BEST TRUE-CRIME PODCAST at British Podcast Awards, 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. Subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Acast, Stitcher and all podcast platforms.
Caxton Hall where the assassination of Sir Michael O'Dwyer took place
Welcome to the Murder Mile UK True-Crime Podcast and audio guided walk of London's most infamous and often forgotten murder cases, set within and beyond the West End.
EPISODE ONE HUNDRED:
On Wednesday 13th March 1940 at 4:30pm, in the Tudor Room of Caxton Hall, Udham Singh would murder Sir Michael O'Dwyer, a man he had never met before, but fuelled by hatred over twenty-one years, Udham’s reason to kill would make him not just a murderer, but a martyr.
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 of Caxton Hall on 10 Caxton Street is where the bright green triangle near Westminster, just off The Thames. To use the map, click it. If you want to see the other murder maps, such as Soho, King's Cross, etc, access them by clicking here.
I've also posted some photos to aid your "enjoyment" of the episode. These photos were taken by myself (copyright Murder Mile) or granted under Government License 3.0, where applicable.
Left to right: Sir Michael Francis O'Dwyer, Udham Singh and General Reginald Dyer
Credits: The Murder Mile UK True-Crime Podcast was researched, written and recorded by Michael J Buchanan-Dunne, with the sounds recorded on location (where possible), and the music written and performed by Erik Stein & Jon Boux of Cult With No Name. Additional music was written and performed as used under the Creative Common Agreement 4.0.
SOURCES: This case was researched using the original declassified police incvestigation files from the National Archives - https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C1257785 MUSIC:
SOUNDS: Spent Cartridges - https://freesound.org/people/shelbyshark/sounds/501566/ 22 Rifle - https://freesound.org/people/gezortenplotz/sounds/19514/ Old Time Rifle - https://freesound.org/people/craigsmith/sounds/438581/ Enfield 303 - https://freesound.org/people/kyles/sounds/450854/ Chambered Round - https://freesound.org/people/shelbyshark/sounds/505203/ Sikh Music - https://freesound.org/people/CasaAsiaSons/sounds/240820/ Sikh Celebration - https://freesound.org/people/bangcorrupt/sounds/486622/
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE:
SCRIPT: Welcome to Murder Mile; a true-crime podcast and audio guided walk featuring many of London’s untold, unsolved and long-forgotten murders, all set within and beyond the West End. Today’s episode is about the assassination Sir Michael O'Dwyer by Udham Singh; two strangers from very different worlds, who had never met before the day of his death. To many, his murder seemed almost random, and yet Udham’s reason to kill would make him a martyr. Murder Mile is researched using the original police files. It contains moments of satire, shock and grisly details. And as a dramatization of the real events, it may also feature loud and realistic sounds, so that no matter where you listen to this podcast, you’ll feel like you’re actually there. My name is Michael, I am your tour-guide and this is Murder Mile. Episode 100: The Martyr and the Massacre. Today I’m standing on Caxton Street, in Westminster, SW1; four streets north of the left luggage kiosk where Patrick Mahon dumped the hacked-up bits of Emily Kaye, three streets west of the mysterious murder house of Lord Lucan, five streets south-west of the infamous Spaghetti House siege and three streets north of the hammer-wielding butler Victor Ford-Lloyd - coming soon to Murder Mile. Westminster is the heart of the British political system, as within spitting distance (a feat tested by so many protestors) is 10 Downing Street, the Foreign Office, the relevant Ministries and the Houses of Parliament; where laws are made, lies are spouted and the same useless toothless morons are made into Ministers, swiftly sacked for being crap and punished by being promoted – and that is democracy. Infamous for its protests, Westminster is often filled with more placards than people, as everybody’s voice has the right to heard… even the idiots. Except recently, when a very astute Police Constable saw five knuckle-scraping skinheads staggering towards the Black Lives Matter protest, and instead of riling them up by suggesting they weren’t welcome, she hit them were it hurts by saying “sorry lads, you can’t bring booze into Parliament Square”. And with that, they toddled off to The Jolly Racist pub, unaware that everything they love (beer, football and curries) was invented by the “bloody forunuz”. Two streets away from Parliament Square is Caxton Street; a small side-street crammed full of new offices, old houses, renovated flats, a single tree and Caxton Hall, a place not of protest, but of debate. Built in 1883, Caxton Hall is a five storey, grade II listed, former town hall with a history as colourful as the red and pink sandstone its sculpted from; having witnessed many musicals, speeches and the weddings of Peter Sellers, Ringo Starr, Elizabeth Taylor and Joan Collins (not to each other), as well as political movements, such as first Pan African Conference, the Women’s Social & Political Union and the first public meeting of the Homosexual Law Reform Society. And although, almost all of these events (except the marriages) ended peacefully, it was also home to a very political murder. As it was here, on Wednesday 13th March 1940, in the Tudor Room, where Udham Singh would come face-to-face with Sir Michael O'Dwyer, for the very first time… and would shoot him dead. (Interstitial) So, what connected the Indian killer and his Irish victim? Well, on the surface… nothing. Michael Francis O'Dwyer was born 28th April 1864 in Barronstown; a remote windswept farmstead in County Tipperary in the south-west of Ireland, four thousand miles from the Punjab in northern India. As the sixth of fourteen siblings to John, an affluent landowner and his wife Margaret; as Irish farmers who had struggled in the wake of the Great Famine which left almost a million people dead - with their country torn between independents and nationalists - the O’Dwyer’s turned their backs on their own homeland to climb the greasy pole of prosperity, having sided with their brutal British oppressors. From an early age, Michael was raised and educated to be British, not Irish. To be cold, ruthless and ambitious. To never give-in or give-up, no matter how unfair, unkind or inhumane his orders or goals. And being an Irish farm boy, his only assured route to success was through the Indian Civil Service. With India under the tyrannical boot of the British Empire, the careers and wealth of many infamous leaders and politicians - whose statues still stand tall on our streets – were forged in India’s blood, as seeing its people as uncivilised savages to subjugated, Michael adopted this attitude of supremacy. In 1884, having passed his Indian Civil Service exam, he was posted as an ICS officer to Shahpur in the Punjab, where – later promoted to the euphemistically titled ‘Director of Land Records’ – he oversaw the resettlement of Indian land to native people and tribes, but mostly British landlords and investors. With a total disrespect and disregard for Indian life, culture and sensitivities, he lived as the British did, with the invaders in privilege and the natives in poverty, their country ravage by colonialism. In 1887, assigned to ‘re-organise’ the separation of the North-West Frontier and the Punjab, after quarter of a century of re-writing laws, rules and boundaries for Westminster, in May 1913, he became Lieutenant Governor with total control over the Punjabi people, for which he would be knighted. Upon his succession, Viceroy Penshurst warned Sir Michael that “the Punjab was highly flammable and (if an explosion was to be avoided) it required careful handling”, a skill he was not blessed with. In 1914, with Britain losing the bloody conflict with Germany, although countless Indians had died in the fight for independence, now the master come crawling to its slaves for help. Under the Defence of India Act of 1915, 360,000 Punjabi men were enlisted to die for their captor’s King and country, in return for land, money and the promise of a better future. It was a promise which was agreed with a metaphorical handshake, only once they had turned, that same hand would stab them in in the back. Being short on soldiers, sensing an uprising of Punjabi nationalism and with the country on the brink of unrest, under “emergency war-time measures”, the Defence of India Act 1915 limited the civil and political liberties of the Indian people, a draconian act strongly favoured and enforced by Sir Michael. But by 1918, with the war over and the “emergency measures” obsolete, as Indian soldiers returned from the battlefield to their homeland with a sense of loss and every promise broken, seeing a rise in radical thought, the British sought to supress India’s freedom, by extending those war-time rules. The Rowlatt Act was passed by the British Government on 10th March 1919, and although Sir Michael wouldn’t be murdered for another twenty-one years, the date is significant, as just five weeks after it was signed, his actions would invoke of the one of the world’s bloodies and most shocking massacres. So, who was Udham Singh and why did he kill? Born on the 26th December 1899, in the impoverished Sangrur district of the Punjab, Udham’s birth name was Sher Singh. With his mother having died in child-birth, he was raised as the second of two sons to Sardar Tehal Singh Jammu, a widowed watchman of a railway crossing in the village of Upalli. Aged three, following the tragic sudden death of his father and with no family to raise two sensitive little boys who had nothing and no-one, Sher and his older brother Mukta were sent to the Central Khalsa Orphanage in Amritsar, where Sher was initiated as a Sikh and given the name of Udham Singh. Of those first two decades of his life, that is all we know; in 1916 he attended Khalsa College, in 1918 he graduated, and in 1919 he left the orphanage. Living under the brutal British boot, with the Rowlatt Act curbing his rights, Udham was conscripted to fight in the Third Anglo Afghan war against the Afghan rebels who would win their independence from the British. He served in Basra, East Africa and after four years’ service, he returned home to India to nothing but broken promises. With ‘killing in cold blood’ outlawed in Sikhism and with murder not a part of his curious heart, Udham wanted to see the world, develop his skills, expand his mind and escape his poverty. So, over the next sixteen years, he would travel far and wide, but the things he had seen would eat away at his soul. Setting sail to Mexico, under the alias of a Costa Rican seaman called Frank Brazil (as Indians weren’t permitted to sail on a US vessel), he lived in California, Chicago, Detroit and New York for several years, as well as France, Belgium, Germany, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Switzerland and Italy, only to earn his passage back to India, in July 1927, by working as a carpenter onboard SS Jalapa. Seeing his besieged country from afar, whilst in the US, Udham had become deeply influenced by the revolutionary nationalist Bhagat Singh, who sought to overthrow India’s colonial oppressors. Upon his return to his birth-place of Amritsar, Udham was arrested for possessing two unlicensed revolvers and a large stash of the prohibited Ghadar Party paper called ‘Ghadr-i-Gunj’, which in Punjabi means ‘Voice of Revolt’. Admitting in court a desire to murder his British oppressors, even though this was his first crime and the only time he had ever killed was in combat, he was sentenced to five years in prison. In 1931, he was released, and after that, everything fell apart. Being under constant surveillance - via Kashmir and East Germany - Udham came to England. For six years, as a committed nationalist, he was literally in the belly of the beast… but his life was in chaos. With no-one to guide him, he was indiscrete about his anti-British attitude; he used several aliases, lodged with known Bolsheviks, and applied for and received travel visas to Holland, Germany, Poland, Austria and Italy, as well as Eastern Europe and Russia, during the rise of Hitler’s fascist dictatorship. Living in a white protestant city, Uhdam wasn’t exactly anonymous; as being an Asian Sikh with a big beard and a bright turban, who drifted from job-to-job, bragged about smuggling arms to India and spouted extremist views, by the end of 1936, having embraced a British way of life, he was cohabiting with a “white woman in the West End” and was making his living as jobbing carpenter and a film extra. By 1938, he was charged with demanding money with menace. By 1939, being unemployed, he was living off benefits of just 17 shillings per week. And by 1940, with World War Two in full force and London ravaged by the blitz, the revolutionary wind had gone out of his sails and he felt like a failure. And yet, his martyrdom was just around the corner. But how? His motivation began more than two decades earlier, in the year that he left the orphanage, as 1919 was a flash point in the collapse of the British Empire and India’s struggle for Independence. With the country crippled by strikes, riots and mutinies, in the five weeks since the Rowlatt Act, seeing Amritsar as a city in revolt, as Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab, Sir Michael had implemented strict draconian rules to maintain his tyrannical strangle-hold on the people and deny them any freedom in their own city; protests were outlawed, leaders were exiled and curfews were brutally enforced. To impose his will and quash any rebellion, the policing of Amritsar was overseen by Acting Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer; a cruel sadistic cold-blooded bully who ruled with an iron rod and no emotion. On Sunday 13th April 1919, given a blank sheet by Sir Michael to enforce the rules at will, General Dyer banned all public meetings of more than four people, and imposed an 8pm curfew starting that night. Only this would be a warning which few locals would heed; as Amritsar was a city of many languages, where few people were literate enough to read the sparsely dispersed leaflets, and - more importantly - it was a key day in the Sikh faith. This was the festival of Baisakhi (Bah-saki); a sacred day where thousands of pilgrim families descend from the hills, to the city, for prayers, food and the cattle fair. Incensed that these peasants had flagrantly ignored his rule on public meetings, at 2pm, General Dyer shut down the cattle fair. But the people didn’t disperse. Instead, with nothing to do and nowhere to go, having already prayed and reluctantly heading home, many drifted aimlessly into Jallianwala Bagh. Jallianwala Bagh, known as the Bagh is a six-acre garden with a twenty-foot well, surrounded by ten-foot high walls and accessed by one entrance and five narrow alleys with lockable steel gates, as during the rainy season, the garden is used for farming, but being flat and arid for the rest of the year, it is also a public meeting place, a Sikh cremation site and somewhere to peacefully protest and debate. At 4pm, estimating the crowd at between 6,000 and 20,000 people, General Dyer did nothing to disperse this crowd, as in his mind, he had already warned them and they had chosen to ignored it. The evening was warm and peaceful, as although densely packed with a small but peaceful protest over two exiled leaders, the Bagh was full of thousands of families playing games, eating picnics and savouring the last few hours of sunlight; the mood was calm, happy and good natured. Only General Dyer didn’t see it that way. This wasn’t a picnic; this was a rebellion, an uprising and a revolt. At 8pm, as decreed, with his curfew in-force and these anarchic peasants deliberately disobeying his direct order, having blocked the main entrance, locked all of the side alley gates and formed a line of ninety Sikh and Gurkha soldiers, armed with .303 Lee–Enfield rifles, General Dyer gave no warning of his bloody intentions, except for his men to “make ready”, “take aim” and “fire”. (Mass shooting) It was like shooting fish in a barrel, as even as the terrified people fled, so thick were the crowds that Dyer ordered his men to fire at the densest part, so each bullet wound penetrate several bodies deep. Panicked, frightened but unable to escape - with nothing to hide behind but a bloody pile of mounting corpses –the fittest were shot climbing the locked gates, the elderly and the sick were crushed in the stampede, mothers died diving into the deep dry well to shield their babies, and with not a single shot being fired back, as the people were unarmed, the troops continued the slaughter for ten whole minutes, manually loading every single one of the 1650 bullets, until their ammunition was spent. With the carnage ceased and the Bagh bathed in blood, Dyer ordered his men to retreat. They didn’t offer any aid, or count the dead, instead with Dyer’s deadly curfew in-force until the morning and the city too terrified to enact a rescue effort, many of the wounded were condemned to lie there, dying. 192 were injured, 379 were dead, the eldest was eighty-two and the youngest was just six-weeks-old. The Amritsar massacre traumatised a nation and having witnessed to one of the worst atrocities ever inflicted by the British, many people were scarred for life. One of whom (it is said) was an 18-year-old boy from Amritsar orphanage, who was serving water at the festival - his name was Udham Singh. To cover his tracks, Sir Michael O’Dwyer initiated martial law in the Punjab on 15th April 1919, two days after the massacre, but backdated the paperwork to 30th March, two weeks before, giving a legal justification for General Dyer’s atrocity. And having re-enforced his side of the story to the British high-command, he sent a telegram to General Dyer saying “your actions were good, right and I approve”. Under the protection of Sir Michael, General Dyer was found innocent of any criminal charges, he was removed from duty, denied a promotion and he retired from the Army on a pension provided by the British people who felt what he had done was right. He died in 1927, unrepentant for the massacre. Arrogant to the end, Sir Michael O’Dwyer was relieved of his office by Edwin Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, to which he replied “well, that’s what comes of having a Jew in Whitehall”. He returned to London with his wife and children, to live out a comfortable retirement as a public speaker. Twenty-one years on, with Germany as the new enemy, many had forgotten about the massacre… but one man had not. And although murder was against his religion, Udham Singh still harboured enough hatred to kill. On Wednesday 13th March 1940 at 3pm, in the Tudor Room of Caxton Hall, a meeting of the East India Association and the Royal Central Asian Society was held to debate the conflict in Afghanistan. Hosted by Brigadier-General Sir Percy Sykes, chaired by Lord Dundas (2nd Marques of Zetland and Secretary of State for India) with lectures by such luminaries as Lord Lamington (2nd Baron and former Governor of Bombay), Sir Louis Dane (former Under Secretary for the State of Punjab) and Sir Michael O’Dwyer (former Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab). All were titled, all were white and all were British. Entering via the wooden double-doors of the red and pink sandstone of this former town-hall, Udham Singh was given a wide-birth as he cut through the throng of the white and privileged; as although he wore a dark suit, was clean-shaven and had swapped his turban for a trilby, to many Westerner’s eyes this brown skinned man seemed a strange addition in this discussion of Asian affairs. With his ticket in hand to this sold-out event and ushered into the small but snug wood-panelled room, as all one-hundred and thirty of the rickety wooden chairs were occupied, Udham stood with a small group of late-comers, in a thin aisle to the right of the room, a few feet from the speaker’s platform. Stood slightly behind, Bertha Herring, a self-described spinster from Wraysbury, later stated “I saw a dark coloured man five yards ahead. I wondered who this man was and how he came to be here. He appeared to be of very unpleasant appearance”. Being dressed in a clean white shirt, shiny black shoes and a smart woollen suit with bulges in both jacket pockets, Udham shrugged-off this racism, as her bigotry simply set the tone of the afternoon and besides, given what needed to do, he needed space. At 3pm, the lectures began, with a dull Anglo-centric diatribe by Lord Zetland; who exalted the British, vilified the Afghans and reminded the room of how “we know what’s best for them and their kind”. And although his crass comments were well-received with a polite applause, he wasn’t why the people were her. As the next speaker was Sir Michael O’Dwyer. Two decades on, this seventy-five-year-old former Governor of the Punjab was thin, grey and frail but fervently unrepentant for his past. In a twenty-minute speech, delivered in his notoriously “racy Irish manner” and littered with the kind of unabashed bigotry, lazy stereotypes and hate-filled xenophobia which (today) would end a career, Sir Michael was cheered and harrumphed as he frivolously joked about the Afghan invasion of India and his crushing of the Punjabi uprising – a tyrannical action for which he was awarded the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Empire – whilst he conveniently side-stepped the tricky topic of the hundreds of unarmed civilians slaughtered, under his orders, at the Amritsar Massacre. As Sir Michael concluded his racist rant to a rapturous applause, a standing ovation and then took his seat on the right of the stage, although barely inches away from his would-be killer, through it all, Udham had remained stoic and remarkably calm. So calm, that he listened to the rest of the lectures. At 4:30pm exactly, as the meeting was concluded by Lord Lamington - and the densely-packed room echoed to the familiar hubbub of dying applause, appreciative murmurs, the shuffle of papers and the creak of wooden chairs as the audience slowly filed out and the speakers on stage all congratulated each other on how marvellous they were – clutching a British issue Smith & Wesson .455 calibre six-round revolver, Udham dashed forward and (from just eighteen inches away) he fired six quick shots. Caught off-guard by the gun’s sharp recoil, his last four shots missed their mark – as one nicked Lord Lamington’s right wrist, one grazed Sir Louis Dane’s forearm, one caused a superficial abrasion to Lord Zetland’s left lower ribs and one missed the stage entirely – but his first two shots were bang on target. Fired into Sir Michael’s back, the second bullet smashed through his 12th rib, his right kidney, his stomach and came to rest inside the front of his crisp white shirt. The first smashed his 10th rib, ripped through his right lung, the right ventricle of his heart and exploded out of the left of his chest. Unlike those who had been murdered at the Amritsar Massacre; his killing was by one man, not ninety; his injuries were caused by two bullets, not an exhaustive wall of shredding lead; and his death would be quick, not a ten-minute terrifying slaughter, followed by a long night of pain, tears and fear. Instead, he staggered, he collapsed and he died almost instantly; with no time to feel pain, to ask why, to face his killer, to apologise, or even to regret his decisions which sent countless thousands to an early grave. As the room erupted into panic, a stampede of screaming people tumbled over chairs and formed a bottle-neck by the only exit. Before Udham could reload or escape, having shouted to her sister to “bar the exit”, Bertha Herring had blocked the packed aisle, later stating “I did nothing. I merely put my fat body in the way to stop him”, and as Mr Wyndham Riches threw a coat over Udham’s head and wrestled him to the floor, although the assassination had descended to the depths of an old-fashioned farce, Udham Singh, the Indian Nationalist had surrendered, as his mission was finally complete. (End) Smiling and composed, Udham was arrested moments later. In his pocket, they found a linoleum knife, a box of twenty-five rounds, two French Francs, sixty Russian Roubles and a small red diary in which he had written the addresses of Lord Willingdon, the Marquez of Zetland, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, and in that day’s entry, it read - “3pm, Caxton Hall” and “Action. Only the way to open the door”. Under the alias of ‘Ram Mohammad Singh Azad’, a name which represented the three major religions of the Punjab and his anti-colonial views, Udham Singh was tried at the Old Bailey on Monday 3rd June 1940. After a two-day trial, being found guilty of murder, Mr Justice Atkinson sentenced him to death. Judged by his colonial masters and asked if he had anything to say, Udham made his protest, as angrily thumping the dock, he shouted about the brutality, the slavery, the indecency and the legalised murder of men, women and children, under the so-called flag of democracy and a civilisation drenched in blood. And as he was led away into the cells, cursing “down with British Imperialism, down with the dirty British dogs”, the Judge directed the press not to report a single word that Udham had spoken. With his appeal dismissed, on Tuesday 30th July 1940 at 9am, forty-year-old Udham Singh was hanged at Pentonville Prison, having befallen the same fate as any common killer, traitor or spy, which to the British he was. But to the Indian people, he was hailed as a hero. Posthumously, the humble carpenter and orphaned boy from Amritsar was honoured by the Indian people, the Punjabi press and Indian Prime Minister Nehru, who praised his selfless action by stating “he kissed the noose so that we may be free”. Udham was awarded the title of Shaheed (which means "the great martyr"), a district in the Punjab was named in his honour, and just seven year’s after his death, with the British Empire little more than a crumbling ruin, India had won its independence. OUTRO: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for listening to Murder Mile. After the break, I shall yawn for a bit, I shall waffle about things I’ve done, I’ll make a tea, I’ll do a quiz which I’ll probably ruin, I’ll tell you some things which weren’t in the episode and then I shall stop. Whoopie-do. Before that, a big thank you to my new Patreon supporters who are Jennifer Cowles, Carol Gavin and Jane Louise Braun. I thank you all. With an extra thank you to Anne-Marie Griffin and Deryck Hughes for the very kind donations. As well as everyone who listens to Murder Mile and writes a lovely review on your favourite podcast app’, as without listeners, Murder Mile is nothing. Murder Mile was researched, written & performed by myself, with the main musical themes written and performed by Erik Stein & Jon Boux of Cult With No Name. Thank you for listening and sleep well. Michael J Buchanan-Dunne is a writer, crime historian, podcaster and tour-guide who runs Murder Mile Walks, a guided tour of Soho’s most notorious murder cases, hailed as “one of the top ten curious, quirky, unusual and different things to do in London”, nominated "one of the best true-crime podcasts at the British Podcast Awards", one of The Telegraph's top five true-crime podcasts and featuring 12 murderers, including 3 serial killers, across 15 locations, totaling 50 deaths, over just a one mile walk.
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BEST TRUE-CRIME PODCAST at British Podcast Awards, 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. Subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Acast, Stitcher and all podcast platforms.
EPISODE NINETY-NINE:
On Sunday 29th May 1887, in the first-floor flat of 29 Great Windmill Street in Soho, twenty-year-old Amelie Pottle had a "little accident" with an oil-lamp which would lead to her slow and painful death. But was it a mishap, or a murder?
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 of 29 Great Windmill Street, W1, is where the black triangle is - the one in the middle of Soho. To use the map, click it. If you want to see the other murder maps, such as West London, King's Cross, etc, access them by clicking here.
I've also posted some photos to aid your "enjoyment" of the episode. These photos were taken by myself (copyright Murder Mile) or granted under Government License 3.0, where applicable.
It's impolssible to get into the back yard or the cellar of 29 Great Windmill Street, as it's a private property, but here's a few photos of the street, number 29 and the the side-street neatr the back yard. As well as an image of the Red Lion, and mentioned in the episode
Credits: The Murder Mile UK True-Crime Podcast was researched, written and recorded by Michael J Buchanan-Dunne, with the sounds recorded on location (where possible), and the music written and performed by Erik Stein & Jon Boux of Cult With No Name. Additional music was written and performed as used under the Creative Common Agreement 4.0.
SOURCES: Sadly, there was no police file in the National Archives, so I used the original transcripts of the court case at the Old Bailey, the Coronor's Court file, local knowledge and several other sources, which also included:
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE:
SCRIPT: Welcome to Murder Mile; a true-crime podcast and audio guided walk featuring many of London’s untold, unsolved and long-forgotten murders, all set within and beyond the West End. Today’s episode is about an accident with an oil-lamp, an everyday mishap which was so common in Victorian London, that it was listed as one of the highest causes of unintentional death in the home. The deceased even admitted that it was all her fault. So where was the murder? Murder Mile is researched using authentic sources. It contains moments of satire, shock and grisly details. And as a dramatization of the real events, it may also feature loud and realistic sounds, so that no matter where you listen to this podcast, you’ll feel like you’re actually there. My name is Michael, I am your tour-guide and this is Murder Mile. Episode 99: The “Accidental Death” of Amelia Pottle. Today I’m standing on Great Windmill Street in Soho, W1; two streets south-west of the bludgeoned sex-worker Jacqueline Birri, one street west of the stabbed hostess Camille Gordon, one street south of the sweet-natured ‘Ginger Rae’, five houses north from The Unfortunate Mr Johnson, and two streets west of the tragic death of eleven-month-old Richard Higgs – coming soon to Murder Mile. Situated just off Piccadilly Circus, Great Windmill Street is a gloomy one-way road used by taxi-drivers as a sneaky cut-through to whizz from Shaftesbury Avenue to Oxford Street without being asphyxiated by the rush-hour smog. Back in the 17th century when Soho was a hunting ground, this small hillock known as Windmill Field was named after a wooden windmill which stood at its top end. But like many parts of a bustling city like London, over the decades, as the people change, so do the places. Back in the 1980’s, at the peak of Soho’s sleaziness, as a seedy side-street still living off the reputation of the defunct Windmill Theatre - where mucky-macked men watched tastefully posed nudie ladies in a ‘tableaux vivants’ with both eyes jutting out of their heads and one eye peeping out of their pants -Great Windmill Street was smut from top-to-bottom, as each business was listed like this; pub, porn palace, sex club, pub, sex club, sex club, brothel, porn palace, sex club, brothel, brothel, brothel, primary school, brothel, pub, pub, theatre, brothel, brothel, pub. And yes, I said primary school. Today, being barely three hundred feet long, although recently gentrified, it still packs in a lot for such a little street; being full of swanky cocktail bars, traditional boozers, slightly pretentious clothes shops for hipsters who love to show-off that they have no genitals, and only one lap-dancing club where a slew of very heterosexual lads pay for the privilege of getting a boner whilst sat next to their buddies. Near the top sits 29 Great Windmill Street; a three-storey flat-fronted brown-bricked terraced house built in the mid 1700’s; it’s simple, basic and forgettable. Just as it was in the 1880’s, today it has a shop on the ground-floor and accommodation above, and although these flats are much sought-after today, they were once lodgings for Soho’s most impoverished in a place of poverty, sadness and death. As it was here, on Sunday 29th May 1887, that twenty-year-old Amelie Pottle had a little accident with an oil-lamp which lead to her slow painful death. And yet, it wasn’t a mishap but a murder. (Interstitial) The life of Amelia Pottle was short, tragic and unremarkable. She was a nobody, a nothing, just one of thousands of working-class immigrant girls living in Soho whose pitiful little life took place in an anonymous slum more than one hundred and thirty years ago; she was raised in poverty, died in pain, dumped in a pauper’s grave and she was forgotten. The only reason we know about her life is because of her death, and the only reason we know about her death is because her injuries made it newsworthy, as the pain she endured became a grisly hook for an insatiable media with a few columns to fill… and nothing more. You may ask “why should I care? I didn’t know her and I’ve got nothing in common with her”, but you do. Amelia’s story is a poignant tale as resonant today as it was the day she died, but it’s not about death. It’s a very everyday story about love, trust, abuse and how far someone is willing to go to protect the person they love. Amelia Pottle was born in 1867, although the day and month we don’t know, as on different records she was listed as Amelie, Emily and even Eliza, although it could also have been her middle name, as being so common, there were six Amelia Pottle’s in and around the West End during that era. The likelihood is it wasn’t her real name, as with the parish records inaccurate, her birth details missing, her death certificate wrong and having arrived and died before the 1881 and 1891 census, as she had only lived in London for a few years, according to locals, she wasn’t English but French. As many immigrants did, it’s likely that she anglicised her birth name to blend-in, so although Emily or Amelie could have been correct, as an English name, Pottle may have been a misspelling of the French names Poulin, Poitile, or perhaps as a nod to her hometown of Poitier? But that we shall never know. Knowing almost nothing about her life prior to her seventeenth birthday, we don’t know why she left France, why she came to England, where her family were, or who (if anyone) she was running from. But with no loved-one’s to visit her in hospital, to attend her trial, or to lay flowers on her grave, with her meagre belongings claimed by her uncaring boyfriend, we can only assume that she was alone. In truth, as an immigrant girl, no-one cared when she was alive, and three years later, she would die. By 1887, aged just twenty, Amelia Pottle had become a shadow of the girl she once was. It is said, with dreams of being a dancer, she was lured to the West End and its burgeoning theatreland. Set at the back of Shaftesbury Avenue, twelve years before the Windmill Theatre was built as a picture-house for the latest films by Mutoscope & Biograph, Great Windmill Street was encircled by the Trocadero Music Hall, Dr Hunter's Anatomical Theatre, the First London Pavilion Music Hall and the stage doors of The Lyric theatre. But as close as she may have got to her dream, her life would become a nightmare. Although a mystery, her physical description tells us everything we need to know about Amelia. According to locals, she was an ordinary girl of an average height and weight, who walked with a slight limp in her left leg, which flared up during the cold winter months, but whether it was caused by illness or injury is unknown. Her hair was brown and tangled, her eyes were blue and bloodshot, her pale skin was a sickly pale yellow with mottled purple bruises, and – although her stick-thin arms and legs were as skinny and brittle as autumn twigs - with a large scar across her belly and a plumpness about her midriff, this told the sorry but all-too-familiar tale of a woman whose absent children had either been placed in a workhouse, far from their unfit mother, or that none of them had survived. She spoke French with a French accent, her German was good and her English was passable, but being unable to read or write, she hadn’t the skills or the education to pull herself out of poverty. As many women did, with blistered fingers, Amelia took on piece-work, working long hours for short pay, stitching decorative accessories for the garments she could never afford to wear, to be used by the tailors on Berwick and Wardour Street, and sold in the fashion stores on the nearby Oxford Street. Life was hard. Some days she ate and some days she didn’t, but forced to make that choice whether to live or die, what she could earn in a day by sewing, she could make more in an hour by selling sex. For at least the last two years of her life, Amelia Pottle had been a sex-worker, a ‘street walker’ as she was known, who sold her body for pennies in the local haunts of Regent Street and Leicester Square, and brought her many punters back to her squalid little lodging, limping passed the endless lines of adoring fans outside of the packed theatres where her dreams were now nothing but a faded memory. She sold sex to eat, she ate to live and - to forget her life - she drank, which she paid for with sex. It was a vicious circle of which she would never escape, but with some level of sex-work undertaken by at least one third of woman in that era, she was lonely, but she was not alone. With a pitiable story, like so many women, the misery of her life was not uncommon; she would be born, she would work, and she would die. Joy would be fleeting; dreams would be only dreams and hope was a lost cause. The best thing in her life was that she loved to be loved and wished one day to be married, but with only a string of short-term lovers, in August 1886, during one of her boozy sessions in a local pub, she met the man she would love, loathe and would defend with her very last breath. (Interstitial) Franz Schultz was a nobody, but unlike Amelia, he was once a somebody… or so it seemed. Although a mystery, his physical description tells us everything we need to know about Franz Schultz. According to locals, the thirty-two-year-old German arrived from Bremen half a decade earlier, having settled somewhere in the East End with a woman and several children, only now he was alone. Fuelled by an intense pride; his voice was gruff and Prussian, his pals were all Germanic, he never anglicised his name (although he was also known as Josef) and as a fervently political man, it is said he was once a teacher, but whatever he taught, it was no longer of practical use. He was too stubborn to give up, too angry to go home and too useless for manual labour, so with nothing but his education, he earned a pittance as an interpreter… only his command of the English language was pitiful. Being tall, broad, bearded and bespectacled, looking like an academic, he wasn’t a powerful man, but he could be loud, frightening and imposing. A passionate bookworm with a fiery temper, a selfish streak and uncontrollable emotions which swung from happiness to anger to tears in an instant. Maybe once he was something, but now, he was nothing; a failure, a leach and a drunk from dusk-till-dawn; with a slurred rhetoric, a threadbare suit and a foul mood clouded by booze, who stumbled from pub-to-pub all along Great Windmill Street - angry at a system which had failed him - from the Stone public house at number 50, to the Catherine Wheel at 45, from the Duke of Argyll at the top, all the way down to the Red Lion pub, where forty years earlier, the great Karl Marx had outlined the Communist Manifesto, just five doors down from where he would live at 29 Great Windmill Street. Amelia Pottle and Franz Schultz were two failures bound together by desperation; she was a hopeless dreamer in search of a happy life and her forever lover, where-as he was a homeless drunk. Amelia was trapped in a bad relationship, in a bad place, with a bad man, but she always had hope. In October 1886, after a week together, Amelia & Franz moved into a small shabby lodging at 29 Great Windmill Street; with a communal yard out back, a water-tank in the cellar, a cess-pit shared by the four streets and on the first floor, a cramped sparsely-furnished room with a stove for heating, water by the bucket, a coarse horsehair bed for sleeping (and sex-work), and the only light was by oil-lamp. Amelia worked hard to provide them both with a home, food, furniture and drink. And where-as she only drank to steady her nerves, to drown her sorrows and to get herself through another rotten day, he drank himself into oblivion. She provided everything for their lives and (she hoped) their future, she presumptively called herself Mrs Schultz. And where-as he provided nothing, but a big mouth, an angry face and – as a supposedly principled man - an intense jealousy anytime he saw her with another man. In his eyes, she was a whore and he hated it, but he didn’t have a problem living of her earnings. Over the next few months, as much as Amelia tried to make peace, pick up the pieces and stitch back together the ragged fragments of their disintegrating romance, Franz would never back down. Their love was gone, their fights were bitter, and of the few personal possessions of hers he hadn’t smashed in a drunken rage, what pieces she had left, he would pawn-off to buy himself some more booze. Their first-floor room so often echoed to the sounds of screams, squeals and smashes, that the other tenants often ignored it, as although Amelia gave as good as she got, she often came off worse. Her sickly pale skin was now a kaleidoscope of abuse; her blue and bloodshot eyes were lost behind two puffy black lumps, the fresh red welts on her back blended-in with the day-old purple sprains and the week-old yellow sores, and - with her stick-thin arms weak, her belly sore from being kicked, the mottled bruises down the length of her limping left leg made her more likely to stumble and trip, and with her fists swollen and her fingers fractured - she was now more prone than ever to “mishaps”. The days when he felt enough pity to stop the beating had passed. What held his anger back was that she was his meal-ticket, and he knew was that the more he beat her, the worse she looked and the less she earned. So, if he kept on thumping her, he knew nobody would pay to fuck that. After every brutal and sustained fight, with her body too woozy to feel the pain and her face so swollen it absorbed the punches, having fled to the safety of the communal yard, under the windows of several prying eyes, to keep the peace, it was always Amelia who apologised, blamed herself and when asked what had happened, she always lied to protect the man that she would love with her dying breath. Sunday 29th May 1887 was an ordinary day. For the wealthy, they rested. For the devout, they prayed. And with three breweries perched at the top of the street, for many locals, it was an excuse to booze. But for Amelia? She worked. The cupboards were bare, the rent was due and she was struggling. Burdened by a multicoloured mess of blotchy lumps, her battered face could no longer command the twelve shillings it once could, and – even in the dark and at a discount – it would fail to raise any punter’s passion, so Amelia had returned to piece-work while her bruises healed. Hours were long, pay was short and her work-rate was slow, as stitching was impossible with her fingers so swollen. Luckily, Amelia still had a regular customer who (no matter what) would visit her lodging every Sunday. He was never named in the court records, perhaps because of his status, all we know is he was young, decent and polite. He was a little lonely but he treated her well. And as an admirer of hers, he often treated her to something special, whether a wild flower, a love poem, or (as a rarity amongst the poor) a fresh tomato from the Berwick Street market, or sometimes a citrus fruit. Each fleeting visit was brief, but afterwards, buried in the midst of her mangled face, she could be seen to crack a smile. At 5pm, on the coarse horse-hair bed in her first-floor lodging at 29 Great Windmill Street, Amelia and her admirer were engaged in sex. On a bedside table, by a glass oil-lamp, lay ten shillings as payment. It’s unknown whether she charged him less because of the way she looked, or because she liked him, but (for that brief moment) he was a little ray of joy in her miserable little life… …a life ruined by Franz. While Amelia had been working, Franz had been boozing, and having been booted out of several pubs for spouting his angry political rhetoric, now he was drunk, broke and in need of more money. Staggering down Great Windmill Street, stumbling into number 29 and banging his way up the wooden stairs, on the first-floor landing, he stood silent and seething, as inside he heard Amelia making money. (Squeaking bed/sex) He knew what she did, how she did it and how much she charged, as not only did he contribute nothing to their food or rent, but to him; every pump was a pint, every suck was a shot and every fornication was a flagon. So, no-one really knows why it angered him so much this time. Having heard the squeals, screams and smashes, Theresa Marshall, a matronly Prussian woman had thundered down from the floor above. Seeing the door hanging off its hinges, the young man hurled out and the couple bitterly cursing one another, being furious - not only at Amelia’s infidelity having shagged another man, but being even angrier at how little she had charged him - before Franz could belt Amelia with the hard back of her broken wooden chair, Theresa had stopped him. Disarmed and alarmed by this strong-willed woman, who tossed aside the chair-back, Theresa ordered Franz to shut-up, calm down and to go to bed. And for the rest of the evening, he was silent. (Silence) A few hours later, from her death-bed and through the pain of her last gasping breath, Amelia Pottle who presumptively called herself ‘Mrs Schultz’ would insist that what happened next was an accident caused by her sore fingers, a fumbled oil lamp and that it was all her fault. But we know that it wasn’t. At roughly 1:30am the next morning, 29 Great Windmill Street was once again awoken by an almighty fight with furniture breaking, a single oil-lamp flickering the angry shadows as Amelia was beaten black and blue, and over it all, the gruff Germanic bark of obscenities like “dirty beast” and “you are whore”. With the tenants so used to her screams, many simply curled-up and waited for the inevitable to blow over, as a tearful Amelia would flee to the safety of the communal back yard, and under the scrutiny of the neighbour’s windows, she would apologise, he would calm down and silence would return. Only this time, it didn’t. Dressed in nothing but a red flannel nightdress, a stark shade which mirrored the blood which seeped from her busted nose, as Amelia’s bare feet hammered down the wooden stairs, screaming the whole house down with the words “Murder!” and “Police!”, behind her followed a furious Franz, his enraged face illuminated by the single oil-lamp and - in the dark of the unlit passageway, a few steps before the sanctuary of the back yard - neighbours heard the smashing of glass and a never-ending scream. The night was dark and the lamp was broken, but somehow the whole back yard was bathed in a bright orange glow, as if the sun had mistimed a new dawn. Struggling to adjust to this blinding light, the tenants heard no song-birds, only the screams of a young girl being burned alive, as with only the flailing of her terrified arms and legs to be seen, Amelia was enveloped by an intense ball of fire. Sunk to his knees and sat beside her, every time that Franz tried to extinguish the inferno, the panicked flapping of his hands just fanned the flames, as when he touched her, her hair sizzled-up into tufts of black ash and her nightdress fizzled as it melted into her bare skin, which came off in thick red clumps. Dampening her slightly down, as Franz scooped-up Amelia in his arms, the disintegrating remnants of her clothes, hair and skin littering the floor, as he carried her down into the cellar to dowse in water her scorched body, she was heard to whimper “take me to the hospital; I will say that I did it myself". Hand-cranking an old water-pump, filling a bucket and hearing it hiss as the cold liquid hit the burning skin of the blackened and charred woman, again she pleaded “Please. I am dying. Take me to the hospital. I will say I did it”. But instead, he dithered, filling a second bucket, pump-after-pump. Moments later, as a stranger had shouted “Police!”, hearing the distant sound of a police whistle and the murmur as crowds congregated outside, Franz changed his mind. And with her nightdress burned off, as well as much of her skin, having wrapped Amelia’s smoking and smouldering body in a blanket, he carried her out into the street, hailed a horse-drawn cab and took her to the hospital. After an interminably long thirty-minute journey, from Soho to Fitzrovia, over a series of cobbled and bumpy roads, Amelia finally arrived at Middlesex Hospital. Collapsed and barely conscious, a porter carried this unsightly steaming lump inside; her hair was gone, her features unrecognisable and – from her face to her feet - her purple and yellow bruises had all been replaced by a red and black mottling. Seen by the house surgeon (Dr Hedley Bartlett) her condition was described as “dangerous” and it was feared that she may not survive the night, but even before she was led in, Franz’s excuses had begun. To anyone who would listen – from the cab-driver, to the porter, to the surgeon and to the neighbours – he would forcibly argue his side of the story, angrily insisting against all evidence that “she did this”, “she threw a lamp at me”, “we burn, we both burn”, and although he only returned to the hospital once - to see if she was dead - it was clear that he didn’t care about her, he only cared about himself. At 3:40pm, that day, Inspector Edmund Burke arrested Franz Schultz for the violent assault of Amelia Pottle, to which he said almost nothing except “very well… is she dead?”. At 9pm, barely alive, used her last breath to make a statement to the Police. But by 10pm, having suffered more than 50% burns to her head, face, limbs and most of her torso, Amelia died of her injuries. (End) The Police investigation was simple, as although Franz would try to bribe several onlookers to change their story by gifting them some of his dead girlfriend’s personal affects, and with his sole defence being that she had accidentally tipped the oil-lamp over herself whilst in bed, all of the witnesses and all of the evidence – from the screams to the scorch marks, from the broken lamp to the paraffin residue, not a single thread of which was found in the bedroom – would find his guilt irrefutable. At the Coroner’s inquest held at the Marlborough Street Police Court on the 3rd June 1887, instead of trying him for the lesser charge of violent assault, the jury returned a guilty verdict for manslaughter, and the case was committed to a criminal trial, with the possibility of a death sentence looming. Held at the Old Bailey on the 27th June 1887, just four weeks after her death, thirty-two-year-old Franz Schultz was tried for the wilful murder of twenty-year-old Amelia Pottle. His defence was farcical, the evidence was damning and with single every eye-witness recounting the incident, the many times he had mercilessly beat her, and assassinating his character by describing him as “a drunk”, “a bully” and “a pimp”, a unanimous jury should have found him guilty of murder and watched as his pathetic little body dangled from a rope, with his neck snapped. But they didn’t. One witness would change everything, and she wasn’t in court that day, or even alive. To the Police Inspector and the hospital surgeon, keeping a promise from her death-bed, Amelia had made a statement that it was all “an accident”, that it was “her fault” and with that, Franz Schultz (the man who she loved and one day hoped to marry) was found innocent of her murder. Upon his release, he pawned off her personal belongings for booze, and that was the last time he was ever seen. OUTRO: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for listening to Murder Mile. After the break, I shall tell you all the secrets of life, that’s if the secrets of life all involve tea, cake, coots and lots of waffling. Before that, a big thank you to my new Patreon supporters who are Len Adams, Roisin McGettigan and Matt Munnery. I thank you all. With an extra thank you to Sharon Brereton for the very kind donation. I know that now and the days ahead are hard for everyone, so I really do appreciate all of your support for this small independent podcast, whether as a Patron, by sharing the podcast with your pals, or by giving it a nice review on your favourite podcatcher. Murder Mile was researched, written & performed by myself, with the main musical themes written and performed by Erik Stein & Jon Boux of Cult With No Name. Thank you for listening and sleep well. Michael J Buchanan-Dunne is a writer, crime historian, podcaster and tour-guide who runs Murder Mile Walks, a guided tour of Soho’s most notorious murder cases, hailed as “one of the top ten curious, quirky, unusual and different things to do in London”, nominated "one of the best true-crime podcasts at the British Podcast Awards", one of The Telegraph's top five true-crime podcasts and featuring 12 murderers, including 3 serial killers, across 15 locations, totaling 50 deaths, over just a one mile walk.
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'PLay 2 Win' at 23 Gerrard Street in Chinatown, formerly known as 'Leisure Amusements Limited' where Victor Castigador and his gang perpetrated a robbery and one of London's worst mass-murders
Welcome to the Murder Mile UK True-Crime Podcast and audio guided walk of London's most infamous and often forgotten murder cases, set within and beyond the West End.
EPISODE NINETY-EIGHT:
At just before midnight on Sunday 2nd April 1989, Victor Castigador and his small gang of cohorts robbed the Leisure Investments amusement arcade at 23 Gerrard Street in Chinatown, but owing to a very petty grudge, Victor would turn a simply robbery for a few thousand pounds into one of London's worst and most horrific mass-murders.
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 of Leisure Investment amusement arcade, now known as 'Play 2 Win' at 23 Gerrard Street in Chinatown is where the orange triangle is. To use the map, click it. If you want to see the other murder maps, such as West London, King's Cross, etc, access them by clicking here.
Here's a little video shownig you 23 Gerrard Street in Chinatown, where the robbery and mass murder took place.It hasn't changed since that day back in 1989. I've also posted a link to the song - 'Burn It Up' by the Beat Masters, this was the song that Victor and his gang were singing to celebrate the robbery and the arson attack on their victims. This video is a link to youtube, so it won't eat up your data.
Credits: The Murder Mile UK True-Crime Podcast was researched, written and recorded by Michael J Buchanan-Dunne, with the sounds recorded on location (where possible), and the music written and performed by Erik Stein & Jon Boux of Cult With No Name. Additional music was written and performed as used under the Creative Common Agreement 4.0.
SOURCES: Sadly, the original police investigation files is held in the National Archives until 1st January 2096, so I've had to use other sources and filter out the tabloid shite:
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE: SCRIPT: Welcome to Murder Mile; a true-crime podcast and audio guided walk featuring many of London’s untold, unsolved and long-forgotten murders, all set within and beyond the West End. Today’s episode is about Victor Castigador; a liar, a thief and a deluded fantasist who held such a petty grudge having been rejected for a promotion in a West End arcade, that his simple plan for some quick cash would leave two innocents fighting for the lives and two others dead. Murder Mile is researched using authentic sources. It contains moments of satire, shock and grisly details, and as a dramatization of the real events, it may also feature loud and realistic sounds, so that no matter where you listen to this podcast, you’ll feel like you’re actually there. My name is Michael, I am your tour-guide and this is Murder Mile. Episode 98: The Petty Grudge of Victor Castigador. Today I’m standing in Gerrard Street, W1; one street north of the charred remains of Reginald Gordon West, two streets west of the shooting Michael Barry Porter in the Rose n Dale club, a few doors north of the stabbing of David Knight in the Latin Quarter, and two hundred feet west of James McDonald, the bank robber who may not have known that he was robbing a bank – coming soon to Murder Mile. To most visitors, Gerrard Street is commonly known as Chinatown, as although this area also consists of Rupert Street, Newport Place, Newport Court, Lisle Street, Coventry Street and a bit of Shaftesbury Avenue and Wardour Street, as the most central and decorated part, it’s also the most visited. After the blitz bombing by the German Luftwaffe of the city’s largest Chinese enclave in East London’s Limehouse Docks, by the early 1970’s, a few seedy side-streets south of Soho had spawned into a new Chinatown. Looking less like a real street and more like a tacky theme-park ride designed by a colour-blind architect who was obsessed with dragons, lanterns and pagodas, this pedestrianised street is full of the staples of Chinese life – such as restaurants, supermarkets and betting shops – but as if this oriental experience isn’t confusing enough, a demented ex-Disneyland designer has added a few weird flourishes; like a slew of non-Asian buskers – such as an Elvis, a Bee-Gee and an Edith Pief – and several characters in dirty threadbare costumes – including a Spiderman, a Pikachu and two Mickey Mouses. On the corner of Wardour Street at 23 Gerrard Street sits a four-storey wedge-shaped building with three non-descript white-fronted offices above and on the ground-floor an amusement arcade called Play 2 Win. With large frosted windows plastered with gambling symbols on both sides and illuminated by flashing neon signs, through the red Doric pillars of the corner door echoes the moan of cheesy pop music, the tinny tunes of slot-machines and the occasional machine-gun thrum as a few pound coins are excitedly pooped-out, only to be ploughed back-in before the supposed winner can crack a smile. All this colour and sound suggests ‘fun’, but this is also a place of loss; not just of money, but of life. As it was here, on Sunday 2nd April 1989 that Victor Castigador, a small security guard with a big grudge would turn a very simple robbery into one of West London’s most horrific mass-murders. (Interstitial) Open any trashy tabloid newspaper or turgid true-crime book and you will see the same lazy phrases trotted-out again-and-again to describe Victor Castigador – “he was mad”, “he was bad”, he was pure evil”, “the man was a maniac”. Many sources will gleefully tell you that the Spanish translation of his surname means the ‘punisher’ or the ‘enforcer’, as if a killing-spree was part of his birth rite. And even though, many writers still regurgitate the same tired facts that this so-called ‘Killer from Manilla’ was a violent and ruthless assassin for either the Philippine commandos, the President’s death squad or regime’s secret police – even though not a single shred of his sinister-history can be proven, every lie which emanated from his mouth is still rehashed even years after his incarceration and his death. So, why do we accept it? Firstly, it makes for a more exciting story. Secondly, as he’s dead, almost anything can be written about his life without legal ramifications. Thirdly, most readers believe that if it’s in a book then it must be true. And finally, because no-one wants to believe that a person so ordinary could perpetuate such a brutal and horrifying crime over a grudge so petty. But he did. The rage, resentment and rejection had built-up for decades, and yet sometimes all it takes is a single spark to turn a tiny flame into an inferno. So, who was Victor Castigador and why did he kill? Born in 1954, Victor Morales Castigador was raised in Quezon City, a densely populated metropolis in the south-east Asian country of the Philippines. As an archipelago of more than seven thousand islands between Japan, Taiwan and Indonesia, being surrounded by some of the world’s most active volcanos, infamously known as the ‘ring of fire’, the Philippines is also prone to earthquakes and typhoons. But as the fifth most populous country, it’s not just geologically unstable, but financially and politically. As spoils of the Spanish empire, the Philippines has been fought over by countless invaders for the last hundred years, from the Spanish to the Americans to the Japanese, and although the Treaty of Manilla saw this newly independent country become a democracy, like so many, it soon slid into a dictatorship. Raised in a period of political upheaval, as a poor boy from an impoverished background, very little is known about Victor’s family, his upbringing and therefore almost nothing has been documented. Being small and skinny, Victor was pushed around and bullied by the bigger boys; seen as insignificant in a world where men and boys needed be physically strong to succeed, this little sprat was easily forgotten, often neglected and readily angered and hurt by the constant rejection. To stand his ground and gain the respect he craved, Victor would assert his dominance over those who dared to say “no”. By the mid-1960’s - as President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda espoused to the cash-strapped country their hopes and dreams of a better future for everyone, only to embezzle billions of dollars of public funds to live a lavish lifestyle - being in his early teens, Victor dreamed of a better life. As a small kid keen to flee his bullies, Victor worked-out, hoping to make-up for his lack of height with width, and although he bulked-up to become a thickly-set teen, he wasn’t physically imposing, as this short squat guy with a boyish face, long black hair and a feeble goatee beard was barely five-foot-tall. Following the state of martial law declared by President Marcos in 1972, as imposed by his brutal army and sinister secret police - being an adult with the dreams of respect, control and the authority which comes with a rank, a title and a crisp black uniform - aged 21, Victor applied to both forces… …but was rejected. Having claimed to anyone who would listen to his lies that he had joined the Army, the Police and a “quasi-military death squad”, given that the minimum height requirement for a Filipino soldier in the 1970’s was five-foot-four and for a Policeman it was five-foot-two - as he was too short, partially deaf owing to a childhood infection, had only ever worked as a diver and he lacked the basic literacy skills for an administrative role - it’s more than likely that his “career in uniform” was as a security guard. But who would know any different and who could prove otherwise in such an unstable region? By 1983 - the year that the political rival of President Marcos was ‘conveniently’ assassinated – 29-year-old Victor, who described himself as a “part-time diver” and a “sort of Policeman” befriended Michael & Jacqueline Haddon, two ex-pats living in the Philippines whose seven-year marriage was at an end. Beguiled by his charm and mystery, Jacqueline and Victor began an affair, they fell in love, and having returned to England in 1984, they set-up home in the coastal village of Middleton-on-Sea. In October 1984, their son Adam was born. In August 1985, Victor & Jacqueline married. In October 1986 – as the Philippines erupted in a People’s Revolution after the corrupt election and subsequent death of Ferdinand Marcos - their daughter Robyn was born. But being a short-tempered and jealous man who beat Jacqueline and ill-treated their two toddlers, she told him to leave and they divorced. As a UK Citizen with a passport and a legal right-to-remain, by the winter of 1986 Victor had moved into a relative’s flat at Coventry Cross, a council estate in Bow, East London. Being too small for a career in the British military or the Police, he headed into the West End in search of a job. Victor Castigador - a short stocky bully with a patchy work record, no known convictions and a habit of lying to mask his inadequacies – had found work as a security guard in a low-rent amusement arcade at the edge of Chinatown. He was solid, prompt and ambitious. But four years later, in that basement, all because of a very petty grudge, this so-called assassin would kill. (Interstitial) Life was uneventful at the Leisure Investments amusement arcade at 23 Gerrard Street. Open from midday to midnight, Monday to Sunday, with a strict over 18’s only policy, the arcade consisted of two ground-floor rooms crammed full of the flashing lights and tinny tunes of thirty pinball, penny-drop, videos games and slot-machines. And although this alluring cacophony of sights and sounds suggested fun, excitement and possible riches, you would never see a smiling face here, as being a cash-cow for the owners only, the customers were guaranteed to lose more than they could ever hope to win. Overseen by the duty manager - 24-year-old Yurev Alejandro Gomez from Chile, known to his friends as Yuri - the average day in the arcade was often routine, dull and predictable. At 11am, escorted by one of two security guards, Yuri would deposit the night’s takings at Lloyds Bank in Piccadilly, while the second guard secured the arcade, as the cashier – 26-year-old Kenyan, Deborah Bernadine Alvarez, known as Debbi – ensured the slot-machines had enough coins for any pay-outs. At 12pm, as a simple security feature, the arcade’s only entrance or exit (situated on the corner of the ground-floor) was opened and every customer was watched by security and filmed by a CCTV system. The cash box on each slot machine was alarmed, the door to the strong-room below was locked (with the key held by Yuri) and the only other money was doled-out in denominations of 10, 20 and 50 pees by Debbi, up to a limit of £500 (£1500 today), whilst she was sat behind a secure metal cage. In the event of a robbery, all monies were kept to a minimum and the owners had told their staff to offer no resistance to the robbers and to surrender to their requests, as all losses were insured. With a high turnover of cash on the premises, Victor was one of three security guards who worked in shifts, with two on duty at all times. It was a simple job with regular hours, nice staff and an adequate wage, but as much as this barrel-chested boaster loved to strut-about in his crisp black uniform, using his rank to assert a modicum of authority, the hardest part of the job was the boredom. Being stuck in two small rooms, twelve-hours-a-day, seeing the same sights, the same faces and the same routines - as a little man with big dreams and even bolder lies – his days had become dull. Every midnight, with the customers gone and the slot machines shut down, as one guard kept an eye on the arcade floor, a second guard would escort Yuri and Debbi down into the basement. Behind a thick steel door stood the strong-room, a reinforced concrete hold with no windows, no vents and no way of breaking in. Inside of which was six-foot-square wire-cage where the takings were stored in a safe till the morning and - as no-one but Yuri had the key - this messy basement also worked as a makeshift storeroom stacked with cleaning products, newspapers and paints for any general repairs. By 12:30am, with the doors locked, the lights off and the alarms set, all of the staff would head home, only to start the whole process again, the very next day. By March 1989, after three years at the arcade, Victor had developed a reputation as a bit of a bulldog; he was short but strong, fun but fiery and was prone to snap when pushed too far, and although the staff had all been regaled with his fanciful stories – of how, as a commando, a secret police agent and an assassin to President Marcos’ personal death squad he had shot, drowned and burned alive twenty people – nobody believed his lies. He was just a little guy who liked playing tough, and had a very vivid imagination and a sadistic streak having watched too many video nasties. So, although he considered himself good at his job, superior to the other two guards – 21-year-old Ambikalpahan Anapayan known as ‘Pan’ and 28-year-old Kandiahkanapathy Vinayagamoorthy known as “Moorthy” – and felt that he deserved a promotion to deputy manager; owing to his lack of literacy, his short-fuse and his abundance of lies, he was denied the leg-up into a minor management role. Feeling spurned and angry at this rejection, Victor became lazy, abusive and unreliable, so much so that by the end of March 1989, he was dismissed as a security guard at the amusement arcade. Anyone else would have found themselves another job, but Victor harboured a very petty grudge. On Sunday 2nd April 1989, just shy of midnight, the tiny shadowy figure of Victor Castigador sculked behind a brick wall in Rupert Court; a thin unlit alley sixty-feet south of Gerrard Street. With Chinatown shutting down after a busy day trading, across the desolate street he had a perfect view of the arcade. His plan was simple; with the customers gone, the door unlocked and the staff cashing-up two day’s takings as the bank was shut on Saturdays, ordered to offer no resistance to robbers, he would raid the safe, lock the staff in the strong-room and escape; in short, get in, get out, in three minutes flat. Had Victor been a commando as he claimed, he would have known that an oversized hood, a slipping scarf and no gloves wasn’t a great disguise - but he didn’t. Had he been in the Secret Police, he would have known how to get a real gun rather than a child’s plastic toy – but he didn’t. And had he actually been a death-squad assassin, he could easily have robbed the arcade single-handed – but he didn’t. Instead, he roped-in four useless youths who he knew; 17-year-old Calvin Graham Nelson, 19-year-old Paul Stephen Clinton and – tagging along for the ride, the excitement and some easy money to be split five ways - their girlfriends, 17-year-old Karen Dunn and 20-year-old Allison Linda Woodside. But this robbery would be a breeze, as he knew the layout, the routine and the rules. As per usual, at 11:58pm, with both security guards on the arcade floor, as Pan got into position to lock the main door and Moorthy stood guard over Debbi and Yuri as they counted-up the cash, dashing across the unlit street five dark figures (four slight and thin, one short and stocky) stormed the arcade. Swinging open the frosted door, in an instant, the hard-fisted Victor punched Pan, knocking him to the floor, as Nelson and himself pulled pistols on the startled staff. Caught by surprise, overpowered by numbers and aiming toys guns which looked real enough in the neon-bathed arcade, Yuri and his team offered no resistance as the bulldog-shaped man and his excitable gang of accomplices - who towered over their tiny leader - herded the trembling staff down the stairs into the concrete basement. With the money insured, the well-trained staff knew it wasn’t worth risking their lives, so instead they were silent, they listened, they obeyed and memorised everything about the gang and the robbery. Standing at the heavy steel door of the strong-room, surrounded by the office supplies and paint pots of this badly-used space, as Victor pressed the gun’s muzzle against Yuri’s neck - in his thick Filipino accent - the five-foot-tall stockily-built bully-boy with the slipping disguise and the very familiar eyes, curtly ordered Yuri to unlock it, which he did, as the staff were ushered inside. The strong-room was cold and dusty. It was little more than a four-sided concrete shell, with a single metal door, no windows, no vents and to one-side, a six-foot square wire-cage, which housed the safe. Again, ordered by the miniature masked marauder to unlock it, the second that Yuri unveiled the stash of cash within, Victor thumped his former-employer hard across the back, flooring him, as the gang bundled £8,685 worth of used and untraceable notes into an anonymous black rucksack. Two minutes in; with the robbery over, to allow ample time for a clean getaway, knowing that the cleaners weren’t due until 8am, the next part of the plan would give them an eight-hour head-start. Inside the wire-cage, Victor ordered his ex-colleagues to their knees, he bound their hands behind their backs and – to ensure that they couldn’t escape till the morning – he would tightly wind the wire-cage’s lock with a metal coat-hanger and lock the steel door of the strong-room. By dawn, they would be cold, hungry and tired, but ultimately fine. And that would take the third of three minutes. It wasn’t a great robbery, one which was devised by a military or criminal mastermind, but it was more akin to a thug nicking of some easy-pickings having coerced some poor kids with a bullshit history and the promise of pocket-money which may have seemed like a fortune, but it was littered with mistakes. The slot-machines were full of cash and yet he ignored them. The CCTV had recorded it all, and yet he didn’t switch it off or remove the tape. With no gloves, his gang had left fingerprints everywhere. With no getaway car, they were forced to hop in a taxi. Having stolen the equivalent of £21,700 today – if evenly split between five – that was barely £4,500 each. And – worst of all - even though their disguises were truly awful, it was practically impossible to hide the fact that their short, stocky, foul-tempered Filipino gang-leader was a recently-sacked security-guard at the arcade called Victor Castigador. This was the moment that Victor should have fled, but he didn’t. We know what happened next wasn’t pre-planned as he hadn’t come prepared. Whether he did this to protect his identity, or as part of a petty grudge over the failed promotion is unknown. But seeing his old colleagues tied-up, helpless and kneeling - from a waste bin - he scattered piles of dry discarded paper around him. Down a drain, he emptied the only fire extinguisher until it was nothing but a dribble of water. And from a store-cupboard full of cleaning products and paints, he produced a one litre squeezy bottle of white spirit. The staff screamed as Victor soaked all four from head-to-foot in the highly flammable fluid. Yuri yelled “How can you do this? These are people just like you”, but his pleas fell on deaf-ears, even as his old work chum – Pan – begged for his life, screaming “Don't light it. I would rather you shoot me”. Besides, even if the gun had been real, Victor had no plans to give any of them a merciful death, as with gleeful cackles, he and Nelson fired a volley of flaming matches at the tinder-dry paper and volatile fluid. Getting to his feet, Moorthy tried to stamp the matches out, but there were too many. And as Victor secured the cage with a coat-hanger and slammed the heavy steel-door shut, being saturated in a lethal accelerant and igniting in a fog of explosive vapours, the abandoned staff were left to burn alive. (Street sounds, screams fade). This wasn’t the work of a professional assassin; this was the vengeful act of a petty-minded little man with serious psychological issues. Trapped in an airless basement with no vents to expel the smoke, or for their screams to be heard by neighbours, four good people were subjected to a slow and painful death; as their lungs choked on the toxic fumes, their hair was scorched by the licking flames, and the intense heat stripped the searing flesh from their bodies. But if he had been a real assassin, knowing he had enough time, he would have stayed behind to make sure that the job was done and that all the witnesses were dead - but he didn’t. (Screams fade back in). The charred bodies of Pan and Moorthy lay at the back of the wire-cage - smoking, collapsed and horrifically burned - as in their last moments alive, the two Tamil refugees who had fled the Sri-Lankan civil war to begin a new life for their families, uttered a final prayer, exhaled and expired. In the pitch-black basement, having freed his hands from behind his back, Yuri had used his rubber-soled shoes to kick open the scorching heat of the wire-cage. Describing the strong-room as like an oven, each time he rolled on the floor to extinguish the hot blue flames which enveloped his clothes that melted onto his skin, the searing heat re-ignited the fire, as he felt his whole body disintegrate. Blinded, chocking and exhausted, as Yuri dragged himself along the concrete floor, under a thick blanket of swirling flames and towards the impenetrable steel-door, he tried to push the blistering hot handle, but with no key, he knew he was trapped. And yet, this door would be their salvation. Having dragged Debbi to his side, barely able to breathe amid the acrid smoke and poisonous fumes, a small but vital supply of air was seeping through the key-hole and the thin gap under the steel-door. And although the hot metal blistered their lips, it was all they had left to save them from death. That night, as two people died and two more baked alive, Victor and his four compassionless cohorts - Calvin, Paul, Karen and Allison - celebrated their audacious robbery with a nice meal, a boogie at a nightclub and the next day they headed to Torquay for a holiday. There they drank, laughed and – as a private joke – they regaled their taxi-driver with a rendition of the Beat Masters tune ‘Burn It Up’. At 7:55am, eight hours later, smelling smoke, the cleaners called 999, and within minutes, fire fighters from Shaftesbury Avenue station were on-scene and heading towards the basement. As they unlocked the steel-door, everything was a smouldering black mess; all warped, charred and smoking; no-one could tell a wall from a door, or a box from a bench, but over the familiar smell of accelerant, they could also smell the overpowering and unforgettable stench of roasted flesh. Inside, amidst the darkness, on the scorched floor, lay the dark and lumpen shapes of four bodies – all black, silent and featureless. All four should have died, but somehow, two had survived. And although both were in critical condition, Yuri was able to utter three simple words - “Victor did it”. (End) All five were arrested a few days later in Torquay and in a joint operation between the Devon and Met Police, they were escorted back to Cannon Row police station, where – under questioning – Victor remained indifferent to the robbery, the injuries to the witnesses and the callousness of his crime. On 14th April 1989, he was charged with one count of robbery, two counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder at Bow Street Magistrates Court, with a full trial at the Old Bailey, one year later. At both trials, having sustained horrifying injuries – with Yuri suffering 30% burns to his left arm, chest, right arm and losing a lung having inhaled the scorching hot smoke, and Debbi with 28% burns to her arms, hands, back, thighs, lungs, and losing almost all of her face – through unquestionable strength, Yuri and Debbi testified against the accused and on 28th February 1990, all five were found guilty. Calvin Nelson and Paul Clinton were convicted of robbery, murder and attempted murder, with Calvin sent to a young offender’s institute for life, Paul was held in detention under Her Majesty’s pleasure, and both of their girlfriends - Karen Dunn and Allison Woodside - were found guilty of robbery. So cruel were Victor’s crimes, that James Mulcahy, Victor’s own defence said to the jury “it would be very surprising had you not come to the conclusion that he was a ruthless, callous and inhuman monster”. The Judge, Mr Justice Rougier concluded “I find it almost impossible to understand a mind as evil as yours”, and sentenced him to life in prison, to which Victor cockily crowed “fair enough”. Extended to a whole life tariff meaning that he would never be released, on the 21st March 2017, having served twenty-seven years, 62-year-old Victor Castigador died of a stroke. He was mourned by nobody. So, as much as trashy tabloids love to trot-out the same tired story about ‘the Killer from Manilla’ who was (supposedly) a hired assassin for President Marcos, if you really feel the need to share his tawdry tale to impress your true-crime chums, don’t glorify his actions, his exploits, or perpetuate the same unproven twaddle which only spewed from his lying lips. Instead, remember him for who he was – a small, pathetic, mentally unstable liar, who ruined four lives, and all because of a petty grudge. OUTRO: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for listening to Murder Mile. After the break, I shall do some of this, a bit of that, some additional of the other, just as I did last time, only some of the words will be in a different order – and that I will call Extra Mile. Oooh. Before that, a big thank you to my new Patreon supporters who are Annette Milsom, David Evans and Mandy Belshaw, I thank you all. I hope you enjoy all the extra goodies which come with being a Patron, like locations videos, exclusive crime-scene photos and special discounts off Murder Mile merch. Oh yes, the list of benefits is endless. Murder Mile was researched, written & performed by myself, with the main musical themes written and performed by Erik Stein & Jon Boux of Cult With No Name. Thank you for listening and sleep well. Michael J Buchanan-Dunne is a writer, crime historian, podcaster and tour-guide who runs Murder Mile Walks, a guided tour of Soho’s most notorious murder cases, hailed as “one of the top ten curious, quirky, unusual and different things to do in London”, nominated "one of the best true-crime podcasts at the British Podcast Awards", one of The Telegraph's top five true-crime podcasts and featuring 12 murderers, including 3 serial killers, across 15 locations, totaling 50 deaths, over just a one mile walk.
Nominated BEST TRUE-CRIME PODCAST at British Podcast Awards, The Telegraph's Top Five True-Crime Podcasts, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50, iTunes Top 25. Subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Acast, Stitcher and all podcast platforms.
Piccadilly Circus, seen from Coventry Street
Every-so-often I will be rolling out a new style of episode called Meander Mile, where I take you on a guided walk through a single street in London; I'll show you streets and murder cases you're already familiar with and others as yet untold. This week's episode focuses on Piccadilly Circus.
CLICK HERE to download the Murder Mile podcast via iTunes and to receive the latest episodes, click "subscribe". You can listen to it by clicking PLAY on the embedded media player below. THE LOCATIONS For your enjoyment, I've posted photos of the locations discussed in this episode. They're all in chronological order. These photos were taken by myself (copyright Murder Mile). 
Credits: Murder Mile was researched, written and recorded by Michael J Buchanan-Dunne, with the music written and performed by Erik Stein & Jon Boux of Cult With No Name.
The music featured in this episode include:
Michael J Buchanan-Dunne is a writer, crime historian, podcaster and tour-guide who runs Murder Mile Walks, a guided tor of Soho’s most notorious murder cases, hailed as “one of the top ten curious, quirky, unusual and different things to do in London”, nominated "one of the best true-crime podcasts at the British podcast Awards 2018", and featuring 12 murderers, including 3 serial killers, across 15 locations, totaling 50 deaths, over just a one mile walk
BEST TRUE-CRIME PODCAST at British Podcast Awards, 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. Subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Acast, Stitcher and all podcast platforms.
Gerrard Street in Chinatown, W1
Every-so-often I will be rolling out a new style of episode called Meander Mile, where I take you on a guided walk through a single street in London; I'll show you streets you're already familiar with and some you aren't, pointing out locations you'll recognise from the podcast, and introducing you to new true-crime tales, as yet untold.
This week's episode focuses on Gerrard Street, W1 (in the heart of Chinatown). You can listen to the episode via the link below, or if you fancy viewing the locations via photos, or via GoogleMaps there's a link to this below. CLICK HERE to download the Murder Mile podcast via iTunes and to receive the latest episodes, click "subscribe". You can listen to it by clicking PLAY on the embedded media player below.
THE LOCATIONS
For your enjoyment, I've posted photos of the locations discussed in this episode. They're all in chronological order. These photos were taken by myself (copyright Murder Mile).
Credits: Murder Mile was researched, written and recorded by Michael J Buchanan-Dunne, with the music written and performed by Erik Stein & Jon Boux of Cult With No Name.
The music featured in this episode include:
Michael J Buchanan-Dunne is a writer, crime historian, podcaster and tour-guide who runs Murder Mile Walks, a guided tour of Soho’s most notorious murder cases, hailed as “one of the top ten curious, quirky, unusual and different things to do in London”, nominated "one of the best true-crime podcasts at the British Podcast Awards 2018", one of The Telegraph's top five true-crime podcasts and featuring 12 murderers, including 3 serial killers, across 15 locations, totaling 50 deaths, over just a one mile walk |
AuthorMichael J Buchanan-Dunne is a crime writer, podcaster & tour guide of Murder Mile Walks, hailed as one of the best "quirky curious & unusual things to do in London". 
Subscribe to the Murder Mile true-crime podcast
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Note: This blog contains only licence-free images or photos shot by myself in compliance with UK & EU copyright laws. If any image breaches these laws, blame Google Images.
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