Nominated BEST BRITISH TRUE-CRIME PODCAST, 4th Best True-Crime Podcast by This Week, iTunes Top 25 Podcast, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50, The Telegraph's Top 5, Crime & Investigation Channel's Top 20 True-Crime Podcasts, also seen on BBC Radio, Sky News, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week.
EPISODE TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY: On Tuesday 31st May 1932, in a place she had dubbed ‘The Love Hut’, although the evidence stated that (in a drunk and emotional state) Elvira shot her lover to death, the circumstances of the murder was so dubious - that the truth was easily whitewashed by an adoring press who were so besotted by this beautiful but vapid rich kid - that they made her the only victim, and him the absolute culprit.
THE LOCATION
As many photos of the case are copyright protected by greedy news organisations, to view them, take a peek at my entirely legal social media accounts - Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
The location is marked with a purple coloured symbol of a bin under Hyde Park and beneath the words 'The Serpentine'. To use the map, click it. If you want to see the other maps, click here.
SOURCES: This case was researched using some of the sources below.
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE: Welcome to Murder Mile. Today, I’m standing on William Mews in Knightsbridge, SW1; two roads west of The Goat Tavern where William McSwan was treated to a farewell drink, two streets west of the Hyde Park bombing, and a short walk south of the fake SAS soldier and his cowardly initiation - coming soon to Murder Mile. Hidden off the rather posh Loundes Square, William Mews was once a cul-de-sac comprising of stables where society’s elite bragged that they kept their horses, only to have a flunky shovel up the shit - as that’s what the wealthy do, they boast about their success and have the little people do all the work. By the 1930s, William Mews had become a line of garages occupied by cabdrivers whose families lived in the flats above. One exception was at No 21, where 27-year-old socialite Elvira Barney lived, boozed, debauched and had her bad behaviour rewarded by society and her crimes excused by the law. On Tuesday 31st May 1932, in a place she had dubbed ‘The Love Hut’, although the evidence stated that (in a drunk and emotional state) Elvira shot her lover to death, the circumstances of the murder was so dubious - that the truth was easily whitewashed by an adoring press who were so besotted by this beautiful but vapid rich kid - that they made her the only victim, and him the absolute culprit. My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 250: The Socialite’s Premonition. Money: it can turn the good bad, the bad worse, the needy greedy, and the wealthy blind. Born on 22nd January 1904, the early life of Elvira Enid Mullen was as pampered and privileged as any posh little prig whose first words were ‘nanny’ having been born with a silver spoon in every orifice. As the middle child of three siblings to affluent stockbroker Sir John Mullens, manager of the London Stock Exchange, and his wife Lady Mullens, with no need to understand the value of money, she was raised believing that everyone below her should be at her beck and call, and had no understanding of why she couldn’t have whatever she wanted, when she wanted it, and often without earning it. Following the death of her brother Cyril when she was only 12, what occupied her time wasn’t a career but the seeding of the sibling rivalry with her baby sister. Both described as “society beauties” who were pretty, petite and auburn haired, although Avril would make her parents proud by marrying in lofty circles - first to Ernest Simpson (the ex-husband of Wallis Simpson whose relationship with King Edward 8th almost brought down the monarchy) and later to a Georgian royal prince, meaning that she would be titled as Princess Imeritinsky - Elvira saw herself as the rebel and the troublemaker. Like a petulant child, Elvira went out of her way to do everything her parents despised. In 1924, she studied at Lady Benson’s Drama Academy, and although acting was seen as a disreputable profession for a young woman of means, under the stage name of Dolores Ashley, she appeared in The Blue Kitten, a musical about a waiter who pretended to be upper class so he can marry a socialite. In its run, it was only modestly reviewed and barely lasted a season, and although the acting career of Dolores Ashley never went much further, this brief spark of stardom gave Elvira the notoriety and the attention she craved, as by 1924, she was already being heralded as part of The Bright Young Things. The Bright Young Things were the in-crowd of the late 1920’s and early 1930s. Like the Kardashians… only with talent, this fashionable set of wealthy bohemians lived by their own rules, poo-pooed the stuffy Victorian values of their privileged upbringing and caused as much scandal as possible by drinking heavily, imbibing illicit drugs, flouting the law, and engaging in bisexual sex. The antics of the Bright Young Things set the tabloid papers ablaze, making household names of these trendsetting luminaries, such as photographer Cecil Beaton, actress Tallulah Bankhead, poet John Betjeman, playwright Noel Coward, novelists Barbara Cartland and G K Chesterton, renowned fascists the Mitford sisters and Guy Burgess the spy, as well Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, later The Queen Mother. Elvira wasn’t as high-profile as many, which is why amongst such celebrities her name is barely known today, but it was her erratic and often eccentric exploits which gave her such an infamous reputation. In 1924, Elvira got engaged to Charles Graves, a gossip journalist whose articles about the Bright Young Things had established them as cultural icons, as opposed to just privileged wastrels. They were seen as the ‘hot couple’, only it was Elvira’s bizarre behaviour which ended their tempestuous relationship. In his 1951 autobiography titled ‘The Bad Old Days’, Charles doesn’t name his fiancé, but states “the girl was the daughter of a rich businessman, her home life was not particularly happy, I’d made the unfortunate error of mistaking sympathy for love… so I wrote her a note asking her to break it off…”. Returning to his Chelsea flat, “at 3am on a Saturday night I was woken up by my guest, who said “there is a girl walking up and down the pavement. I think she has a revolver. I went to the window which was on the first floor and sure enough there she was…”, an angry auburn beauty with a loaded gun. Knowing how unstable and volatile she was, he said to his guest “’when you hear me undo the latch, open the window and attract her attention. I’ll do the rest’”. It was a stratagem he had mulled over and possibly put into practice several times before, as once the latch was unlocked, his guest whistled, Elvira looked up, and Charles dashed out, stating ‘it was time enough to grab the pistol. Luckily, I knew which wrist to grab. She tried to pull the trigger, but the pistol fell onto the pavement with a clang”. Charles had a lucky escape, later stating “she was hysterical for some minutes. I made the girl sleep on the divan while I sat out the night in an armchair to make sure that she did not run away, or do herself any damage. When I saw her mother and told her what had happened, she was horrified”. It was an incident which wasn’t reported to the police, and with Charles then being the editor of the Sunday Express, it didn’t feature in any of the newspapers, and besmirched none of their names. Thus is the power of the wealthy and influential… …so, why do I tell you this? Because it is a premonition of things to come. In 1927, causing more consternation for her exasperated parents, Elvira met John Sterling Barney at a party. Married the following year, it was a relationship bitterly opposed to by her family, which ended in frequent quarrels and fights, mostly because he wasn’t a Lord or a stockbroker, just a singer. By 1929, with her husband returning to America, Elvira Barney (as she was then known) continued her spiral out of control, by combining her drinking and late-night escapades (in an era when drink driving was still legal) with the purchase of Delage D8; a French-built 8-cylinder motorcar, costing twice that of the average house, and with a 102hp engine was capable of speeds of 82mph on roads which had barely been improved since the days of horse and carts, so it was no surprise she had several accidents. In 1930, Elvira was arrested in Croydon having crashed her car at speed while drunk. It was entirely her fault, but like the spoilt little rich girl she was, she “furiously berated the constable, reminding him of her status, her name, her family, and threatened to get him sacked”. Let off with a fine, a year later, she crashed her car in Piccadilly Circus, breaking her jaw, losing a tooth and getting a slap on the wrist. The era of the Bright Young Things was coming to a close, as with the Wall Street Crash plunging the world into recession, their kind of decadence and excesses was seen as nothing short of disgusting. But did they care? Some did, but others did not, as being born with no sense of the less fortunate, when the poor struggled, the powerful and the popular only ever worry about their own pleasures… …and that included Elvira. Some may suggest that Elvira was only interested in herself, which is why, of the man she claimed to love and would ultimately murder, she said “I have known Michael for about a year. We were great friends, and he used to come and see me from time to time… but we were never a couple or an item”. Similar to Elvira, Michael’s upbringing of one of privilege, albeit of a lowly middle-class status. Born in Elgin in 1908, Thomas William Scott Stephen known as Michael was the son of a prominent financier and a Justice of the Peace. As one of three competitive siblings, with Francis becoming a respected solicitor and Harbourne becoming the managing director at the Daily Telegraph and one of the most honoured airmen of The Battle of Britain, Michael too saw himself as the rebel and the troublemaker. Educated, but unwilling to put in a hard day’s work, although it was said that Michael was a dress designer, being denied an allowance by his father, he turned to gambling and became a bit of a dandy. And this is how the story would be split in two; with the press deciding who the public should root for, based on who was the most popular and who was not, as once again, money and power would win. During the trial, being dead, Michael couldn’t defend himself. Described as ‘unemployed’ and ridiculed as ‘a sponger and a scoundrel’, they ignored the fact that Elvira was no better just more popular. Many called him a nobody as if she was a somebody. And whereas they both drank, did drugs and engaged in promiscuous sex, his faults were seen as immoral, whereas hers was a beloved part of her character. It was said that they met in Paris, and some time before May 1932 (the month he was murdered), he’d move into her little flat above a garage at 21 William Mews – which they had titled as ‘The Love Hut’. As in her volatile engagement with Charles Graves and her jealous marriage to John Barney, there was no denying that Elvira & Michael loved each other as much as they hated each other, as in so many letters found, Michael wrote “dear darling, forgive me all the dreadful things I have done. I promise to be better and kinder so you won’t be frightened any more. I love you, only you, in all the world”. Of which, she replied “my darling baby. I really do love you darling”, but stated, “I feel like suicide when you are angry. It absolutely ruined my marriage and it leads to all kinds of misery. I won’t let you down. God knows why I should when you are so lovely. Take care. All my love, really all. Elvira”. It was a relationship as tragic and fractious as it was loving and deadly, as these two wastrels with nothing to offer the world bounced from party to party, often drunk, on drugs, and claiming to live a liberated life when monogamy was shunned, and yet, they would condemn each other for cheating. Nobody really knew what went on behind their closed doors, but although (in court) Michael was accused of only using her for money, among her popular friends, he was seen as nothing but a butler. Neither had any respect for their neighbours… …as the hipsters of their day, they loved to brag about how they “lived among the real people”, and yet, they didn’t know their names, and sullied the cul-de-sac’s peace with late-night fights and parties. Like a premonition of his death, a fight occurred on Thursday 19th May 1932, 12 days before his murder as Mrs Dorothy Hall who lived opposite recalled “it was 3:30am. I was awakened by a terrible screaming out of Mrs Barney’s window”. Elvira was naked and angry “telling him to go away, as he asked her for money, she wouldn’t give him any and she said ‘go and fish for it’”. So far, so ordinary… …until “Mrs Barney looked out of the window and screamed to him ’laugh baby, laugh for the last time’, and fired. I heard the sound of firing and I saw the flash and some smoke. After she had fired she kind of fell inside the window”, both laughing and crying, as Michael walked away. The next morning he called on her, “and once again they were quite friendly”, as if nothing had happened. But with their fights becoming so commonplace, tragically their neighbours often ignored them. The night of the murder began like any other… with a raucous party. Elvira didn’t care a wit that her hard-working neighbours had jobs and lives, as from ‘The Love Hut’, this cul-de-sac echoed with loud music, arrogant voices, and the popping of champagne corks. Inside, roughly 30 members of the Bright Young Things partied heartily, being crammed full of artists, poets, painters and even a power boat racer, only Michael was little more than a helper who served drinks. At 9pm, giving respite to their neighbours, the party decamped to the opulence of the Café de Paris in Piccadilly – where more drink, drugs and pretentious chat only added more fuel onto the fire – after which they headed to the infamous The Blue Angel club on Dean Street, to ruin their livers further. Being half cut and arseholed, it was still dark when her car skidded into William Mews. As if their fight from the morning had never ceased, their hurtful barbs could be heard before the car doors had even opened, as their bickering echoed across the cul-de-sac, causing some neighbours to slightly stir. As before, Dorothy Hall heard it all, but she saw very little; “at roughly 4:30am, I heard screaming and shouting, which woke my baby. There was a light on in the top floor window. I heard Mrs Barney, who was very hysterical telling him to get out of her house at once. Then she screamed out and said ‘I will shoot you’. She said that twice, ‘I will shoot you’. He said he would be going and then I heard the shot”. One shot… …followed by Michael crying ‘good God, what have you done?’ and Elvira screaming ‘Chicken, come back to me’. “I heard Mrs Barney call ‘Michael’ twice, and then all was quiet”. Which was odd, as Kate Stevens at no8 claimed “I heard four shots before the final one, a very loud one and Mrs Barney say ’Michael come back, I love you’”. And yet, William Liff, who was as close as any other, stated “I heard Mrs Barney say ‘go away or I’ll shoot you’, a pistol shot, followed by a groan and a thumping noise”. But which was it? As all three witnesses had seen nothing, and what they’d heard was only observed through the haze of tiredness across a dark echoey mews having been woken with a sharp start at an ungodly hour. And yet, all their statements contradicted how Elvira said the shooting had occurred. The socialite would later claim in a statement which was endlessly reported by an adoring media “we arrived home about 2am. We had a quarrel about a woman he was fond of”, her name being Dora. Inside the ‘Love Hut’ there was just Michael and Elvira, no-one else, so we only have Elvira’s side. She said “Michael threatened to leave me. I said ‘if you do, you know what will happen?’”, as several times prior (with Charles, John & Michael) she’d tried to take her own life. “He knew I kept a revolver… last night it was under the cushion of a chair near the bed, He knew where it was… he took it and said, ‘I’m going to take it away for fear you’ll kill yourself’”, as Elvira was a danger to herself and others. “I ran after him and tried to get it back”, but as the two struggled with both of their hands gripped on the revolver, “it went off… he looked surprised”, I didn’t know he was hurt, he went into the bathroom, half shut the door, and he said ‘fetch a doctor’, I saw he looked ill”, which his bloodstains would prove. Summoning Dr Durrant to what she would describe as “a dreadful accident” in which a man “has shot himself”, upon arrival, the Doctor declared Michael dead. Detective Inspector William Winter arrived shortly afterwards to find Elvira in a hysterical state unwilling to explain how this death had occurred. With the revolver by his hand, an entry wound in his left lapel, an exit wound in his back, and the bullet having passed through his left lung, filling his plural cavity with four pints of blood, his cause of death was heart failure - for which he was conscious for roughly ten minutes, before he collapsed and died. On the surface, it seemed like a very plausible accident… …but by the man’s dead hand lay a .32 revolver with three live and two spent rounds in the barrel. But what was odd was the order of the bullets, which went; one live, one live, one spent, one live and then one spent, as if (at some point) the barrel had been spun, like in a cruel game of Russian Roulette. Four experts examined the body; Home Office pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury, Robert Churchill the Met’s gun specialist, Dr Arnold Harbour the police surgeon and the detective, all of whom would state the following: “the revolver was three to six inches from the body when it was fired”, “his hands were clean, there was no blackening or singeing”, “there was no scorch marks on the entry wound”, and with Elvira wearing a kimono and knickers, no fingerprints were found on the gun as she wore gloves”. That said, if the two of them were face to face and struggling with the gun, “it was unlikely they would hold it at lung height”, “it would have been practically impossible for a man holding the butt of the revolver and struggling to have pulled the trigger, and fired it in the direction it was fired”, and with the gun being “one of the safest revolvers made”, requiring a lot of force and only space for one finger in the trigger guard, “if two people struggled with it, they’d have great difficulty in pulling the trigger”. When asked to give an account, Elvira the pampered socialite was petulant and flew into a temper. When told she would be taken to Gerald Road police station for questioning, she struck Sergeant Campion across the face, wailing “how dare you threaten to put me in a cell, you vile swine”, which he didn’t do. Having to be restrained, with the police informing her mother, Lady Mullens of her arrest, she barked “now you know who my mother is, you will be a little more careful in what you say to me”. But what else would you expect? When questioned, she was emotional, restless, as well as cold and callous, with her only thoughts being about herself, but as a self-interested socialite, it’s what she did. Tried in Court 1 of the Old Bailey on the 4th of July 1932, she pleaded not guilty to the charge of murder, before a gallery packed full of journalists, as outside, her legion of fans protested her innocence. Putting on a show before an adoring crowd, rather than focussing on the details of the case, the press dedicated the first third of every article to her hair, her clothes, her brave demeanour, how she wept and raised a tiny green bottle of smelling salts to her nose as her love letters were read out in court. But often, they forgot to even mention the name of the victim, which many of them also got wrong. With many famous faces giving testimony as to her good character, and Michael being little more than an afterthought as the socialite hogged the limelight, with the jury retiring to consider all of the evidence against her, on Thursday 7th July at 4:45pm, after just two hours, a verdict was returned. Judge: “on the charge of murder, how do you find her?”, Foreman: “not guilty”. Judge: “on the charge of manslaughter, how do you find her?”, Foreman: “not guilty”. Judge: “and on the charge of grievous bodily harm, how do you find her?”, Foreman: “not guilty”. Unable to prove beyond reasonable doubt that she intended to kill him, Elvira Barney was acquitted of all charges, and she walked free. (End) Deluged with bouquets and congratulations, this should have been the reawakening of her celebrity status, but with The Bright Young Things having lost their sparkle, Elvira went into self-imposed exile. Three weeks after her acquittal, while travelling at high speeds and drunk, Elvira crashed her car near Cannes on the French south coast, seriously injuring Countess Caroline Karolyi, and leading to another court case. Disowned by her family, divorced by John Barney, and with her upcoming marriage to Paris dress designer Rene Jean Cady being postponed, she fell in a deep bout of depression and alcoholism. Three and a half years after the trial, having to be helped to her bedroom by the porter of Hotel de Colisee in Paris owing to hard drinking, on the Christmas Day of 1936, Elvira was found dead. She was alone, and with her fame almost gone - unlike the murder - her “natural death” was barely reported. Unlike many of those supposed Bright Young Things, Elvira Barney’s name has vanished into obscurity, just as Michael’s had at his own trial for his own death. But such is the curse of fame and infamy, as when a celebrity is beloved, no matter what, they are given the benefit of the doubt. And yet, when the other party isn’t as liked, or as famous, or as praised by the press from whom we get most of our information, all-too-often the facts are cherrypicked to sell a narrative which best suits the celebrity. The Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast has been researched using the original declassified police investigation files, court records, press reports and as many authentic sources as possible, which are freely available in the public domain, including eye-witness testimony, confessions, autopsy reports, first-hand accounts and independent investigation, where possible. But these documents are only as accurate as those recounting them and recording them, and are always incomplete or full of opinion rather than fact, therefore mistakes and misrepresentations can be made. As stated at the beginning of each episode (and as is clear by the way it is presented) Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast is a 'dramatisation' of the events and not a documentary, therefore a certain amount of dramatic licence, selective characterisation and story-telling (within logical reason and based on extensive research) has been taken to create a fuller picture. It is not a full and complete representation of the case, the people or the investigation, and therefore should not be taken as such. It is also often (for the sake of clarity, speed and the drama) presented from a single person's perspective, usually (but not exclusively) the victim's, and therefore it will contain a certain level of bias and opinion to get across this single perspective, which may not be the overall opinion of those involved or associated. Murder Mile is just one possible retelling of each case. Murder Mile does not set out to cause any harm or distress to those involved, and those who listen to the podcast or read the transcripts provided should be aware that by accessing anything created by Murder Mile (or any source related to any each) that they may discover some details about a person, an incident or the police investigation itself, that they were unaware of.
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Nominated BEST BRITISH TRUE-CRIME PODCAST, 4th Best True-Crime Podcast by This Week, iTunes Top 25 Podcast, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50, The Telegraph's Top 5, Crime & Investigation Channel's Top 20 True-Crime Podcasts, also seen on BBC Radio, Sky News, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week.
Welcome to the Murder Mile UK True-Crime Podcast and audio guided walk of London's most infamous and often forgotten murder cases, all set within and beyond the West End.
EPISODE TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY-NINE: On Saturday 24th January 1976 at 1:30pm, in their second floor flat at 41 St Olaf’s Road in Fulham, John Park brutally murdered his heavily pregnant wife. In an act of rage which was unusual for such a calm and placid man, he would claim he murdered her over money she had given to her daughter. But was there more to this?
THE LOCATION
As many photos of the case are copyright protected by greedy news organisations, to view them, take a peek at my entirely legal social media accounts - Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
The location is marked with a black coloured symbol of a bin at the middle of the markers near the word 'Fulham'. To use the map, click it. If you want to see the other maps, click here.
SOURCES: This case was researched using some of the sources below.
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE: Welcome to Murder Mile. Today I’m standing on St Olaf’s Road in Fulham, SW6; a short walk south of the slaying of a super spy, four streets north of the dumping of the woman in red, three roads east of Lyn, Jan and the man only known as “him”, and a short dawdle from the brutality of Ronald True - coming soon to Murder Mile. St Olaf’s Road is a quiet residential street complete with two long lines of brown bricked three-storey tenements with each flat accessible by a communal door. It’s the kind of place newly-weds move into; where they kiss every six seconds, say “I wuv you” in a vomit-inducing voice and decorate it with ‘live-laugh-love’ and other heart-shaped shit. Only to twig that they can’t stand each other, scream “I hate you, you noodle dicked f**k”, flush the wedding cake down the bog, use his tux as loo paper, and then be stuck in a 20 square foot prison with the world’s worst cellmate for a very long time - aaaah love. Relationships require effort, as was proven in 1975, when John & Elizabeth Park moved to 41 St Olaf’s Road. Recently married and with a baby on the way, they were described as devoted. But with a point of friction gnawing at their souls, what began as an ordinary day would soon turn into a cruel murder. My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 249: Besotted: The Endless Love of Mr & Mrs Park. John & Elizabeth Park were two sides of the same coin. Recently, life had been a struggle for Elizabeth Mary Deevy, as being raised a Catholic in the Irish city of Kilkenny to a farmer father and a housewife mother, she lived in accordance with The Good Book. Born in 1937, as was decreed by her faith and family, by the age of 18, she married James Kavanagh; at 19, she gave birth to Margaret the first of her four children, and for almost twenty years she made-do with an unhappy union. But by 1973, for reasons she never spoke of, the marriage was dissolved. Leaving behind all but her eldest to be raised by her parents, alongside Margaret who was 18, they moved to London, although the relationship between them was often said to be sour and perfunctory. The 1970s was a dark time in Britain owing to the strikes, a recession, unemployment and a fever of anti-immigrant sentiment which rippled among the uneducated, especially against the Irish. Elizabeth was a lone woman in a world where a divorced or unwed mother was spurned. What got her through was her strength, looks and her savvy brain, as being spendthrift and frugal, as a loving mother, her priority was to send money back to her children, and to give them her last penny in times of strife. Working during the day as a cashier for the North Thames Gas Board and in the evenings as a much-loved barmaid at The Elm pub, both on North End Road, although a little sullen, her life was good… …but having been parted from her children, owing to a broken heart, what she lacked was love. Like two odd-shaped peas in an uneven pod, it was their differences which complimented each other, as where-as she was quiet, he was chatty, and as a previously married mother of four who was experienced in life, love and heartbreak, as a 43-year-old virgin, he was innocent and untouched. Born in the Scottish city of Aberdeen on 29th of December 1932, John Alexander Park known as Jack was one of six siblings to a housewife mother and a dockyard stevedore father. As a devout Protestant, John never let his beliefs override his life, therefore everyone said he was always polite, kind and fun, but as a moral man who was held by his traditional values of rarely drinking and never gambling, lying, cheating or stealing, although now his 40s, he refused to engage in sex before he was legally wed. John had had girlfriends before, several in fact, and always being pleasant and loving, the ladies liked him, and although – as a short, stocky, balding man, whose harelip was masked by a broad moustache - some suggested that he was ‘punching above his weight’ by dating a such stunner, but balancing each other out perfectly, where-as she was the brains and the beauty, he was the charm and calm. Since leaving school, John had always worked hard. In the early 1950s, he was a Leading Aircraftsman in the Royal Air Force. Demobbed, he became a bakery driver. In 1956, he became a Lieutenant in the Salvation Army (who he remained with for the rest of his life). But in 1958, with God testing his morals, it was while working for a cleaners in Aberdeen that he stole some money. “It wasn’t a lot” John said, but getting two years’ probation for theft, it was a mistake that he swore he would never make again. After two years as a stevedore at the Aberdeen Shipping Company, needing a fresh start, in November 1972, he moved to London. Lodging at the home of Mr & Mrs Hawes of 2 Rylstone Road in Fulham, he was said to be “a nice fellow, sober and clean”, who paid his rent regularly having become the manager of a Ladbrokes betting shop in Notting Hill, with a big part of his job being to investigate the cheats. It was in Autumn 1974 that Elizabeth and John first met during what was an unlikely circumstance. As a barmaid at The Elm pub, Elizabeth served drinks at the weekly meeting of the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes known as ‘The Buffs’, a fraternal order that John was part of. As “an exemplary member who never missed a meeting”, as may be expected from an all-male group getting drunk in a pub, the banter often turned bawdy with many of the men bragging about their sexual conquests. John didn’t though. Said to be “kind and respectful to women, but never inappropriate”, maybe it was his inexperience which made him go quiet in those moments, maybe he was raised better and didn’t feel that such talk was suitable for outside of the bedroom, or maybe, it was because he was in love. Trading glances across the bar; in her he saw beauty, in him she saw kindness, in each other they saw a future, and although different, many stated “they were a couple who were clearly besotted”. Within weeks, this devoted twosome moved-in together… …one year later, he brutally murdered her. Around the time they met, Elizabeth moved into a second floor at 41 St Olaf’s Road in Fulham. It was small but affordable on a single woman’s wage, it had extra space for if her daughter dropped, and needing a bit of decorating done, in early 1975, John popped in with some paint tins and his brushes. Said by older generations to be ‘courting’, that night, they shared a meal, a little wine and a lovely chat, but being unmarried, they kissed, but did nothing more to test his bubbling temptations, so instead he slept in the kitchen which Elizabeth respected. By the month’s end, they were living together, and although they slept in the same room, until married, there was never any nookie. With their loving and wholesome relationship blossoming, seeing her as ‘the one’, in March 1975, over a meal at the Steak House on Dawes Road, John asked Elizabeth to marry him, and she said yes. Having planned a Christmas wedding amidst the snow surrounded by their nearest and dearest, to cement their love forever, they bought each other engagement rings, and wore them until they day they died. By all accounts, they loved each other, they made each other smile, and they were never unkind to one another. Their neighbours never heard them shout, as John said “we never had a cross word, we always spoke if there was anything to discuss, we always talked it out to the logical points”. Which made sense, as every relationship has its troubles, and their first test as a couple was about to come. In the first week of April 1975, getting word that her elderly father was growing sicker, Elizabeth went back to Ireland as a loving daughter, and as a caring mother, it also gave her a chance to see her kids. For some couples, time apart can be a true test of their fidelity, but reuniting on 9th April at Heathrow Airport, seeing each other and jumping into each other’s arms, their love was as a strong as ever. So much so that – whether her father’s ill health played a pivotal role in her decision is uncertain – keen to change their winter wedding to a summer one, John jumped at the chance and fixed a sooner date. With just seven weeks until their nuptials, and with neither getting any younger (as Elizabeth was 39 and John was 43), keen to start a family of their own, in preparation for their first time being intimate on their wedding night, on the 12th of May, Elizabeth said she had her contraceptive coil removed. On 31st May 1975 at Fulham Town Hall, Elizabath Kavanagh became Mrs Park. As a small but charming affair with a few friends but very few family, following a little party at his ex-landlady’s home on Lillie Road, that night they went to the seaside town of Eastbourne, and for the first time, they had sex. Mr & Mrs Park were a lovely couple, described by many as “always happy and joking” and following a week’s holiday in Jersey, by the end of June, Elizabeth was excited to announce that she was pregnant. Being overjoyed at the news that they were to become parents, as often happens, their relationship would be tested not by the stress of an impending birth, but by circumstances outside of their control. As before this beloved baby was even born… …it would end in a whirlwind of anger and hate. The summer of 1975 began beautifully but ended badly. The first conflict between John & Elizabeth was over her eldest child, Margaret, who John said was “charming to everyone, but her mother. I think she tried to commit suicide by slashing her wrists. I believe she’s neurotic”. Aged 19, although she was working as a typist, John said “Margaret only turned up when she wanted something” – usually money. With a baby on the way, their frugal budget was stretched even thinner. Even with two bank accounts - hers (£650 in credit) and their joint account (with just £118), being 12 years before the statutory maternity pay was introduced meaning she would have to quit her job and receive no benefits, their financial survival was based on her savings and his wage as the manager of a Notting Hill betting shop. But as things started to go wrong, it unleashed a domino effect of little disasters. John’s job was their security, but in August, owing to what he described a “mistake with a betting slip”, as he was a fraud inspector with a criminal record for theft, he lost his job. Struggling to get another, he had to retrain as an accountant, but until he graduated, they’d be living off their dwindling savings. By the Christmas of 1975, with the couple tightening their budgets further but still doing okay, on the 20th of December, Margaret – who John said was “always sponging money from her mother” – claimed she had either lost her purse, or it was stolen. As a good caring mother, although she was eight months pregnant and needed every penny she had, Elizabeth bought her a new purse and placed inside £50. John was not happy about this, not happy at all, as £1 given to a grown woman was £1 taken from his baby’s mouth, and although he knew he couldn’t win the fight as the money come from her personal account, not theirs, all he could do was to say his piece, apologise and let it lie. And yet, it was another cruel incident, which tested their nerves. Christmas had been good, New Year had been jolly, and with Mr & Mrs Park excited for the year ahead, on Saturday 17th January 1976 at around lunchtime, being a loyal loving househusband for his heavily pregnant wife, John returned from shopping, with his arms weighed down with food and nappies. Opening the tenement door on St Olaf’s Road, what greeted him was horror, as lying on her back in the communal stairwell was Elizabeth; slightly bruised, bleeding a little and screaming a lot. It was the last of several incidents which had been sent to test their love and their faith, and although she had fallen hard on the cold concrete steps, they hugged each other tight to learn that “the baby is fine”. Like many parents, they were stressed but excited to welcome to the world their first baby, a boy… …only one week later, it wouldn’t be the birth which would kill the mother, but her loving husband. Saturday 24th January 1976 was an ordinary day. It was cold and wet with a blanket of snow. As John told the Police, “everything was alright between us. I went shopping, I came back about 11:30am. Elizabeth was up, we had something to eat, then said ‘I’m not feeling too well, I’ll go and lie down’”. Being just 10 to 14 days from giving birth, and still worried after her fall, every kick the baby made or didn’t make gave them a cause for concern. “She went to the bedroom” John said, “I was watching some horse-racing on the telly. After a while, I felt tired myself, and went to see her”. It was 1:30pm. Under the covers, lay his heavily pregnant wife, all round, swollen and groaning with discomfort. “You okay?” he asked, “yeah, I’m fine, it’ll pass” she replied, as he put an extra pillow under her head. There was nothing they could do but wait, as the little mite inside her squirmed, kicking her in the kidneys. Feeling both helpless and useless, John asked “do you want anything? Cup of tea? Toast?”, but replying “no, I’m fine”, with Elizabeth not wanting to be impolite, she suggested “why don’t you go to the pub, I’ll be fine, I’m just going to try and get some sleep”. And he could have done, but as a good man who was devoted to his beloved wife, all he wanted was to look after her, so he laid on the bed beside her. As they lay there, staring at the ceiling and chatting, “Elizabeth mentioned that she was worried about Margaret because she hadn’t heard from her in several days”. She had been a constant point of friction between them, and although they always talked it out, that day their little chat became a little heated. “I said something like ‘why don’t you have nothing to do with her’”, as with the midwife advising that she get rid of “all the stresses in her life” John worried that “since we married, we’ve spent quite a bit of money, time and a hell of a lot of worry on her”. Now they had bigger priorities; a baby, no jobs and their savings were dwindling, she shouldn’t be worrying about whether her grown-up daughter who earned a good wage as a typist was getting everything she wanted, when she wanted it. It wasn’t right. But guilt can be a cruel motivator, and given that this wasn’t their money, but hers which she had earned herself, and a decision which was almost certainly guided by a sense of regret having left three of her children behind in Ireland and with the relationship between her and Margaret a little strained, “she relied ‘Jack, I’ve got my own money and I’ll use it to help Margaret in any way I can’”. According to John, that was the spark which ignited the fire inside him. The neighbours didn’t hear any shouts, any screams, or any cries, their voices didn’t raise above a level of mild annoyance, but with the weight of the world on top of them, John said “I just went potty”. Having turned away from him, as (in her mind) their little tiff was over, “I stood”, John recalled. By the bed was a wine bottle he was keeping to fashion into a lamp, “she was crying ‘Jack, it’s my money, I’ll use it any way I want’. I picked up the bottle in anger. I’m sure I was only going to throw it against the wall, but I hit her on the head once and the bottle shattered completely, and she gave a small scream”. He had never hit her before, but for some reason, with a rage bubbling inside of him, he didn’t stop, he couldn’t stop, as having mounted and pinned her swollen body to the bed, he attacked her again. “She sort of gurgled, I panicked, and I picked up a heavy ashtray from the side and hit her over the head several times. She was unconscious, I wasn’t sure if she was dead”. Only still he wasn’t finished. “I let go of the ash tray and picked up a heavy flower vase and hit her again several times on the head”. And although he had fractured her skull, with the sharp shards of bone embedding into her brain, “I don’t know why I stopped hitting her. I can’t tell you why”, but having reached over and opened his drawer, “I went for the ties, I wanted to make sure she was dead. I got two and tied them round her neck, one at a time as tight as I could”, as he strangled the life out of her, and their baby inside of her. And there she lay, her tongue protruding, her eyes glassy and wide, her beautiful face now a mottled mix of bursting purples and seeping reds, as within her swollen bump, the baby gave its last ever kick. John stood there, in a daze, his hands dripping with her blood. “I went onto the kitchen and took all my clothes off and washed the blood off”, but not thinking, he didn’t destroy them as any killer would, he hid them in his own kitchen cupboard. “I went out with the idea of going to the police station. I wish I had. Instead I went back into the house. For some reason, I then tied her legs with her stockings. I put the pillowcase over her head so I couldn’t see the blood. I then covered her over with the big red bed cover”, and there he sat, in the kitchen, trying to watch the telly. “I made a cup of tea and tried to eat but couldn’t. I still thought I would give myself up”. But the next day, having packed a bag, and with £120 in his pocket, he fled… …at least, that’s what he said. His apprehension was simple, as being a man with no plan, he headed to Eastbourne where they had honeymooned and laid low. But not wanting to be a burden, he returned to pay the milkman, he told their friends she was staying at her younger sisters, each week he attended his meeting of ‘The Buffs’, and although he put on a good show of pretending that everything was okay, he was confused by the anger he had unleashed on the woman he loved, and the baby he would never see or hold. On the 15th of February 1976, with Helena, Elizabeth’s younger sister popping by (who supposedly she had gone to stay with), as the date of the baby’s birth had passed and no-one had heard a thing, seeing the rooms in darkness and the flat’s door locked, she called the police, and they forced the door. After three weeks, with flies having feasted on her seeping blood, her body so badly decomposed that an autopsy would prove difficult. It was a murder as violent as any the detectives had seen. With both ties biting deep into her neck, her death was due to strangulation. With no money or jewellery missing, robbery was not a motive. With her nightdress rucked up and her knickers exposed, although there were bloodstains on her crotch, there was no evidence of a sexual assault. And with defensive wounds to her arms and hands, this mother had fought to protect her unborn baby with her dying breath. The scene was as he had left it… and all that was missing was the culprit. Having alerted the banks, he was spotted on Thursday 19th February at 10:30am trying with withdraw £10 from a Lloyds Bank in Eastbourne. 20 minutes later, with DS Geggie seeing him staring at a full pint of beer at the Devonshire pub on Seaside Road, he asked “are you John Alexander Park?”, and having replied “yes”, he calmly walked with the officer to the local police station, a broken man. (end) Arrested, he confessed, and stated “I am ashamed of what I did to Elizabeth. I loved her dearly”. Tried at the Old Bailey from the 23rd to the 28th of July 1976, he pleaded not guilty to murder, but offered a plea of manslaughter by provocation, having dropped his initial story that her death was over money. In court, John would state that when he saw her in bed that day, she cruelly said to him 'do you think this is yours?' showing him her stomach. As she said it, on her face “was a hysterical and smirky look and there was an incredulous tone to her voice as though I had believed that the baby was mine”. The prosecution would pour scorn over this obvious besmirching of Elizabeth’s good name, as no-one had seen her cavorting with another man, no-one had heard any gossip about her getting pregnant by anyone but John, and in his first statement, he had never mentioned that the child might not be his. But the date of baby’s conception was problematic. As a 43-year-old Christian who had refused to have pre-marital sex with her; the facts prove they were married on the 31st of May and that she supposedly had her coil removed on the 12th of May (although her decomposition made that impossible to verify), but her hospital records would confirm that the baby was conceived between 26th April and 3rd May, at least one month before they were married. John would state “I did not have sex with her until we got married”. But if he didn’t, who did? Was she seeing someone else? Was he? Or was he too ashamed to admit that he’d had sex out of wedlock? Having retired, after less than an hour, he was unanimously found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison. He died in Lambeth in October 1998, and although the violence inflicted upon her didn’t match their minor tiff over money, whatever his motive truly was, they both took it to their graves. The Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast has been researched using the original declassified police investigation files, court records, press reports and as many authentic sources as possible, which are freely available in the public domain, including eye-witness testimony, confessions, autopsy reports, first-hand accounts and independent investigation, where possible. But these documents are only as accurate as those recounting them and recording them, and are always incomplete or full of opinion rather than fact, therefore mistakes and misrepresentations can be made. As stated at the beginning of each episode (and as is clear by the way it is presented) Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast is a 'dramatisation' of the events and not a documentary, therefore a certain amount of dramatic licence, selective characterisation and story-telling (within logical reason and based on extensive research) has been taken to create a fuller picture. It is not a full and complete representation of the case, the people or the investigation, and therefore should not be taken as such. It is also often (for the sake of clarity, speed and the drama) presented from a single person's perspective, usually (but not exclusively) the victim's, and therefore it will contain a certain level of bias and opinion to get across this single perspective, which may not be the overall opinion of those involved or associated. Murder Mile is just one possible retelling of each case. Murder Mile does not set out to cause any harm or distress to those involved, and those who listen to the podcast or read the transcripts provided should be aware that by accessing anything created by Murder Mile (or any source related to any each) that they may discover some details about a person, an incident or the police investigation itself, that they were unaware of.
Nominated BEST TRUE-CRIME PODCAST at The British Podcast Awards, 4th Best True Crime Podcast by The Week, The Telegraph's Top Five True-Crime Podcasts, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50 and iTunes Top 25.
EPISODE TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY-EIGHT:
On Monday 15th January 1945 at 12:15am, a Dutch seaman called Jan Pureveen was murdered at Fred White’s coffee stall on Euston Road. It was a brutal and unprovoked attack which came out of nowhere, and yet, it was both expected and unexpected, as the killer was already known to the police as ‘The Creeper’.
THE LOCATION
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The location is marked with a lime green symbol of a bin at the top right of the markers near the word 'London Euston'. To use the map, click it. If you want to see the other maps, click here.
SOURCES: This case was researched using some of the sources below.
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE: Welcome to Murder Mile. Today, I’m standing on Euston Road, NW1; one street west of the Camden Ripper’s picked up place, two roads south of Paula Field’s dismembered body parts, one street north of the Sad Faced Killer’s last sleep, and a short walk from the despicable deadbeat who drilled - coming soon to Murder Mile. Situated at 137-139 Euston Road in King’s Cross currently stands the Travelodge. Like most chain hotels, the complimentary coffee in the rooms will undoubtably be bad, it always is; being cheapo crap which tastes like it’s been scraped off a baboon’s backside, with a single serving of milk so mean I’d be better off suckling on a mouse’s teat, and with just two biscuits (yes, two), either they don’t want me to ‘have a nice time’, or they think I’m not a man but a chihuahua on hunger strike. Thankfully, back in 1945, on the ground floor stood an all-night coffee-stall owned by Fred White, a place where during the wartime blackout servicemen and civilians could chow down on sandwiches, with cups of hot coffee and tea. It was cheap, friendly and safe… or at least it should have been. On Monday 15th January 1945 at 12:15am, a Dutch seaman called Jan Pureveen was murdered at Fred White’s coffee stall. It was a brutal and unprovoked attack which came out of nowhere, and yet, it was both expected and unexpected, as the killer was already known to the police as ‘The Creeper’. My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 247: ‘The Creeper’. (Creeping feet) Most people are murdered by those they already know. Stranger attacks are rare, killings without motive are even rarer, and although it does happen… it doesn’t happen like this. Sunday 14th January 1945, King’s Cross. After the D-Day landings as the Allies swept across Europe, the German war-machine sputtered to a halt and bombing raids were few and far between, like most cities, London was no longer in a full ‘blackout’ which left its streets in near darkness, but a ‘dim-out’ meaning that (unless an air-raid sounded) lighting was permitted up to the equivalent of moonlight. The night was dark, cold and cloudy, as a sprinkling of frost peppered the pavements. At the Osborne Hotel on Endsleigh Street, two Dutch merchant seamen on shore leave met for the first time and headed out to grab a bite to eat and to sink a few pints. They were Gerrit Bravenboer, a short but stocky sailor in his mid-20s, and 27-year-old Jan Bernardus Pureveen of Rotterdam; a 6-foot 2-inch hulk with a barrel chest, ham-hock legs, no neck, no charm, no patience and very little brains, whose tree-trunk thick arms were crudely doodled with enough rude tattoos to make a docker blush. Normally, I would tell you about his life story, about the pain, misery and heartbreak of his upbringing so that you can sympathise with his plight and perhaps cry when his life is cruelly ended. But I won’t. Jan was a violent drunken brute, a racist thug and a bigoted moron, who picked fights without reason, who wasn’t liked (as you’ll see) and whose actions that night speak for themselves. And although, in theory, he was the victim, he had more to do with his own death than the man who murdered him. At 7pm, at The Rising Sun pub in King’s Cross, Gerrit said that Jan had sunk at “least eight pints of beer”. As a big man with a cast-iron liver who could hold his drink, he wasn’t stumbling drunk, just loud and mouthy having engaged in yet another pointless argument with the barman, until last orders. Being kicked out at 10pm, feeling famished, they headed to Walley’s Coffee Stall nearby, where Gerrit confirmed “we had steak and chips, some bread and coffee” to soak up the booze and mellow Jan out. Around midnight, back at the Osborne Hotel, “Jan was noisy”, Gerrit said, “he started singing, Jan said he wanted some cigarettes and asked me to go with him as he didn’t know the way”, so he did. The nearest place selling ciggies was White’s Coffee Stall at 137-139 Euston Road, owned by Fred White. As a fast-food stall with space for a few standing customers, as Fred and Charles the manager cooked and served, perched at the bar were seven customers; Jan & Gerrit, Gerardus Nederpel of Antwerp, a fourth unidentified Dutch seaman, US Army Private Jeremiah Sullivan, a black GI called Private Herman Carter Robinson, and his paid-for date for the night, a white prostitute called Alice Emily Shepherd. They’d just met, as being a lonely and in need of a little ‘lady love’, she said “hullo” to him as he passed The Liberty Club in Upper Woburn Place, and ahead of some nookie, he invited her for tea and cake. The mood was fine, until Jan, who’d become pissed off that the stall didn’t sell the brand of cigarettes he wanted got pissy, as Gerrit recalled “I was standing back as I was fed-up with him grumbling”, and as this minor inconvenience had narked him, Fred said “he was mad drunk and looking for trouble”. At 12:15am, in what Gerrit recalled as “for no reason”, having never seen each other before, Jan barked at Herman “you black bastard, you wouldn’t be with a white girl in the States. I have been over there and know what they would do with you, you Mexican bastard”, as Gerrit tried to quieten him. Being weary of this brute’s aggression as Jan spate “you Mexican nigger”, Herman rightly said “watch that stuff” meaning his foul language. But as Jan’s racist blood boiled hotter, having pushed the black GI to goad him to fight, as Gerrit held Jan back, Alice & Herman saw their chance to leave, and did. Herman and Alice were walking away, heading back to The Liberty Club, a hostel for black servicemen, and as far as they were concerned the argument was over. They had only made it 25 feet west, but as they (ironically) passed a coffin maker’s and the front entrance of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson hospital, having broken free, as Jan screamed “I’ll break your bloody neck”, he dived right on top of Herman. Witnesses state, the fuming Dutchman repeatedly punched Herman in the face and slammed his head into the pavement, as the two men tumbled in the road risking being run over as cars swerved to avoid them, and although Fred had tried to split them up, again Jan broke free and grabbed Herman by the throat screaming “I’ll kill you, you black bastard, I’ll fucking kill you” – as all racists are thick as pig shit. As the two scuffled and Alice screamed, Fred later stated “I parted them again. The coloured soldier went away with the woman, and I stood with the Dutchman until they were out of sight. All the time they were going up the road, he was shouting ‘I’ll kill you, you black bastard’. He was raving mad”. With The Liberty Club so close, having said goodbye to Alice, Herman were safely behind a locked door in minutes, so by the time that Gerrit & Fred had released the seething sailor, he’d vanished for good. No-one at the coffee stall had anything to do with Jan after that, nobody spoke or looked at him; not Fred or Charles who worked there, not Gerardus or the unidentified Dutch sailor, not Private Jeremiah Sullivan who headed back to his hotel, or Jan’s transient friend Gerrit who had walked away in shame. Herman was gone, and yet, barely seconds later, Jan would be dead. His killer was a total stranger to him… …who was known as ‘The Creeper’. ‘The Creeper’ was an enigma, and what little we do know about him is sketchy at best. Born in 1907, supposedly in Lagos, Nigeria in West Africa, although he was also said to also be a native of Freetown in Sierra Leone, unremarkably ‘The Creeper’s real name was Phillip Berry. Being short and stockily built in a scruffy brown suit and a trilby hat, burdened by moon-shaped face, the thin black moustache on his lip looked like a slug had humped his nose, and with glasses so thick his eyes looked as wide as cracked saucers, although an odd little man, always seen wearing crepe-soled ‘brothel creepers’ on his feet, he walked with a skulking gait as if he was up to something bad. His nickname amongst the prostitutes was ‘Jesus’, as apparently, mid-coitus he was prone to quoting scripture from The Bible, and although strange, it wasn’t the only thing about Phillip Berry which was. For 20 years, Berry had been a boilerman stoking the fires which fuelled the engines of cargo ships like the SS Honomu. It was a dark gruelling job for little pay, but that all changed on 5th of July 1942, when this 7000-tonne beast was torpedoed by a German U-boat and sunk in the Barents Sea off Finland. Of the 41 crew, 13 died, and although 28 survived, after two weeks adrift in a frozen lifeboat with no food, fire or shelter, many were badly injured, with Berry’s left fingers falling off owing to frostbite. Rescued by a British crew, Berry moved to London, got a job as a boilerman in the bowels of the War Office in Whitehall, and although he lived in small cheap lodgings across the city, he rarely slept there. Instead he chose to snooze outside in the air, on a chair by a fire in a club (as if he was back onboard his ship), or often spending his nights prowling the street, ‘The Creeper’ had a reputation as a weirdo. By day he worked, by night he stalked, as his soft-shoes silently creaked along the red-light districts of Soho, Paddington and King’s Cross, looking for whatever love he could find, for at most £1 a time. In October 1942, at a pub in Soho, he met 31-year-old Mary Miller from Scotland, a dance hostess and prostitute, and although he said he loved her, she’d state “we met from time to time by appointment”. As a widow from an unhappy marriage with three children all of whom had died, Mary’s life was hard and made harder as her dead husband had no savings or pension, so she had no choice but to sell sex. In January 1943, Berry moved in with Mary. Only this wasn’t a relationship built on love, but fear, as being a nasty piece of shit, her face was bruised and her body battered as often he would strangle her. Being possessive and jealous of her having sex with other men - which was odd, given that he lived off earnings as a prostitute - as an abusive bully who regularly carried one of two revolvers in his pockets, at least twice that we know of, the police were called to their flat, as he had threatened to kill her. In August 1943, as Mary sat on the windowsill cleaning the windows of her flat at Cambridge Road in Kilburn, “he caught hold of my legs” Mary said “and tried to push me back out of the window. I kicked him so hard he let go, but as he pushed me, he shouted ‘you’ll look fine the other side’” meaning dead. On Saturday 19th February 1944, in her second floor flat at 20 Torriano Avenue in Kentish Town, having grabbed Mary by the throat and pinned her to the bed, before he could hurt her further, her lodger and a client wrenched him free, and insisting he leave, she tossed his suitcase out of the front door. That day, Mary complained to the Police, they filed a report, but they did nothing as being a prostitute, it was said “she bought it on herself”. Her life was worth nothing, and although Phillip Berry was a criminal who was known to the Kentish Town Police as ‘The Creeper’, they would do nothing to protect her… …until he turned to murder. On Tuesday 22nd February 1944, two days later, Berry returned. Entering what he saw as his flat (which he had been booted out of), to collect his suitcase (which wasn’t there), only to find his woman in bed with another man (a cowardly client who fled in terror with his trousers round his ankles), 10-year-old Joseph Youles, a neighbour, said that he heard “a man knocking a woman about in that house”. As he rained down fists upon Mary’s screaming and steadily swelling face, with her trying to defend herself using a kitchen knife, neighbours said they heard her rear window open. Why? Is uncertain. Maybe she was trying to call for help, or maybe it was her only means of escape. But with two 9-year-old twins (the Richardson boys) at number 28 clearly stating “the black man pushed Mrs Miller out of the window… he pushed her in the small of her back”, with the entire street alerted to her panicked screams, “I saw her hanging out of the window, she fell downwards, and screamed all the time”. Falling 20 feet onto the hard concrete of the basement steps below, she landed head-first. Berry claimed “Mrs Miller suddenly jumped from the window”, at which, again he claimed, “I hurried from the flat to get a policeman”. Only the witnesses saw “a black man calmly walk out of the house”. With the Police and an ambulance arriving a few minutes later, Dr Sydney Tibbles stated she was found in a crumpled heap wearing just her pyjamas. Bleeding from a severe skull fracture and coughing up blood, as she drifted in and out of consciousness, she was rushed to St Mary’s hospital in Islington. Listed as critical, with her left eye ruptured and protruding, blood in her spinal fluid, and her brain swollen, Mary fell into a coma, and although described as ‘at death’s door’, miraculously she survived. Callously describing her as “not my wife”, just “a girl”, in the several statements Berry made to Police Inspector MacDonald - all of which were inconsistent - pleading not guilty to her attempted murder at Clerkenwell Magistrates Court, on the 18th May 1944, he was tried at the Old Bailey. Discharged from hospital a day later, Mary was too sick to give evidence and owing to her head injury, she couldn’t recall what had happened that day. And although, it should have been a clear-cut case of attempted murder, with much of the evidence based on what the witnesses had seen, it wasn’t to be. With the defence describing Mary as “a women who preyed on coloured men when they have money to spend”, and even the Judge sympathising with him by stating “it was a great pity he had anything to do with her”, bafflingly finding ‘no intent’ to his crime, on the 22nd May, the charge was reduced from attempted murder to grievous bodily harm, and Phillip Berry was sentenced to just nine months. Sent to Brixton Prison, he served just six, and was out by November. Mary was left a broken woman, who walked with a limp, suffered from epilepsy, sickness, headaches and dizziness, and barely unable to work legally (let alone illegally), she struggled to get by on benefits. Berry was a violent man, who was selfish and sinister, and although she still bore the physical scars and emotional wounds he had inflicted upon her, on Boxing Day, at a Chinese café on New Compton Street in Soho, he stalked her for third time that month, and pestered this weak woman for money. “We argued”, Mary said, “and suffering a fainting spell, as I fell against him, I struck my head on a hard object under his coat” – a 45-calibre revolver. As an evil unrepentant beast, although she was hardly half the woman she once was, unable to give him a single penny, he spat “I failed the first time, but I won’t fail a second time”. That day, on New Compton Street, Phillip Berry tried to shoot Mary Miller dead. But thankfully, having been ushered to safety by a friend, “that’s the last time I saw him”. Mary Miller would survive her violent relationship with Phillip Berry… …and although they had never met, death was looming for a Dutch sailor called Jan. Sunday 14th January 1945. After a gruelling shift shoving coal into the boilers in the fiery bowels of the War Office, even though he lived at in a small lodging at 8 Mornington Crescent in Camden, Berry had quick snooze at the Coloured Colonial Social Club at 5 Gerrard Street, and then hit the dark-lit streets; his eyes wide, his fingers gnarled and his shoes shuffling stealthily, as in his pocket lay a .45 revolver. And although the ladies-of-the-night all knew him, they wisely crossed the street to avoid The Creeper. Where he went? Nobody knows. Why he was there is a mystery. But he was. (shouting heard) “You Mexican nigger”, “hey, watch that stuff”, “I’ll break your bloody neck”. At 12:15am, outside of White’s Coffee Stall on Euston Road, the hulking lump of Jan hurled Herman’s stick thin frame to the ground; punching, kicking and slamming his head on the road, as cars swerved. Scuffling, as Alice screamed, Fred pulled the two men apart, as aided by Gerrit, he held back the red-faced seething moron who frothed with rabid racism, spitting “I’ll kill you, you black bastard, I’ll fucking kill you”, as Alice the sex-worker led Herman the black GI around the corner, until he was out of sight. The fight was over, Herman had gone, and Jan’s temper was cooling. Herman later said “the woman walked me as far as Upper Woburn Place, where she said ‘goodnight’, and I went into the Liberty Club”. It was his first day in London, he didn’t know anyone at the coffee stall, not Fred, not Alice, and especially not Jan. Like most people, he saw nothing and heard nothing. (Creeping fast) But out of the darkness, ‘The Creeper’ crept like the wind. (wind) Fred said “the next thing I recall is that a small, coloured man ran into me, knocking me off my balance, saying ‘get out of my way’”. By then, being stood in front of a coffin makers, as he venomously glared into the inky blackness amongst the ‘dim out’ into where Herman had vanished to, the last thing that Jan supposedly heard wasn’t Berry’s brothel creepers, but him shouting “you couldn’t kill me buddy”. Berry didn’t know him, they had never met, and what he saw of the incident before is uncertain. From his right pocket, Berry pulled his revolver, and although the looming shadow of the giant pasty racist swamped the little black dot, although easily a foot taller and twice his weight, the Dutch seaman was no match for four hard fast slugs from a .45. Fired from just two feet away, Jan fell like a brick. Examined by Sir Bernard Spilsbury; the first bullet ripped open his right wrist as he covered his eyes; the second burrowed deep into his chest, 2 inches from the midline, passing through his 5th and 6th rib, severing the left lung, the aorta and ricochetting off the spine; the third smashed his left shoulder and shattering into pieces, they exited like shotgun pellets, and the fourth dislocated his left elbow. Slumping to the ground, Jan could do nothing but dribble and bleed, his pale face on the frosty floor, as blood and various fluids oozed from every orifice, whether new wounds or old holes. Like most of the coffee stall patrons, many like Gerrit ran, as – rightfully - Jan wasn’t worth getting killed over. Having been shot directly outside of the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson hospital on Euston Road, the big bearded brute was carried inside and examined by Dr Dixon, but with his beer-filled chest swimming in blood and what was supposedly a heart bleeding out, Jan Pureveen was pronounced dead on arrival. A racist was no more, which is no bad thing… …but into the darkness, his killer had fled. As you might expect, the investigation was short, very short. Eight people at the coffee stall described him as a small black man with a slug-like tash, thick lensed glasses, a brown trilby, a dirty suit and a deformed left hand, and with Alice Shepherd (Herman’s brief date and a King’s Cross sex worker) stating “I heard the shots… he ran right passed me by the fire station… I knew this man as ‘Jesus’”, Inspector John Black easily identified the suspect as ‘The Creeper’. At 12:40am, Berry returned to the Coloured Colonial Social Club to sleep by the fire, and just 11 hours after the shooting, Berry was arrested in Room 0047 of the War Office, shovelling coal into a boiler. When questioned, Berry denied being there, he claimed he was just a customer, he also blamed it on another shooter, and while being escorted to prison, Berry said “I don’t wish to make a statement. I’m in enough trouble. This is my last time to Brixton”. So, why he did it remains a mystery. (End) Changing his alibi to implicate an unnamed friend who had fired the shots, at an ID Parade held at Bow Street police station, all the witnesses identified Phillip Berry as the shooter. Charged with murder, he replied “I got nothing to tell about this case. I don’t think I knows anything. That’s all”. But escorted to Brixton prison, he was heard muttering “the Dutchman called him a nigger. No man is born a nigger”. Tried at the Old Bailey on 12th of March 1945 before Justice McNaughton, pleading ‘not guilty’ to wilful murder, after a three-day trial, the jury retired for just one hour before returning with a guilty verdict. Donning his black cap, Justice McNaughton decreed that the right sentence was a death sentence, and although manslaughter was not considered as there was no hint of provocation, later commuted to life in prison, once again, Phillip Berry would serve a pitiful sentence and was released after ten years. Oddly, in November 1945, just eight months after his trial, having been reduced to theft (having stolen a pendant and a book of clothing coupons from a neighbour on Torriano Avenue) and deceit owing to the horrific injuries inflicted by her ex-boyfriend Phillip Berry, Mary Miller was tried at the Old Bailey. As a widow, Mary had struggled to scrape by. Later learning that her husband wasn’t dead, but he had in fact abandoned her, with him also having bigamously married her, Mary was charged with falsely declaring the army allowance of a serving soldier and was sentenced to six months in Holloway prison. Hearing the news, owing to her weakened heart, she collapsed. Carried to her cell by two warders, an uncompassionate judge declared "you are obviously in need of medical attention, and you will get the best of that in a place of detention". 33-year-old Mary Miller, who still had the scars of the attack on her broken skull would serve more time in prison for bigamy, than Berry did for her attempted murder. The Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast has been researched using the original declassified police investigation files, court records, press reports and as many authentic sources as possible, which are freely available in the public domain, including eye-witness testimony, confessions, autopsy reports, first-hand accounts and independent investigation, where possible. But these documents are only as accurate as those recounting them and recording them, and are always incomplete or full of opinion rather than fact, therefore mistakes and misrepresentations can be made. As stated at the beginning of each episode (and as is clear by the way it is presented) Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast is a 'dramatisation' of the events and not a documentary, therefore a certain amount of dramatic licence, selective characterisation and story-telling (within logical reason and based on extensive research) has been taken to create a fuller picture. It is not a full and complete representation of the case, the people or the investigation, and therefore should not be taken as such. It is also often (for the sake of clarity, speed and the drama) presented from a single person's perspective, usually (but not exclusively) the victim's, and therefore it will contain a certain level of bias and opinion to get across this single perspective, which may not be the overall opinion of those involved or associated. Murder Mile is just one possible retelling of each case. Murder Mile does not set out to cause any harm or distress to those involved, and those who listen to the podcast or read the transcripts provided should be aware that by accessing anything created by Murder Mile (or any source related to any each) that they may discover some details about a person, an incident or the police investigation itself, that they were unaware of.
Nominated BEST TRUE-CRIME PODCAST at The British Podcast Awards, 4th Best True Crime Podcast by The Week, The Telegraph's Top Five True-Crime Podcasts, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50 and iTunes Top 25.
Welcome to the Murder Mile UK True-Crime Podcast and audio guided walk of London's most infamous and often forgotten murder cases, all set within and beyond the West End.
EPISODE TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR:
On the evening of Wednesday 11th November 1987, two orthodox Sikhs (Rajinder Singh Batth and Mangit Singh Sunder) sat in the sports hall of Dormers Wells High School in Southall, listening to the sermons of (some say) ‘self-proclaimed’ Guru Darshan Das. It would become one of Britain rare school shootings, and yet, unlike Dunblane, it has almost been forgotten.
THE LOCATION
As many photos of the case are copyright protected by greedy news organisations, to view them, take a peek at my entirely legal social media accounts - Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
The location is marked with a lime green symbol of a bin at the top left of the markers near the word 'Greenford'. To use the map, click it. If you want to see the other maps, click here.
SOURCES: This case was researched using some of the sources below.
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE: Welcome to Murder Mile. Today, I’m standing on Allenby Road in Southall, UB1; one mile west of the last sighting of Alice Gross, two miles north of the Chohan family murders, four roads south-east of where unidentified body parts were found in the canal, and a short walk from the old Grey Woman - coming soon to Murder Mile. Set on a busy residential street, Dormers Wells High School is an all-inclusive secondary and sixth form. It’s a quiet street, but - as with all kids - once the ‘little darlings’ get sugared up, they dash about like Tasmanian Devils with a serious case of the bum-grapes and squeal like Spinal Tap’s roadie has set the volume on all their voices to 11. It’s such a horrific din, the collective cacophony can make cats wince, bats weeps, and those of us with Tinnitus actually wish the awful humming in our ears would increase. But what there isn’t is a memorial to the massacre and the bloodshed which occurred on Wednesday 11th of November 1987, when murder came to this quiet little street. Rebuilt in 2011, a £30 million regeneration project has replaced the old High School with a thoroughly modern one, and although the sounds of squealing and screaming still remain, what it erased was the tragic memory of one of Britain’s only school shootings - a mass murder which was barely reported and is almost forgotten. My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 247: The Dormers Wells Massacre. What follows is based on the declassified court records. Gun control. Before 1900, almost every British citizen could carry a gun. Thankfully, seeing sense, in 1903, the first permit and age-restriction limited the sale of weapons to children and some teenagers. By 1919, a mandatory firearms certificate was introduced meaning you had to have a legitimate reason to own a gun. In 1936, short-barrelled shotguns and fully automatic weapons were outlawed. And by 1946, the police no longer deemed ‘self-defence’ a valid excuse to own one, and yet it wasn’t until 1953, that carrying a firearm, outside of supervised and permitted areas, was made illegal. None of these controls happened by mistake, as the laws which made Britain a more civilised and safer country were all exacerbated by a series of gut-wrenching tragedies perpetuated by gun owners. On 13th March 1996, in Dunblane, a small town outside of Stirling in Scotland, 43-year-old former Scout leader Thomas Hamilton entered Dunblane Primary School armed with four handguns. Angry at being blacklisted having committed sex-crimes against minors, he opened fire, wounding 15, and murdering in cold blood, teacher Gwen Mayor and 16 of her young pupils who were all aged between 5 and 6. It remains the deadliest mass shooting in UK history, and so appalled were the people, that Parliament banned the ownership of handguns, all semi-automatics and required a mandatory registration for shotgun owners. Since 1997, 27 years ago, there hasn’t been a school shooting in the United Kingdom. Roughly 30 gun-deaths a year occur in Britain, and yet in comparison, America which has very little gun control, if any at all, it averages a whopping 19500 gun-deaths every year - that’s 53-a-day. At a cost it’s impossible to calculate, the Dunblane massacre made Britain safer, as among those who care (not about their guns, but about their children), every life is precious and should be protected. But it wasn’t a single mass-shooting which led to this change in our law… …as a few years earlier, a little-known massacre occurred at Dormers Wells High School. The target, some say, was a Guru. On 7th December 1953 in Batala, the eighth largest city in the Punjab, Mahraz Darshan Das Ji was born as the second child of three siblings. For some followers of the Sikh faith, Darshan Das was seen as a Guru, but with its more orthodox followers only regarding first ten leaders of Sikhism as the true Gurus, for others, Das was little more than a fake sage in what was a politically volatile time for Sikhs. Hailed by his followers as a spiritual master, it was said that “his birth was prophesied in Bhai Bala’s Janam Sakhi”, the biographies the founder of Sikhism, “which states that the light of Guru Nanak Dev Ji will reappear in the town of Batala and will be born into a ‘Jatt-Brahmin’ family” – which he was. With his life story chronicled by his worshippers, it is said that “at the time of his birth, a snake dropped onto his bed and immediately vanished. That brought his parents attention to seven locks in his hair which resembled the seven-headed great snake, which (as Hindus) was considered a great blessing”. As word spread about the boy and his unusual locks of hair, “Yogis, Peers and Faqirs would stop and see the young Mahraz sitting outside of the doorway… to bow and pay their respects to him”. For many Sikhs, Das was not an ordinary child, as when he visited a nearby eye-hospital, his chroniclers state “he would comfort patients with his polite words… anything he said to them would come true”. In 1966, when Das was 13 years old, while feeding the family’s buffalos with a bale of hay too heavy to lift, “a figure in a white robe with a long white beard asked him if he needed any help. The man asked him to pay attention to the work he was born to do and told him that this weight which he was struggling to lift was nothing compared to ‘the weight of the world’ he was destined to lift upon his shoulders”. Das didn’t think much of it, but this was supposedly his first encounter with the divine. In his teenage years, it was said “at night when walking down the street people around would notice a light radiating from him, almost as if he was carrying a lamp. If someone was sick in their home, he would enter the doorway and the sick person would immediately feel better. At the time Mahraz Ji did not know why this was happening but others were starting to notice his presence as being special”. In 1970, aged 17, it is said that Das received a second spiritual message, stating that “if he wanted to be true… that his true vocation was the ‘service of mankind’”, and having returned to his aunt’s home, so intense was this experience, that he remained unconscious for three days, and - later said by an priest to have been ‘touched by a divine grace’ - after 40 days of fasting, he knew what he had to do. Giving his first sermon on 15th August 1971, this became known as ‘The Day of Enlightenment’ among his worshipers, as over the coming years, as his “unique healing powers” grew, so did his followers. Aged 19, one of his miracles was performed in Batala, when a buffalo (vital to the prosperity of the village) fell into a well of snakes. Unable to get out, Das blessed it, “the well very quickly became full of water, the buffalo was spotted shortly afterwards unhurt and happily grazing in the nearby fields”. For many Sikhs, his divinity was proven when on 16th of February 1980 the Punjab was swathed in the darkness of a solar eclipse, which many believe brings about everything from bad omens to blindness. Reassuring his faithful that no ill would befall them, it didn’t, and Das announced the founding of a new faith, ‘Das Dharam’ which means ‘Service to Humanity’ and laid down its rules and practices. To his followers, Darshan Das was a holy man, who was benevolent and peaceful… …but to the more orthodox Sikhs, he was a fake and a heretic. Das first came to England on the 23rd of December 1979, one year before he founded Das Dharam, and in 1982, having established his first religious centre in Handsworth, Birmingham, he split his time between visiting his followers and giving sermons in school halls right across the United Kingdom. Seen by Orthodox Sikhs as self-styled Guru who was disliked by the fundamentalists for his moderate views, Das was a controversial figure during an increased time of infighting and divide in the Sikh faith. As with many of the world’s biggest issues, it began in the 1930s, when the governance of India was handed back to those it rightfully belonged to, after we have ravaged its resources, looted its treasures and left it in chaos. With each religious group vying for political and financial supremacy, a ‘Khalistan’ was proposed, which split the Sikh faith between those who wanted an ethno‐religious sovereign state for Sikhs in the Punjab, and those who wanted to remain as part of an independent and unified India. Many wars were fought, many lives were lost, and innumerable rivers of blood and tears were spilt. 1984, three years before Das’ murder, was a particularly turbulent year for Sikhs, as from 1st to 10th of June 1984, Operation Blue Star sought to remove militants and separatists from the holiest Sikh site, The Golden Temple. Seen as a barbaric tragedy which left 554 Sikh militants and civilians dead with 83 dead and 236 wounded among the government forces - a figure which is still hotly disputed – it marked the start of a bloody insurgency in the Punjab and radicalised further its more militant Sikhs. Das was pro-India, anti-violence and (some say) a ‘self-proclaimed Guru’, so according to his followers “some religious factions saw his teachings as a corruption of their own faith”, and therefore, he often received death threats. Having condemned the violence by Sikhs fighting for an independent state, in speeches, he defiantly stated “I hold my views as a human right which I will continue to fight for”. With his life frequently in danger, in 1986, a man armed with a sword stormed a prayer meeting with the intent to kill Darshan Das. That day, his killer failed. But it is said that Das had foretold of his own death, as just moments before he was murdered, his chroniclers state “someone in the congregation asked ‘what is death?’ and he replied ‘wait two minutes and you will see it with your own eyes’.” Das’ life was dangling by a thread, as the threats came thick and fast… …but the coverage he received in the press only angered the fundamentalist Sikhs further. In the Sunday Mirror dated 7th September 1986, it states “John Kensit says he has been miraculously cured and has cancelled his heart operation after meeting the Guru. John said ‘Darshan Das touched my hands, recited a prayer and told me to repeat it each night’. Although a heart specialist later commented in the article “I think it would be wrong to put too much credence on an Indian holy man”. The mystical Indian Guru with the healing powers had come to Britain, and although some believed it, some didn’t and some were scared of it, there were others who were angered by his ‘fake miracles’. In the Sunday Mercury dated 15th of November 1987, four days after his death, it read “an unnamed businessman claimed ‘he lost his family, his parents and sisters who had fallen under the influence of Darshan Das. He said the self-proclaimed guru preyed on the fears of women…he alleged that Mrs Das sold bottles of water for £11 claiming they had healing powers, and demanded cash donations for his sect, instead of traditional Sikh gifts such as salt, sugar and flour’”. Later stating “he came to Britain because there was money here, he is not interested in traditional gifts, only cash. I also have a video of him laughing at the people he claimed to be healing’”. Although, when asked, Chief Inspector Keith Newell of West Midland Police said “we have never had any complaints about activities at the temple”. As a precaution, Das’ home in Handsworth was protected by alarms, locks and CCTV… …only his killers wouldn’t kill him at his bed in Birmingham, but in a school in Southall. Rajinder Singh Batth was a 37-year-old orthodox Sikh who believed in violence to achieve a ‘Khalistan’. Born in the Punjab in 1950, having come to England in 1972 and later losing his job at a plastics factory in Feltham one year before, being unemployed, by 1987, he was living on Burns Avenue in Southall, a few streets south of the Dormers Wells High School, where every Wednesday, Darshan Das preached. The plan was Batth’s idea, stating “he used to read the prayers out of our Guru Granth Sahib”, the Sikh scriptures, “calling himself a guru and being a Singh, I couldn’t bear this because after the ten gurus there’s no other guru except for Guru Granth Sahib. He was spoiling our culture. We don’t want fake sages. Any person can read the prayers from the Guru Granth Sahib, but he can’t call himself a Guru”. To get close to his target and to assess the site of this soon-to-be assassination, Batth attended several of Das’ Wednesday evening prayer meetings at the Dormers Wells High School across the four months prior. As a local Sikh, he blended in, and it gave him ample opportunity to assess the room, its exits, its timing, and to get up-close to his intended target. But with the congregation ranging from 150 and 300 worshippers, he knew he needed an accomplice with the same political beliefs as him. His name was Mangit Singh Sunder, a 25-year-old factory worker from Sandwell, who Batth knew well, being both members of fundamentalist groups within the International Sikh Youth Federation. Batth’s intention was sketchy at best, as to the Police, he confessed that he intended to murder Das, stating “we thought if he called himself a Guru again, we’d shoot him. I have been to these sessions many times thinking that he would stop but did not, that is why I shot him”. Later changing this to “I thought I would hit him in the legs”, which went against all the evidence. But at his trial, he changed his story again, stating “we planned to use the guns to force the audience to listen to our words”. And yet, what is without doubt was that – in premeditation - he had purchased guns. On an undetermined date in August 1987, although he’d been unemployed for a year and wasn’t on any benefits, either on a street in Southall or outside of a Sikh temple in Handsworth – as different sources give different accounts – “I met a black man”, Batth said, and for £250 (£880 today) he bought single barrelled Soviet-made sawn-off shotgun, a .22 calibre handgun and a .38 Smith & Wesson. Batth & Sunder were ready to kill… …but did Batth save money for this, or was he funded by someone else? Wednesday 11th of November 1987 was a typically British day, as a cold wet drizzle howled among a biting wind. That day, from noon onwards, Batth & Sunder drove the second-hand car, said to be a Datsun, which they’d purchased as a getaway car and drove around Southall with the guns in the boot. Driving to an isolated spot, Batth & Sunder loaded the guns, which they split among them; Sunder had the sawn-off shotgun and the pistol (said to be a Luger), and Batth had the .38 Smith & Wesson, which may seem unfair, but with the pistol holding just six bullets and the shotgun with only two, Batth’s .38 revolver was loaded with 6 bullets, and in his jacket pocket he’d stashed 8 spares, if he needed them. At a tree, Batth test-fired his revolver, and with Sunder strapping the shotgun and pistol to his chest, and Batth hiding the pistol in his waist-strap, they parked-up on Allenby Road at 9pm, and headed in. Dressed in a black and brown turban, a shirt, trousers and a grey jumper, Batth and his gun-toting ally entered the sports hall and blended in among the throng of worshippers, who all sat upon the floor. As part of the planned format, with the evening being one of three mandatory prayer times for Sikhs, from a slightly elevated dais, Das sat and recounted songs, prayers and hymns from the holy scripture, spoken in Punjabi, and for education purposes a tape recorder captured this sermon on a cassette. At roughly 9:30pm, with the prayer meeting coming to an end, some of the congregation said “Batth looked ill-at-ease” having shifted uncomfortably as Das came amidst the congregation talking to the people, answering their questions, and Batth said “making them bow to his feet”, as if he was a Guru. “He kept talking for quite a while, we kept listening”, Batth said. But it was as Das spoke the words “we imagine in Punjabi”, that Sunder suddenly shouted “you dog” and pulled out his sawn-off shotgun. From those two words to the final shot, the Dormers Wells Massacre lasted just 16 seconds. Having stood up, both men filed down the sides of the silenced congregation. Unsure what was going on, it happened so fast that the crowd were still seated when Sunder blasted the shotgun at Das from just six feet away. And although the two men were almost within touching distance, Sunder missed. Whether though nerves, fear or bad marksmanship, as the crowd panicked and the terrified masses fled towards the nearest exits, as Sunder cocked the shotgun’s hammer, a group of Das’ most faithful dived on the shooter, flooring him before he could get a last shot off and disarming him of the shotgun. Seeing the uprising and fearing for his life, Batth held his pistol in the air, as if the warn the crowd, but still they surged. And as Sunder struggled, having pulled out the pistol, he fired in panic, shooting 45-year-old Joga Singh of Southall, who as a writer of Psalms had just seconds earlier had punched him. Seeing Sunder struggle, as the crowd cornered, floored and beat him with chairs, as the crowd surged towards him, Batth also fired in panic, shooting 41-year-old telecoms engineer Satwant Singh Panesar in the chest, and 53-year-old shopkeeper Dharan Singh Bimbrah in the leg, with both being unarmed. Batth later claimed (in a cowardly self-serving way) “I didn’t want to kill him”, meaning Das, “but when the people jumped onto my friend, I lifted up my pistol into the air, pointing it at the ceiling, hoping it would stop them doing what they were doing, a maniac grabbed my arm, pulled it down and it went off by mistake” – which the recording, eye-witness testimony and even his own confession disproved. Later stating in court, “when I fired at Das and was stepping back, my foot slipped and it was then that they caught me. Shots got fired then because my finger was on the trigger”, although witnesses state “Batth jumped on stage, pulled the .38 from his waistband and from a few feet away, shot at Das”. With this single shot entering his skull at the back of his ear, the bullet penetrated his head, and having ricocheted off the petrous bone - being the hardest bone in the skull - its deathly sharp fragments shot down into his chest, penetrated his vital organs like his lungs, heart, and filled the cavity with blood. With Batth floored by Das’ unarmed worshippers, as he tried to flee, he was floored, beaten with a microphone stand, stamped on and he says stabbed, “then I lost consciousness”, and although he would claim “they tried to kill me”, an examination determined his cuts and bruises were superficial. In total, 12 shots were fired, 8 of them missed, and the entire massacre ended after 38 seconds. Police and ambulances from nearby Southall Police station and Ealing Hospital were on site in minutes, the scared congregation were ushered to safety, and although chaotic, a crime scene was established. Inspector Geoffrey Brydon and Detective Inspector Paul Secombe obtained testimony from more than 150 witnesses, the guns were retrieved, fingerprints were found, and both shooters were questioned. Of the four men shot, with the bullet in Bimbrah’s leg, he made a good recovery and was released from hospital nine days later. Joga Singh, the psalms writer who always accompanied Das was shot in the stomach and died five hours later during surgery. Panesar, the British Telecoms engineer remained critical for two weeks, and although he was transferred to Charing Cross hospital to be put on a kidney machine, he died, leaving behind a widow, a 9-year-old son and twin daughters, aged just 5. And although was rushed to nearby Ealing Hospital, which was just one and a half miles away, being unconscious and barely breathing owing to a bullet wound to the head and massive internal bleeding, 33-year-old Darshan Das – the prophesized Guru of ‘Das Dharam’ - was declared dead on arrival. (End) As expected, some sects of Sikhism condemned the murders as despicable, and although the Punjab Times reported that the International Sikh Youth Federation (who Sunder & Batth were both members of) “had praised the efforts of the murderers”, they later “denied any connection with the incident”. Arrested and charged with three counts of murder and one of attempted murder, Sunder was said to be co-operative, while Batth claimed he didn’t speak English, which he did, he repeatedly lied in his statements, and although declared fit to be interviewed, he routinely complained he had a headache. Given the risk of retaliation that these murders had unleashed, Batth & Sunder were transported in an armoured van to the Old Bailey, where their 14-day trial began on Monday 20th of February 1989. With Mangit Sunder pleading guilty to the murder of Darshan Das and the manslaughter (reduced to the lesser charge of the malicious wounding) of Satwant Panesar, on the 9th of March 1989, he was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum of 20 years, plus 8 years to be served concurrently. And although, the trial almost collapsed - as at an after-dinner speech, the judge, Sir James Miskin QC made a racially charged references to black people being ‘nig nogs’ and of the Dormers Wells killers being ‘murderous Sikhs’ which he denied and was later blamed on early on-set Alzheimer’s - Rajinder Batth was sentenced to life with a minimum of 30 years, plus 10 years to be served concurrently. Having served their sentences at HMP Frankland, Sunder was released in late 2010, and in December 2021, Batth returned to India where (for the murders) he was honoured at the Akal Takht temple in the Punjab. As of today, Batth lives as a freeman, and the schism amongst the Sikhs still rages on. The Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast has been researched using the original declassified police investigation files, court records, press reports and as many authentic sources as possible, which are freely available in the public domain, including eye-witness testimony, confessions, autopsy reports, first-hand accounts and independent investigation, where possible. But these documents are only as accurate as those recounting them and recording them, and are always incomplete or full of opinion rather than fact, therefore mistakes and misrepresentations can be made. As stated at the beginning of each episode (and as is clear by the way it is presented) Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast is a 'dramatisation' of the events and not a documentary, therefore a certain amount of dramatic licence, selective characterisation and story-telling (within logical reason and based on extensive research) has been taken to create a fuller picture. It is not a full and complete representation of the case, the people or the investigation, and therefore should not be taken as such. It is also often (for the sake of clarity, speed and the drama) presented from a single person's perspective, usually (but not exclusively) the victim's, and therefore it will contain a certain level of bias and opinion to get across this single perspective, which may not be the overall opinion of those involved or associated. Murder Mile is just one possible retelling of each case. Murder Mile does not set out to cause any harm or distress to those involved, and those who listen to the podcast or read the transcripts provided should be aware that by accessing anything created by Murder Mile (or any source related to any each) that they may discover some details about a person, an incident or the police investigation itself, that they were unaware of.
Nominated BEST BRITISH TRUE-CRIME PODCAST, 4th Best True-Crime Podcast by This Week, iTunes Top 25 Podcast, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50, The Telegraph's Top 5, Crime & Investigation Channel's Top 20 True-Crime Podcasts, also seen on BBC Radio, Sky News, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week.
Welcome to the Murder Mile UK True-Crime Podcast and audio guided walk of London's most infamous and often forgotten murder cases, all set within and beyond the West End.
EPISODE TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY-SIX: Across October 2000, 55-year-old Brian Darby concocted a plan to rape an murder six women across West London over 24 hours, in order to become more infamous than his hero - Jack the Ripper. As a useless man with no skills, no talent and even less brains, he would fail in every way. And although this pointless little man was desperate to be hailed as a serial-killer, the best he deserves is to be known as Jack the Shitter.
THE LOCATION
As many photos of the case are copyright protected by greedy news organisations, to view them, take a peek at my entirely legal social media accounts - Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
The location is marked with a orange coloured symbol of a bin at the top of the markers near the word 'Shepherd's Bush'. To use the map, click it. If you want to see the other maps, click here.
SOURCES: This case was researched using some of the sources below.
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE: Welcome to Murder Mile. Today, I’m standing outside of BBC TV Centre in Wood Lane, W12; a tube stop south of the Wormwood Scrubs massacre, two streets east of where Reg Christie euthanised his dog, a short walk from Lena Cunningham’s drowning, and a dawdle from the Shepherd’s Bush sadist - coming soon to Murder Mile. Opened in 1960, Television Centre was an all-purpose self-contained television studio complete with scenery dock, editing suites, a costumiers, as well as an office where I pretended to work, a basement where I mostly snoozed, a bar where I spent a decade getting shitted, a stationery store and tape hub which I officially rinsed dry, and all the staff’s favourite person, Mani the tea lady - “thank you darling”. It’s a place infamous for making some of the world’s most iconic TV shows; like Dr Who, Blue Peter, Steptoe & Son, Fawlty Towers, Quatermass, Black Adder, Monty Python and Top of the Pops, but sadly, it’s more synonymous as a place which shielded sex pests, rapists and paedophiles, as well as – and almost nobody knows this - quite possibly Britain’s most pathetic excuse as a wannabe serial killer. In 2001, 55-year-old douchbag Brian Darby was convicted of hatching a sad little plan to slaughter six women across West London in a murder spree to rival his so-called hero, Jack the Ripper, as what this friendless little twat wanted most was fame. Urgh, so tragic. But lacking any skills, any talent, and with a statistically small penis and the brain power to match, this useless turd unleashed nothing but pain. My name is Michael, I am your tour-guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 246: ‘Jack the Shitter’. In the pantheon of serial-killers, you probably haven’t heard of Brian Darby, and for good reason. Born in Leicester in 1946, as another unwanted side effect of too-many amorous parents who bonked to mark the end of the Second World War, Brian Peter Darby should have gone on to live an ordinary life as an unremarkable man in the 32nd worst place to live in Britain, and in many ways, he did. Almost nothing is recorded about his upbringing; he achieved a basic education, there were no known reports of sexual abuse, and he was raised by his mother as a good God-fearing Protestant Christian who regularly attended church and supported the work of the Salvation Army. As I said, ordinary. As a young boy with dark curled hair, gerbil like eyes and an increasingly gormless face, even into his 50s, he still retained a childlike quality which endeared him to others who saw him as no threat. And although he wasn’t tall, strong or powerfully built, often coming across as a bit of a loser, it’s easy to suggest that he may have been bullied, but who isn’t? So, what drove him to want to be a serial-killer? Was it a sense of inferiority, a warped mind, abject loneliness, or did he just want to be famous? From his teens to his early twenties, he drifted between jobs, as most people do, as he tried to work out who he was, what he was about, and what to do with his life, given that he had no skills or talent. Living in Greensward, which was then a pleasant little road sprinkled with a hotch-potch of bungalows, farm buildings and ramshackle sheds in the remote and leafy village of East Goscote in Leicestershire, he was surrounded by fields, woods and even a railway society, but what it lacked was any excitement. In 1972, with a fascination for crime, a desire to be respected and keen to earn a good living as a local Bobbie, Brian attended Hendon Police College on a 13-week course and graduated as a probationary constable. Unlike the other young whippersnappers who were fresh out of school, Brian was already 26, but being baby-faced, he barely looked 16 when he began his shift as a beat officer in the city. The 1970s was a bad time to be a copper as Britain was in chaos; with mass unemployment, strikes, power cuts, race riots, a recession, skyrocketing inflation and an enforced three-day working week, crime was rife, the bins weren’t collected, and the streets stunk of shit, piss and festering nappies. In Leicestershire, Gartree Prison erupted in riots, imperial typewriters went on strike, and 24-year-old prostitute Rosina Hilliard known as Rosie was found beside a building site on Spinney Hill Road with extensive head injuries and fractures to her collar bone and spine. But later discovered to have been strangled, she is suspected of being one of the first victims of Peter Sutcliffe - the Yorkshire Ripper. As a beat copper, he may have been called in to cordon off the street or secure the scene before the detectives arrived on many horrific crimes which ravaged the county and kindled his morbid love of all things grisly, or he may have seen nothing, as his days could easily have been spent cooing cats out of trees, stopping drunks from widdling, or if he was lucky, collaring a bag snatcher or a knicker sniffer, Across his seven years as a constable, it gave him a sense of power, control and the respect that comes with a uniform and a badge, but being just a humble bobbie, with his duties being far from the thrills and spills – of kicking down doors, roughing up hoodlums, speeding a Ford Capri down a back street at 50 miles per hour and maybe being flashed a set of boobies – as seen in TV series The Sweeney… …he developed a fascination for true crime. It’s a common pastime which the uninitiated may regard as unhealthy, but it only is when the audience loses their grip on reality, forget that real lives are involved and sidelines the victim’s tragedy in place of praising the skills or pitying the past of a pathetic loser’s desperate search for fame and attention. Sadly, Brian was the latter, a dull little Herbert who mistakenly thought that he was unique or even remotely interesting, because he had a poster of a serial killer on his wall, and could reel off a pointless list of ‘who killed who using what’ simply because he’d wasted half his life sitting on his fat lazy arse watching cheaply made shite on the Telly and trawling thought a dirge of ill-informed true-crime toss. It was that which ignited his desire to be famous. As a child, he’d been enthralled by Jack the Ripper, the infamous and possibly fictional case of the East London so-called serial-killer who - when you conveniently cherry-pick the scant details - was either a genius or a maniac who being blessed by his “fans” with God-like skills, charmed every victim to her death, and through his cunning, supposedly outwitted a perfunctory Police force at every turn. Yawn. As a teenager, he’d have digested the endless tabloid diatribe about the sadist child-murderers Myra Hindley & Ian Brady, whose heinous crimes elevated these two sad and tragic tosspots to the height of celebrity, making them icons of the sixties, and (even though they murdered children), as if to twist the knife into their grieving mother’s broken hearts further, they’ve been immortalised by their “fans”. And as a bored and frustrated police constable who plodded his beat in Leicester, at every turn across the mid-to-late 1970s, he’d have seen the sycophantic wall-to-wall coverage of The Yorkshire Ripper, as this tragically pathetic little arse-candle with no skills, no talent, no charm, no personality, and with not a single redeemable feature, dominated the British headlines for years, having achieved nothing. In Peter Sutcliffe, he saw himself. In Jack the Ripper, he saw his mission. And yet, if he was Ian Brady, what he was missing was his Myra Hindley. Born in 1958 in the West Country suburb of Westbury on Trym in the city Bristol, Jeanette White was only 14 years old when 26-year-old Brian Darby met her, and some say, groomed her. As a vulnerable girl who should have been protected, across the 28 years they spent in their on-and-off relationship, by her 40s, as an alcoholic, Jeanette was “drinking 11 litres of strong cider a day”, or so she claimed. Referred to by Brian in a series of sexually explicit and deeply disturbing letters written between the two of them as ‘my Myra Hindley’, in the later years, Brian would try to groom his long-term lover or possible confidante, Jeanette, to pick out the most vulnerable of victims for ‘an orgy of lust and death’. Given his warped mind, it’s amazing that he wasn’t caught sooner, but across the seven years he spent in the Leicestershire Police Force, Constable Brian Darby was said by Superintendent Norwell to be “a reliable, straightforward and efficient officer, who would have had a good future in the force”. And he would have done, had this pathetic little loser not had a pervert weakness… …children. As a well-known but not particularly well-liked constable, in early June 1979, knowing that his gormless gerbil-eyed face was too familiar in Leicester – always committing his attacks in the neighbourhoods where he was unknown - he travelled 40 miles west to Birmingham, and a playground in Selly Park. Dressed in his civvies, Brian Darby, then aged 34, saw a five-year-old boy sitting down by the swings. Sidling up beside him, Brian chatted to the defenceless and isolated child, he spoke about his favourite toys, he pulled out a bag of sweeties from his pocket, and then, seeing that the boy’s distracted parent was smoking a ciggie, several times, he forced himself on the youngster, kissing him full on the lips. Hearing the child’s screams, the other children ran off to tell the boy’s father, and having darted across the park, diving over the roundabout and through the swings to lamp the dirty little fucker squarely in the face, although Brian fled with blood spurting from a busted nose, one street away he was arrested. On 22nd of June 1979 at Birmingham Crown Court, Brian Darby was tried for indecently assaulting a 5-year-old boy, and although he pleaded ‘not guilty’, on 17th of July he was found guilty and in a bafflingly shortsighted twist, Judge Ross described this predator’s behaviour as ‘an aberration’, stating “perhaps the best thing to happen to you, to bring you to your senses was the punch the boy’s father gave you”. A psychiatric assessment was made, but failed to prove to the authorities that he was a danger to the public, and that, owing to the stresses of a demanding job and homelife, it was brushed off as a blip. Kicked out of the police before any further embarrassment could be reported (as well as any other crimes against children he may have committed), having served a short sentence in the prison’s nonce wing, he moved in with his girlfriend Jeanette in Bristol, who’d taken back this convicted paedophile. From the summer of 1979 to the mid-1980s, being two decades before both CRB checks and the Sex Offender’s Register were introduced, once again, he drifted between a smattering of mindless manual jobs in factories and warehouses, which didn’t require him to reveal his conviction, and again, he lived an ordinary and unremarkable life as security guard, and over the decade, he married Jeanette twice. In the late 1980s, with their relationship in a fragmented state, although Jeanette often lived in Bristol, they also assumed the identity of a happily married couple living in Lavender Hill, North London. Being Christians, they belonged to the Enfield chapter of the Salvation Army and they regularly donned their black and red uniforms, shook collection tins in the faces of annoyed shoppers to (ironically) raise money for the most vulnerable, as an out-of-tune brass band blasted out festive carols behind them. None of the fellow worshippers knew anything about Brian’s past… …but deep down, his thoughts of a murderous killing-spree were forming. In the early 1980s, having masked his conviction for kiddie-fiddling, Brian got a job as a Fire and Safety Officer at BBC Television Centre. Cor! You’re probably thinking, I bet he did cool things like rigging the gunshot which killed Dirty Den in Eastenders, or filling the gunge tank on Noel’s House Party, right? No, Brian was one of those boring little men in hi-viz vests who stalked the long corridors of TV Centre with a clipboard, checking that the fire doors were shut, refilling buckets with sand, and reprimanding any staff members who flicked their ciggie butts in a plant pot - “erm, is that an ashtray? I think not”. But, like when he was a constable, as a security officer who will have overseen the public’s access to shows like Jim’ll Fix It and Top of the Pops, two hugely popular shows for teens and children which was presented by some of Britain’s vilest sex pests and paedophiles, the job gave him access to people. Watching the productions also gave him an insight into how TV shows are made, as seeing all the girls, boys and their mums being quizzed by researchers and ushered into the studio by assistants like willing participants who would do anything for 5-minutes of fame, he saw that this was a person they trusted. On the long boring nights spent endless walking the same dull corridors, he fantasised about stalking, raping, terrorising and slaughtering a slew of terrified women across London in a vicious spree so horrifying, it would make him as internationally infamous as his blood-soaked hero Jack the Ripper. Only, little Brian Darby’s goal was to beat his hero by killing 6 women in 24 hours. At night, he dreamed of the fame which awaited him; the book signings, the adoring fans, maybe being invited to a crappy overpriced crime convention, and the endless cheaply made documentaries which would hail him as a crafty, charming master manipulator with a genius IQ, a foot long cock, and hair which didn’t resemble pubes, all the while imagining the grisly nickname the tabloids would give him. Maybe the West London Lobotomiser, the Acton Annihilator, or the Shepherd’s Bush Slaughterer? But it wouldn’t happen, as a more apt title for this gormless twat and gerbil-eyed tosser should have been Britain’s Most Pathetic Loser, the Turd Who Stalked London or as I shall call him - Jack the Shitter. In 1998, as his girlfriend Jeanette had moved back to Bristol, in an endless stream of perverted verse to the woman he described as ‘my Myra Hindley’, in more than 150 letters over 400 plus pages, Brian wrote – probably in crayon – about his deep carnal desire to rape, kill, dismember and cannibalise his victims, as having become obsessed with necrophilia, he dreamed of raping a woman as he killed her. In his letters, Brian wrote “one day soon we must both kill a girl and we’ll be together forever… I need the body of a female to sacrifice and use her death as our birth. Any race, creed or colour, any female of any age is fair game. Once the sin of murder has been embraced, the age becomes a mere detail”, and in a hint to his sick twisted paedophilia “a little angel is as welcome in my bed as a Page 3 girl. Whether Jeanette willingly participated in his victim hunt wasn’t reported but having written “I will take whatever you bring me…” and describing the death as “erotic torture”, even though he had asked her to destroy his letters, in an odd homage, they were found in her home, bound in a leather binder. By the turn of the new millennium… …Brian had begun planning his killing spree. The hunt for victims was simple. Unlike his hero, Brian wouldn’t stalk the fog-wreathed London streets wearing a cloak, a top hat and dashing into doorways letting out an evil laugh “mwah-ha-ha-haaa”. Nope, he used Loot, one of the UK’s leading free classified ad papers, which – in an almost pre-internet world – was a great place to sell cars, clothes, unwanted crap and (as many people did) their homes. And being a physical newspaper, it had to include your name, location, a photo and a phone number. With Jeanette having found each victim, to assess their suitability, Brian called them up. “Hi, I’m Brian, I’m a researcher with the BBC. We’re doing an investigation into flat sales and finding tenants. I saw you’re selling your flat in Loot, and I wondered if I could have a few minutes of your time?”. And of course, always wanting to be helpful, each woman was happy to answer his very standard questions such as “are you married… do you live alone… and when would be a good time to come and see you?”. Questions a TV researcher would ask, and having sent Jeanette to each home to recce the property in advance, having arranged a date to meet her, Brian the wannabe serial killer began to prepare his ‘murder and rape kit’. Packed into a rucksack, he stashed an A-to-Z map, a pack of condoms, a garrotte made of curtain wire, a set of gloves, a Dictaphone to record his victim’s dying moments, and as the perfect piece of a disguise, his official BBC identity card, which only contained his name, a matching photo and the recognisable BBC logo, but with no department or job title, he could have been anyone. In total, he stalked six women… and each time, he failed. Of the two attacks we know about, on the 4th of October 2000, at the agreed time, Brian knocked on the door of the Westminster flat of Susan Oghre, a childminder and mother of two in her 40s. Having opened her door, Susan let in this softly spoken sweet-faced man who held his ID badge up to her eyes, and although he knew she possibly had a tenant as he’d seen the advert in Loot, realising that her well-built Polish lodger was sat in the sitting room, like a coward, Brian made his excuses and fled. As a truly pathetic excuse for a man, let alone a wannabe serial killer, Brian only attacked the most vulnerable of victims, women and children who were alone, as he knew he was too weak and feeble to take on a man, and having already failed five times, his sixth victim was chosen with a more care. On the 31st October 2000, Hallowe’en, the rodent faced tit slunk his way to Windemere Road in Ealing to supposedly interview an unnamed 45-year-old mother of four, who – at that time of the day – was alone in the house, with no lodgers, no siblings, all of her children at school, and her husband away. (Doorbell) “Hi, it’s Brian from the BBC, we spoke on the phone”, “oh, hi, come in. Can I get you a tea?”, “Oh, yes, that would be lovely”, and so began the standard pleasantries. For about an hour, he chatted to her about her home, her life and the house sale, recording it on his Dictaphone, and stating that “if we use you in the documentary, we’ll pay you £250”, which for anyone is always a nice little bonus. With the interview having gone well, and asking “do you mind if I look around and I take a few photos for the director”, having built up a trust with her, she had no qualms about walking him from room to room. But as they approached the kitchen, it was then, as she turned her back to him, that he struck. Wrapping the white plastic curtain wire around her neck, as she struggled, he squeezed harder, but as a woman who’d given birth four times, who knew what pain was, and (in her own words would say) “I wanted to be alive for the sake of my children”, with his grip loosening, she pleaded with him “if you don’t kill me, I’ll give you anything – money, sex, anything”. In his eyes, it was the magic words, a victim who was willing to do anything to please him, and like an idiot, he believed her and let go… …but as he turned his back on the crying woman lying at his feet, she kicked him hard, ran out into the street (as she said) “screaming like a crazy woman”, and – again, being a tragic little cesspit of piss - through her back garden, Brian fled, as Britain’s most pathetic loser had failed for a sixth time. (End) Brian Darby was suggested as a suspect in the unsolved murders of Elizabeth Chow & Lola Shekoya, crimes which media-hungry whores like Levi Bellfield routinely claim responsibility for, and although the detective who arrested Brian described him as “one of the most dangerous men ever arrested” and a “serial killer in the making”, surely it’s wrong to give this loser the glory that he so badly craved? In a short but swift investigation, just six weeks after the Ealing attack, detectives traced the calls to a phone at the BBC, as well as his fingerprints on a tea cup which had been held on the police database since his conviction for assaulting a child, and identifying Brian (who had used his real name and his real ID card), when he was arrested at work – it won’t surprise you to learn – that he was “facing disciplinary action for downloading sickening photographs from his favourite website at work”. Tried at the Old Bailey on 21st of December 2001, with Mr Justice Focke recognising that his girlfriend “was under his spell and worshipped him. You would do anything for him and were desperate not to lose him. You were also a willing an enthusiastic supporter of Darby and all his vile plans", 43-year-old Jeanette White of Bristol was sentenced to seven years in prison for conspiracy to murder. Found guilty and deemed a risk to the public, 55-year-old Brian Darby was given two life sentences for attempted murder and conspiracy to murder, with a further seven years for aggravated burglary. As of today, aged 79, if he is still alive (and let’s hope he isn’t), Brian Darby the wannabe serial-killer is stuck inside a prison cell dreaming that true crime fans are hailing him as a criminal mastermind, when in fact, he was just a twat. So instead of singing the praises of this gerbil-faced turd, rather than giving him fame, if he is to be remembered, let’s make sure it’s as Britain’s most pathetic little loser… …and a pointless little turd who shall forever be known as ‘Jack the Shitter’. The Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast has been researched using the original declassified police investigation files, court records, press reports and as many authentic sources as possible, which are freely available in the public domain, including eye-witness testimony, confessions, autopsy reports, first-hand accounts and independent investigation, where possible. But these documents are only as accurate as those recounting them and recording them, and are always incomplete or full of opinion rather than fact, therefore mistakes and misrepresentations can be made. As stated at the beginning of each episode (and as is clear by the way it is presented) Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast is a 'dramatisation' of the events and not a documentary, therefore a certain amount of dramatic licence, selective characterisation and story-telling (within logical reason and based on extensive research) has been taken to create a fuller picture. It is not a full and complete representation of the case, the people or the investigation, and therefore should not be taken as such. It is also often (for the sake of clarity, speed and the drama) presented from a single person's perspective, usually (but not exclusively) the victim's, and therefore it will contain a certain level of bias and opinion to get across this single perspective, which may not be the overall opinion of those involved or associated. Murder Mile is just one possible retelling of each case. Murder Mile does not set out to cause any harm or distress to those involved, and those who listen to the podcast or read the transcripts provided should be aware that by accessing anything created by Murder Mile (or any source related to any each) that they may discover some details about a person, an incident or the police investigation itself, that they were unaware of.
Nominated BEST TRUE-CRIME PODCAST at The British Podcast Awards, 4th Best True Crime Podcast by The Week, The Telegraph's Top Five True-Crime Podcasts, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50 and iTunes Top 25.
Welcome to the Murder Mile UK True-Crime Podcast and audio guided walk of London's most infamous and often forgotten murder cases, all set within and beyond the West End.
EPISODE TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY-FIVE:
On 18th of May 1942, 33-year-old part-time prostitute Jean Stafford welcomed a regular client into her room at 3 Bedford Place in Bloomsbury. Being shy and hating her job, she was hoping that a wealthy bachelor would sweep her off her. But later found dead, the detectives initially mistook her death for natural causes. But was it an accident, a suicide, or a murder?
THE LOCATION
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The location is marked with a blue symbol of a bin at the top right of the markers near the word 'Russell Square'. To use the map, click it. If you want to see the other maps, click here.
SOURCES: This case was researched using some of the sources below.
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE: Welcome to Murder Mile. Today, I’m standing on Bedford Place in Bloomsbury, WC1; one street east of Vera Crawford’s killing, one street south of where The Unfortunate Mr Johnson’s killer took a snooze, the same street as the arrest of Zakaria Bulhan, and a few houses from the feet which stunk - coming soon to Murder Mile. Built in 1805, Bedford Place consists of two rows of Georgian townhouses with white stucco walls and black iron railings on the ground floor, with brown brick and white sills on the three floors above. It’s easy to get confused, as with every house identical, the neighbour’s lives must resemble a bawdy sex farce, as several randy salesmen kiss their frumpy wives, dart next door to doink a saucy strumpet silly, only to realise he’s either boffed his wife, the vicar, a dog, or a tub of Avocado & Humus Sashimi. On the night of Monday 18th of May 1942, 33-year-old part-time prostitute Jean Stafford was waiting in her ground floor room at 3 Bedford Place for a man, someone she trusted. As a good woman in a bad situation, she hoped that this potential husband would end her struggle and take away her misery. And although this expectant guest arrived, that night he erased her pain by ending her life. But why? My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 245: Good Girl Gone. The death of Jean Stafford makes no sense when you look at her life. Her real name was Agnes Martin. Born on the 3rd of August 1909 in the village of Deepcar, a few miles north of Sheffield, although she adopted several monikers, she never lost her strong Yorkshire accent. Raised in a working-class family of coal miners and quarrymen, Agnes (who preferred to be called Jean after actress Jean Harlow) was the only stepsibling in this family of 12, so felt that she never belonged. Little is known of her upbringing but growing to be a small but sturdy girl with pale skin, blue eyes and apple blossom cheeks, her shyness endeared her to others, her quietness meant she was rarely in any trouble, and her sweetness attracted her to older men, who she liked, as she sought a father figure. As the runt of the litter, after the death of her mother when she was just 15, Jean left the family home. For 8 years, as a young solitary girl, we know nothing about her life, except her work as a cook and a housemaid in Barnsley and Harrogate, but in 1932, when aged just 23, her life had changed forever. Having moved 70 miles east to Hull, Agnes Martin had become Jean Smith, a common name it was all-too easy to confuse with others and for good reason, as being a single woman earning a dishonest crust in a city she wasn’t known in, living a life of ‘easy virtue’, she was twice cautioned for soliciting. As a sweet-faced girl with a kindly manner, she didn’t have any convictions for prostitution, she didn’t have any charges of drunkenness as she rarely drank, she had never been to prison as she didn’t steal or cheat her clients - in fact, they often came back as she was good and honest - and although a solidly built girl who many said “could easily handle herself”, she never got into fights and was rarely attacked. As a quiet, polite and pretty girl who had been selling sex for quite some time, she often went under the police radar, as being seen as no-bother-to-anyone, it was clear she was just struggling to get by. Later that year, having dyed her hair platinum blonde and dressed in a faux leopard-skin coat, Jean met 49-year-old retired sportswriter James Stafford known as ‘Jim’, a quiet unassuming sugar daddy who many described as “foolishly generous” with his £3000 inheritance (£250,000 today), who would lavish the lady he loved to posh meals, nights out and fancy clothes, treating her as a ‘kept woman’. On 7th February 1933, under the alias Jean Smith, Agnes Martin technically became Jean Stafford, the wife of a salesman, and they happily lived in the Spring Bank district of Hull… for a while at least… as although James would state “she had no sense of the value of money”, he had a gambling addiction. He later said “my wife was a strong woman… attractive, pleasant, exceedingly generous, and able to look after herself”, so having got herself a job as a housemaid at the Angell Arms pub in Brixton, South London, with no bad blood between them, the last time Jim saw her was on Valentine’s Day of 1938… …four and half years later, he identified her body on a cold slab of marble at Holborn Mortuary. It’s typical, that the next years of Jean’s life were spent working hard, being liked, causing no trouble and chasing an impossible dream of finding another man to ensure that she never needed to work. Olive Elder, landlady of the Angell Arms described Jean as “a quiet girl, very clean and hardworking, but a tremendous liar. She told me she was a widow” which she wasn’t, “a native of Hull” which belied her strong Sheffield accent, and whether this was the truth or a family lie, “she was a distant relative of John Campbell Boot”, 2nd Baron of Nottingham and the millionaire owner of Boots the Chemist. Apart from that, she was a good worker, always polite, and after a year, she left to seek a better wage. By the outbreak of the Second World War, with the city in chaos, Jean earned a tiny wage as “a tidy housemaid and a crafty cook” in several pubs across the West End, and although given a bed to sleep in, with the Argyll and the Cooper Arms both bombed, almost everything she owned was destroyed. As a single woman separated from her husband, with few close friends (being so private) and only a few sparse letters between herself, her father and her stepsiblings, life was hard. Jobs were scares, food was rationed, and with so many potential husbands called up to fight, the pickings were slim. For a while, she had been seeing William Fitzgerald, an Irish ex-dirt track rider who had lost a leg in an accident, and although they were sweet on each other, on 9th of October 1940, he was found dead lying face down in a Bloomsbury bomb crater, in what the coroner said was ‘death by misadventure’. And yet, as a strong and resilient woman, he never gave up. On Saturday 18th of October 1941, carrying the few items she owned, Jean called at 3 Bedford Place having seen a ‘Room to Let’ sign. Greeted by Joseph Lamb, a 40-year-old warehouseman who lived in the basement, his evidence proved invaluable, and although police stated “he knows more about her than anyone, but he denies being intimate with her”, it wasn’t exactly a revelation, as Joseph was gay. Having agreed to pay 30 shillings a week for a ground-floor backroom and a shared kitchenette and a bathroom with the other twelve tenants, Joseph told the Police, “she introduced a tall man, saying ‘this is my friend, he’s helping me to pay the rent’”. She never said his name, but he was described as “late 40s to 50s, dark hair, deep set eyes, swarthy and broad, with a Jewish nose and a deep voice”. For Jean, life at 3 Bedford Place was good. Owned by Mrs Horn-Heap who she rarely saw, it was managed by Edith O’Connell the housekeeper, with Joseph keeping an eye on things in the evenings and every Sunday when Edith wasn’t there. As a private person who spent most of her time alone in her room, Jean regularly received men friends, occasionally some post, and a few times a week, on the communal telephone in the hallway, a call. With the ground floor split into three rooms, Jean’s had barely enough space for a single bed, a sofa, a dressing table, a gas fire, a lamp, and with so few clothes in the wardrobe, the tenants often saw her wearing just a thin frock, or according to Joseph “I’ve seen her in her bed, sitting up, she was bare”. As a quiet girl who often sat alone knitting in front of the fire, although she only spoke in passing to the other tenants (who were always polite), she got on best with Joseph, “as hardly a day went by without her popping her head into my room” he would say, and to help each other out, as a good cook, she often made his meals which she left in the cupboard for when he returned home from work. But not every tenant in the house was as pleasant. Joseph said “Jean told me that she’d asked Mr Pollard”, an ex-Army Captain who lived in the adjoining room “to set a mouse trap” as she was terrified of the mice which scuttled from the kitchen. “Having done so, he had tried to fondle her”, as being an alcoholic who had lost his career and his family having been convicted of buggery, George Pollard was a sex pest, but there was no proof he had killed her. In the ensuing investigation, the Police examined the lives of a wealth of suspects, especially as by the Christmas of 1941, with the Tall Man having left her following a tiff, Jean had returned to selling sex. Joseph said “I didn’t know she was a prostitute”, as she kept her life private, rarely drank, shuttled her clients between the door and her room in silence and she tried to keep the sex as quiet as possible... …but detectives were able to track down several of her clients. In keeping with her good-natured way, her sex-work wasn’t sleezy and cheap, but innocent and sweet, as almost all her clients described the same warm and reliable routine she undertook with her punters. Private Ronald Ward of the Royal Montreal Regiment said “on 18th of January 1942 at 10pm, outside of the Lyon’s Corner House in Piccadilly”, where she regularly solicited, “she asked if I’d like to go home with her, I asked how much, she said £1 and 10s, and I said okay”. At roughly £100 today, she charged more than most, but being sweet, she reassured the timid ones, she cheated no-one and knowing that many men simply missed their girlfriends, instead of just sex, she gave these boys what they needed. Having walked back to 3 Bedford Place, Jean asked Ronald to be as quiet as possible as they entered the hall, and having unlocked the door to her small room, instead of undressing, she made him a meal. With it being wartime, everyone was struggling, so as part of her good nature, they sat in front of the gas fire getting warm, eating toast and jam, supping a nice cup of tea, and having a good old natter. It was part of who she was, and if she could convince him to stay over for a little bit extra, all the better. “She stripped off all of her clothes but her stockings, although she seemed very shy”, Ronald said, “we had sex twice” albeit quietly, “and then we went to sleep”. At 7am, she woke him with a cuppa, asked him to leave before her landlady arrived, and having enjoyed her company, he gave her his details. He was ruled out as a suspect, as on the day of the murder, he was at stationed at Petworth in Hampshire. Another client was 42-year-old Coleman Fellerman, who first met her in October 1941, and like many he became a friend. “I agreed to go back with Jean. She was in no hurry, in fact, had she not solicited me, I shouldn’t have thought she was a prostitute”, he said. And as she often did, she made him food, they chatted, had sex, and with him being in catering, she asked if he could get her a job as a cook. Two weeks later, he interviewed her for a job in Gosport, and although he said “let me know how you get on”, he never heard from her again. At the time of her death, he was at his lodgings in Morden. A third client - Gunner Alexander Campbell of the Canadian Artillery - regularly wrote her letters as he loved that she mothered him. First meeting on 7th March 1942, he bought her gifts and paid to stay across most of the weekends in March and April having telephoned before. He last saw her alive on 8th of May 1942, but 10 days later when she was murdered, he was stationed at Sittingbourne in Kent. And a fourth client, whose ration card was found in her room having given it to her as a gift “as I saw she had hardly any food in her cupboard” was Private Ornulf Hop, a Norwegian ski instructor, whose movements on the night of the murder were accounted for by several witnesses at the Savoy Hotel. All four were ruled out, which is not to say she only ever had four clients… …or that of the few people she spoke to that none of them were innocent. Weekly, Jean bought condoms from a vendor in Piccadilly Circus called Sydney Bloom. Six years earlier, he was quizzed by the police over the murder of Soho prostitute, Josephine Martin alias French Fifi. And although, an infamous RAF Cadet picked up women at the Lyon’s Corner House in February 1942, by that May, found guilty of murder, Gordon Frederick Cummins was already awaiting his execution. None of these men, her friends or any of her family were suspected of being her murderer… …but the police had narrowed it down to just three; the Tall Man, her Caller and ‘Johnny’. Breaking up with the Tall Man in Christmas 1941, being “roughly 50, with deep set eyes, swarthy skin and a deep voice”, he would have been easy to spot, only after that date, he was never seen again. ‘Johnny’ whose real name she never divulged was described as “a dapper-looking cove” in his mid-30s, 5 foot 5 inches tall, with fair hair and a slight paunch. And having met him six times prior, Edith the housekeeper stated “he was always polite with a nice disposition”, as just like every other suspect, he didn’t threaten Jean, as she always chose her clients carefully and didn’t associate with bad men. By the end of April 1942, having split up with ‘Johnny’ for reasons unknown, Jean was struggling. Being close to broke, she sold her few possessions – a faux-Leopard skin coat and two handbags - at Jimmy’s hairdressers on Charlotte Street, as well as the last of her best dresses leaving her room almost empty. And with her usually large appetite stymied by a recurrent headache and an earache, she wasn’t well. In fact, since the 24th of April up until the day of her death, she spent much of her time in bed. Monday 18th of May 1942 was her last day alive. Waking late, as far as we know she sat knitting for a few hours, she saw no-one (which wasn’t unusual) and with the few coins she had left, she shopped for bread and milk. At 4:30pm, while out, Edith took a phone call for her, which went; “is Miss Stafford there?”, “no, she’s out”, “will she back by six?”, “I guess”, “can you let her know I’m in the Royal Flying Corps now, I’m a nephew of her father’s brother”, and assuming that Jean knew who he was, as he didn’t give it, she didn’t take his name or number. Edith said, it was a local call (as the ring was long), it wasn’t from a phone box as she didn’t hear the coins fall, and although she would confirm “it was something like Johnny’s voice, but it was definitely not his”, being neither a deep, light nor with an accent, she didn’t think she had spoken to him before. Every nephew of her father and husband were accounted for, every absentee from the local RAF bases were questioned and ruled out, but with the caller using the term ‘Royal Flying Corps’ - an archaic term for the Royal Air Force - the police felt that either this was a red herring, or Edith had misheard. Either way, Jean read the message, and later, its charred remnants were found in the bin. The rest of that evening was as routine as any other. At 6pm, Joseph returned from work, he waved as he passed her room and said she was her usual self. In the kitchen cupboard, she had prepared a meal of roast lamb, cauliflower, carrots and potato mash, and although he returned the plate at 7pm, she’d barely eaten half of hers, having been sick for weeks. Sat in a blue and white flower-patterned dress, she said she was going out, but was waiting a call first, so to pass the time, they chatted as they always did, and with them both smelling a faint whiff of gas in her room, with Joseph unable to detect the leak, they queried if that was the cause for her sickness. At 7pm, Kitty Jones (a ground-floor tenant) saw her, stating she was wearing all the jewellery she had, being a metal ring with the stone missing and a cheap wristwatch, which were later found on her body. By 7:15pm, Joseph left to meet his friend, Mr Clermont at the Fitzroy Tavern in Fitzrovia and the York Minster in Soho, being two bars frequented by gay men. And at 9pm, Kitty heard Jean welcome a man into her room, who she didn’t see but said “they were on friendly terms”, then Kitty left until 10pm. That left, Aircraftmen Marc LeBlanc & George Hudon on the first floor listening to the radio, and on the ground floor, George Pollard was asleep, and with the partition walls so thin that the tenants could hear each other breathe, from 9pm to 10pm when her murder occurred, none of them heard a thing. The next morning, at 9am sharp, Edith the housekeeper greeted Joseph on the doorstep as he sorted out the post, and called out to Jean “love, you’ve got a letter”, which (being a late sleeper) she ignored. But by 11:40am, with her door still ajar, and Jean having not moved an inch, seeing the blankets pulled up to her nose which exposed her toes, as Joseph went to shake her awake, he felt that she was cold. Jean was dead. The room was as she had left it the night before; being neat, orderly and clean, with the drawers shut, the gas fire off, a lamp’s shade on the floor (suggesting she had been knitting), the back window open to let a light breeze in, and her knickers and stockings neatly folded on the armchair beside her bed. And with a cup of tea, half drank, and no other crockery, it looked like she’d died alone in her sleep. Told of her headache, her earache, and seeing a single spot of blood on the inside of her left ear with a corresponding stain on the pillow, Divisional Surgeon Dr Gregg assumed it was natural but ordered an autopsy to determine the cause of her death, whether a fever, or (as was common) gas poisoning. It was a scene the Police had witnessed before, an unexplained death with no sign of a burglary, no hint of a struggle, and although cyanosis had left her pale skin a slightly swollen mix of blue and red hues, beyond the decomposition, there were no cuts nor bruises, and no-one had heard her scream. But that night, although no meal was cooked nor cup of tea brewed, she’d had a client. Naked except for a pink suspender belt and black lace and silk bra, she had neatly folded the belt up to remove her knickers, the right cup had been pulled down exposing her breast, and with a recently used condom (minus any semen) found under the bedside rug, it was clear that sex had taken place. What didn’t make sense was her dress, as this blue and white flower-patterned frock was the only one she had left, and yet, unlike her underwear, it was found behind her head, scrunched up and creased. It was a scene as ordinary as any the detectives had investigated before, and yet, amongst its absence of evidence lay something strange, as on the bedside dressing table, in a dark ominous lump was a clump of pubic hair - a brown handful of curly strands, ripped out at the roots, which wasn’t Jean’s. In the room, an unidentified set of fingerprints was found, but when examined, none of them matched any of her four known clients - Ronald Ward, Alexander Campbell, Coleman Fellerman or Drnulf Hop - or any of her friends, family or the tenants at 3 Bedford Place, and neither did the clump of pubes. Described as “a generous, good-natured girl, fond of life and without any enemies”, it made no sense for anyone to hate her so much that they would kill her. She has no money, few clothes, no jewellery of any value, and anything she did have she’d either sold or shared with her clients. As a quiet women, she had rivals, no stalkers, no issues with her family, and her ex-lovers weren’t bad men with a grudge. She was careful about her clients, she stuck to a regular routine, she rarely went out, she didn’t cheat the men she solicited or dated, and she always treated them well, which is why they always liked her. No-one had any reason to murder her… and yet, they did. (End) Examined at Holborn Mortuary, an autopsy determined she had been rendered unconscious by a fist which had fractured the left of her jaw. Although strong and fiery (if needed), Jean was strangled with her own dress, and unable to fight back, it only took a small amount of pressure to end her life. On 19th of June 1942, four weeks after her death, the St Pancras Coroner Bentley Purchase concluded that Jean Stafford was ‘murdered by person or person’s unknown’, and the case was closed. Neither the Tall Man, the Caller, or ‘Johnny’ were found, and no-one was arrested on suspicion of her murder. It remains unsolved to this day… …and yet, on the 30th of May 1953, a decade after the murder, a 51-year-old man walked into a Police station at Elizabeth Bay in Sydney, Australia. His name was Joseph Lamb, a former tenant at 3 Bedford Place who Police stated “knows more about her than anyone, but he denies being intimate with her”. Interviewed, he said “I believed I was under suspicion for some time, I suffered a nervous breakdown and eventually came to Australia”, where his name was not known. And although, he’d initially denied knowing what this private woman did as a job, he’d later admit “she was a ‘high-class’ prostitute”. That day, Joseph identified a man from a photograph published in the newspaper who he said “was seen with Jean on subsequent occasions”. This was a man who regularly used prostitutes, a man who had strange sexual perversions like keeping the pubic hairs of his victims, and having murdered before, this West London serial-killer had committed at least eight murders of women from 1943 to 1953, who he had rendered unconscious with a punch, some gas, strangled and raped, but didn’t mutilate. The man he identified as the regular client of Jean Stafford… was John Reginald Christie. The Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast has been researched using the original declassified police investigation files, court records, press reports and as many authentic sources as possible, which are freely available in the public domain, including eye-witness testimony, confessions, autopsy reports, first-hand accounts and independent investigation, where possible. But these documents are only as accurate as those recounting them and recording them, and are always incomplete or full of opinion rather than fact, therefore mistakes and misrepresentations can be made. As stated at the beginning of each episode (and as is clear by the way it is presented) Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast is a 'dramatisation' of the events and not a documentary, therefore a certain amount of dramatic licence, selective characterisation and story-telling (within logical reason and based on extensive research) has been taken to create a fuller picture. It is not a full and complete representation of the case, the people or the investigation, and therefore should not be taken as such. It is also often (for the sake of clarity, speed and the drama) presented from a single person's perspective, usually (but not exclusively) the victim's, and therefore it will contain a certain level of bias and opinion to get across this single perspective, which may not be the overall opinion of those involved or associated. Murder Mile is just one possible retelling of each case. Murder Mile does not set out to cause any harm or distress to those involved, and those who listen to the podcast or read the transcripts provided should be aware that by accessing anything created by Murder Mile (or any source related to any each) that they may discover some details about a person, an incident or the police investigation itself, that they were unaware of.
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Welcome to the Murder Mile UK True-Crime Podcast and audio guided walk of London's most infamous and often forgotten murder cases, all set within and beyond the West End.
EPISODE TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR:
On Thursday 25th of October 1934, at the Westminster Institute on Fulham Road, Jim Harvey smashed in the skull of his friend George Hamblin, nine times with a hammer. But what drove a lonely man to murder his only friend? of hot tempers flared by alcohol?
The location is marked with a orange coloured symbol of a bin just above the River Thames near the word 'Cheslea'. To use the map, click it. If you want to see the other maps, click here.
SOURCES: This case was researched using some of the sources below.
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE: Welcome to Murder Mile. Today, I’m standing on Fulham Road in Chelsea, SW10; a few streets south of the beating of Gunther Podola, a short walk west of the jealousy of Jane Andrews, barely a quick trip from the bubbling drum of John George Haigh, and a little trot east of the lies of Ronald True - coming soon to Murder Mile. At 369 Fulham Road, on the site of the St George’s workhouse stands Chelsea & Westminster hospital, a small but vital facility with a world-renowned burns unit, a children’s hospital, and if you’re a man who (on a Friday night) slipped on a cucumber while making a salad in the nude, they’ll sort that too. In 1876, before the NHS was founded, as a middle ground between the workhouse and the infirmary, the Westminster Institute was built to provide beds, meals and free health care for 1300 sick and impoverished men who had no homes, no work and no families, in return for an honest day’s work. Like a prison, the inmates did what they could to relieve the boredom by sneaking in contraband, by pinching treats from the mess hall, by blagging an extra cup of tea when the warders weren’t watching, and – through George Hamblin, the Institute’s secret bookie – you could bet on a horse for a penny. As just a little bit of fun for regulars who liked a flutter, at best he made a small profit off the £4 a day he placed on the day’s races, and although he barely made enough for a fun night out with a lady, that little stash of coins would prove so tempting for a fellow inmate, that they’d kill him for it. But why? My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 244: No Fixed Abode. George Hamblin was typical of the institute’s long-term inmates… …he wasn’t there because of a crime he had committed, but because life had been unkind to him. Allen George Hamblin was born in 1886 in Lambeth, South London. Having never married or had kids, and with him and his only next-of kin, his brother, having not spoken in a decade, little is known about his life, except that he was a driver, until he was hospitalised owing to heart issues and chronic asthma. Beginning as a day inmate in 1921, growing ever sicker and paler as bronchitis ravaged his battered lungs, by 1934, George had become one of Westminster Institute’s longest serving residents. As a small thin man who a stiff breeze could easily blow over, on the outside he was a nobody, but on the inside, 49-year-old George had the privileged position of being valet to the labour superintendent. With light duties, he cleaned his boss’s room, served his meals and ironed his uniform in return for a less strenuous day – befitting a man of his frailty – as he walked the dark echoey halls with stoop. Being a familiar face and a trusted lag who could get an inmate what he wanted for a price, wherever George went – from the mess hall in B Block, his bunk in Bed 3 of B63, his boss’s room in B78, or the storeroom in B77 which everyone nicknamed the ‘dug out’ – his slow and steady shuffle was heard, accompanied by his raspy wheezing cough, which he soothed with another rollie from his daily ration. This was his life, simple and inoffensive, as this ailing and tragically forgotten man would make his days a little better by placing small bets for his pals, trading goods for simple pleasures, and by October 1934, the highlight of his week was finding a French 25 Centime coin which he kept in his wallet. His friend was a recent inmate called George Harvey, who everyone called Jim. Born in Wandsworth In 1908, 27-year-old George Frederick Harvey was an ex-chef of no fixed abode. At least, that is what he would tell the police, only little of it was true. Born in Balham, his real name was Charles Malcolm Lake Schonberg, one of six siblings to Thomas (of German heritage) and Florence (of French) who were raised – in post-World War One Britain - on a respectable middle-class street. As a stockily built man who would grow to a strapping six-foot two, Jim’s health was cursed from the day he was born being burdened by sickness, disability and chronic alcoholism in the family. As a baby, he was plagued with infantile convulsions and having left home when he was just 8, he rarely returned. Sparsely educated, aged 17 he joined the Merchant Navy as a cook, but having contracted malaria, in 1926, aged 19, this large imposing brute was discharged from service on account of his breathlessness. Being unmarried, homeless and jobless, after two and a half years in prison for stealing a few coins, a watch and a set of earrings (as a present for a lady), in 1932, aged 25, the large lumbering form of Jim entered the infirmary to be treated for asthma which left him unable to do the simplest of tasks, and also plagued by a bad heart, this wheezing hulk couldn’t run a few steps without sweating or fainting. Like George, the Westminster Institution had become his home… …but as much as he would hate it, there were ways to make it more bearable. Life inside was all about little victories. Unlike a workhouse, as the beds were for men too sick to be booted out but not sick enough to stay at the infirmary, the Institute wasn’t a bad place. You couldn’t leave without permission, but if you did, they wouldn’t alert the police to watch the ports, as (knowing that the men had nothing else) most returned, only to be punished by just having their privileges cut. Inside, you wore the uniform on an inmate (a blue striped shirt and trousers), but if you were granted a day pass to go outside to earn a day’s money or to visit your family, you got your own clothes back. Which is why Harry Pocock the superintendent knew about these little scams, but didn’t nothing about them. If the inmates were selling drugs, hard liquor or blades, he’d clamp down on those harshly, but he’d turn a blind eye to these innocent little trades for a few pennies which made the men feel normal. Jim’s racket was selling cups of tea, as with every inmate rationed to just three cups of rather weak dribble which had once been waved near a leaf, for 1p, he could slip you a hot mug of a nice strong brew. Not alcohol, not mentholated spirit, just tea, which as we know is the fuel which powers Britain. George’s racket was horseracing, and his routine was always the same. Before breakfast, George went around Block B with the newspaper informing the inmates of the races, the odds were calculated using a ‘ready reckoner’ book which he kept in his jacket, each inmate was handed a betting slip, at 4:30pm George’s messenger William Richardson popped out to purchase an evening paper with the race’s results, and with the bell for B Block ringing at 5pm sharp, every winner was told of their score over the meal in the mess hall, with all winnings collected from the ‘dug out’. Everyone knew about the ‘dug out’. Room B77 was little more than a storeroom, where (as Harry Pocock’s valet) George would wash his plates, iron his uniform, and - given a key - it was the perfect place to stash the cash, which he received from the inmates in pennies, tuppences, occasionally a sixpence, and most recently a postal order. It wasn’t much of a room, barely 13 by 8 feet, with a chair, three low tables, an electric light, a bed (for if George got sleepy) and the sideboard decorated with all manner of mucky pictures of sexy ladies and with this being the 1930s – if you were really lucky – you may get to perv over… an ankle. Phwoar! As pals, one of the few inmates who George let into this room was Jim… …but just as his real name was Charles, his real motive wasn’t to chat. It began, it is assumed, a few days before when Jim sent a letter to a girl he was fond of, Clara Barnes. He wrote “Dear Miss Barnes. I shall like to see you Saturday. If you are round the Regal ‘Marble Arch’ at about 8 o’clock, we could get in a show or something. You will know me, tall fellow, saw you on Monday while back. Hope all OK. See you soon. Frederick”, even though everyone knew him as Jim. George’s lady friend, a widow called Mrs Eva Clark, later informed the police “he said a big fellow was blackmailing him… some time afterwards he received a ragged piece of paper on which was written ‘yes, 13, yes’”. She didn’t know what it meant, and George never told her who the ‘big fellow’ was… …but I think it’s safe to guess. Thursday 25th of October 1934 was as routine as any other day. At 5am to 7am, Jim served 40 cups of strong tea making himself about £90 today, as before breakfast, George chatted to the betters about the races. But at 9am, as a key piece of premeditation, Jim asked the Assistant Master for permission to leave at 5pm. Being an unusual request as none of the inmates were allowed night jobs, this was denied, meaning he couldn’t obtain a leave slip or his own clothes. During the day, William the messenger collected the inmate’s coins, totalling £4 and 3s on 137 bets as noted in the ready reckoner, as well as a postal order from Walter Blanchette for a horse called Argyl. At 4:30pm, knocking on the locked door of the ‘dug out’, William handed the evening paper to George, who was slumped over a table calculating the winnings, as Jim towered beside the inside of the door. As usual, William stayed for a minute, the door was locked behind him, and he saw nothing suspicious. At 5pm, the dinner bell rang, and the inmates dashed to the mess hall leaving B Block empty. Nobody heard anything, not a shout, a cry nor a scream… …but having done the unthinkable, Jim needed to flee. His escape wasn’t really a masterplan, but with the Institution’s security so lax, at 5:15pm, the hulking bulk easily made his way out. Having already swiped a day slip from an unattended desk, he changed into this own clothes with his bloodied shirt hidden under his grey suit, he handed in his uniform, and although he was very agitated and sweating profusely, he tottered out, before anyone quizzed him. Also at 5:15pm, William the messenger knocked on the door of the ’dug out’, but as George was prone to taking a nap after dinner, getting no reply, he wasn’t that worried. And even though a night count discovered that both George Hamblin and Jim Harvey were missing from their beds, the police weren’t alerted, and no search party was sent for, as (like on most nights) as many as six men had gone AWOL… …only one hadn’t left and the other would never return. At a little after 5:30pm, a taxi pulled up outside of 2 Colville Houses in Bayswater, the home of Miss Clara Barnes, a local prostitute, who Jim was sweet on. Perspiring like the Niagara Falls of sweat, she was shocked to see him, not because his face was as red as a baboon’s backside, but because he wasn’t due for two more days. But with his bad heart and his chronic asthma explaining his look, he confessed “I was running a betting book, and I lost a lot of money”, which more than explained his frayed nerves. Clara was why he stole the money, to spend a night with the girl he loved, having met her just once. Only the romantic date he had dreamed of would be ruined by the horror of what he had done. That night, before anyone in the Institution was even aware that he was missing, at 7pm, Clara & Jim hopped a taxi to the Blue Hall Cinema on Edgware Road. Described as nervous, exiting the cab, he was a twitchy as an addict going through withdrawal, as every voice, bark or siren he heard spooked him. Paying two shillings for seats in the empty Upper Circle, although they both wanted to see Manhattan Melodrama (the last movie that wanted criminal John Dillinger saw before being gunned down by the police), within minutes of being seated, Jim nervously stammered “sorry, I’ve gotta go to the toilet”. According to Clara, he was away for ten minutes, too long for a plop and a piddle, which he blamed needing to find a pub for a pint (which didn’t ring true to her as the cinema bar was stocked). But the real reason was he was away for so long was he was in the grip of a panic and he had evidence to bin. Jim knew that it wouldn’t take a detective to find George’s body, to blame Jim for the death, to realise the money was missing, and to see that the murder weapon was still on the table, where he’d left it. Having stashed the bloodied shirt, he knocked up a ceiling panel in the cinema’s bathroom and hid the ready reckoners and tobacco pouch, and although he wanted to go into hiding, the purpose of the crime was to go on a date with Clara. So having ditched the film, they went to a pub where he sunk a few double whiskeys with a Guinness chaser, and although Clara wanted to have fun, Jim couldn’t. That night, they didn’t have sex, as with his nerves shot, he couldn’t manage it. Sitting upright in bed, smoking and muttering, although Jim put on two shirts as he was shivering, he couldn’t stop shaking. Holding George’s wallet, it contained all that was left from the heist, four shillings and six pence which he gave to Clara, leaving him with a postal order, a 25 Centime coin and the key to the ‘dug out’. And that was it. It should have been a wild night of thrills… …but with a man lying dead, it was all for nothing. At 5am, the usual 40 men who paid a penny for a strong cup of tea were awoken to nothing from Jim. At 7am, no-one heard that familiar shuffle as George went from bed to bed with the paper taking bets. At 7:15am, with both men missing, Frederick Thomas the Labour Master grabbed the spare key to the ‘dug out’, where it was known that George often kipped, and unlocked the door. The light was still on, although it was bright enough to see, “when I entered, I slipped”, as all around his feet was blood. The room was small, but so violent were the blows that blood spattered four feet off the floor, up the walls, parts of the ceiling, and even speckling the mucky nudes in a red dripping goo. With the door locked, the police knew the killer had let themselves out, and yet, only a few men were ever let in. Arriving on site and seeing the position of the body and the concentration of the spatter, Home Office Pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury deduced that the attack had occurred as George was slumped over a low table, tallying the betting slips which were scattered across the floor, using his ready reckoner which was missing, as was the pot of winnings which usually totalled £4 to £5 in assorted coins. Many items had vanished, like his tobacco pouch, his wallet and the door key, and with his killer having rifled his pockets with bloodstained hands as the sticky insides were sticking out, there was no denying that this was a robbery. But was it also a personal attack, as the level of violence would suggest? George was not a well man, a small frail weakling who wheezed when he breathed and as Sir Bernard would state “the first blow as enough to render him senseless”, but this attack was brutal and frenzied. On the table, the weapon sat, sopping wet and unnervingly sticky. It was hard to tell what it was having been wrapped in a hessian sack and tied with tape (so when his victim’s juices rode up the handle with every blow, the killer’s hand didn’t slip), but having snapped in two owing to the force used, at two feet long and two kilos heavy, George had been killed with a lump hammer, used for breaking rocks. The autopsy confirmed “he was struck while over the table and held there while the other blows were delivered”. He was hit nine times with a hammer across the back of his head. The first rendered him semi-conscious, the next three smashed his skull wide open, the rest of the blows were overkill, and according to Sir Bernard “on the wall was a soft pinkish mess which proved to be a piece of brain”. Only the violence inflicted upon George wasn’t the most tragic part of his death, as Sir Bernard stated “his body temperature showed he hadn’t died until at least 10pm and with evidence of movement”, although his skull had been smashed in, unable to stand, speak or even scream, George lay on the cold hard floor behind a locked door, slowly dying, paralysed, bleeding and terrified, for at least five hours. Based on when William the messenger had delivered the evening newspaper to George and when he had found the door to B77 locked, the detectives determined that the murder occurred during a 25-minute window of 4:50pm to 5:15pm. Having locked the Institute down with no-one allowed to leave, of the six inmates who had gone AWOL, one was dead, four had returned but only one was missing. George’s pal, Jim Harvey who was last seen, sweating and agitated as he fled the Institute at 5:15pm. That day, on Friday 26th of October, knowing that he read the lunchtime paper, the Standard published the following story on the front page. It read: “Murder in a London Hospital… George Hamblin was last seen about five o’clock last night… when discovered… Police questioned the patients and staff, and Scotland Yard were informed that one of the inmates was not on the premises… a widespread search was begun for his man”, and what followed was a description of the hulking bulk of Jim Harvey. That same day, with a cleaner finding his bloodstained shirt behind the toilet of the Blue Hall Cinema in Edgware Road, Police also discovered George’s ready reckoner books and his tobacco pouch. And with the evidence mounting up, even more than usual, Jim was beginning to tremble and to sweat. Lying in bed, smoking heavily and with the newspaper shaking in his nervous hands, Jim said to Clara “I want to tell you the truth. I am not a bookie. I am the man they want for the workhouse murder”, at which, even though he was the one with the chronic heart problems, it was Clara who fainted. Having convinced him that it was the right thing to do, 7 hours after George’s body was discovered, Jim walked into Paddington Green Police Station and gave himself up. But upon his arrest, when asked “do you have anything thing to say?”, he replied “do what you like, I know nothing about it”. (End) The evidence against him was compelling. In his pockets, police found George’s wallet, a postal order for to that day’s horse races and the door key to the ‘dug out’. His fingerprints were found on the hammer, and George’s blood group (being A when his was O) was found on his shirt (which he’d hidden) and his trousers (which he’d handed in), which were all stitched with the laundry mark B132, a number unique amongst the 1300 inmates to him, and no-one else. Making no confession, he refused to give an account for his whereabouts when George was killed, he didn’t deny that he wasn’t in the ‘dug out’, but with the money spent, the blackmail note missing and it unexplained as to what ‘yes, 13, yes’ actually meant, bar a robbery, the murder was motiveless. Even at his committal, when charged that he did “feloniously and wilfully with malice aforethought kill and murder George Hamblin with a hammer”, Jim simply replied “it is all a mystery to me, sir”. Declared fit to stand trial, on Monday 21st January 1935, in a five-day trial at the Old Bailey, asked “did you inflict these nine blows with a hammer which killed George Hamblin?”, he replied “I did not”, and although he professed his innocence, after just one hour, the jury found him guilty of wilful murder. On the 11th of March 1935, at Pentonville Prison, George Frederick Harvey known as Jim was executed by hanging. No family or friends had come to visit him, and with the only witnesses being the prison staff, his solicitor and the hangman Robert Baxter, he died as he lived, all alone. Jim Harvey took the real motive for the murder to his grave, and yet, one detail remained a mystery. Why did he hide the fact that his real name was Charles Malcolm Lake Schonberg? As even at his trial, he was referred to as George. Well, in some of the last words he ever spoke, he stated that although he hadn’t seen her in years, “my mother is gravely ill and I don’t want to upset her”. He already had one death on his conscience, and with that shame enough to kill her, he just couldn’t bare another. The Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast has been researched using the original declassified police investigation files, court records, press reports and as many authentic sources as possible, which are freely available in the public domain, including eye-witness testimony, confessions, autopsy reports, first-hand accounts and independent investigation, where possible. But these documents are only as accurate as those recounting them and recording them, and are always incomplete or full of opinion rather than fact, therefore mistakes and misrepresentations can be made. As stated at the beginning of each episode (and as is clear by the way it is presented) Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast is a 'dramatisation' of the events and not a documentary, therefore a certain amount of dramatic licence, selective characterisation and story-telling (within logical reason and based on extensive research) has been taken to create a fuller picture. It is not a full and complete representation of the case, the people or the investigation, and therefore should not be taken as such. It is also often (for the sake of clarity, speed and the drama) presented from a single person's perspective, usually (but not exclusively) the victim's, and therefore it will contain a certain level of bias and opinion to get across this single perspective, which may not be the overall opinion of those involved or associated. Murder Mile is just one possible retelling of each case. Murder Mile does not set out to cause any harm or distress to those involved, and those who listen to the podcast or read the transcripts provided should be aware that by accessing anything created by Murder Mile (or any source related to any each) that they may discover some details about a person, an incident or the police investigation itself, that they were unaware of.
Nominated BEST TRUE-CRIME PODCAST at The British Podcast Awards, 4th Best True Crime Podcast by The Week, The Telegraph's Top Five True-Crime Podcasts, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50 and iTunes Top 25.
EPISODE TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY-THREE:
On Friday 12th of December 1969, at roughly 9:50pm, at the Duke of York public house at 47 Rathbone Street in Fitzrovia, a fight erupted between a group of black youths and a group of white youths, which resulted in Robert Kent being stabbed to death, and Sozen Moodley sent to prison for life. But was this a racially motivated attack, or a set of hot tempers flared by alcohol?
The location is marked with a teale coloured symbol of a bin at the top of the markers near the word 'Goodge Street'. To use the map, click it. If you want to see the other maps, click here.
SOURCES: This case was researched using some of the sources below.
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE: Welcome to Murder Mile. Today, I’m standing on Rathbone Street in Fitzrovia, W1; three streets east of the deadly soap of Georgia Antoniou, one street west of the Charlotte Street robbery, two streets south of the scattered body parts by Louis Voisin, and a short walk from the crying weasel - coming soon to Murder Mile. Situated on the corner of Rathbone Street and Charlotte Place is the Duke of York pub, a decent boozer frequented by locals as most tourists are unlikely to pass it. Licenced in 1757, it was named after the younger brother of King George III, but – above the door – you may notice a portrait which resembles a very different Duke of York; an alleged randy royal, a noble nonce and a taxpayer funded paedo who – possibly owing to his inability to sweat – had to warm up his todger by bothering a young girl’s foof. Which is not to say that just because someone is infamous for one thing, that is all they ever do. The same could be said for the murder which occurred here. As on the night of Friday 12th December 1969, during the height of Apartheid and the demise of the British Empire, a fight between two groups of black and white males occurred, during which a young boy lost his life. But why? Depending on whose side was taken when this particular story was told, this could be seen as a struggle against oppression, racism and prejudice, or simply an all-too tragically familiar tale about arrogance, a temper, a simple spark and a bunch of idiots who were drunk. But what sparked it is down to you. My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 243: In Black and White. Sentenced to life for murder, 19-year-old Sozenderan Moodley (who most of his friends called Sozen) wasn’t the kind of person you would expect to be a convicted of a young man’s murder. But he was. Born on 11th of June 1950, Sozen was one of four children (two boys and two girls) to Doria, a housewife and Balasundrum, a school master. Raised in the South African city of Johannesburg during the tinder dry height of the brutal Apartheid, as a family of African and Asian origin, they saw the extremes of wealth and poverty, freedom and oppression, in a country deeply divided between blacks and whites. As the youngest, Sozen always looked up to his older brother Kastree, and as they grew, becoming fine young men who were both six feet tall and pencil thin, they were often mistaken for one another, with the only way to tell them apart being that Kastree had a neat little moustache, and Sozen did not. Johannesburg in the 1950s and 60s was a difficult time to be black, let alone also an Indian immigrant, but being raised with a solid work ethic and good morals, both boys were educated at Bree Street Indian School in their primary years and Lenasia High School in their secondary years, leaving with a school diploma, and although Sozen was more artistic than academic, he dreamed of higher education. Having left school aged 15, Sozen worked as an apprentice printer at Golden Era Printing in the city, earning himself a decent wage and a set of skills which would put him in good stead for the future. He was good, decent and although a tad hot-tempered, he never got into any bother with the police. But for him, although this was his home, South Africa had a long history of intolerance and segregation. In 1912, half a century earlier, the South African Native National Congress was established as a black nationalist organisation and political party with the mission “to maintain the voting rights of coloureds (being persons of a mixed race) and Black Africans in the Cape Province”. Renamed the African National Congress in 1923, the ANC would spearhead the fight to eradicate apartheid and South Africa’s policy of racial separation and discrimination. Across the next seven decades, they would fight hard and many would die, but with apartheid finally quashed in 1990, four years later, ANC President Nelson Mandela was elected to head South Africa’s first multiethnic government, changing the nation forever. In the 1960s, freedom from oppression was in sight, but it was still three decades away. For Sozen and his siblings, they knew their homeland wasn’t the place to fulfil their dreams, as with both sisters having already moved to Canada, it wouldn’t be long until Sozen left South Africa too. In 1963, aged 24, Sozen’s older brother Kastree came to the UK to study. Obtaining a General Certificate of Education from the Eliot School in Putney, although he returned home to undertake a degree at the University of Durban, as an anti-apartheid activist, he quit in 1967 for what he called ‘political reasons’. Obtaining a visa, in 1968, he married, moved to Fulham, and as a translator for political organisations like Amalgamated Protections on Oxford Street and later the United Association for the Protection of Trade in Berners Street, when charged – for his only known crime - the Police Report stated “he is an active member of the African National Congress” which in brackets they wrote “(the Black Panthers)”. And that was a big part of the problem – miscommunication. By 1969, when the murder took place, people in South Africa knew the difference between the African National Congress and the Black Panthers (the black nationalist organisation headed up by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in California, whose radical and - some say – provocative actions led to a high level of press coverage and the founding of the British Black Panthers), but here, most British people didn’t see the difference, especially as, our government and the press were still supporting apartheid. From 1960, with the ANC banned by the entirely white South African government, and with Britain being one of South Africa’s biggest trading partners and investors - who didn’t care what was morally right, only what was profitable - the ANC were forced to become an underground political movement. For Kastree, London’s West End was key to the ANC’s struggle… You could walk down these streets today and not see a single memorial to its past, but across just a few streets in Fitzrovia, through the 1960s, it was a political hotbed of the black freedom movement. A discrete little flat above 24 Goodge Street was the secret headquarters of South African Communist Party in exile. 39 Goodge Street was where the African Communist Quarterly was printed, miniaturised and smuggled overseas. The upper two floors at 89 Charlotte Street were the offices of the Anti-Apartheid Movement. And (before moving to their more infamous offices at nearby 28 Penton Street) directly opposite the Duke of York pub was the ANC’s London headquarters at 48 Rathbone Street. …and yet, for Sozen, he only came to London for the art. Arriving on a work visa at Heathrow Airport on the 11th of August 1968, 15 months before the murder, even the Police report describes Sozen as “a man of sober habits and a good character”, and unlike many of the others caught up in this deadly incident, “although he is known to associate with members of the ANC”, such as his friends and his brother, “he is not a member of the organisation (Black Power)”. Getting a place at the London College of Printing in Borough High Street, one year later, Sozen qualified as a Print Manager. Financially aided by his father to ensure that he would never be broke nor hungry, in September 1969, he attended a 12-week course in Lino Typing at a college in Kings Cross. He wasn’t political and he wasn’t a radical, he was just a young lad in a new country looking for work as a printer… …and yet, in a fight between a group of blacks and whites, he’d stab an unarmed youth to death. But was it a political act, a personal grudge, or self-defence? In his book, ‘London Recruits, The Secret War against Apartheid’, Ronnie Kasrils (ex-leader of the ANC’s military wing) describes how “after Nelson Mandela was jailed for life in 1964… this spelt the nadir of the liberation struggle”, so a group command was formed to “plan daring acts to demonstrate the ANC was not dead…” including the broadcast of anti-apartheid messages and the smuggling of literature, as well as one of their most infamous tactics – bombs – only these were not designed to kill or maim. ANC recruit, Eddie Adams described his training, like so: “in an empty office on Charlotte Street, (Ronnie & I) crouched behind some desks while he explained what we called ‘leaflet bombs’. These consisted of a plastic bucket with a platform”, piled with propaganda leaflets, “over a tube with explosives in it”. When triggered, “it would send leaflets a hundred feet into the air”, injuring no-one, causing (what the British would term as) a bit of rumpus, and educating as many onlookers as possible. But as an illegal political organisation hiding in a pro-apartheid country, they played a dangerous game with dangerous people who wanted them to be kept under surveillance or silenced for good; as from 1976 to 1994, 140 Gower Street (two streets over) was the headquarters of the British Secret Service, and at 200 Gower Street was BOSS, the South African Bureau of State Security, their secret police. Eyes were everywhere, ears were eavesdropping, and they didn’t know who they could trust, so it was no surprise when in 1961, the headquarters of the Anti-Apartheid Movement were bombed. And then, in 1982, 13 years after the murder, the South African secret police exploded a 24lb bomb in the new offices of the ANC on Panton Street. Killing no-one, injuring a janitor, and destroying a wall, it sent an all-too unsubtle message that they were being watched and were – very much - under threat. So, it’s no surprise that the ANC offices on the first floor of 48 Rathbone Street were so discrete. Situated opposite the Duke of York pub, beside a hotel and along from the eateries on Charlotte Place, this vague brown-brick corner building had three doors leading to its three higher floors, but with no signs, no posters and no flags, it just looked like any another office in this dark little corner of the city. It could have been anything; a storeroom, a help group, a charity, or an accountants, and not being an ANC member – even though he supported their beliefs - Sozen was not known to frequent the offices, as the nearest he came to them was to pay a visit to the pub for a pint with his pals, who were regulars. Also from Johannesburg, 31-year-old Surcaparakash Nannan was a married man with three children in South Africa, who worked as a teacher at Willesden High School and a clerk for Abbey Life Assurance. And as a more militant member of the ANC London group who wore his Black Panther sympathies on his sleeve - although he wasn’t the biggest, the boldest, the bravest but was often the most vocal - he wore the easily identifiable uniform of the Black Panther Party - the leather jacket and the black beret. And whereas Nannan was all mouth and no trousers, Linda Moole was too often all fists and no brains. Born in Queenstown, 27-year-old Linda was described as aggressive and bullish, an aimless thug with two criminal convictions for theft and assault (for which he was sentenced to 80 days in prison), who – although he was given a better start in life than most – was expelled from Blythwoods Institution “for political reasons”, struggled to hold down jobs, illegally arrived in the UK with no passport in 1967, and lived by himself in a small poorly furnished room in Islington, as paid for by National Assistance. Just like Sozen, they had their own reasons to be in London at that time when acts of rebellion, marches and demonstrations were rife, as Britain’s links to South Africa was a political hot potato. And yet, their ANC membership didn’t automatically mean that everything they said or did was politically motivated. So, how and why was a young white man stabbed to death… …in a part of the city described as the hotbed of the black power movement? Friday 12th of December 1969. It was a year of huge highs and low lows, as Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, the ANC held its first conference in exile, the House of Lords voted to abolition the death penalty and Chicago police killed two members of the Black Panther Party. But for Sozen, it marked the end of his Lino Typing course. As a 6-foot South African Asian, who was pencil thin and dressed in a blue suit and a white mackintosh, Sozen stuck out off a crowd, but then he had no reason to hide, as he was an artist, not an agitator. Being well-mannered, he handed his teachers a present as a thank you, and keen to mark the end his education, he bought a bottle of whiskey from an off-licence, even though he wasn’t much of a drinker. Sozen would state “I’d been celebrating… I had a fair number of drinks. I arrived at the Duke of York pub at 7:30pm”, where he met his brother, Kastree’s wife Mel, his pal Sathia and several others. Situated on opposing corners of Charlotte Place, the Duke of York pub may have been barely eight feet from the ANC headquarters in the heart of the black freedom movement, but this area – not being known for just one thing - was also known as part of London’s film district, its second-hand jewellery quarter, a haven for haberdashers, and many of its pubs were infamous haunts of radical novelists. Not being activists, Sozen and his pals had no reason pop into the ANC HQ, so as planned, they headed to the Duke of York, where they were regulars, and of the 30 people there, no-one was a total stranger. Racially, the mood across the city was no better or worse than usual, with the ramifications of the 1958 Notting Hill race riots still felt, as well as the 1966 riots in Cleveland, and several major riots bubbling under in Brixton, Toxteth, Handsworth, Broadwater Farm and Chapeltown. But this was just a pub. The Duke of York was a small corner pub with doors on Charlotte Place and Rathbone Street barely 20 feet apart. Dominated by a semi-circular bar with bench seats around the edge and pockmarked with tables and chairs, it had a juke box which played the latest hits - Marvin Gaye’s ‘I heard it through the grapevine’ and Ziggy Stardust’s Space Oddity – with a pinball machine and a football table out back. As always, being a Friday night (which for many was pay day), the bar was busy, with shoulders rubbing against shoulders, an occasional bit of argy-bargy and no spare seats for latecomers. As a regular’s pub, everyone split into groups, with a table of white youths, a table of black youths, a gaggle of old geezers at the bar, no solo or groups of girls drinking Lambrini (as unaccompanied women were banned from pubs until the 1970s), but a mixed group of lads playing snooker, as sport often brings people together. There would be many witnesses to what happened that night, most of whom were white, and although the police report makes it clear which of the South Africans were “members of the ANC” or “associated with members of the ANC”, no-one else’s political views were investigated, but several were criminals. At the bar, Peter Llewellyn-Jones had served two years for drug smuggling in Spain, and having fled, he was wanted by the Greek police, and convicted by a court in Athens to three years for drug smuggling. George Hayden was imprisoned for nicking petrol, Fred Atterbury pilfered clothes, Melvyn Goodings stole a car, and Cyril Bower had “persistently importuned male persons for immoral purposes”. Behind the bar, John Delham was convicted of possession of an offensive weapon, and the assistant manager, John Moore was (wait for it) fined £10 for stealing a tomato sauce dispenser. But then again, just because someone is infamous for something they have done, it doesn’t mean that is all they ever do. At 9:15pm, a group of white youths came in and sat at a vacated table by the door. Two students, Nicholas Clark & Michael Flannagan, Roseanne Barry, a typist, Pauline Battson, a trainee dental nurse, all aged 16 to 19, followed by Phillip Kent, a printer and his bespectacled brother Robert – the young man who would be murdered. And all being friends, they sat there quietly and unnoticed. The atmosphere was typical for a Friday night, as Michael told the police, “Phillip and Nicholas had a game with two coloured men on the football machine”, as everyone else sat drinking and chatting. Robert and Sozen were sat by opposite doors, and (as far as we know) they hadn’t met or spoken… …but at 9:50pm, the mood abruptly changed. Into the pub walked Linda in a dark brown coat, and Nannan in his Black Panther beret, as they pushed and shoved their way in, causing drinks to spill, voices to raise, and as almost every witness to agree that they were “determined to cause trouble”. With Peter the drug smuggler perched at the bar, Linda & Nannan faced him down when he wouldn’t (or couldn’t) budge over to give them a little more space. But was this a racist act, a principal, or a matter or logistics from Peter, Linda or Nannan? As Linda grabbed Peter by the lapels and shouted in his face, although several men of different colour came to the aid of whoever had a similar skin-tone to them, before it kicked off, the landlord had split them up, and even though Linda had invited Peter outside for a fight, the incident was over for now. It seems like nothing, an insignificant little something which happens in a pub, on every week, in every city, as someone whose had too much to drink tries to take on another drunk for a pointless purpose. But as fast as the anger had quelled, it erupted just as quick. Sozen stated “Linda jumped on my table” and launching himself from a bench, “he began to fight with the other brother”, by which he meant Phillip Kent. Why? We don’t know because everything went into chaos. “Phillip broke a glass on Linda’s head”, Sozen said, and suddenly “everyone was fighting”. As Robert stepped in to protect his brother, Sozen said “I didn’t pay much attention until the two white brothers came over and joined in the quarrel. I then got up, went over and tried to stop the fight. The brother with the glasses pinned my arms behind me”, being Robert, as the melee continued in the bar, with bottles being smashed, benches being thrown, and Michael hurled across a table, as all the while Nannan made a swift exit, and Peter the drug smuggler, who some said had incited it, was ignored. With the action reported by Rosemary & Pauline who’d wisely sought refuge by the ladies’ toilets, the police report stated “there was little doubt that the coloureds were the aggressor”, with the ringleader being Linda who stood on the bar to kick Robert in the face, and as that boy fell to the floor, Linda repeatedly kicked him as he lay bleeding, and seeing another, Linda move onto Michael to do the same. And although, Sozen and Robert were only participants on the periphery… …it was then that this happened, and nobody knows why. From his pocket, Sozen pulled a six-inch knife. Whether he carried it for self-defence, as a souvenir, for a friend, or as a tool of his trade being an artist, neither was even suggested in the police report. With the pub in panic, only a few saw the weapon, only a handful heard a girl scream “he’s got a knife”, and although Robert asked him to “put the knife away”, in a single fast swipe, Sozen confessed “I then stabbed the white boy with the glasses, then he fell to the floor”. And although almost everyone ran, even though Robert was unconscious and bleeding profusely, Linda kicked him again as he fled. (End) Called at 9:50pm, the Police arrived 3 minutes later, but with the landlord having cleaned-up, the pub didn’t look all that bad, bar the broken glass, the blood, a screaming girl, and Robert who lay silent. Nannan was detained on site, Linda was arrested at the ANC offices, the witnesses were rounded up, and Sozen was apprehended just two streets away, with the knife (given to a friend) quickly found. Transferred to Middlesex Hospital, being in a coma and with his organs mechanically assisted, having suffered a single stab wound above his right ear, so much force had been used that the blade had sliced through his 7mm thick skull and penetrated his temporal lobe, resulting in a massive haemorrhage. One week later, Robert died of his injuries, and Sozen was charged with his murder. Tried at the Old Bailey on the 18th of June 1970, of those involved in the fight, only the black men were convicted; with Kastree and Nannan sentenced to a 6-month suspended sentence and Linda sent down for 6 months for assault. But with Robert’s blood on the blade, Sozen’s fingerprints on the handle, an ID parade identifying him as the killer, and later confessing “I stabbed the white boy. I’m sorry I stabbed him”, 19-year-old trainee printer Sozenderan Moodley of South Africa was sentenced to life in prison. With an appeal of provocation dismissed, Sozen served part of his term at Wormwood Scrubs prison. But with the witness statements being such a confusing mess (that Peter identified the killer as Sozen’s brother Kastree), the crime-scene having been cleaned-up and neither man having never met before, no-one could explain the motive for the killing; not their friends, not their family, nor Sozen himself. So, was it political, was it personal, was he protecting a friend, was his defending himself, was it an act of drunken idiocy by a hot-tempered lad stuck in a melee, or was it as simple as black and white? The Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast has been researched using the original declassified police investigation files, court records, press reports and as many authentic sources as possible, which are freely available in the public domain, including eye-witness testimony, confessions, autopsy reports, first-hand accounts and independent investigation, where possible. But these documents are only as accurate as those recounting them and recording them, and are always incomplete or full of opinion rather than fact, therefore mistakes and misrepresentations can be made. As stated at the beginning of each episode (and as is clear by the way it is presented) Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast is a 'dramatisation' of the events and not a documentary, therefore a certain amount of dramatic licence, selective characterisation and story-telling (within logical reason and based on extensive research) has been taken to create a fuller picture. It is not a full and complete representation of the case, the people or the investigation, and therefore should not be taken as such. It is also often (for the sake of clarity, speed and the drama) presented from a single person's perspective, usually (but not exclusively) the victim's, and therefore it will contain a certain level of bias and opinion to get across this single perspective, which may not be the overall opinion of those involved or associated. Murder Mile is just one possible retelling of each case. Murder Mile does not set out to cause any harm or distress to those involved, and those who listen to the podcast or read the transcripts provided should be aware that by accessing anything created by Murder Mile (or any source related to any each) that they may discover some details about a person, an incident or the police investigation itself, that they were unaware of.
Nominated BEST TRUE-CRIME PODCAST at The British Podcast Awards, 4th Best True Crime Podcast by The Week, The Telegraph's Top Five True-Crime Podcasts, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50 and iTunes Top 25.
Welcome to the Murder Mile UK True-Crime Podcast and audio guided walk of London's most infamous and often forgotten murder cases, all set within and beyond the West End.
EPISODE TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY-TWO:
This is Part Four of Four of Meticulous. On the south side of Sutton Lane North lies a delightful three floor semi-detached house called Kendal Villa. Back in the late 1960s, this was a series of flats owned by psychiatrist Dr Streacy, with the ground floor flat rented out to 48-year-old Elenora Essens and her common-law husband, Alec Vanags. Having spent Christmas together, on the afternoon of Sunday 29th December 1969, as a troubled woman who prone to disappearing without warning having escaped a brutal marriage with her husband in Mansfield, Elenora walked out on her boyfriend, never to return. Almost three years later and 16 miles south, her dismembered body was found in three shallow graves near to Leatherhead golf course. But who had killed her, and why had they dissected her body?
THE LOCATION
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SOURCES: This case was researched using some of the sources below.
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE: Thursday 2nd January 1969 at 10:30am. Victoria Station. Through the turnstiles, Alec Vanags departed the train, blending in among the families, shoppers and commuters. Dressed in a once neat now slightly shabby suit, although it was bitterly cold outside, he wiped a bead of sweat from his furrowed brow with a dirt sodden hand, as pain ripped across his face. His injured back was arched and aching, as with his one good eye red raw with exhaustion and tears, in his arms he grappled with an unwieldy cardboard box which was clutched to his chest. Weighing 12lbs or 5.4kgs, roughly the same as a sack of spuds, Alec Vanags was a man out of his depth, as even though he was famously meticulous when it came to researching military aircraft, faced with the task of disposing of a dead body or at least part of a body, he hadn’t a clue what to do, or how to do it. “I wanted to get rid of it quickly”, Alec confessed, “so I got the train to Mitcham. I went to some woods near there and realised I couldn’t scrape a hole with my hands”, so he returned, still carrying her head. With the box too heavy to carry back home, he popped it in a 24-hour locker, number 424, and locked it. “I was glad to get rid of it, I felt it was evil”, Alec said, but he knew it would have to return to it soon. The Police mistakenly believed that the murderer of Elenora Essen was “a monster”, an experienced serial-killer or sadistic psychopath owing to the neat and meticulous way that he disposed of her body. Only it wasn’t, as being nothing more than trial and error, Alec Vanags would make many mistakes… …and the first, he had already made. As Alec returned to his gloomy ground-floor flat at Kendall Villas, through the darkness and the distinct lack of festive cheer, gone was the familiar shrill as Nora barked at her slave “where’s my dinner?”, “work faster”, “I said I wanted eggs” - a sound which made him clench - as although now mercifully quiet, he couldn’t savour its silence, as between the twin beds, his girlfriend lay dead, minus her head. So how did he get this point? On Sunday 29th December 1968, having bludgeoned Nora to death with a broken air-pistol, “I didn’t know what to do”, he admitted, so for four days, he did nothing. He went to work, he did his job, he came back home, and with nobody having reported her missing, as promised, neither did he. Each night he slept in an armchair in the sitting room, as her slowly decaying headless remains lay oozing. On Thursday 2nd January 1969, Alec took two days off. Having been Nora’s skivvy for months, no-one at MacDonald Publishing queried this, as they believed that she was still making his sad little life hell. That day, although a man without a car, “I decided the only solution was to dismember and bury her”, something he’d no experience of, not being a monster. “I couldn’t find the nerve, so I bought a bottle of vodka, told myself ‘do it now or you never will’ and drank half the bottle. I don’t usually drink”. The hacksaw he’d had in his toolbox for years, as well as many other tools being practical. “I went up to Nora’s body, I shut her eyes, and with the hacksaw, I cut off her head”. Alec said in a matter-of-fact way, only it was far from it. “I felt sick” he said, “in fact, I was sick. I vomited next to the body”, as he severed the 6th and 7th vertebrae at a 45-degree angle, for no reason other than that’s how he did it. “I wrapped it up”, but with her murder as unplanned as her disposal, he didn’t have anything useful to wrap her in, so – being frantic, upset and exhausted – he grabbed what was to hand, like a shirt, a woollen cardigan and a cotton tea towel, not even once thinking of how the skull would decompose. “I found a cardboard box, tied it up with string, and sat there wondering what could I do?” Not thinking straight, he hopped on a train to Mitcham in South London, wandered around for a while with a box stuffed with a rotting head, he found a bush by the roadside, and having struggled to dig a hole in the hard frosty earth with his hands, he returned to Victoria Station, and stashed it in a locker… for now. The next day, Friday the 3rd, things were different. With the risk of his capture now heightened, his rational brain kicked in, so having glugged back the last slugs of vodka, “I cut up the rest of the body”, and although it still made him sick, “I started with the legs”. He began by disarticulating the hips and knees, as even with a basic knowledge of biology everyone knows that once the joints are separated, it would be a lot easier than sawing through bone. After that, like a manual, it was just a case of repetition. “I cut off the arms”, again disarticulating and severing the joint. “I was surprised there was hardly any blood”, which left him with the torso. And with the body divided into portable bits, it would be a lot easier and less obvious to carry across town. But with flies forming and the maggots writhing, it was already beginning to rot. On the Chiswick High Road, “I went to Woolworths and bought four sets of plastic sheets and a three reels of string. I got some newspaper”, one of several old copies of the Evening Standard he kept in the sitting room to light the fire “and I used it to wrap them up”. Not a single second of this was a well-thought-out ploy to cunningly throw the detectives off his scent, it was simply that as bodies ooze as they decompose, it didn’t take an expert to know that he had to wrap them up… as he could smell it. Having purchased a sturdy blue holdall with a zip, and a spade from Cutlers, a hardware shop he knew near his work in Soho, he bagged-up the arms and legs. And as a final insult to Nora, as “her torso was too big”, he had to buy a larger and sturdier bag, which by evening, left him exhausted in the armchair. That night, he slept, believing that the next day, he would bury her… …only she would be a much weightier problem to dispose of. Saturday 4th January 1969, 8am, Chiswick. Out of the front door of Kendall Villas, Alec dragged the first bag, which contained her torso. As a small weak man with a disabled back, with the bag being as big as a 20-kilo sack of coal but weighing 10 kilos more, even that was a mission for him to carry. “I just managed to carry it up Sutton Lane, but I had to put it down four times as it was too heavy”, so instead of getting the tube, “I stopped a taxi”. (A taxi pulls up). Driver: “where to gov’?”, Alec: “Victoria station”, Driver: “Right oh. Blimey, you’re not packing light, you going anywhere nice?”, but the truth was that Alec hadn’t decided. With Mitcham a washout, having only briefly looked at a transport map for the largest patch of green he could see, he had chosen “Ashtead Woods”, Driver: “Oh, nice, you got relatives there”, Alec: “erm, yes, sort of”. As a gentleman, Alec chatted to the driver, tipped him a shilling and wished him a pleasant day, as he dragged the large unwieldy bag into the concourse of Victoria Station. It may seem strange that no-one batted an eyelid (not even the constables on duty) at a profusely sweating man struggling to drag a body sized bag across one of London’s busiest stations in daylight, but everyone had a bag fit to burst. With the legs alone weighing 18 kilos, the same as half a bag of cement, and the arms the length of two cricket bats and adding at least 5 kilos to the load, just those trips to the station took him the rest of the day and knackered him out, and - with the flat still needing to be cleaned - along with her head, he stashed the torso and the limbs in the left luggage lockers, as tomorrow, he would bury them. Sunday 5th January 1969, 7am, Victoria Station. Mercifully, the snow had stopped, but with the ground still rock hard, as he removed the bagged torso from the left luggage locker, he strapped the spade onto the side. Dragging the bag to a florist’s booth, he then bought a bunch of red roses (as he still loved her), but he didn’t board a train to Leatherhead. Having done a little more research, “I found a bus which ran direct to Ashtead Woods, I got a taxi from Victoria Station to Hyde Park Corner, and I asked for a ticket to Leatherhead golf course”. Sat onboard a Green Line bus for 90 minutes, as he often did, he was pleasant with anyone who spoke to him, as in the rack, he stashed the bulging bag containing her torso, and hopped off at Pachesham Park. With the road quiet and the golf course empty, “I got off, I waited for the bus to go, and then dragged it behind some bushes and covered it with branches”. Being on the cusp of a dense and impenetrable wood with no houses in sight, having wrapped it in a discarded hessian sack, he knew it would be safe. By noon, he returned to Victoria Station to collect the bag of limbs from the locker and repeated the journey from Hyde Park to Pachesham Park. By then, “it was getting dark. I dug a grave”, which sapped his strength and left his back raw, as with the soil as a solid as bricks and the hole criss-crossing with tree roots, he couldn’t bury the torso as deep as he wanted to, so each grave was far too shallow. But what was he to do? And besides, who would search for a dead woman’s body in a dense wood? No-one… except maybe a hungry fox? With the sunlight beginning to fade, and the burial almost complete, as he had already done twice that day, Alec bussed it back to Victoria Station to collect the final piece of Elenora Essens – her head. Clutching the key, and knowing that – by tonight - all of this horror would finally be over, as he turned the handle to locker 424, it gave a satisfying click as it unlocked… but as he opened it, his heart raced. (heart beats) The box wasn’t there. (heart beats) The locker was empty. (heart beats) And the head was gone. It was the right locker, at the right station and he had the right key, so the only logical answer was that someone had opened it and had taken the box. But who? The Police? “I didn’t know what to do”, Alec said. And although he panicked that perhaps a detective was watching him and was ready to pounce, the answer was staring him in the face, as above his head was a large sign which read ‘24-hour locker’. Station staff had cleared it out that morning, and with the decapitated head either being examined at Scotland Yard, or not, “I decided after all this, I had to go through with it". So going to Lost Property, he explained his situation, he apologised, he paid the fine and got the box back. No-one had checked inside or queried its weight, and with the package starting to smell, they were happy to get rid of it. By that time, it was well into the evening, and with the city gripped by a bitterly cold darkness and the bus to Pachesham Park having stopped, Alec caught the train to Ewell, but with no taxis there to give him a lift, “I walked in the direction I assumed was to the woods. It was 3 hours till I reached the road”. Cold, aching and exhausted, “I buried the head. It broke the spade, and I threw it away. I planted some red roses with the box. Into the tree, I remember cutting the letter ‘N’”, as in Nora, “where I’d placed the torso” - only this wasn’t a clue left to torment the police, but a memorial to the woman he loved. Back at home, “I tried to clean the carpet, it was too bloody, so I cut it out and threw it away, as well as the hacksaw into a metal disposal truck near to Sutton Lane”. Miraculously, even though he had no idea what he was doing, through a little bit of planning and a meticulous mind, no-one had seen him. Somehow, he had got away with murder… … and, although he still missed her, slowly his smile returned. January 1969. Chiswick. When the neighbours asked, Alec told them “she finally left me”, which no-one queried as it was just nice not to hear her nagging, as most evenings, this quiet little man sat in, reading a book. He said the same to his colleagues, and with her no longer stalking him, the office’s mood improved. And as the staff at Latvia House knew him, he paid Nora’s bill, they gave him her stuff and cleared out Room 16. With at least the last decade of his life being loveless, he admitted he enjoyed the newfound freedom of a single man, and in June, at a dance at the Hammersmith Palais, he met a girl called Denise Abbott. They dated, they fell in love, and by the August, she had moved in, and they lived a happy life together. And with Nora no longer there to scoff at him, he rekindled his relationship with his daughter, Linda. He had a new life now, with new loves, hopes and dreams. So with no need of reminders of the life he once had, as his memory of her faded as fast as her skull in the shallow grave, telling his loved one’s “she didn’t want the gifts I gave her”, her dresses, shoes, rings and a fur coat were all given away. And with no-one reporting her missing - as even the police had a long list of the dates she had vanished without a trace only to return when and if she wanted to - she wasn’t seen as lost, just absent. But although she had disappeared from Alec’s life, Nora was ever present in his very anxious mind. In his diary for Sunday 29th of December 1969, one year after her death, he wrote ‘anniversary, I think very much about N, and how did it all happen… nightmares’, as with a hole cut in the carpet under the twin beds, as a never-ending reminder of what he had done, Dr Stracey prescribed him stronger pills. Alec just wanted to get on with his life… …and although she was dead, Nora still taunted him. Sunday 29th August 1971, two and a half years later, and 16 miles south. “As the greenskeeper’s hut is close to the 10th hole bunker”, said Norman Stones, “I finished up my duties at 7:40am, I raked it over, and on the front crest of the centre of the bunker, I found a bone”. Stripped of meat and freshly dug from a shallow grave, it was the first of many that alerted the police. On Thursday 2nd September 1971, the news-story went national, reporting “two rings are the vital clue that may identify a woman whose hand and forearm were found at Leatherhead golf course”. He hadn’t removed the rings as it hadn’t occurred to him to do so, but with the Police hunting her killer, again Alec cleaned the flat, and this time – with his landlady’s permission - he had the carpet replaced. But the police were closing in, and he knew it. On Saturday 13th of November 1971, at 5:55pm, Alec & Denise sat in the sitting room of Kendall Villas watching ITV. As a short public service programme after the early evening news, Police Five was a five-minute-long appeal by the Police, hosted by Shaw Taylor, relating to recent cases under investigation. The episode was about a woman’s body found at Leatherhead. Denise told Alec “I thought it could have been Nora”, as she knew that Nora had left him but hadn’t returned almost three years ago, that the description matched her details, that the artist’s sketch looked oddly similar to the photos she had seen of her, as did the amber-stoned necklace of hers which Alec had given her. But Alec denied this. With the rings and the dental records leading the detectives to Mansfield, even his own family queried if the killer was him, with Linda stating “my mother asked us whether we thought Alec was capable of such a crime and she said not, as he was too docile”, which everyone agreed, as he wasn’t a monster. Having ruled out their most likely suspect, her violent husband Aleksander Essens, the Police’s next and only prime suspect was the man who saw her last. But with no evidence against him, and being meek, moral and a ‘gentleman’, if it was him, they would need to spook him into making a mistake. On Thursday 18th November, the press announced “an alert went out to ports and airports to look out for a man the police want to help them with their inquiries”. That day, Detective Constable Gray kept surveillance on Alec as he left his office on Poland Street in Soho, went to the Kings Head on Gerrard Street where unusually for such a sober man, he drank two whiskeys, “in Leicester Square, he bought a newspaper, looking at each page slowly”, and at a pawnbrokers, he tried to sell Nora’s watch. With him suitably nervous, the next day, Friday the 19th, the newspapers reported “the woman whose dismembered body was found at Leatherhead golf course was named as Elenora Essen. She lived in Mansfield until 1965 and then moved to London, where inquiries are being concentrated”. On hearing that, a monster would have fled, but having lived with the pain of his actions for the last three years… …Alec could not. That day, having phoned his good friend, Dennis Green, the aviation author who had helped get him his job, Alec confessed “I’m in a bad way… the body on the golf course was Nora. What should I do?”. Those who knew Alec as a quiet, shy and mild-mannered man stated, as Dennis did, “I am absolutely convinced he could not be knowingly involved in any violence, or himself capable of any violence”, as having witnessed the injuries that Nora had inflicted on him over months and even years of torment, no-one could believe that this could be a cold-blooded murder, but a desperate act of self-defence. In the afternoon, Alec walked into West End Central police station and voluntarily gave a statement. Initially, his statements weren’t entirely the truth, as (in his eyes) he hadn’t committed a murder. With his flat at Kendall Villas examined by a forensics team, a fingerprint found on a bowl in a cupboard confirmed Nora’s ID, but with no traces of blood, there was no evidence of a murder at the flat. In fact, as a Latvian refugee who was still traumatised by the war, hidden behind his radio, he had a fully working and loaded pistol. So if he had wanted to kill her, he could have shot her… only he didn’t. On 11th January 1972, Alec was charged with Nora’s murder in a risky strategy by the police to make him confess, as they knew that their evidence against him was circumstantial. They had no witnesses, no blood, no fingerprints, no weapon, no motive and no crime scene for the murder; he hadn’t fled, bragged or financially benefited from her death; and just as no-one could recall seeing him at Victoria Station, Leatherhead or Ashtead Woods, except for the little drinks party in their landlady’s flat on Christmas Day, no-one had seen Nora, so she could have left of her own accord, as Alec had said. The case against Alec Vanags was about to collapse… …but it was his own guilt which had already convicted him. Plagued by nightmares and the knowledge that (still loving her) he had denied her a proper burial, the next day, speaking to Detective Chief Superintendent Shemming, Alec confessed “I’ve been thinking it over and I’ve decided I should tell you what did happen. I did kill her. She was horrible to me”. (End) In the interview room of Dorking Police Station, he confessed “I only wanted to knock her unconscious, not to kill her”. When presented with the evidence – her bed clothes, the blue slipper and the rings – he confirmed what was what; he explained about the murder, the dismemberment and the disposal; and even admitted to the evidence they couldn’t find – the hacksaw, the penknife and the air-pistol. Tried in Court 4 of the Old Bailey from Monday 2nd to Friday 7th July 1972, Alexander Vanags pleaded ‘not guilty’ to murder. Giving evidence, he admitted to killing Elenora Essens, dismembering her body and burying them in three shallow graves. But with Basil Wigador QC arguing a defence of ‘extreme provocation’, the prosecutor Richard Lowry QC agreed that the charge to be reduced to manslaughter. Having retired for 90 minutes, the jury returned with a unanimous verdict of ‘guilty of manslaughter by provocation’. With Justice Swanwick summing-up, “despite the circumstances of provocation, you used a terrible weapon which happened to come to hand. Had you thought about it, I think you could have overpowered her”. But hindsight is a wonderful thing, and besides, this wasn’t the culmination of one fight which got out of hand, but the end of 12 years of persistent abuse, humiliation and assault. On the 7th of July 1972, 44-year-old Alexander Leonard Vanags was sentenced to three years in prison, and having quietly served a little over two years, owing to good behaviour, he was released in 1975. Having walked free from Wormwood Scrubs, prisoner 105197 disappeared from police records, and going on to live a good life in Hornsey, 87 years old Alec died in 2014, where - as a meticulous little man – the rest of his life had revolved around the things he loved; his family, his work, and his books. The Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast has been researched using the original declassified police investigation files, court records, press reports and as many authentic sources as possible, which are freely available in the public domain, including eye-witness testimony, confessions, autopsy reports, first-hand accounts and independent investigation, where possible. But these documents are only as accurate as those recounting them and recording them, and are always incomplete or full of opinion rather than fact, therefore mistakes and misrepresentations can be made. As stated at the beginning of each episode (and as is clear by the way it is presented) Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast is a 'dramatisation' of the events and not a documentary, therefore a certain amount of dramatic licence, selective characterisation and story-telling (within logical reason and based on extensive research) has been taken to create a fuller picture. It is not a full and complete representation of the case, the people or the investigation, and therefore should not be taken as such. It is also often (for the sake of clarity, speed and the drama) presented from a single person's perspective, usually (but not exclusively) the victim's, and therefore it will contain a certain level of bias and opinion to get across this single perspective, which may not be the overall opinion of those involved or associated. Murder Mile is just one possible retelling of each case. Murder Mile does not set out to cause any harm or distress to those involved, and those who listen to the podcast or read the transcripts provided should be aware that by accessing anything created by Murder Mile (or any source related to any each) that they may discover some details about a person, an incident or the police investigation itself, that they were unaware of.
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Welcome to the Murder Mile UK True-Crime Podcast and audio guided walk of London's most infamous and often forgotten murder cases, all set within and beyond the West End.
EPISODE TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY:
This is Part Three of Four of Meticulous. On the afternoon of Sunday 29th December 1969, Elenora Essens, a troubled woman who was prone to disappearing without warning having escaped a brutal marriage with her husband in Mansfield, walked out on her boyfriend, never to return. Almost three years later and 16 miles south, her dismembered body was found in three shallow graves near to Leatherhead golf course. But who had killed her, and why had they dissected her body?
The location is marked with a run & raisin symbol of a bin to the right, near the word 'Chiswick'. To use the map, click it. If you want to see the other maps, click here.
SOURCES: This case was researched using some of the sources below.
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE: Sunday 29th December 1969, at roughly 10:30am. When questioned, Alec Vanags told the police, “Nora left me the day before I went back to work. I got up, made coffee, I took her a cup in bed, I said ‘good morning’, she did not answer”. That day, after 12 years together, even though she had fled a brutal marriage in Mansfield to live a happier life with a quiet bookish little man who loved her without question, their relationship would come to an end. In the sitting room of their ground-floor flat at Kendall Villas in Chiswick, “she was putting on her make-up. I asked her if she was going out. She told me she was leaving for good. I told her I did not want to witness her going, and so I put a coat on and I walked to the Gunnersbury roundabout, then to Kew Bridge. When I returned to the flat it was getting dark”, it was roughly 4:40pm, “and Nora had gone”. The flat was empty, her bag was missing, and so was his girlfriend. That day, she vanished for good. Two years and nine months later, in three shallow graves, her remains were found, dismembered with precision using a hacksaw and meticulously wrapped in air-light plastic, by – what was believed to be – a cruel and unemotional man who the investigating detective would describe as “a monster”. At least, that’s what Alec told the police… …only none of it was true. Alexander Leonard Vanags was not a monster, but the epitome of meek. Described by everyone who knew him as “conscientious, meticulous and a perfectionist in his work”, in his life he was “passive, unassuming and quiet, a man who would rather suffer all inconveniences than speak-up for himself”, as – without a violent streak or an angry bone in his body – he lived his life as “a very gentle man”. Born on the 5th of August 1927 in Riga, Latvia, being six years younger than Nora, they never met. But living around the same time and the same place, they suffered similar traumas and tragedies. In 1943, following the death of his father, a Latvian AirForce officer who was killed by invading Russian forces, aged 16, Alec was enlisted in the Luftwaffe. Which is not to say he was a Nazi at heart, as with Latvia under German control, you either volunteered to fight and die, or were imprisoned then shot. As a young, timid and ultimately expendable paratrooper, Alec was sent into the heart of many brutal and often suicidal battles in the Eastern Front, where it was a miracle that this bookish boy survived. Captured by the Russian Army in March 1945, and – owing to his uniform - seen as a Nazi collaborator, he was imprisoned in several concentration camps for months, where he was tortured and starved. As with so many survivors, you may think that the trauma of war turned the meek into a monster, but being good to the core, although plagued by nightmares, he always made the best of a bad situation. In October 1945, using ingenuity and planning, he escaped the concentration camp. Unable to return to Latvia as – cruelly classified as a traitor – his homeland was now under Russian control, he joined the Polish Underground Movement to help refugees flee to safety, and in July 1946, having made his way to a displaced person’s camp in Germany, in March 1948, he was given a work visa for Britain. Aged just 21, having fought for his country, now he had nothing, except for the ragged clothes on his back, the meagre meal in his belly, the few coins in his pockets and whatever courage he could muster. Forced to start again, although he was intelligent and fluent in English, Polish, Russian and Latvian, as a refugee, he was only permitted to do the most menial of jobs for a pittance, but still he fought on. As a good man with a big heart, what Alec wanted most was a quiet and loving life. In July 1948, Alec married Ingrid Lebedorfs and the two moved to Mansfield in Nottinghamshire while he worked as a miner at the Thorsby Colliery. It wasn’t a job he wasn’t physically suited to, but keen to provide for his wife (and in 1950 and 1952, his two children, Linda & Robert) he did what he had to. Only this was not a relationship built on trust, as Linda would later admit “my father told me that he had been trapped into marriage because he was told he was the natural father of the unborn child”, even though Ingrid was already a few months pregnant by a German solider before they tied the knot. Desperate to make a go of it, although they separated four times, as an exhausted miner who worked 16-hour shifts, 6 days a week, it wasn’t his work which split them apart. In March 1956, Ingrid was sentenced to six months in prison, for what The Birmingham Post described as “the children were seen to eat potato peelings, cat food, dog biscuits and licking out tins”. Admitting neglect, “although the children were unwashed and ragged, they weren’t malnourished as neighbours took pity on them”. As a good man, it broke Alec’s heart to see his family split apart, and although he tried to care for them and hold down a full-time job, that same year, unable to keep up his payments, he too was sentenced to 45 days in prison, and with a ‘ward of the court’, aged just 4 & 2, Linda & Robert were put into care. Upon his release in the Easter of 1956, being broke, lonely and homeless, Alec moved in with his two closest friends in Mansfield, with one being a fellow miner called Aleksander, and the other… …being his rather flirtatious wife called Nora. It’s true that Nora wanted Alec to live with them as a lodger to protect her from her husband’s brutal fists, but also, because she liked him. Alec would confess, “during the Easter of 1956, I went to a party, there I met Mrs Essens, who promptly seduced me that same evening. She told me she had wanted me for a long time. She offered me a room in her house”, which she shared with her husband, “and we became lovers. Her husband knew this, but did not object. She was a very attractive woman who enjoyed flirting and to my knowledge she’d had several affairs on the side, and so did her husband”. After the court case at which Aleksander Essens was charged with his wife’s assault, Nora & Alec both moved out, and although – as old friends - Alec and Aleksander wrote to each other on a regular basis, Aleksander & Nora never spoke again, until he tried to divorce her, which failed, as she was dead. With their pasts behind them, their bright future ahead started badly, as just one month later – and in an incident weirdly similar to what would happen to Nora four years later – Alec was hit by a scooter. Hospitalised for weeks, “I lost the vision in my left eye, I was registered disabled, and I had to give up my job at the colliery”. As an unemployed man with one eye, an inability to lift heavy objects and having never learned to drive, with Nora unable (or unwilling) to work, it was all down to Alec. It was while working as a machine assistant at a printers that Alec’s persistence paid off, as after four years of corresponding with Dennis Green, a respected aviation author, that a new opportunity arose. In February 1967, given his knowledge of aircraft and his mastery of languages, Alec – as a good and kindly man, who although shy, he was impossible to dislike – got a job as the Aviation & Military Editor at MacDonald & Co publishing at 49 Poland Street, Soho. Having come from nothing, he had turned his hobby into a job, his passion into a career, and as a gentleman whose one good eye was perpetually engrossed in a military reference book, it was the perfect job, as he was meek, calm and meticulous. Alec had built a wonderful new life for them both… …but there was one problem, and that was Nora. “In February 1967, I moved to London”, while Nora stayed in Nottingham. “I’d visit her every weekend, where she accused me of not trying hard enough”. So although he was paying for his bedsit and hers, “she didn’t like staying there because of the presence of a young woman. Nora was often quarrelsome, picked on me for trivial things and accused me of making eyes at other women. None of this was true”. In June 1967, 11 years into their relationship, they moved to 22 Tabor Court in Cheam. “Once again, I tried hard to make a go of it, but was not very successful”, as owing to her “pains”, she didn’t work a single day. And yet, although half blind and disabled, Alec earned for them both, as she did nothing. “During our time at Cheam, she was supported by me, her benefits and maintenance payments from her husband”. But with nothing to keep her mind occupied, her unwarranted jealousy only got worse. “The first serious trouble occurred when a German friend of mine came to see me with his wife. Nora accused me of making eyes at her, but this was totally untrue”. Which was ironic, as – with her being so blunt and domineering, and him being so shy and nervous – “I found it hard to sexually satisfy her”. So when her love for him would wane, if indeed it was ever there, she would vanish without a trace. Described by those who knew her as “promiscuous and highly strung”, she drank too much, she liked to party, and as a popular woman, she was not ashamed to tell Alec of her many men friends “who kept in her in fine clothes, money and gifts, and with whom she had affairs with, in London and Surrey. To try and keep her happy, he bought her presents. Only to discover that she had sold his. And then, came the violence which she inflicted upon him. “The second trouble occurred when she found some pin-up girly magazines amongst my aircraft files”. Coming in, just shy of midnight, half drunk, “she accused me of collecting porn, she said that I was ‘no good as a man in bed’, and then, she attacked me with a kitchen knife and a kettle of boiling water”. “I was cut around the face, one of my wrists was scalded, I was bleeding from a wound to my right eye the back of my neck and hands. I tried to restrain her, but couldn’t, and ran out of the flat”. Being 13 miles from London, “I walked to St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, where I was treated for my injuries”, as proven by the doctor and several stitches, and being too afraid to go home, he stayed in a hotel. “I went back to work wearing dark glasses”, Alex said. Everyone in the publishers saw his wounds, but with him being such a quiet man, they didn’t ask him about it. And being keen to return to his normal life, “I phoned Nora at the flat and she said I could come home if I wanted to, and so I went back”. It was about this time that his employer sought him a psychiatrist, but with Nora still as violent towards him, when she vanished for days on end, although he missed her, it was that which gave him relief. As confirmed by his colleagues, “It was after this time that she began visiting me at my office, she just sat there, watching me work and the people I was talking to. She had set her mind that I was having an affair with an office girl, but there was no truth in it at all”. Even his boss, James McGibbon stated “he confided in me that he was having a very bad time with his wife, who was a most neurotic woman. Three times he arrived at work with bruises, scratches, black eyes, and said that Nora had done it”. Being too meek, kind and desperate to make the best of a bad situation, Alec ploughed on… …only, one incident would give Nora the leverage she needed to control him. On 14th August 1968, while crossing the street, Nora was hit by scooter. Treated by Dr Lionel Cleveland at Charing Cross Hospital, he found no breaks and no fractures, only a large bruise, and although no evidence of the injury existed four months later when she was murdered, she used it to her advantage. Being supposedly bedbound but able to leave when it suited her needs, insisting that he become her carer – to cook, to clean, and to act like a skivvy to assuage her every whim – with him confined to the flat she could keep an eye on him, but when he was at work, she would harass him by phone. From September 1968, although he had moved her to Kendall Villas in Chiswick, a flat better suited to her supposed “mobility issues”, she became more aggressive, possessive, and vanished more often. With no close friends to confide in, Alec wrote letters to Klaus Henke, an old buddy in Berlin, as well as Aleksander Essens in Mansfield, which were later read out in court. In them, Alec stated that “all I wanted from all my heart was peace”, and that “since we lived together, it has been a dog’s life”. In December 1968, needing a break, Nora checked into Room 16 at Latvia House in Bayswater, as she had done several times before. Alec said “I did not object because our relationship had cooled off and I could see she had made up her mind to start a different life. I was not jealous because I knew that I could not satisfy her sexually and I did not want to stand in her way. All I asked her was to make the break as quickly as possible and part as friends”. So, out of kindness, he invited her over for Christmas. She did so on Tuesday 24th of December, Christmas Eve… …by the Sunday 29th, she was dead. The winter was bitterly cold, as a hard frost bit early and a low fog smothered the frozen ground, as up to 10 centimetres of snow covered large parts of the South East of England. With his back prone to more severe aches and pains in the colder months, he had no intention of going out. “I had a few days off, and I was hoping to spend these in peace at home”, reading a book on aviation in front of the fire. Having taken too many days off work to act as Nora’s carer, Alec hadn’t the money to buy a Christmas tree or decorations, so the flat was as joyless as the air between them, as Nora lay wearing her blue slip, her pink woollen housecoat and – if and when she ever got out of bed – a pair of blue slippers. Christmas Eve was also Nora’s 48th birthday, Alec said “I bought her a small bunch of flowers. She was disappointed with my gift”, as she sat staring at it, glaring at it like it was poison. “I offered to take her for a drink”, Alec said, but all she did was grumble, complaining “this was the bleakest birthday ever”. On Christmas Day, they awoke, lying separately in twin beds, and although again she grimaced with a face like smacked arse at the meagre but thoughtful gift he’d given her, she had given him nothing. By that point, “our relationship was cool and we only just managed to tolerate each other”, so looking to escape the four walls for least an hour and sink some free booze and nibbles, they headed upstairs to the flat of their landlady Dr Streacy, in a pleasant little party at which Nora bitched about everything; from the drinks, to the sandwiches, to her furniture, and to the cheapness of her presents to them. Boxing Day was a wash out, as all Alec could recall of it was “I cooked a meal, we stayed in but didn’t argue, and she kept complaining about pains”. He didn’t even have any alcohol to drown his sorrows, so the 27th was no better, “she spent most of it in bed. The only time she got up was to ask me if I had cooked anything. ‘You’ve not done enough shopping’ she’d say”, and yet, the 28th was even worse. “I asked Nora to come out for a drink. She laughed in my face and said you have no money. She said I could not afford the drinks she liked. She said she knew people who knew how to treat her. And I said if you know those people, why don’t you leave me and go. But she laughed in my face and repeated ‘I’m going when I am good and ready’. I didn’t want to argue, so I stayed up reading in the other room”. It had been a dreadful Christmas, which marked for him 12 years of misery and abuse. Sunday 29th December 1968 was the day that Nora died. In his first statement, Alec told the Police, “Nora left me the day before I went back to work. I got up, made coffee, I took her a cup in bed, I said good morning, she did not answer”. Most of that was true. Although her autopsy would show that she didn’t get dressed and she didn’t put on her make up, as still in the bedclothes she was murdered in, everything Alec had said about going for a walk was a lie. In his confession, Alec said “she was sitting up in bed while I was hoovering. This was midday and she was taunting me all the time…”, as being as threatening and vulgar as she always was, she spat at him ‘I’ll see you ruined and licking a nigger’s arse’, as – with Alec, her faithful servant failing to please her, she barked ‘can’t you work any faster? Isn’t the dinner ready yet?’. I did not answer. I just kept quiet”. Alec didn’t like to argue, as being meek and mild, instead he put his head down and gritted his teeth. “A few hours later, she fell asleep”, which was the festive blessing he’d been waiting for, only it didn’t last. “When she woke up, she demanded an omelette made of a dozen eggs. I tried to break 12 eggs and make it in two pans. I put it in a large dish and she was sitting up in bed and said ‘what is that?’, I said ‘that’s the omelette you wanted’, she shouted ‘you stupid fool, you can’t do anything right’. And then, “she said I was no good in bed. I told her that it was mainly because she had ruined my nerves”. So far, it had been an argument as ordinary as any other, but after so much abuse, both physical and mental, Alec was about to snap. “At the beginning I was silent”, as he didn’t like to fight, “but then I began to answer back. I went out of the bedroom and Nora got out of bed… she screamed ‘you are nothing but a bastard, and your mother was nothing but a whore’”. who she knew he was fond of. That made him mad, but then, everybody has a breaking point… …and his, she was about to reach. Upon several neat shelves were his treasured possessions; his medals, his photos, the letters from his daughter and a broken air pistol, as well as the one thing that many people said he loved, even more than he loved Nora – as neatly arranged in alphabetical order were his aviation reference books. They were this meek man’s passion, and she knew that. “She shouted ‘this is all you are interested in, books. I’ll see you have none of this left’ and started to pull them off the shelves and tear them up”. Everything he had worked for, everything he had sacrificed for her, she was destroying. Alec would confess “at that moment, I couldn’t control myself any longer. Between us was a broken air pistol, which was lying on the bookshelf. I grabbed it by the barrel and hit her on the back of the head with the butt. She spat in my face. I couldn’t control myself and started hitting her. I don’t know how many times, the butt plate broke, I must have gone mad, as while she was falling, I hit her again”. Slumping hard onto the floor in the sitting room, “then I stopped. There was blood all over the carpet. She was lying face up. I realised what I had done. I listened for a heartbeat, it was there but weak. Then I just sat down and cried. I knelt beside her body. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to call for an ambulance, but it was too late. I wanted to call the police, but who would believe me? I had hit her so many times”. So many times… …and now, Nora was dead. (End) Alec was alone in his flat, his girlfriend’s dead body at his feet and the weapon in his hand. “What was I to do?”, he asked himself, so being desperate to hide her even from himself, “I dragged her between the two beds, it was getting stiff, and covered it up with a sheet and pushed the beds a bit together”. He didn’t know if anyone had heard them fight, so just in case, “I tidied up as much blood as I could with newspapers, I wrapped the gas pistol in some rags and put them in a carrier bag. Then I went to work without sleeping a wink and I ditched the pistol in a rubbish bin near Chiswick bus station”. But still, in the flat, was her body. “I didn’t know what to do”, as he wasn’t a maniac or a monster. Alec Vanags was a five-foot five-inch man with a blind eye and a disabled back, who struggled to walk more than a mile, let alone move the stiffening corpse of a 9 stone woman, to a place where he could bury her without being seen. He couldn’t pull up the floorboards as the landlady would hear, Turnham Green was too public and open for a burial, and he didn’t have access to the cellar or the garden. He couldn’t trust anyone to help him, he didn’t know anyone who would, he had no skills in butchery, no experience in death, he got queasy when he had a nosebleed, and he didn’t drive or own a car. And although seasoned detectives would assume that Nora’s body was disposed of by “a monster”, everything he did was for the very first and the very last time, as this had all been a tragic accident. He had to get rid of her, but how? As the only skill he had was as a bookworm who was meticulous. The Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast has been researched using the original declassified police investigation files, court records, press reports and as many authentic sources as possible, which are freely available in the public domain, including eye-witness testimony, confessions, autopsy reports, first-hand accounts and independent investigation, where possible. But these documents are only as accurate as those recounting them and recording them, and are always incomplete or full of opinion rather than fact, therefore mistakes and misrepresentations can be made. As stated at the beginning of each episode (and as is clear by the way it is presented) Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast is a 'dramatisation' of the events and not a documentary, therefore a certain amount of dramatic licence, selective characterisation and story-telling (within logical reason and based on extensive research) has been taken to create a fuller picture. It is not a full and complete representation of the case, the people or the investigation, and therefore should not be taken as such. It is also often (for the sake of clarity, speed and the drama) presented from a single person's perspective, usually (but not exclusively) the victim's, and therefore it will contain a certain level of bias and opinion to get across this single perspective, which may not be the overall opinion of those involved or associated. Murder Mile is just one possible retelling of each case. Murder Mile does not set out to cause any harm or distress to those involved, and those who listen to the podcast or read the transcripts provided should be aware that by accessing anything created by Murder Mile (or any source related to any each) that they may discover some details about a person, an incident or the police investigation itself, that they were unaware of. |
AuthorMichael J Buchanan-Dunne is a crime writer, podcaster of Murder Mile UK True Crime and creator of true-crime TV series. Archives
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