincidence and conjecture, I started to write another book entirely, and had to be saved from myself by my genius editor and long-suffering friend, John Williams, who kindly and patiently illuminated the way back out of the labyrinth of my own mind. On the day I handed the final draft over to him, I took off for a well-earned weekend in Canterbury with friends, amazed that I had actually been able to finish writing it – although not at all certain whether I might soon be joining Hannah and Irene for a dip in the Thames.

  When I returned, Stewart Home emailed to say that David Seabrook had just died.

  The dial slipped.

  Bad Penny Blues has had a heartening afterlife – both The London Adventure and Tom Vague asked me to do walks and talks for the local history society about what I had discovered in my research; people who had links to the victims came up to say they had liked and appreciated the book, which was the most I had ever hoped for. Myself and dear friend Ann Scanlon found ourselves giving a talk about the case from one of the murder sites – Kensington Town Hall, whose Library staff thoughtfully pulled from their own archives press coverage of the discovery of Frances Brown's body, Pauline Boty's Anti-Ugly protests and photos of the building going up to illustrate our presentation there that evening. One of those present at the event, Joanne Connolly, voted Bad Penny Blues her top Lockdown Read in the summer of 2020 in a series run by Robert Elms on his BBC Radio London show. Thank you, Joanne.

  Top collaborator and near-neighbour Pete Woodhead used Joe-Meekian methodology to create spook-infested soundtracks for me to read the ‘transmissions’ parts to and we performed them live in London and – more surprisingly – Oslo, thanks to NRK Radio journalist Leif Ekle. You can hear Pete's recordings on the Transmissions page of my website, cathiunsworth.co.uk. The great Savage Pencil, aka Edwin Pouncey, got me and Pete to recreate a tangential story, ‘Johnny Remember Me’, for his Earworm cassette series.

  I had an astonishing and entirely unexpected review from another literary hero, Greil Marcus, that he has kindly allowed us to reproduce here as the Introduction. Portobello Radio DJ Aidan McManus became a good friend through his constant championing of the book on his Flipside Radio London show. Sadly, another important friend who put me and Tom together to do more local history talks, and screened so many of the films that helped and inspired me in his genius run at the Portobello Pop-Up, Tim Burke, has since gone on to join the Ghosts of Ladbroke Grove. His corporeal presence is keenly missed.

  It seems only appropriate that this new edition should be published by Mark Pilkington, who was in at the very start of all this madness, when we both worked for Bizarre/Fortean Times, on the corner of Bramley Road W11. The leylines always connect. Thank you, Mark.

  If you want to know who Jack the Stripper really was, then I point you towards Fred Vermorel's Dead Fashion Girl, also published by Strange Attractor Press, which alone among all the books that purport to solve the case offers a firsthand witness testimony to the most convincing solution I have ever read. That Fred was not even looking for the Stripper, but came across his star source during the course of his own investigation into another unsolved murder of a young woman from 1954, somehow makes his breakthrough all the more poetic and poignant. Although I don't think all of the victims were killed by the man Fred's book names – I still feel that more than one person was responsible for these murders – it finally makes sense of a central mystery. All the working girls who drank in The Warwick Castle and used the same hairdressing salon, all those hard, smart, streetwise women I could not picture going off with someone they were unsure about at such a heightened time of danger – now I can see why they unwittingly walked to their deaths, and why the police could not make out what had happened to their teeth. There is an unforgivable betrayal at the root of these crimes.

  Fred's witness, a woman whose life story touches on just about every subject mentioned here, had been carrying the horrible and unwanted insight she had into the murders around with her for over fifty years until she was finally able to unburden herself. Now there is another corner of Ladbroke Grove that I will never be able to pass again without crossing myself first.

  Rest in peace, all of you.

  Cathi Unsworth, Lockdown Ladbroke Grove, April 2020

  STRANGE ATTRACTOR PRESS

  2020