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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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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