The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (3 page)

This miscellany also covers cases in which, although crime was committed, no one was subsequently charged. Included in this category is the murder of the Hollywood film director William Desmond Taylor, recalled by the super-selling Erle Stanley Gardner. Meanwhile another American, Dorothy Dunbar, puzzles over a
cause
célèbre
from the London of almost half a century earlier, the Bravo mystery at Balham.

There is a small category of cases which remain unsolved because of outbreaks of judicial foot-in-mouth disease. These are instances in which those who were thought to have been responsible for crimes have subsequently been not only exonerated but officially pardoned. I have excluded the ordeal of Timothy Evans, hanged in 1950 for the murder of his wife and baby daughter at 10 Rillington Place, west London. Although Evans was eventually pardoned, the solution to the mystery seemed clear — Mrs Evans and her child had been murdered, along with others, by another resident at 10 Rillington Place, John Reginald Halliday Christie. We can be much less certain, however, about what really happened in a handful of other cases, including those of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1920 and the British Drummond family, massacred on a touring holiday in France in 1952. The American fish peddlers Sacco and Vanzetti were officially exonerated by the Governor of Massachusetts in 1977, fifty years after they were executed by electric chair.

Sometimes, juries are unable to agree on the question of culpability, and the legal process becomes deadlocked. The result can be that the accused goes free, leaving the question of guilt unresolved, as happened in two cases in different continents in the first decade of the twentieth century. In New York, Nan Patterson, the girl from the
Floradora
chorus, left little by way of a mystery when she emerged from her third trial to public acclaim in 1906, but the story comes up fresh at the hands of Alexander Woollcott and one is inclined to excuse him if his exuberance betrays a ring of invention. More soberly, as befits an English barrister, Jack Smith-Hughes is altogether less tolerant of black-bearded Willie Gardiner. The Methodist elder of piratical aspect seems to have bamboozled the juries at both his trials.

Was it murder? The question invites us to consider another selection of cases in which the evidence is just so intractable as to leave us at best doubtful and at worst openly sceptical. For nearly forty years, the debate over how Marilyn Monroe really met her death has spiralled this way and that, conspiracy theorists have laid siege to the facts, and the entire case has been sucked down into the black holes of the Kennedy assassinations. Kirk Wilson pulls together what is known about the death of Hollywood’s most potent female icon. From an earlier age and landscape, the Scottish criminologist William Roughead throws the tragedy of Ireland’s Eye into the sharpest relief, and explains that although the accused man Kirwan was convicted of murder and punished with a life sentence, subsequent medical opinion suggests that Kirwan’s wife probably died of natural causes, and that in fact there was no murder. In the Maybrick poisoning case of 1889, it is equally likely that no murder was done, and that the victim (the drug-driven cotton man James Maybrick) succumbed to his self-administered nostrums without the help of his neglected wife Florence. Arrested and tried for murder, but in reality convicted for the unpardonable sin of adultery, Mrs Maybrick’s martyrdom resounds with the grinding of gears to modern ears. At Liverpool prison, she lay in the condemned cell listening to her own scaffold being erected, but at least her deliverance was at hand, and a reprieve (the mob, for once, clamouring for mercy) snatched her from the brink.

Crime and its insolubility has hooked and held a surprisingly distinguished crop of writers. Well into middle age, Rebecca West, hailed at the halfway point of the twentieth century as the best writer in the English language, suddenly turned her talent to crime reporting. West produced a brilliant study of the post-war treason trials in
The
Meaning
of
Treason
; its portrait of William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) was acclaimed as the best single biography she was ever to write. In December 1949 she turned to the case of Donald Hume, accused of the murder of the shady car dealer Stanley Setty. Her impressions at Hume’s trial, one of which is included here, were published in the newspapers before being reworked into her full-scale and haunting study
Mr
Setty
and
Mr
Hume
which appeared a few years later. Hume was acquitted of murder, and Miss West thought it likely that Setty’s murder was likely to rank as one of the great unsolved mysteries. “The possibility that Hume murdered Mr Setty can definitely be excluded,” she wrote. “But who murdered Mr Setty, and how, and where, is known to nobody but the murderer. Not for lack of evidence. That is piled sky-high. There is so much that whatever theory the mind may base on that evidence, there exists some fact which disproves it.”
⁷
Hume had pleaded guilty to being an accessory to Setty’s murder, and served eight years of a twelve-year sentence. On his release, he went to a Sunday newspaper and confessed to murdering Stanley Setty. In fact, Hume went on to murder again and was sentenced to life imprisonment, spending nearly thirty years in Broadmoor.

Like Rebecca West, the critic Alexander Woollcott enjoyed a lifelong fascination with murder, and was one of the first to strike a distinctively American tone in writing about crime. The British may have the best mysteries, but by and large the Americans write up crimes with greater fizz. It was an American, Truman Capote, who in the 1960s invented a completely new genre, the non-fiction novel, and with the publication of
In
Cold
Blood
raised the true crime book to the level of literature. In the 1930s, Woollcott relished the retelling of old murders in what he self-deprecatingly dismissed as “a grab-bag of twice-told tales”. He was living in a less sophisticated age than our own, in which the incidence of unsolved crime (or, at any rate, murder) is statistically rare. Of the 716 murders reported in England and Wales in 2003–4, for example, only fifty-four remained unsolved a year later, a clear-up rate of 92 per cent. Improved detection and scientific techniques are responsible, methodology that would have been unrecognizable (indeed, unimaginable) to the fictional 1940s detectives of the Department of Dead Ends, a non-existent branch of Scotland Yard, invented by writer Roy Vickers
⁸
, in which details of all unsolved murders were stored. But in spite of such giant strides, unsolved murders will never be killed off altogether. Consigning mystery to history is not a realistic option. The American crime writer Ed McBain believes people like mysteries because they can come close to the violence without being part of it, and can be sure that “the people who are doing the violence at the end of it are going to be caught.” But the stories that follow have no ending, for they finish curled up in a question mark; we are drawn closer to them because the mystery is not yet dispersed.

(Rachel Nickell, 1992)

Brian Masters

In Britain, the most notoriously unsolved murder of the 1990s was that of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common. Her killing, witnessed by her little son on a summer’s
morning, provoked a national clamour. Detectives eventually arrested Colin Stagg, an out-of-work loner who lived nearby. But he was freed by a judge at the Old Bailey when it was revealed that police had tried to snare their suspect into confessing by the use of a so-called “honeytrap,” a woman police officer who, operating undercover and using the name “Lizzie James”, had befriended Colin Stagg and sought to establish a relationship with him. The judge, Mr Justice Ognall, ruled that evidence from such a witness was inadmissible. The prosecution dropped the case, and Colin Stagg was cleared of murder. The case also raised questions about the use of psychological profiling, and it was this contentious aspect of the investigation that concerned the British author Brian Masters (b. 1939). He has written about many controversial murder cases in Europe and America since his classic study of the mass murderer Dennis Nilsen appeared in 1985.

Rachel Nickell was an enchanting, pretty, ebullient girl, described by her father as “a bright star” whose “happiness was so real you could touch it”. On 13 July 1992, she went bouncing out for a walk on Wimbledon Common with her two-year-old son Alex, arriving there at ten a.m. Thirty-five minutes later she was dead, viciously stabbed forty-nine times in a random, motiveless murder which bore all the signs of psychopathic disorder. It had taken three minutes to dispatch Rachel and leave her little boy, bathed in her blood, clinging to her body and pleading for her to get up. No wonder the nation was overwhelmed with pity. And no wonder Mrs Nickell shed tears in court last week when the case against the man accused of killing her daughter was not even allowed to go to trial. I do not know the Nickell family, but having spent many weeks with Bruce and Pat Cottrill, whose daughter Fiona Jones was slaughtered by a stranger in France, I think I know something of their anguish. Being cheated of an answer, a result proclaimed in court, makes it seem that Rachel’s death did not matter.

But it was not the fault of the court that there was no evidence to connect Colin Stagg to the crime. It was the fault of naïve and increasingly desperate police methods born of understandable frustration. The murderer left no tangible clues. Police had mounted the biggest murder hunt in London’s history. They interviewed hundreds of people, drew up a list of over 500 suspects, cautioned scores, actually arrested and released thirty-two men. One of these had been Stagg, who had been interrogated for three days from 18 September 1992; he had co-operated fully and given a reliable account of his movements. They searched his flat and found nothing of any relevance. Nevertheless, they did not forget him.

It was not entirely a mistake for police to seek the guidance of an “offender profiler” to describe the sort of man they should be looking for, but it was, perhaps, foolish to attach importance to what can only be intelligent conjecture. Anyway, they had nothing else, so they turned to Paul Britton, a psychologist who works in Leicester and who had helped on other investigations. Offender profiling is not a science; it relies upon the merging of experience with intuition, and was first developed by the National Centre for the Analysis of Violent Crime, a division of the FBI at Quantico, Virginia, as a tool to assist traditional detection. The acknowledged expert there is Robert Ressler, who is frequently called upon to offer an opinion, although the judge at the trial of Jeffrey Dahmer in Milwaukee declined to allow Mr Ressler to testify in court. When American judges have permitted an “offender profile” to be presented in evidence, they have regretted it. Convictions have been secured on seventeen occasions, and all of them have been overturned by a higher court.

The trouble is, “offender profiling” is an infant art. It is experimental and haphazard. Professor David Canter has written about the “shadow” left by the criminal of himself at the scene of crime, which is a striking image, but he has more reliably concentrated on the clues he might find as to methods rather than as to personality. It is when one starts postulating the personality of an unknown killer that the “shadow” becomes really insubstantial, and this is what happened, sadly, to the Wimbledon inquiry.

The FBI’s Behavioural Science Unit, where psychological profiling originated as an aid to the analysis of violent crime, was based precisely upon this idea that behaviour
always
reflects personality. Therefore, if you can see how the murderer behaved towards his victim, you can work out what kind of man he is. To this end, a team of FBI agents conducted extensive interviews with thirty-six convicted sex murderers between 1979 and 1983 in order to discover what they had in common, and use the results to make a composite picture of the typical offender. They found, for example, that nearly half of them had been sexually abused in childhood and most of the rest at a later stage. Seventy per cent of them had problems functioning as sexual adults and had to use pornography as a stimulus. They enjoy watching somebody look terrified, and had a compulsive itch to dominate and control somebody else. Pornography, the FBI concluded, was never the cause of the murder, but the fuel of a unrealized fantasy which might include murder. When inhibiting factors were weak, the fantasy might explode, so it was another characteristic of these men that they had little capacity for self-restraint and poor self-esteem.

(Incidentally, the film
Silence
of
the
Lambs
purported to show an FBI agent interviewing serial killer Hannibal Lecter. Just one of the fraudulent aspects of that film was that agents always operate in twos when in close contact with a dangerous convict).

The value of the psychological profile is debatable. It is obviously useful in eliminating suspects who might be happily married clergymen or clubbable classical lexicographers, but the rather general characteristics which are left can cover an awful lot of people. Ted Bundy, the plausible good-looking young man who killed and disfigured several girls in various of the United States in the 1970s, was not caught by the FBI’s profile but because he fired on a traffic policeman who gave chase when he was driving a stolen car. He had killed for years undetected. Once in custody, however, he was identified with the help of the profile, which for the defenders of this method is sufficient justification. For its critics, there is just too much reliance placed on hunches, which can often be quite unsupported.