The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

BOOK: The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes
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The Mammoth Book of

 
UNSOLVED
CRIMES
 

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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

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

BOOK: The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes
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