The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (51 page)

June 30 ended as the Night of the Long Knives: Adolf Hitler, self-styled as “the supreme court of the German nation”, organized the massacre of ninety or so people whose political views and morals did not coincide with his own. And on 25 July, over the border in Austria, the Heimwehr Fascists attempted
a coup d’état
. The timing was awry, though: the Nazis turned up at the Chancellery just after the Cabinet had gone to lunch. Still, Dr Dollfuss was shot as he tried to escape. The Nazis refused to allow anyone out of the building to summon medical help, and the “little Chancellor” bled to death on a red leather couch.

Few people in Great Britain seem to have been specially concerned about the atrocities in Germany and Austria—least of all, Oswald Mosley’s black-shirted biff-boys, who were far too busy carrying out atrocities of their own, all in the name of King and Country. On 8 June, members of parliament expressed disquiet at the scenes of well-drilled thuggery they had witnessed at a Nuremburg-style rally at Olympia, the night before, and the Home Secretary recited an assurance that “the situation is under most careful scrutiny”. Maybe it was some consolation to victims of blackshirt brutality to know that the Home Office was watching what was happening.

A casual scanning of newspapers of 1934 gives an impression of a year that had more than its fair share of death; but this is probably an optical illusion induced by a large tally of banner-headlined accounts of bizarre deaths and post-mortem occurrences. On a blustery day at the recently-opened Whipsnade Zoo, a man seeking to retrieve his bowler from the lions’ den fell on the fatal side of the barrier . . . the first man to be hanged in Austria for fifteen years was a half-witted hobo who had set fire to a hayrick . . . the wife of the Nepalese Minister to Great Britain having died, she was cremated at an alfresco, coffin-less ceremony at Carshalton, South London . . . in America, a resident of the buckeye state of Ohio suffered a slapstick-comedy death by slipping on a banana-skin. And in Brighton—addendum to attractions that were part and parcel of the holiday season—bodies were treated as baggage.

Its fortune founded in the middle of the eighteenth century by Dr Richard Russell of Lewes, who enticed rich sufferers from scrofula (otherwise known as the King’s Evil) to bathe in—and even to quaff—the sea-water at Brighthelmstone, a fishing village whose sole claim to fame was as the place where Charles II embarked for France following his defeat at Worcester, Brighton owed much of its subsequent prosperity and growth, and all of its architectural splendour, to the morally insane but aesthetically inclined George, Prince Regent, who was a regular visitor in summers from that of 1783 till that of 1820, shortly before he was crowned King, and in half a dozen summers afterwards. The First Gentleman’s influence was at least two-fold: his presence acted as a magnet to others, and aspects of his taste were mimicked in the design of houses and hostelries that were erected to cope with the rush.

In 1934, Brighton was still the most resplendent seaside resort in England, perhaps in Europe. Pebbledashed and Tudorbethan residential nonentities were already blemishing the hem of the town, and office blocks, posing as architecture, degrading the skyline, but these were just first symptoms of a disfiguring rash. The general impression was of the Regency: of bowfronts and balconies, of faded stucco, of snooty squares, terraces and crescents (some of which in propinquitous Hove had conveniences for dogs, few of which took advantage of them).

In this setting—and, by a perverse visual alchemy, seeming to be apt to it—there were all the gaudy trappings of a trippers’ town: red-blue-and-predominantly-white seafood stalls, assailing the nostrils with the intermingled scents of vinegar and brine . . . fortune-tellers’ booths, their velveteen-curtained windows patched with pictures of customers as celebrated as Tallulah Bankhead, Isaac Leslie Hore-Belisha (whose lollipop-like beacons appeared on the streets that year) and Amy Johnson . . . arcades crammed with penny-in-the-slot peepshows and pin-tables . . . a display of waxwork dummies . . . hundreds of greasy-spoon cafés (“Thermos Flasks Filled with Pleasure”) and near as many pubs . . . dance-halls . . . an aquarium . . . souvenir emporiums that did a roaring trade in miniature-po ashtrays, sticks of rock-candy, boaters with ribbons that extended invitations such as “
KISS ME QUICK
”, and naughty postcards painted by Donald McGill. There was even, on the prom, a store that offered not only Rhinestone jewellery and strings of paste beads but also—unsurprisingly, come to think of it—“Ear Piercing While-U-Wait”.

Since the days of the Prince Regent and his
corps
-
d’amour
, Brighton had enjoyed a reputation as a place where sexual illicitness was allowed, expected, invited even; when the town was mentioned in conversation, a knowing wink was very nearly implicit. “A dirty weekend at Brighton” was a catch-phrase so familiar as to suggest that the town had cornered the market as a venue for sexcapades—that weekends were never at all grubby at resorts like Frinton, Lytham St Anne’s and Bognor Regis. As is often the case, with people as well as with places, the reality was less exciting than the reputation.

Brighton had acquired more nicknames over the years than anywhere else in the land. In the decade or so following the Great War, when the race-course and the town were infested by villains, “Doctor Brighton”, “London-by-the-Sea”, “Old Ocean’s Bauble” and other chamber-of-commerce-nurtured sobriquets were joined by “Soho-on-Sea” and “The Queen of the Slaughtering Places”. But the preposterous coincidence of the town’s being the scene of three of the five known trunk-crimes in Great Britain made “Torso City” perhaps the most deserved nickname of all.

The first trunk-murder was committed in 1831 by John Holloway, a twenty-six-year-old labourer on the Brighton Chain Pier, who was assisted in his post-executional chores by the fact that his victim, his wife Celia, had stood only four feet three inches tall. His crime was brought home to him at Lewes Assizes on 14 December, and he was hanged two days later.

The next two trunk-murders were London sensations.

In 1905, Arthur Devereux, a chemist’s assistant, poisoned his wife and two-year-old twin sons with salts of morphine, and crammed the bodies into a tin trunk fitted with a home-made airtight cover, which he deposited in a warehouse at Kensal Rise. Three months later, in April, his mother-in-law got permission to have the trunk opened. Arrested in Coventry, Devereux was tried at the Old Bailey in July; the jury rejected his plea of insanity (which was supported by a clergyman who asserted that Devereux was “a little bit off the top”), and he was hanged in August.

The third trunk-employing murderer was John Robinson, an estate agent who in May 1927 did away with an aspiring prostitute called Minnie Bonati in his office facing Rochester Row Police Station, and afterwards dismembered the body, packed the portions in a trunk and deposited the trunk in the left-luggage office at Charing Cross Station. Robinson, who had scattered incriminating evidence as if it were confetti, was, like Devereux, hanged in the month of August and at Pentonville Gaol.

As far as is known, there was a lull of nigh on seven years before Brighton, home of the inaugural trunk-crime, became the main setting for more than one.

17 June 1934, the day when a large amount of the first-discovered body came to light, was a Sunday: a bright, tranquil day, one of many that summer, with the temperature on the south coast rising into the seventies by early afternoon. In Brighton’s railway station, on the brow of Queen’s Road, the sunlight, softened by its struggle through the grimy glass of the vaulted canopy, descended in dust-dotted, steam-flecked columns that emphasized the shadows.

Four o’clock; the median of a busy day at the station; a hiatus of calm between the arrival of the last of the special trains that had brought thousands of trippers to the town and the departure of the first of the trains that would take most of them—moist, pink-faced, salty-lipped—away after a Nice Day by the Sea.

It was stuffy in the left-luggage office. Occasionally, the movement of a bus, cab or car in the forecourt of the station would send a breeze scuttling across the linoleum-surfaced counter; but this merely rearranged the stale air. And it certainly had no deodorizing effect on an item of luggage that, at that moment, was being discussed in unflattering terms—and not for the first time—by William Vinnicombe and James Lelliot, the attendants on the two-till-ten shift.

The plywood trunk was brand-new. Its covering of light-brown canvas was clean, unscratched—marred only by the counterfoil of the threepenny ticket, number G. 1945, that had been dabbed on the lid when the trunk had been left for safe-keeping eleven days before, on 6 June.

The trunk stood solitary on the stone floor, as if shunned by the pieces of luggage on the tiers of wide, slatted shelves. Actually, it had been left on the floor because of its weight. Harry Rout, the attendant on the other shift who had accepted the trunk, had told Vinnicombe that he remembered saying how heavy it was to the man who had handed it in. The only other thing that Rout had recalled of the transaction was that it had taken place some time between six and seven on the Wednesday evening. In his memory, the depositor of the trunk was faceless, formless; he might, just might, recognize the man if he saw him again—doubtful, though. After all, 6 June was Derby Day, and crowds of racegoers returning from Epsom Downs had combined with the usual early-evening commuter-rush to overcrowd the station.

Now, standing as distant from the trunk as the confines of the left-luggage office would allow, Vinnicombe and Lelliot agreed that the smell from it—which they had first noticed a couple of days before and wrongly attributed to a shoulder of lamb insufficiently wrapped in sheets of the
Brighton
Argus
—was growing stronger, more pungent, with every minute that passed. Before long—and in no time at all if the fine weather persisted—the odour would be unbearable.

Something was rotting within the trunk; there was no doubt about that. But what? The smell, as well as being noxious, was unique in their experience. In all probability, both men surmised what was causing the smell. Neither of them, however, was prepared to put the thought into words.

“Whatever is is,” William Vinnicombe prevaricated, “it’s definitely not lilies of the valley.”

The conversation about the trunk drifted on; aimlessly, repetitively, uncertainly. At last—spurred, perhaps, by a specially rich whiff—Vinnicombe decided that enough was enough. Leaving Lelliot to hold the fort and to endure the smell alone, he went in search of a railway policeman.

As it happened, the officer he found was hidden from public gaze, having a chat with the constable of the Brighton police force assigned to uphold law and order in the environs of the terminus. Neither officer was pleased at having his unofficial tea-break interrupted, but when Vinnicombe explained the reason for his own absence from his post, both of them accompanied him back to it. Having sampled what troubled the attendant, they agreed with him—and with the more talkative Lelliot—that the trunk gave cause for suspicion; they only nodded their agreement, then hastened from the left-luggage office and began breathing again. Talking to each other, they concluded that the trunk had to be opened and its contents examined, but that the adding together of their respective years of service did not equal the authority to take on the task. The Brighton policeman “got on the blower” to his station, which was a section of the town hall, and within a few minutes (the town hall being just over a quarter of a mile away, close to the sea) they were joined by Detective-Constable Edward Taylor. The latter, a man of action, borrowed his uniformed colleague’s truncheon and used it to prise open the two catch-locks on the side of the trunk. Then he flung back the lid. And then, his need for resuscitation easily overcoming his curiosity, he staggered out on to the concourse. Perhaps it was his imagination, but he was sure that the fumes from the trunk had seeped into his clothing. (Perhaps not imagination at all: even a year later, the trunk, sans contents and having had dozens of drenchings with disinfectant, gave off such a disgusting odour that the spare room at the police station where it was kept was dubbed the “stink-hole”.)

Taylor was joined by another detective-constable, Arthur Stacey (whose slight delay is explained by the fact that, having been ordered to proceed to the terminus, he had decided to wait for a tram rather than make himself intolerably sweaty by walking). The two of them dashed into the left-luggage office, stared into the trunk, observed a large brown-paper parcel tied with cord of the type that was used in venetian blinds, scrabbled some of the paper away, sufficient to reveal a female torso, and dashed out again. Having recovered, Stacey telephoned the police station to request—no, to insist upon—the despatch of the head of the CID (never mind if it was his Sunday off) and other senior detectives and an undertaker’s shell and canvas screens and the police surgeon and a posse of uniformed constables to what he described as “the scene of the worst crime we’ve had in donkey’s years”.

By the time the rush of homeward-bound day-trippers got under way, the left-luggage office was obscured by decorators’ sheets; a scribbled notice apologized for the inconvenience of temporary closure. The offensive trunk, contents and all, had been removed to the mortuary. Its floor-space had been scrubbed with boiling water and lysol soap, and half a dozen detectives (known in Brighton as “splits”) were perusing the remaining left-luggage for indications of the presence of the limbs and head that had been detached from the torso. No such parts were discovered. (But the search did reveal other human remains. A battered Moses-basket, on the lid of which the initials VP had been partly scratched away, was found to contain the body of a baby—a girl who, if she had lived at all, had survived no longer than a few days. As the basket had been deposited as far back as 23 February, Detective-Inspector Arthur Pelling, the officer in charge of the investigation, felt confident in saying that there was “no possible connection between this discovery and the trunk case”.) The search was still going on when Captain W.J. Hutchinson, the ex-soldier who was chief-constable of Brighton, got in touch with the duty officer at both Scotland Yard and the London headquarters of the railway police, to ask for all left-luggage offices in the south of England—in coach depots as well as railway stations—to be scoured for suspicious baggage.