Barbaric Murders - Child victims, lady-killers and bodies in boxes (Infamous Murderers)

by Rodney Castleden

A few days later, Oscar Slater was released, though not pardoned.

  Arthur Conan Doyle despaired at the sheer wickedness of the Scottish authorities who refused to admit that they were wrong. But he also despaired of Slater. It says much about Conan Doyle’s probity that he was prepared to put himself to considerable trouble and expense to help a man he really disliked intensely. Because Slater was released but not pardoned, his case had to be re-opened and re-tried if he was to be exonerated. It would be only then that Slater could apply for compensation for the eighteen years of wrongful imprisonment.

  Conan Doyle and others gave money so that Slater could pay the legal fees. In the end Slater was cleared of all the charges brought against him and awarded £6000 in compensation. Conan Doyle naturally assumed Slater would pay back his supporters for the legal fees they had given him, which is what the honourable Sir Arthur would have done in the same circumstances. But Slater was embittered by his time in prison, and resented the fact that he had been put in a position where he had been forced to buy a re-trial; he should not have been asked to pay anything. He regarded the £6000 as his. Conan Doyle was a wealthy man and did not really need to have back the £1000 he had put into Slater’s fund, but he was shocked that Slater was not prepared to pay him back. Slater was not an honourable man. Conan Doyle wrote to Slater, ‘You seem to have taken leave of your senses. If you are indeed responsible for your actions, then you are the most ungrateful as well as the most foolish person whom I have ever known.’

  When Oscar Slater died in 1949, the newspaper notice read, ‘Oscar Slater Dead at 78, Reprieved Murderer, Friend of A. Conan Doyle’. Slater, Conan Doyle and many other people had gone to a lot of trouble to prove that Slater was not a reprieved murderer. It is doubtful whether Conan Doyle ever thought of Slater as a friend, either. But then, not everything we read in the newspapers is true.

  Oscar Slater certainly did not kill Marion Gilchrist, but somebody did. Who was the real murderer? Nobody knows who killed Miss Gilchrist, though several theories have been floated. There are some significant pieces of evidence that point to the possible motive and the curious ‘coincidence’ of Helen Lambie’s popping out to buy a newspaper.

  Marion Gilchrist was well-off. She had collected jewellery for years. By the time she was murdered she had a collection worth £3,000 then, and probably worth £60,000 in today’s money. To build this collection, she often bought from shady back-street dealers. It may possibly have been one of these who attacked her. Helen Lambie also revealed that she was expected to make herself scarce whenever one of these less than legitimate dealers was due to call. Was there rather more than coincidence to Helen Lambie’s absence from the building at the time of the murder? Had she been asked to make herself scarce by Miss Gilchrist so that she could have a confidential conversation with a caller she was expecting? Or was she asked to make herself scarce by the murderer himself? Either way, it seems likely that Helen Lambie may have known more about the situation than she ever revealed.

  The murderer was also able to let himself in with his own doorkey, or was let in by Miss Gilchrist; either way, he must have been well known to the old lady, probably a regular dealer, a friend, or a relative who hoped to inherit. Maybe the theft of the brooch was meant to put the police off the scent and make them think the motive was robbery, when the real motive was something else, such as inheritance. And that brings us back to William Park’s intriguing theory about the unnamed nephew.

  PART THREE: BODIES IN BOXES

  Kate Webster

  ‘and the Barnes Mystery’

  Kate Webster was born in 1849 in County Wexford in Ireland. She was born as Catherine Lawler and started her life of crime very early on. Most of her crimes were small-scale: theft, deception and dishonesty. She claimed that she married a sea captain called Webster, by whom she had four children, but it is not certain that any of that is true. She stole the money for the ferry across the Irish Sea and sailed to Liverpool, where she went on stealing. At the age of eighteen she was sentenced to four years in prison for theft.

  Released from prison she moved to London to make a sort of fresh start. She became a domestic servant, a cleaner. She would clean conventionally, though fairly incompetently, for a while, before cleaning out her employer’s valuables and then moving on to a new job.

  In 1873 she was living in Rose Gardens, Hammersmith. She got on well with her neighbours, Henry and Ann Porter, who were to reappear later in her story and become implicated in the most bizarre way imaginable. Then she moved to Notting Hill, where she became cook and housekeeper to Captain Woolbest. While she was there she met a man called Strong, by whom she became pregnant. After the baby boy was born in April 1874, Strong disappeared. Kate Webster fell back on stealing and this in turn led to her being sent to prison again.

  Coming out of Wandsworth Prison in 1877, Kate looked once again for domestic work. She worked for a while for the Mitchell family in Teddington, but complained that the Mitchells did not have anything worth stealing. She shifted from job to job, sometimes using the name Webster, sometimes Lawler. She became friendly with another domestic called Sarah Crease, and it was Sarah who looked after Kate’s son while Kate was in prison.

  A photograph of Kate Webster exists. She stares blankly into the camera. The face is plain, severe, determined, with a cruel and aggressive mouth and deep-set staring eyes. Looking like that, every inch a murderess, it is surprising that anyone employed her at all.

  In January 1879 Kate Webster took a job as a domestic servant with Mrs Julia Thomas at No 2 Vine Cottages, Park Road, Richmond. It went well at first. Kate was happy working for Mrs Thomas who was a rather eccentric woman in her fifties, and fairly well off. Problems began to develop when it became apparent to Mrs Thomas that Kate’s work was poor. Mrs Thomas was also irritated by Kate’s frequent visits to local pubs. A series of reprimands followed, and then Mrs Thomas gave Kate Webster notice. This period of notice was fatal. Mrs Thomas seems to have realised it, too, as she started asking friends and relatives to come and stay with her. She did not like being alone in the house with Kate Webster.

  The day of Kate’s dismissal arrived, 28 February, and she still had no new job to go to, so she pleaded with Mrs Thomas to let her stay over the weekend. Mrs Thomas reluctantly agreed.

  On the Sunday, 2 March, 1879, Mrs Thomas went to church in the morning as usual. This Sunday afternoon, Kate was to visit her son, who was being looked after by Sarah Crease. She called in at a pub on her way back to Vine Cottages. She arrived back late, which annoyed Mrs Thomas, who expected Kate to be back before she went to the evening service. Mrs Thomas rashly took this opportunity to deliver one last reprimand, which with hindsight seems foolish, in that Kate Webster was supposed to be leaving for good the next day.

  At church, Mrs Thomas appeared agitated. It is possible that Kate’s behaviour had been threatening. It is possible that Mrs Thomas suspected Kate might be stealing her possessions. Yet, when the evening service was over, Mrs Thomas unwisely did not persuade any her friends to escort her home. She went home alone – and to her death.

  What happened when Julia Thomas got home is unclear. Kate Webster’s later version of events was straightforward enough. ‘We had an argument which ripened into a quarrel, and in the height of my anger and rage I threw her from the top of the stairs to the ground floor. She had a heavy fall. She was seriously injured and I became agitated at what had happened, lost all control of myself and to prevent her screaming or getting me into trouble, I caught her by the throat and in the struggle I choked her.’

  Mrs Thomas’s next-door neighbour, Mrs Ives, heard the fall, but that was followed by silence. Probably there was no struggle. Probably Kate Webster’s confession was full of lies.

  Kate Webster then decided to try to cover up what had happened by disposing of the body. She began to dismember it, with the idea of dropping it in bits into the river. She cut off Mrs Thomas’s head with a razor and meat saw. Then she cut off the arms and legs. She b
oiled the torso and limbs in a copper on the stove and burnt the internal organs. Even Kate Webster found all of this revolting, but she kept at it until she had burnt or boiled all the body parts. She packed them all into a wooden box, all except the head and one foot, which she could not fit in. It was said later that she even tried to sell the boiled-off fat as dripping, but this seems unlikely.

  Mrs Thomas’s next-door neighbour, Mrs Ives, noticed a strange smell, which was probably the burning.

  Kate threw the spare foot onto a manure heap, but was unsure what to do with the head. She put it into a black bag for the moment and set about cleaning up the cottage. She borrowed one of Mrs Thomas’s silk dresses to visit the Porters on the Tuesday afternoon, taking Mrs Thomas’s head with her, in the black bag. She told the Porters she had inherited a house in Richmond from an aunt; she was going to sell it and return to Ireland. She asked Henry Porter if he knew of an estate agent who would help her. Kate had given Henry Porter and his son Robert the black bag to carry from the station, via two pubs, and the Porters both noticed how heavy the bag was. It is not at all clear why she took Julia Thomas’s head on this macabre outing, or how she disposed of it. As far as I know it was never found.

  Kate enlisted the help of young Robert Porter to help her move the wooden box. She and Robert together carried the box to Richmond Bridge, where she said someone was meeting her to collect it. The young man was told to walk on; she would catch him up. Robert did as he was told, but he had not walked on very far when he heard a splash, as of something heavy hitting the water. A few moments later Kate caught up with him again.

  The box was picked out of the water by a coalman, who must have had a very nasty surprise when he opened it. He reported it to Barnes police station. The police got a doctor to look at the remains, and he confirmed that they were parts of a female and that they had been boiled. Without the head, identification was impossible.

  Meanwhile Kate Webster took to calling herself Mrs Thomas and wearing all of the dead woman’s finery. She sold the contents of the cottage to a Mr John Church, who was a general dealer. The two of them seem to get on well, and were later seen drinking together. The real Mrs Thomas had not been reported missing yet, so the newspapers called the case ‘the Barnes Mystery’. The Porters read about the case in their newspaper. Young Robert noticed that the box described in the press was much like the one Kate Webster had made him carry to Richmond Bridge for her. He had good reason to remember it, and the very peculiar way in which it had ended up in the Thames.

  Kate agreed a price for the furniture and some of the clothes with Mr Church and he arranged to have them moved. This aroused the curiosity of Mrs Ives, who asked Kate what was going on. In amongst the dresses, Mrs Church later found a purse and a diary belonging to Mrs Thomas as well as a letter to a Mr Menhennick. Mr Church and Mr Porter decided to go and visit this Mr Menhennick, who evidently knew the real Mrs Thomas. The three men realised from what they now knew that the body in the box was probably that of Mrs Thomas. Together with Mr Menhennick’s solicitor, they went to Richmond police station.

  The next day, the police searched No 2 Vine Cottages. They found an axe, a razor, some charred bones and one of the handles belonging to the box found floating in the river. It was obvious now that not only was the body in the box that of Mrs Thomas but that Kate Webster was the murderer. On 23 March a detailed description of Kate Webster was circulated by the police.

  Kate Webster had meanwhile fled to Ireland with her son. This was not a very intelligent move, partly because it was predictable – it was where she had originally come from – partly because she had told the Porters that that was where she was going. The Irish police found her fairly easily and arrested her on 28 March. She was escorted back to England. At Richmond police station she made a statement and was formally charged with murder. Typically, Kate Webster included some lies in her statement. She tried to incriminate John Church. He, she said, had been responsible for the murder. Poor Church was arrested and charged with murder. Luckily he had a good alibi and had conspicuously helped the police in uncovering the crimes. The charges against him were eventually dropped at the committal hearing, but only after an unnerving interval.

  Kate Webster’s trial opened at the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, on 2 July, 1879. It was presided over by Mr Justice Denman. The prosecution was led by the Solicitor General, Sir Hardinge Gifford. Kate Webster was defended by Mr Warner Sleigh.

  The prosecution called Mary Durden as a witness. She was a hat maker, and she said that on 25 February, several days before the murder, Kate Webster had told her she was going to Birmingham to take possession of the property left to her by a deceased aunt. This was clear evidence of premeditation. The prosecution encountered difficulties with the matter of identification. There was no direct evidence that the remains found in the box were actually those of Mrs Thomas. The head had still not been found, and without that there was, at that time, no way of being certain whose body it was. Medical evidence was produced to show that all the body parts belonged to one body, and that the body had belonged to a woman aged between fifty and sixty. But that still did not mean that it had to be Mrs Thomas.

  The defence weakly argued that even if it was Mrs Thomas, she could have died of natural causes, which seemed rather unlikely. Whoever chopped her up, boiled and burnt her, could not have meant her well or cherished her memory. Henry Porter and John Church gave evidence against Kate, and once again the defence tried to cast suspicion on them and implicate them in the murder. In his summing up, the judge went out of his way to vindicate both Church and Porter, pointing out that they were both men of previous good character.

  On 8 July, the jury retired to consider a verdict. It took just over an hour to reach a guilty verdict. Kate once again denied committing the murder. Just before sentence was passed she claimed to be pregnant. She was examined by some of the women present in court and this claim was written off as just another lie. She was taken to Wandsworth Prison to await execution. While she was there, Kate Webster told yet more lies. She made two more confessions. One of them implicated Strong, the father of her son. Her solicitor told her that there would be no reprieve even though there was (surprisingly) a small public lobby to have her death sentence commuted. The day before her execution, Kate made a second confession to her solicitor, one that seemed to be rather nearer the truth. She said she was resigned to her fate and that she would almost rather be executed than go back to a life of misery and deception. The ‘heat of the moment’ excuse that she used was almost certainly a lie. The murder of Mrs Thomas was a brutal, cold-blooded killing that Webster had been planning for several days beforehand. Whether the motive was simple revenge for dismissal, or another of Kate Webster’s ‘cleaning-up’ jobs, is hard to tell – probably both.

  There were still questions unanswered. Why did Kate Webster turn to murder? She had a very long history of lying and petty theft, but no history at all of violence. Why did she suddenly commit a violent murder at this stage in her life? Also, if Kate pushed Mrs Thomas down the stairs as she claimed, why were there bloodstains at the top of the stairs? Kate must have attacked Mrs Thomas with the axe before she fell down the stairs. Probably already fatally injured, Julia Thomas was finally silenced by strangulation. Kate Webster could not own up to the exact details of the murder, because they showed her as a cold-blooded killer.

  Kate Webster was hanged at Wandsworth Prison on Tuesday 29 July. Wandsworth had taken over the responsibility for housing Surrey’s condemned prisoners when Horsemonger Lane Gaol had closed in 1878, and Kate Webster was only the second person to be hanged there. In fact she had the distinction of being the only woman ever to be hanged at Wandsworth.

  She was taken to the execution shed, which housed the large white-painted gallows. The noose lay on the trap door. The hangman, Marwood, stopped her on the chalk mark on the double trap door, fitted the leather body belt round her waist and secured her wrists to it while his assistant strapped
her ankles with a leather strap. She was supported on the trap by two warders standing on planks, just in case the prisoner fainted and fell prematurely. Marwood, fitted the white hood and the noose, leaving the free rope hanging down her back. He stepped quickly aside and pulled the lever. Marwood’s newly perfected ‘long drop’ meant that Kate Webster fell about eight feet out of sight into the pit, dying instantly of a broken neck.

  The new execution method ensured that the whole business was over within two minutes, and was thus much more humane than Calcraft’s ‘short drop’ executions, in which prisoners took as much as fifteen minutes to die. There were usually two newspaper reporters present, who were there to reassure the public that executions had been carried out ‘expeditiously’.

  Kate Webster was buried in an unmarked grave, Grave No 3, in one of the exercise yards. In all, 134 men and one woman were to be executed at Wandsworth. The last prisoner to suffer hanging at Wandsworth was Henryk Niemasz, who was executed for murder in 1961.

  Arthur Devereux

  ‘out of sight, out of mind’

  Arthur Devereux’s was one of the earliest trunk murders in England. It is a peculiar and eccentric notion – to think that locking a corpse in a trunk is a good way of evading detection. It may be that murderers who seek to hide their crime in this particular way have a special additional delusion, that hiding the body away out of sight is a way of ‘vanishing’ not only the body but the crime itself. Out of sight, out of mind.

  One summer’s day in 1898, Miss Beatrice Gregory was walking in Alexandra Park in Hastings. She was a pretty young woman and it was natural that a polite and neatly dressed young man should try to engage her in conversation. He was a chemist’s assistant called Arthur Devereux. Beatrice was on holiday with her mother. She saw no reason why she should not see Arthur again; in fact she saw him every evening for the rest of her holiday. Beatrice’s mother met him and she too liked him. He seemed different from many other young men: a cut above. He was ambitious and he had some imagination. He talked about the future in a way that was exciting, and Beatrice longed to be part of Arthur’s future. When he proposed, she accepted.