 Seven time nominated BEST BRITISH TRUE-CRIME PODCAST at the True Crime Awards, Independent Podcast Award and The British Podcast Awards, and voted 4th Best True-Crime Podcast by This Week, iTunes Top 25 Podcast, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50, The Telegraph's Top 5, Crime & Investigation Top 20 True-Crime Podcasts, also seen on BBC Radio, Sky News, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week.  Margaret McGowan & Bridget O'Hara EPISODE THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY:
This is Part D of D of Undressing Jack the Stripper, an eight part series made in conjunction with the True Crime Enthusiast podcast. From the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, the bodies of eight sex-workers (Elizabeth Figg, Gwynneth Rees, Hannah Tailford, Irene Lockwood, Helen Barthelemy, Mary Fleming, Margaret McGowan and Bridget O’Hara) were found dumped in or near the River Thames in West London. Panic spread that a sadistic serial killer was on the loose who targeted young petite brunettes; stripped and strangled them, dumped each body within weeks and streets of each other. Yet with not a single witness to his crimes, even though several suspects have since been named, with no convictions, it’s a series of killing which remains a mystery to this day. After the success of their ten-part series, Psychopath: Two Side of Patrick MacKay, Mike at Murder Mile and Paul at the True Crime Enthusiast join forces once again to bring you an eight-part crossover series about one of Britain’s most infamous unsolved serial killing – Jack the Stripper. This episode is about Helen Barthelemy & Mary Fleming.
SOURCES: a selection sourced from various archives:
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: (River sounds) By February 1965, 8 sex-workers were dead; Elizabeth Figg, Gwynneth Rees, Hannah Tailford, Irene Lockwood, Helen Barthelemy, Mary Fleming, Margaret McGowan and Bridget O’Hara. The first four were unlikely to be linked, the last four were unquestionably by the same serial killer. This was the real ‘Jack the Stripper’, as each killing was a carbon copy of the other; all were strangled, stripped post-mortem, stored for days or weeks, only to be found dumped with no rape or necrophilia, obvious robbery or clear motive, and all were covered in an unique dusty rainbow of paint particles. The Police asserted that this killer was experienced, calm and controlled, a sadist with a powerful urge to kill, but the wisdom to leave no clues, the cunning to never be seen, and the patience to make these women vanish, only to then dump the bodies in plain sight and taunt his pursuers with his ingenuity. But whoever dumped the bodies was panicked; being seen several times, driving like a maniac, almost crashing his car, hastily tossing their cadavers into any alley or dead-end, and leaving some tyre marks. Was this ‘Jack the Stripper’ a Jekyll and Hyde type character who killed with impunity, but was gripped with guilt when he sobered up? Or were these last four murders by two different men; a ruthless and violent gangster who killed any of his girls who displeased him (having crossed him in a blackmail scam, worked for a rival pimp, spoke to the Police, gave a name or a face, or attempted to flee), and was the panicked clumsy buffoon who disposed of each body, merely an underling taking orders from his boss? Created in collaboration with True Crime Enthusiast, across this joint eight-part series, Paul & I will rip apart 60 years worth of the myths, lies, misinformation and conspiracies of one of London’s greatest unsolved serial killings to make you rethink what you know or have been told about Jack the Stripper. My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 350: Undressing Jack the Stripper – Part D of D. In a statement dated the 28th of April 1964, Commander George Hatherill appealed to London’s sex-workers “this is urgently directed to all those women whose means of livelihood places them in danger of meeting the same fate”. He wanted to speak to any women who had been “forced to strip under threat of violence or a knife”, had been attacked, or met a client “obsessed with teeth”. It was riddled with misinformation, linking Barthelemy’s murder to the previous three - Rees, Tailford and Lockwood - stating “Police fear that if information isn’t forthcoming, yet another prostitute may be found dead”… …and those were the truest words they ever wrote. Margaret McGowan was a 21-year-old Glaswegian who was a 5 foot 1, 7 stone brunette, described as “a small bird-like women with a pale face”, she was small but strong, jolly yet morose. On probation aged 11 for theft, her tough adolescence was spent in borstal, prison and pregnant, she had solicited for sex since her mid-to-late-teens, and 19 months before her murder was hospitalised for depression. In August 1964, two months before, as an unmarried mother of three children, living in a squalid single room at 16a Southerton Road in Hammersmith with Paul ‘Pepe’ Quinn (a known thief and burglar), they survived on her sex work, as he called her “a good hustler who worked rain or snow”, and even though he was violent towards her, she apparently boasted to her friends, “nobody’s going to kill me”. But had she already met ‘Jack the Stripper’? Margaret McGowan alias Francis Brown told her friend Vera Lynch that weeks before, a man in a grey van picked her up, flashed a Police badge with the CID insignia, and told her how the killer had “pulled the coat down over the shoulders, locking the arms, and screwed what they were wearing around their neck and strangled them”. In fear, Margaret said she fled, didn’t report it to the Police and didn’t give Vera a description of the supposed CID man, but saw a jumble of clothes in the back of his van. Was this a cruel copper taunting the sex-workers, a hint at the Stripper’s persona, or a lie by her friend in an era when the press paid good money for a sensational story? Either way, a myth was forming. And that’s a big part of the problem. In an era when tabloid newspapers were at their most powerful; everybody had a story to tell (for a price) or a theory (if you cherry-picked enough facts), basic details were tenuously linked, scandal reigned supreme, detectives were distracted, investigations derailed, and lost behind a wall of filth, each victim was blamed for their death owing to the lives that they led. It was a story which had everything; sex, drugs, scandal and death, and once it was known that – two of the eight Hammersmith Nudes - Margaret McGowan & Hannah Tailford had testified in the trial of Stephen Ward - and one of biggest scandals of the 1960s, the Profumo Affair, which almost toppled the British government – a wealth of infeasible suspects were conjured out of thin air by the Press, and although every witness was interviewed, the Police found nothing to link anyone to their deaths… …but by then, it had become hard to extract the fact from the fiction. The last sighting of Margaret McGowan was on Friday the 23rd of October 1964 in the Warwick Castle pub at 225 Portobello Road, where it is said “she drank 19 whiskeys” with her friend, Beryl ‘Blondie’ Mahood. She wore a green two-piece-suit with a dark fur collar, a blue and white petticoat, black suede shoes, blue gloves, and (it’s uncertain how this is known) a blue bra with black and pink knickers. After closing time, Margaret & Beryl were waved at by two men in two cars at the corner of Portobello Road and Westbourne Park Road, and in the quiet of Hayden’s Place, they negotiated some ‘business’; they’d travel in convoy, go to Chiswick Green for sex and they’d drop the girls off later at the Jazz Club. Heading toward Shepherd’s Bush Green, Beryl travelled with the taller of the two men in a newish car she didn’t know the make of. The man was 30 to 35 years old, 5 foot 10, medium build, with a long defined face and full lips who was well-spoken with a London accent. Margaret’s man drove a darkish grey Ford Zephyr or Zodiac, was also 30 to 35 years old, but 5 foot 8, stocky, muscular, with a rougher London accent, a square brutish face, a broad nose, a thin mouth, and a large set of protruding ears. They were meant to travel together, but they split at Shepherd’s Bush. The man reassured Beryl, “it’s okay, I’ll see him back at the flat”, and having had sex with her client on Young Street in Kensington, he dropped her off, as agreed, at the Jazz Club… but Margaret McGowan was never seen alive again. But was Margaret’s client ‘Jack the Stripper’? He was the age, height and body type of the man they were hunting, he was her last known client, he was experienced with sex-workers, he was calm and controlled, and knew the backstreets of London well, but he wasn’t driving a Hillman Husky type van, but a Ford Zodiac or Zephyr - a very different car. And by this point, with two confirmed kills to his name (Helen Barthelemy & Mary Fleming), and no-one having seen his face; why would he pick up his next victim as she stood with her pal, chatting to them alongside his friend, who Beryl said was ‘quiet’, and then, he murdered Margaret McGowan? Was this ‘Jack the Stripper’, or just a regular client? Could he not control his urges, or had be become too cocky? Was he a Jekyll & Hyde, who was calm before each killing and panicked during the disposal? Or did Margaret meet someone after him, a punter, a stranger, her pimp, or one from a rival gang? Did this killer work in pairs, and was he the controlling boss, and the other, his panicked underling? Identikits of their faces were released to the press, but the men were never named or came forward. Margaret MacGowan’s body wouldn’t be found for 33 days… …but unlike before, no-one saw her body being dumped, yet it was equally as hasty and panicked. On Wednesday the 25th of November 1964 at 1:30pm, assistant civil defence worker Dennis Sutton crossed the car park at the rear of Kensington Central Library on Horton Street in Kensington. As he went to enter his workplace, an underground Civil Defence building used during the Cold War, on top of a pile of leaves and dead branches, he spotted a metal bin lid which had been missing for six weeks. Lifting it up, he saw the badly decomposed body of Margaret McGowan, crawling with maggots. As before, this was a killing by ‘Jack the Stripper’, as it matched Helen Barthelemy, Mary Fleming and Bridget O’Hara after her. For consistency, the autopsy was conducted by Dr Donald Teare; again, cause of death was asphyxiation by strangulation, she (like the others) had clawed at her neck as she died, she was attacked fast and without struggle, some teeth were missing possibly owing to decomposition as her nose, eyes and most of her face had rotted away, her jewellery had been taken possibly to limit her identification, and again, she was speckled with a fine dust containing a unique rainbow of paint. Again, she was identified by her tattoos and fingerprints, but oddly, although no rape or sexual assault (alive or dead) was proven to have taken place, a small blank piece of paper was found in her vagina. This killing was as baffling as the last two and the next one; he had hidden each body for days or weeks, unseen by anyone, and – for no clear reason – he had driven each body (in states of decomposition) at night across West London (where Police were stopping lone men in cars) and dumping them in plain sight or partially obscured in an alley, a dead end, a car park, and - next time - at the back of a factory, If he was taunting the Police with his cunning, as they implied, why didn’t he dump their bodies where it caused them the most embarrassment; near a police station, a newspaper office, a government building, the BBC, or somewhere significant, like any of the small alleys in and around Scotland Yard? If he was taunting them, why didn’t he leave a note, a clue, or a red-herring? This was his opportunity to show the detectives just how much smarter than them he is, but instead, he shat his pants and fled. So, why would he do that, and why – if the bodies were well hidden - does he move them, at all? Given the similarities between all four of the final murders, the investigation should have been simple for the detectives, but with no arrests made and few credible suspects, they had become a mockery. On the 23rd of October 1964, News of the World wrote “perhaps the biggest embarrassment for the Yard are the unsolved street-girl murders. The identify of the sex maniac who tours the vice areas looking for slightly built prostitutes is still not known. This perverted murderer who may have killed four or five times has perturbed Scotland Yard with its most baffling problem since ‘Jack the Ripper’”. How could they fail to find the killer? Was it because he was too cunning… …or by the end, they were still hunting the murderer of eight women, not four? Prostitution is a very dangerous occupation, with over 75% of sex-workers having experienced serious assault, with threats, intimidation and coercion a regular occurrence. Elizabeth Figg was likely killed by a punter, Gwynneth Rees was violently beaten by her pimp for trying to flee, and Hannah Tailford & Irene Lockwood were forced into blackmail scams, which may have led to their suicide or murder. Pimps are protected by their own gang, the police they paid off, and a code of silence among the girls who work for them knowing that if they step out of line, they will be beaten, sliced up, or murdered. These were not women, they were disposable commodities who no-one would miss if they vanished. When Beryl ‘Blondie’ Mahood heard that Margaret McGowan had been murdered, she gave the Police descriptions of both men – whose identikits were published in the newspapers – and she phoned the Evening Standard saying, “I got a good look at him… now I'm terrified he will try to kill me". That night, she said, “two men in a van tried to run me over by my flat”, a story which made the front page of the News of the World, and a week later, she said she was assaulted as she left the Jazz Club by an unseen assailant who warned her “keep your mouth shut”. But was this real, or a fabricated story for fame? Newspapers need a constant supply of stories and sources, they pay well, and don’t require proof. But this Jack the Stripper doesn’t fit the usual pattern of a serial-killer, as his killings have no motive. Each women was attacked fast, stripped but with no sexual violence, strangled but with no torture or mutilation. And his killings had no hint of any escalation. As a killer get more proficient, he experiments to sate his desires, but this one doesn’t, he does exactly what he did before, with very little deviation. The gap between the murder of Barthelemy and Fleming was 2 months and 3 weeks, from Fleming to McGowan it was 4 months and 2 weeks, and from McGowan to O’Hara was 2 months and 3 weeks. His crimes weren’t quickening as his urge drove him to kill, he was killing these women by necessity. So, maybe this wasn’t an impulse he couldn’t control, but an order. It didn’t thrill him, it was a thing he had to get done, quickly, quietly and without being seen, or leaving a clues to whoever ordered it. If this was true, these killings weren’t committed by a gangland boss, but his most trusted enforcer, a man experienced in brutality, who could kill on command and handed the disposal to someone junior? Hence there was no rape, no torture and no sadism, this didn’t excite him, this was just an execution. Is that why these last four bodies were hidden for days or weeks (to instil fear among the ranks of the sex-workers who threatened to flee, refused to blackmail a client, or had spoken to the police, press or had testified in court), and to keep them in line with the ultimate threat that “wherever you are, we will find you”, their bodies were dumped in a place they’d be found, not instantly, but in hours? Maybe these weren’t murders, but threatening messages which the Police and Press duly published. The final victim was 28-year-old Bridget Esther Moore, known as ‘Bridie’, a 5 foot 1, 9 stone brunette. As the 6th of at least 12 children in a working class family, she tried to make a simple life for herself as a ward-maid at St Kevin’s Hospital in her native Dublin, but had moved to Acton in West London with her older sister in 1954 seeking a better life, but found only pain, which she would pacify with drink. As victims of ‘Jack the Stripper’, all were know about their lives is the darkness and desperation which plagued them, the filth and the misery as reported by the press – alcoholism, drugs, domestic abuse, abandonment, unwanted pregnancies and sex-work – as by framing their lives as pathetic, we either assumed they killed themselves, deserved to die, or were pleading for a serial killer to end their misery. Bridget was last seen on the evening of Monday 11th of January 1965, by her husband, Michael O’Hara in their squalid top floor flat at 41 Agate Road in Shepherd’s Bush. Having separated owing to their drunken fights, they were trying to make a fresh start, but with only 11p to their name, Bridget who had 11 convictions for soliciting, often moonlighted with sex work to feed her family, but wanted out. At 10:30pm, she was in the bar of the Shepherd’s Bush Hotel on the corner of Shepherd’s Bush Green and Goldhawk Road, with Edward Kelly, a window cleaner, and Joseph Kelly, a spray-painter. At closing time, although Joseph wanted to have sex with her, he said she was seen leaving with a man; 5 foot 6, full face, brown hair, trilby and a three quarter length suede coat, whose name he couldn’t recall, but told the police “I heard that he tried to strangle a woman in Acton or Chiswick during a row”. Again, this sighting was reported to the Police, but being impossible to substantiate, it was uncertain if this was the truth, a misremembering, or a lie for attention, an alibi or to blame someone he disliked. She was also said to be seen by Holland Park tube station (from where Elizabeth Figg vanished), with three men; two were Welsh, one was older, and one “short, with a brutish faced and protruding ears”, a description which (maybe) coincidentally matches the Identikit released to the press weeks before. Bridget wasn’t reported missing by her husband until three weeks later on 3rd of February 1965, but even then, she wasn’t treated as a missing person, but as a prostitute who had walked out on husband. She had vanished off the face of the earth for 36 days… … but four days before she was found, someone had moved her. On Friday the 12th of February 1965 at 5:45am, on the Heron Trading Estate in Acton, West London (a large industrial estate full of factories), Thelma Schwartz, a cleaner at Zonal Film Facilities crossed the bridge at Alliance Road, and between the Central Line tube and the entrance to the estate, in one of the sheds backing onto the steep embankment at its perimeter, she heard someone rustling leaves. Spooked, she hurried to her work, and not seeing its significance, she came forward 3 months later. On Tuesday the 16th, Leonard Ernest Beauchamp, an odd job man at Surgical Equipment Suppliers was replenishing the liquid soap for the toilets, when in an 18-inch gap between a shed and the wire fence, under a hasty covering of bracken, sticks and grass, “I noticed a pair of feet” with red painted toenails. This was undeniably another killing by ‘Jack the Stripper’. She had been stripped after death, manually strangled by asphyxiation with two claw marks to her neck but no other injuries, there was no sexual violence, mutilation or struggle, post mortem she was placed on her back and (weeks later) her front, and in a more advanced state of decomposition than Margaret McGowan, her body was mummified. It was dried out, like a raw piece of meat exposed to the sun, and although all four bodies were stored somewhere warm and filthy – as all were sprinkled in the same dusty rainbow of paint – with the body only exposed to the weather for a few days and the grass beneath still fresh, someone had moved her maybe three or four days before, possibly the night when Thelma Schwartz had heard rustling leaves? So, why move the body? Maybe it was the smell, as active decomposition is at its worst between 4 to 10 days, and permeates everything around it the longer it remains in situ. But why did he leave the body there, partially obscured in a public place? Was this his plan? Or was he planning to drive it away, but thinking he’d been caught, in panic, he fled, and by the time he came back, the body was found? But if that’s the case, why move the other three bodies in the weeks or months prior, and why wait so long to move them? Had this Jekyll & Hyde lost his nerve, or did an underling make too many mistakes? With another murdered prostitute in West London proving a major embarrassment for Scotland Yard, Detective Chief Superintendent John Du Rose, nicknamed ‘four day Johnny’ owing to his skill at solving murders was brought in to wrap this up quickly and efficiently, before this crazed killer struck again. So far, they had ruled out; every possible suspect (Fenwick Ward, Ernest Forrest, Micky Calvey, George Kitchener-Dixon, Cornelius Whitehead) and any husband, partner, client or pimp of the dead woman; any man who was “40s, short, stocky”, drove Hillman Husky, a Ford Zodiac or a Zephyr, anyone linked to any sex scandal, anyone who had been caught kerb-crawling, and any paint sprayer in West London. Over 300,000 cars were logged, over 120,000 men interviewed with 7000 alone on the Heron Trading Estate, with 100s of factories and workshops with paint sprayers checked across 24 square miles to find where the bodies were stored - in a mark of incompetence, but on his behalf, supreme arrogance – John Du Rose boasted “at the furthest end of the search area… a perfect sample of the paint came from underneath a covered transformer at the rear of a factory on the Heron Factory Estate in Acton”. Just a short walk from where Bridget’s body was found was “an electricity substation in a small gated compound with a bank of transformers”, underneath were crawl spaces, to the side a paint shop using “a lead acetate base paint with a unique rainbow of red, black and faint specks of blue”, and the consistent decomposition of bodies was achieved as the space was kept warm by the power cables. The Detectives were closer than they had ever been to catching ‘Jack the Stripper’, but with no arrests and no suspects, Du Rose claimed he tried to torment he killer to make a mistake. In the serialisation of his autobiography, ‘Murder Was My Business’, Du Rose wrote “we knew it was useless to appeal to the killer to come forward, so we began a war of nerves. News was released piecemeal to let the murderer know that he was now the centre of the greatest ever force of police officers… we allowed the press to learn of our list of suspects… and that one of three men was the man we would arrest”. But instead, the killings stopped… or did they? On the 28th of April 1965, a naked female body was found in the River Thames near Putney. The murder squad investigated, but ruled it as “unconnected to the Hammersmith Nudes”. On the 21st of February 1966, the Daily Record declared “is she victim number 7?”, as in the Thames at Wapping, a woman’s dismembered body was found, but again, it was dismissed as “not a killing by ‘Jack the Stripper’”. The murder of prostitutes has never stopped, but if these two killings were committed by him, had his method changed? Detectives initially claimed they’d forced him to stop dumping bodies in the Thames by increasing their manhunt, and so, he moved further inland to residential areas. Yet they wouldn’t claim they‘d forced him to change his tactics again, instead they simply said they had made him stop. But how do you claim a killing-spree has stopped, when the killer hasn’t been caught? Simple, you find a patsy. With psychiatrists stating “it is unlikely he was frightened away by the search’s intensity, as compulsive killers are not easily deterred”, as across 1965 when the last body was found, 1966 when the case was closed, and in 1970 when retired detective John Du Rose was publicising his autobiography, he hinted “and then, there were no more killings. In my view, the sheer weight of our investigation and the fact that we had made inquiries about him, led the killer to take his life. And yet, because he was never arrested and never stood trial, he must be considered innocent, and will therefore never be named”. With ‘Jack the Stripper’ possibly known but unnamed, again the press went into a feeding frenzy to find a local man who had died by suicide, and being dead, Du Rose’s suspect couldn’t defend himself. Like the evidence which linked all eight women to one man, the evidence against him was tenuous. 45-year-old Mungo Ireland was one of several security guards who patrolled the Heron Trading Estate, but having only worked there from the 6th to 24th October 1964, he wasn’t on site when Barthelemy, Fleming & McGowan were murdered then stored there and when O’Hara was killed he was in Dundee. He was a heavy drinker whose home-life was fractious, but there’s no proof he was violent, sadistic or visited prostitutes, no evidence he was in any of the areas when the murders occurred, he didn’t drive a Hilman Husky, a Ford Zodiac or Zephyr but a Ford Consul, he wasn’t interviewed, his garage or car wasn’t inspected, his licence plate didn’t appear on the list of kerb crawlers, the murder squad weren’t aware of him until two months after his death, Detective Superintendent Bill Balldock said Mungo Ireland “was not considered a strong suspect” in the final police report which his senior, Detective Chief Superintendent John Du Rose signed off, and the only evidence linking Mungo Ireland was this. Gripped with depression about his life, work, health and a court summons for a traffic violation, unable to cope, on the 3rd of March 1965 – three weeks after Bridget O’Hara’s body was found – he gassed himself in his car, leaving a vague suicide note which read: “I can’t stick it any longer. It may be my fault, but not all of it. I’m sorry Harry (Mungo’s brother) is a burden to you. Give my love to the kid. Farewell. Jock. PS: to save you and the police looking for me, I’ll be in the garage”. And that was it. No confession to the killings, just a vague note by a man struggling with depression, who many still blame for the killings having only been alluded to by a retired ego-fuelled detective with a book to sell. The Police files remain locked away until 2049, but with the forensic evidence said to be “destroyed or lost”, the truth about ‘Jack the Stripper’ is lost is a sea of myths, lies, misinformation and conspiracy. So, who was ‘Jack the Stripper’? Sadly, the truth will never be known. 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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