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.
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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.
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.
Latvia House, 72 Queensborough Terrace, Bayswater
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 Two of Four of Meticulous. December 1968, Bayswater. Three years before the unidentified victim’s shallow graves were unearthed, a woman matching the description entered Latvia House at 72 Queensborough Terrace, booking into Room 16, as she had done many times before. By the end of the month she would be dead, dismembered and buried in Ashtead Woods. But who was she? December 1968, Bayswater. Three years before the unidentified victim’s shallow graves were unearthed, a woman matching the description entered Latvia House at 72 Queensborough Terrace, booking into Room 16, as she had done many times before. By the end of the month she would be dead, dismembered and buried in Ashtead Woods. But who was she?
THE LOCATION
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The location is marked with a blue bin just above the words 'The Long Water'. 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: December 1968, Bayswater, West London. 16 miles north of Leatherhead golf course, three years before the unidentified victim’s shallow graves were unearthed, and just one month before her grisly demise, a five-foot four-inch woman of medium build with neck-length dark hair which was greying at the roots, entered 72 Queensborough Terrace where she was known and felt safe. In her hand, she clutched a small suitcase containing some clothes. Latvia House was a slightly shabby but affordable little hostel, which as a place of refuge for London’s Latvian refugees to find shelter during dark times provided a bed for a few shillings with a locked door. Turning the key and sliding the bolt to shield herself from the struggles of her chaotic life, the woman exhaled deeply as she lay on the soft soothing warmth of a bed in the familiar sanctuary of Room 16. Fingering her two silver rings to remind her of a marriage which she once thought was good, before – being beaten blue and bleeding red - she fled to London. And although now alone, she nestled into a reassuring pillow, wearing a navy-blue slip, a pink woollen housecoat and blue carpet slippers. Said to be nervous and highly strung, she spoke little about her life, she often sought solace in a man called Mr Baulins, she regularly drained her sorrows at the bar, and although she would vanish without a trace, no-one reported her missing; not her friends, not her lover and especially not her ex-husband. Tuesday 7th September 1971, two years and nine months later. The three shallow graves at Ashtead Woods told the detectives almost nothing about the sadistic killer who DCS Shemming had described as “a monster”, as with nature having eviscerated every finger or footprint, the killer’s meticulous ways had made him invisible, so to find him, they’d need to find her. Given the insurmountable task of discovering the identity of a faceless woman of unknown origin, the detectives took every tiny clue and exhausted every angle, as each lead was a step nearer to the truth. On Thursday 10th, they handed over the crime scene to Charles Young, a forestry pathologist, an expert in assessing changes in nature, as by examining the soil erosion, fungal growth and the decomposition of the bark, as well as any disruptions to the natural form of the woodland, the damaged root formations of the young tree under which the torso had been buried “deduced that the graves were dug during the non-growing period of 1968/69”. And as a sharp frost bit at the end of December 1968, and – for first the time in years – with it being a white Christmas, the cut marks of the letter ‘N’ which were whittled into the young tree potentially by the killer himself, also came from the same season. With the head wrapped in a barely legible and badly degraded newspaper, Frederick Waller, a librarian at the Evening Standard was able to date the edition to Thursday 5th December 1968, matching the forestry pathologist’s hypothesis, and potentially linking the dead woman to somewhere in London. As the varying states of decomposition had made determining her age almost impossible, one of the legs was shipped to the Smithsonian Institute who’d had good results with a new technique of carbon dating the bones, and they confirmed she was in her late 40s and had been dead for three years. That narrowed down the search for any missing persons and given that – unlike her face – her fingers had barely decayed, and the loops and swirls were untouched, they were able to pull her fingerprints, but as a woman who didn’t have a criminal record, it would prove to be fruitless… at least for now. And with her face unrecognisable owing to skin slippage, corpse wax and feasting insects, a portrait painter and an anthropologist called Roy Reynolds was hired to build a replica of the head and to work out what she may have looked like, as - even without fingerprints - a face can often lead to a name. The details of who she was were becoming clearer, but it was two clues which became the most useful. John Sharp, a ring appraiser, stated that both the wedding and engagement rings were made of white metal and not a more expensive silver, they were designed in a continental style, that the amber stone was stylish but cheaply cut, and that the inscription of ‘835’ inside of the band was a German hallmark. And although the skull had degraded, the jaw had partially collapsed and the teeth were no longer sat in their sockets - having been repositioned by a forensic dentist - prints were made and circulated to every dentists across the country, with enquiries made in Austria, Germany, Switzerland and France. It was now an international investigation, and yet, her identity was discovered a little closer to home. On Wednesday 10th November 1971, just nine weeks after the body was found, Clifford Allen, a dentist from Mansfield in Nottinghamshire recognised the defining characteristics of the teeth, a pattern of six fillings made of mercury, silver, tin, and attributed it to a patient he hadn’t seen since April 1967. Using the electoral roll to identify her former addresses, three friends - Beryl Kuciers, Maria Cirulis and Hella Kurylo, all housewives from Mansfield - recognised the rings, and now the police had a name… …48-year-old Mrs Elenora Essens, who was known as ‘Nora’. Elenora Essens was born in Riga, the capital of Latvia on the 24th of December 1920, with her mother (a housewife), her stepfather (a jeweller) and a younger sister. Little is known of her early life, but with a broken bone having been fixed badly by an unskilled doctor, this left her with a limp to her right leg. As for the rest of her years, it would not be a happy life. In her late teens, she married a Latvian national of Greek origin and became Elenora Vaino, giving birth to two children. Life should have been blessed and she had earned the right to live a good life as happy as anyone else, but it was not to be. As an independent country crushed under the jackboots of German and Russian occupation, by 1941, Latvia was in a persistent state of civil unrest, as amidst a slew of invasions and bombings, some of its people were pro-Nazi, others were pro-Soviet, and – with families often split between fighting for one side or the other – 1000s of Latvians were sent to concentration camps for collaborating with Russians or the Germans, for daring to be independent, for standing up for their country or fighting for neither. Of a population of 1.8 million Latvians in 1939, 90,000 mostly Latvian Jews were killed in concentration camps, and 80-100,000 died during the fighting, including Nora’s husband and her two children. Barely into her twenties, she was a widow, with no home, no job, no money, no husband and no children. With 200,000 Latvian soldiers conscripted to fight for the occupying forces, 100,000 would be killed in battle, and with at least half a million people displaced, being such a small country, by the end of the war, at least a quarter of Latvia’s population had vanished, but for many, the war wasn’t over. As a young single woman, unable to flee owing to a disabled leg, Nora was sent to a displaced person’s camp at Lubek in Germany, as with post-war Latvia now classified a spoil of war for Russia, she couldn’t go home, she couldn’t stay there, and – as one of 50 million refugees – she had nowhere else to go. Living in an era where a woman couldn’t survive without a husband, as a young attractive widow of five foot four inches tall, with dark hair, pale skin, grey/blue eyes, and a curvaceous figure, Nora knew how to use not only her God given attributes to lure in the men, but also her flirtatious alluring ways. Post-war, with the supply lines decimated, Nora’s sexuality was a currency for many a lonely man who – for the price a sweet word, a little kiss and maybe something more – could buy her food, clothes or medicine, anything she needed as a single woman, as this wasn’t prostitution, this was survival. In 1946, at a registry office in Lubek, having found love either through need or necessity, Nora married fellow Latvian, Aleksander Essens, and – although both were broke – to cement their union, on her left hand she wore a white metal ring with amber stones, and a wedding band with the hallmark 835. By 1947, granted British work permits, Aleksander and Nora moved to Nottingham… …and although she had escaped a certain death, she would soon face another. Getting work as a hospital cleaner in York, Market Harborough, Full Sutton and Worksop, later moving to Mansfield General, she stopped working in 1948 following a bout of appendicitis, and - as her many scars would show – a full hysterectomy in 1959 and a hernia operation in 1960 left her plagued with frequent sickness and chronic pain. And although, as Aleksander, her husband would state “apart from the fact that my wife could not have children, our marriage was quite happy and normal…”, it wasn’t. Whether this was the point at which Nora stopped trusting men in uncertain, as although she was still very flirtatious with many-a handsome stranger, she had become increasingly neurotic and possessive. In 1950, Nora & Aleksander Essens moved into a ground floor flat at 48 Armstrong Road in Mansfield. Aleksander told the police, “we used to have rows, but only slight ones”, which wasn’t true in the slightest, as Alexander Vanags, their recently separated Latvian lodger knew only too well, as the walls were painfully thin and their voices were earsplittingly loud. Later in a police statement he would say “the main reason for the breakdown of their marriage was his habitual drunkenness… this led to many violent quarrels. At least once, he beat her up and she was admitted to hospital for treatment”. As a trusted friend to both of them who was quiet, kind and bookish, “Nora”, Alec Vanags would state “hoped that my presence in the house would stop her husband from beating her…” – the problem being that being only small and slightly built - in the summer of 1956, “he kicked her out of the house in a fit of drunken anger, I tried to restrain him from attacking her, but I was only partly successful”. Nora’s face was often a patchwork of blacks and blues, so often seeking solace in other men, it was no surprise that - with her husband in an affair and having a child with a local widow called Helen Singh – that Nora, being in a need of a man who could and would treat her well, that she fell for Alec Vanags. Despite him being six-years younger than her, unlike her violent and drunken spouse, Alec was sweet, sober, hard-working and softly-spoken, a miner who dreamed of working as an aviation researcher and being fluent in four languages was trying to better himself by getting a well-paying job as a translator. In a slightly fudged and painfully rose-tinted view of his marriage to Nora, Aleksander told the police “my wife and I were still quite happy with each other… but as she and Alec grew closer together, we grew apart”. Only again this was not the truth, as although they had split, the violence continued. On Wednesday 31st of July 1963, as a premonition of how horrible her life could be, the Nottingham Evening Post reported ’Uncle thrashed two boys with a rope… pleading guilty to two summonses, Aleksandris Essens (39) was fined £5 for causing bodily harm to Graham Singh (aged 13) and Geoffrey Singh (aged 12)’ – these were the sons of Helen Singh, the woman he was having an affair with. That Christmas, still living together (as owing to her medical pain, Nora was unable to work) he’d state “we had a big row. It ended up with me hitting my wife. I was fined £5 at Mansfield Magistrates Court and ordered to pay her £5 per week as maintenance”. Having had enough, Nora packed up, she moved out, Alec Vanags found them a little flat, and she began a better life with a good man who loved her. Records confirm the court case occurred on 2nd of February 1964, of which Aleksander Essens claimed “that was the last time I saw her” - six years before her death and 156 miles north of Leatherhead. She had moved on with her life, and - apparently - he had moved on with his… …but he did try to contact her twice. Questioned by the police, he would state “in September 1969, I wanted to claim sickness benefit. I went to the Social Security Office to try and locate her. I was told that she was at 72 Queensborough Terrace in Bayswater…”, a place known as Latvia House, “I did not go to the address and have never visited there”, which the Police could neither prove nor disprove. And then, “in February 1970, I began to make enquiries through a solicitor to trace her to start divorce proceedings and query the maintenance money I gave her” - £5 per week or £75 today, which wasn’t a tiny sum for a coal miner with five kids to feed – “I was told it had accumulated” to the equivalent of £5600, a quarter of the national wage, “as my wife had not claimed it since the Christmas of 1968”. It didn’t strike him as odd? That an unemployed widow, unable to work owing to pains hadn’t collected her main source of income beyond a pitiful state benefit for over a year. And yet, he didn’t chase it up, he didn’t ask her friends, he didn’t go to the police, and - importantly – he didn’t report her missing. But why? Had she been able to see beyond the torment of her past, it would have been clear to Nora that Alec Vanags was a man a million miles away from swinging fists and fiery temper of her ex-husband. As a five-foot five-inch ex-miner who was blind in one eye and registered disabled owing to an injured back, the only anger Alec ever showed was mild frustration at himself when he couldn’t finish a crossword. But trauma always leaves long scars, and trust can take a long time to rebuild. In 1967, moving to London to start a new life, in the February, Alec fulfilled his dream by becoming an Aviation & Military Editor at MacDonald & Co publishing at 49 Poland Street, Soho, specialising in the analysis of aircraft and warships using documents which he translated from Polish and Russian to English, with his first book – Rocket Fighter: The Messerschmitt 163 by Mano Ziegler – still in print. Earning a solid wage of £2400 per year, as a refugee, finally he could indulge his passion by filling the many neat and orderly bookshelves in his home with aviation reference books in an alphabetical order, as well as being able to afford to rent a decent flat in a good part of town for Nora and himself, and as a symbol of his love, he regularly bought her gifts – earrings, dresses, fur coats and a 9 carat gold ring. As a battered husband to a brutal wife whose conviction had led their children being put into care, Alec too was a victim running away from a bad marriage. Seeking to rebuild the shattered remains of his family, he’d begun to correspond with his daughter Linda and repair the damage of the past. Linda would state of her estranged father “he made a terrific fuss of me and showed me off to all his friends”. The future looked rosy, but for Nora, she only saw darkness. By June 1967, they were living in a pleasant little self-contained flat at 22 Tabor Court in Cheam, which was neat, clean and secure. “I tried hard to make a go of it”, Alec said “but was not very successful”. As she had done all too often in Mansfield, Nora vanished without any rhyme nor reason. Worried, Alec always reported her missing, “but often leaving the flat for days at a time, and once for a week, I do not know where she went, or where she stayed”, and then, without warning, she would come back. Seeing her mentally decline, Alec’s boss at the publishers put him in touch with Dr Doreen Stracey, a psychiatrist, “which he did for Nora and I at the firm’s expense. Unfortunately the visit was not helpful, and being most scathing about the whole thing, Nora laughed about it”. He tried, he always tried. Again, as a woman with no work, no family, and no hobbies to occupy her mind and calm her anxieties, plagued by her past and burdened by a jealous streak – being left alone for hours on end in an empty flat as her besotted boyfriend earned an honest crust for them both – Nora got sicker and sicker. In August 1968, as if fate had spited her, whilst crossing the street, Nora was hit by a motor scooter. Rushed to Charing Cross Hospital, luckily an x-ray showed she had no breaks nor fractures, but as a partially disabled woman whose right leg already had a limp, even though she barely existed on a cocktail of strong pain killers and sleeping pills, for her it was painful to stand and crippling to walk. Across the month, Nora was bedbound for days on end, plagued by pain day and night. As a good man full of love for the woman he adored, Alec hated seeing Nora like this, so it was no surprise that – although disabled himself, being a man described as “a gentle, very honest, honourable, contentious, meticulous and always very punctual” – that in those last months, he was often her live-in carer. By September, with her pain not subsiding, Alec moved them from their second floor flat in Cheam to Kendall Villa on Sutton Lane, as owned by Dr Doreen Stracey, a ground-floor flat directly opposite the soothing greenery of Turnham Green and barely a short stagger from the shops of Chiswick High Road. As a homely little flat with a kitchen, a bathroom, a sitting room and a bedroom with twin beds, they settled in without blinking, decorating it with family photos, mementos of Latvia and – as a bookworm who devoured intricate details about the payload capacity of an Arado AR234 jet bomber or how the Heinkel HE112 consisted of 26,864 rivets, which Nora rolled her eyes at – he had shelves for his many reference books, a place for his military regalia, a broken air-pistol (which – as a practical man - he planned to fix one day), and a neatly organised toolbox for all of those little jobs which needed doing. It should have been the perfect flat for both of them, he kept it clean, he made her meals, his wage was just enough, and his sympathetic employer let him leave his work early when he needed to. But as a frequently bedbound woman who was plagued by past, Alec was so used to Nora leaving him, that he stopped querying the packed suitcase she kept by her bed, as he knew that, when she was ready and only when she was ready, she would always come back to him. …only one time, she didn’t. As witness to her life with a violent ex-husband and her last known sighting alive, Alec told the police, “a few days later she disappeared again and didn’t arrive back until after two weeks. When I asked where she had been she said she had stayed with a Greek fellow in Sutton, but gave me no details”. The sicker she got, the more she fled without reason, as Alec stated “she disappeared again. I reported her missing at Chiswick Police Station”. Records show that Alec reported Elenora missing at 9:15pm on 5th of November and 21st of November 1968, at which, an officer came to the flat and took details, but as always, Nora returned, exhausted but unharmed. “Nora turned up after ten or twelve days and I went to the police station and told them she was home”, as verified by a constable and her records. But Nora was not happy. “After the constable left, there was a terrific row when Nora accused me of reporting her to the police. She told me never to do it again”. And although he cared for her, for Nora, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. At the start of December 1968, just weeks before her death, Nora moved into Room 16 of Latvia House in Bayswater, a little room she had stayed at before, where she felt safe and warm. What she had run away from wasn’t him but her past. And knowing that he was a good man who loved her without question and hoped one day that they’d be happy, they spent Christmas together. The final time she left him was on Sunday 29th December 1968. He 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”. She just lay there, a frown on her face, dressed in her comfortable bedclothes – a navy blue slip, a pink woollen housecoat and blue carpet slippers. “I shaved and washed, did some washing up, and then when I went into the sitting room, she was putting on her make-up”, it was about 10:30am, “she was dressed in a pattern-coloured dress and good shoes. I asked her if she was going out. She told me she was leaving for good” and he knew this was coming. “I told her I did not want to witness her going and so I left the flat and went for a walk”. The day was bitterly cold, as with a biting winter frost having settled, and for the first time in years, it being a white Christmas, “I put a coat on and I walked to the Gunnersbury roundabout, then to Kew Bridge. I stood on the bridge for a short time, then walked back the same route via the Chiswick flyover… when I returned to the flat it was getting dark”, roughly 4:40pm, “and Nora had gone”. (End) “She had left various dresses, a fur coat and two or three pairs of shoes I had bought for her. In fact, all the things I had bought for her were thrown on the bed and the floor. I stayed in all evening and read. I felt nervous, but I did not believe she had left me for good, because she had left me before”. As always, she had left no note and never said where she was going. “She had taken a soft suitcase, some clothes and all her make-up. To the best of my knowledge, she was dressed in a powder blue-grey coat with a real fur collar, the fur was dark brown, and she was carrying a dark blue handbag”. “The next day, as usual, I went to work and hoped she would return”. As each day passed, he said he visited the places he thought she might be, but as a private woman who rarely spoke about her life, he assumed – as were her threats – that she had left him for good. Upon the discovery of her name and her former address at 48 Armstrong Road in Mansfield, her brutal and abusive ex-husband Aleksadner Essens was questioned at length by the detectives. As a man with a history and a conviction for violence against her, he was their number one suspect. But with it proven that he had never visited her in London, that he had never been to Leatherhead, that he was at home in Mansfield during the time of her murder, and that he didn’t know that she was staying at Latvia House until eight months after her death, which he didn’t learn about until he read it in the papers… …Aleksadner Essens was ruled out as the murderer of Nora. But one man was not. 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. 
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