Murder of the Black Museum 1875-1975: The Dark Secrets Behind a Hundred Years of the Most Notorious Crimes in England

by Honeycombe, Gordon

  On Monday, 27 April 1903, the Essex County Chronicle noted: ‘Throughout the week people have flocked to Moat Farm in crowds, the majority of visitors being ladies. Oranges and nuts were sold as at a village fair … Souvenir postcards of the Moat House and of the grounds, showing many of the holes made by the police and the tent-like awning which conceals the grave, commanded an enormous sale. A number of sightseers brought Kodaks with them in search of effective snapshots.’

  Samuel Dougal was charged on Thursday, 30 April 1903 by DI Alfred Martin with ‘wilfully, maliciously, feloniously, with malice aforethought’ killing and slaying Miss Holland. He was charged in the dining room of Moat House Farm on a dismal, rainy day, the day on which the inquest was opened in the old barn.

  Dougal was remanded several times, finally being committed for trial, protesting his innocence, on 29 May. In the interim he wrote several cheerfully chatty letters to the women in his life, including Mrs Dougal, who became a Roman Catholic and began calling herself Mary Magdalene.

  The trial began in the Shire Hall at Chelmsford, Essex, on Monday, 22 June before Mr Justice Wright. Leading counsel for the Crown was Mr CF Gill, KC, while the accused, who gave no evidence, was defended by Mr George Elliott. At 4.50 pm on the following day, after an absence of seventy-five minutes, the jury found Dougal guilty and he was sentenced to death. To this he made no reply.

  An appeal was later dismissed. Dougal himself wrote to the Home Secretary, confessing now that he had indeed shot Miss Holland – by accident. His explanation was that on their return from Stansted, where they had done some shopping, ‘stopping on the way at the Chequers public-house and had a glass of whisky each’, Miss Holland had seated herself on a box at the coach-house door while he stabled the horse. As she gazed at the starlit sky he picked up a loaded revolver lying on a shelf and began unloading it – earlier that day he had done some shooting with it. The gun, he said, was in his left hand when she said: ‘Come and look at the beautiful silvery moon.’ He moved towards her and ‘the revolver accidentally exploded’. Her head fell forward. He said: ‘I hope you are not hurt, dear.’ Thinking she had fainted he supported her, saying tenderly: ‘Speak, Cecily dear.’ Then, he said, he ran to the house for some brandy and was confronted by the maid, who asked him where her mistress was. He replied that she had gone to London. He then returned with the brandy, he said, and found that her pulse was still beating:

  I took off her hat and veil and could see no blood, and afterwards removed her cloak, and still saw no blood. At this time I became demented, not knowing what I did. I took her in my arms and carried her up into the fields where there was a breeze, thinking it would revive her … I went back indoors, and shortly after returned to her and found her dead. I did not know what to do then. I carried her back towards the coach-house, and seeing the open ditch … I laid her on some straw in the ditch, and returned to the house again. I could not rest, so returned to where she was. I knelt down and kissed her, and placed a piece of lace over her face, and put some straw over her … Afterwards I placed a branch of a thorn-bush on the straw, so that the fowls could not scratch the straw off her body. After that I walked about the yard.’

  He could not sleep that night, he said, and the following morning Alfred Shaw, who had already begun filling in the ditch, continued doing so ‘until the trench was level, taking about a fortnight’.

  Dougal was hanged at Chelmsford Prison on 8 July 1903 on a bright, sunny morning. He was fifty-seven. The executioner was William Billington, aged twenty-eight, second son of James Billington, who had died in 1901. All three of James’s sons became executioners. William, known as Billie Billington, had carried out the last hanging in Newgate Prison in May 1902, that of George Woolfe, executed for the stabbing death of his girlfriend.

  At Dougal’s execution, a zealous chaplain, determined to save the condemned man’s soul on the scaffold, demanded of Dougal, by then hooded and haltered, ‘Are you guilty or not guilty?’ There was no response. Again the chaplain repeated the question. Dougal’s hooded head half-turned and his voice said ‘Guilty’ as the lever was pulled.

  The chaplain’s explanation for his conduct, which was criticised by the papers and in parliament, was that Dougal had promised to confess before his execution but had failed to do so. ‘My spiritual anxiety became intense,’ said the chaplain. ‘I prayed earnestly with him during the last quarter of an hour, during which he sobbed … I knew not what to do more, so under strong impulse, and quite on the inspiration of the moment, I made the strong appeal at the scaffold.’

  Dougal’s body was buried in Chelmsford Prison. On Miss Holland’s grave in Saffron Walden churchyard a cross was raised on which was carved the figure of an angel receiving a sweet young girl. The inscription said that she died, aged fifty-six, ‘under distressing circumstances’. Little Jacko, who had finally found a home with Mrs Wisken, died a year later; he was stuffed and mounted in a glass case in her parlour.

  12

  ALFRED AND ALBERT STRATTON

  THE MURDERS OF MR AND MRS FARROW, 1905

  Petty crime was the background to murder in the case of the Stratton brothers, as it has been so often. But their trial is unique in that for the first time in a British court fingerprint evidence was used to obtain a conviction for murder.

  Alfred Stratton, aged twenty-three, and Albert, twenty, both labourers, lived in south-east London, at Deptford. Both had previous convictions for housebreaking and burglary. They came to believe that an elderly local tradesman, seventy-one-year-old Thomas Farrow, kept a cache of money in his chandler’s store, which dealt in oil, paint, candles and soap, at 34 High Street, Deptford. He and his wife, Ann, aged sixty-five, lived above the shop, which was owned not by them but by an absentee landlord, Mr Chapman.

  At about 7.30 am on Monday, 27 March 1905, their young assistant, William Jones, arrived for work and found the shop door open. This was not unusual, for Mr Farrow often rose early to supply painters and decorators with materials on their way to work. Jones went in and called out. No one responded. He could see that some chairs had been overturned. On going into the back parlour, he found Mr Farrow in his nightshirt dead on the floor and drenched in blood; his head had been badly battered. Mrs Farrow was later discovered in a similar state in her bed upstairs, unconscious; she died in hospital four days later.

  Jones ran off to summon help. The police, headed by Chief Inspector Frederick Fox, surmised that the old man had come downstairs at about 7 am in response to someone knocking at the shop door. Attacked by the man or men he let into the shop, he had managed to reach the parlour before being bludgeoned to death with a kind of cosh, a lead ball attached to a piece of rope. His wife, awakened by the rumpus below and calling out anxiously, probably then had also to be silenced by the cosh. The cash box, in which there were only a few pounds, had been broken open and was empty. Two masks made from black stockings that were found in the shop seemed to indicate that two assailants were involved. Fox noticed what looked like a fingerprint on the cash box’s metal tray – the print of a bloody right thumb.

  The Assistant Commissioner (Crime), Melville Macnaghten, then head of the CID, took a particular interest in the case, especially when he saw the smudged fingerprint on the underside of the cash box’s inner tray. He took the tray to the new Fingerprint Bureau at the Yard, which had been established in July 1901.

  The Bureau’s chief, DI Charles Collins, had had some success with identifying villains through their fingerprints, but this was still a doubtful and doubted science. However, all those who were known to have touched the tray, including the victims, the shop-boy and a policeman, were now carefully fingerprinted. The thumb print belonged to none of them. Chief Inspector Fox thought the murderers must be local men – why had they worn masks unless they feared recognition? So all the minor villains in the Deptford area were sought out and their alibis checked.

  The Stratton brothers, already known to the police, were not to be found. But Alfred Stratton’s gir
lfriend, Annie Cromarty, was questioned. Disgruntled and afraid (she had a black eye), she eventually admitted that the brothers had been out all night the previous Sunday, that Alfred had later destroyed the coat he had been wearing, and that he had dyed his brown shoes black. A milkman and his boy assistant revealed that they had seen two men leave the chandler’s shop in a hurry about 7.15 am on Monday, leaving the door open. One was wearing a dark brown suit and a cap (Alfred), the other (Albert) a dark blue serge suit and a bowler hat.

  The following Sunday, Alfred was picked up in a public house and Albert, the younger brother, in lodgings in Stepney. They were brought to Tower Bridge police station. Both had their fingerprints taken, and Alfred’s thumb print was found to match the bloody print on the cash box. There were eleven points of resemblance, it was later said in court.

  The Stratton brothers’ trial took place at the Central Criminal Court in the Old Bailey in May 1905, before Mr Justice Channell. DI Collins said that the Fingerprint Bureau now had about 85,000 sets of prints. Knowledgeably questioned by the prosecutor, Mr Richard Muir, who had studied the matter, Collins described how the system of fingerprint identification worked. As an example, the fingerprints of one of the jurymen were taken and examined by the rest of the jury. Mr HG Rooth, defending Alfred Stratton, said that the fingerprint system was ‘unreliable’ – it ‘savoured more of the French courts than of English justice’ – and this new-fangled evidence was contested by some so-called experts for the defence. The judge himself was dubious about the irrefutable nature of such evidence. But the jury had no doubts and found both brothers guilty. Each blamed the other for the murders. While awaiting trial, Albert, the younger brother, had told a man who worked in the jail: ‘I reckon he [Alfred] will get strung up and I shall get ten years.’

  In the event they were both hanged together, on 23 May 1905.

  The chief executioner was John Billington, James Billington’s youngest son. Aged twenty-five, John was assisted by Harry Pierrepoint, a handsome, moustached man, aged twenty-seven, who had first assisted James Billington at an execution in November 1901. Their wages, unchanged since Berry’s time, were still ten guineas for the head hangman and two for his assistant.

  Harry Pierrepoint had previously been employed in a worsted mill in Clayton, Yorkshire, before toiling in a butcher’s shop and then with a firm of cabinetmakers. He had read avidly about the exploits of the Bradford hangman, James Berry, and more recently about those of James Billington, who had hanged Dr Cream and Mrs Dyer. When he was not yet twenty-three, Pierrepoint wrote in February 1901 (three weeks after the death of Queen Victoria) to the Home Secretary, offering his services as an executioner. His first hanging as chief executioner was in March 1902, when he was twenty-four. His son, Albert, who would hang more men and women than anyone else, before and since, was born on 30 March 1905.

  The Strattons were hanged in Wandsworth Prison two months after that event by James Billington, assisted by Harry Pierrepoint. The brothers occupied cells on separate floors, one above the other. The two hangmen peered at the brothers through spy-holes and did their calculations. The elder brother, Alfred, who weighed about 147 lb, would be given a drop of 6 ft 6 in;Albert’s drop – he was heavier – would be 7 ft 6 in. A practice drop on the scaffold in the execution shed was carried out with sandbags, and Harry Pierrepoint wrote the names ‘Alfred’ and ‘Albert’ in chalk on the wooden trap doors below the appropriate nooses. The following morning the two brothers were brought, arms pinioned behind their backs, in silent procession to the scaffold, the only voice being that of a priest reading the burial service. Their legs were bound and their faces hidden in white bags or caps before the nooses were placed around their heads and drawn tight, with the knot behind the left lower jaw. During this process Albert called out: ‘Alfred – have you given your heart to God?’ Alfred’s muffled reply, after a pause, was ‘Yes.’ They fell together.

  Three years later, in 1908, the hanging of persons under the age of sixteen was abolished. Between 1908 and 1921 inclusively, a period of fourteen years, no woman was hanged, although fifty-one women were convicted of murder, sentenced to death and then reprieved.

  13

  DR CRIPPEN

  THE MURDER OF CORA CRIPPEN, 1910

  Very few doctors have been murderers, but not a few may have committed murder without any suspicion being aroused. They have both the know-how and the wherewithal to bring about illness and death: the instruments, the dangerous drugs and poisons. They can pronounce with authority on the cause of death and sign certificates to this effect. They have also the necessary facility of viewing people as objects. The doctors who have killed (and have been detected) have largely been poisoners, as one would expect. Such a one was Dr Crippen, whose extraordinary story also illustrates the frequent connection between murder and dressing-up, playing a part and the use of pseudonyms.

  Hawley Harvey Crippen was born in Coldwater, Michigan, on 11 September 1862, and acquired his medical training through the winning of diplomas in Cleveland, London and New York. His father was a dry-goods merchant called Myron Crippen. In 1887, young Crippen married Charlotte Bell, his first wife; they had a son, Otto. She died in about 1890 and two or three years later in Jersey City, he married Cora Turner, whom he first met when she was seventeen and living with another man, a stove manufacturer. Her real name was Kunigunde Mackamotzki, her father being a Russian Pole and her mother German. Crippen paid for Cora to train as an opera singer, though to no avail, and when they settled in 1900 in London, where he become the manager of a patent medicine firm, she tried to succeed as a music-hall artiste, calling herself Belle Elmore. She sang in various halls in London and elsewhere, going away for about two weeks at a time. Her singing voice, however, was as small as her talents, though her speaking voice was loud and clear with a sharp American twang. She herself was short and stout, and with her dark eyes and hair, bright jewels and colourful clothes, seemed like a plump bird of paradise. Her flamboyant appearance was at odds with her meanness, both of which were mildly tolerated by her husband.

  Considerate and courteous, Crippen was a short (5 ft 3 in) slightly feminine man, with thinning hair, a long and straggly sandy moustache, and prominent grey eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses. ‘Somewhat slovenly in appearance,’ said a later police description. ‘Wears his hat at back of head. Very plausible and quiet spoken, remarkably cool and collected demeanour … Throws his feet outward when walking.’ He was known as ‘Peter’. He worked for a patent medicine company, Munyon’s, who paid him £3 a week, and was a partner with Dr Rylance in Yale Tooth Specialists, situated in Albion House, New Oxford Street.

  In September 1905, the Crippens moved to 39 Hilldrop Crescent, a semi-detached house that they rented at £52 10s a year. The crescent connected with Camden Road and was less than half a mile from Holloway Prison. They occupied separate bedrooms, and had frequent rows. ‘She went in and out just as she liked,’ said Crippen, ‘and did what she liked. It was of no interest to me … I was rather a lonely man and rather miserable.’ By this time Mrs Crippen had acquired many music-hall friends – although on her last appearance on stage, during an artistes’ strike at the Bedford and Euston Palace, she was hissed at for being a blackleg. Thenceforth she enthusiastically embraced the office of honorary treasurer of the Music-Hall Ladies Guild. She also persuaded her husband to become a Roman Catholic. They frequently entertained at home but their private lives were quite squalid, mainly spent in the dingy and disorderly basement kitchen. The grimy windows were never opened – she disliked fresh air – and her two cats were never let out. Her gentleman friends were let in, however, when Dr Crippen was at work. They gave her gifts and also, it seems, money.

  By this time her husband had also found consolation, having fallen in love with the typist who had worked for him for more than seven years, Ethel le Neve, a shy, soft-spoken, boyishly attractive girl, born in 1883, who was slightly taller than he. By 1910 she had been his mistress for three years. She was twe
nty-seven; he forty-eight; Mrs Crippen was thirty-five.

  Perhaps Ethel le Neve had by then become rather discontented, wishing to be more than a mistress. Certainly Mrs Crippen, aware of her husband’s association with his typist, was threatening to leave, to go and live with one of her gentlemen and take all ‘her’ money with her. Most of their money, £600, was in fact banked in a joint deposit account, to which she had somehow contributed £330. Significantly, on 15 December 1909, she gave twelve months’ notice of withdrawal of the whole amount, which would have been paid to her without question in December 1910. Dr Crippen, on the other hand, was in some financial trouble. Entertaining Ethel must have been costly – they made love in hotels – and in November 1909 Munyon’s stopped employing him as a manager and only paid him a commission on his sales. Even these payments came to an end on 31 January 1910.

  That night, the Crippens gave a small dinner party for two retired music-hall artistes, Mr and Mrs Paul Martinetti. Dinner was served in the breakfast room, next to the kitchen. Later they went upstairs to the parlour, where they played whist. The Martinettis – ‘It was quite a nice evening and Belle was very jolly’ – left at 1.30 am, saying goodbye on the gas-lit front-door steps that led down to the dark, cold street. ‘Don’t come down, Belle,’ said Clara Martinetti. ‘You’ll catch a cold.’