And it was in her role as manager of Bradfield Tentor Tarpaulins that Miss Bradfield first met George Ball, a callow youth of some twenty years, diminutive in stature, with a stooped posture and an odd loping gait. Ball was several rungs down the social pecking order from Miss Bradfield and yet, she saw in him some potential. Starting off as a porter in March 1909, Ball had eventually become an office boy, responsible for keeping the place tidy and for general errands and admin work. In December 1912, Samuel Eltoft was employed in Ball’s old job and the two struck up a friendship of sorts. The relationship between Ball, Eltoft, and their employer was cordial, according to other members of staff. But there was no familiarity. Miss Bradfield was the boss and was treated with the appropriate decorum.
Wednesday, December 10, 1913, was a day like any other at the offices of Bradfield Tentor Tarpaulins. Christina Bradfield, as was her habit, opened the business premises at 8 a.m. Ball and Eltoft arrived at around 8:30 and Miss Bradfield scolded them for tardiness but that was soon forgotten and the business day proceeded as usual.
Sometime between 5 and 6 p.m., John Bradfield called at the office and found his sister present, along with Margaret Venables, a typist. Ball and Eltoft were also there, engaged with stamping the company initials onto a pile of hessian bags. Mr. Bradfield spoke of the need to have those bags delivered to a customer the next day and asked Christina to keep the boys working late if necessary. A short while after he left, Miss Venables departed, leaving Christina alone in the shop with Ball and Eltoft. That was the last time anyone, bar the two youths, saw Christina Bradfield alive.
At around 7p.m., Walter Musker Eaves, a ship’s steward on the Empress of Britain was standing on Old Hall Street, waiting for a date. The lady in question was late and Eaves was pacing impatiently outside Bradfield’s tarpaulin shop when the wind caught a shutter and it flew open, fell on his hat and damaged it. Immediately a youth came rushing out of the shop, picked up the shutter, and apologized. Eaves was about to reprimand him when another young man, this one slightly older, emerged from the building. He was carrying a white cash bag from which he withdrew two shillings and handed them to Eaves in compensation for the damaged hat.
Eaves accepted the money and the two men then went back inside, closing the door behind them. When they emerged moments later, the younger of the two was pushing a heavily laden hand cart, with a green tarpaulin drawn over it. While the older of the men locked up the shop, the younger set off towards Leeds Street, pushing the cart. The other man soon caught up with him and they disappeared into the night together.
The following morning, Thursday, December 11, the staff of Bradfield Tentor Tarpaulins arrived at work to find the premises unlocked as usual. Ball and Eltoft were in attendance (the former sporting a scratch across his cheek) but there was no sign of Miss Bradfield. When the shop foreman, William Okhill, asked Ball how he’d gained access to the premises, Ball said that Miss Bradfield had given him the keys the previous evening because she expected to be in late. Okhill thought it unusual that Miss Bradfield would have handed the keys to such a junior staff member but he accepted the explanation.
At 10.40 am, John Bradfield arrived at the office and asked about his sister. Ball then repeated his story, saying that Miss Bradfield had said she’d be in at around nine. Bradfield then asked Miss Venables to phone Mary Holden, his sister’s landlord, to enquire about her. Miss Holden said that Christina had not come home the previous night and had not sent word.
Alarmed now, Bradfield sent Eltoft to the home of his other sister, Annie Jacques, to ask whether Christina had spent the night with her. She hadn’t and by now there’d been a startling new development. The afternoon papers were carrying front page reports of a body found in a nearby canal. Reading the description of the woman’s clothing and of a unique necklace she was wearing, John Bradfield came to the dreadful conclusion that the victim might be his sister, Christina.
The corpse had been found by Francis Robinson, the captain of a flat boat plying the Leeds – Liverpool Canal. It had been floating near the third lock at Lightbody Street, close to the Stanley Basin. Severe bruising to the head and face suggested that the victim had been bludgeoned to death. She’d then been sewn into a large grain sack which was weighed down with two pieces of iron. Obviously, the intention was to sink the corpse, but the churning waters near the lock had bobbed the body to the surface, thus foiling the killer’s attempt at disposal.
And the police soon had a suspect, after Walter Musker Eaves came forward to report the strange incident outside the tarpaulin shop the previous evening. Another witness, dock worker George Black, reported seeing a youth pushing a handcart near Lock Fields at around 8.30 p.m. on Wednesday evening. There was a slightly older man with him, Black said, apparently directing proceedings. The two of them appeared to be heading with their cart in the direction of the canal.
The identities of the men in question were not difficult to fathom. However, while Samuel Eltoft was easy to find, it appeared that George Ball had flown the coop. As a manhunt was launched to find him, the police took the 18-year-old Eltoft into custody. He immediately implicated Ball in the murder and denied having any direct involvement himself.
According to Eltoft’s account, he and Ball had worked late at the shop on the night in question. At around 7 pm, Miss Bradfield had said he could go home. However, as he was leaving, Ball told him to wait for him outside. Eltoft had done as he was told. About half an hour later, Ball had emerged, pulling the handcart with something heavy on it, covered by a tarpaulin. Ball had claimed that it was rubbish that he was going to throw into the canal and instructed Eltoft to help him. Eltoft had then begun pulling the handcart, bringing the load all the way to Lock Fields where it had become bogged down. Ball then told him to wait there and had removed the sack from the handcart. He’d dragged the sack the last hundred yards to the canal and thrown it in. Afterwards, the two men had walked together until they’d parted company at the corner of Old Hall Street and Chapel Street. Eltoft claimed that he never knew, nor asked, what was in the bag. Nonetheless, he was charged, along with George Ball, with causing the death of Christina Catherine Bradfield.
The hunt for Ball, meanwhile, was getting nowhere. He’d last been seen on Breck Road at around 8.30 pm on Thursday, December 11. Now, he was nowhere to be found - not at his lodgings, not at his regular pubs, not at the Pavilion movie theater which he was known to frequent. Speculation was that he’d moved to Birmingham or London, or perhaps that he’d even left the country.
Messages were dispatched to ships at sea, asking them to check their passenger lists, lest Ball was onboard. When these measures failed to turn up their quarry, the police offered a £50 reward. They also brought in sniffer dogs, to see if they could pick up Ball’s trail. By December 19, the police were getting desperate and were even considering offers of help from various psychics. The newspapers, meanwhile, ran stories that suggested Ball might have committed suicide, perhaps by throwing himself into the selfsame canal network where he’d tried to dispose of Christina Bradfield’s remains.
But George Ball had done no such thing, and neither had he fled the city. He was hiding in a lodging house barely a mile from his usual digs. He’d made some effort to disguise himself, changing his hairstyle, shaving his distinctive eyebrows, and wearing an eye-patch and a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles. Unfortunately for Ball, a man who’d known him since childhood saw him walking along a road and recognized his distinctive loping gait. The man followed Ball to his rooming house and then reported his whereabouts to the police. Ball was arrested at his lodgings, where he’d been staying under the name Albert King, on December 20. He surrendered without a fight.
George Ball was brought before magistrate Stuart Deacon on Monday morning, December 21 and charged with murder. Asked if he had anything to say, he launched into a fanciful tale, claiming that Miss Bradfield had been beaten to death by an unnamed assailant who had held him and Eltoft at bay with a revolver. The murderer had t
hen ordered him and Eltoft to clean up the crime scene and get rid of the body, warning them that he’d hunt them down and kill them if they did not comply. It was a quite ludicrous story but one that Ball would stick with throughout his trial, even when it was not supported by his co-accused, Samuel Eltoft.
So what really happened on that fateful night in December 1913? As Ball continued to deny responsibility and Eltoft claimed that he did not witness the murder, we shall never know for sure. But the version of events put forward by the prosecution at Ball’s trial has the ring of truth to it. The motive was robbery, pure and simple. As the manageress of the retail store, Christina Bradfield was known to carry the day’s take, sometimes as much as £20, home with her. It was in order to rob her of this money that Ball had attacked and killed her, beating her to death with a bludgeon. Eltoft’s story, that he was standing outside at the time Miss Bradfield was murdered was generally accepted, although his insistence that he did not know what was in the handcart was not. A sovereign found in his room, which was believed to have come from Miss Bradfield’s purse, bore witness to the lie.
George Ball and Samuel Eltoft were brought before the Liverpool Assizes on February 2, 1914. Sticking steadfastly to his story of the mysterious intruder, Ball was found guilty and sentenced to death, the sentence raucously applauded by the crowd of some 6,000 gathered outside the courtroom. Eltoft was acquitted of murder but found guilty of being an accessory and sentenced to four years in prison.
Justice moved swiftly in those days. George Ball went to the gallows at 9 a.m. on Thursday, February 26, 1914, just three weeks after his sentence was handed down and less than three months from the day on which he’d murdered Christina Bradfield. The Liverpool Echo reported that a large crowd gathered outside Walton Goal on the day of the execution, and cheered when Ball’s death certificate was posted at 9:20.
Many condemned men eventually break and admit their guilt in the hours leading up to their execution but this was not the case with Ball. He went to his death still insisting that he was innocent of the murder of Christina Bradfield.
Justice for Buddy
The prisoner was strapped to the gurney with wrist and ankle restraints holding her in a cruciform position. The attending physician leaned over and positioned the heart monitor on her chest, checked that it was working and then nodded to the guards standing on either side of the gurney. They, in turn, got the wheeled contraption rolling, down the short corridor and into the death chamber at the Huntsville Unit of the Texas Department of Corrections, in Gatesville. The gurney was positioned in front of the viewing window, its curtains still drawn, preventing those invited to view the execution from seeing the next part of the preparations. That involved inserting two intravenous tubes - one in each arm. The tubes ran back through an opening in the wall, where the executioner waited. On a signal from the warden, he flicked a switch, initiating a gradual flow of saline.
Now the curtains were drawn back, allowing those in the auditorium to look in. The warden, voice steady, asked the question he was required to. “Ms. Basso,” he said. “Do you have any final statement?”
“No sir,” the condemned replied, her voice choked with emotion. She appeared fearful, desperate, confused. Whipping her head to the left, she peered into the gloom beyond the glass and spotted two friends among the assembled audience. “Hello,” she mouthed, then with a wan smile and with tears glistening in her eyes, “Goodbye.”
The warden had now given his signal and the executioner had triggered the flow of drugs into the IV tubes. Moments later, the prisoner’s head lolled and she began to snore, loudly at first, but tapering off rapidly into silence. At 6:26 p.m. on February 5, 2014, 11 minutes after the flow of pentobarbital was triggered, Suzanne Margaret Basso was declared dead. She was the 14th woman executed in the United States since the Supreme Court lifted the moratorium on capital punishment in 1976.
It is easy to feel sympathy for Suzanne Basso, given the absolute desperation of her final moments. One can only imagine the terror and despair a person must feel at such a time. But, in truth, Basso’s end had been easy, a gradual descent into a deep and painless sleep. The same could not be said for the unfortunate man whose savage murder had landed her in the death chamber.
Louis “Buddy” Musso was 59 years old. Or at least, that was the biological age of the mentally-challenged New Jersey resident. His mental age, according to friends and family, was equivalent to that of a child aged between seven and ten years. And yet Buddy lived a fulfilled and happy life. He had his own apartment in an assisted living facility; he held down a job as a bagger at a grocery store; he managed his own financial affairs. The job, admittedly, did not pay much, but Social Security payments made up the difference. All in all, life was good.
If there was one thing missing in Buddy’s life, it was the love and companionship of a woman. Despite his disability, Buddy Musso had previously been married and had fathered a son with his wife. But his wife had died of cancer in 1980, and 17 years on, Buddy still felt a hole in his life.
Then, in July of 1997, everything changed. Buddy was at a church carnival in New Jersey when he struck up a conversation with a woman named Sue. Sue was 11 years younger than Buddy, somewhat plain and heavyset. But she was kind and attentive, unlike most of the women he’d met since his wife’s death. They always seemed to talk down to him, to snigger behind his back. Sue appeared genuinely interested in what he had to say. Over the days that followed, they saw each other several times and Bud learned more about his new friend. She said that she was originally from upstate New York, that she was widowed, and that she might be interested in a relationship if she met the right man. Buddy had begun to hope by then that he might be that man. But just when things appeared to be moving in that direction, Sue announced suddenly that she had to return to her home in Jacinto City, Texas.
Buddy was heartbroken. Over the year that followed, he and Sue kept up a long-distance relationship, writing and phoning each other regularly. When, in June 1998, she suggested that he move to Texas to be with her, he jumped at the chance. Over the protestations of his friends and family, he resigned from his job, packed up his belongings, and headed west.
What Buddy didn’t know, what he couldn’t have known, was that Sue Basso was not the kind-hearted soul that she presented herself as. She was a liar and a manipulator, a woman with a violent temper who had once been accused of sexually abusing her son. She was also not a widow but was still married to her first husband, James Peek. That, however, had not stopped her starting an affair with Carmine Basso in 1993, and adopting his name. When Basso died in 1997, Suzanne was suspected of involvement in his death, although no charges were ever brought.
Buddy Musso did not know any of these things but he found out a lot about Sue’s true character once he arrived in Texas. She was an entirely different person from the caring woman he’d got to know in New Jersey, the woman who had written so lovingly to him over the past year. In fact, she was downright abusive. She kicked and beat him, swore at him and called him a “retard.” He was forced to do all of the chores around the house, not only for Sue, but for her son J.D. O’Malley, and for her friends, Bernice, Craig, and Hope Ahrens, and for Terence Singleton (Hope's fiancé). He was regularly beaten by each of these adults, usually at Sue’s urging. When he wasn’t working he was required to sit or kneel on a small mat in the middle of the hall. Any attempt to move from that position earned him a beating, sometimes with a belt buckle and sometimes with a baseball bat.
Buddy’s close friend, Al Becker, was meanwhile having a hard time contacting him. Each time he tried, he’d get Suzanne on the line and she refused to let Buddy come to the phone. In desperation, Al tried contacting the Texas authorities, but walked into a bureaucratic brick wall.
In July 1998, Suzanne Basso applied unsuccessfully to have herself named as the representative payee for Buddy’s Social Security benefits. She also took out an insurance policy on his life, naming herself as his “wife to be,
” and sole beneficiary. The policy carried a special clause, guaranteeing Suzanne an additional $65,000 payout in the event that Buddy’s death was the result of a violent crime. In the meanwhile, Sue had also coerced Buddy into making a Will, naming her as the sole beneficiary of his estate.
With all the financial pieces now in place, Suzanne stepped up her campaign of abuse against Buddy. The poor man was kicked and beaten by Basso and her cohorts. He was struck repeatedly with a baseball bat on the buttocks, back, and groin area. Both Basso and Hope Ahrens worked him over with belt buckles; he was burnt with lit cigarettes and with a red-hot poker. Sue Basso, who weighed over 300 pounds, jumped repeatedly on top of him. When the badly injured man asked for an ambulance they laughed at him. O'Malley, Singleton, and Craig Ahrens then dragged him to the bathroom, threw him into the tub and scrubbed him down with bleach and Pine-Sol cleaning fluid, using a wire brush on his skin. This cruel form of torture was meted out several times and it was on one of these occasions that the severely injured Buddy finally gave up the ghost and died.
On August 28, 1999, a couple of joggers found Buddy Musso’s body dumped in a ditch beside a road in Galena Park, Texas. The lack of bloodstains on the corpse led investigators to believe that he’d been killed elsewhere, then washed down and dressed before been dumped. The intention was clearly to destroy forensic evidence and it was soon evident why. The autopsy on Buddy’s body revealed one of the most horrendous murders any of the investigators could remember.
Murder Most Vile Volume 12: 18 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Murder Books) Page 4
