Marlene had by now become so frustrated with Choegoe’s repeated failures that she had decided to take matters into her own hands. A few days after Choegoe's arrest, she approached a friend, Rob Newman, and asked if she could borrow his gun. When he refused, she asked if he would consider killing someone for her, a request that he laughed off. Newman fully believed that Marlene had been joking, but he had reason to doubt his initial impression a few days later when someone broke into his apartment and stole his 9mm Llama pistol. He immediately suspected Lehnberg, and said as much to the police officer who took his statement. The police, however, were slow in following up. Had they acted faster, they might well have averted a tragedy.
At around 8.30 a.m. on the morning of Monday, November 4, Marlene arrived unexpectedly at Marthinus Choegoe's home and asked him to go for a drive with her. Choegoe agreed and it was soon clear to him where they were headed. At around 9 a.m., Marlene pulled her car to a stop across the road from the van der Linde residence. She then reached into the glove compartment and removed a pistol. When she told Choegoe to follow her, he did so without hesitation.
Susanna van der Linde was shocked when she answered her front door and saw her husband’s lover, together with the man she’d recently had ejected from her neighborhood. She tried to close the door on them but they forced their way into the house. In the ensuing struggle, Susanna was thrown to the floor and pistol whipped by Marlene, who then instructed Choegoe to throttle her. While he was doing that, Marlene picked up a large pair of scissors from a nearby table and handed them to Choegoe. The hired assassin then delivered six vicious blows to his semi-conscious victim. Susanna van der Linde, whose only crime was being married to a philanderer, was soon bleeding to death on the floor.
Christiaan van der Linde was in the habit of phoning his wife from work each mid-morning. On this day, however, he got no reply and several subsequent calls also went unanswered. Concerned, he phoned his daughter, who worked at the nearby Tygerberg Hospital, and asked her to check on her mother during her lunch break. Zelda van der Linde duly arrived at around 1 p.m. to find the house locked. When her persistent knocking brought no response, she skirted the building and began peering through windows. It was then that she spotted her mother, lying on the living room floor in a pool of blood. She ran immediately to a neighbor and called the police.
The murder of Susanna van der Linde had been naively planned and clumsily executed. Yet despite Marlene Lehnberg being the obvious suspect, the police initially focused their investigation on Marthinus Choegoe who had been spotted several times lurking in the area. He, however, had gone into hiding and it would be a full week before the police eventually tracked him down. Under interrogation he quickly confessed, implicating Lehnberg, who was by now in Johannesburg, staying with relatives.
Lehnberg was brought in for questioning by members of the Brixton Murder and Robbery Squad on November 13. This elite unit has one of the highest closure rates for murder cases worldwide, and it wasn’t long before the interrogators had worn Lehnberg down. Initially, she admitted only that Christiaan van der Linde was her lover. Then she conceded that she’d spoken to Robert Newman about getting rid of Susanna van der Linde. However, she insisted that she’d been joking. As for Marthinus Choegoe, she swore that she knew him only as a patient at the hospital.
Sustained pressure, however, took its toll. Eventually, Lehnberg blurted out, “I took the guy there. I waited for him. He came back and I took him home.”
The “Scissors Murder” as it was dubbed by the media, drew massive public interest in South Africa, with hundreds of spectators jostling for seats inside the Cape Town Supreme Court as the matter came to trial. Lehnberg’s defense was that she had played no part in the actual killing but had waited outside for Choegoe. This of course, would not have absolved her of responsibility but Lehnberg stuck steadfastly to her story, even when it was proven untrue by eyewitness testimony. Her car had been seen standing unoccupied outside the death house, indicating that she had been inside when Susanna van der Linde was killed.
In the end, both Lehnberg and Choegoe were found guilty. And with no extenuating circumstances, there could be only one outcome. Both were sentenced to death. Those sentences, however, would be commuted on appeal. In July 1975, Marlene Lehnberg was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment. Marthinus Choegoe got 15 years.
Neither of the killers would serve out their full terms. Choegoe was the first to be released, walking free in June 1986, having served less than 12 years behind bars. He later became an evangelical preacher. Marlene Lehnberg was paroled in December of the same year and immediately caused controversy by selling her story to a Sunday newspaper. This prompted South African lawmakers to pass the so-called ‘Lehnberg laws,’ which sought to prevent convicted criminals profiting from their crimes.
And what of the third member of the tragic triangle? Christiaan van der Linde left Cape Town shortly after his wife’s death and moved to the small town of Krugersdorp, where Susanna was interred at a family plot. He visited her grave daily for the rest of his life and died a broken man in 1983, having never forgiven himself for his wife’s death. As he once told a reporter: “My dear wife is dead. I wish to God that I had never set eyes on Marlene Lehnberg.”
Murder in the Moonlight
The town of Gatton lies in the Lockyer Valley, some 60 miles west of Brisbane in Queensland, Australia. It is a sleepy, agricultural enclave, renowned for its prodigious vegetable production, which has earned it the nickname, “The Salad Bowl.” In a 2011 census, the town registered a population of just 7,000. In 1898, when our story takes place, it was more sparsely populated even than that.
It was December 26, 1898 and 29-year-old Michael Murphy was bored. It was all very well spending the Christmas holidays on the family farm but there were only so many evenings he could take sitting around, swopping stories with his parents and siblings. And so when Michael heard of a dance to be held at the Divisional Board Hall in Gatton, some eight miles from the farm, he was determined to attend. After borrowing a two-wheel sulky cart from his brother-in-law, William McNeill, and persuading his sisters, Norah, 27, and Ellen, 19, to accompany him, Michael set out into the moonlit evening. He told his parents that they would only be a few hours.
Over in Gatton, however, the dance organizers were in somewhat of a quandary. The musician they’d hired had not shown up and the early arrivals at the dance venue had soon drifted away. Eventually they decided to call off the event. The Murphys, oblivious to this, continued along the path, the sulky listing on a slightly wobbly wheel.
It was a pleasant evening with a full moon providing more than adequate light. The trio passed by Moran’s paddock and crested Moran’s Hill. Further on, they went by the butcher’s shop owned by local farmer, Arthur Clarke. It was a short while further on that they encountered a fellow traveler who told them that the dance in Gatton had been canceled. Disappointed, Michael turned the sulky around and headed back to the Murphy farm. It was 8:15 p.m.
The following morning, the Murphy clan awoke to find that Michael, Norah and Ellen had not returned. This raised immediate alarm, although there was no suspicion of foul play. Crime in the Lockyer Valley was virtually unheard of. Perhaps they’d met with an accident. After no more than a minute’s debate, it was decided that William McNeill would set off towards Gatton on horseback, to look for them.
The sulky’s path was easy to follow, since the wobbly wheel made a distinctive imprint. McNeill had soon tracked it along the same path that Michael had taken the previous evening – along Moran’s paddock, over Moran’s Hill, past the butcher’s shop. Then a mile or so on, it appeared that the cart had made a turn and headed back the way it had come. Not much further on, it had veered from the path entirely, taking Tent Hill Road and then heading into Moran’s paddock. It was there, to his relief, that McNeill spotted his in-laws, apparently asleep on the ground.
McNeill geed his horse and trotted towards them, convinced that they’d wake from t
heir slumber as they heard his approach. But as he got closer, he spotted his sulky, teetering on its side, the horse that had pulled it lying dead on the ground. It was then that he first suspected that something might be wrong. “Still I did not think they had been murdered,” he later told the police. “But as I got closer I saw the clothing of the girls disarranged and then I could see the ants crawling all over them.” Without even bothering to check for signs of life, McNeill turned his horse around and raced towards Gatton to alert the police.
The first policeman on the scene was the officer in charge at Gatton, Sergeant William Arrell. He was met by a gruesome sight. Michael Murphy had been killed by a bullet fired at close range to the back of the head. Ellen had apparently been bludgeoned to death, her head injuries so severe that her brain matter was exposed. Norah had also been battered, the force of the blows shattering her skull. A strap was pulled tightly around her throat and there was a gash on her cheek which exposed the bone. Both women had their hands bound behind their backs and from the state of their clothing, Arrell believed that they had been raped. A postmortem would later confirm this assessment.
The tiny police force at Gatton was, of course, not equipped to deal with an investigation of this magnitude. A call therefore went out to Brisbane and Inspector Frederic Charles Urquhart, head of the Brisbane CIB, was dispatched to Gatton, bringing two detectives with him. Unfortunately, no one had thought to secure the crime scene. By the time Urquhart arrived on Wednesday morning, the site had been visited by dozens of curious onlookers. Whatever evidence there might have been had been trampled into the dirt.
The morning of Urquhart’s arrival also marked the funeral of the Murphy siblings, with Catholic priest, Father Daniel Walsh, delivering a moving eulogy to over 1,000 mourners. The funeral procession that headed out from the church to the Gatton cemetery was reportedly more than a mile long.
Over the weeks that followed Inspector Urquhart and his men conducted their investigation in earnest. In conjunction with the Gatton force, they collected over 3,000 statements, most of them from people who really had nothing to contribute to the inquiry. The result was a mish-mash of second hand testimony which served no purpose other than to bog down the investigation. Add to that the lack of physical evidence from the contaminated crime scene and it is easy to see how the police were soon chasing their tails. Eventually, the case went cold. It would remain so ever more and become one of Australia’s greatest ever murder mysteries.
So who killed the Murphys? And why? Numerous suspects were considered during the course of the investigation and many more names have been proffered in the years since.
The man considered the most likely suspect was a laborer by the name of Thomas Day (known also as Theo Farmer or Thomas Furner). Day had arrived in the area just two weeks earlier and was employed by the butcher, Arthur Clarke, whose farm the Murphys had passed on the night of the murders. Interestingly, Clark was suspected in another murder, one that had occurred in nearby Oxley just a few weeks earlier. On that occasion, 15-year-old Alfred Stephen Hill had been killed, his pony shot in the head, much like the Murphy horse.
Adding fuel to the belief that Thomas Day was the killer, was the fact that he disappeared from Gatton within days of being questioned by the police. He showed up next in Sydney two years later, when he was admitted to hospital with an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound, from which he eventually died. Reportedly, he left behind a suicide note, saying that he was present during the Gatton Murders and was haunted by visions of seeing the victims’ heads being bashed in.
The actual note, however, has never been seen. But even if it was real it only compounds the mystery. Day admitted to being present, not to being the killer. And if he wasn’t responsible, who actually wielded the gun, and the bludgeon?
A number of candidates have been suggested over the years, including an American-born itinerant laborer named Richard Burgess, who was in the area at the time and was known to the police as a violent sex offender. Another theory suggests that it was an inside job, with members of the Murphy clan involved in the killing. But what possible motive could they have had?
Yet another hypothesis has Father Daniel Walsh, the same priest who conducted the funeral service, as the killer. This one has the padre involved in an illicit affair with Ellen Murphy and killing her to ensure her silence. Norah and Michael were just unfortunate enough to be caught in the crossfire. According to this story, the police were well aware who the killer was but were under orders to deliberately botch the investigation. The branches of the conspiracy apparently reached to the top echelons of the Australian government and all the way to the Vatican. Even ignoring the fact that Father Walsh had an alibi for the time of the murders, this is the most outlandish theory of all.
No, even a cursory investigation of the facts tells us that this was a sex crime. We know also that the murders must have been committed at the spur of the moment, since the victims were not expected to be traveling along that stretch of road on the night they were killed. It is likely that the killer saw them coming, flagged down their cart, and then forced them into the paddock at gunpoint. Michael Murphy would have been dispatched quickly by a bullet to the head. His sisters would then have been tied up and raped before being bludgeoned to death. And which suspect does this point to? I would suggest, Thomas Day.
No less than eight witnesses had seen a man standing by the sliprails at Moran’s paddock, near the scene of the murders, and at least one identified him as “Clarke’s man” i.e. Thomas Day. It was he who was seen by his employer with suspicious blood spatters on his shirt on the morning after the murders, he who was seen vigorously scrubbing the shirt despite his employer instructing him not to do so and to hand the shirt over to the police for examination. It was he who promptly disappeared once the police turned up the heat on him. Lastly, it was he who was present in Oxley at the time that a very similar murder occurred, that of Alfred Stephen Hill.
Thomas Day was in all likelihood a serial killer who saw the opportunity to kill and rape and responded on impulse, as such killers are prone to do. There might well be other murders that we are unaware of, for which he bears responsibility. Day was, in fact, linked by one writer to a double homicide in Carcoar, New South Wales. Like the Gatton case, these murders will probably remain unsolved.
The End of the Affair
Ruth Neilson was born in the town of Rhyl, on the north east coast of Wales, on October 9, 1926, the third of six children. Her mother was a Belgian refugee, her father, a musician who was often away, plying his trade on Atlantic cruise ships. During her childhood, the family moved to Basingstoke, and later to London. By then, Ruth had grown into a precocious 14-year-old, who had already quit school and was working as a waitress. It was while thus employed that the 17-year-old Ruth became pregnant by a married Canadian soldier in 1944. Her son, Clare Andrea Neilson (known to the family as Andy) was born the next year, although Ruth played very little part in his upbringing, those duties falling mainly to the boy’s grandmother.
Ruth Neilson, in truth, was never cut out for the role of a stay-at-home mom. She had by now adopted a whole new persona. Petite and pretty, and with hair dyed platinum blonde, she was a nightclub hostess with a sideline in nude modelling. She was also a part-time prostitute and, in 1950, she became pregnant by one of her regular customers. Unwilling to take on the responsibility of another child, she had an illegal abortion, terminating the pregnancy in its third month.
In November 1950, Ruth accepted a marriage proposal from one of the regulars at the hostess club where she worked. George Ellis was 16 years her senior, a heavy drinker with a violent temper and an extremely possessive nature. Unsurprisingly, he and Ruth clashed frequently and when she fell pregnant, he denied paternity, resulting in the marriage breaking down. Ruth’s daughter, Georgina, was born in 1951. With no financial support from the child’s father, Ruth was forced to move back in with her parents and to return to work as a nightclub hostess. It was two ye
ars later, in 1953, that she met David Blakely, and the seeds of disaster, for both of their lives, were sown.
Ruth was at the time managing a drinking establishment called the Little Club, where Blakely was a regular. He was handsome and well-educated, a “toff” in the parlance of the day. But he was also a womanizer and a heavy drinker. At the time he met Ruth, he was in fact, engaged to another woman. Still, the attraction between them was instant and mutual and it wasn’t long before Blakely had moved into Ruth’s apartment above the club. It was only then that she began to see the dark side of her new paramour. The two of them fought regularly, with Blakely not afraid to use his fists on the five-foot-two Ruth to settle a dispute. The relationship was extremely volatile, with Blakely moving in and out of the apartment several times. In the wake of all of this turbulence, Ruth became pregnant again. Again she underwent an abortion. And perhaps seeking some stability among all of this discord, she took on a new lover.
Desmond Cussens was considerably more staid than David Blakely. During the war, he’d served as an RAF pilot. Now he was the director of a family business, a retail tobacconist with outlets in London and Wales. It wasn’t long before Ruth had moved into his luxury apartment near Oxford Street, and become his mistress.
Murder Most Vile Volume 12: 18 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Murder Books) Page 7
