Silent Witnesses (23 page)

Apart from the murder of Aumuller, further investigation revealed Schmidt to have had a second apartment set up as a counterfeiting workshop where, with the assistance of a dentist, Dr. Ernest Arthur Muret, he forged $10 bills. Faurot also suspected him of the murder of Alma Kelmer, a nine-year-old schoolgirl whose body was found buried in the basement of St. John's Church in Louisville, the church to which he had originally been attached. Her body had been burned, but, from the remains, authorities suspected that the killer had initially tried to dismember her. The janitor, Joseph Wendling, had been convicted of the crime and sentenced to life imprisonment, but serious doubts persisted about his guilt. It also later transpired that German police in Aschaffenberg wanted
to interview Schmidt regarding the murder of a young girl.

Faurot now began to think about preparing for the trial. It was necessary to prove the identity of the remains once and for all. Luckily he managed to persuade a girl called Anna Hirt to take a look at the remains. She was another of the servants at St. Boniface's Church and therefore knew Aumuller very well. She explained to Faurot that Aumuller had a brown mark on her chest, and indeed when she was shown the remains she pointed at once to just such a mark. Aumuller's identity was thus established beyond all reasonable doubt and the trial could go ahead.

Schmidt was convicted of the murder on February 5, 1914, and sent to the electric chair two years later, on February 18, 1916. He remains the only Catholic priest in US history to be executed for murder (if indeed he was still truly a priest at the time of the murder).

Another preeminent figure in the history of the analysis of human remains is Sir Bernard Henry Spilsbury (1877–1947), a British pathologist who is considered by many to have been the greatest medical detective of the twentieth century. He was born in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, and was the eldest of four children. His father was James Spilsbury, a manufacturing chemist. In 1896 he went to Magdalen College, Oxford, to study natural sciences, and in 1899 entered St. Mary's, Paddington, as an exhibition student, specializing in the then novel science of forensic pathology. In October 1905, when the London County Council requested that all general hospitals in its area appoint two qualified pathologists to perform autopsies following sudden deaths, Spilsbury was appointed resident assistant pathologist at St. Mary's Hospital.

St. Mary's Hospital in Paddington. The hospital was asked to appoint two resident pathologists to handle autopsies and investigations into suspicious deaths. In the course of his work here Bernard Henry Spilsbury solved some of the most horrific murder cases the hospital ever saw.

As a result of his expertise, Spilsbury became involved in the investigations of some of the most notorious crimes of the twentieth century, including that of Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen in 1910, the Brides in the Bath in 1915, and the infamous Brighton Trunk Murder in 1934. However, the case that Spilsbury later confessed was the most challenging he ever encountered is known as the Murder at the Crumbles.

The Crumbles, a shingle beach between Eastbourne and Pevensey Bay on England's southern shore, had already been the setting for violence and foul play when, in 1920 Jack Alfred Field and Thomas Gray had killed a young typist named Irene Munro there. Four years later another more macabre murder would follow.

Along the beach were a few cottages, once owned by the local coastguards but now available to vacationers for a few pounds per week. In April 1924, a man using the name of Walter took up the lease on the cottage known as Officer's House for two months. His real name was Patrick Mahon, and he had rented the cottage as a secluded love nest for him and his mistress, Emily Kaye.

Kaye, a blonde woman of thirty-seven, was a shorthand typist—just like Irene Munro—and arrived in Eastbourne on April 7. She was pregnant with Mahon's child. She moved into the bungalow expecting it to be the beginning of an exciting new life with Mahon, whom she had met when working at an accounting firm in London; they had quickly embarked on an affair.

Kaye was fully aware that Mahon was married—to an Irish woman named Mavourneen—but this did not diminish her attraction to him, particularly as he had led her to believe he was unhappy in his marriage and would soon leave his wife. Kaye was also aware that Mahon was an ex-convict, having been jailed for five years for a bank raid when he was younger. However, she was pregnant, in love, and thrilled at the prospect of a new start with this dark, handsome man. What she was not aware of was Mahon's incessant womanizing and the fact that in addition to bank robbery, he had committed fraud at various points in his past.

Mavourneen, on the other hand, was certainly aware of her husband's numerous indiscretions, but stayed in the relationship nonetheless. Mahon himself, however, had pushed his luck too far: he now faced the reality of having impregnated a woman who expected him to leave his wife—not something he was planning to do.

Indeed, Mahon continued to return to Mavourneen on most
weekdays. He even found time to engage in a new affair, this time with a young woman in Richmond named Ethel Duncan, whom he agreed to take to dinner the following week. All the while, he was concocting a horrifying scheme to deal with Kaye. On April 11, he went to Eastbourne, moving Kaye's trunk to the Officer's House where she was staying. Telling Kaye he was returning to London to arrange a passport application, he in fact went to an ironmonger's in Victoria where he acquired a butcher's knife and a tenon saw. He returned to the Crumbles that same evening and spent the next three nights with Emily. On the evening of Tuesday, April 15, he bludgeoned his lover to death, swept her body into the spare room, and locked the door.

Next, in one of the most extraordinary parts of the case, while Kaye's body was still in the spare room slowly decomposing, he invited his new lover, Ethel Duncan, to stay in the cottage over the Easter weekend. She agreed. Mahon now knew he would have to work quickly. He returned to the cottage on Good Friday, prior to Duncan's arrival, and began to dismember Kaye with the knife and saw he had picked up in London. This done, he wrapped up each of the portions of the body and stowed them away in the trunk before leaving this in the spare room once more.

That evening Mahon met Duncan at Eastbourne station and the pair went on to spend an apparently normal weekend together at the cottage. Duncan even saw the trunk after wandering into the spare room. Mahon, in a slight panic, told her it was full of rare books that he was looking after for a friend, before locking the door shut to prevent further awkward questions. On Easter Monday Duncan returned home, still oblivious to the fact that she had spent the weekend a few feet from a corpse.

Once she had left, Mahon continued his efforts to dispose of
the body. He put the head and several other body parts into a fire. He cut the torso into smaller pieces and boiled it in saucepans to render it down. Finally, he carried some remaining parts of the body to London in a Gladstone bag and dumped them just outside Waterloo Station. It was here that Mahon made his first and only mistake. He left the bag at the luggage office in the station. Shortly afterward his wife, who knew of his tendency to see other women, found the luggage ticket while searching his suit for clues of infidelity. Her suspicions aroused, she hired a private detective named John Beard to look into the matter further.

On May 1, she and Beard traveled to Waterloo together and collected the bag. When they opened it, they discovered bloodstained clothing, a butcher's knife, and a canvas tennis racket bag bearing the initials EBK inside it. Beard, who was an experienced detective, called the police at once. Mavourneen, still not aware of the serious implications of what had been discovered, was instructed to go home and replace the luggage ticket in Mahon's suit without saying anything about it to him. They then returned the bag to the luggage office and set a trap.

On May 2, Mahon returned to the station, intending to pick up the bag and return to Eastbourne with it. But the police were waiting for him. As soon as he had his hands on the bag, two detectives arrested him and took him to Cannon Street Police Station. There they opened the bag and confronted him with the contents. At first he claimed that the blood had come from some meat that he had carried home. However, when he was told that a forensic examination of the bag had shown the blood to be human, he broke down and confessed to the killing and to attempting to dispose of the body. However, he maintained that Kaye's death was accidental, saying that during a quarrel she had
fallen, hit her head on a coal bucket, and died. He said that he had panicked, thinking that he would be branded a murderer, and so had decided to hide the body.

Two police inspectors were sent to check out the house at the Crumbles. They could tell before they had opened the door that a significant amount of the body must still be inside; even just approaching the house, the stench was overwhelming. Spilsbury was sent for immediately. He described the scenes he found as “the most gruesome I have ever encountered.” Inside the trunk already mentioned, he discovered four parcels, each containing various parts of the deceased. There were two large saucepans of boiled human flesh, as well as saucers and other receptacles swimming with greasy human fat. In a hatbox there were thirty-seven different portions of flesh hidden away, while a cookie jar was found to contain various organs. The carpet was drenched with blood.

It took Spilsbury several days to complete his search of the property. In that time he recovered no fewer than a thousand fragments of calcined bone that he found amid ashes. Each item was carefully cataloged before being removed to his laboratory for scrupulous testing. In the end, every piece of the body was found, except for the skull and a small portion of one leg. It was Spilsbury who established from her breasts that Kaye had indeed been pregnant at the time of her death; her uterus, which would have proved the same thing, was still missing. However, he could never prove how she died, especially as he was unable to examine her skull. Nevertheless, he was convinced that Mahon's story that it had been an accident was a lie. Quite apart from the fact that the grisly treatment of the corpse suggested a man capable of extreme and disturbing acts, Spilsbury observed that the coal
bucket on which Kaye was supposed to have hit her head was completely undamaged, which seemed odd, given the force with which her head would have had to hit it in order to kill her.

Strenuous efforts continued to be made to track down the missing parts of the body, especially the head. The yard was dug up and the beach was searched, but nothing further was ever found. However, while remanded in custody, Mahon apparently told another inmate that he had burned the head in the stove during a storm, and that during the procedure it had rolled to face him and its eyes had popped open. In fact, this was a natural effect of the heat and other conditions that the head was under, but Mahon had run screaming from the cottage in terror. Having been given this information, Spilsbury decided to look into whether a head could be totally destroyed by fire. He burned a sheep's head and discovered that in just four hours it had become a charred remnant, which he was then easily able to smash into dust using a poker. It seemed, therefore, entirely possible that Mahon had successfully disposed of the head in this way.

Mahon was tried for the murder of Emily Kaye on July 15 at Lewes Assizes. He stuck to his story that it had been a tragic accident, after which he had panicked. However, there was considerable evidence against him, perhaps the most damning being that he had bought the saw and the knife he used to dismember the body prior to Kaye's death—a strong indication of premeditation. He even contested this, claiming to have bought them afterward, on April 17, but a carbon copy of the receipt clearly showed that he had purchased them on the twelfth. It only took the jury forty minutes to find him guilty as charged, and he was executed on September 9, 1924.

One of the most important long-term changes that arose as a result of this case was the creation of the “murder bag” for use by police. Spilsbury had been shocked to see police officers having to remove rotting flesh and body parts from the scene of the crime using their bare hands. To address this problem, a series of meetings were held between Scotland Yard and Spilsbury, which led to the development of the murder bag, which contained rubber gloves, tweezers, evidence bags, a magnifying glass, compass, ruler, and swabs. Such a bag is now an essential part of any major inquiry and may contain various items, depending on the specific department. Common modern additions include a fiberglass brush, lifting tape, powder, utility knife, scissors, a blood test, a semen test, swabs, alcohol hand spray, scalpels, and goggles (see
Plate 10
).