The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (101 page)

Hannah, small and slim, had come to London from Heddon-on-the-Wall, Northumberland, and, like a lot of street girls, used a number of different names, calling herself variously Anne Taylor, Teresa Bell, Anne Lynch and Hannah Lynch. She had lived for some time with a man named Walter Lynch and they had a daughter called Linda who was about three years old.

Lynch was convinced that Hannah had been murdered. So was I.

Detective Inspector Frank Ridge, head of the Thames Police CID, who was in charge of this investigation, followed up a number of possible leads, but they came to nothing.

There were indications that Hannah had attended “kinky” parties arranged by a foreign diplomat, who employed an agent to recruit women willing to take part in perverted sexual practices. These affairs were supposed to have been held in plush houses in Mayfair and Kensington.

There was also a theory that she might have been killed by someone she was blackmailing, because in an apartment she rented for prostitution officers found cameras, photographic lighting equipment and an address book. She had evidently taken compromising pictures of her clients with the idea of getting extra money from them.

Detective Chief Inspector Ben Devonald questioned 700 people during the enquiries into Hannah’s death, but found nothing of real value. She had been convicted three times for soliciting, specialising in “car clients”, and it was known that she was always willing to take off all her clothes.

About a hundred bodies are taken from the Thames every year. Many people are accidentally drowned, others commit suicide and a few are murdered. The circumstances of Hannah Tailford’s death could have indicated either suicide or murder. It is not unknown for suicides to undress, and push a gag in their own mouths to prevent themselves screaming for help at the last minute if their nerve breaks. Dr Donald Teare, the famous pathologist, found some bruising over her jaw, which could have resulted either from blows or from a fall. In the circumstances the only possible verdict the Coroner, Mr Gavin Thurston, could return at the Hammersmith inquest was an open one.

Hannah Tailford was just another West London streetwalker and nobody could then have anticipated that her death would prove to be the first of six killings which would receive more sustained publicity in one year than any other series of crimes in London’s history. It really got going two months after the Tailford affair when a second nude woman was found dead on the Thames foreshore at Dukes Meadows, Chiswick, about 300 yards upstream from the spot where Tailford’s body had been discovered.

She was identified as Irene Lockwood, a five-foot blonde who had lived in Denbigh Road, W.13. She was pregnant and her naked body bore a tattoo on the right arm, “John in Memory”. The ocelot coat, check dress and black underwear she was believed to have been wearing had disappeared.

This girl, who had come to London from Lincolnshire, called herself Sandra Russell at the twelve pounds ten shillings a week flat at which she entertained her clients.

Detective Superintendent (later Commander, and now retired) Frank Davies, who was in charge of this investigation, established a murder headquarters at Shepherd’s Bush Police station. He quickly found that Irene Lockwood had been friendly with another good-time girl, Vicki Pender, who had also been murdered a year previously.

Both Vicki and Irene were known to have taken “purple hearts” and to have been involved in “blue film” rackets. Vicki used to lure rich men to nude parties where pictures were taken and she had been beaten up several times because she tried to blackmail some of the men shown in the photographs.

The two girls were well known in clubs in the Soho and Euston area and both were car prostitutes. On 21 March 1963, red-haired, twenty-three-year-old Vicki, whose real name was Veronica Walsh, was found battered and strangled in her two-room flat at Adolphus Road, Finsbury Park, N.4. Former paratrooper Colin Welt Fisher, who lived with his wife and two children at Leverstock Green, Hemel Hempstead, Herts, was found guilty of her murder and jailed for life.

When first interviewed by the police, Fisher told them that on the night Vicki was killed he was at an hotel with Irene Lockwood, but at his trial at the Old Bailey in July, 1963, the jury heard about a weekend “bender” he had shared with Vicki. He was said to have bought reefer cigarettes before he met the girl in the Nucleus Club in Monmouth Street, Soho. They both took purple hearts and spent the night together at her flat, where her body was found four days later.

Frank Davies was one of the Yard’s shrewdest detectives. Prematurely bald and with a small moustache, he is a man who bristles with energy when he handles a major investigation. Because of his exceptional ability, he is today the head of the Yard’s Flying Squad. At first, and for a very good reason, he suspected that Irene Lockwood, if she was working the same photographic blackmail racket as Vicki, might have been murdered by one of her victims—or that the men behind the racket, who employed a number of prostitutes, might have killed her because she tried to poach private fees for herself, instead of being content with the “wages” they offered.

But enquiries into her death took a new turn when, out of the blue, a man named Kenneth Archibald confessed to her murder.

The fifty-four-year-old bachelor caretaker of a tennis club in Addison Road, Kensington, W.14, Archibald had appeared at Marlborough Street Court on 27 April 1964, in connection with the alleged theft of a hearing aid. The case was adjourned and Archibald went drinking with friends.

He told them: “It is more serious than you think. You do not know how serious it is.” He then went to Notting Hill police station and told a detective that he had killed Irene Lockwood and pushed her body into the river.

After fifty-six days in jail and a six-day trial, he was found not guilty and set free. He told reporters: “I should never have had all that beer, then I would not have shot my mouth off in such a ridiculous way. I just kept talking, thinking up the story as I went along, and by amazing coincidence, certain details fitted in with what the police knew. I was confused and depressed, although I shall never really know why I said I did it. I have been very silly.”

We had no reason to believe that Archibald had anything to do with the murder, but he had to be charged and a jury had to decide the case because he had repeated his false confession twice before eventually retracting it.

The Lockwood affair, naturally enough, revived the enquiries into the circumstances of Hannah Tailford’s death and these were being pursued when the next murder occurred. This time the victim was Helen Barthelemy who, like the others, was completely unclothed when she was found lying in a narrow driveway at the rear of houses off Swincombe Avenue, Brentford, only a mile or so from the scenes of the earlier murders. Detective Superintendent Bill Baldock led the investigation. The discovery was made by a young man named Christopher Parnell as he was on his way to work early one morning.

In this case Detective Superintendent Maurice Osborne, an experienced murder investigator with so many successes that he had been appointed to the Yard’s Murder Squad, collaborated in the inquiries, collating and coordinating the previous investigations.

Helen Barthelemy, a petite brunette who lived in Talbot Road, N.W.10., had the doubtful distinction of being the first nude among the victims to be found away from the river and this happened on 24 March 1964 – only sixteen days after the discovery of Irene Lockwood’s body. Four of her teeth were missing and a broken piece of one was found lodged in her throat but, strangely enough, there was no indication that the teeth had been dislodged by a blow. Nevertheless, the condition was a factor of some kind as was the discovery of a dark ring round the victim’s waist which proved that her panties had been removed
after
death.

I suppose one might say that Helen, who was only twenty-two and convent-educated, had had a colourful career. She had left her home in Scotland when she was sixteen to join a circus and became a performer on the trapeze. Then for a time she had worked as a stripper on Blackpool’s Golden Mile and later as a café waitress.

Some people knew her as Teddie and she had used the surnames Thompson and Paul. She varied the colour of her Beatle-style hair, too. There were times when she was a brunette and other periods when she became a redhead. Like many prostitutes she was tattooed and had the words “Loving You” on her forearms.

She hadn’t been in London much longer than a year because in August, 1962, she had been convicted at Liverpool of luring a young man on to Blackpool sands to be robbed. She had met the man, a holiday-maker, and gone with him to the sandhills to make love—a pleasure which came to a speedy end when he was beaten up and robbed of his wallet containing twenty-two pounds, by three men who had been with Helen earlier in the evening. She was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment, but the conviction was quashed on appeal.

In London she became a prostitute around Notting Hill and Shepherd’s Bush. Because of Helen’s association with coloured men—she lived in a house occupied by coloured families—the investigation took this factor into account. It could hardly have been ignored although the police recognized that, if the same person was responsible for the deaths of Tailford, Lockwood and Barthelemy, it was highly improbable that he could have been a close friend of all three.

The more closely detectives studied the details of the murders the more certain they became that the killer was a casual “pick-up.”

The target for the officers engaged in the “field” investigations—Detective Inspector Frank Ridge, Detective Superintendents Frank Davies and Maurice Osborne—were those men who used their cars for kerb-prowling and nightly checks were made on any driver in the area. Warnings were given to those girls who were known to be soliciting in Notting Hill and they were asked to cooperate with the police if only for their own sakes. Helen Barthelemy had, in fact, been specifically warned only a few days before she was killed. Many streetwalkers did, in fact, report encounters with “clients” in search of sex deviation and quite often the police were able to trace the men concerned.

So great was the Press and public interest in police activities that for the next three months no further killings took place. The enormous publicity, plus greater cautiousness on the part of the prostitutes, obviously persuaded the murderer to lie low.

In the meantime, at the end of April, the inquest on Helen Barthelemy was opened and adjourned. Her mother, Mrs Mary Thomson, of New Waltham, Grimsby, said that she had last seen her daughter about four years previously.

Then, on 14 July 1964, the Stripper claimed victim number four—Mary Fleming, of Lancaster Gardens, W.11. Her naked body was found in a sitting position at the entrance to the garage of a private house in Berrymead Road, a cul-de-sac, in Chiswick, W4.
She, too, had teeth missing, although in her case it was a denture
. There was no sign of the clothing she was thought to have been wearing—a woollen two-piece suit, black padded bra, red suspender belt, lace G-string panties and white shoes.

Scots-born Mary Fleming was married in 1953, but had left her husband James Fleming, of Blake Street, Barrow-in-Furness, during his period of service in the army in Germany in 1955. At the time of her death she was living in one room with her two young children and, apart from the money she earned by soliciting, received National Assistance.

Her body was discovered at 5 a.m., by Mr George Heard, a City banker’s chauffeur, who lived directly opposite the spot. Detectives learned of a strange incident that had occurred earlier that morning when some painters, working throughout the night at business premises at the rear of Chiswick High Road, had heard the doors of a vehicle being slammed after it had reversed. They had seen a man standing at the side of the vehicle. When he realised he was being watched, he got in the car and hurriedly drove away. Unfortunately the men were looking through open frosted windows and only saw the shadowy figure of the driver. They could not see the number of the car but said that it was an estate vehicle or a small van.

About ten minutes later similar noises were heard in the quiet cul-de-sac and two hours later the body was found.

Despite the somewhat vague details we had been given of the vehicle, a full-scale effort was made to trace its driver. Many curious incidents came to light, to be sure, but our suspect was not among the numerous men we interviewed.

A vital clue, however, was uncovered by the Metropolitan Police Forensic Laboratory and passed on to Superintendent Osborne.

It had been noticed that the bodies of the last two victims, Barthelemy and Fleming—both found in London Streets—bore minute dust particles, which, under microscopic examination, were shown to contain even smaller particles of paint. The laboratory staff devoted a lot of time to this clue and found that a constant pattern of colours showed up in the paint. This pattern was found to fit in with the general picture of the colours of motor cars being currently produced by certain manufacturers and it became clear that these two bodies had been in or near premises in which cars were spray-painted during repairs. But where were the premises?

We had a double headache. We had to find a killer and we had to ensure, as far as was humanly possible, that nobody else fell victim to him. But such were the difficulties that had existed from the very beginning that the tempo of the investigation, involving countless enquiries, could not be quickened enough to prevent the deaths of yet two more women.