The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes Read online

  The Mammoth Book of

  UNSOLVED

  CRIMES

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  The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  3 The Lanchesters

  162 Fulham Palace Road

  London W6 9ER

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 1999

  This revised edition published by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2005

  Collection copyright © Roger Wilkers 1999, 2005

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that is shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 1-84529-149-2

  eISBN: 978-1-78033-373-1

  Printed and bound in the EU

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Roger Wilkes

  EVIDENCE BY ENTRAPMENT

  (Rachel Nickell, 1992)

  Brian Masters

  THE SHORT, SWEET MARTYRDOM OF JAKE LINGLE

  (Jake Lingle, 1930)

  Kenneth Allsop

  THE SECRET JANET TOOK TO THE GRAVE

  (Janet Brown, 1995)

  David James Smith

  THE REAL MARIE ROGET

  (Mary Rogers, 1841)

  Irving Wallace

  CHECKMATE

  (Julia Wallace, 1931)

  F. Tennyson Jesse

  A CASE THAT ROCKED THE WORLD

  (Sacco and Vanzetti, 1920)

  Louis Stark

  THE BUILT-IN LOVER

  (Fred Oesterreich, 1922)

  Alan Hynd

  THE MYSTERY OF THE POISONED PARTRIDGES

  (Hubert Chevis, 1931)

  C.J.S. Thompson

  FLORENCE MAYBRICK

  (James Maybrick, 1889)

  Maurice Moiseiwitsch

  THE OBSESSION WITH THE BLACK DAHLIA

  (Elizabeth Short, 1947)

  Russell Miller

  “COLONEL HOGAN’S” UNSOLVED MURDER

  (Bob Crane, 1978)

  John Austin

  MURDER HATH CHARMS

  (Edwin Bartlett, 1875)

  Christianna Brand

  DR JOHN BODKIN ADAMS

  (Mrs Morrell and Mrs Hullett, 1957)

  Eric Ambler

  A SORT OF GENIUS

  (Rev. Hall and Mrs Mills, 1922)

  James Thurber

  WHAT BECAME OF MARTIN GUERRE

  (Martin Guerre, 1560)

  Elliott O’Donnell

  THE CASE OF THE SALMON SANDWICHES

  (Annie Hearn, 1930)

  Daniel Farson

  DEATH OF A MILLIONAIRE

  (Sir Harry Oakes, 1943)

  Julian Symons

  THE MYSTERY OF THE HANSOM CAB

  (Nan Patterson, 1904)

  Alexander Woollcott

  A COINCIDENCE OF CORPSES

  (Brighton Trunk Murder, 1934)

  Jonathan Goodman

  THE SECRET OF IRELAND’S EYE

  (William Burke Kirwan, 1852)

  William Roughead

  THE CASE OF THE MOVIE MURDER

  (William Desmond Taylor, 1922)

  Erle Stanley Gardner

  THE DUMB BLONDE WHO KNEW TOO MUCH

  (Marilyn Monroe, 1962)

  Kirk Wilson

  TEMPTATION AND THE ELDER

  (William Gardiner, 1902)

  Jack Smith-Hughes

  THE HOOPLA MURDER TRIAL

  (Jessie Costello, 1933)

  Sydney Horler

  JACK THE RIPPER

  (The Whitechapel Murders, 1888)

  Philip Sugden

  THE MURDER OF MARGERY WREN

  (Margery Wren, 1930)

  Douglas G. Browne and E.V. Tullett

  THE ZODIAC KILLER

  (Zodiac Killings, 1968)

  Colin Wilson

  AND TO HELL WITH BURGUNDY

  (Florence Bravo, 1876)

  Dorothy Dunbar

  FOOLS AND HORSES

  (Shergar, 1983)

  John Edwards

  THE FALL RIVER AXE MURDERS

  (Andrew and Abby Borden, 1892)

  Angela Carter

  THE CAMDEN TOWN MURDER

  (Robert Wood, 1907)

  Nina Warner Hooke and Gil Thomas

  ARNOLD ROTHSTEIN’S FINAL PAYOFF

  (Arnold Rothstein, 1929)

  Damon Runyon

&n
bsp; THE DEATH OF BELLA WRIGHT

  (Bella Wright, 1919)

  Edmund Pearson

  THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF STARR FAITHFULL

  (Starr Faithfull, 1931)

  Morris Markey

  THE MAN WHO CONTRACTED OUT OF HUMANITY

  (Stanley Setty, 1949)

  Rebecca West

  JACK THE STRIPPER

  (Various Victims, 1964–5)

  John du Rose

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND SOURCES

  INTRODUCTION

  Twenty-five years ago, I disturbed the bones of an old murder case. It was unsolved; a man had been convicted but then freed on appeal, and no one else had subsequently been brought to book. Back in 1931, the hot-from-the-hob headlines had blazed the tale. An insurance agent called Wallace had murdered his drab little wife, beating out her brains in their blood-boltered front parlour in Liverpool with such unclerkly ferocity that the walls were streaked, spattered and flecked as high as the picture rail. Wallace was accused of having devised an alibi of consummate cunning, involving the critical synchromesh of logged telephone calls, word-of-mouth messages, at least three tram timetables and a bogus appointment. Picking it over for a radio programme half a century later, a panel of experts agreed that Wallace did not murder his wife—indeed, could not have done so. Moreover, newly uncovered testimony suggested a different solution and buttressed the case against a different suspect, a much younger man who boasted secret CID connections, a propensity to steal and to dissemble, and who nursed a grudge against Wallace. Yet amid the excitement of discovery, we discerned an unexpected note of melancholy. It now seemed a shame to spoil a perfectly good whodunnit. We had, in a sense, performed the reverse of alchemy and transmuted the burnished gold of mystery into dross. Solving the riddle had diminished the story, reduced it to a commonplace. Everyone loves a good murder, but especially a murder that defies solution, that continues to frustrate and ultimately defeat our forensic skills and the constructs of logic. We’d rather our unsolved crimes remain unsolved. What draws us is the magnetic field of mystery.

  For more than three hundred years, readers of crime fiction have accorded with the seventeenth-century writer and physician Sir Thomas Browne. “I love to lose myself in a mystery,” declared this strange and curious sage in one of his few homespun moments. But his enthusiasm was characteristically prognostic—he had identified a trend that was only to achieve its full flowering a full three centuries later during the Golden Age of the detective novel. The English poet W. H. Auden (1907–1973) was a self-confessed addict, but viewed the popularity of the whodunnit as a substitute for religious patterns of certainty, the dialectic of innocence and guilt. Auden was anxious to dignify the genre. He described the noir tales of the American Raymond Chandler, a writer of the hard-boiled school, as serious studies of a criminal milieu, to be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art. And yet, detective fiction is imprisoned within a basic formula. It is a ritual, as Auden himself reminds us: “a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies.”1

  The connoisseur of real-life crime is affronted by this comfortable and threadbare format. He knows that in the real world, not every crime mystery is solved by the arrival of the detective, the knitting of brows and the application of improbable powers of deduction. Murder is always mysterious. Even if (as the American murder scholar Wendy Lesser suggests) we know all the who-what-when facts, “the distance between our own lives and the act of murder leaves a space where mystery creeps in. We seem able, though, to accept the full subtlety, the full complexity of the mystery only in a work of fiction, which can give us other satisfactions than The Definite Answer.”2 There is no fiction in the stories that follow; but neither is there a full tally of Definite Answers. Far from it. Here are crimes so puzzling, sometimes clueless, often motiveless, that we can only guess at the truth of them.

  The history of unsolved crime is as old as the history of crime itself, but it has only been documented in any coherent form for the last 200 years or so. One of the earliest recorded cases of unsolved murder in London dates from 1678 when Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, politician, magistrate and woodmonger, was found dead in a ditch. The crime remains one of the most celebrated of historical British mysteries. Sir Edmund was the magistrate before whom Titus Oates swore the existence of a Popish Plot, by which English Protestants would be massacred, the King assassinated and a Catholic ministry installed in his place. The “plot” was Oates’s invention, but Godfrey’s murder ensured that the tale gained widespread currency. Whoever did the murder was supposed to have dripped blobs of wax on to the body, possibly in an effort to throw suspicion on to the priests from the Popish Queen’s Chapel. Three Catholic suspects were duly arrested, tried and hanged for the murder, but the trial was a travesty and the part played by this wretched trio in Godfrey’s demise (if any) remains hidden. The great essayist in black humour Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859), applying the principles of aesthetic criticism to murder (“as one of the fine arts”), judged Sir Edmund’s assassination “the finest work of the seventeenth century” precisely because no one knew who had done it. “In the grand feature of mystery, which in some shape or other ought to colour every judicious attempt at murder, it is excellent,” de Quincey declared, “for the mystery is not yet dispersed.”3

  Another early unsolved case occurred in Bristol in the middle of the eighteenth century, de Quincey’s Augustan age of murder, a double killing he applauded for its “originality of design, boldness and depth of style”. This was the shocking case of a Mrs Ruscombe, who lived in College Green with a single maidservant. Some suspicion arising, neighbours broke into the house and found Mrs Ruscombe murdered in her bedroom and the servant murdered on the stairs. The case was never officially solved, although suspicion fell on several local tradesmen including a baker and a chimney sweep. Some fifty years later, de Quincey himself claimed to have learned the real murderer’s identity during a visit to the home of a celebrated surgeon. The surgeon kept a private museum, in which de Quincey was shown a cast or deathmask taken from a notorious Lancashire highwayman. This villain concealed his profession from his neighbours by drawing woollen stockings over his horse’s legs to muffle the clatter of its hooves as he rode up a flagged alley to his stable. The surgeon had dissected the highwayman’s body under curious circumstances. “At the time of his execution for highway robbery,” he explained, “I was studying under Cruickshank and the man’s figure was so uncommonly fine that no money or exertion was spared to get into possession of him with the least possible delay. By the connivance of the under-sheriff, he was cut down within the legal time and instantly put into a chaise-and-four; so that when he reached Cruickshank’s he was positively not dead. Mr ——, a young student at that time, had the honour of giving him the coup de grace, and finishing the sentence of the law.” De Quincey was sceptical at first, but two pieces of information from a Lancashire woman who knew the highwayman convinced him. “One was the fact of his absence for a whole fortnight at the period of that murder; the other that, within a very little time after, the neighbourhood of this highwayman was deluged with dollars—now, Mrs Ruscombe was known to have hoarded about 2,000 of that coin. Be the artist, however, who he might, the affair remains a durable monument of his genius; for such was the impression of awe and the sense of power left behind by the strength of the conception manifested in this murder, that no tenant (as I was told in 1810) had been found up to that time for Mrs Ruscombe’s house.”4

  Such exceptional murders aside, crime chronicles from Biblical times until the eighteenth century disclose few cases that were unresolved or that proved insoluble; indeed, there was an underlying assumption that although the mills of justice may have ground slow and exceeding small, at least they ground passably straight. Justice always got it right. Forces of law and order, including those predating the modern police, were deemed incorruptible and all-knowing, incapable of maki
ng mistakes. Virtually every suspect fed into the machinery of the courts emerged at the other end bearing the brand of guilt and was often doomed to die. Acquittals were rare. A more brutal public appetite demanded vengeance. It would not do to have crimes left unsolved, loose ends trailing. Fortunately, when cases fell short of a conviction, few people came to hear about it.

  The spread of literacy in the early nineteenth century put a brake on such ignorance. In Britain, a series of sensational murders (the Thurtell–Hunt case, the crimes of the bodysnatchers Burke and Hare, and the murder by William Corder of Maria Marten in the Red Barn) excited the interest of an embryonic popular press, and the die was cast. Indeed, in 1824 the trial of Thurtell and Hunt, a couple of Regency conmen who bludgeoned their victim, shot him and finally slit his throat, was the first “trial by newspaper”. But these cases all ended with a snap of the hangman’s trap that was richly deserved, and the day of the unsolved crime as an identifiable genre had not yet dawned.

  Murder was a favourite topic of popular literature in England as early as Elizabethan times, and accounts of occasional homicides “pathetic or merely horrifying” appeared in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century broadsheets. Shakespeare read about real-life murder, and so, in a later age, did Dickens. In his day, an eager reading public drawn from the literate (and, by definition, “respectable”) section of the population devoured the accounts of crimes and criminals pulled together and published by the hacks of Grub Street. Detective fiction was also putting down roots, with Edgar Allen Poe’s “tales of ratiocination” of the 1840s establishing a format that would reach its apotheosis nearly a century later. Fashionable ladies despatched their servants to purchase the most celebrated of Grub Street compilations, the Newgate Calendar; their daughters and granddaughters thronged the Old Bailey half a century later for the trial of the Stauntons, the family accused in the so-called Penge Mystery: “well-dressed women, favoured occupants of the choicest seats [who] stared through lorgnettes and opera-glasses at the four pale and weary creatures … in the dock”, latter-day tricoteuses over-dressed, over-jewelled and over-victualled on champagne who lapped up every detail of the evidence “and [who] skimmed the pages of Punch when the interest flagged.”5