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EPISODE TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-NINE:
This is Part Two of Two of The Chalk Pit Murder. On Thursday 28th of November 1946, Australian politician Thomas Ley enlisted four good people to help him trap a bad man who terrorised women. As a simple plan with no law broken and nobody hurt, it was a gentlemanly reaction to a dastardly crime by a criminal who they felt deserved worse. Only what began as a good deed by four decent and moral people, soon descended into deceit and death.
THE LOCATION:
The location is marked with a gold/brown symbol of a 'P' just under the words 'Hyde Park' and 'Kensington'. To use the map, click it. If you want to see the other maps, click here.
SOURCES: a selection sourced from the news archives:
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: As the basement door of 5 Beaufort Gardens slammed shut and Wolseley drove off, facing two burly men on either side of the passageway and the scowling grimace of Thomas Ley, John Mudie muttered “I know what this is about”. At least he thought he did, just like the co-conspirators (Lawrence Smith, Mrs Bruce, John Buckingham, and his son John Junior the chauffeur) who had lured this man here. As a strong ex-soldier, Mudie knew he was outmanned so didn’t struggle as Buckingham threw a sack over his head and Smith bound his ankles and arms with 12-foot of rope. Muttering “you’re stifling me”, to scare him, Buckingham joked “you’re breathing your last”, not knowing that this was the truth. Buckingham recalled “Mudie was scared” as the aim was for the man (Ley claimed was terrorising Mrs Brook and her daughter) to sign the confession, to take the money, be on a flight and never to return, as they dragged Mudie to a small windowless office and dumped him in a chair with a pen and paper. If he moved, they pulled him back. If he screamed, they gagged him with a green odd-smelling cloth. And if he didn’t sign it, he was threatened with a beating, even though “no-one would get hurt”. But that was a lie, as soon he would be dead with his strangled body buried in a chalk pit far from London. At 7:05pm, barely five minutes after Mudie was lured in, with his services no longer needed, Ley gave Buckingham an envelope of £200 as he left, and said “don’t contact or phone me again”. At the Crown & Sceptre pub opposite, they each got a cut - £30 for Mrs Bruce, £25 for Junior and the rest for himself – as they raised a toast to a job well done. These three morally decent people truly believed they had done the right thing, as in their minds, two women had been saved and a bad man had been caught… …but, the real ‘bad man’ was Thomas Ley. Born on the 28th of October 1880 in the English city of Bath, Thomas John Ley was one of four children to Henry & Elizabeth. But with his father dying when he was two, aged 6, they emigrated to Australia. Throughout his early years, he was hailed as a bastion of moral decency being a teetotaller with strong Christian values, a father of three boys and married to his wife Emily who fought for Women’s suffrage, and was seen as a hallmark of success having risen from a junior clerk to a solicitor to the Supreme Court, MP for Hurstville, Minister for Justice in Sydney and seen as a future Prime Minister of Australia. To the people, he was moral and trusted. But in real life, his friends, lovers and enemies would describe him as being “a man with a brilliant brain”, but “insanely jealous” of others to the point of paranoia. As he rose up the political ranks, several deaths dogged his career. During the 1925 campaign to be MP for Barton, it was claimed he had tried to bribe his opponent - Frederick McDonald – with a £2000 share in a property at Sydney's Kings Cross if he withdrew from the ballot. Ley won the election, the story got leaked, and on the 15th of April 1926 having contested the results, McDonald mysteriously vanished and his body never found. Ley denied any involvement, and yet the suspicion had bedded in. In 1927, having built the legal firm ‘Ley, Andrews & Co’, several businesses he was engaged with (like as Australasian Oil Fields and S.O.S Prickly Pear Poisons) were under scrutiny for irregularity. One critic was the politician Hyman Goldstein, a meticulous man who was famed for taking early morning walks and was all-but-blind without his glasses, but on the 3rd of September 1928, his broken body was found at the base of Coogee Cliff also known as ‘Suicide Point’, with his glasses missing and no suicide note. And when Keith Greedor, a vocal opponent of Ley’s was appointed to investigate these alleged dodgy deals, while travelling to Newcastle by boat, Greedor mysteriously fell overboard and drowned. There was no evidence to link Ley to any of these suspicious deaths which were listed as ‘possible suicides’, but as Minister for Justice, he had the paid goons to make it happen and the power to make it vanish. By 1928, with his name synonymous with scandal, suffering an abject election defeat, this so-called family man left his wife in Australia, and having kept an affair secret for years, Ley and his housekeeper turned mistress (whose husband had also died in mysterious circumstances) emigrated to England. It could have been a fresh start, as here his name wasn’t mud. But in 1931, he promoted a fraudulent £1 million Derby sweepstake, in 1940 his son was sentenced to 3 years for forgery on his behalf, his real estate dealings were said to be “dubious” and he was convicted of war-time black marketeering. Again, to those who didn’t know him, he was a respected solicitor and ex-Minster for Justice who was moral and trusted. When in truth, he was a ruthless narcissist who used his past to hide his crimes. On Thursday 28th of November 1946 at 7pm, in a way similar to those earlier suspected ‘suicides’, he coerced four co-conspirators (having been fed a lie) to lure an innocent man to a place he didn’t belong; where no-one knew he was going, where no-one would see him vanish and where his death would be listed as self-inflicted. Once inside the basement door of 5 Beaufort Gardens, Mudie was as good as dead. But as Ley never got his hands dirty, being a 66-year-old 18 stone lump with Asthma… …he needed someone fit and strong to do the unthinkable. Having been tied up and gagged, terrified and with a false confession for him to sign, what happened in that small windowless office will never be known. When Buckingham left at 7:05pm, he went to the Crown & Sceptre pub where Mrs Bruce & John Junior joined him for a drink, as witnessed by others. When questioned, Ley said he left the flat two hours earlier, went to the Liberal Club to watch a game of snooker, had dinner alone at the Cumberland Grill at 7:20pm (the time that Mudie was murdered), returned home by 11:30pm and noticed nothing strange, yet not a single witness could recall him. He also said the £550 he withdrew in untraceable £1 notes was for furnishings as his flat was being rebuilt. When the police searched 5 Beaufort Gardens two weeks later, the building was still in a state of chaos as builders were thick into renovations; it was strewn with dust and rubble, there were no fingerprints belonging to Mudie, Smith or Buckingham, the door locks had been changed, and there were no rope marks or any beams or hooks where he could have been hung for the 15 minutes it took him to die. Ley’s secretary said she had found 20 cigarette butts on her office floor the next morning, all being of the brand Player’s, but she had disposed of them, as she naturally thought they were just rubbish. As for the fourth co-conspirator, Lawrence Smith, he admitted his part in luring Mudie to the flat, but after Buckingham had left, he stated “Ley stood in the hall for ten minutes, he seemed to be waiting for someone”, then hearing a bell, “Ley said ‘alright, you can go now”. Smith was given an envelope of cash, he left via the basement door, got in the hired 8hp Ford and was back at work by Monday. When Smith asked, Ley said “everything went alright and Mudie had been dropped off at Wimbledon”. That second man was never seen, and Detectives confirmed that it would have taken either two men to carry the corpse of John Mudie to the car, or a large man to drag or to carry him in a fireman’s lift. Smith denied any involvement in the disposal of the body, but we know that he prepared it. Following Ley’s instructions, on Monday 25th of November, four days before the murder, Smith hired the 8hp Ford saloon for the week, not just the day they drove it to and from the Reigate Hill Hotel. On Wednesday 27th, one day before the murder and the body’s disposal, as the storm clouds loomed and the rains began to pour making the clay soil boggy, at 4:30pm, two local gardeners - Fred Smith & Clifford Tamplin – saw a man in the chalk pit widening the hole of the old latrine trench with a pickaxe. Being dusk, the sun had set and the man was shining a torch, but it was as they cycled up Slines Oak Lane to the pit’s entrance that the man – 5 foot 6, early 30s, medium build, dark hair – realising he’d been seen, sprinted to a car hidden by the bushes, and trying twice to reverse it, he sped away. With their suspicions raised, they noted “it was a new-ish dark 8hp Ford, licence plate FGP101”, but as all he was doing was digging a hole, they thought nothing of it until the murder appeared in the papers. His fear and incompetence at merely preparing the hole for the body could be a reason why the police and the pathologists couldn’t tell if it was a suicide or a murder as the disposal was incomplete? Maybe he’d been paid to bury the body, but having been disturbed by another passerby, in panic, he fled? The co-conspirators (and possibly Lawrence Smith too) had been fed a lie by Thomas Ley… …but if it was a lie, why did Ley want John Mudie murdered? The co-conspirators would admit they didn’t know Mrs Brook, the victim of the rape and blackmail who Ley, as her solicitor was protecting. But what he deliberately hid from them was the truth - she wasn’t just a co-director of Connaught Properties, she was also his mistress. As his ex-housekeeper, Evelyn Byron Brook known as Maggie, had moved to England in 1928 with Ley and her daughter June. Maggie & Ley’s relationship had been turbulent for years, and with her nerves frayed, she had relied on sleeping pills to get by as Ley had claimed to love her, yet she stated “he was insanely jealous… he didn’t like me having any friends, and during a quarrel with my daughter, he pulled a revolver on us”. To get away from him, Maggie moved into her own flat at 14 West Cromwell Road, yet it was around the time that he became impotent, that his jealousy spiralled out of control. For years, with his libido broken, he accused this 66-year-old widow who just wanted a quiet life of having sexually-explicit and tempestuous affairs with four younger men and spreading rumours that “being old she can’t keep up”. In June 1946, doing a good deed for her daughter (Jean) who was in hospital for an operation, Maggie housesat for her at 3 Homefield Road in Wimbledon as she was one of its lodgers; one of whom was a 35-year-old ex-soldier who was handsome, fair-haired, blue-eyed and knew how to chat to a lady. John Mudie had lived there for six weeks, so when Mrs Evans, the landlady introduced him to Maggie, he greeted her, they spoke for a minute, and that was it. Getting a new job at the Reigate Hill Hotel, although she said she found him attractive stating “well, he won’t be single for long with such beautiful eyes”, he left two days later, and they never saw each other or communicated in anyway ever again. And why would they? When the Police questioned Mrs Brook, she said “I have never told Ley that I have been blackmailed”. Mudie who was described as “a quiet and clean living man” stated in letters to Ley’s solicitors that he hadn’t received any cheques, and when the Police examined both of their bank accounts “we couldn’t find a single hint of blackmail, nor any improper liaisons between Mudie, Mrs Brook or her daughter”. Initially, Ley’s lie had been a ruse to ruin Mudie’s reputation believing he was one of four men having an alleged affair with Maggie, but the further Ley believed it, the more his paranoia made it real. Just like the rape story used to poison his co-conspirator’s minds and make them believe their actions were morally right, it didn’t happen. As a possessive man, who (even when they lived apart) demanded on knowing where she was, who she was with, and every night repeatedly called her to check if she was in, he claimed he heard her having sex in her flat with Arthur Barron, her own daughter’s husband. He was deluded, irrational, paranoid and possessive, but the more he built upon the story that Maggie had been blackmailed and raped by John Mudie, the more it became a reality. The co-conspirators believed his lies because he believed his lies, and that the only way to stop Mudie was to murder him. On Thursday 3rd of December, Smith & Buckingham met at the Crown & Sceptre, and with none of the co-conspirators attributing a body found in a chalk pit to John Mudie, they were none the wiser. Over a pint, Smith told Buckingham “the old man was very pleased with the way things went. Mudie signed the confession, he was given £500 and is out of the country”. It was a job well done. But ten days later, being told “he didn’t make the flight, Mudie’s gone missing”, they were told to speak to no one. They were worried that Mudie would blab, unaware that he was lying dead on a mortuary slab. Ley was getting twitchy, and this was no coincidence, as by the 3rd of December Joseph Mudie (John’s brother) had identified the body, by the 5th of December Police had searched the room at the Reigate Hill Hotel, and interviewing Ley at his flat on the 7th, being shown the solicitor’s letter, Detective Sergeant Shoobridge bluntly stated “John Mudie has been found dead, and I am making enquiries”. With Smith still foreman of the renovations in Ley’s flat, he had ample time to eviscerate any evidence of a crime, a victim or any culprits, but there were other pieces of evidence it wasn’t so easy to destroy. In the solicitor’s letter, DS Shoobridge noticed a line which caught his attention, it read “Mrs Brook directed us to send the cheques to her in your care”. He checked this, she didn’t, and could prove it. Staff at the Reigate Hill Hotel also noted that Mudie had been offered a job at a fancy cocktail party in London by a wealthy widow who was chauffeur-driven in a Rolls Royce or a Wolseley. They all saw it, and they all chatted about it, as that kind of thing doesn’t happen every day, and with Mudie feeling that this was the good piece of luck he needed, he cancelled a date with his girlfriend Euphemia McGill. To be thorough, the Police also checked every phone call and guest that Mudie had received in the months he’d worked there; one call on the day of the murder was later discovered to have been made by the chauffeur to let Mudie know that the widow was running late, and one guest was Thomas Ley. We know this, because there were witnesses. In August 1946, three months prior, Mudie entered the hotel’s kitchen and said to William Healey the vegetable cook “I want you to witness something, I’ll explain later”. Said to be nervous and uneasy, Mudie led him into the Tapestry Room where two men in suits accused him of forging cheques. Able to prove his innocence and that this was a miscommunication, one of the men (Tom Barron, the father of Mrs Brook’s son-in-law) apologised for the inconvenience and stated “the matter was settled”. The other man we know was Thomas Ley, because he handed William his business card, which he kept. That’s why Ley didn’t want Mudie to see his face until he was inside his flat and it was too late to run, (door slam) “I know what this is about”. Mudie was innocent, Mrs Brook wasn’t a victim and this had all been proven beyond a shred of doubt, but as a plan concocted by a demented and paranoid mind… …the biggest lie by Thomas Ley was the crime itself. In the windowless office of the empty basement at 5 Beaufort Gardens, Mudie had been tied up with 12 foot of rope, far too much to restrain one man but sufficient enough to bind him and hang him. With a suspicion of foul play in this suspected suicide, a second autopsy was conducted by Home Office pathologist Dr Keith Simpson who spotted two bruises to the frontal portion of the brain, and his intestines (being dark with the appearance of velvet) pointed to some kind of violence to the stomach. Consulting Dr Francis Camps, Dr Simpson had three issues with the ‘suicide’ hypothesis; first, that the noose was tied with a half hitch commonly used to secure items rather than a hangman’s knot; second, there were no hooks or beams to hang a rope from anywhere in the basement or chalk pit; and third, that elevated carbon monoxide levels proved that Mudie had taken 15 minute to die by asphyxia, yet if hung, most persons would be unconscious in one minute and dead in two even with an inferior knot. His death had been slow and protracted. With his clean shoes proving he hadn’t touched any soil and a V-shaped strangulation mark from his chin to his ears and up the midline of his skull matching the rope, as it had taken him far too long to die, it was as if he had been hung, and again, and again. Dr Simpson stated “the marks were caused by the upwards pull of a rope”, as if someone strong and fit (like Smith) had hung him using his hands while he was seated, and taking him close to death, he only stopped to do it again, as if Mudie was being forced to confess for something he hadn’t done. It was a deliberately brutal and painful death, but this wasn’t the wound that killed him. Underneath the rope burn on his neck, obscured by purple bruises, pinprick haemorrhages and a state of decomposition, a very faint line of constriction was found. Unlike those made by the noose, these were lower, deeper and had crushed the windpipe as it was tightened by someone stood behind him. With the confession signed, he was strangled to death, carried to the boot of the Ford, driven to the chalk pit, dragged to the pre-dug grave causing his clothes and the noose to ruck up around his neck, the rope was then cut with a blunt blade as if it was to be destroyed, but being disturbed by a passerby, this nervous assassin had fled, leaving a pick axe and a body half buried to be mistaken for a suicide. The evidence proved this wasn’t a suicide, it was unmistakably a murder. The Police’s prime suspect was Thomas Ley, the solicitor, politician and Sydney’s ex-Minister of Justice, but being a 66-year-old 18 stone asthmatic and diabetic who had difficulty standing up, let alone carrying a body, said to be a “brilliant brain” who had four suspicious deaths linked to him, they knew he had co-conspirators? But who were they, and where were they? The investigation was proving problematic as any evidence linking Ley to Mudie’s murder had been erased; the flat had been renovated, the hire car had been valeted, every Rolls Royce was ruled out, every Wolseley was still being checked, and with a phone-call made by the wealthy widow’s chauffeur to Mudie on the day of his death, the caller didn’t seem like a hired killer, just a moral family man. Knowing Ley’s penchant for lies, the Police suspected that his co-conspirators were merely paid pawns in a ploy to kidnap Mudie for whatever reason but not to kill him, so they decided to smoke them out. On Saturday 14th of December, two weeks after the body was found, John Buckingham Senior opened a copy of the Daily Mirror and read a small article, it read “Chalkpit Riddle of a hanged man is puzzling Surrey police… John McMain Mudie, 35 was found hanged in Woldingham Common… police want to know what happened to him after he left the Reigate Hill Hotel”, and next to it was a photo of Mudie. It was to be a simple plan with no laws broken and nobody hurt, but the man they had lured was dead. For their crimes, they risked being charged with kidnapping and possibly as accessories to murder, but as three law-abiding moral citizens who had only taken part in this ploy to trap a ‘bad man’ because they had been hoodwinked into believing a lie about two women being terrorised by a blackmailer, that day, John Buckingham, John Junior and Mrs Lillian Bruce all voluntarily attended Scotland Yard. Stating to the sergeant “we’ve come to tell you about the body found in a chalk pit”, they each gave a statement which was verified as accurate, stating “we thought we were stopping a dirty blackmailer”. With Smith identified by the gardeners who had seen him at the chalk pit, and with enough evidence to arrest Ley, on the 28th of December 1946 at Chelsea police station, Thomas Ley, Lawrence Smith and John Buckingham Senior were charged with the murder of John McMain Mudie. (Out) In a four-week trial held at the Old Bailey, Mrs Bruce and John Junior proved to be reliable witnesses for the prosecution, and having turned King’s Evidence, Buckingham Senior was dropped as a suspect. As predicted, Ley and Smith both pleaded ‘not guilty’ to murder, and although Smith remained mostly silent, Ley (who looked ill and pale) was described as “defensive, antagonistic and rude”, that’s when he could be bothered to turn up. In cross-examination, he denied knowing the co-conspirators, giving them money, approving the plan, being at Beaufort Gardens that night, and when asked why Mudie had been bought to his flat, Ley stated his innocence which no-one believed, and retorted, “I have no idea… but people who accept £200 for kidnapping a man are quite capable of framing someone else”. The jury deliberated for less than an hour, and on the 24th of March 1947, with Ley & Smith found guilty of murder, Justice Goddard sentenced them to death. To the court, Ley arrogantly exclaimed “I am not surprised at the verdict after the allegations of jealousy and suchlike nonsense. I am perfectly innocent”, and seeing himself as the victim he described it as “an injustice” and “totally unwarranted”. Their executions were set for the 8th of May 1947, but on appeal, Smith’s sentence was commuted to life. As for Ley, with two psychiatrists diagnosing him as a possible paranoid schizophrenic, he was declared insane and was sent to Broadmoor Asylum, becoming its richest and most illustrious prisoner. Barely two months later, on 24th of July 1947, having suffered a stroke, Thomas Ley died at Broadmoor leaving his estate to his wife and three sons. Asked before his death “did you suspect Mudie of being in a relationship with Mrs Brook”, he replied “never”, and yet, Mudie’s confession was never found. 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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