by Robin Odell
He established that parts of the arms and legs were missing and, subsequently, returned to the bombed-out church to see if any further bones might come to light. Despite the removal of nearly three tons of earth, no human bone fragments were found, but the pathologist’s attention was caught by the presence of yellowish deposits in the cellar and a wooden box. Analysis showed that the deposit was slaked lime. Suspicions formed that the body might have been brought in the box to the cellar where it was buried in lime. Murder was very much on the cards and this line of thought was strengthened by the pathologist’s examination of what remained of the limbs on the skeleton. Both legs had been cut off at the knee and the arms severed at the elbow; clear indications of dismemberment.
It was the teeth remaining in the upper jaw which provided evidence of identity. Simpson had already alerted the police to this possibility when officers trawled through lists of missing persons and found the name of Rachel Dobkin. She was the wife of a fire watcher and had been reported missing by her sister. The description she provided broadly matched what was known about the dead woman and, most importantly, she knew the name of Rachel Dobkin’s dentist. It was a short step to invite the dentist to view the teeth in the jaw. He recognised his work immediately and amid much excitement, declared ‘That’s my patient … That’s Mrs Dobkin.’
Armed with a family photograph of Rachel Dobkin, Dr Simpson set about superimposing the facial image onto a photograph of the skull. This was a technique employed with considerable success a few years earlier by John Glaister and Professor Brash in the Ruxton case. Working with the photographic technician at Guy’s, Simpson prepared a positive image of Dobkin’s portrait and a negative image of the skull on transparent X-ray film and placed one over the other. ‘The portrait fitted the skull like a mask,’ he wrote later. The remains found in the bomb-damaged church were those of Rachel Dobkin. This was a moment of triumph for the young pathologist in what his secretary, Molly Lefebure, described as a ‘case of a lifetime’. To add a further shine to his work, Simpson had retrieved the remains of a larynx preserved in the lime at the scene of burial. He found that the thyroid cartilage was broken and surrounded by a blood clot. This was firm evidence that Rachel Dobkin had been strangled.
The conclusion of the case was left to the police who located Harry Dobkin and invited him to answer a few questions about his wife’s disappearance. As a result, he was charged with murder and sent for trial at the Old Bailey. The jury took twenty minutes to find him guilty and he was subsequently executed at Wandsworth Prison. In the final act of what had been a remarkable case, Simpson carried out the post-mortem on the executed man’s corpse. Molly Lefebure recorded that Dobkin, ‘… looked very peaceful. His debts were settled at last’, she said. Simpson concluded, a touch ruefully, that if there had not been a war on, his case might have achieved headlines to match those that Spilsbury had achieved with Crippen.
Investigation of another concealed burial came to Dr Simpson’s attention just a few months after the first. In October 1942, soldiers on manoeuvres at Hankley Common near Godalming in Surrey came across a body buried in a shallow grave. All that was visible was a hand rising up through the earth as if beckoning attention. Simpson was called to the scene and the outstretched body of a young woman was uncovered. The maggot-strewn corpse was clothed and lying face down. The massive injury to the back of the skull was all too apparent. The remains were taken to Guy’s Hospital for further examination.
The corpse was that of a woman aged around nineteen to twenty who was identified by her clothing. She was known to the police on account of the fact that she lived rough on Hankley Common in a wigwam made from tree branches and foliage. This shelter had been made for her by a Canadian soldier based at Witley Camp who was her boyfriend. August Sangret, aged thirty, was a French-Canadian of native North American stock. Simpson determined that the woman’s skull had been smashed with a violent blow, probably from a tree branch used as a bludgeon. The presence of adipocere on the body led him to estimate that Pearl Wolfe had been dead for between five and seven weeks. The broken skull, which had fractured into thirty-eight pieces, was re-assembled in the laboratory with help from Dr Eric Gardner, whom Simpson liked to call a ‘GP pathologist’. They found two stab wounds which had penetrated the bone. There were also defensive wounds on one of the arms. A characteristic of the stab wounds was that they seemed to have been inflicted with a knife having a distinctive hooked blade.
A detailed search of the area where the body was found turned up a tree branch with hair impacted on one end. The microscopic characteristics of the hair matched the head hair of the dead woman and the thickness of the branch corresponded with the skull injury. Simpson had no doubt that this was the murder weapon. His reconstruction of the crime was that Pearl Wolfe had been stabbed but managed to escape her attacker until he caught up and smashed her skull with the tree branch. He then dragged the body to the place where it was buried, causing injuries to her legs. The question was, where was the knife?
August Sangret was questioned and made a long, rambling statement. He admitted his liaison with Pearl Wolfe and it emerged later that he had reported to his regimental Provost Sergeant that she had failed to turn up for a pre-arranged meeting. The Sergeant told Sangret that this was a private matter and no business of his, to which Sangret responded, tellingly, by saying, ‘If she’s found and anything has happened to her, I don’t want to be mixed up in it.’ The soldier’s uniform and blankets were examined by detectives and proved to have been recently washed but there was no knife among his personal effects. By chance, a soldier picking blackberries on Hankley Common found a knife stuck in a tree close to a shack used by Sangret. The soldier handed the knife in to the regimental provosts who described it as British Army issue with a black handle and hooked blade. As the knife was found near Sangret’s shack, he was given the chance to claim ownership and promptly accepted.
The next time the knife appeared, it was by another chance discovery, this time as the result of unblocking a drain. A soldier clearing a drain at Witley Camp retrieved a black-handled knife with a hooked blade. When Simpson examined it, he found no incriminating fingerprints but determined that the blade fitted perfectly into the holes that Pearl Wolfe’s attacker had stabbed into her skull. Sangret was charged with murder and sent for trial at Kingston Assizes. The pathologist attended to give expert evidence, equipped with the murder victim’s skull and the hook-bladed knife. He demonstrated to the court how precisely the knife fitted into the skull injuries and, when the jury retired, they took both articles with them. After two hours’ deliberation, they found August Sangret guilty but with a recommendation to mercy. The recommendation was not acted upon and the convicted soldier was executed at Wandsworth Prison. Once again, Simpson had the last word when he carried out the post-mortem following Sangret’s execution.
Many years later, in 1978, when the Sunday Telegraph serialised Keith Simpson’s autobiography, Forty Years of Murder, the pathologist posed for a photograph to be shown on the cover of the magazine. It was a reprise of his appearance in court over thirty years earlier; looking slightly menacing, he held the murder knife in one hand and the victim’s skull in the other. It was publicity of a type that Spilsbury could not have imagined.
‘The Three Musketeers’ continued to deal with the dead in London and the Home Counties. They were not all headline cases with suspicion attached, but simply corpses requiring confirmation of cause of death. As Molly Lefebure recorded in her memoir, Evidence for the Crown, published in 1954, her boss was carrying out between ten and twenty-eight post-mortems a day. Where there was no need of extended investigation, Keith Simpson would often complete seven or eight examinations in a morning. Even with the steady flow of bodies, lecturing duties at Guy’s, air-raid warnings and raising a family, he still found time to write. The first edition of his textbook, Forensic Medicine, was published in 1947.
War, or no war, it seemed that people were still driven to commit mu
rder on the domestic front for the time-honoured motives of elimination, revenge and jealousy. Following his success in establishing the victim’s identity in the Dobkin case, Keith Simpson was soon confronted with another identification puzzle. Workers changing shifts at the Vauxhall car factory in Luton on 19 November 1943 followed a familiar route, walking along the towpath which ran beside the River Lea, on their way to the factory gates. Some of them noticed a bundle lying in the reeds of the shallow, murky river but thought no more of it. Later that day, two Luton Corporation employees also observed the bundle when they made routine checks on the water levels. They waded out into the river and pulled the bundle open sufficiently to see what was inside. They recoiled in horror when their curiosity was rewarded by the sight of a pale, bloodied face of a woman.
When the police arrived on the scene, the bundle was pulled up onto the river bank for closer inspection. The naked body of a woman was revealed and her battered face showed that she had been the victim of a violent attack. The police surgeon looked at the facial injuries and mistakenly determined that the woman had been shot. He arranged for the body to be taken to the mortuary at Luton and Dunstable Hospital pending the arrival of the Home Office pathologist, Dr Keith Simpson. He carried out a post-mortem examination on the corpse which he judged to be a female aged between thirty and thirty-five. She was about five feet, three inches tall and her body had been doubled up and enclosed in four sacks. Her ankles had been tied together and the knees bound to her chest. Bruises on her back suggested she might have been pinned down in at attempt at strangulation, but that was not the cause of death. There were massive injuries to the face, including a split cheek, fractured jaw, a wound across one eye and another injury that had practically severed an ear. There were bruises on the elbows and hands, suggesting a struggle had taken place. The pathologist found vital reaction in bruises on the legs which he thought might indicate she was concussed following the heavy blows to the face but, not at that point, dead. The woman was five and a half months pregnant.
Simpson estimated that death had occurred thirty to forty minutes after the head injuries had been inflicted. The body had not been in the water longer than twenty-four hours. There was no jewellery on it and no distinguishing marks, although a denture appeared to be missing. At this stage, the victim was simply a Jane Doe. The police investigation was led by Chief Inspector William Chapman who organised a painstaking search of the scene. The river bed was dragged and the banks searched. Missing Persons Lists were consulted, house-to-house enquiries made and workers at the Vauxhall factory interviewed to determine if any of them had noticed signs of suspicious activity anywhere on the riverside. The dead woman’s identity proved elusive. There was no match for her fingerprints in criminal records so it was decided to circulate photographs of her face. This was not a decision arrived at easily because her features had been battered almost beyond recognition. Nevertheless, police photographers came up with a passable side portrait view which was published in the local newspaper in the hope that someone would recognise her and come forward with a name. The photograph was also shown at local cinemas and, as a result of this publicity, several people came forward and were invited to view the body although no positive identification resulted.
Chief Inspector Chapman decided to widen his search activities to include trawling through street refuse bins and council rubbish tips. This unappealing task finally rewarded searchers with a possible clue in the form of a fragment of clothing bearing a dry-cleaning label. The remnant of a black coat was traced to a dry-cleaning shop whose records showed that the garment belonged to Mrs Caroline Manton who lived in Regent Street, Luton.
DCI Chapman called at the house and his knock on the door was answered by a young girl. He asked if her mother was at home, to which the child’s response was that her mother had gone away. The detective’s instinct told him he was on the right track and, not least, because the girl bore a startling likeness to the dead woman’s photograph. He had also gleaned information about the girl’s grandmother whom he arranged to visit. Elderly Mrs Bavister provided him with evidence which would prove to be significant. The late Mrs Manton’s mother mentioned that she had received four letters from her daughter during the three months that she had been missing. The astute detective noticed various spelling mistakes in the writing and his keen eye was drawn to a missing letter ‘p’ in the word, ‘Hamstead’. His next port of call was to revisit the Manton family home where he intended to question Bertie Manton, the dead woman’s husband. He worked in the National Fire Service and was on duty in Luton when the detective called. Chapman located him at his fire station and learned that he was trapped in an unhappy marriage to Caroline, also known as Rene, and that they had quarrelled, allegedly over her extra-marital affairs. Manton said they parted company on 25 November when Rene left home and went to stay with relatives.
He professed not to recognise her from the police photograph he was shown, but identified as hers the handwriting in the letters received by her mother. The detective then asked Manton to write out a sentence which he indicated in one of the letters supposedly sent by his wife to her mother. This he did and, with Chapman looking over his shoulder, he spelled the word ‘Hampstead’ without its letter ‘p’. The final question the policeman asked Manton was the name of Rene’s dentist, which was readily supplied. When, in due course, the dentist was shown the photograph of Rene Manton, he instantly recognised her as a patient for whom he had fitted a denture in May 1943. Identification was placed beyond doubt when the patient’s dental records were matched to the dentition in the jaw of the dead woman.
When Manton was arrested and charged with murder, he promptly confessed. He apologised for lying when previously questioned and admitted killing his wife, although he explained that he had not intended to do so: ‘I lost my temper,’ he said. He told detectives that there had been a marital argument during lunch on 18 November when Rene threw a cup of hot tea into his face. At this point, he lost his temper and, picking up a heavy wooden stool, smashed it several times against her head. When his anger abated, he realised he had killed her and decided to hide the body and tidy up before his children returned from school. He stripped her clothes off, removed her jewellery and took the body down to the cellar as a temporary hiding place. To earn a little extra money to supplement his fireman’s wages, Manton ran a small greengrocery business from home for which he kept a supply of potato sacks. He now used four of these to conceal the body after tying it up at the knees and ankles. Manton then cleaned up the bloodstains and when his children returned home asking for their mother, he told them she had gone to stay with grandma.
After their evening meal, his eldest daughter went to visit a friend and Manton gave the other three children money to go to the cinema. While they were absent from the house and as darkness fell, he brought the body up from the cellar, balanced the sacked-up bundle over the handlebars of his bicycle and pushed it down the road towards the River Lea where he rolled it down the bank and into the water. In his statement, he said, ‘I then rode home and got the children’s supper ready. They never suspected anything.’ When detectives searched the house they found bloodstains in the living room which tested as Group O, the same as Mrs Manton. The noted fingerprint sleuth, Superintendent Fred Cherrill, did a search for prints and found one on an empty pickle jar. It matched Mrs Manton’s left thumb and, as Keith Simpson put it very succinctly, ‘That clinched the identification.’
While Bertie Manton’s cleaning-up operations had been well organised, they were not quite foolproof. He had been careful to dispose of the murder weapon, the wooden footstool, which he had broken up for firewood, but he had left sufficient blood traces in the house to enable crime technicians to match blood groups. Crucially, he did not burn his wife’s coat when he was clearing her clothes but cut it into pieces for disposal with the household refuse. When part of it turned up during the police fingertip searches and it was identified as belonging to Caroline Manton, his game w
as up.
Manton was sent for trial at Bedford Assizes in May 1944. His defence was manslaughter, argued along the lines that he was a mild-mannered man provoked by his wife who had strayed into the company of other men and taken to drink. His wife’s death was not premeditated and the extensive cover up he engaged in was for the benefit of his children. Keith Simpson’s evidence was telling, for he said he had found clear indications of an attempt to strangle Mrs Manton. The defendant’s response to this was that he remembered, ‘taking hold of her throat and pushing her against the wall. I may have grabbed her twice, but that was in my temper.’ This was an admission he had not previously made and it went a long way to ensure his conviction. Simpson described the outcome as, ‘a strangling and bashing murder’. He also reserved some scathing remarks, expressed privately, about the police surgeon who had first examined Mrs Manton’s body and could not distinguish blunt force trauma from gunshot wounds. The jury found Manton guilty and Mr Justice Singleton sentenced him to hang.
Despite the brutal nature of his crime, Manton had garnered considerable public sympathy and a petition for mercy collected 30,000 signatures. One of his young sons campaigned on his father’s behalf and sentence was commuted to life imprisonment on appeal. Manton became ill in prison and died at Parkhurst in November 1947. The investigation of this case had, once again, shown the invaluable nature of dental evidence in establishing identity. This was an area of forensic work in which Simpson was a pioneering influence. Credit was also due in the ‘Luton Sack Murder’ to the meticulous attention to detail demonstrated by Detective Inspector Chapman.
