Murder Mile UK True-Crime Podcast - #214: The Woman in Red - Part One (Winifred Virginia Mulholland)14/6/2023
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 FOURTEEN:
At 5:40am on Thursday 6th May 1948, on the basement steps of 17 Finborough Road in West Brompton, the broken body of 26-year-old part time waitress and prostitute Winifred Mulholland was found. Missing for four days, and dead for almost one, the position of her body posed a perplexing mystery; as had she been hit by car, had she fallen from a height, or had her killer dumped her in plain sight on a busy street? But why?
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THE LOCATION
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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 Finborough Road in West Brompton, SW10; one stop west of the stabbing of Countess Lubienska, three streets east of the last killing by the sadistic drummer boy, and a few streets north-east of where Police brutality possibly led to a suspect’s amnesia – coming soon to Murder Mile. Typical for this area, Finborough Road consists of a long-line of five-storey white-stone terraces with each floor off-set, so from the basement all you can see is feet, tyres and poodle turds, and (to truly infuriate the disabled) simply to get to the ground floor you have to first ascend a set of stone steps. With no front garden, just a sharp descent down a set of hard stone steps to the basement, it’s the balconies where the tenants tend to dump their crap; whether a broken pram, a burst bouncy castle, an excess of empty booze bottles, the gym equipment they only used once, the cardboard box for a posh telly so the burglars know which flat to break into first, and an over-sized patio set for the one summer’s day they can sit and sup wine (like they’re in Venice) as they inhale the fumes of fifty trucks. But at 5:40am on Thursday 6th May 1948, on the basement steps of 17 Finborough Road, the broken body of 26-year-old part time waitress and prostitute Winifred Mulholland was found. Missing for four days, and dead for almost one, the position of her body posed a perplexing mystery; as had she been hit by car, had she fallen from a height, or had her killer dumped her in plain sight on a busy street? But why? Being easy to identify by her rabbit-fur coat and the deep red heels to her shoes, the biggest mystery about the death of Winifred Mulholland was how did she ended up here, and why she died? My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 214: The Woman in Red – Part One. There wasn’t any rhyme nor reason why Winifred Mulholland would be murdered. She lived a modest life, she had a few debts, and she didn’t cause trouble, as alongside thousands of other single women struggling in the post-war era, she made the best of what she had, and she had big plans for the future. But there was a piece of her life which was missing, and this hole she filled with little white lies. Born on 11th July 1922 at Elizabeth Hospital in Birtley, Gateshead in the north-east of England, Winifred Virginia Mulholland was one of two children to Florence & James Mulholland. Raised in a poor mining community, living a hand-to-mouth existence, even though it was said by Florence & James that their marriage was not a happy one, being unable to pay for a divorce, they plodded on as best they could. Maybe this unhappy upbringing was the reason Virginia (as she preferred to be called) would remain an eternal child, always drifting from daydream to nightmare, and fleshing out her life with fantasy. Across her 26-years alive, Virginia would retain a sweetness about her; being a dainty 5 foot 2 inches tall and barely 8 stone, her fair hair was as light and airy as candy floss, her eyes twinkled as if only innocent thoughts buzzed her brain like a bee seeking out pollen, and shining like dunes on the whitest of beaches were two apple-blossom cheeks protruding as if a naughty word was perched on her lips. Years later, Lillian her landlady would state “she was a quiet babyish sort of girl, who was very fond of dancing to my wireless at home”, but she didn’t truly know her as “I thought that she was Canadian”. Why Virginia chose to pretend to be a Canadian is anyone’s guess, but she did. In 1936, aged 14, she moved with her parents and brother to London seeking better work and brighter prospects, but as happened to many families, they found the pay was higher but so were the costs. Having finished school with a basic school certificate, her options as a working-class girl were limited, and as she hadn’t the skills to become a secretary, she earned a modest wage by waitressing in cafes. And that was her life; she worked long hours to earn a pittance, she had no plans for the future, and then she went home to witness the bickering and sniping of her arguing parents. With her only escape being music, dancing and friends – her days were as typical as any other young person in that era. By 1940, being a few months into the Second World War and at the start of an eight-month bombing campaign of British cities by the Luftwaffe, with her brother sent to boarding school, Virginia and her family moved into a small cottage in the remote village of Wadhurst in Kent, 50 miles south of London. It should have been a place of safety far away from the bombed-out ruins of the West End, but being stuck alone with her warring parents – whose relationship was so bad, they lived in separate parts of the cottage - she often came home to more screams and explosions than she had heard in the city. Throughout the war-years, Virginia occupied her time and served her country by assisting the nurses at the Westminster Hospital through the Woman’s Auxiliary Air Force, but - for reasons we shall never know – her father forbade her to come home, so she took up a lodging, alone amid the bombings. In 1945, with the war finally over and a sense of normality returning, as Virginia had been struck down with an unidentified gastric disease, she returned to her parent’s cottage for two years, but then left… …only to encounter her very first brush with murder. It’s an odd link which no-one has ever connected, but in 1946, Virginia worked as a waitress at The Victory Café at 266 Edgware Road in Paddington. For two years, she was employed by the café’s manager Alice Williams who all of her staff would call ‘Madam’, as previously reported in Episode 162. Nothing could be proven, but it was suggested that although Alice supplied employment and support to many young women in a difficult situation, she was potentially also a madam; who took possession of their official papers, who got girls into sex work, and who may have taken a cut of their earnings. But on Boxing Day 1950, just 19 months after Virginia went missing, Alice was stabbed to death in the café’s kitchen by June McKechnie, a friend, a customer and a prostitute in an argument over money. It is uncertain if Alice got any of her waitresses into prostitution, but around that time Virginia received the first of four convictions for soliciting, with the last on 28th January 1948, shortly before she left. That said, there is little information about what type of prostitute she was. For Virginia, sex-work wasn’t a career option, but a casual habit she hopped into to supplement her very meagre income. As with many women in the late 1940s, the war had provided them with job opportunities unavailable prior; such as better pay and higher skills by making munitions for the war-effort. But with conscription over and many such jobs being reserved for ex-soldiers, several forms of prostitution filled the gap. It wasn’t always sex that she provided, as being an attractive and affable young lady, she sometimes escorted men on trips to the cinema, on dates at affordable restaurants and provided companionship like she was a surrogate ‘girlfriend’. And yes, she gave them full sex if they wanted it, but also a grope, a fondle, some hand relief, or a little kissing if they were that way inclined. For her services, they paid in cash, but also often with a hot meal, a warm bed, and black-market items liked chocolate and tights. With the rift between Virginia and her father ongoing, and being ashamed of her occupation, she kept a distance from her family in those final years, writing regularly to her mother, but rarely visiting. One of the last known addresses she was known to live at was the home of Mr & Mrs Evans, at a three-storey terrace at 87 Winchester Street in Pimlico, where she lodged alone in a small second floor room. It should have provided her with security, but with the Evan’s treating her with suspicion and a violent argument having erupted just shy of Christmas 1947, Virginia risked injury, poverty and homelessness owing to the unwanted affections of their son, who was described as “a little vacant”. Taking his side, Mrs Evans had threatened “to do me an injury if I did not go out with him” Virginia confided in a friend, and having paid £39 (£2000 today) in rent in advance, she risked losing it all over a sad little boy. With her contract hardly worth the notepaper it was scrawled on, Virginia left the lodging quietly, but agreed to take Mrs Evans’ rabbit-fur coat as payment for any monies lost. This was the coat she would be found dead in, but there would be nothing to connect the Evanses to the dumping of her body. In the last letter sent to her mother just a few weeks before her death, Virginia would write “my life is hard, but I hope with God on my side, I can get through it”… …only if God was watching over her, he must have blinked. It’s understandable then, that around this time, realising that Britain held nothing for her, she decided to move overseas and was in the process of applying to live in Canada. So determined was Virginia that she even adopted a Canadian accent, and – to Mrs Lillian Hall, her new landlady at 8 Bramah Road – ‘Mrs Virginia Mulholland’ of Ottawa as she called herself, said she was returning to Canada soon. For the modest price of 38 shillings-a-week for a furnished ground floor room in a Camberwell house along with breakfast and high tea if she desired, Lillian would state “she agreed to occupy the room alone”, which she did and although Lillian thought she was a waitress, no men were brought back. Quite why she lied about being a Canadian in uncertain, but these little flourishes to her life didn’t have a malicious streak – as she wasn’t running from bad men, large debts or dirty secrets – so it could simply have been her immaturity or a desire to make her dull life seem that little bit more thrilling… …but if it was a thrill she wanted, then the climax to her life was about to begin. Sunday 2nd May 1948 was an ordinary day for Virginia. As a woman who wasn’t much of a drinker, rarely argued, and was harassed by men no more than any other attractive woman, her landlady Lillian would state “she told me she worked in a café near Fleet Street, she left at 6:30pm every evening, or sometimes at 4pm she’d go to the pictures and used to arrive home at 6am. She always kept herself-to-herself and I never saw her with anybody during her stay… she’d stop away for nights, or a day or two saying she was staying with a young woman…”. That said, the café where she worked was never found and neither was the young woman, but that didn’t mean they didn’t exist, just that the details the police were given were too scant to find them. At 4pm, Lillian would state “she left my house in Camberwell and said she was going out”, although she didn’t say where she was going which wasn’t unusual. Across her shoulder was slung a string handbag containing her purse and a small red diary (into which she noted her clients and the monies they paid), she wore a rabbit’s fur coat with a mend on the hem that Lillian had recently repaired herself, and on her feet, a pair of black ‘toeless’ sling-back shoes with red heels to match her red dress. That was the last time she was seen alive. With no known place of work, no close contact with family and no regular routines with friends, being the type of girl who did her own thing and could easily be gone for days, no-one reported her missing. Four days later and 4 and a ½ miles west of Camberwell, on Thursday 6th May at 5:40am, Albert Edward Stamp, a millwright was walking to work when he cut through Finborough Road, as per usual. Strolling along the north-side of the pavement, as he passed 17 Finborough Road, he spotted a stockinged foot of what he thought was a discarded mannequin peeping out of the wrought iron railings, its toes up. Peering over, the left leg was buckled underneath, twisted at an unnatural angle as if the hip had been dislocated or the knee had been snapped 90 degrees left, as long splashes of blood ran vertically along the length of both legs. Being the wrong size and shape, he knew it was too realistic to be a dummy. With her legs splayed over the stonework, her torso sprawled across the length of the top step, and her head hanging backwards over the lower step, facing the basement with her body facing skywards, either she had been hit by a car and landed in a heap, had fallen from a height, or had been dumped by someone who saw her as nothing more than disposable, like rubbish chucked out with the bins. What had happened was uncertain, as maybe in the fall, her red dress had riden up, her camiknickers were shown, to the side of her head lay her string handbag (almost as if it was a pillow to rest on), as underneath her smashed and shattered body lay her rabbit’s fur coat, worn as she was last seen in it. And yet, although she was dressed to go out, her shoes were missing, but she hadn’t walked barefoot. Believing this to be an accident, Albert ran to nearby St Stephen’s hospital. At 6.30am, Dr John Higgs examined the body and certified her as dead, and at 6:40am, Detective Inspector Albert Webb arrived. Speaking to the neighbours, no-one knew the woman, had seen her nearby and no-one had heard any suspicious sounds which could explain her injuries or how she had got there. According to her details, she wasn’t a resident at the house she was found in front of and she had no known reason to be there. If she was hit by a car, where were the broken lights or scratched paint flecks? If she fallen from one of the balconies, how did she get into the house? And if her body had been dumped here, where was she killed, as a lack of fresh blood at the scene would prove that she hadn’t died where she was found. She had no stab wounds, no bullet holes, and no obvious evidence of an impact by a car. She hadn’t been dragged a considerable distance, but where she had, it wasn’t outside. And there was no alcohol, no drugs nor poison in her system to suggest that her demise may have been a result of a suicide. If she was murdered, her killer would most likely (according to the detectives) have dumped the body in a place she had no known association with and usually within a mile of where the murder took place, as the longer he spent in public with the body, the more likely he is to be caught and leave clues. It was a crime-scene which didn’t make much sense; she was a woman who didn’t belong here, who no-one had seen, with no signs of a robbery, and although her face had sustained significant injuries, if her killer had tried to hide her identity, why did he dump her with her handbag, purse, ID and diary? Inside the red diary were entries such as “February 11, I met a client, failed to record his name - £4”, and yet there was no references to the night or any client in question, and no page had been torn out. But then again, maybe she only filled in her diary after she had serviced her client, and not before? And as for her jewellery, although she never wore anything expensive - just cheap plastic costume pieces to highlight her look - under her body lay a single clipped earring, and bit of a broken brooch, but where were the other pieces? Had someone taken them or were they in the place where she died? The pathologist Dr Donald Teare saw the body in situ at 10am. In his notes, he observed “it was lying on its back on the upper steps leading down to the basement of 17 Finborough Road… the atmospheric temperature was 57.5 degrees Fahrenheit” (roughly 13.8 degrees Celsius) “the body felt cold, but rigor mortis was not detected in the jaw or the limbs”. As it was unlikely that she had died where she was found, her time of death was impossible to determine, “as decomposition was beginning to set in the internal organs”, but as the congealed blood and the bruises were older than the decomposition, her injuries were at least two-to-three days old, but her possible time of death was no more than a day. With a dislocated left hip and knee, a fracture in her lower left femur and one through the 5th cervical vertebrae of her neck, these injuries were most likely as a result of a short fall, possibly onto the stone steps themselves, but they hadn’t been the cause of her death, as it was likely she was already dead. Like robbery, rape was ruled out as a possible motive, as “although her vagina contained a large quantity of white mucus”, believed to be sperm, “although there was a small erosion to the lining, I found nothing inconsistent with her having had sexual intercourse prior to death”, consensual or not. Which didn’t mean it didn’t happen, just that any evidence of any sexual injury was not seen. Inside her throat, “there was extensive bruising to both sides of the tongue, and as was apparently due to the teeth being driven into the tongue”, owing to a sharp impact, “and with dried blood found in the trachea”, she was still breathing after the attack, which had occurred hours, if not days earlier. The autopsy confirmed that her cause of death was not due to the fall, but to the wounds to her face. Four wounds, all swift and shocking enough to render her unconscious, and her death to be slow. Dr Teare would state “cause of death was laceration to the brain... as across the centre of the forehead was an irregular lacerated wound four inches long… with an area of depressed fractures, an inch and three quarters wide from the frontal bone… which radiated back into the roof of the eyes and nose…”. Using a blunt heavy object, she had been hit hard over the head with an object made of steel or iron, of an irregular shape and surface, it had caved her skull in sending sharp shards of bone into her brain. Owing to the force, this injury was unlikely to be an accident or as a result of a fall, as owing to free-flowing blood from the wound, she was alive and her heart was beating when she was the attacked. This swift and sudden impact resulted in rapid unconsciousness and a slow and agonising death which almost certainly paralysed her entire body in seconds, only her assailant’s attack was far from finished. Upon what was described as her once apple-blossom cheeks “a series of circular abrasions, with one on the right cheek and two on the left, had left distinct circular marks”. Being of even size and slightly octagonal, she had been struck three times with a hammer across the face, as the bones fractured across the bridge of her nose, down to her chin and right up into the depths of her eye sockets. All of these injuries occurred while she was still alive, but everything else was post-mortem. Including the superficial abrasions to the knuckles of her left hand and a laceration to her nose, which may have occurred as she was dragged from where she had died to where she would eventually be dumped. And with the fractures to the 5th vertebrae of her neck, a dislocated hip, knee and a smaller fracture to the lower left thigh bone, all were post-mortem injuries resulting from “at least a 15-foot fall”. The autopsy asked more questioned than it answered, such as where had she died, why was her body been dumped here, who had attacked her and why, and - if she was attacked on Sunday 2nd May, and she wasn’t found until Thursday 6th - what happened to her for the four days in-between? (End) All of the tenants at 17 Finborough Road aided the police as best they could with the investigation and provided witnesses statements into what they had seen and heard, prior to the body’s discovery. They were John Eldred a docker in the basement, George Eyton an engineer on the first, Zdenek Kubert a toolmaker who lived with his wife on the second, and Dr Wallace a female GP on the third floor. Police also spoke to all of her family members, her closest friends, her landlady Lillian Hall, as well as her former employer Alice Williams at the Victory Café and the possible prostitution ring she may have been involved in, and Mr & Mrs Evans and their “slightly vacant” son, whose coat Virginia was wearing. Only, there didn’t seem to be an immediate reason why anyone would want her dead. She wasn’t a bad person, she didn’t blackmail anyone, and her only real secret was her desire to move to Canada. The murder of Winifred Virginia Mulholland would prove to be one of the most baffling cases that the Police had ever encountered, on the surface at least. And yet they would have the case wrapped up and a prime suspect in custody by the end of the day, with every piece of evidence proving conclusive. But this would be a turning point for many of the investigating officers, as the murder itself would go against everything they had known about murderers and their motives, as although they believed the killer was at least a mile away, all the while, he was watching them and listening to their every word. The concluding part of The Woman in Red continues next week. 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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AuthorMichael J Buchanan-Dunne is a crime writer, podcaster of Murder Mile UK True Crime and creator of true-crime TV series. Archives
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