The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (92 page)

Towards the end of the fourth day Marshall Hall submitted to the judge that there was no case to answer. But he was overruled. The main points of his opening speech for the defence were: the absence of positive identification, the absence of motive and the absence of a weapon. He dismissed the false alibi concocted with Ruby Young as the misguided act of a young man wishing to conceal his double life from his family. He drew attention to the fact that Wood’s father and brother confirmed that he had spent the night of the murder at home. He called the charred letter an invention of Roberts’s to divert suspicion from Roberts to Shaw. He agreed that McCowan had seen a man leaving the house in St Paul’s Road but this man was not Wood. He would call several witnesses to prove that Wood had no peculiarities of gait.

Wood, called in his own defence, was a thoroughly bad witness. He seemed incapable of giving a straight answer to a question. When asked by Marshall Hall, “Robert Wood, did you kill Emily Dimmock?” he smiled and said nothing at all. The question was repeated.

“You must answer.”

“I mean, it is ridiculous,” was Wood’s reply.

“You must answer straight.”

“No, I did not.”

Throughout the examination he was the despair of his counsel and even Sir Charles Mathews, then at the height of his powers, could do little to break through his apparent indifference. He seemed to be regarding the proceedings as an observer rather than a participant, making sketches of the personages involved in the trial—including the judge, Mathews, Ruby Young and himself. The salient point of Mr Justice Grantham’s summing up was the statement: “In my judgment, strong as the suspicion in this case undoubtedly is, I do not think the prosecution has brought the case near enough home to the accused.”

In the face of this clear direction the jury could do nothing else but bring in a verdict of “Not Guilty”.

There was no doubt that Marshall Hall had scored a great triumph. In the words of Basil Hogarth:

There were cheers in court on Wood’s acquittal and the streets around the Old Bailey were packed with excited people. Mrs Beerbohm Tree rushed on to the stage of a West End theatre to announce the verdict. In contrast, there was universal vilification of Ruby Young who had to be smuggled out of the Court disguised as a charwoman to save her from a mob who would have lynched her. Seldom in the annals of our legal history has the hysterical sentimentality of an English crowd gone to such lengths.

Looking back from a distance of almost sixty years it would seem probable that this public demonstration, ostensibly of sympathy for Robert Wood, was in point of fact adulation of Marshal Hall, his saviour and deliverer. After this there could be no doubt in anyone’s mind that Marshall was restored to his old eminence and popularity.

It is significant that when he first accepted the brief he was absolutely convinced of Wood’s innocence. But many years afterwards, on one of the rare occasions when he discussed his work with his daughter Elna, he told her that he had since reversed his opinion.

It certainly seems odd to the student of this baffling case that Wood should have been at pains to conceal his association with Dimmock from his family when they must have known about his friendship with Ruby Young—whose mode of life was much the same. Again, it cannot be ignored that the murderer, whoever he was, searched through the postcard album looking for something he suspected to be there, something which might incriminate him, and which could not have been anything else but the Rising Sun postcard. Marshall Hall’s theory that the charred letter found in the bedroom grate existed only in Roberts’s imagination was generally unsupported. Wood’s own explanation of it was totally unbelievable. He said that the fragments were of some sketches and writings of his which Emily had appropriated. In that case, what was her reason for burning them—especially in the presence of Roberts? They were quite innocuous, according to Wood.

Out of this jumble of admission and denial, charge and countercharge, only one thing emerges plainly, that Robert Wood was the only possible suspect once Roberts and Shaw had been eliminated. He had the opportunity, but what was the motive? Poor little Emily Dimmock represented no danger to him. Her few belongings were hardly worth stealing, even had he been so short of money as to contemplate robbing her. It is most unlikely that he was in love with her and swayed by jealousy. One is thrown back on the suggestions of a schizoid personality and a long association with Dimmock as a regular client. Given these factors, it is not difficult for anyone familiar with the elements of psychopathology to visualize a possible sequence of events—the young man of unblemished reputation in his own circle, with his church school education and repressive Scottish upbringing, waking in the small hours in a sleazy bed beside a woman who meant nothing to him and to whom he was merely a customer for the night, the uprush of shame and disgust and the uncontrollable impulse to destroy the partner of his guilt. But here again one is faced with an insoluble problem. If the crime was the result of a sudden impulse to violence he would not have had with him the means to commit it. It takes a very sharp blade to cut a woman’s throat so savagely that her head is almost severed. Shaw’s two razors were in the bedroom, but it was established through microscopic examination that neither of these had been used.

From that day to this the Camden Town murder has fascinated criminologists, both amateur and professional, but they are no nearer a solution than the clientele of the Rising Sun who discussed it so avidly during that sultry autumn of 1907.

Ernest Raymond used it as the theme of a novel,
⁴²
inventing for his murderer the character of an elderly lover of Dimmock’s who met her by appointment after she left the Eagle on 12 September, and went home with her.

Someone else has advanced an ingenious theory whereby Shaw, by catching an earlier train and jumping from it while it was halted outside St Pancras Station, could have walked into the house, guessed what Emily had been up to and killed her in a wave of jealous fury. This of course presupposes that Shaw had previously been ignorant of Emily’s activities, which is not very probable. Returning as he did each morning to a disordered room, to a bed in which the girl often lay sleeping off the weariness of the night’s business in soiled and rumpled sheets, he must have been blind if he did not know what had been going on. Undoubtedly he knew about and condoned Emily’s trade for the sake of the benefits it brought him; in which case to kill her would be killing the goose which laid the golden eggs.

Was there anyone who had the means, the opportunity and a possible motive? If so, it must have been someone who had access to the house or lived in it. It is worth considering the other inmates of 29 St Paul’s Road. There was another lodger, a Mrs Lancaster who rented the upper floor. Mrs Stocks, the landlady, lived in the basement, and Mrs Stocks had a husband, a railway carriage cleaner. Stocks said in evidence that he heard nothing unusual on the night of the murder. He had wakened at five o’clock when the alarm went off but had fallen asleep again.

This is interesting because it argues a break in pattern. He had to report for duty at the railway yard at five-thirty and had done so for many years. If he had been liable to oversleep, in those days he would have got the sack for unpunctuality. Why did it happen on that particular morning? Had he perhaps had a disturbed night? Both he and his wife deposed at the trial that they knew nothing of Dimmock’s nocturnal activities. She was out every evening and seldom returned before they had gone to bed. Whether they slept in the back or the front room of the basement it seems impossible that they could have been ignorant of what was taking place in their house. Emily Dimmock had lived there some eight or nine weeks.

If in fact Stocks did know the truth about her, who knows what thoughts may have passed through his head? He might have made advances himself and been repulsed. Did he lie abed listening to the comings and goings overhead and brooding on forbidden joys, the resentment burning and boiling in him till it erupted into action? Possibly. But although McCowan’s identification of Wood had been discounted by Marshall Hall under cross-examination, the man could not be shaken on the point that he had seen
someone
leave the house early on the morning of the murder—someone who presumably lived elsewhere. But again, this could have been some chance caller, a client of Emily’s returned from abroad, who entered the house in the usual way, knocked on her door and, obtaining no answer, went out again. In any event the front door was not the only means of access. Emily’s room had a french window that opened on to the garden and formed a convenient entrance for those of her clients who preferred to visit her surreptitiously. In hot weather the french window was sometimes left ajar. The murderer could have come and gone unseen by McCowan or anyone else.

When all the possibilities have been eliminated, only the impossible remains. One theory that has not so far been advanced is that Emily Dimmock was killed not by a man but by a woman. It does not require any great strength to sever a throat with a sharp instrument. The fact that no murder weapon was found on the scene argues that the crime was premeditated. Jealousy is the motive that therefore springs to mind. The trouble between Robert Wood and Ruby Young had begun when she found out that he had been associating with other women. There were presumably others besides Emily Dimmock, and Ruby may not have been the only jealous one. One can theorise indefinitely but in the end one is thrown back on the fact that, circumstantial though it was, the Crown’s case against Wood was defeated only by the exceptional brilliance of the defence put up by Marshall Hall.

Up to a few years ago Robert Wood was alive and living in Australia. Many of the sketches that he made in court and in prison remain in this country. They are proof of exceptional talent, but what do they tell us of the enigmatic personality of the artist? Preoccupation with the symbol of the rising sun is obvious in one. But in the other the sun is not rising. It is setting. Of what state of mind is this brilliantly executed and imaginative picture indicative? The old man, moribund, lying in the snow, the desolate scene, the forlorn and shivering dog and the stark caption
Silence
— what would a psychologist have made of this? There were no psychiatric experts in 1907. Perhaps this was as well for Robert Wood.

(Arnold Rothstein, 1929)

Damon Runyon

Arnold Rothstein was the most prominent underworld figure in 1920s New York. A suave and urbane gambler, Rothstein (b. 1882) was known variously as New York City’s “Big Bankroll”, “The Brain” or simply “AR”. In 1919, he achieved notoriety as the man who bribed the Chicago White Sox baseball team to throw the World Series. During the Roaring Twenties he accumulated a fortune by financing most of the East Coast rackets, but on 4 November 1928, during a poker game at the Park Central Hotel, someone shot Arnold Rothstein. “I won’t talk about it”, he told police from his hospital bed, “I’ll take care of it myself.” He died two days later without naming his killer. Police believed that Rothstein welshed on $300,000-worth of gambling debts to a group of men including George “Hump” McManus. McManus was duly indicted for murder, at a series of hearings attended by the writer and journalist (Alfred) Damon Runyon (1884–1946). Runyon’s reports, filed to the
New York American,
read like an electric charge, with their characteristically racy language, laced with jargon and slang from the street. Material from this and similar cases involving organized crime informed Runyon’s best-known collection
Guys and Dolls
(1932), later the basis of a hit musical (1950) and film (1955).

New York City, 19 November 1929

If the ghost of Arnold Rothstein was hanging around the weather-beaten old Criminal Courts Building yesterday—and Arnold always did say he’d come back after he was dead and haunt a lot of people—it took by proxy what would have been a violent shock to the enormous vanity of the dead gambler.

Many citizens, members of the so-called “blue ribbon panel”, appeared before Judge Charles C. Nott, Jr, in the trial of George C. McManus, charged with murdering Rothstein and said they didn’t know Rothstein in life and didn’t know anybody that did know him.

Arnold would have scarcely believed his ears. He lived in the belief he was widely known. He had spent many years establishing himself as a landmark on old Broadway. It would have hurt his pride like sixty to hear men who lived in the very neighborhood he frequented shake their heads and say they didn’t know him.

A couple said they hadn’t even read about him being plugged in the stomach with a bullet that early evening of 4 November a year ago, in the Park Central Hotel.

Well, such is fame in the Roaring Forties!

They had accepted two men to sit on the jury that is to hear the evidence against McManus, the first man to pass unchallenged by both sides being Mark H. Simon, a stockbroker, of No. 500 West 111th Street, and the second being Eugene A. Riker, of No. 211 West 21st Street, a traveling salesman.

It seemed to be a pretty fair start anyway, but just as Judge Nott was about to adjourn court at four o’clock, Mark H. Simon presented a complication. He is a dark complexioned, neatly dressed chap, in his early thirties, with black hair slicked back on his head. He hadn’t read anything about the case, and seemed to be an ideal juror.