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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.
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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. 
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