The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (54 page)

Similar scenes were enacted when he left the court, having been remanded in custody, and when, over the next few weeks, he was brought from Lewes Goal, first for further remands, then for the committal proceedings, at the end of which he was ordered to stand trial at the forthcoming Lewes Assizes.

The trial lasted four days. Beforehand—perhaps on his own initiative, perhaps at the suggestion of his counsel, Norman Birkett—he had done some preparation:

“I had carefully rehearsed my lines like an actor. I had practised how I should hold my hands and when I should let the tears run down my cheeks. It might sound cold and calculating, but you have to remember that my life was at stake.”

His story—in its essentials, entirely false, as he admitted when the rule against double-jeopardy protected him—was that he had found Violette Kaye lying dead when he returned to the basement flat in Park Crescent on 10 May. As he had a record of convictions for petty crimes (none involving violence—an important point in his favour, Birkett contended), it would not have occurred to him in a month of Sundays to report the matter to the police: “I considered that a man who has been convicted never gets a fair and square deal from the police.” So—very silly of him, he now understood—he had bought the trunk, wedged the body in it, and moved, trunk and all, to a different basement.

Birkett brilliantly abetted the lies, saliently by patching together disparate answers from prosecution witnesses so that they seemed to support the theory that Violette Kaye had either taken a mite too much morphine and fallen down the area steps or been pushed down them by a dissatisfied, over-eager or jealous client—and that, whatever had caused the fall, she had struck her head on a projecting rail or a pilaster of masonry.

Holes gaped in both Mancini’s story and Birkett’s theory: but the jury, having stayed out for some two hours, returned to the bijou court with a verdict of “Not guilty”.

Was Mancini surprised? One cannot tell. When he entered the dock to hear the verdict, he was wearing an overcoat—indicating that he expected to walk out into the high street a free man—but when the foreman of the jury spoke two words rather than the fatal one, he staggered and stared, and when he was at last able to speak to his counsel, muttered, “Not guilty, Mr Birkett—not guilty?”, as if he were a character in someone else’s dream.

(The following summer, Mancini toured fairgrounds with a sideshow featuring a variation on the trick of sawing a woman in half. Instead of a box, he used a large black trunk; his “victim” was his wife, whom he had met at Aladdin’s Cave shortly before his flight from Brighton and married a week after his acquittal. He did not draw the crowds for long, and was almost forgotten by 1941, when he was serving in the navy. In that year, a man who really was named Toni Mancini was hanged for a gang-murder in Soho, and people recalled the earlier case, the self-styled Toni Mancini, and said, “Now there’s a coincidence.”)

While Brighton Trunk-Crime No. 2 had been delighting the populace, Robert Donaldson and his eventually reduced team of helpers had been working hard to solve Trunk-Crime No. 1. Donaldson had reason to believe, but was never able to prove, that one or both of the missing arms had been burned on the Sussex Downs, close to a place where, after the Great War, the bodies of Hindu soldiers who had died in hospitals in or around Brighton were cremated. As to the whereabouts of the head—well, perhaps Donaldson obtained a general indication of its resting place when, early in September, he was put in touch with a young man of the town. The latter stated that “shortly before the discovery at the railway station, he and his girl had been walking along Black Rock, to the east of Brighton. In a rock pool they found a head. It was the head of a young woman. The man explained to his sweetheart that they should leave it alone as it was probably the remains of a suicide and that the police had removed all they needed of the body”.

As soon as Donaldson received this information, he caused a search to be made of the whole beach: “Nothing relevant was found, so I consulted various marine authorities on the question of where the head might be; the sweep of the tides indicated that it could have been taken out to sea and then swept ashore at Beachy Head, but nothing was found there either.”

The courting couple’s silliness was just one thing among many that Donaldson had to hide his anger about. His greatest reason for anger was the action of a high-ranking policeman stationed at Hove.

By early July, Donaldson had garnered indications that the person directly or indirectly responsible for Trunk-Crime No. I was Edward Seys Massiah, a man in his mid-fifties who hailed from the West Indian island of Trinidad. One of Massiah’s parents had been white, the other black, thus making him a mulatto, his skin dark but not ebony, his hair more wavy than crinkled, his lips quite thin. He had an impressive collection of medical qualifications: MD, MB, B.Ch, DTM. All but the last of those designatory letters, which stood for Doctor of Tropical Medicine, were scratched larger than his name on his brass shingle, which in 1934 gleamed beside the imposing entrance to a slightly less imposing house within sight of the sea at Hove: 8 Brunswick Square.

The fact that he lived as well as practised there was something he stressed in conversation with prospective patients and with gentlemen whose lady-friends were pregnant or at risk of becoming so; he was, so to speak, open all hours, and that convenience was allied with a guarantee of confidentiality. No doubt you will have guessed that he was an abortionist; and it will have occurred to you that abortion was a criminal offence.

Now, a likely cause of the death of the Girl with the Pretty Feet was a mishap during an attempt to abort her embryonic child; if that
was
the cause, then a person who had been involved in the arrangements for the abortion or the person who had tried to perform the operation, or both, would have been most anxious that the transaction and, more important, their roles in it remained secret.

When Robert Donaldson had put together diverse reasons for being suspicious of Edward Massiah (whose qualification of B.Ch was, by the way, a shortened form of the Latin
Baccalaureus Chirurgiae
, meaning Bachelor of Surgery), he found a sum greater than its parts. But as that sum did not equal justification for making an arrest, he came to the obvious conclusion that efforts were needed to ascertain whether there were additional reasons for suspicion—or whether there was a single exculpatory fact. Towards that end, he gathered a number of people together in one of the apartments at the Royal Pavilion; among those present at the meeting were Captain Hutchinson, Inspector Pelling, key-members of the trunk-crime team, and a senior officer from Hove. Donaldson enumerated the points that seemed to tell against Edward Massiah, invited discussion of them, and then—speaking specially to the man from Hove—requested covert collection of information regarding the doctor’s background, his present activities and acquaintances, and his movements on Derby Day. He emphasized the word
covert
.

However, that emphasis was overlooked or ignored by the Hove policeman. Having come upon—and kept to himself—a further unflattering fact about Edward Massiah, he went, uninvited and unexpected, to 8 Brunswick Square and laid Donaldson’s cards on the consulting-room table. Massiah paid attention, smiling the while, never interrupting. The sun shining through the tall windows glistened on the ranks of surgical instruments, on the green and crystal-clear pots of medication, on the framed diplomas, tinctured the red-plush couch, nestled in the careful creases of the doctor’s pearl-grey cravat, black jacket and striped trousers, flashed from the unspatted parts of his patent-leather shoes. Towards the end of the policeman’s speech, the doctor took a silver pencil and began jotting on a pad. Notes of what he had said and was saying, the policeman guessed.

But no, he was wrong. When he had quite finished and, pleased with himself, was feeling in a pocket for his own pad—he would need that to record the doctor’s exact response—he was nonplussed by what the doctor was doing: carefully tearing the sheets from the pad on the ormolu table, turning them round, and using one manicured finger to prod them towards him. He looked at the writing. Names. Addresses, too. Telephone numbers following some of the addresses. Many of the names he recognized: they belonged to important personages of Sussex, or to national celebrities, members of noble families, or extravagantly wealthy commoners who gave financial support to worthy causes. The doctor explained. These were people who, if he were ever threatened with court proceedings and, in turn, threatened them with publicity relating to services he had rendered them, would do all in their power to protect him and ruin his accuser or accusers. The list of names was only a small sample—come to think of it, he had omitted the name of Lord So-and-So, of the member of parliament for the Such-and-Such constituency, of the owner of the Thingummyjig group of newspapers . . .

It seemed to the policeman that the sun had gone in: all of a sudden, the consulting room was a place of sombre shadows. The doctor was speaking again—quoting the forewarned-is-forearmed adage, thanking the policeman for revealing each and every fact known to Donaldson, adding that he was much obliged since he could now set about sanitizing most of those facts. And, needless to say, he would make blessed sure that Donaldson—whom he would be delighted to meet some time—made no further headway towards his objective of foisting responsibility for Trunk-Crime No. 1 on a quite innocent person: himself, he meant. Could the officer find his own way out . . . ?

The officer could. And did.

Of course, he didn’t volunteer an account of the interview to Robert Donaldson. The latter learnt of the visit from one of the people named by Edward Massiah. The doctor had just happened to mention it—casually, with all the humour of a hyena—to that person, whose consequent fear was manifested as a quietly-spoken threat to Donaldson. The threat didn’t worry Donaldson; but the disclosure of the Hove policeman’s action made him very angry indeed. Even so, though he got the full story of the interview from the policeman himself, and berated him for “putting ambition before professionalism”, he did not instigate disciplinary action.

(Shortly afterwards, Edward Massiah left Hove and started practising in London. There, a woman died following an illegal operation that he had performed. It would be wrong to say that there was a “cover-up”, but somehow or other he managed to escape retribution; his name was not erased from the Medical Register. By 1938, he had left England and was living in a fine house, “Montrose”, near Port of Spain, Trinidad. Not until December 1952 did the General Medical Council strike his name from the Register, and then only because he had failed to respond to letters.)

At about the time of the Massiah incident, Robert Donaldson brought his family to Brighton: “Not wanting this to be found out by a gossip-columnist, we lived in a private hotel under the name of Williams. I was supposed to be an engineer. My wife and I briefed the children as to their new surname and we thought all would be well. However, my six-year-old younger son, not realizing what was at stake, would solemnly ignore the injunctions of ‘Andrew Williams, come here,’ etc., and would tell all and sundry that he was a Donaldson. My cover was quickly blown.”

Months later, the strain of the inquiry took its toll on Donaldson: “I found that I was having trouble with my eyes. I went to an oculist in London, and after extensive testing he said there was nothing organically wrong with my eyes. He recommended that I see a nerve specialist. His diagnosis was that I had been overworking. Under the circumstances, that was somewhat self-evident. However, I was then given a Detective-Inspector—Taffy Rees—to help me. But Taffy too became a casualty with a stomach ulcer.”

There is a final—one could say unforgivable—coincidence to be mentioned. In September 1935, Robert Donaldson took a well-earned holiday. He went motoring in Scotland. On the way home, he parked his car near the border-town of Moffatt and sat on the bridge at Gardenholme Linn for a quiet smoke. Beneath the bridge, tucked well out of sight, were some of the neatly-parcelled remains of Dr Buck Ruxton’s common-law wife and of his children’s nursemaid, Mary Rogerson. By the time Donaldson reported back to Scotland Yard, those parcels and others had been discovered, and it goes without saying that it was he who took charge of the London end of the inquiry into the north-country variant on bodies-as-baggage. Though not a superstitious man, he must have been at least slightly worried when he learnt that Dr Ruxton, guilty beyond doubt, was to be defended by Norman Birkett, the barrister who had been so helpful to Toni Mancini. But no: this time Birkett’s client was found guilty and was duly hanged.

(William Burke Kirwan, 1852)

William Roughead

Here is a case in which the outcome was almost certainly a miscarriage of justice. William Kirwan, an artist, was convicted of murdering his wife and sentenced to death. In the event he was reprieved and served nearly thirty years of penal servitude. But subsequent medical opinion suggests that the woman died of natural causes. Kirwan appears to have been a victim of some intangible intuition on the part of the Dublin Court that he was guilty, although the evidence strikes the modern reader as flimsy in the extreme. Journalist Richard Lambert believed the case to have been beset by “a sort of nightmarish atmosphere, a murk in which judges, witnesses, lawyers and jurymen seem to stray as if bewitched . . . If the law at that time had allowed the accused to go into the witness box and undergo cross-examination, the mystery would probably have been dispelled.” This unravelling of the mystery is by the Scottish lawyer and writer William Roughead (1870–1952). Roughead rejected the label of “criminologist”, preferring to be described as a teller of “plain tales from jails” but he agreed that his study of criminology had encouraged his admiration for the ingenuity of the human race. Dorothy Sayers hailed Roughead as “the best showman that ever stood before the door of a chamber of horrors” and he is especially celebrated in America. President Roosevelt collected Roughead’s works, and his relaxed, but acute, style has earned him a cult status that has eluded him in Britain.