The Ability to Kill (12 page)

It was a wet, January day when I last inspected the house; the anniversary, it so happened, of the purchase of the hyoscin. After ten minutes of Hilldrop Crescent in the wet, almost any explanation of the crime would seem credible. The visiting student is advised to take a raincoat and to keep his taxi waiting.

In fact, the same taxi might well take him on hurriedly to the next London murder home on his list. Leaving Holloway Prison on his left, and travelling in the general direction of Finsbury, five minutes’ driving will bring him to Tollington Park, Islington, a street as straight as a hangman’s rope, and, in the rain, about as cheerful. The significant house is Number 63. The significant name is that of Seddon, the poisoner.

Ladies and gentlemen, when I first mentioned the theme of these lectures to a British colleague, I had to listen to some most ill-natured criticism. Did I really suppose, he sneered, that the frame was as important as the picture? Was I proposing to claim a relationship between certain styles of architecture and the impulse to murder? Or was this merely an arch lapse into the pathetic fallacy, the anthropomorphic ah-if-these-stones-could-only-speak sort of rubbish?

I will not mention the man’s name. Since his prosecution on a charge of attempting to steal the door knocker from 10 Rillington Place,
^†
and after the magistrate’s timely denunciation of vulgar, sensation-mongering souvenir hunters, little has been heard of him, and he must be held discredited. I
would only add that if any visiting student cares to explore the subject of English murder-home architecture he can count on my encouragement and guidance. He might well start with Tollington Park.

Frederick Henry Seddon was the district superintendent for an insurance company when he bought Number 63. That was in 1909; and in November of that year he brought his wife, his father and his five children to live there. He was forty; a good business-man, shrewd and hardworking; but with an obsessional attitude towards money and property that verged on the pathological. He rented the basement of the house as an office to his employers. He partitioned one of the upper rooms so that it could accommodate his father, the maidservant and four of the children. The top floor he decided to lease unfurnished. In July, 1910, he found a tenant, a middle-aged spinster named Eliza Mary Barrow.

She was an unhappy creature. A quarrelsome alcoholic with a small private income, derived from property and some gilt-edged securities she had inherited, she had accumulated during her stormy progress from lodging to lodging a retinue consisting of a couple named Hook, who acted as her servants in exchange for their bed and board, and an eight-year-old orphan named Ernie Grant. She was miserly in the picture-book sense of the word—she used to keep gold coins and count them—deeply distrusted banks, and was perpetually fearful of some disaster which would depreciate her capital. One day she sought the business-like Seddon’s advice on the subject.

It was like dangling a hunk of fresh meat before a hungry tiger.

The first thing that happened was that the Hooks were given notice to quit by Seddon, acting on Miss Barrow’s behalf. By October, 1910, Seddon had persuaded Miss Barrow to devote
her capital to the purchase of an annuity—from Seddon personally.

It is not clear just when Seddon decided that he would have to murder Miss Barrow. All we know is that it was not until August of the following year that he sent his daughter Maggie to buy some arsenical flypapers. As this purchase was part of his plan to suggest that the victim had absorbed arsenic accidentally, the decision must have been made some days earlier; probably towards the end of July. By then, he had had Miss Barrow’s capital in his hands for over six months, and for over six months he had been paying out the annuity. To him, it must have seemed monstrously unfair that he should have to go on doing so. After all, where was the profit in selling an annuity if the buyer were not soon to die?

So, in September, after a two weeks’ illness in the top floor front bedroom, she died. A doctor certified the death as due to ‘epidemic diarrhoea and exhaustion.’ She was buried cheaply and hurriedly in a common grave. The funeral cost £3. Seddon demanded from the undertaker, and received, a small commission on the deal.

Unfortunately for Seddon, Miss Barrow had relatives, and although she had quarrelled with them repeatedly, they always in the end had made friendly overtures. No doubt the fact that she had an estate to bequeath helped. At all events, a few days after the funeral, relatives bent on reconciliation arrived at Tollington Park. To their consternation they found not merely that Miss Barrow was dead, but that Seddon was the executor of a will leaving what remained of her estate to Ernie Grant.

Within two months of the funeral the police had been induced to interest themselves in the affair, an exhumation order had been obtained, and arsenic found in the body. In March, 1912, Seddon and his wife were tried for murder.

It was one of the great arsenic trials. Counsel on both sides were brilliant. So was Seddon. He was in the witness box for two days and for over half the time was being rigorously cross-examined by the Attorney-General. He did not crack. The case against him was by no means strong, and he had a logical, intelligent and reasonable answer for everything. Yet he still managed to convince the jury that he was a murderer, and that his wife was absolutely innocent. What he did, in fact, was to reveal his monstrous obsession with money so blatantly that by the time he had finished he was regarded with loathing by everyone in court. ‘Never,’ one onlooker is reported to have said, ‘have I seen a soul stripped as naked as that.’ Seddon himself was apparently quite unaware of the impression he had created. He went to the gallows a very indignant man.

Number 63 is in excellent condition and the brickwork appears to have been repointed fairly recently. Seddon would have approved.

But, ladies and gentlemen, I think that it is time to leave London for the fresh air of the country and the seashore. Where shall we go? Herne Bay? I regret to inform you that the 80 High Street which saw George Joseph Smith’s first bride-drowning is no longer there, the site being occupied by a chintzy restaurant called The Pantry; while the plumbing emporium next door but one, which carries a big display of baths, is not Hill’s, the ironmonger’s from which the famous bath was purchased. A pity.

His next murder was in Blackpool, also by the sea. Yet here again I have been disappointed. Blackpool is full of boarding houses, but that belonging to the late Mrs Crossley of Regent Road (the Mrs Crossley who angrily shouted ‘Crippen!’ after the newly-bereaved but complacent Smith) has eluded me. In fact, Smith’s traces seem to have been completely covered. His last murder, at Miss Blatch’s boarding house in Bismarck
Road, Highgate, is also without its memorial; Bismarck Road no longer exists.

If I have so far dealt mainly with poisoners, it is not because I scorn the less devious practitioners of murder. My difficulty is that so many of the more violent murders have been committed out of doors. Again, in many of these cases the murderer is only an incidental protagonist. It is the victim or a third party who is the nub of the matter; or even society itself. So it seemed to me the other day as I stood looking at the Villa Madeira in Bournemouth.

In 1934, foolish, sad, oversexed Mrs Rattenbury (37) hired muscular, dim-witted George Stoner (17) as chauffeur. Soon he became her lover. A few months later, in a fit of infantile jealousy, he took a mallet to the husband, bibulous, inoffensive Mr Rattenbury (67), and killed him. Mrs Rattenbury attempted to take the blame, and was tried with Stoner for the murder. She was acquitted. He was convicted and sentenced to death. His sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment; but Mrs Rattenbury never knew that. Soon after her acquittal, she committed suicide.

At the time, the case aroused a great deal of moral indignation. Alma Rattenbury was virtually driven to suicide. Before stabbing herself to death on the bank of a river near Christchurch, she wrote a note which ended: ‘Thank God for peace at last.’

The house in which her tragedy was acted out is still there, though it is no longer called Villa Madeira. Let us leave that in peace, too. There is nothing there for the murder-taster. He prefers to believe in justice.

A visit to Wales will cheer us up. Let us go over the English border to Cusop Dingle, near the town of Hay-on-Wye.

There, in 1919, in a house called
Mayfield
, there lived Major Herbert Rowse Armstrong, his wife Katherine and their three
children. The husband was not as martial a figure as his title might suggest. He was under-sized, ingratiating and henpecked.

Katherine was a formidable woman. She forbade alcohol and smoking in the house and if her husband were offered a drink at a neighbour’s he had to have her permission before accepting. Usually, permission was withheld. She had a lively sense of discipline. Once, at a tennis party, she loudly ordered the major home because it was his ‘bath night.’

In 1920 she was certified insane and removed to an asylum for treatment. In January, 1921, she returned to
Mayfield
, and the major, who had liked the taste of freedom, bought some arsenic. In February he administered it. She had been ill with nephritis and a heart disease, and the local doctor certified her death as due to natural causes following an attack of gastritis. The major had got away with murder; and the fact went to his head.

An interesting character this; probably the nearest approach to a fictional murderer there has been. Having attained freedom, he developed a taste for power. After the death of his wife and a period of dalliance in Italy, he returned to his house in Cusop, a new and dangerous man. He had realised that all he had to do to dispose of someone he did not like was to give that person a pinch of arsenic.

It is not known exactly how many persons he dosed, but it is certain that quite a number of those who accepted his hospitality during the latter part of 1921 (including the local Income Tax Inspector) afterwards became very sick with symptoms of arsenic poisoning, and one, at least, died of it. One who did not die was a Mr Martin.

Major Armstrong was a solicitor with an office in the main street of Hay. On the opposite side of the street in another
office sat Mr Martin, also a solicitor, and the major’s only competitor in town. In October a dispute arose between the two men over a property sale and Mr Martin demanded the repayment of his client’s deposit. The major’s reply was to ask Mr Martin to tea at
Mayfield
to discuss the matter. Mr Martin ate a buttered scone and was in bed for four days with an illness that the doctor (who was by now becoming familiar with the symptoms) diagnosed as arsenic poisoning. The authorities were informed.

A macabre little comedy was now enacted. The police, afraid to do anything that would arouse the major’s suspicions before they had built up their case, bound the doctor and Mr Martin to secrecy. The major, on the other hand, having failed to dispose of Mr Martin the first time, was determined to try again. He proceeded to bombard Mr Martin with invitations to tea.

The wretched Martin had an appalling two months. He had had one painful dose of arsenic and did not want another. Yet, if he rejected the major’s invitations without reasonable excuses, that terrible little man’s suspicions might be aroused. The major changed his tactics and issued an invitation to dinner. Then, when Martin and his wife were at breaking point, the police acted. The major was arrested. Arsenic, wrapped in handy little packets, was found in his pockets. The exhumation of Mrs Armstrong’s body followed. Five months later the major was hanged.

Ladies and gentlemen, at the beginning of this lecture I suggested that it was the revelation of the primitive beneath the mundane that made murder interesting to us. Yet, is that, after all, the whole story?

Looking back over the distinguished murderers in this present list, it seems to me that those who retain our interest (and, if I may say so, our affection) have two things in common.
They murdered for severely practical reasons—profit, security, freedom—without feelings of guilt.

Perhaps we envy them. The murders we commit in our hearts can never be as simple.

Ladies and gentlemen, in the first of these lectures, I ventured to criticise my countrymen for their failure to memorialise and, where possible, to preserve their historic murder buildings.

Needless to say, the British reaction has been apathetic. The warmth of the American response has been consequently all the more gratifying; in some respects, even a trifle disconcerting.

Thomas M. McDade, corresponding secretary of the American Society of Connoisseurs in Murder (if you will forgive my mentioning a rival body) is particularly forthright.

‘Murder,’ he writes, ‘is in the public domain. Eventually, British Officialdom will no doubt see the wisdom of preserving their scenes of homicide, which are more a part of the national heritage than many a country estate or Norman fief.’ He also takes a look into the future. ‘It is said that the murderer feels compelled to return to the scene of the crime. In this he shares an impulse with millions. In time we may hope that he can indulge this compulsion by paying his shilling (or quarter) and joining a properly conducted tour to hear a guide explain how he (the murderer) did it.’

Letters inquiring wistfully after particular buildings have been numerous. Typical is the one from Mr Carl D. Halbak of Buffalo, New York, who is anxious about the sinister Moat
House Farm, where the monstrous Dougal did away with poor Mrs Holland, and the boarding house which figured in the Camden Town murder. Such letters are surely evidence enough of that lively interest in murder for its own sake so characteristic of a vigorous and ascendant culture.

In one respect, however, I have misled my American colleagues. I referred to ‘British’ indifference and to ‘British’ obscurantism on the subject. For this reckless solecism, I apologise. I should have said ‘English.’